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Wednesday Morning Guest Rant [Joe Mannix]

A Referendum of His Own Baffling Choice In his presser of lies, prevarication and bombast last week, Brandon said this little gem:

But the fact is that I think that the - I'm happy to debate and have a referendum on how I handle the economy, whether or not I've made progress on when - look, again - how can I - I'm taking too long answering your questions. I apologize.

Okay. You asked for it. Let's look at some key economic indicators from the past three years, comparing data for the month of December or Q4, depending on availability. Where applicable, all data are seasonally adjusted. Data source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

	2019	2020	2021
Labor Force	164,633,000	160,671,000	162,294,000
Total Nonfarm Employment	151,919,000	142,503,000	148,951,000
Labor Participation Rate	63.3	61.5	61.9
Productivity (change from year ago)	+0.6%	-3.4%	-5.2%
CPI-U	258.203	261.56	280.192
Urban Gasoline Index	240.923	204.217	305.483
Urban Energy Index	219.718	203.716	264.08
Urban Food Index	260.393	270.656	287.67
Med. full-time pretax weekly wages	936	984	1,010

Okay, so there's the BLS data. Let's compare each item from December or Q4 2021 to the final pre-pandemic month (December/Q4, 2019) and the final Trump month (December/Q4, 2020).

	Compare 2019	Compare 2020	Relative 2019	Relative 2020
Labor Force	-2,339,000 (-1.4%)	+1,623,000 (1.0%)	Worse	Better
Total Nonfarm Employment	-2,968,000 (-1.96%)	+6,448,000 (4.5%)	Worse	Better
Labor Participation Rate	-0.033 (2.2%)	+0.4 (0.07%)	Worse	Better
Productivity (change from year ago)	Already Relative	Already Relative	Worse	Worse
CPI-U	+21.989 (8.5%)	+18.632 (7.1%)	Worse	Worse
Urban Gasoline Index	+64.56 (+26.8%)	+101.266 (49.6%)	Worse	Worse
Urban Energy Index	+44.632 (20.2%)	+60.364 (29.6%)	Worse	Worse
Urban Food Index	+27.277 (10.5%)	+17.014 (6.3%)	Worse	Worse
Med. full-time pretax weekly wages	+74 (7.9%)	+26 (2.6%)	Better*	Better*

That's not a good scorecard. He's not going to be judged only on his first year in office, but also as compared to the Dread Trump and the good times we had before the pandemic was used a justification to blow up the world.

Compared to a year a go, Brandon has improved on the labor force, total employment and the participation rate. Everything else is worse except *gross earnings, which are up, but by less than CPI-U growth and by a lot less than the Gasoline, Energy and Food sub-indices.

Compared to the last pre-pandemic year, though, every single category is worse. The labor force is smaller. Employment is smaller. Participation is lower. Productivity is down. Prices are up. Gasoline and energy are up hugely. Food is up by a lot. *Wages are up haven't kept pace with anything.

If you're spinning this like mad, it's mediocre at best compared to Trump's last month and the improvement (the employment figures) were essentially a fait accompli as restrictions started to wind down. Prices and wages are out of control and that squeeze is getting worse every day and everyone has no choice but to notice it. But even that's just as compared to Trump's last month. Compared to the final pre-pandemic month/quarter, everything is an unmitigated disaster in every respect.

You're happy to have a referendum on how you've handled the economy, Brandon? You want to run on your economic performance? Are you sure about that? Because if you're running on that, your prospects are about as good as the Wermacht's were around, say, April of 1945.