The touted success of 'Bidenomics' is an illusion based on amnesia about the recent past, argues an economist.
A US media report earlier this week claimed that the average cost of the annual Thanksgiving dinner this November 23 had fallen compared with last year, largely due to lower poultry prices.
That was not the first claim of financial wellbeing under the administration of President Joe Biden — in the face of rampant inflation and soaring interest rates.
Economist Dr. Linwood Tauheed told Sputnik that the price of Thanksgiving turkeys was a mere economic "anomaly" that was meaningless in light of long-term inflation.
"Turkey prices last year were up because of avian flu decreasing the supply of turkeys. This year, avian flu is down, so the supply of turkeys is up," Tauheed explained. "So we're doing relative pricing. It doesn't mean that the price of turkeys is not high. It just means that it's less this year than than last year."
"While we have this anomaly occurring with one commodity, turkeys, food prices in general are up, as well as rent prices and other prices that ordinary people have to spend their money on," he continued. "And so while the rate of inflation is down now, there's still inflation in prices."
The same was true of the Biden administration's claims of record jobs growth, the economist argued.
"We've just come out of a horrible period of of recession in a pandemic where there was a huge increase in unemployment, a decrease in gross domestic product," Tauheed said. But while there had been a recovery from that slump, "we have not gotten back to pre-pandemic levels of employment."
"We've had an increase in in jobs created because we have such a decrease in jobs lost," he added. "The Biden administration is in fact touting that as a statistic, the fastest growth in jobs ever. Well, that's because you're having a recovery from from a horrible recession."
The academic warned that the US had effectively experienced one economic recession — defined as two two consecutive quarters of contracting gross domestic product (GDP) — and was heading for a second, deeper one.
"The reason that that we haven't had it yet is because people are spending. Now, what are they spending? They're spending on their credit cards," Tauheed stressed. "Credit card debt has reached a high of over $1 trillion in the in the third quarter of 2023."
"When those credit limits are broached and they're not only will we have a decrease in spending, but it will be a sudden decrease in spending. And we will we will have a sharp recession coming," he predicted.
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