Insane levels of military spending are not justified by "jobs!"

Not even if those claims were legitimate.

Lest you think that Biden’s economic pitch for such aid was a one-off event, Politico reported that, in the wake of his Oval Office speech, administration officials were distributing talking points to members of Congress touting the economic benefits of such aid. Politico dubbed this approach “Bombenomics.” Lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states. And that, by the way, is a tactic companies like Lockheed Martin routinely use to promote the continued funding of costly, flawed weapons systems like the F-35 fighter jet. Still, it should be troubling to see the White House stooping to the same tactics.

Yes, it’s important to provide Ukraine with the necessary equipment and munitions to defend itself from Russia’s grim invasion, but the case should be made on the merits, not through exaggerated accounts about the economic impact of doing so. Otherwise, the military-industrial complex will have yet another never-ending claim on our scarce national resources. - TomDispatch

Corporate media's flagrant right-wing propaganda on the economy

This could in part be an indicator of how nervous the greedheads are getting, about the GOP's, and even corporate Dems', electoral prospects in coming cycles. With crap like this their mouthpieces are basically sacrificing any chance of gaining younger, more knowledgeable audiences for the long haul.

If you were a casual consumer of the news over the last couple years, you may not have heard much about these success stories. You may, in fact, think that everything has suddenly gone wrong all at once.

And it would be hard to blame you. In the wake of a historically progressive response to an economic downturn, corporate media have been intently focused on the negative...

In this environment, any discussion of Biden’s poor approval ratings on economic policy has to include consideration of the media’s role in manufacturing those ratings. In the wake of the Covid recession, in May 2020, Trump’s disapproval on this measure hit 51%. Biden’s most recent rating is a full 16 points worse, at 67% disapproval. This despite a much stronger economy than in May of 2020—the unemployment rate, for one, is nearly 10 percentage points lower now.

If we want to understand how progressive policy is undermined by a media owned by the wealthy, the experience of the last several years offers a case study. In the wake of robust government intervention in 2020 and 2021 that cut inequality and boosted incomes, especially for those at the bottom, inflation-mania has taken over in the media. - FAIR

The reality of the Trump economy

While the plethora of reasoning from fact therein won't have the slightest effect on those in MAGA fantasyland, or on Trump's boosters in corporate (especially financial) "news" media, this one's worth keeping on hand. It's by Joseph Stiglitz.

It is becoming conventional wisdom that US President Donald Trump will be tough to beat in November, because, whatever reservations about him voters may have, he has been good for the American economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. - Project Syndicate

The economy won't crash tomorrow, but, red flags

- "Household debt hit a record high of $13.5 trillion last quarter"

The total debt shouldered by Americans has hit another record high, rising to $13.5 trillion in the last quarter, while an unusual jump in student-loan delinquencies could provide another signal that the nation's economic expansion is growing old.

Flows of student debt into serious delinquency — of 90 or more days — rose to 9.1 percent in the third quarter from 8.6 percent in the previous quarter, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. - NBC News