President Joe Biden falsely claimed Sunday that he is responsible for increasing Americans’ wages.
Touting what his administration calls “Bidenomics,” the president claimed that real wages are higher today than they were before governments shut down businesses in 2020 using the COVID-19 pandemic as their justification.
“Right now, real wages for the average American worker is higher than it was before the pandemic, with lower wage workers seeing the largest gains,” Biden boasted. “That’s Bidenomics.”
It’s a great narrative for Biden. But unfortunately for him, it’s not true.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the per hour real wage, adjusted for inflation, was $11.15 in March 2020 and jumped to $11.72 in April 2020. The real wage per hour in June 2023, on the other hand, was $11.05.
Real wages, in fact, remained mostly steady from June 2020 through September 2021 despite widespread lockdowns and economic havoc. They began trending downward in October 2021 before bottoming out at $10.92 per hour in June 2022. That trend followed the outline of the inflation crisis, which economists widely blamed on Biden’s COVID economic relief package.
To sum up: Not only are real wages not higher for American workers today than before the pandemic, but they decreased after Biden took office, a downturn correlated with the inflation crisis.
Biden is no stranger to taking credit for economic successes that he was not actually responsible for.
Biden, for example, claims he has created 13 million jobs. But the majority of those jobs are not newly created jobs, but jobs the economy added back after government lockdowns during the pandemic. Biden also takes credit for record deficit reduction. But his policies didn’t actually reduce the deficit. Rather, deficit reduction that has happened in his presidency was already going to take place before he became president because if waning of pandemic-related spending.
Meanwhile, Biden abdicates responsibility for crises.
Last year, when gas prices hit record highs, Biden blamed Russia and the oil industry. Then, when gas prices moderated, the administration took credit and praised Biden.
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