(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Good News Is That The Bad News Is Wrong [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-06-12 Good news keeps rolling in that will make the MAGA Republicans very angry. MAGA Republicans are invested in the failure of Biden and the United State. They only way they can win next year is if bad things are happening to the American people. The Atlantic has reported that the murder rate is falling: “Murder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022. Big cities tend to slightly amplify the national trend — a 5 percent decline in murder rates in big cities would likely translate to a smaller decline nationally. The drop shown in the preliminary data is astonishing.” As I’ve noted in previous posts, a report from Third Way finds that the murder rates are actually higher in red states than blue ones. Republicans like to explain this away by claiming that homicides are concentrated in blue cities. This isn’t true — the homicide rates in blue and red cities are essentially the same. In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2022 that murder rates soared in rural America in 2020. “After undergoing one of the largest increases in US history under Donald Trump in 2020, the murder rate was flat in 2021, city based statistics showed it declined slightly in 2022, and now appears to be in a free fall in 2023. Will anyone mention this happened under Joe Biden?” @What46HasDone What this means is that the crime issue will be an even less effective issue for the GOP in 2024. Last year, the “liberal” mainstream media and the GOP believed that the crime issue was a silver bullet for the Republicans. As it turned out, the Republican fearmongering on crime fell flat nationally in 2022 and in Lincoln in 2023. A majority of voters recognized that the Republicans have a record of failure on crime. We’re also getting good news on the inflation front. The New York Federal Reserve has estimated that underlying inflation in April was only 3.4%. If that marks a new trend, then inflation has already fallen to a rate only moderately above the Fed’s long-term target — and will probably reach the Fed’s target of 2% by the end of the year. Unlawful entries along the southern border have decreased 70% from their record highs since the end of Title 42 on May 11, according the Department of Homeland Security. This was the dog that didn’t bark. Both Fox and CNN obsessed about a predicted border surge before May 11. It never happened and they have since lost interest in the issue. “Probably worth noting that inflation, gas prices, violent crime and border apprehensions — three sources of HUGE coverage on their way up — are all coming down significantly.” Chris Hayes. However, media coverage of these positive developments has been virtually non-existent. The media did briefly mention that we had another great jobs report in May that disappointed the MAGA Republicans. The U.S. added 339,000 jobs in May alone. This is the progress Pete Ricketts and Deb Fischer tried to destroy by voting for default. Aren’t you glad they failed? Another 92,000 new jobs were added from prior revisions. There have now been over 13 million jobs created during the Biden administration. In 28 months, Biden has created more jobs than any president has created in a 4 year Presidential term. Under President Biden and Vice President Harris, we’ve regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic and created 3 million more. The unemployment rate is currently 3.7%. That means the unemployment rate has been under 4% for 16 months in a row. The last time our nation had such a long stretch of low unemployment was in the 1960s. Under President Biden’s economic plan, more Americans are joining the labor force — with the highest prime-age labor participation in 16 years. Because a record number of people are working, the American people are traveling again. At airports, it’s likely to be busier than it was in 2019 pre-pandemic, according to a recent AAA travel forecast. Air travel is expected to be up by 11% over last year. That figure exceeds the previous 2019 record levels by 5.4% — or 170,000 more air travelers. While the media briefly covered the good news on jobs, they have not mentioned that domestic US oil production reached the highest level since 2020. The Energy Information Administration has predicted that the U.S. oil production will be at a record high in 2023 and 2024. America is also experiencing a factory construction boom. Investment in manufacturing has surged. What Trump’s tax cuts for the rich didn’t achieve, President Biden’s industrial policies have. There was no investment boom after Trump cut taxes for the rich and corporations in 2017. (Approximately 80% of these tax breaks were grabbed by the top 1%.) Instead, 85% of his corporate tax cuts were used for stock buybacks and dividends. In contrast, under Biden, manufacturing construction has doubled over the past year. “And there’s no real question about the causes of the surge. It’s being driven by two major pieces of legislation: the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, whose actual core is subsidies for green energy, and the CHIPS Act (“creating helpful incentives to produce semiconductors” — call in the acronym police!), which is supposed to protect national security by promoting domestic production of, um, chips.” Paul Krugman. The good economic news is reflected in the fact that 73% of Americans are satisfied with their own personal finances. However at the same time, an overwhelming majority consistently erroneously believes that we’re in a recession — just 18% think the national economy is in good shape. We can blame the “liberal” mainstream media for this paradox. The overwhelming majority of stories on the economy are negative. Media coverage largely has focused on inflation and the possibility of a recession. The media has been predicting a recession for two years. The media’s ignorance and incompetence is deeply misleading and frustrating. The media has worked in concert with the Republican Party to convince Americans into believing the economy is bad despite their own personal financial situations. The media somehow believes its partisan to point out that the economy is doing well. Actually, it’s partisan for the “liberal” mainstream media to repeat GOP talking points that everything is terrible. The Republicans don’t need or deserve any help from the media in pushing out their false narrative of doom. The Republicans have been predicting doom during Democratic presidencies since 1993. Every Republican office holder predicted that Bill Clinton’s economic policies would cause a recession. When Barack Obama was president, they GOP doubled down and predicted “Armageddon” and that America would “cease to exist.” Those predictions of doom were wildly off the mark. President Obama did a great job in 2015 when he ridiculed the GOP’s predictions of imminent disaster: “We’re making enormous progress. Why is it that so many Republican politicians are so down on America? They’ve constructed this entire separate reality. It’s like the Twilight Zone,” Obama said. “Have you noticed that?” Obama asked the crowd of about 500 cheering women. “I mean, they are gloomy. They’re like Grumpy Cat.” Then he turned the corners of his mouth down into a frown, emulating the famous feline. “Everything is terrible, according to them,” he said. “We’re doomed!” A big problem for Democrats is we are too often reluctant to declare that things are getting better. In 2000, Al Gore ran away from Bill Clinton’s economic record. In 2016, Hillary Clinton rarely mentioned that unemployment had declined from 10% to 4.7% under President Obama. We don’t focus on our accomplishments because there’s always something more to be done. Now just imagine if you will that if under a Republican president, that we’re creating more than 300,000 jobs per month with inflation going down, which is incredibly rare. If a GOP president were in office, the Republicans would be shouting about it from the rooftops. (Of course, this would never happen during a GOP Administration — the Republicans are wreckers.) Don’t take this progress for granted. In 2000 and 2016, some of us were complacent and stayed home or voted third party. The last two Republican presidents destroyed their predecessors’ progress and presided over deep recessions. We can’t let that happen again. The Republicans are dangerous when they are in power. The choice in 2024 is America or the MAGA Republicans. Choose wisely. Now let’s get it done! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/12/2174890/-The-Good-News-Is-That-The-Bad-News-Is-Wrong Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/