This list of reasons from Damon Linker, on why the nation is unhappy, is fascinating for what it says about the nature of thinking in elite circles. Note that some of these items are things in people's lives that they are likely to see themselves or through friends and family.

Ah yes, the good old days. I remember when Biden told Governor DeSantis that he wouldn't help Florida after Hurricane Idalia unless he said nice things about him whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…

https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1772253211895759349

Of course, Biden didn't do that. He did everything he could to help the victims in Florida as quickly as possible as any president should. Biden would have been impeached in a second if he tried in any way to make aid contingent on DeSantis praising him, as he should have been.

@David_Charts They should require everyone reporting on the presidential campaign to read this. Reporters should know that the inflation the U.S. saw was not due to Biden, it was a worldwide story due to the pandemic and Russia's invasion. @David_Charts I know reporters always say that people don't care about inflation in Germany and France, they care about inflation here. That may be true, but they should be constantly confronted with the fact that it was a worldwide pandemic, not Biden policies.

Your periodic reminder that the major media outlets are owned and controlled by people who will pay lower taxes with Donald Trump back in the White House
nytimes.com/2024/03/09/us/…
Why does the NYT think it will be "challenging" for Biden to have to run on his record? He had record job creation, the longest streak of below 4.0 percent unemployment in half a century, by far the best growth of any major economy.

Just to quickly point out why some of us would be very happy to see Biden back in the White House, apart from keeping the dictator out, let's recount the record. Biden's recovery act quickly boosted the economy back to full employment. We know Trump has problems with numbers, but employment growth had slowed sharply by the end of his term.

Since the Trump family and CNN commentators seem to have difficulty the nature of his fine in his fraud case, let me lay out the issues as simply as possible. They claim since the loans were repaid with interest, no one was harmed. Let’s take a similar situation that would be closer to people’s ordinary lives to make the point.

Since some folks were asking about the carried interest deduction and how much we give Bill Ackman through it, I’ll give a brief explanation and then some calculations. Carried interest is a type of payment that hedge fund and private equity managers typically get for their work. A standard contract will pay them some share of the money invested (say 1-2 percent) and then a percent of the gains (say 15-20 percent) over some threshold.

There is a big market for research claiming that retirees are living high on the hog because of Social Security and Medicare. This is very useful in diverting concerns about the upward redistribution of income into a generational war. I will try to write something more substantive in the near future (lots of travelling), but there are several points worth making.

The need to hide policy decisions behind "the market" is really really deep. Here is the NYT talking about the failures of globalization
nytimes.com/2023/06/18/bus… Sorry folks, it was not "the market" that made government-granted patent and copyright monopolies longer and stronger.

#EconTwitter 🧵A question for the Econ Twitter crew. If we look at the Average Hourly Earnings (AHE) series there has been a sharp slowing of wage growth. Annualizing over three-month periods, we went from over 6.5 percent at the start of 2022 to around 4.0 percent in recent months. This is only slightly higher than the wage growth we saw in 2018-2019, when the inflation rate was at the Fed’s 2.0 percent target.

More mind reading at the NYT in a very bad way. This implies that there is a question of what would "convince Mr. Trump." Has anyone shown any evidence whatsoever that Trump cares one iota whether his prosecution is justified?

I saw that Manchin wants to revive something like the 2010 Bowles-Simpson commission as a way to deal with the debt ceiling crisis. I thought it might be worth a quick reminder of how the last Bowles-Simpson commission ended up. Under the commission's by-laws, a final report had to have the support of 12 of the 16 members of the commission. If it had this support, its recommendations would be fast-tracked in Congress for a straight up or down vote.

NYT says investors might lose confidence in the U.S. government's abilities to pay its bills if Treasury minted the platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling nytimes.com/2023/01/17/bus… It might be useful if they can find an investor who says they would be unwilling to hold U.S. debt in this situation.

Since the NYT is running its piece again on how young people and minorities are being prevented from owning homes, I'm reposting my piece on the government data (apparently not available to NYT reporters) showing homeownership rates rose sharply since the pandemic. Young people, Blacks, Hispanics, and lower income households (below the median) all saw big gains in homeownership

I know that the economics profession has a big recession lobby, but what's the argument for further rate hikes, rather than a Fed pause, after Friday's jobs report? The annualized rate of wage growth was 3.9 percent over the last three months. This is only modestly higher than what we saw in 2019, when inflation was comfortably below the Fed's target.

#jobsday On the whole, this is a very positive report. The job growth is somewhat higher than can be sustained over the long-term, but not hugely so. Sectors that had trouble hiring, most notably health care, are catching up.

#jobsday share of workers working two full-time jobs, fell sharply. (This is a Washington Post measure of economic distress -- although it actually rises in good times) I assume that the Washington Post will have a major piece on how workers' plights have improved.

The WaPo is working overtime to trash the economy under Biden. Here's a homepage headline about expected Q3 growth:
washingtonpost.com/business/2022/… This requires a massive WTF? How do people "notice" economic growth? Most people are not reading the latest monthly data releases from the Commerce Department.

The idea that the economy is terrible under Biden is an invention of Republicans and the major media outlets, tens of millions of families have seen substantial improvements in living standards cepr.net/the-good-news-… I have had several people respond to this by pointing out the recent plunge in the stock market. The stock market measures the discounted expected value of future corporate profits.

The New York Times, like CNN, NPR, WaPo and other mainstream news outlets has been absolutely relentless in pushing the bad economy story ever since Joe Biden entered the White House. Today, we got a piece headlined< "the job market has been like musical chairs. Will the music stop?" nytimes.com/2022/10/07/bus…

I saw a post here yesterday (sorry, can't remember the guilty party) claiming a symmetry between inflation fighters, who say inflation hits the poor hardest, and doves who say higher interest rates and higher unemployment hit the poor hardest. I want to take issue with that one. The components we think usually affect the poor most are food, energy, and housing.