Billionaire investor and TV personality Mark Cuban on Friday defended the state of the economy under President Biden and slammed former President Trump, arguing that Trump squandered the strong economy he inherited from President Barack Obama.
After highlighting a graph on social platform X showing 12 consecutive months of positive growth in real wages in the U.S., Cuban responded to users who seemed less than impressed by the numbers.
“Can you imagine looking at this chart and not seeing that your candidate has underperformed the economy he inherited from the Obama administration and abandoned all of the trends in wage growth that were established when he took office?” Cuban said of Trump.
The graph shows the year-over-year change in real average hourly wages going back to before 2010 and appears to cover most of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.
Users argued that Cuban was ignoring the fact that wages have not experienced negative growth under the Trump administration.
“While Biden’s ‘wage growth’ is nothing to brag about because it’s positive, it’s hard to ignore that wage growth has not been negative under Trump,” they said.
Before Biden recorded 12 consecutive months of positive real wage growth, meaning wages were growing faster than the rate of inflation, he had seen 25 consecutive months of negative real wage growth, according to the chart.
The “Shark Tank” star responded by arguing that Obama and Biden inherited an economic crisis that was able to reverse negative wage growth, but President Trump presided over a decline in wages.
“I just showed you the chart, I’m not going to explain,” Cuban said. “The fact is, Obama and Biden inherited a generational problem, the Great Recession and COVID, and over time they turned the economy around.”
“The guy between them inherited a booming economy but scaled it back in terms of wage growth,” he added. “Do the numbers say so?”
Biden has struggled to change Americans’ generally negative view of the economy as he prepares to face off against Trump again in November.
A Harris Poll released earlier this week found that nearly three in five Americans believe the U.S. is in a recession, even though experts say no recession has occurred since 2020.
Inflation rose sharply in 2021 and 2022, hitting a 40-year high of 9.1%, but has since eased significantly. As of April, consumer prices were up just 3.4% from a year earlier.
Despite the Federal Reserve’s repeated interest rate hikes to tame inflation, the labor market has also performed surprisingly well, repeatedly beating expectations and keeping the unemployment rate below 4 percent for the longest period in the past 50 years.
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