In his recent Wall Street Journal column crowing about his handling of the economy, Biden claimed “real income for the bottom half of earners is up by 3.4% since I took office.”
That seemed completely at odds with every statistic we had seen over the past two years. Our CTUP senior fellow in economics, EJ Antoni, did some fact-checking and here is what he found: According to Biden’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics, under Biden, the bottom 25% of income earners have seen their real incomes have fallen 2.3% while the second income quartile has fallen 3.9%. That means the two groups that make up the bottom half of earners have both seen their real incomes decrease, not increase. So where did the Biden economists get their numbers? You’d have to ask them, but no one in the media is likely to do that. |