Biden is finally winning the election from 4,515 miles away

Job growth and inflation on a decline might have Joe Biden humming ‘the best is yet to come’

(Getty Images)

This past week, President Joe Biden has been abroad, first in the United Kingdom and then in Lithuania for the Nato summit. But perhaps the biggest boon he has received is back home on the domestic front, as he has received a series of good economic news.

Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the US economy added 209,000 jobs in June. That number is not as robust as experts had predicted, but it is welcome news for the president since he can clearly point to the economy continuing to add jobs throughout his presidency, something that every president wishes for. Indeed, the economy is in a better position now than it was around the same time of his vice presidency when he was Barack Obama’s vice president and the two embarked on their re-election campaign.

Back then, the Mr Obama and Mr Biden were focused on stopping the hemorrhaging of jobs and bank failures that stemmed from the 2008 financial crisis and the unemployment rate continued to hover around 9 per cent in June 2011. The economy did not begin to improve until much later. Similarly, wage growth was meager at the same time during Mr Obama’s first term in the White House.

Conversely, Mr Biden can boast that jobs have grown consistently and that wages have grown 4.4 per cent in the past year. That means that more people not only have jobs but that they also have good jobs that pay them well.

The big challenge, of course, has been that inflation has eaten into that wage growth and has prevented people from feeling like the economy has fully recovered from the sledgehammer that was the Covid-19 pandemic. Typically, the economy has to trade off either robust jobs numbers, which leads to increased demand from consumers and therefore drives inflation, or lower job growth to keep inflation at bay.

As I wrote earlier this year, inflation has remained the biggest cloud over Mr Biden’s head as high gas and grocery prices prevented him from convincing the American people that the worst was behind them. Throughout much of last year, headlines noted how inflation had not reached the same heights since the 1980s, economic figures that doomed Jimmy Carter’s presidency and sent Ronald Reagan to the White House.

But on Wednesday, Mr Biden received a break when the US government’s Consumer Price Index report showed that inflation ticked up only 0.2 per cent in June and more than that, inflation only increased by 3.0 per cent in the past 12 months, its lowest rate since March 2021, which is a sign that the worst of inflation might be behind the US economy. This also comes as the Federal Reserve paused its increase in interest rates, which it had raised as a means to tamp down rising prices and cool the economy.

Specifically, energy prices ticked up only slightly, a welcome change for Mr Biden after the war in Ukraine had caused gas prices to skyrocket and food prices barely ticked up, meaning people won’t see grocery bills increase as much.

This is not to say that Mr Biden has gotten everything that he wants. Shelter drove much of the increase in inflation this last month, something that might remain stubbornly persistent. He also faced a major setback when the Supreme Court blocked his student loan forgiveness programme, meaning that a major pledge he had made to turn out younger voters will not be something he can tout ahead of 2024.

Some younger voters might argue that being saddled with debt will make it harder for them to make long-term purchases that drive the economy (indeed, Mr Biden argued his plan would allow young people to do things like buy homes, a boon to the economy).

At the same time, it allows for Mr Biden to continue to make his case for “Bidenomics,” the term he has adopted from the right to make the case his policies have worked and that Americans can look forward to better days. Indeed, while he may not have Kimberly Guilfoyle on his side, he might soon be saying “The Best is Yet to Come.”