Blowing economic smoke to hid reality prior to elections

New polling data from Gallup show Americans are not having an easy time through this period of rising prices.

According to Gallup, 56% of Americans say now that rising prices are causing severe or moderate hardship.

Drilling down, we see that the hardship is not shared equally.

Among low-income households, those with income less than $48,000, 74% report that they are experiencing hardship. Among middle-income households, with income $48,000 to $89,999, 63% report hardship. And among upper income, $90,000 and above, 40% report experiencing hardship.

But Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen showed up at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, recently with an upbeat economic message reminiscent of the joke, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

Yellen announced that she is “more optimistic about the course of our economy than I have been in quite a while.”

The Biden administration hopes to blow enough smoke into the eyes of voters so that reality will not set in until the November elections have passed.

Yellen ought to consider reading the latest long-term budget and economic projections form the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Per CBO’s just-published “The 2022 Long-Term Budget Outlook,” over the next 30 years, the U.S. budget deficit, as a percent of our gross domestic product, will be double what it has averaged over the last half-century, and national debt as a percentage of GDP will reach historically high levels, arriving to a mind-boggling 185% of GDP in 2052.

The result of this ongoing absorption of the U.S. economy into the hands of government and politicians will be, according to CBO, a slowing and sputtering of the U.S. economy

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