This week in Bidenomics: Good news nobody cares about
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This week in Bidenomics: Good news nobody cares about
One thing is going right for President Biden. The job market remains hot, with businesses hiring just about anybody they can find. Employers added 678,000 jobs in February, far more than economists expected. The February report was uniformly solid, with gains in nearly every sector. Upward revisions to job growth in the two prior months show that the surge of the Omicron COVID variant had little to no effect on hiring.
This may not benefit Biden at all, politically. Americans are now overwhelmingly worried about inflation, which is likely to get worse in coming weeks on account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its impact on oil and gas prices. Oil prices have risen by $25 per barrel since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24, and by $36 per barrel since the start of the year. That flows directly into gas prices, which are up about 50 cents per gallon to a national average of $3.84. Average prices seem likely to top $4 soon and could eclipse the all-time high of $4.11, from 2008.
There might be a little more tolerance than usual for spiking gas prices, given widespread sympathy for Ukrainians enduring a savage invasion. The willingness to bear higher energy costs, in a way, is the average consumer’s contribution to the sanctions the United States and many allied nations have slapped on Russia. Those sanctions don’t include energy, but prices have soared anyway because of fears Russian energy supplies could be disrupted and new difficulties Russia is having shipping oil and gas due to sanctions on its financial system.
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But soaring gas prices are perilous for Biden, anyway, for three reasons. First, while Biden is earning high marks for unifying allies in support of Ukraine, he has not prepared Americans for any kind of sacrifice. In fact, he has said repeatedly that he’s trying to protect the U.S. economy from rising prices, given that inflation was running at 7.5% before the Russian invasion. Gas prices are rising anyway, and drivers are getting mad.
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