Are Happy Days Here Again?

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”

– Samuel Gompers, 1892 or so.

The debate on the impact of the economy on voter preferences rages on. A fair amount coming from the left is at pains to note the improvement of certain indicators under the Biden Administration. Improvements there have certainly been, in contrast to the steady profusion of lies from MAGA sources. But to some extent, depending on the personalities involved, the good news could also be understood as well-intentioned propaganda, even though it is based in fact.

I’m as well-intentioned as anyone, but my propagandistic impact is negligible. I’d rather puncture the “Happy Days Are Here Again” narratives with a little realism. Factuality is not enough. It depends on which facts you pick.

I readily acknowledge that a Biden victory next year is absolutely essential, for the sake of the world as well as for my little corner of it. Even if the economy sucked, or if Biden had helped it get worse, it would still be worth voting for Biden, against Trump. In any case, this post is not going to hurt Biden’s electoral prospects.

One type of leakage from the Biden balloon lies in the reality that under Trump, thanks I would say to the pandemic and to the Ukraine war, the economy nose-dived. We can debate how much better a President Clinton would have handled these difficulties. In any case, the depths to which the economy sank means it was easier to look better in recovery.

To my way of thinking, the economic decline was supply-driven and was bound to reverse itself before too long. Like others I could have overstated how quickly it would happen, but without doubt the economy has come back.

To this, I still say, so what?

Go back to whenever you think the economy was in respectable shape, at the start of 2020 or earlier. Any lefty worth his or her salt would be bursting with criticism of the economy at that point. Income inequality was unacceptable, as “Occupy” dramatized. The rent was still too damn high. Poverty was not much different from its rates after 1970. Advances in social protection for the U.S. mostly dried up forty years ago.

I don’t want to gloss over the important advances, though there were not many. One of a double-sided nature was the explosion in spending for health care benefits, for both the poor and the elderly, under Medicare and Medicaid. This made medical providers rich and their patients not much better off, except in relation to an alternative history where the services those benefits financed were not maintained. It still follows that the expansion of funding was basically eaten by the health care industry.

The Clintons helped give us an expansion of health benefits for children (“SCHIP”), and an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Obama gave us ObamaCare. Biden gave us big, albeit temporary increases in unemployment benefits and the Child Tax Credit.

Even if Democrats had done absolutely nothing, their results would still be preferable to conceivable alternatives under presidents Bush, McCain, Romney, or Trump II.

Still, the comparisons to some point in recent history, whether under Trump, Obama, or absent the pandemic and Ukraine war, are rally thin gruel. Moreover, they are arguably a class-blind neglect of the deficiencies of working-class well-being in recent history. The selection of any recent interval as the be-all and end-all for evaluation or criticism is a surrender of progressive economic commentary.

Another world should be possible. Biden is getting credit for a return to normal, but normal sucks! Normal for the U.S.A. has sucked for generations, for centuries.

I don’t want to look down my nose at recent progress. For instance, the latest GDP number of 5.9 real growth (after factoring out inflation, year over year, which means from October of 2022 to October 2023) is remarkable. Still, it covers a recent interval, which is not the way to maintain a long view.

Another important respect in which we are doing better than normal is in the historically low unemployment rates. Thanks to the economics profession, on both sides of the political spectrum, current and recent unemployment rates were dismissed as either impossible or founded on bad policy. A revisionist view, which started to be taken seriously after the boom of the latter 1990s, could be attributed to no less than Alan Greenspan, in his leadership of the Federal Reserve. These days we could call it dumb luck.

The great economist Joan Robinson once said, “The only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.” This was a reference to the Marxian notion of “surplus value” being extracted from labor. To be extracted from, you have to be working, which is usually better than not working. Jobs are essential, but as above, we should be able to consider how much more is available.

A low unemployment rate does have knock-on benefits in other dimensions, as is elaborated by the dynamic duo of Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker in The Benefits of Full Employment.

Still, following Samuel Gompers circa 1890, the question for the Left is: how do we get more?