Q3 2022 Small Business Confidence Index decreases to a score of 42, four points lower than last quarter and beating the previous all-time low of 43 in Q1 2021. Small Business Confidence drops to a new all-time low as inflation and recession concerns continue to plague small business owners.
Just 30% of Americans approved of Biden's handling of the economy as inflation surged by 9.1% in June.
Americans have taken a more dismal view of Biden’s economic chops than they did for either of his most recent predecessors. Former President Donald Trump’s economic approval ratings never fell below 41%, while ex-President Barack Obama’s reached a low point of 37%.
A whopping 52% of Americans say they expect the economy to get worse over the next six months. That number marked the highest on record for CNBC’s survey and an even larger portion than what was reported at any point in the 2008 economic crisis.
Just 22% believe the US economy will improve by the end of the year and more than six out of 10 say America is already in a recession.
Biden says...
Where am I?
“We’ve made historic progress over the last 10 months. Unemployment is down to 4.6%, two years faster than everyone expected. When we started at this job, it was over 14%,” Biden said.
Facts First:
Biden was wrong in two ways here. First and most importantly, his phrasing created the inaccurate impression that the unemployment rate was over 14% when he “started at this job” as president. In fact, the unemployment rate in January 2021, the month he was sworn in, was 6.3%; it had not been above 14% since April 2020. Second, while the unemployment rate has fallen faster under Biden than some experts had expected, he exaggerated when he said the 4.6% rate was achieved two years faster than “everyone” expected. It happened roughly one year faster than the Federal Reserve had projected in December 2020.
Biden strongly suggested that all of the “historic progress” in bringing the unemployment rate down from more than 14% to 4.6% happened “over the last 10 months,” the period in which he has been in office. But the majority of the decline occurred during the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency.
The unemployment rate spiked under Trump on account of the Covid-19 pandemic, jumping from 3.5% in February 2020 to a pandemic-era
peak of 14.8% in April 2020. Then the rate started falling, hitting 6.3% in January 2021. So far, through October, it has fallen another 1.7 percentage points during Biden’s tenure.
A White House official, who responded to CNN’s questions on condition of anonymity, said that when Biden spoke about unemployment being above 14% “when we started at this job,” he was referring to the peak of the pandemic, not the start of his presidency.
But this section of Biden’s speech was focused on the achievements of his administration over the past 10 months. He certainly didn’t make it clear that, for this particular claim, he was reaching back to a starting point during the last year of the Trump era.
As for Biden’s claim about the 4.6% rate being achieved “two years faster than everyone expected”: “Everyone” was too strong. The Federal Reserve, for one, projected in December 2020 that the unemployment rate would average less than 4.6% – 4.2%, to be precise –
in the fourth quarter of 2022. (The Federal Reserve projection is a median of projections from Federal Reserve Board members and Federal Reserve Bank presidents.)
Biden
tweeted last week: “Last year, there were 21 million unemployment insurance claims before the Thanksgiving holiday. Today, there were 2.4 million. It’s historic progress.”
Facts First:
Biden left out key context here. His numbers were correct, taken straight from newly released Department of Labor data about the week that ended on November 6. However, in portraying this decline in unemployment claims as an unqualified success story, he didn’t mention that a significant percentage of the decline happened not because of economic improvement but because the federal government’s special pandemic-era unemployment programs expired in early September and about half of state governments ended those programs earlier. When the programs went away, millions of people could no longer make unemployment claims even though they were still not working; some of them eventually got jobs, experts say, but some didn’t. “The tweet is a misleading measure of progress,” said Peter Ganong, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago.
Biden
said in the economic speech on Wednesday: “The number of small businesses is up 30% compared to before the pandemic.”
Facts First:
There is no basis for Biden’s claim; Ray Keating, chief economist at the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council advocacy organization, said it is “not correct.” Intentionally or unintentionally, Biden was inaccurately describing a statistic he had explained somewhat better – though still not precisely – in a speech last week. The statistic is actually about a certain group of business applications for tax identification numbers; it is an indicator of new entrepreneurship, but it says nothing about the number of small businesses that already existed in the country.
The White House official said Biden was referring to how the 4.6% rate had been achieved two years faster than the Congressional Budget Office had
projected. But Biden said “two years faster than everyone expected,” not “two years faster than the Congressional Budget Office expected.”
Biden “is confusing the data or not using it correctly. One cannot simply use one set of data as if it is another set of data,” Keating said. “The President’s point should be that it is great that business applications for tax IDs are at
record levels. And yes, this will translate into more new businesses, and hopefully that’s happening now and will accelerate. This is a hopeful indicator.”
A White House official said Biden was referring to
figures that show a roughly 35% increase this year, compared with 2019, in a subset of of business applications for tax identification numbers. Specifically, the White House official said, the President was talking about applications for entities that are thought to have a high likelihood of turning into businesses with payrolls. So in
the speech last week, Biden said, “Americans are starting small businesses at a record rate – up 30% compared to before the pandemic.”
Even this claim was flawed, Keating said, since “these are just applications at this point, not businesses.” Though some of them will certainly become businesses, “we simply don’t know how many have been started.”
Biden’s Wednesday claim was more inaccurate. While there is an ongoing
boom in the number of Americans starting their own businesses, and while there were about
4.5 million total new applications for tax IDs in the first 10 months of this year, it’s not true that a roughly 35% increase in new “high likelihood” applications means the country has seen a 30% increase in the total number of small businesses in the country.
Keating said we don’t know how many small businesses there are in the US today, since there is an
extended lag time in the official data on this subject. Regardless, Biden’s “30%” claim didn’t take into account the number of small businesses that existed prior to the pandemic – according to the
federal Small Business Administration, there were about 32.5 million businesses with fewer than 500 employees in 2018, about 26.5 million businesses with no employees – and didn’t take into account the number of small businesses that have
shut down during the pandemic, which is not definitively known.
Keating said, “We need to factor in the businesses that have been lost for a complete picture.”
Biden has been lost, lying and confused from day one.
