Video: "With Democrats Things Get Better" (1/26/23)
The new House Republican leadership has made it clear that we are going to be having a big economic and fiscal debate this year. To help the center-left family prepare for that debate (and win it!) we will be updating and showing our influential With Democrats Things Get Better presentation throughout the year. With Dems takes a deep dive into decades of data and finds when Democrats have been in power, things have repeatedly gotten better. We've seen growth, lots of jobs created, lower deficits, progress. With Republicans we've seen something very different. The last 3 Republican Presidents have brought recession, spiraling deficits, decline.
As we often say this story - repeated Dem economic success, repeated R economic failure - remains the most important, least understood story in American politics today. It is a story that needs to be told in 2023, a story the center-left needs to be very very loud about.
You can watch the latest With Dems presentation from January 26th, 2023 here.
To learn more about the big arguments in With Dems start with our recently published analysis The Economy Remains Strong, 10.7 Biden Jobs, a related thread, and an essay, The Case for Optimism, Rejecting Trump's Poisonous Pessimism, which was the basis of the earliest version of this presentation. We have also frequently written over the past few years about the need for the center-left to get far more intentional about winning the economic argument with MAGA and the Republicans. Given our repeated strong performance we shouldn't be losing the economic argument to these guys.
We strongly recommend reviewing David Leonhardt’s NYT essay "Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy?" It makes very similar arguments and has lots of terrific and useful charts. Maria Cardona cites our research in her CNN column, as does David Rothkopf in this USA Today essay. Mike Tomasky’s rave review of With Dems in a recent Daily Beast column is a great read. Mike writes: “Simon Rosenberg heads NDN, a liberal think tank and advocacy organization. He has spent years advising Democrats, presidents included, on how to talk about economic matters. Not long ago, he put together a little PowerPoint deck. It is fascinating. You need to know about it. The entire country needs to know about it." We agree of course!
The deck has been revamped to include a new, longer section on the strong economic recovery under President Biden. Some of the key stats from that section, and a graph:
- GDP growth 3x Trump, 5x as many Biden jobs as last 3 GOP Presidents combined
- best COVID recovery in G7
- lowest unemployment rate in 50 yrs
- lowest poverty/uninsured rates ever
- very elevated wage gains/new business starts
- 2 job openings per unemployed person, a record
- real earnings up in 2022, trade deficit/deficit down
- historic investments in our future prosperity (infrastructure, CHIPs, climate, health care)
- domestic oil production on track to set records in 2023
Finally, our understanding of the American economy and the role of inflation was heavily influenced over the past year by the writings of our long time collaborator, Rob Shapiro. Rob wrote in January that employment was booming at historic levels, in May that inflation was having little effect on people’s incomes, in July that pundits’ talk about recession was flat-out wrong, in August that Americans were clearly better economically off under Biden, and in October that Democrats should tout their economic record. Like the red wave, we think too many commentators in 2022 bought into the "inflation is killing the Democrats" narrative far too easily.
You can find even more background here. Thanks for your interest, and we hope to catch you at one of our upcoming presentations!
