CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Tell a lie often enough, some people will believe it. Joe Biden’s latest whopper is that the economy is good, Bidenomics is working, prices are coming down (actually they are just not going up as fast as a year ago), and, during a Labor Day speech he declared “the United States has the strongest economy in the world.”
The problem with getting these untruths to take hold is that they fly in the face of our day-to-day experiences at the grocery store or the gas station.
Suppose you had a friend who was a letch. They were a little short of cash, and ask if you could give them $20. You might do it once or twice; but certainly not once a week. Yet if you fuel up your car once a week, that’s how much more your paying for gasoline. If the typical grocery item you buy is up 25-cents, and you by 100 items during each trip to the store, you’re grocery bill is up at least $25 a week.
Other costs are going up to: the Teamsters union just ratified a new contract with UPS. The top wage for drivers is going up to $49 per hour. Union Pacific freight engineers get $40 an hour under their new labor deal, plus new time off rules. Surely you don’t think Amazon will absorb those higher shipping costs?
So we should take a moment to review what exactly Bidenomics is. It is: higher gas costs, higher grocery prices, higher utility bills, and if you have trouble covering those higher costs and put them on your credit card, those interest rates are between 20- and 25-percent. When I was growing up, you’d get better terms from a loan shark.
And Joe Biden’s re-election team has decided that the “great” economy is what he’ll run on. That’s a lie that needs to be repeated much more often before it’s believable.
Chris Conley
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