A century ago, relatively few Americans had investments. The stock market was for the rich – or so we thought.
Today, we’ve made advancements; almost everyone has a 401K plan through work, and many of us also invest in separate post-tax accounts now. Almost all of us have stocks and bonds, whether we manage them ourselves or let our employers’ chosen firms do it for us.
So we find ourselves watching the stock market, weekly, maybe daily. The radio and television announce the latest news; our computer’s home screen lights up with the latest Dow and S&P numbers.
We tend to believe somehow that the latest numbers on Wall Street ARE the economy.
And that’s wrong.
For starters, the Wall Street numbers are just about one kind of company: publicly traded firms that choose to be listed in the United States. That doesn’t count publicly traded firms that choose to be listed abroad (many of which are just as big, and have just as many US employees, as the ones traded here). It doesn’t count all the privately held companies that aren’t listed because they don’t sell stock. It doesn’t count your local franchises, your local stores, your local consultants, your local contractors.
Wall Street numbers are real, but they aren’t the whole market. They are just a part of it. An important part, sure, but not the whole thing. And they are rarely as representative of the economy at large as people assume.
The stock market is like any other market; it’s a store that sells things that people want, in this case, stocks. And those stocks are denominated in US Dollars. So that means that as the dollar goes down due to inflation, prices go up without representing any change in real value; the dollar is just worth less, so it takes more than before to buy something of the same value.
So it is that the stock market looks like it’s been climbing beautifully over the past four years – and the Democrats would sure like you to believe that it was – but in fact, it conveys a terrible truth: the stock market’s rise shows us the real rate of inflation.
Far from the low numbers that the Biden-Harris regime has announced, the real rate of inflation has varied between ten and twenty percent over the past four years. Because the stock market covers a broader cross-section of the economy than the market basket that the Feds use to calculate the “published” inflation rate, the stock market’s climb presents a truer picture. We’ve gone from roughly a 29,000 Dow to a 43,000 Dow in four years. That’s inflation of almost 50% over four years, or over ten percent per year… after a forty-year-long stretch in which inflation was kept under 3% by both Republican and Democrat governments.
The Biden-Harris crowd will tell you “but we’ve brought inflation down!” – but have they really? Inflation is a rate of increase, and yes, it’s not going up as fast as it was the first three years, but prices are still rising. Prices haven’t fallen at all. Prices haven’t stopped climbing; for the most part, they just aren’t climbing as quickly as they were.
It’s rather like an innocent prisoner being tortured in a dungeon for four solid weeks. After being beaten every hour on the hour the first three weeks, the torturers get tired and only beat the prisoner every other hour for the fourth week. Do you think the innocent prisoner even notices this break? There isn’t much of him left by the time things let up, is there?
Apologies, Gentle Reader, if that analogy is flawed. You’re right, it’s not perfect; this situation has been going on for four solid years, not weeks.
But otherwise, it’s spot on.
This Bidenflation is crippling the nation. Just a few years ago, if your children were graduated from college, they could afford to move out; if your children got married, they could soon afford to buy that first condo or that first starter house.
Today, the real estate market is out of reach for most Americans, because the Biden-Harris regime has warped it. It’s often more advantageous to sell to a foreign investor, like the Chinese investment firms. Today’s mortgage rates are unaffordable for Americans; some banks find that renting out homes is more profitable for them under these conditions. And it’s killing the American family, killing a generation, economically speaking. Everyone who was just starting out, hitting their 20s, these past four years, has been economically set back a decade by these four miserable years.
And that brings us to real issue about the economy at election time: the Left wants you to disregard your personal experience, and instead accept that their numbers, the numbers reported in Washington, are the numbers that define the economy.
They don’t.
When the feds report a number, you get no real context, or worse, you get deceptive context. For example, if they publish the number of jobs that were created in a given month, you don’t know from that how many of those jobs were entry-level positions or better-paying management positions. You don’t know how many were government jobs or private sector jobs, how many have career potential and how many don’t. We can’t complain about that; it’s impossible for the government to cover all that information in a statistic. It’s just important to remember that the statistics aren’t really as good as they sound, because they don’t have the information you need to really evaluate them.
Look at your own personal experience instead; that’s where you’ll find the truth.
Are groceries as affordable for you as they were five or six years ago? Is a new car as affordable for you as it was then? If you need to replace a major appliance in your home today – a new washer/dryer, a furnace, a central air conditioner – always a painful expense – is it easier or even harder today than it was five years ago?
Look up and down the streets of your city, your township, your county. Are the storefronts booming? Are the shopping malls busy? Or are the furniture stores and giftshops shutting down from lack of business? Is the local industrial park full of new enterprises, or is it full of empty buildings, as more and more American companies have given up the ghost?
Do you – and your children and your neighbors – have the disposable income to shop for extras, or are you spending everything you have on necessities?
If you could afford to go shopping for clothes and shoes five years ago, but not today – if you didn’t have to check the price of the ground beef, the eggs, the onions, the broccoli, four years ago, but you do today – if you didn’t dread opening the envelope containing the gas bill or the electric bill five years ago, but you do today – then these are signs of YOUR economy, the reality of life in your home, your neighborhood, your community.
This reality is truer to you and to the country than the cooked-up numbers released by Washington bureaucrats, or the narrow perspective offered by Wall Street.
What did it cost you to buy your first home? What will it cost your children to buy their first home?
There are things your government could do to ease these burdens. All government needs to do, frankly, is to get out of the way.
Stop inviting in millions of illegal aliens to suck up our welfare state resources and compete with citizens for jobs. Stop driving manufacturers offshore with outrageous regulatory burdens and crippling business taxes. Stop driving up the cost of electricity by forcibly replacing energy that works (nuclear, oil, gas and coal) with energy that doesn’t work (solar and wind). Stop concocting government programs that pour unlimited tax dollars down a drain of crony capitalists with “green deals” selling Chinese products.
The Biden-Harris regime has done massive damage in these four short years. It is dreadful to imagine how much more they could destroy if given another four.
There are countless reasons to vote against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – their clear incompetence without a script, their outrageous positions on social issues and foreign policy matters, their clear distaste for such basic American values as the Bill of Rights…
But the simplest case of all is the economy. This crowd has utterly destroyed the economic boom of the Trump administration, leaving the nation a shell of what it so recently was.
Only another economic boom can enable this nation to get back on a solid footing again. Kamala Harris actually was part of the destruction, and she sure looks like she would delight in wreaking even more havoc.
Only President Trump can deliver that economic growth; we know, because he’s done it before.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman in the 1990s, he has been a regular contributor to the American Free News Network since July of 2023. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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