Last month Democratic President Joe Biden was able to announce a significant win, or at least what seemed like one.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, average hourly wages had increased from $29.35 in June of last year to $30.40 in June of this year. This, of course, gave Biden and his friends all the proof they needed that they were indeed doing a better job economically than former President Donald Trump.
However, when we take a closer look at current wages, it doesn’t really seem like much of a gain, especially when you consider the current rate of inflation.
While people are technically making more money, they also have to pay more for consumer products, a lot more. According to the consumer price index (CPI), which measures the cost of consumer items, most cost 5.4 percent more than they did a year ago. And that means the real average hourly earnings has actually dropped by a whopping 1.7 percent.
This means that for families who earn about $50,000 a year, $850 is lost to nothing more than inflation.
And that’s just over the past year. In the last month, things are looking even worse.
From May of 2021 until June, average hourly wages rose about 0.3 percent, which on the surface, seems good. However, during that same period of time, CPI rose some 0.9 percent.
That means in just one month, the real average hourly earnings dropped by 0.5 percent…
If the economy performs at expected rates for the rest of the year, you might as well add another 0.5 percent loss for every month, equally out to a whopping 6 percent drop in annual average hourly rates.
But surely Biden and his party can’t be to blame for all of this, right? I mean, there’s a pandemic still going on.
To some extent, that is true. But who’s been responsible for the last year and a half of lockdowns?
Take lumber prices, for instance.
As you well know, the increased costs of lumber came about because people were forced to sit at home instead of working through COVID-19. And so a lot of home renovations and do-it-yourself projects got done. But during the same time, lumber mills were shut down, and if they weren’t, people were getting just as much to sit at home rather than work at sawmills and such. And so, there was a lumber shortage.
The same thing can pretty much be said of raised prices in car and truck rentals. During the height of the pandemic, no one was going anywhere. So rental companies began selling off their vehicles. According to New York magazine, some 770,000 rental cars were sold last year. But now that demand is back, there aren’t enough cars to be found.
Computer chip shortages affect this as well. Like rental car companies, car manufacturers canceled vehicle parts orders last year, such as the much-needed computer chips, as cars just weren’t being sold. But now that people are buying vehicles again, there aren’t enough to go around.
As we already see with the lumber industry, prices are starting to level out again. Since late May, lumber prices have dropped some 68 percent already, according to Fortune.
And as vehicle manufacturers and rental companies make up for lost time, we’ll likely see those prices, as well as availability, decrease too.
However, it still may not be enough to stop the rise in CPI from overtaking average hourly wages each month.
Gas prices, for example, are just one of those reasons. And don’t tell me Biden’s had nothing to do with that…
Another seems to be the government’s insistence on paying for things like stimulus checks and unemployment benefits to people who could just as easily re-enter the workforce and increase production, which would lead to lowering the cost of nearly all consumer items.
But why help out our economy if Biden is going to pay you just as much, even it drags the national debt down farther, to do nothing?
All of this is to say that Democratic lockdowns have done nothing but create more unrest and destruction.