We at the Washington Examiner have illustrated the many reasons Bidenomics has proven a total bust across the electorate: Overall prices are up 18% since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, while wages are 2% below where we’d expect given the pre-pandemic trend. But sometimes, the best illustration is the simplest. To understand truly why Biden’s approval rating has tumbled to a rock bottom 33% according to ABC News/Ipsos, simply consider not how much the economy has failed to live up to the idiosyncratically American expectation of growth, but how much real wages have fallen.

Adjusted to the 1982 dollar value used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for standardization’s sake, real average weekly earnings were $399.88 when Biden took office in January 2021. By December 2023, real average weekly earnings were down to $380.59, or a real decline of nearly 5%.