The Daily Signal - Trump Turned Biden’s ‘Anemic’ Net Wealth Grow Into a Rocket Sled on Rails | E.J. Antoni

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you need any further evidence on what a menace inflation is and what a blessing it is when inflation ends, take a look at the latest data on household wealth. After Biden, it is truly impressive how fast the turnaround happened in 2025. I said that Biden really is stupid. We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars in additional wealth for the median family. That's a significant difference. And it's worth asking, how did we get here? The great progress by the Trump administration to shrink government spending and the federal

Starting point is 00:00:29 workforce to reduce taxation and regulation while increasing energy production have all contributed to faster private sector wage growth and slower inflation. In fact, it's been deflation in some cases, meaning certain prices have actually gone down. Hello, I'm E.J. Antony for the Daily Signal. If you need any further evidence on what a menace inflation is and what a blessing it is when inflation ends, take a look at the latest data on household wealth. These numbers tell are, I should say, retail, a shocking story about how inflation robbed people of their incomes, savings, and even wealth under Biden, but also that the nation is quickly regaining lost ground under Trump. Last year, from the first quarter through the third quarter, household net wealth jumped

Starting point is 00:01:23 more than $9 trillion or more than 7%, even after adjusting for inflation. If you extend those gains to an entire year, you're looking at an annualized growth of a whopping 10 percent. And again, these are the increases after inflation, meaning wealth is increasing faster than prices by a double-digit margin. Now, let's contrast this with what we saw under Biden. And for that, we'll want to look at both nominal and real changes to household net wealth. Nominal just means the dollar amount. Well, real means the inflation-adjusted amount. The nominal increase under Biden was actually respectable. Over his four years, this level of wealth rose about 23.5%. Unfortunately, almost all of that was just inflation. As Americans are sadly

Starting point is 00:02:11 quite familiar with at this point, the phenomenon of inflation causes the price of everything to rise, and that includes homes, financial assets, etc. In other words, the apparent rise in household net wealth was really just an increase in the price of things owned by households. Did the quality or quantity of assets owned by households increased dramatically during Biden's four years? No, not at all. In fact, once you adjust for prices, you eliminate more than 90% of the increase in household net wealth over the time in question. Think of that for a minute. Out of every dollar that household net wealth rose, more than 90 cents was an illusion. It wasn't real. It was a mirage, fairy dust, a Fugazi. So what was the real increase under Biden? Over four years, household net wealth

Starting point is 00:02:57 adjusted for inflation, grew in anemic 2.0 percent. That's not even half a percent. That's not even half a per year. It was, in a word, pathetic. It also means that Trump, in his second term, is overseeing an increase in real household wealth that is a shocking four times what we saw under Biden. And the pace of increase is even faster than what we saw during Trump's first term. Even including the 2020 year of the pandemic, when governments forcibly shut down most of the economy, real household wealth still rose 28.9% during Trump 45. After Biden, it is truly impressive how fast the turnaround happened in 2025. We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars in additional wealth for the median family. That's a significant difference. And it's worth asking, how did we get here? In other words,

Starting point is 00:03:51 why the sharp change from the doldrums under Biden to the stratospheric increase under Trump 47, which again is even outpacing the solid gains from Trump 45. Well, we're seeing incredible increases in growth and productivity. We have tax reform, energy reform, the most regulatory reform in history. And yes, there are even some positive impacts from rebalancing international trade and deportations. Both productivity and economic growth are running red hot right now, around 5% or more. Productivity is a great indicator of where real wages and wealth are both, trending, and these productivity numbers are among the best we've had since the Reagan administration,

Starting point is 00:04:33 about four decades ago. Of course, more productivity means not only more real wage growth, but more profits, too. As my good friend Larry Cudlow likes to say, profits are the mother's milk for stocks. Higher profits mean higher stock prices, with major indexes, now seeing double-digit returns. Even better, the tax cuts from the big, beautiful bill, and the trade deals hammer out by the president are driving investment higher by trillions of dollars. That investment translates into even more growth and higher productivity, driving stock prices higher still, and booming stocks have added trillions of dollars to mutual funds, pensions, IRAs, stock portfolios, and private companies, all beneficial to household net wealth. Meanwhile, small businesses are being founded

Starting point is 00:05:22 or expanding, thanks to regulatory reform, getting the government out of the way. For those families where small businesses, a mom and pop shop, accounts for much of their net wealth, this has been a godsend. But that's not to say everything is sunshine and rainbows. Biden and the radical left did a tremendous amount of damage to most households, with losses concentrated among lower income and middle class families. And we're still dealing with the fallout today. For example, a recent report from Bank of America estimated that one in four households are living paycheck to paycheck. Now, believe it or not, that's an improvement from when it was one and three, but it's still not great that so many Americans are spending 95% of their incomes on essentials

Starting point is 00:06:10 like rent, groceries, and utilities. Even though inflation has come way down and prices are no longer rising quickly, a big killer today for many households is the cost of servicing debt, and that mirrors a problem for the federal government. For many Americans, the cost of living rose much faster than incomes under Biden, and they turned to debt to make up that difference. As their credit card balances exploded and interest rates likewise skyrocketed, their monthly finance charges went to the moon. And now those households are drowning in debt servicing costs. With so much money going to interest expenses, it's estimated that one and three American adults don't even have an extra $400 to cover an emergency expense today. Now, while it's not all

Starting point is 00:06:55 sunshine and rainbows, it's also not all doom and gloom. Things are getting noticeably better. Over the last year, incomes have risen faster than prices. That's great. It means more people have more left over after paying for the essentials and they can pay down some debt. The great progress by the Trump administration to shrink government spending and the federal workforce to reduce taxation and regulation while increasing energy production have all contributed to faster private sector wage growth and slower inflation. In fact, it's been deflation in some cases, meaning certain prices have actually gone down. If we want to get inflation down even further and see more prices start to decrease, we need Congress to cut spending and eliminate overregulation,

Starting point is 00:07:43 especially in health care and environmental mandates that have astronomically increased the cost of everything from health care to transportation, to housing, to food, etc. But let's also give credit to the Trump administration for enforcing immigration law and deporting illegal aliens because that's having a positive impact on the labor market as well. For some reason, pundits today seem hesitant to talk about the labor market as a market. Nevertheless, the labor market abides by the laws of supply and demand. When you restrict the supply of illegal alien labor, the price of labor, which we call wages, rises. And today's higher wages are incentivizing people to get off the couch and get a job, something that's especially true in low-income households when the government is running a $1.5 trillion

Starting point is 00:08:31 welfare machine. Again, the Trump administration has done its best to cut back fraud, but it will take congressional action to really move the ball down the field on this one and reverse the catastrophic welfare expansions passed under Biden. Congress can actually get on board with the president's agenda instead of constantly trying to thwart it, we'd see household net wealth take off even faster, and it would disproportionately help lower income and middle class families. Perhaps that's something to keep in mind next time you vote. This is E.J. Anthony for The Daily Signal.

The Daily Signal - Trump Turned Biden’s ‘Anemic’ Net Wealth Grow Into a Rocket Sled on Rails | E.J. Antoni

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.