Janet Yellen, the Biden-Harris administration Treasury Secretary had an op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal that is full of gaslight claims, and so I offer here some clarification on some of them.
When President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, thousands of Americans were dying from Covid-19, and the unemployment rate was 50% higher than it is today.
Fifty percent more than a small number still is a small number. Aside from that, unemployment already had been starting down, sharply, and had reached roughly 6.5%—down from a peak of 10%-11% at the height of the shutdown—and was continuing to fall rapidly as our nation reopened in the latter half of the last year of the Trump administration.
We vaccinated millions to save lives and allow businesses to reopen safely.
Aside from the fact that businesses already were reopening—hence the already rapidly falling unemployment—those vaccinations occurred with vaccines developed under a Trump administration crash program. Production and distribution of those vaccines had already begun, and one of the first actions of the Biden-Harris administration in early 2021 was to delay delivery of those vaccines to the distribution centers.
[W]e made critical investments in infrastructure and manufacturing—from clean energy to semiconductors….
The Biden-Harris administration allocated those dollars; a large fraction of them, three-plus years later, remain unspent.
The US labor market recovered faster from the 2020 recession than from previous recessions. Economic growth surpassed private-sector predictions of a modest recovery.
Our economy already was in a steep, rapid recovery, beginning in late summer 2020—the last year of the Trump administration. Oh, and the labor market already was rapidly reemploying the work force.
[T]he US has outperformed many other advanced economies, with greater real gross domestic product growth and a faster decline in inflation while maintaining a strong labor market.
This is an especially large bit of gaslighting. Our economy doing better than “many other advanced economies” is a non sequitur. We aren’t those other nations; our citizens live here in the United States, and we operate here in our American economy. Too, that so much bragged about inflation decline is from a high peak caused by Biden-Harris policies, not least of which was the Inflation Reduction Act enacted in the Biden-Harris first year that threw trillions of dollars into our economy without an associated increase in production. Yellen also carefully ignored the fact that prices remain higher today, by double digit accumulated inflation, than they were in the final stages of the Trump administration. Those higher prices are an especially serious problem given that real wages have shrunk over Biden-Harris administration, with only recent periods of wage increases exceeding the same period inflation.
And that GDP growth? That’s compared to the exceptionally low GDP growth experienced during the depths of the Wuhan Virus situation.