Democrats in Washington are worried. Despite President Joe Biden's messaging blitz to promote "Bidenomics," Americans are not buying his rosy assessment of the economy. The president only has a 34 percent approval rating on the economy, despite his aggressive push to remind Americans of his $370 billion spending bill in subsidies for electric cars, solar panels, and green energy just one year ago.
Dubbed the "Inflation Reduction Act," last year in an attempt to show Americans that Democrats were tackling inflation, Biden even admitted that the last-minute branding attempt was a mistake.
“I wish I hadn’t called it that, because it has less to do with reducing inflation than providing alternatives where we generate economic growth,” Biden said last week at a fundraiser in Utah.
“It has nothing to do with inflation,” Biden told donors in New Mexico, highlighting the subsidies for his climate change agenda.
Biden should not worry. Americans were not fooled.
That's because they still feel the economic pain behind the inflation spike that occurred under Biden's leadership. The cost of groceries for a family is still higher, the cost of power, gas, and even an occasional fast food order is still high and not going lower.
The cost of a new car or even a used car is out of reach. Forget an electric car, despite Biden's generous subsidies. Americans watch their paychecks disappear each month with little left for future projects. The dream of a new home has disappeared for most families as significantly higher interest rates have pushed that dream far into the future.
No wonder the economic numbers are bad for Biden. A recent CBS-YouGov poll showed that 70 percent of Americans believe their work income is not keeping up with inflation while only 30 percent believe that it is. Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe prices the last few weeks are going up and they are right.
Biden and his team continue boasting of inflation going down, and yes, the rate of inflation is shrinking from the record-high rates of last year. The costs of living, however, remain stubbornly high and refuse to go down as Biden continues to spend the country into oblivion.
An economist noted last week that the typical household spent $202 more in July than they did a year ago to buy the same goods and services. They spent $709 more than they did 2 years ago. That's the kind of legacy that Biden has built. In the short time we have left before the election, Democrats will not be able to change that stark reality that Americans are living every day.
In 1992, Democrat strategist James Carville coined the famous phrase "It's the economy, stupid," when his candidate Bill Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush for president. Biden can continue traveling the country to promote his efforts to stabilize the economy, but until he has an answer on inflation, Americans will continue to give him bad grades on his leadership.
Charlie Spiering is a Wyoming native who works in Washington, D.C., where he continues writing about the White House, Congress and national politics. A former writer for Breitbart News, The Washington Examiner and columnist Robert Novak, Spiering frequently returns home to the family farm in Powell to escape the insanity of Washington.
