Business

Column: Voters are finally noticing that Bidenomics is working

Published

2 years ago

February 9, 2024

Column: Voters are finally noticing that Bidenomics is working

The turning point in Americans’ perception of the economy — that despite months of doom-colored predictions of a looming recession — may have occurred on Jan. 25.

That was the day that Fox Business economic commentator Larry Kudlow, a former official in the Trump White House and consistent dispenser of grim economic predictions during President Biden’s term, went on Fox’s “America Reports” telecast and acknowledged that the Biden economy was, you know, good.

That day, government figures had been released showing a 3.3% annual increase in the gross domestic product for the fourth quarter of 2023, on top of a 4.9% growth rate for the third quarter.

Instead of contracting, the economy has continued to grow….Inflation has come down significantly. …The labor market is healthy.

— Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen

Candidly, if a bit glumly, Kudlow stated, “It was a good quarter, don’t get me wrong, and the last quarter was a good quarter, 4.9.” Biden, he said, “gets his due. If I were he, I’d be out slinging that hash too, no problem.” Asked by the host if this meant that the economy was not as bad as he had been saying, he answered, “I would say, probably, I would agree.”

Fox being Fox, Kudlow couldn’t resist sticking the shiv in: “Wages are rising more slowly than prices,” he said, which doesn’t happen to be true: Wages and benefits for rank-and-file workers have grown faster than prices throughout the post-pandemic period.

The bottom line, however, is that if the bad-economy camp has lost even Larry Kudlow, they’re on the wrong side of the argument.

The truth is that the Biden economy (“Bidenomics,” if you prefer) has been chugging along for some time. The fundamental question that has circulated about his record is not about the economy’s strength, but about why he hasn’t gotten credit for it.

Sentiment may now finally be shifting. In January, the University of Michigan saw the largest two-month jump in its consumer sentiment index since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. News coverage, which throughout 2023 relentlessly forecast a recession, now touts the prospect of a “soft landing” — that is, a successful battle against inflation without an increase in the unemployment rate or a general economic slowdown.

As it happens, some news outlets seem reluctant to give up on the old theme. “A soft landing, for now,” was Politico’s headline on a mid-December roundup of economic statistics including unemployment below 4% and inflation having been brought down to 3%.

But even White House aides, who last year were reported to be uneasy at trumpeting the term “Bidenomics” in the president’s reelection campaign, are now reported to be hoping that “a strong economy will sell itself to Americans,” according to NBC News.

Administration officials have been trying to spread the word. “Instead of contracting, the economy has continued to grow,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the Economic Club of Chicago on Jan. 25. “It now produces far more goods and services than it did before the pandemic. … Inflation has come down significantly. … The labor market is healthy.” The unemployment rate, she noted, “has been below 4% for 23 months now, a stretch that has not been seen during the last 50 years.”

Moreover, Yellen said, the current recovery has been “the fairest recovery on record,” with wage and employment gains for the middle class and demographic groups such as Black and Hispanic workers. And the U.S. recovery from the pandemic has outstripped those of other developed countries: “The increase in real wages is unique to our country’s recovery: in other economies, real wages have declined since 2019.”

Hourly earnings growth for rank-and-file workers (blue line) has exceeded inflation (red line) since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. Gray stripe signifies a recession.

(Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Unionized workers have been among the leading beneficiaries of economic growth, achieving strong improvements in wages and working conditions at unionized auto plants and United Parcel Service.

Some economic commentators have been perplexed at Americans’ failure to recognize the good news about the Biden economy. “Something weird is happening in America,” John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times observed on Dec. 1.

Even though GDP growth for the third quarter had just been pegged at higher than 4.9% and job growth remained strong, Burn-Murdoch wrote, “the public is up in arms about economic conditions, with consumer confidence dropping to a six-month low. There really is no pleasing some people.”

The disconnect should not have been so mysterious, however. As I’ve noted in the past, changes in economic conditions, especially improvements, often take time — even many months — to filter into public awareness. People will typically think that a recession is still in full cry long after a recovery is underway.

This happens partly because the news media keep projecting gloom, because bad news always sells better than good news and no reporters want to get caught out as Pollyannas if conditions worsen again.

Marketers of economic nostrums such as cryptocurrency and gold investments flood the airwaves with come-ons, and they don’t win customers by proclaiming that sunny days lie ahead. Opposition politicians don’t win votes by praising incumbents for implementing effective economic policies.

Nor are opinion polls the best way to gauge people’s feelings about the economy; polls consistently show Americans to be discontented with economic policies, but their spending shows them to be profoundly optimistic. That said, the public’s feelings about the economy are often tempered by the fear that things could turn down again in the blink of an eye.

One source of confusion about economic affairs is that public perceptions of the economy are generally snapshots of longer-term trends, and are therefore inevitably distorting. Professionals aren’t immune from the same error.

Federal Reserve and Treasury officials have been consistently pilloried for wrongly predicting that the inflation that emerged in late 2020 would be “transitory.” Indeed, the Fed, smarting from this criticism, arguably has kept interest rates high for longer than has been warranted.

Yet, viewing things in a rearview mirror, team transitory was right. As Kevin Drum has observed, the painful inflationary era of the 1970s and 1980s — which peaked at an annualized 12% in 1974 — actually began in the late 1960s, when the annual rate first exceeded 5%, and persisted into the 1990s, when the rate fell below 3%. That’s more than two decades. (The measure at issue is personal consumption expenditures excluding food and energy, the Fed’s preferred metric of overall inflation.)

By contrast, the recent bout of inflation that supposedly is a black mark against the Biden administration began in mid-2020 (under Trump), peaked at an annualized 6% at the beginning of 2022, and has now fallen to 2%. The period of high inflation lasted less than three years, and never came close to the 1970s peak. In other words, it was the definition of “transitory.” Yet people remember it as a long stretch of relentless price increases.

People also imagine inflation today to be as high as it was in 2022, yielding persistently high prices. But they may not yet have fully recognized the extent to which overall inflation has moderated or that some prices are coming down.

The average gasoline price nationwide is $3.15 per gallon of regular, down from the peak of $4.54 reached in mid-June 2022, according to the AAA; across the Midwest, average prices have fallen below $3 per gallon. Prices of staple foods, many proteins and vegetables are falling.

In political terms, the economy is a moving target. There is always something for naysayers and pessimists to point at to make the case that all is not well. The generally good news in job growth, with the blowout report of 353,000 new jobs in January and months of gains in manufacturing, is confounded by employment bloodbaths among tech and media firms.

But there’s certainly a case to be made that Biden has been an effective steward of the U.S. economy — and one who has succeeded in pushing to favor ordinary Americans through initiatives such as infrastructure spending. That’s a big change from Trump, whose most significant economic achievement was an enormous tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.

Despite all that, opinion polls show that Biden still gets low marks for his management of the economy. But recognition of the truth may soon come his way.

Business

California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’

Published

7 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Press Room

California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’

A California food manufacturer is recalling thousands of cases of salad dressing distributed to major retailers over potential contamination from “foreign objects.”

The company, Irvine-based Ventura Foods, recalled 3,556 cases of the dressing that could be contaminated by “black plastic planting material” in the granulated onion used, according to an alert issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Ventura Foods voluntarily initiated the recall of the product, which was sold at Costco, Publix and several other retailers across 27 states, according to the FDA.

None of the 42 locations where the product was sold were in California.

Ventura Foods said it issued the recall after one of its ingredient suppliers recalled a batch of onion granules that the company had used n some of its dressings.

“Upon receiving notice of the supplier’s recall, we acted with urgency to remove all potentially impacted product from the marketplace. This includes urging our customers, their distributors and retailers to review their inventory, segregate and stop the further sale and distribution of any products subject to the recall,” said company spokesperson Eniko Bolivar-Murphy in an emailed statement. “The safety of our products is and will always be our top priority.”

The FDA issued its initial recall alert in early November. Costco also alerted customers at that time, noting that customers could return the products to stores for a full refund. The affected products had sell-by dates between Oct. 17 and Nov. 9.

The company recalled the following types of salad dressing:

Creamy Poblano Avocado Ranch Dressing and Dip
Ventura Caesar Dressing
Pepper Mill Regal Caesar Dressing
Pepper Mill Creamy Caesar Dressing
Caesar Dressing served at Costco Service Deli
Caesar Dressing served at Costco Food Court
Hidden Valley, Buttermilk Ranch

Business

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

Published

19 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Press Room

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.

The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.

When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.

Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.

“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”

While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.

Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.

“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”

The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.

Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.

“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.

The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.

Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.

It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.

In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.

Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.

A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.

“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”

To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.

Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.

Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.

Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.

As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.

“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”

After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.

Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.

“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”

Business

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Published

1 day ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Walt Disney Co. is expanding its presence in the Middle East, inking a deal with Saudi media conglomerate MBC Group and UAE firm Anghami to form a streaming bundle.

The bundle will allow customers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to access a trio of streaming services — Disney+; MBC Group’s Shahid, which carries Arabic originals, live sports and events; and Anghami’s OSN+, which carries Arabic productions as well as Hollywood content.

The trio bundle costs AED89.99 per month, which is the price of two of the streaming services.

“This deal reflects a shared ambition between Disney+, Shahid and the MBC Group to shape the future of entertainment in the Middle East, a region that is seeing dynamic growth in the sector,” Karl Holmes, senior vice president and general manager of Disney+ EMEA, said in a statement.

Disney has already indicated it plans to grow in the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the company announced it would be building a new theme park in Abu Dhabi in partnership with local firm Miral, which would provide the capital, construction resources and operational oversight. Under the terms of the agreement, Disney would oversee the parks’ design, license its intellectual property and provide “operational expertise,” as well as collect a royalty.

Disney executives said at the time that the decision to build in the Middle East was a way to reach new audiences who were too far from the company’s current hubs in the U.S., Europe and Asia.