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Americans struggling to pay bills? Record credit card debt? High grocery prices? Higher cost of living? No problem! A Washington Post columnist is idiotically claiming Americans are better off economically than they were four years ago. 

Washington Post columnist Heather Long decided to gaslight voters one more time before they head to the polls to decide who will run the White House for the next four years. “As Election Day arrives, the data is clear: Americans are better off economically than they were four years ago,” read Long’s ridiculous opening paragraph for her Nov. 4 item. She must have realized the insanity of her claim because she then resorted to telling voters they were better off whether they knew it or not: “I understand many people aren’t feeling it because of the inflation hangover that has left prices noticeably higher than they were in 2020. But it’s important to step back and assess the full picture.” It’s as if Long is trying her hardest to channel her inner Paul Krugman. 

Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni blasted Long’s reality-challenged propaganda in comments to MRC Business. “It’s easy for the elites to approve of the last four years, especially regarding economic policy, because they have not been devastated by the fallout of this administration’s mistakes,” Antoni rebuked. “For the average American, however, it has been four years on the path to impoverishment. Cherry-picked figures and erroneous data provided by the government cannot overcome widespread disapproval on the economy in opinion polling.” 

And cherry-pick Long did. She pointed to the out-of-context 4.1 percent unemployment rate; propped up pay increases long-hampered by inflation pressures; fawned over “robust” economic growth being artificially buoyed by an explosion of government debt; falsely claimed that Biden created “16 million” jobs, and praised the volatile stock market generating an alleged “massive increase in wealth for the middle class” as evidence of the supposed stroke of genius that is Bidenomics. 

Did Long mention that 76 percent of Americans are currently struggling to pay their bills because of inflation? No. Did she mention that Americans are reeling from record credit card debt? No. Did she mention that at least 1.7 million people are currently missing from the labor force? Did she mention that the average American family has to spend nearly $12,000 more a year just to afford the same standard of living they had in January 2021? Nope. Nada. Zilch. But in Long’s view, “Historians are likely to give the Biden economy a better grade than voters.” She continued with her hot garbage take:

“But what’s really important is how Biden and the Federal Reserve have proved endless experts wrong and pulled off the deftest macroeconomic maneuver in decades: a true soft landing. They’ve set up the next president for success. The economy has healed. Inflation is back under control. For the past 17 months, wages have grown faster than inflation, and with each passing month, more people tangibly feel that.”

Economist Dan Mitchell pointed MRC Business to an analysis he conducted in September 2024 on Americans’ income situation, just to address one of Long’s distorted data points. Mitchell argued based on Labor Department data that “workers lost a lot of ground in 2021 and 2022. There’s been a bit of progress since then, but the best-case scenario is that workers have merely recovered their losses.” In essence, wrote Mitchell, this “means zero overall economic progress over the past four years.” Citing from a Census Bureau report on U.S. income, Mitchell also noted that “[t]he good news is that median family income rose last year.” However, “The bad news is that families are still worse off than they were before the pandemic.” [Emphasis added.]

Ah, but how about that sexy stock market, says Long! “The stock market has gained about 75 percent since Oct. 30, 2020. (A record share of Americans — nearly 60 percent of households — have money in the market],” she wrote with glee. Not so fast. As Heritage Foundation Senior Research Associate Alexander Frei noted in an Oct. 31 column, “Inflation is also making stock markets appear stronger than they really are and cutting into returns for everyone, including those with retirement accounts.” In other words, as prices rise, “even significant returns lose their purchasing power.” Frie argued that now “[m]ore money is required to buy the same goods and services, eroding the real value of one’s gains. As everything becomes more expensive, higher earnings or investment returns don’t stretch as far, making it harder to keep up with the true cost of living.”

But Long was adamant that “looking at the full picture shows that most Americans are better off financially than they were four years ago.” But a Sept. 25 analysis by the Financial Health Network determined that “the majority of Americans are not financially healthy, with expenses outpacing income, little wiggle room to protect against financial shocks, and diminished hope for the future.”

Long is clearly trying to attempt a pathetic, last-minute effort to smear as much lipstick on the pig of the Biden-Harris economy as she can before Election Day closes out. She even undercut herself by conceding that most of her points matter “little to voters. And I get it. They are focused on high prices.” Uh, duh? 

Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Washington Post at 202-334-6000 and demand it stop gaslighting Americans on their economic struggles.