One of the most memorable activities growing up in the New York Metroplitan area were the frequent visits to Playland Amusement Park in Rye, New York. A ride on the dragon coaster, a jump off the ten-foot-high diving board into the saltwater swimming pool in the summer months, or a ride through “Ye Old Mill,” was the kind of activity that gave real meaning to the happy and carefree nature of childhood. Most fascinating, however, was stepping inside the house of mirrors, where one was quickly reincarnated into a multiplicity of long and short limbs, huge midsections, and wildly elongated faces. The same mirrors of distortion are feverishly working at present trying to twist and contort a success story out of Joe Biden’s economy.

Every president exaggerates and can always be counted on to lay claim to being responsible for positive trends. The economy, when things are going well, is most assuredly the greatest opportunity for a president of the United States to crow about his accomplishments. In Biden’s case, the economy is not going well, and even though he and his acolytes are singing the praises of his administration’s policies it is difficult to find a single American who believes the song they are hearing.

Let’s start with inflation. For an administration that has devoted itself to counteracting misinformation, it might be well worth it to start at the most likely source, the oval office. First, Biden denied inflation was real, then it became only a transitory phenomenon, and then it wound up being the creation of greedy corporations, oil companies, small businesses, and Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine, even though inflation’s upward creep commenced long before the invasion of that country. To deal with the problem of post pandemic economic sluggishness, the Biden administration’s 1.9 trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan was enacted after more than 3 trillion dollars in stimulus had already been passed in the prior administration. Likened by some economists to pouring gasoline on a fire, the ARP contributed to an increase in inflation by 3 percentage points by the end of 2021. U.S. inflation remained on average 4 percentage points higher than the Euro Zone far into 2022. Inflation is like a tax, and for the average American, that tax has translated into an average increase of consumer items by 18 percent since Biden took office.

Let’s look at gasoline. In August of 2023, the average price of a gallon of regular in the U.S. was $3.82 cents. Biden was telling Americans they should be ecstatic when gas prices hit $3.39, and although that had been a huge drop from the $5.00 a gallon price tag a year prior, it was still, on average, 90 cents higher than the $2.49 cents when Trump left office. Today, the average price for a gallon of regular is $3.63. The Biden administration has repeatedly asserted that the U.S. is on a path to record breaking domestic oil production. This is patently false. Biden’s war on fossil fuels is costing the U.S. economy 160 million dollars daily, and the U.S is producing 2-3,000,000 fewer barrels of oil per day than under the Trump energy production plan. More troubling is how the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has dwindled to its lowest level in almost 30 years. The Institute for Energy Research has identified 100 separate Biden executive orders, regulations, and laws that are impeding oil and gas production, killing pipelines, expanding EPA regulations on oil and gas drilling, and making hundreds of thousands of acres of prime drilling land off limits. A reversal of these measures would result in a major price drop at the pump.

Let’s look at exploding consumer debt. In the first 15 months of the Biden Presidency, consumer debt rose by a whopping 1.29 trillion dollars, and credit card debt, which decreased over the pandemic by $100 billion dollars is now exploding at the fastest rates on record. Put simply, American’s are simply not able to live in Joe Biden’s America.

In fairness, to say that job creation has not been significant under Biden’s watch would not be a wholly justified. There has been an impressive hiring spree over the last 14 months, and jobs are out there for those who want to work. However, there is a hitch in the actual numbers in that almost two-thirds of the jobs that Biden touts as part of his sterling achievement were in fact jobs that had disappeared because of the pandemic, and reappeared when the economy started to reopen. In other words, even if a chimpanzee was president, these jobs would have come back anyway, but they are still included in Biden’s whopping big jobs creation claim. Backing out the pandemic jobs, Trump’s numbers for new job creation after roughly the same amount of time in office reflected 46,000 more jobs per month than Biden.

As to the psychological effects of Bidenomics, America is not exuding a gay and optimistic feeling with respect to the current or future economic picture. Even though the White House spinsters parade out charts to show Joe Biden as the greatest job creator and economic motivator in the history of the modern presidency, the average American opening his wallet to buy things sees himself or herself as part of a very different universe. Why would anyone believe the president on the state of the economy, especially when he insisted China’s spy balloon was only engaged in a friendly meteorological exchange, consistently sent his Homeland Security Secretary to lie before Congress insisting that the Southern border is secure, and to this day still swears up and down he was neither privy to nor aware of his son’s business dealings with corrupt oligarchs and America’s adversaries, even though incontrovertible evidence proves otherwise. The truth is if almost 70 percent of Americans believe that the economy is worse under Biden than it was under Trump, that’s because it is.

The Biden public relations wing is in overdrive trying to hustle the American people into the house of mirrors in the hope they will see something that is not real, and somehow come out the other side believing it is. They are twisting and contorting a narrative that counts on the deception of light and mirrors to fool the viewer into believing the absurdity of what they are seeing. As we watch America getting poorer before our very eyes, the elongated face of Joe Biden is smiling benignly back at us, a skilled master of light and mirrors.