Economy Opinion
President Joe Biden has been taking a vicious beating in just about every poll. A general theme coming from Americans is a feeling of doom and gloom regarding the state of the economy.
This sense that things aren’t going so well for Americans’ pocketbooks and ability to provide for their families and futures has the Biden administration perplexed. How could Americans be so ungrateful for all the great things that Team Biden has done for them these last two years?
Despite their best efforts, the Biden administration has yet to convince Americans that not only is the economy doing great thanks to Bidenomics, but that their feelings surrounding their finances are ill-founded and imaginary. So now they will turn to their new favorite tool: online censorship.
Dumb Americans
The narrative that the Biden administration has created a stellar economy worthy of praise from the American people is one that Team Biden has been unable to sell. Instead of taking a critical look at the economy through the lens of an average citizen forced to exist within it, Biden believes that the answer to this paradox lies within Americans’ social media habits.
The Washington Post published a piece about this concept titled The viral $16 McDonald’s meal that may explain voter anger at Biden. Within the article, Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity research fellow Will Stancil explains away American’s irritation at the economy:
“This has a lot to do with the social and media environment that young people live in. People’s ideas of things like the economy – which they can’t experience directly – are being constructed from what they’re hearing from other people.”
The idea behind this argument is that Americans, particularly younger Americans, are easily swayed by what they see and hear on social media, regardless of whether it is true. In other words, they want you to ignore your lying eyes and ears, and understand that the economy is great because they said so.
This touches on the muse of the WaPo piece of the viral TikTok video of a consumer showing their $16 McDonald’s order.
The TikTok video is simple enough: a man lamenting that while he understands there is a labor shortage, paying $16.10 for a McDonald’s meal is “crazy.” In the video, he shows the meal itself, which included a burger, fries, and a drink, and the receipt as proof of what he purchased and how much.
Purchasing a fast food meal, particularly from one of the most popular chains in the world, let alone the United States, is something most Americans including young ones, experience directly.
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Office of Misinformation
The White House has an office designated to track videos such as the $16 McDonald’s order on TikTok and memes depicting the Biden administration negatively. The White House Office of Digital Strategy is specifically geared to keep track of social media posts that may upset Team Biden.
But tracking is only one facet of this office’s job. The Washington Post article laid out another one of the office’s charges:
“The White House official said the administration is working with TikTok creators to tell positive stories of Biden’s economic stewardship while also working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.”
If it seems strange to you that the government would just brazenly admit to making naked propaganda, well, that’s just where we are now.
But as anyone to the right of AOC has learned over the last eight or so years, the alarming aspect of this strategy is the White House “working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.”
We’ve witnessed what that entails thanks to the release of the Twitter Files that uncovered that the administration, via the arm of the Department of Justice and various aspects of the Intelligence Community, manipulated and infiltrated social media companies to bury factual news stories and infringe on the First Amendment rights of countless users.
This problem only notoriously affected some Americans. The kind who have opinions that haven’t been Officially Approved by MSNBC.
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Nobody is buying it
The argument that young voters are too dumb to know better might be a convenient and generational favorite for whichever political party is struggling. Still, it doesn’t make it an intelligent argument.
Founder of the think tank People’s Policy Project Matt Bruenig explains:
“The insistence that the economy is just obviously good and that grievances against it are necessarily rooted in bad motivations or perpetual goalpost-moving is really just lazy punditry.”
Content creator and progressive activist Jordan Uhl backs this argument, stating:
“There’s this cadre of number-crunching paperwork obsessives who are convinced that if some report says inflation is slowing, that means everything is great and everybody who feels something different is either lying or brainwashed by TikTok. The idea that people are just making this up or are misled about their own material conditions is absurd.”
You don’t have to be highly intelligent or be a degreed economist to know that groceries are too expensive, buying a house is harder than it was for the previous generation, and saving up for the future seems almost impossible. High-interest rates have made it nearly impossible for young would-be homeowners to purchase a house.
Healthcare, an often-used victory flag for President Biden, is also more expensive. The annual survey of employer health benefits released by the Kaiser Family Foundation published the following:
“Amid rising inflation, annual family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance climbed 7% on average this year…”
It’s not just the perceptions of Americans viewing viral videos on TikTok; their experienced realities are driving dissatisfaction with the economy.
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Quite the defense
It remains to be seen how effective President Biden’s social media influencers will be in curbing the feelings of young Americans. But legacy media is still doing their best to go to bat for the struggling incumbent.
The Atlantic published a piece called Why Americans Hate a Good Economy that listed seven possible reasons the American constituency has gone sour on the Biden economy. The following reason is by far the most telling:
“During the pandemic, the federal government provided Americans unprecedented support. It stopped evictions; it dropped thousands of dollars into personal bank accounts; it paused student-loan repayments; it gave aid to unemployed workers; it provided tax breaks to parents of young children…”
Don’t be fooled into believing this argument proves that some on the left might finally get the concept that when you give free money and remove financial obligations from a population and then take those things away, it will turn the constituency against them. This statement is meant to advocate for these policies to be made permanent, which, as anyone who has studied economics and history knows, would mean the eventual ruin of democracy.
The Biden campaign released Your Handy Guide for Responding to Crazy MAGA Nonsense this Thanksgiving. The guide instructed liberals to school their Republican family members on the truth about the economy by listing out all of President Biden’s accomplishments.
That same day, President Biden told NBC News’ Al Roker:
“We have to bring the nation together and treat each other with a little bit of decency…”
The decent thing for the Biden campaign would be to stop gaslighting the American public and acknowledge the financial distress felt by every American regardless of age, socio-economic status, and political affiliation. Or they could continue to rely on spreading misinformation to fight factual information.
Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust.
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