schmidlap
Platinum Member
- Oct 30, 2020
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It's difficult for some chronic whingers to admit.
If the United States’ economy were an athlete, right now it would be peak LeBron James. If it were a pop star, it would be peak Taylor Swift. Four years ago, the pandemic temporarily brought much of the world economy to a halt. Since then, America’s economic performance has left other countries in the dust and even broken some of its own records. The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them...
Let’s start with economists’ favorite metric: growth. When an economy is growing, more money is being spent. More stuff is being produced, more services are being performed, more businesses are being started, more workers are being hired—and, because of this abundance, living standards are probably rising. (On the flip side, during a recession—literally, when the economy shrinks—life gets materially worse.) Right now America’s economic-growth rate is the envy of the world. From the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, U.S. GDP grew by 8.2 percent—nearly twice as fast as Canada’s, three times as fast as the European Union’s, and more than eight times as fast as the United Kingdom’s.
“It’s hard to think of a time when the U.S. economy has diverged so fundamentally from its peers,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. Over the past year, some of the world’s biggest economies, including those of Japan and Germany, have fallen into recession, complete with mass layoffs and angry street protests. In the U.S., however, the post-pandemic recession never arrived. The economy just keeps growing...
From the beginning of the pandemic through the fall of 2023, the last period for which we have good comparative data, real wages in both Europe and Japan fell. In Germany, workers lost 7 percent of their purchasing power; in Italy, 9 percent. By these metrics, the only workers in the entire developed world who are meaningfully better off than they were four years ago are American ones.
[MSN]
