President Joe Biden is running for re-election, and he’s making some baffling choices.
Biden has been pointing to a graph in order to dismiss voters’ concerns about their elevated grocery bills… and he’s also lying about the economy.
“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. That’s Bidenomics,” the president’s official account tweeted Sunday.
Twitter users checked the record in brutal fashion.
“The tweet’s claim about real wages contains a factual error. On 3/15/20 when US COVID lockdowns began real wages adjusted for inflation (AFI) were $11.15. As of 7/16/23 real wages AFI are $11.05. Real wages AFI remain lower (not higher) than before the pandemic,” fact-checkers said under the tweet.
On Twitter, a user becomes a fact-checker by signing up for “Community Notes,” a program allowing users to rate the notes written by existing fact-checkers.
Take a look —
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.
That's Bidenomics.
— President Biden (@POTUS) July 16, 2023
Last week, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly report on real wages. Americans saw their weekly earnings grow by 0.6 in the month of June… after a decline lasting more than three years.
Before June, Americans saw their real, weekly earnings decline every month since a 0.7 percent gain in February 2020.
For this reason, Biden faced criticism for sounding out of touch.
“I don’t understand the strategy behind lying to middle class folks in an attempt to convince them that their neighbors are doing better but they themselves aren’t,” one Twitter user said, in reply to Biden’s tweet.
Still, Biden is running on “Bidenomics.”
In a major economic speech in Chicago last month, Biden said his administration’s efforts were sparking recovery. But only one in three U.S. adults approve of his economic leadership, according to a June survey from The Associated Press-NORC.
That 34% figure is even lower than his overall approval rating of 41%, according to the AP-NORC poll. Only about 1 in 10 Republicans approved of Biden overall or on the economy.
Last month, the president gave a speech on “Bidenomics” in hopes that the term will lodge in voters’ minds ahead of the 2024 elections.
“I came into office determined to change the economic direction of this country, to move from trickle-down economics to what everyone in The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times began to call ‘Bidenomics,’” the president said. “I didn’t come up with the name. I really didn’t.”
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.