Tangle - The state of the economy.

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

On Friday, the latest jobs report was released, giving one final look at the state of the economy as we head into 2022. The report's numbers drew both celebration and disappointment in certain quarters, with a mixed bag of data on where things stand.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I hope you all are doing well and had a great weekend. I, like I said last week, am on the road this week. Not going to tell you exactly where I am, but I am in West Texas. It is cold. I'm in a closet. I hope I sound good. It's going to be a very interesting week in the political entangle world. And today we're going to kick

things off with some reflections on the latest jobs report that came out on Friday and kind of a look at what it means for the economy in the context of the year and the first year of the Biden presidency. But before we jump in, as always, we'll start with some quick hits. First up, all three men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia were sentenced to life in prison last week. Number two, at least 19 people, including nine children, were killed in an apartment fire in New York City. It is one of the worst fires in the city's history. Number three, tennis star Novak Djokovic had his visa cancellation overturned and was released from an immigration detention center in Australia where he is trying

to compete in the Australian Open despite being unvaccinated. Number four, the president of Kazakhstan said he weathered a coup attempt. Violent unrest led to the deaths of 16 security forces and the number of civilians killed is still being tallied. Number five, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican who had previously planned to retire, now says he will seek re-election. Back now to the breaking economic news. The U.S. adding just 199,000 jobs in December, with the unemployment rate falling to just 3.9%. We are back with a Fox News alert, and this is not a good number. The December jobs report just released.

The United States adding just under 200,000 jobs last month. Economists were expecting 422,000. In some ways, we're back to some sort of amazing job environment, but then in other ways, we're not. So on Friday, we got the latest jobs report. This was a big one, as the end of the year jobs report typically is the kind of thing that creates a lot of introspection and retrospection about the year we just had. It's the final state of the economy as we head into 2022. The report's numbers drew both celebration and disappointment in certain quarters with a mixed bag of data on where things stand. So first, we'll start with the good news.

The U.S. ended the year with 6.4 million more jobs than there were at the end of 2020, which is the largest increase in job numbers on record. The unemployment rate dropped to 3.9 percent, ending the largest one-year decrease in history and the first time in 50 years a president has had an unemployment rate below 4 percent in his first year in office. Jobless claims were about 207,000 last week, close to the lowest in five decades. The October and November jobs report was revised as well, adding a combined 141,000 jobs. Wages climbed 0.6% on the month and were up 4.7% year over year. The bad news, we are still 3.6 million jobs short of where we were before the pandemic. The economy only added 199,000 jobs in December, well short of the 400,000 economists were expecting. These numbers are mostly drawn from the hiring spree that occurred in early December,

meaning the impact of Omicron is not yet totally in the picture. Companies are still struggling to hire workers. Inflation has wiped out much of the wage growth and is still causing problems across the country. Given that this was the jobs report for the last month of 2021, it sparked a lot of reflection about the Biden economy, the state of the country, and where things are headed. We're going to take a look at some with what the left is saying. So the reviews are actually mixed here with some cheering on the state of unemployment and others pointing to ominous signs ahead. Some say inflationary pressures are coming from corporations, not government spending.

Still others say it's clear the pandemic is the thing dictating the economy even now. Paul Waldman said that the latest report is a reminder of a marvelous bipartisan success. Here's the simple fact. In the full 11 months that Joe Biden has been president, the U.S. economy has added more than 6 million jobs. And when Biden took office, the unemployment rate was 6.4%. Now it's 3.9%. A triumph, Waldman wrote. The truth is that we made a collective decision at the beginning of the pandemic about our economic crisis, a bipartisan decision. There seems to be a misconception that Biden was the one who spent all that money, but that's just false. Let's review our history. In March of 2020, Congress passed

the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, which spent $8.3 billion to begin responding to the pandemic. President Donald Trump signed the bill. Two weeks later, they passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act at a cost of $192 billion. Trump signed it. At the end of March 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act. Trump signed that one as well. It spent more than $2 trillion, though its final cost after loans were repaid was estimated at $1.7 trillion. The next month, Congress passed the Paycheck Protection Program and Healthcare Enhancement Act at a cost of $483 billion. Trump signed it. In December 2020, Congress packed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which added $868 billion in pandemic relief spending. Trump signed it.

In March 2021, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan with an estimated cost of $1.8 trillion. This time, not a single Republican voted for it, and Biden signed it. In The Guardian, Robert Reich said the latest numbers mean the Fed is going to raise interest rates, the wrong medicine for the economy. Higher interest rates will cause more job losses. Slowing the economy will make it harder for workers to get real wage increases, and it will put millions of Americans at risk. The Fed has it backwards.

Wage increases have not caused prices to rise. Price increases have caused real wages, what wages can actually purchase, to fall. Prices are increasing at a rate of 6.8% annually, but wages are growing only between 3% and 4%. The most important cause of inflation is corporate power to raise prices. Yes, supply chain bottlenecks have caused the cost of some components and materials to rise, he wrote. But large corporations have been using these rising costs to justify increasing their own prices when there's no reason for them to do so. Corporate profits are at a record high. If corporations face tough competition, they would not pass those wage increases on to customers in the form of higher prices.

They'd absorb them and cut their profits. In the Washington Post, Catherine Rample called it a swing and a miss. This is not good news, she wrote. For a while, we were rapidly filling in the huge crater in employment levels created by layoffs during the early months of the pandemic. More recently, progress has slowed a lot, and the vast numbers of Americans forced into isolation because of positive COVID tests over the past several weeks may well halt even that slowed growth, at least temporarily. As of mid-December, the U.S. economy was missing about 3.6 million jobs relative to the employment levels from just before the pandemic began. There are a few likely factors at play. Even before the recent Omicron surge, people were still getting sick and missing work. In December, 1.7 million people who were still counted as employed

said they missed work because of their own illness. That's nearly 600,000 more people than the number who missed work because of illness in the December right before the pandemic started. All right, so that is it for what the left is saying, and this is the right's take. The right says the economy is failing Americans and ended the year with a whimper. Many tie government spending to inflationary pressures. Others say it will only get worse with Omicron and Biden's policies. The New York Post editorial board said another bad jobs report shows the obvious. Bidenomics is a total disaster. The Labor Department reported that the United States added just 199,000 jobs in December. That's the worst of the year, with the fewest jobs added since the president took office and significantly less than half the 422,000 jobs economists expected.

Yes, the unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent, down from 4.2 percent, but that's because the rate doesn't count people who have given up. Sorry, but 3.6 million Americans lost their jobs thanks to the pandemic and have yet to get them back. And it's that $2 trillion rescue plan passed unilaterally by Democrats at a time when the last thing the already recovering economy needed was a rescue that has fueled inflation. Worse, it seems Biden, unlike the Republicans he's announced, is itching to do even more economic damage. The same day the jobs report came out, his lawyers were before the Supreme Court arguing for his vaccine mandate on employers, which would force them to lay off workers who refuse the jab and require them to waste resources on enforcement. But in the National Review, Dominic Pico called it a set of more unusual data. The unemployment rate is unlikely to get too much lower, he said. There will always be some people who are unemployed because they're in between jobs. In February 2020, the unemployment rate was 3.5%. The last time it was below 3.5% was May of 1969. The lowest it has

ever been was 2.5% in May of 1953. People who want to work can find work. That's good news. Less than a year after a recession, it's very unusual for this to be the case. Low unemployment is good. The jobs are out there, and if people come out on the other end of this disruption in a job they enjoy better than the one they had before, that's a good thing, Pico said. Hopefully, some of the people who have left the labor force will get wind of that and come back to fill the millions of available jobs. It bears repeating. There has never been a job market like this less than a year after a recession. The patterns of specialization and trade that were disrupted by the pandemic are being

reassembled one piece at a time, often in different configurations than before. That's going to create some unusual data. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada,

which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

Thanks to Omicron, the Washington Examiner said things are about to get worse. Biden took office last January with the easiest job perhaps of any president in history, the Washington Examiner said. He inherited newly approved vaccines to deal with COVID, plus a full-blown recovery already well in progress from one of the most sudden and acute economic disasters in the nation's history. There was a V-shaped recovery going on. All Biden has to do is sit back and avoid interfering. Just watch the job creation and take credit. Instead, he meddled, they said. He began his presidency by putting his boot on the neck of the gas and oil industries and approving a massive inflationary spending measure. More recently, he has imposed crushing pandemic-related measures that have harmed workers,

especially parents who have nowhere to put their children when malingering teachers' unions refuse to work. Now, Biden is trying to shovel even more inflationary spending out the door despite the current alarming levels of inflation. All right, that is it for what the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. So I am not an economics reporter, thankfully, because it seems like a very difficult and kind of boring job. But one thing I've learned from covering the economy and its deep ties to politics, the state of mind of Americans, and how Congress acts is that the long view is always preferred. In that regard, I do think Biden has plenty to celebrate. Returning the economy to sub-4% unemployment numbers, averaging over 500,000 new jobs a month over the last year, and seeing healthy stock market gains on the year

despite the latest dip is actually a triumph, as Paul Waldman put it. That's by any traditional metrics that Republicans ordinarily love to use. It's easy to forget that at the beginning of this pandemic, we had unemployment rates near 15% and some 20 million jobs lost over the course of a single month. Simply put, if someone gave you these prospective numbers at the beginning of Biden's term, I'm 100% certain his administration and most Republicans would have taken them gladly. As Waldman said, this is a bipartisan success story. Trump and Republicans deserve credit too. It's also true that if inflation is your number one gripe and you tie inflation to government spending, then Republicans and Democrats share the blame. Inflation is a big deal, one that is impacting Americans from the top of the economic ladder

to the bottom. But there is more than one force at work that's driving it, and I don't find it particularly compelling to lay the blame squarely at the feet of President Biden. Global inflation is a real thing. Robert Reich's take on the corporate squeeze is compelling. So are the supply chain issues and the government spending and quantitative easing. And so maybe they're all playing a role. When it comes to unemployment numbers, there are all sorts of other factors at play, too. Both Catherine Rample and Dominic Pico highlighted them. 1.7 million people called out sick from work in December, 600,000 more than the December before the pandemic began.

Many older Americans have retired early. Staffing shortages across various industries are being driven by fear of COVID-19, vaccine mandates, and burnout. New immigration has fallen and backlogs in the visa system have left many immigrant workers unable to legally stay on the job, creating a labor shortage. Childcare shortages are forcing many parents to stay home too. The numbers, in a word, are really noisy. All told, the overarching feeling I have is that things could just be a lot worse. On a personal note, I started a business in the middle of the pandemic, one that so far has been a resounding success. Pandemic aid helped my wife and me weather some of the lowest points of the

pandemic. Wages for workers are growing, mobility in the market is up, and the fact that there are lots of job openings and lots of people quitting their jobs can easily be seen as a positive. A lot of my friends are quitting okay jobs to pursue careers they really want and finding a lot of success doing it. As we enter year two of the Biden presidency, though, things are on solid footing. It's not cataclysmic or dire, which means the pressure is on in a big way for Biden to produce a strong year of growth, oversee easing inflation, and help guide policy that keeps things trending in the right direction they are going now. Mixed results and a mixed bag won't cut it in 2022. Anything less will probably cost Democrats big in the midterms and beyond.

That's big in the midterms and beyond. All right, that brings us to our reader question. This one is from a reader named Rachel. She said, if we shouldn't throw the book at rioters from January 6th, what is the appropriate punishment or legal ramifications for their actions? Should rioters who showed premeditation, like social media, conversations with family, etc., for criminal activity or violence before the event be treated differently than the ones who might have been carried away in the excitement of the mob? Does intent matter? Okay, so this is a great question, Rachel. I think it really depends on the crime. So by measure of consistency,

rioters who assaulted police officers or caused serious damage to the Capitol building should definitely be doing some time in prison, I think. It's a common refrain from many conservatives that I speak to to ask why the rioters from the summer of Black Lives Matter protests weren't prosecuted. But many may not like the answer. As of August, over 300 cases were being prosecuted, and of the more than 70 defendants who were sentenced in August, were being prosecuted, and of the more than 70 defendants who were sentenced in August, they got an average of about 27 months behind bars. At least 10 received prison terms of five years or more, according to the Associated Press. On the face of it, that's fewer arrests but more serious punishment for those people versus the January 6th rioters, and that was five months ago. It was also for crimes committed in cities across the country, many of which were probably

prosecuted at the local level, not an attack at the Capitol, which obviously draws more federal and local scrutiny. To answer your question even more directly, yes, I think premeditation, people who plan to storm the Capitol or cause damage to try and halt the count of the electoral vote, should draw stronger penalties than folks who got caught up in the fever. I think fines and probation are the appropriate responses for the majority of the people involved in January 6th, and I don't think the people who ran into the Capitol for a selfie or a YouTube video should be going to prison. Which, for what it's worth, brings me to my most radical political view, which I've stated here

for the record several times, and that's that prison is not going to do much good for anyone, regardless of whether they are rioters from the summer of 2020 or folks who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. I don't think locking human beings in cages is good for society, good for the people inside, an idea that is shockingly uncommon in our country. Prison is not a good way to punish or rehabilitate people. It's only an effective way to isolate extremely dangerous people from society. Given that view in a vacuum, I think the number of folks from January 6th who deserve prison time is probably fewer than a couple dozen. Alright, that brings us to our story that matters, and this is a tough one. Between 2020 and 2021, fentanyl overdoses became the leading cause of death for adults between the ages of 18 and 45 in America. The synthetic opioid can be deadly even in small amounts and has been found laced into drugs like heroin, meth, cocaine, and marijuana.

The Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, says most fentanyl comes into the U.S. from Mexico and China. 37,208 people in the 18 to 45 age group died of fentanyl overdoses in 2020. In 2021, it was 41,587. More adults age 18 to 45 died of fentanyl overdoses in the last two years than any other leading cause of death that includes COVID-19, motor vehicle accidents, cancer, and suicide. Fox News has a story about this national emergency, and you can find a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, that brings us to our numbers section. This one is around some of the stuff we were discussing in our main story today.

37% is the percentage of Americans who said COVID-19 was one of their top five priorities for the government to work on in 2022. That's according to an early December poll from the AP News. 53% is the percentage of Americans who said COVID-19 was one of their top five priorities for the government to work on at the same time a year ago. 68% is the percentage of respondents who mentioned the economy in some way as a top 2022 concern. 14% is the percentage of respondents who named inflation as a top five issue in the recent poll. Less than 1% is the percentage who named inflation as a top five issue a year ago. And 4,157 is the percentage of voters who approve or disapprove of Biden's handling of the economy. So that's 41% approve, 57% disapprove.

All right, last but not least, as always, our have a nice day story. This one is a pretty remarkable piece. About 27 people who were ice fishing and walking on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin had to be rescued after the ice they were standing on broke off from the shore. The huge chunk of ice carrying more than two dozen people floated for about an hour and a half and drifted nearly a mile from land before the people standing atop it were rescued by a combination of local authorities and the Coast Guard using airboats that run on water and ice.

Some described the sound of the ice breaking like a gunshot before everybody scrambled out of their shanties they were fishing in and realized they were being separated. The incident took place north of Green Bay in Lake Michigan. Every person involved in the incident was rescued without injury in about 90 minutes. USA Today has the story, and there's a link to it in today's newsletter. minutes. USA Today has the story and there's a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, everybody, that is it for our podcast today. As always, if you want to support our work,

please check out the episode description. I'm serious. Just click on the episode description. You can find links to subscribe, to support us with a monthly donation, do all sorts of fun stuff to spread the word. Obviously, as always, just sending this podcast to friends or giving us a five-star rating is a great way to help us get in front of more people. Thank you so much for the support and we'll see you tomorrow. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul,

edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. Witness to a crime? Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases.

What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCelvax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. Thank you.