Sometimes seeing things in close proximity helps to drive home a point. Yesterday I saw a tweet by Republican Senator Bernie Moreno that had a list of complete lies about the Trump economy.

Moreno said egg prices were down 55 percent under Trump (they are up 2.0 percent from when he took office and 49 percent from a year ago). He put inflation at a five-year low. It’s almost identical to the rate from last September and had been dropping for the prior two years. Moreno had the stock market up by 10 percent. It was actually down by about 2.0 percent at the time.

Moreno also had consumer confidence at the highest level in 4 years. It’s fallen sharply under Trump and hit its lowest level since 2022. And he boasted about $6 trillion in new investment. This seems to be a Trumpian invention that has no relationship to anything in the world. (Annual investment is around $4 trillion.)

I happened to also see an American Prospect piece by Democratic political analyst Stan Greenberg, for whom I generally have considerable respect. In this piece, Greenberg complained about Biden taking credit for features of the economy that were actually true, most notably the fastest economic recovery ever. (Under Biden we had the longest stretch of low unemployment since the early 50s.)

I also saw an interview by NYT columnist David Leonhardt with Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin. In the interview, Slotkin complained about Democrats saying positive things about the economy:

“This Harvard economist says that G.D.P. is the highest, bah, bah, bah. I was going to punch someone if they quoted me one more Harvard economist when I could tell you with certainty that in my part of the world, people’s wages were not keeping pace with inflation. Period.”

Well, I didn’t go to Harvard, but I did learn arithmetic in third grade, and I learned how to read numbers on a chart. And I can say that wages did outpace inflation for most workers in the country under Biden, especially for those at the bottom end of the pay ladder, who saw the fastest real wage growth in half a century.

Also, I can say that whatever people might say in surveys, they were acting like they were getting ahead. Real (inflation-adjusted) spending in restaurants, including fast-food restaurants, rose rapidly in the Biden years. It doesn’t seem plausible this rise was driven by billionaires eating up their stock gains at McDonald’s. Hard-pressed people usually would not cut back by spending more in restaurants.

Anyhow, the big question here is why Republicans can tell the most outlandish lies about the economy, but our supposed political experts yell at Democrats for telling the truth?

I have some ideas, but if someone analyzing recent elections can’t answer that question, they might just try shutting the fuck up until they know what they are talking about.

My answer begins with the media. The Republicans have a set of right-wing networks, starting with Fox News, which repeat and amplify any lie the Republicans push. There is no remotely comparable network on the left, and almost everyone allied with the Democrats has some qualms about pushing outright lies.

It’s also worth mentioning that for whatever reason the mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post feel a need to push lies that help Republicans. Under Biden they repeatedly emphasized the economic hardship story even when the facts didn’t support it. They said recent college grads couldn’t find jobs when their unemployment rate was near a 20-year low. They told us young people had given up owning a home when their ownership rates were at the highest level since the housing bubble.

They had numerous pieces about the “retirement crisis,” at a time when the run-up in the stock market and house prices left most near retirees in better financial shape than at any point in the last half-century and possibly ever. They even invented a new measure of economic hardship: the number of people holding two full-time jobs. While this hit a peak in absolute terms in 2022, the peak as a share of the labor force was in the summer of 2000, when we had the strongest labor market since the early seventies.

Anyhow, it’s fair to say that the mainstream media was not friendly to the Biden administration. It’s also worth mentioning that Biden did not enjoy anything like the echo chamber among Democratic politicians that Trump has among Republicans.

There is zero doubt that if Trump had the exact same economy as Biden, he constantly would be saying “greatest economy ever.” Every Republican politician in the country would be repeating that line, as would the right-wing media. And the mainstream media outlets would be running thoughtful commentaries on how the strong economy would make it difficult to defeat the Republicans in the next election.

I’m not suggesting that we should want Democrats to act like mindless parrots repeating what our dear leader says, but they should not be afraid to speak truthfully about the positive features of the economy, which apparently is now the case. If someone wants to seriously analyze the Democrats’ political failings, they need to be able to explain why they can’t speak truthfully about the economy. I’m happy to have Senator Slotkin punch me if we can then have this discussion.