Before the Media Research Center could fully cheer on the economy under President Trump, it still had some further talking down of the economy under President Biden to do (even though there’s little immediate difference between the two). Joseph Vazquez huffed in a Feb. 5 post:
It seems as if The Washington Post has dropped its facade somewhat about how star-spangled fantastic the Biden economy supposedly was, but only now that President Donald Trump is in office. Coincidence? We think not!
The February 2 print edition of The Post had a pretty revealing headline by reporters Lauren Kaori Gurley, Federica Cocco and Andrew Ackerman buried on the front page of the “Business” section: “More Americans are taking second jobs to pay bills.” Quite a 180-degree turnaround from The Post’s asinine July 2023 claim in the middle of the Bidenomics-induced inflation crisis that “Americans are still better off, with more in the bank than before the pandemic.” Now, The Post seems to have flipped to some degree by admitting that “Late last year, the share of U.S. workers with more than one job hit the highest level since 2019, previously last reached during the Great Recession.”
[…]The Post turned to Center for Economic Policy and Research senior economist Dean Baker, who obfuscated that “‘It’s pro-cyclical, meaning that you increase the number of multiple-job holders during good times.’” But as Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni retorted in comments to MRC Business, “The idea that the multiple job holder boom is pro-cyclical right now doesn’t make any sense if you look at the data comprehensively.”
Vazquez offered no evidence that Antoni, his favorite biased right-wing economist, should be trusted beyond the fact that he’s slavishly sticking to his mandated partisan script. He also didn’t mention that another right-leaning economist, Larry Kudlow, has conceded that the economy under Biden was better than right-wingers like Vazquez had claimed.
Despite that fact, Vazquez stuck to his narrative in a Feb. 12 post:
Politico may be trying to re-ingratiate itself with the American public after its government funding scandal by finally admitting what voters already knew about the Biden economy: It sucked.
“Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong,” read the eye-popping Politico magazine headline from Tuesday by author Eugene Ludwig, chairman of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.
Ludwig reminisced how “[m]any in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.”
But as Ludwig conceded, “What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed.” No kidding!
It is quite the turnaround from Politico’s pre-Election Day propaganda salivating how then-Vice President Kamala Harris was supposedly riding a “Dream Economy Into the Election!”
So that narrative flies out the window now that President Donald Trump is back in the White House, right?
Again, Vazquez failed to mention Kudlow’s flip-flop, nor did he offer any proof that government economic statistics were actually flawed. Instead, he cited a report from his favorite biased business channel:
Fox Business also recently reported on a new study from digital lender Biz2Credit, which the outlet said showed how “[t]he backbone of the U.S. economy – the American small business – may be breaking beyond repair without some serious intervention.”
Specifically, the outlet noted that “[d]ata from the study was pulled from more than 100,000 financing applications submitted to Biz2Credit between January 2022 and December 2024, and it shows a sharp decline in the earnings of small businesses toward the end of 2024, a trend the lender sees continuing into 2025.”
Vazquez concluded by sneering: “Bottom line: The Biden economy was always a nightmarish streak of unbelievably stupid policies from beginning to end, even by liberal standards. Politico may be late to the show, but at least one outlet finally had the guts to publish the obvious.”
Vaque3z groused more in a Feb. 21 post:
Politico either advertently or inadvertently just exposed the Democrats’ grotesque hypocrisy in trying to yoke President Donald Trump to the inflation-plagued economy that his predecessor’s insane spending policies created.
Politico State Policy reporter Liz Crampton managed to call out Democrat governors for doing an immediate switcheroo on the economy they just finished celebrating under former President Joe Biden.
“Democrats spent the last four years defending the economy. Now they’re turning it into a cudgel,” Crampton scolded in her lede paragraph. “It’s a dramatic swerve for a party that insisted for years that the economy was doing well and that Joe Biden had pulled off a soft landing on inflation.” In other words, this is a textbook case of what happens when you show your hand too early.
Perhaps Politico, which itself was adamant in October 2024 that Vice President Kamala Harris was riding, er, a “dream economy” into the 2024 presidential election, is still doing public relations penance for the scandal of taking millions in subscription payments by the U.S. government it was reporting on. Journalistic ethics be damned!
Vazquez didn’t mention his flip-flop on the economy caused solely by a change in presidents, not an actual change in the economy. He went on a rager in a March 10 post:
It must have taken a hefty amount of acid dropping for the detached journos at The New York Times to psych themselves into believing the abject falsehood that President Joe Biden’s economy was just a booming spectacle of awesome.
“Trump’s Policies Have Shaken a Once-Solid Economic Outlook,” gaslighted economic reporters Ben Casselman and Colby Smith.
It didn’t take but one paragraph for the authors to go into a complete pro-Bidenomics slobbering session replete with rehashed talking points: “President Trump inherited an economy that was, by most conventional measures, firing on all cylinders.” The authors continued: “Wages, consumer spending and corporate profits were rising. Unemployment was low. The inflation rate, though higher than normal, was falling.”
Spot the deception yet?
First, inflation was never “falling” and it’s egregious for reporters to continue acting like their readers are just dumb by fiddling with the semantics. The rate of increase has slowed, but it didn’t revert into negative territory. Secondly, missing from the consumer spending narrative was that the elevated levels of consumer spending is more credibly attributed to record explosions in credit card debt.
Once again, Vazquez censored Kudlow’s recanting; rather, he once again called on Antoni to peddle more right-wing propaganda.