The Atlantic has an absurd message for struggling Americans: the economy isn’t just not bad, it’s the “Taylor Swift” and “Lebron James” of economies.
In a June 10 article for The Atlantic headlined “The U.S. Economy Reaches Superstar Status,” staff writer Rogé Karma claimed, “There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.”
Throughout this article, Karma made several misleading claims, asserting that “household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class.”
However, this wasn’t his only mistake.
Karma boasted that “the post-pandemic recession never arrived,” echoing a host of leftist propagandists who tap-danced around the fact that America entered a recession in 2022. At one point, Karma acknowledged the rising cost of living before attempting to refute it: “One school of thought maintains that the answer is no, because of the rising cost of living. Thanks to three years of higher-than-usual inflation, just about everything costs more than it did before the pandemic,” Karma wrote.
Shortly after, he shamelessly added, “If prices go up but people’s incomes go up faster, then the cost of living decreases. And that is exactly what has happened in the U.S. over the past five years.”
On June 10, 2019, then-President Donald Trump still had a year and a half left in his term. Nonetheless, Karma proceeded to claim that wages have outpaced inflation, starting his analysis at the beginning of the pandemic when inflation was incredibly low (There was 1.4% annual inflation in 2020).
If Karma started at the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term, he would find that the country has averaged 5.5% monthly inflation from January 2021 to May 2024. He would also notice that there has been zero growth in real wages during that period, as median real weekly earnings fell from $373 early in 2021 to $365 early in 2024.
Late in the article, Karma dumped the bad news that even he can’t run away from. He cited a study claiming that Americans grew vastly more wealthy from 2019 to 2022, before conceding that a major factor in that study was the insane raise in home prices, which have increased far faster than incomes.
At the same time that housing prices are rising, interest rates are too. From Jan. 21, 2021, Biden’s first full day in office, through May 7, 2024, mortgage rates have risen 156%.
Karma even admitted that these rising costs are a major factor “putting a middle-class lifestyle further and further out of reach.”
In fact, Americans’ savings have been decimated under Bidenomics, falling 75% from January 2021 to March 2024.
Despite this, Karma dismissed the concerns of polled Americans about the state of the economy in his article, much as he did in a previous piece titled “What Would It Take to Convince Americans That the Economy is Fine?”
What would it take to make The Atlantic take struggling Americans at their word?
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Atlantic at (202) 266-6000 and demand it quit shilling for the terrible Biden economy.