According to a new Gallup poll, confidence in Joe Biden’s economy has slipped into negative territory.
Per Gallup:
Last month, Americans were more positive than negative on both measures, while their readings are net-negative on both this month. Twenty-seven percent of Americans now rate current economic conditions as excellent or good, while 30% rate them as poor. Meanwhile, 43% say the economy is getting better, and 53% say it is getting worse.
What happened to the numbers? Well:
The decline in May came mostly from a sharp drop in Republican confidence in the month. Republicans in the index register at -52, down from -35 in April. Democrat confidence declined from 31 to 27. Independents went from -4 to -3, a slight improvement.
Two-thirds of Democrats say the economy is getting better, according to Gallup. Just 13 percent of Republicans agree. More than eight in 10 Republicans, 84 percent, believe the economy is getting worse. Independents are slightly more likely to say the economy is getting worse (50%) rather than getting better (44%), Gallup said.
Just as a point of comparison, in Feb of 2020, before the Coronavirus hit, this score was sitting at 41. So, why did we see a 48 point drop from a 41 to a -7? Well, there have been a number of factors that have played into it.
Certainly, the coronavirus was a significant negative, but the government overreactions to it did more damage than the virus. Unnecessary and ineffective shutdowns across the country put a lot of Americans out of work and drove a lot of small businesses under. Congress then made things even worse by adding so much money to unemployment checks that in some cases, people were making more money lying on their couch all day than going back to work. This contributed to last month’s nightmarish jobs report. Over a million Americans were expected to get back to work and only 266,000 actually did.
In other words, after driving so many small businesses out of work last year, many of those surviving businesses have to deal with a government-created job shortage. At the same, in an effort to inflate the economy with Keynesian stimulus, the Biden administration passed an extremely wasteful coronavirus stimulus and is now looking to slam through an enormous infrastructure bill that puts more of the money involved into things that aren’t infrastructure. Partially as a result of this flood of money, we’ve seen the largest inflation increase since the Great Recession. Yet, because of our enormous debt, the Fed really can’t afford to jack up interest rates. What this means is that inflation is eating into people’s savings, but there’s no safe place for the American people to put their money because bonds aren’t paying enough to even beat what inflation is normally, much less what it is now.
The only real way to fix this whole mess would require fiscal responsibility from the government. The alternative is for politicians like Joe Biden to keep spending at an unsustainable rate until inflation gets completely out of control, the dollar is no longer the reserve currency and our entire economy collapses as we can’t simply print. We all know which choice has been made and the only question now is when the bill will be due.
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. You can find him on Parler here and Twitter here.
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