The third and largest round of fiscal stimulus was in March of 2021. That’s when Biden’s popularity peaked at 55.1 percent.
Base image from 588 Biden Approval Ratings.
Why Biden’s Approval Rating Is Miserable
Income is rising and so are wages. Even real income is up. But real wages are another matter.
Personal Income vs Hourly Wages Notes
- DPI means Disposable Personal Income. Disposable means after taxes.
- Real DPI means inflation adjusted using the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) deflator. Real DPI is a BEA calculation.
- Average hourly earning are for production and nonsupervisory workers.
- Real wages are deflated by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) not the PCE.
- The BLS does not report a real hourly wage. I used the CPI-W index for production and nonsupervisory workers, produced by the BLS, as the deflator.
Personal Income Definition
The BEA defines personal income as “Income that people get from wages and salaries, Social Security and other government benefits, dividends and interest, business ownership, and other sources.” Rental income is a part of other sources.
Three Rounds of Fiscal Stimulus
- Round 1, March 2020: $1,200 per income tax filer, $500 per child(CARES Act) – Trump
- Round 2, December 2020: $600 per income tax filer, $600 per child (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021) – Trump
- Round 3, March 2021: $1,400 per income tax filer, $1,400 per child (American Rescue Plan Act) – Biden
The three rounds of free money fiscal stimulus (literally a helicopter drop), plus eviction moratoriums put an unprecedented amount of money in people’s hands. In addition, unemployment insurance paid people more to not work than they received working.
The third round of stimulus under Biden was totally unwarranted. However, it is also worth noting that Trump wanted a much bigger second stimulus package than the Republican Congress gave him. Trump is no fiscal hero.
For more discussion, please see Why Biden’s Approval Rating Is Miserable in One Economic Chart
The three stimulus packages, on top of supply chain disruptions, energy disruptions due to the war in Ukraine, and Bidenomics in general, set in motion the biggest wave of inflation in over 30 years.
Biden went from an approval rating of 17.2 percent to a disapproval rating of 17.2 percent.
Peak Free Money
In addition to declining real wages, perhaps Biden’s big problem is the free money has run out.
Biden’s popularity peaked in March of 2021 along with stimulus. Was that a honeymoon impact or peak free money?
I suspect a bit of each coupled with hope of more free money, especially student loan forgiveness.
Sending free money to Israel and Ukraine does not help perceptions of how Biden is doing. And neither does the border or ridiculous energy regulations that cost people money.
Biden keeps telling people what a great job he has done.
I don’t believe it and most don’t either. And that shows up in the polls no matter what reason you assign.
A politician could sprout Angel Wings and spit gold into my Vaults and I would still call them all liars.
Terrorist biden along with TERRORIST friends in ukraine/middle east
It’s surprising how few people that are gunning for benefit and wage increases understand that this free money is the basis for inflationary increases elsewhere. When governments mandated increases in minimum wage for many jobs that had no particular skill set, all of the jobs that required a skill set now wanted increases in their wages as well so the floor price of everything, relatively speaking, started to rise. If free money was the solution, then the government should write a check to everyone for a million dollars. Sounds great but the next morning, a Toyota Corolla will be $100,000 under our current supply/demand economy.
What you describe requires printing money, easy monetary policy.
In a fixed amount of money world mandated minwages increases has the effect of any price floor, as described in the first year of Economics. An increase in the well-being of minwage workers is accompanied by a decrease in the well-being of the next people up the ladder, and a decrease in demand for the products and services provided by those minwage workers.
(Worth mentioning the side effect of an increase in doing work informally, off-the-record, for pay that is less than minwage.)
Basic economics. Most people aren’t smart enough to understand the ramifications.
I though trump was responsible for 1.5 of those three rounds of stimulus. Not to mention loans to businesses.
Wanted to make sure his name was on the checks, even.
Only Congress was responsible for all 3 rounds. The acting President just signed the bills.
C’mon, Joe, your LIVs need the cash
“Peak Free Money”
I read that Bill Gates bought a boat load of stock in a vaccine maker in September 2019. The following month was Event 201, which Gates apparently participated in. I read recently that Nancy Pelosi bought a boat load of NVDA stock or options, eliciting a headline asking what Nancy knows.
Is there ever peak free money for the insiders?
Meanwhile the lowly FDA regulators have to toil at pharmaceutical firms, hoping to earn enough to some day behave like an insider.
“Fink’s LinkedIn profile states that he finished his role at the FDA in December 2022. Two months later he was working at Moderna, heading the translational medicine and early clinical development programme in infectious diseases. He is one of two regulators The BMJ has found to have recently moved to Moderna from the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review.”
link to bmj.com
It would be useful to have more detail on when that money ran out, and in articular what imact it has had on employment, and what future impact the “run out” will have, and when.
A little bit here
$Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see! What could go wrong?
The die has been cast by the past parade of profligate spenders. It’s coming close to the time when the debt collector knocks at the door. Sorry! Your American dream has been repossessed.
Agree.
Alot of individual Americans live life leveraged to the hilt. Some do so simply to survive will many others do so to maintain a lifestyle. There’s alot of people just waiting for boomer mom and dad to kick off so they can access those assets. How could this setup not end in disaster?
I see stagnation for a long long time.
I am leveraged so I can move the risk elsewhere.
To folks known as bagholders.
Who is going to come knocking? The people we owe this money too haven’t been born yet.
Gen Z and millennial hate Israel. Biden might lose the election, bc of his support. He supports Israel, despite his disagreements with Bibi. Bibi cont to forage in Gaza, attack S. Lebanon and mop up the west bank. US forces attacked the Shia HQ in Bagdad.
The CIA and the Mosad support ISIS and the Balochi rebels in Iran. ISIS killed 100
Iranian yesterday.
Tul-Karem in the west bank is 7 miles from the Mediterranean sea. Tul Karen, Jenin
and Nablus Hamas commander in Lebanon was killed yesterday. The IDF cleansed Hamas cells and Palestinian’s Universities cells in the west bank. Biden’s ME coordinators Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein supports a peaceful resolution in Lebanon. Nasrallah claims that Galant – Israel defense minister – wants to start a
war with Hezbollah.
General Suleimani had a tight grip on his proxies. After 4 years Iran has lost control
A 34 point swing in favorability in less than three years. Has that ever happened before? Carter? Nixon?
Polls are goals for those who enjoy manipulating numbers. When math can’t be trusted, we are in serious doo.
Trump was more generous.
The youth, with little assets is priced out of the housing market, and can barely pay rent. At best they make virtue out of necessity.
Normally, they would vote liberal or democrat, but those left them high and dry.
The old, will vote against those that destroyed the country they knew.
Surprise Biden has double digit approval.
You’re forgetting the marketing bubble (e.g.: fake news and education), and the tribalism.
Democracy as conceived by the founders and written in the Constitution awarded voting rights to property owners who paid taxes and had a vested interest in a small, frugal, economical government. Socialist governments give voting rights to the welfare class who do not pay taxes and have no interest in fiscal rectitude. Consequently all socialist governments fail. Ours is in the process of catastrophic failure. What can’t be paid won’t be paid. Transfer payments are coming to an end as hyper inflation devalues transfer payments towards zero. The welfare parasitic class are becoming unhappy. They want what you’ve got. They want all of it. They express their displeasure with crime, theft, and riots.
And their allies, the Socialists, unable to provide them with what they ask for directly (i.e. “all of it”) permit the crime, theft, and rioting to continue to pretend they are allies of the welfare class.
They should realize people really don’t want to part of the welfare class, give up Socialism, and build a truly strong economy.
Not to worry.
They are making great progress with taking firearms away from the common folk.
The first half of this is accurate, but the second half is not. Social security transfer payments are sustainable at some level of pay-as-you-go. There is no hyperinflation, and there won’t be. Nearly all people want to work, but they want meaningful work that supports a decent living. The heart of the current problem is actually parasitism of the elites, who have squeezed wages as a share of production to all-time lows by gerrymandering the government to enable monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly control of most markets. Lack of corporate competition impoverishes the nation through high costs, low productivity, and excess profit margins at the expense of workers’ earnings. The oligarchs control the selection of candidates by the major parties, and use endless propaganda to brainwash the poor into voting however the elites want. And the largest, by far, “welfare” recipients are elites grifting away on the endless tide of corruption they’ve created. Actual welfare to actual poor people is negligible by comparison!
People are miserable because the things that matter (i.e. housing) are unaffordable.
I think there are a lot of people who aren’t happy unless they are miserable.
Couldn’t agree with you more.
Fox news showed a chart this morning from the BLS illustrating real wages, which showed a decline of 4.7% from Jan 2021, when Biden came into office until Nov 2023.
THIS is the crux of the problem for the average person.
Reduced purchasing power is what consumers feel in their pockets. They don’t care about trumped up statistics like the current rate of inflation, the price of gas somewhere that they don’t live in or the unemployment rate if they have a job.
That’s BS not BLS. If you look at Mish’s chart, you can see that real wages jumped by 4.3 percent when the pandemic hit because it was mainly low-wage workers that fell out of the data. Since Biden took office, those low-wage workers have come back into employment, and the real wage has declined back accordingly. Real wage growth excluding this composition effect under Biden was (almost) exactly the same as under Trump. Neither Trump nor Biden have made any difference when it comes to the dismal long-term trend in US real wages.
The misery index, inflation + unemployment, at about 7.5, is at the low end of averages. Stop being so miserable.
People who are employed now were employed before. Having a job is irrelevant if you are worse off, and large swaths of the population are under Biden.
How so? Real wage growth has been the same as under Trump.
That real wage chart will make a great exhibit in a future edition of How to Lie with Statistics.