Please read housekeeping note at end of this post!

Joe Biden’s presidential grade so far? A grim F is what he deserves. This is doubly tragic, because Biden seems determined to run again in the 2024 presidential election, and his  likely opponent will be Donald Trump, whose presidential escapades prompted me, as regular readers of this blog may recall, to grade his White House performance as a D- (see that post here).

If you’re a Biden supporter (or a Trump supporter, or none of either), please read on. Consider the present situation for a moment. Our country seems doomed to have a gloomy election next year, specifically a race between an angry, bumbling D- and a dense, blundering F? Imagine how you will feel with these two geriatrics lurching breathlessly around the country, each struggling to reach the finish line in November.

Having already assessed Mr. Trump’s presidential performance, I’ll now explain why I believe Mr. Biden deserves his ignominious F. I begin by acknowledging that I’m stunned that his most recent approval ratings hover around 35%. How, I wonder, can a third of our populous approve of his performance? Certainly party loyalty is strong in certain individuals, but I can’t fathom how even his strongest backers refuse to acknowledge his mental decline. Even last spring a Washington Post/ABC poll, 63% of over 1,000 voting-age respondents believed Mr Biden was not sharp enough to serve effectively as leader of the free world (See here), and his blunders have continued since then. All one has to do is watch a few TV clips to see he’s cognitively impaired. (I refuse to lay his weakened cerebration and uncertain balance entirely on his age; I’m a full decade older than he is, yet I don’t stumble around like he does. Nor do I mumble as much.)

Setting aside his mental and physical lapses, I believe that three main reasons account for his low popularity. These are the 1, the economy, 2, the border crisis, and 3, a string of suspicious family financial dealings. One could extend the evidence each of these into a long chapter, but I’ll just touch on some highlights each one.

1: The Economy

Earlier in his administration, Biden went big on spending, submitting an unprecedented $6 trillion budget, this compared to Trump’s proposed budget of $4.8 trillion in the last year of his term. Biden’s goal purportedly was a way to thing green and to spend our way to prosperity. How did it work out? Well, inflation took off, but not wages. What happened to the average hourly earnings of all private workers? Here’s the information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As the Wall Street Journal explained, there was a 3.16% drop in real earnings for the average worker across the 29 months of the Biden presidency as of mid-2023.

You probably have heard a variation of the old line: Statistics don’t lie, but liars often use statistics.  This seems to be especially true in our nation’s capitol. Here’s how Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen touted “Bidenomics” in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal just before Christmas. In her piece, she said, “wages have risen more than prices since 2019,” thus implying that Biden’s plan had benefited workers. 

Can you spot the misdirection in her statement? Well, former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Phil Gramm, and Prof. Donald Boudreaux did.

In a letter to the editor of the WSJ earlier this week they wrote, “The problem with this claim is that President Biden wasn’t in office a single day in 2019—or in 2020. From the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2020, with Donald Trump still in the White House, real weekly earnings rose by $69 (or 6.2%) and annual median income rose by $3,592. But from the beginning of the Biden administration to the third quarter of 2023, the last quarter for which we have data, real weekly earnings fell by more than $25 (or 2.1%), pushing real annual median income down by $1,306. Oh, and they added: “Maybe Bidenomics works only when Mr. Biden isn’t President.”

2, The Border Crisis

Photo from BBC News

This is a big one.

Here’s what CNN reported last Friday: Border authorities encountered more than 225,000 migrants along the US-Mexico border this month, marking the highest monthly total recorded since 2000, according to preliminary Homeland Security statistics shared with CNN. Over the course of the month, authorities dealt with more than 10,000 migrants crossing daily until more recently, when the numbers began to drop.

This onslaught wasn’t particularly worrisome for so called sanctuary cities; these large cities are almost uniformly under control of Democrats. (According to the Washington Post, sanctuary cities are communities with policies that limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal authorities’ efforts to deport immigrants. For the past few decades, “U.S. sanctuary city policies have been chiefly about welcoming immigrants . . .)

How times have changed! In the past few years, the burden of rampant illegal migration was felt mostly by the southern border states and Florida. That is no longer true. Migrants now are being shipped northward by a stream of buses, most notably from Texas by order of Governor Greg Abbott.

 Effects of illegal migration on northern cities

Chicago

“Chicago’s migrant crisis spirals out of control: City spent nearly $1 million on failed camp before pulling the plug – as officials now IMPOUND buses bringing migrants to the city from Texas on Gov. Greg Abbott’s orders” Headline from UK Daily Mail. Subheadings: * * *The city spent over $985,000 on the shuttered migrant camp at Brighton Park * * * There are currently more than 13,000 migrants staying in Chicago’s shelter system and the city has spent more than 250M handing the crisis this year.                            (The full article in the Daily Mail [12/15/2023] is well worth reading. See it here.)

New York City

And things are really getting dicey in New York City. The cost of sheltering migrants in the Big Apple could run to about $12 billion by summer of 2025 if the flow of migrants continues apace with current numbers, this according to Politico (see story here). Apparently more than 160,000 migrants have entered New York City since the spring of 2022. See an up-to-date New York Daily News story (1 Jan 2024) here.   *  *  *  *  * I could go on, but you get the point.

 3. A String of Suspicious Financial Dealings

 

Housekeeping note:

I have decided to take a break from blogging. Why? Yesterday, when working on this article, I mistakenly  clicked on “publish” instead of “preview,” so you received an unbaked loaf of my bread. Major frustration #1. Today, I spent three hours cleaning things up, adding Denver to Chicago and New York regarding the illegal migrant crisis. I tuned up the entire article, much improving it and adding interesting details, none of which you will ever see. Why? When my post was finally ready to go, I moved to another part of my “backdoor,” where I work on my blog. and when I came back to my new draft, all of the careful changes and additions I had made were gone, unable to be retrieved. That was major frustration #2. Am I going to take time to repeat those three hours? Not a chance!

I’m cruising (or maybe crashing) into 92 in a few days, and I’d prefer to do that without a bundle of frustrations. So, I’m taking a break of at least a month, maybe more. Writerken.com will remain open, so I’d love to have you browse through what I’ve written here, over 100 articles are available on topics such as politics, classical medical experiments, information on aging, health, travel, literature, culture, and whatnot.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The photo of fallen Biden was on CNN