Written by Michael Thervil
It was Wednesday 16th, 2023 during primetime television that American President Joe Biden delivered his speech on the Inflation Reduction Act. As with all speeches given by all Presidents in every nation, they want to instill a sense of progression and strength while easing the fears and boosting confidence of its people. It seems that’s what American President Joe Biden has set out to do. But as like the rest of the world who were watching and listening to his speech, we couldn’t help but reflect on if what he was saying applied to us as individuals or to the unknown people within America that seem to have benefited from his policies and other Presidents before him.
The part that stood out to us at VEDA Magazine the most was the fact that American President Joe Biden stated the following:
“America is winning.”
The question is how? Followed by who are we winning against? Well, it was written that America places 11th out of 79 countries in science and doesn’t even make the rankings when it comes to being one of the top math scoring countries in the world. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, America ranks far behind Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, Finland, Poland, Northern Ireland, Norway, Chinese Taipei, England, Latvia, Sweden, Hungary, and Bulgaria in that order. Furthermore, it was the University of South Carolina that reported that even though America spends more than $809.6 billion on education it still falls behind most countries when it comes to literacy, math, and science scores. It looks like when it comes to education in America it doesn’t get what it pays for.
In terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and economic growth (goods and services), it’s something that you really must analyze – especially in America. There are 4 components that you must consider and there are as follows: investment, consumption, exports, and governmental spending over time. Currently America is sitting at $25.46 trillion in GDP. Which places them at the top of the food chain when compared to other countries, but one must ask the question why? Because America is a service sector economy. In the service sector economy this is something that must be scrutinized.
We say this because in a service sector economy you don’t really “make” anything – so there’s no such thing as a “hard product” for lack of better terms. What America does create is what we call “soft products” and that would be “products” (goods and services) from hospitality, retail, human services, financial services, and education (which is failing). Keep in mind that the numbers of service sector economies are often manipulated as they don’t have to have “hard products” which can be empirically counted.
The service sector economy must be scrutinized because hospitality really doesn’t pay as the average hospitality worker earns slightly less than $39,000 a year according to talent.com. When it comes to retail workers, the average earnings are less than $30,000 a year (often significantly less). When you consider the average salary of people who work in human services it can range from $37,000 to $45,000 a year depending on location. And lastly, the financial service sector’s workers’ median salary can range from anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 or more; again, depending on where you live, length of time in position, type of financial service provided etc. Considering all the above, in a nutshell, the average person in America doesn’t make that much money when you consider taxes, inflation, “shrinkflation”, general cost of living and the devaluation of currency. For the average American that’s not winning.
Another statement President Biden made that caught our attention was:
“Name me a single objective that we ever set out to accomplish that we failed on – name me one – in all our history.”
Well, there’s more than one and the list could be rather extensive. There is the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the failure to provide efficient care to military veterans at the veterans affairs (VA), the war on drugs, the war on poverty, systematic discrimination against Black Americans (remember “Redlining” and Jim Crow), the 1995 crime bill that disproportionately affects Black American people, the prison-industrial complex which is another thing that disproportionately affects Black American people, purposely underfunding American Black businesses and schools, a failing criminal justice system, failing to close the ever widening wealth gap, immigration and the southern border crisis, failing to maintain infrastructure, failing marriages and families, failing education system, the list can go on and on. Now granted every country has its issues and there is no “cure all” or “silver bullet” – but to boast that America hasn’t failed any of its objectives in its entire history is something that makes the people of America and the rest of the world look at America with the side eye of rebuke.
There are several other talking points from President Joe Biden’s speech that are worthy of touching on here, but the following statement is something that everyone should really take the time out to reflect on.
“This isn’t about the past, it's about the future we’re going to build.”
Unfortunately, the past is what makes and drives the future. And for the overwhelming majority of America, the socio-economic wounds from the past have yet to be properly cared for and healed. And thus, those unhealed socio-economic wounds for the average American still cripples and stifles their growth. With that, families and communities suffer and if families and communities are suffering that means America is suffering. It is our position that President Biden’s speech is nothing more than a “feel good” motivational speech to maintain the dwindling morale of the average American. And we take this position not from our personal or professional positions as journalists, and not even because of the empirical evidence staring at our faces as observers but because of the numbers and the totality of the circumstances that every person in America finds themselves in.
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