Joel Suarez in n + 1:
“The US economy is currently near perfect.” So wrote the economist Jennifer Harris—“the quiet intellectual force behind the Biden administration’s economic policies,” according to the New York Times—in a tweet posted in mid-July. The tweet has since been deleted, but Harris’s view was hardly idiosyncratic at the time. In the months before Trump’s victory, not just elected Democrats but countless wonks and columnists were celebrating the Biden Administration’s macroeconomic successes: sustained low unemployment, strong GDP growth, falling inflation, and rising wages. This is the stuff of economists’ dreams—and as close to fulfilling labor’s long-held hope of full employment as the country has come in nearly half a century. Under contemporary US capitalism, this is about as good as it gets.
Around the same time that Harris was celebrating the economy, a heated exchange broke out in Congress. Ann Wagner, a Republican representative from Missouri, berated Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the delayed sales of weapons to Israel that “just happen to be made in the St. Louis metropolitan area, in St. Charles, in my district.” She scolded Blinken: “My constituents . . . rely on these jobs to pay for their mortgages, their car payments, their day care costs and they can’t afford to lose their jobs to support this partisan stall tactic.” In response, Blinken seemed flustered but, for once, honest enough: He insisted that there were no intentional delays; Israel would be armed, as it wished; St. Charles would have jobs, as it should; Palestinians would die, as they seemingly must. This encounter prompts a question: how could the economy be “near perfect” if US military largesse was the only thing saving an entire congressional district from immiseration?
More here.
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