It will do less harm than Donald Trump.
In 2020, with the world in a tailspin and locked down with people dying everywhere from COVID-19, hospitals jammed with too many patients to tend to and the economic fallout epic, someone had the gall to ask me for whom I was voting for president. There happened to be an empty Gatorade bottle sitting on the table next to us. I pointed to it, and said, “I would vote for this empty Gatorade bottle rather than put Donald Trump back in charge.” My reasoning was that the bottle would do less damage. And so, my answer was Joe Biden.
As it will be again.
Not because I adore the president or his presidency, but this narrative that he is a walking shell of a human at 82 is overblown. Agism at its worst – have you guys seen Mick and Keith on the Stones tour this summer? I mean, this ain’t 1972, but shit, no one reading this can do what they’re pulling off in their eighties for nearly three hours over the course of months no matter your age. Yeah, Biden’s old, and I considered that someone younger might be better, but then I thought, “Would they?” Assuming he is shot, the numbers sure don’t indicate the “walking shell” is a problem. In fact, he’s killing it.
There are issues (there are always issues), but things could be and should be waaaayy worse (not the least of which the recession that was predicted for three years as we’ve pulled out of the pandemic’s economic disaster – better than any nation in Europe – especially when you consider what catastrophic condition the Trump Administration left us in. People have amnesia about that mess. Like in the early aughts when it was chic to say, “George Bush kept us safe,” conveniently forgetting the first nine months of his administration that ended with the worst attack on this country since Pearl Harbor. Some people choose to remember pre-2020, which was one crazy fuck-up after the next anyway, ignoring that Trump’s “leadership” killed thousands of citizens and plunged us into the worst economic crisis in nearly a century in his final year in office.
So, let’s say Biden is a shell, or in my thinking, the empty Gatorade bottle – had that shell been president from 2017 through the COVID crisis, there would have been a National Security Council directorate for global health, security, and bio-defense, which was in charge of preparing for the possible outcome of a national pandemic. Trump dismantled it, though. The Gatorade bottle wouldn’t have. Better result.
Pushing my Gatorade bottle analogy further, right now, as stated, the United States has the most robustly powerful recovery and growth of any industrialized nation on the planet. Inflation is down from 9% from its worst after the pandemic subsided two years ago to 3.3%, and that is without a predicted recession. Sure, the price of groceries and other goods remain high and will likely stay that way because that is how the blessed free market works. Once they raise prices, they’re not bringing them down – by a little, maybe (which they are), but if they did come down hard that would be what they call “market deflation,” and that is very, very bad. That would lead to rising unemployment and wages to plummet.
Prices of goods, of course, have zero to do with the executive branch of the government, as is the interest rate (the Fed handles that) and should. Like the stock market (record highs under the Gatorade bottle) and for the most part, gas prices (also down) are independent factors. This is called the free market. This is what people who are not Marxist dig, and in that paradigm this economy is fucking humming.
The leading indicator of this is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the growth rate of which illustrates the general health of the economy. Assuming Biden is a shell and/or an empty Gatorade bottle, the U.S. is enjoying consumer spending growth of 2.3% in 2024, supported by solid early-year momentum, following a 2.2% advance in 2023. Residential investment surged 13.9% – its third consecutive quarterly gain and the third largest in a decade. A wild man like Trump would only screw this up with tariffs and mass deportations and personal vendettas against booming industries. The empty bottle is the safer bet.
Most importantly, in all this boom, wages are up above the rate of inflation for the past calendar year. People make more money based on the cost of living, and according to the US Index of Consumer Sentiment, it was up to 77% last month, a tick-up of 17% from April.
Going “up,” to be clear, is a sign of things are moving in the right direction. Travel is up. Recreational activity is up. Non-discretionary spending is up. When wages don’t match or exceed inflation we have Stagflation, which is not happening; the opposite is, and it is damn good. Better than at any time under Trump, in fact.
Unemployment is down, too, from when Trump left office from 6.3% to about 4%, which has risen slightly from the past two years where it hovered at 3.7%. In fact, for the past two years we have seen historic sustained job growth. Just last month the country produced 272,000 jobs – above the expected 180,000.
Chock all this up to the Gatorade bottle or the “old man,” because if Trump – who is busy going around erroneously painting this country as a hellhole – gets back into the White House, he is promising to flip the narrative, and the other side of all this good news will be bad news. Period.
The Empty Gatorade Bottle (capitalizing it because it’s a thing now) has also managed to watch the national crime rate plummet 15%, especially violent crime, which is way down across the country. Why? Because the economy is cruising. I see it. Roads are packed with travelers and workers heading to their gigs. Cities are flourishing (I go to NYC every week and there are more people walking around, attending shows, concerts, shopping, filling parks, and packing the bars than I have seen in years). Under the noisy, sloppy goofball human who last held office, crime rates skyrocketed. His repeated violent rhetoric at rallies and from the bully (emphasis on bully) pulpit didn’t help matters. The Empty Bottle… well, you get it.
Biden is too old? Considering these stellar economic numbers, (not to mention keeping NATO together – which Trump wants to eradicate – during the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and the fact that he is the only candidate standing between a national abortion ban and a religious take-over of the federal government, then maybe we need someone older! Did someone say centenarian?
Without getting too much into the weird hypocrisy of framing the president as an evil manipulator of the DOJ to weaponize against his enemies after stealing a national election when, at the same time, they say he is a doddering old fool who can’t spell his name… let’s just say that whatever that creaky fella is doing is working on every indication of how we’ve measured presidents for the past two centuries. I didn’t come up with these parameters, but if you do the homework like I do, you come up with the truth: Things are good and getting better – not worse. Anyone who doesn’t understand this is either misinformed or just wants to believe what they believe, like Trump won in 2020 or whatever propaganda the fascist media tells them.
Assuming we have an Empty Gatorade Bottle in the White House, and things keep rocking, he has my vote.
Worked out fantastically last time.
