At your local arthouse cinema, Talking Heads celebrate the 40th anniversary return of their iconic rock ‘n’ roll documentary Stop Making Sense. On the big screen in your living room, television announcers are trying to make sense of the startling discrepancy between America’s booming economic numbers and the sour mood of voters. I don’t envy her job.
How could anyone understand that? On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department released monthly unemployment statistics that once again surprised economists with the strength of Biden-era jobs, with an impressive gain of 336,000 new jobs. The report gave President Joe Biden an opportunity any POTUS would crave: bragging about 13.9 million new jobs since taking office in January 2021 and unemployment at levels not seen since the 1960s.
But just hours earlier, a national voter survey from Marquette University Law School compared the two overwhelming front-runners – Biden and his GOP predecessor Donald Trump – and found that respondents overwhelmingly trusted Trump over the Democratic incumbent, with the policy was more important than job creation, with a whopping 50%-39% margin. That’s a voter sentiment that’s not supported by statistics — the 45th president, in fact, had the worst employment numbers of any modern president ravaged by the pandemic and his response in his final year — or any lasting political success.
There could be a lengthy answer to this astonishing inconsistency – one that addresses inflation and the ongoing consumer shock over the high prices of gas or a steak burrito, but also the effects of Fox News bias and macroeconomics, who wins and who loses under “Bidenomics.” Or you could do what Shawn Fain, the brash leader of the ongoing strike by United Auto Workers members, did on Friday and boil it down to just three words and spread them across your chest for the world to see:
“Eat the rich.”
Fain chose to wear this particular shirt as he announced a major victory in his crusade to ensure that workers rise alongside America’s automakers at a time of record corporate profits, but also during a crucial transition away from traditional fossil fuels. The UAW had just won an agreement from General Motors to include workers at its upcoming electric vehicle battery plant in Indiana in the union contract – a crucial signal that America can fight climate change with domestically built electric vehicles while creating good-paying jobs.
“We’re winning, we’re making progress and we’re on the right track,” Fain said in a broadcast announcing the deal while wearing his now infamous shirt. It’s easy for people – especially journalists – to get caught up in the UAW’s daily picket battles with GM, Ford and Chrysler owner Stellantis, or in the latest economic statistics and presidential poll numbers, confusing as that analysis may be .
But there’s a much bigger picture at play here, and I think it goes a long way toward explaining why the middle class isn’t happy with the economy and why Democrats’ efforts to tout Binomics are not only not working, but potentially backfiring and said some, angering voters who think this White House is out of touch. I think when you talk about “the economy,” millions of people don’t see the monthly ups and downs of the job market. They sense a continuing oppression of the middle class, which ironically gained momentum right around the time the Talking Heads released “Stop Making Sense” in 1983.
In any case, working-class wages have remained remarkably stagnant for about 50 years, while the wealth of higher-income Americans has soared over the same period. The Pew Research Center reported last year that middle-class families’ share of total U.S. income fell from 62% to 42% from 1970 to 2020, while the richest group’s share rose from 29% to 50%. The average CEO of a company earned 21 times more than his employees in 1965, while this ratio had increased to 344 times by 2022.
When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, his two most significant actions in his first year were sharply cutting taxes on the rich and firing striking federal air traffic controllers – which also sent a signal to corporate America that they would pay no price for tough tactics against unions . Since 1983, the share of U.S. workers who hold a union card has fallen from just over 20% to just over 10% last year, and workers’ wages and benefits have suffered under this regime.
The UAW’s Fain gets it. He has made it clear that the UAW’s labor action is not just about ensuring that auto workers get a significant pay increase, pension benefits, better working conditions and protection from the rush to electric vehicles. It also sends a signal to the broader economy that is just as strong as Reagan’s firing of those air traffic controllers and that the pendulum swings back to the working class.
» READ MORE: UAW strike exposes fraud that GOP is the party of the working class
“There’s a billionaire class, and there’s the rest of us,” Fain recently told striking workers outside a Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan. “We are all expected to sit back and take what’s left with us, paycheck to paycheck, and what’s left to make ends meet. We are second-class citizens.” In other appearances, Fain criticized “corporate greed.” His message resonates with many, but like Biden – who traditionally joined the UAW leader on a picket line last month – it is difficult to break through the political static.
As noted, there are many temporary, short-term reasons why voters are giving Biden poor marks on the economy. The higher prices shoppers see at the supermarket or at the pump still hurt, and telling them that inflation has cooled in 2023 or that many people are now seeing their pay rise faster than inflation means few. Plus, the economic statistics aren’t good enough to reflect some of the things that hurt everyday Americans, especially younger voters, like resuming student debt payments or ridiculous rents in big cities.
Plus, there’s evidence that the biggest benefits of Bidenomics – job opportunities and wage growth for workers at the bottom of the economic pyramid who have suffered the most for decades – are the people who are rarely interviewed or rarely appear on talk radio, while people tend to is louder to lose some ground in fixed income and in the face of higher prices. Especially those that focus on Fox News or talk radio, as they present a biased interpretation of business news.
President Joe Biden joins striking United Auto Workers on the strike line in Van Buren Township, Michigan, on Tuesday, September 26, 2023 (` Photo/Evan Vucci). … Read more
But I can’t help but think that when millions of people say “the economy” sucks, they’re not really comparing it to 2021, but to 1983, or at least what our young people were promised by their elders, who were there back in 1983. They cheer when Fain shows up in his “Eat The Rich” T-shirt because it’s been difficult to put real food on the table for decades. What Fain and the UAW are proposing is not just a nice little bump in next week’s paycheck, but a return to the day when someone off the assembly line could afford a fishing cottage — or send their kid to college.
This is a possible world, but it cannot happen overnight. It will take time, hard work and the courage of the men and women braving the picket lines now. My biggest fear is that most voters don’t have that patience. This is why the man with 91 charges, who promises to blow up the American experiment so that “I alone can fix it,” is in a dead heat with Biden in the same polls.
But with so much evidence that unions are the true path back to middle-class prosperity, why vote for Trump — who, as the 45th president, has pushed through a series of anti-worker policies when he hasn’t spent his political capital on tax cuts? wealthy and pro-corporate — instead of Biden, who has backed up his pro-worker rhetoric with actions and appointments at agencies like the National Labor Relations Board aimed at helping the middle class? That really wouldn’t make sense anymore, but when it comes to our twisted world of politics and economics, it wouldn’t be the first time.
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