When inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, the unemployment rate stood at 3.6 percent. Today, using the same metrics, inflation is just 3.2 percent, and unemployment is at just 3.9 percent. For 12 of the previous 19 months, the jobless rate has held steady at or below its June 2022 level, while inflation has been running below 4 percent since June 2023. Economists are still debating why the Fed’s higher rates didn’t translate into job losses, but the important point is that millions of people were not, in fact, fired. Moreover, millions of people did not need to be fired in order to fix inflation.
As Mike Konczal concluded in a report for the Roosevelt Institute in September 2023, the vast majority of inflation during the Biden years was driven by pandemic-related supply problems. Whatever was going wrong in 2022, it wasn’t because you were too rich.
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Contrary to the narrative abuse directed at Biden over the past few years, the economic numbers across his presidency tell a simple, optimistic story about the art of government in the democratic world. The American economy is strong today for the same reason that the labor market has been strong throughout Biden’s presidency: the U.S. government spent a ton of money to support workers and their families. Biden has not only established a blueprint for successful crisis management, but he has achieved something on the economy that pessimists across the ideological spectrum have been declaring impossible for much of the 21st century: He learned from the government’s prior mistakes and found a way to govern better.
Sharp and sustained economic criticism from Biden's ostensible allies established a narrative of failure that has proved alarmingly resistant to reality.
slate.com