More than five and a half million Americans out of work in January found jobs by November. In the same period, the jobless rate fell from 6.3 to 4.2 percent, a drop of one-third. Jobless claims in November hit a 52-year low. Real GDP growth for 2021 is expected to be 5.9 percent. (Between 2000 and 2019, real GDP growth stayed lower than 3 percent.) President Biden’s temporary child tax credit, which provides direct cash payments to poor families, cut child hunger rates from 30 percent to 21 percent. That’s 2 million fewer kids who went hungry.
Yet Biden’s popularity, as measured by poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, remains in the doldrums. At 43 percent approval, his numbers are worse than any postwar president at this point in his term except for his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Author Noah Berlatsky has written an analysis for The Editorial Board in which he says that all this kind of…makes sense. In fact, it may be a sign of democracy working. On the show, Matt and Noah run through his argument and talk about whether democracy truly can work in the process of so much media propaganda, misinformation, and voter confusion.
