CNBC anchor Joe Kernen confronted a top Biden adviser on Tuesday over the administration's failing "Bidenomics" message.
The president's top economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, went on "Squawk Box" and painted a rosy picture about the economy. He claimed that "Bidenomics in action is helping, it's working, it's helping to build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out."
It's good rhetoric, no doubt. But Kernen was not buying it.
Kernen pointed to stories in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post detailing Biden's economic woes. Specifically, he brought attention to Biden's falsehood that he has cut the deficit "when, in fact, it's going to be $2 trillion — double last year — and the cuts that he did make are based on cutting from the pandemic level."
"So, it's kind of disingenuous," Kernen declared. "All that taken together, it leaves a very sour case in most people's mouths."
Kernen even took issue with Bernstein specifically, who, according to the CNBC host, likes to claim that Americans are "more optimistic" about the economy if you ask them individually.
"But," Kernen countered, "only one-third consistently of Americans buy into your contention that Bidenomics is working. So maybe you need to come on every day because it's not working, your message."
In response, Bernstein claimed he is not "discounting" poll data, but said they only show American sentiment from "30 or 40,000 feet up."
Meanwhile, Bernstein listed only two metrics to support his claim: that Americans support Biden's intervention on pharmaceuticals and they support providing manufacturing companies tax incentives to create more jobs, a rather risk-free policy that most Americans would support, no matter who implemented it.
"So, I think it's an inaccurate narrative to declare that somehow Bidenomics isn't working or that it's not favorably received by people when you drill down into what it actually is," he contended.
Notably, Bernstein did not provide data on inflation, wages, employment data, the deficit, or any other meaningful economic metric to support his claim. On the other hand, the latest Wall Street Journal poll definitively showed that Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of the economy.
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