Former Trump Economist Breaks Down the Biden Economy

AMAC Newsline spoke with Casey Mulligan, a professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and the former chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump White House, to find out the truth about how the economy is doing and why most Americans don t share the White House s cheery outlook.

Though Biden administration officials generally point to metrics like the unemployment rate and GDP growth as proof that the economy is doing well, Mulligan said it remains understandable why people aren t buying that.

There are probably two things that make them unwilling to accept that. One is that they ve kind of set the bar low for themselves. Normally when you recover from recession, you get quite rapid growth. And the fact that maybe we are getting average growth when we should be getting above average that s disappointing, Mulligan said.

Some of the Biden team s self-proclaimed economic figures, Mulligan continued, amount to little more than an exercise in cherry-picking that allows them to brag about a mediocre economy particularly when it comes to metrics like consumer spending and retail sales. When you re coming out of a recession, you ought to be breaking some records, or getting near it. It should be very rapid growth coming out of a downturn.

For a measure that more accurately describes how the economy is doing, Mulligan said, Americans should turn their attention to one key metric: real wages.

Normally, real wages are increasing a percent or two every year on average and since Biden s been in office for three years almost, real wages have not even gotten close to returning to previous trends and maybe haven t even kept up [with] the old level prior to the pandemic.

Another issue preventing a more vigorous economic recovery, Mulligan continued, is what he describes as human capital problems which include factors like poor health and lack of career advancement in the private sector, each of which has continued to disproportionately affect the livelihoods of young and middle class Americans.

Mulligan indicated that another metric worth keeping an eye on is private employment on a per capita or per adult basis, which has barely been growing over the last year and a half. Private employment is serving consumers who have kind of a choice about things, whereas the government employment only serves what the government thinks [is] valuable but whether people think it s valuable is a totally different question.

via amac.us