MSN
These days it often seems like we’re caught in a deluge of bad and worrying news on everything from artificial intelligence and UFOs to homelessness and smoke in the air. But you could argue that life has been getting better in the USA overall, as Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher did recently in examining some of the issues people, and especially Republicans, blame on President Joe Biden. He offers as an example this indictment of Hellhole America from Ron DeSantis in his candidacy announcement last month:
Our southern border [has] collapsed. Drugs are pouring into the country. Our cities are being hollowed out by spiking crime. The federal government’s making it harder for the average family to make ends meet and to attain and maintain a middle-class lifestyle … Stop pricing hardworking Americans out of a good standard of living through inflationary borrow, print, and spending policies.
Actually, notes Scher, the “inflation rate for May is down to 4 percent, less than half of the June 2022 peak.” Illegal border crossings “have dropped by 70 percent in the last few weeks, according to the Department of Homeland Security, after Biden implemented a new border-management policy.” And aside from the fact that rising crime rates during the last few years left crime much, much lower than it was in the late 20th century, any “crime wave” claims are now clearly questionable:
Murder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022,” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher, writing in The Atlantic, a trend that could lead to “one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded.” That follows a 4 percent drop in homicides in 2022 from the prior year, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis of data from 35 cities…
