2024 was a pretty good year

It’s difficult to find an unambiguously good year in American history. In my lifetime, 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet empire was doomed, comes to mind. Maybe you can think of a few others.

2024 was not an unambiguously good year, but I think it’s among our best in recent times. The year was highlighted by Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race, coupled with the GOP’s retaking of the Senate and managing to hold onto the House (barely).

I’m not a fan of Trump and I have concerns about what his second term will bring. But the alternatives that 2024 presented — more of Joe Biden or four years of Kamala Harris — were considerably worse, in my view.

Trump’s presidency may be high risk/high reward. Another Democratic presidency would have been all risk.

2024 was a bad year for DEI and wokeism. DEI isn’t dead, but it’s ailing. Corporations, under threat of litigation, are abandoning the worst form of it — setting aside jobs and internships for blacks only. In addition, many are slashing their DEI staff.

Meanwhile, wokeism has gotten such a bad name that liberals who once proudly called themselves “woke” (i.e., awake, like the blacks who coined the word, to how racist and generally rotten America is) now say they don’t know what “woke” means. Wokeism reached a low point when the Trump campaign hit a home run with that ad saying “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

The 2024 economy was great for those who have more than a small amount of money in the stock market. According to Gallup data, 62 percent of Americans are invested in the market, either directly or through retirement accounts, but most Americans aren’t heavily invested. Reportedly, as of 2022, the median value of total stock holdings among White families was $67,800, compared with $24,500 for Hispanic families and $16,500 for Black families.

In 2024, the value of stocks rose by about 20 percent (depending on which index one looks at). So the average portfolio of whites (who have one) yielded around $14,000, more than the rise in the cost of living for all but the highest spenders (whose portfolios, on average, will have grown by much more than $14,000).

Even the average portfolio for blacks (who have one) yielded more than $3,000.

As for inflation, according to this source, it rose by around 3 percent in 2024. Wages increased by more than 4.5 percent.

I don’t fully trust these numbers. On the cost of living side, they don’t seem consistent with what I experienced this year. Still, taking into account wage growth, increases in the value of stocks, and inflation, it seems to me that 2024 was an okay year or better for most American families. The fact that most Americans don’t see it that way (as the election results demonstrate) is due mostly to what happened in the preceding few years, in my opinion.

GDP growth in 2024 is expected to come in at just under 3 percent for 2024. That’s mediocre. The unemployment rate for the year hovered at around 4 percent. That’s good.

However, our national debt continued to soar in 2024. Until America somehow comes to grips with the debt, we won’t have an unambiguously good economic year.

Illegal immigration reached, and arguably surpassed, epidemic proportions under the Biden administration. However, 2024 finally saw significant progress in stemming the tide. According to Forbes Magazine, border encounters in the Southwest dropped precipitously this year from their highpoint in 2022. Government data support that view.

The improvement was too little, too late. However, I think it adds support to my view that 2024 was a pretty good year.

The statistics on crime also point to improvement, though not to the point that I think we had a good year in that regard. Numbers compiled by the FBI show a decrease in violent crime, especially murder and rape, as well as robbery and property crimes. However, the statistics available to the FBI were incomplete.

I judge a year not only by what happens in the U.S., but also by what happens to our friends and enemies abroad.

For Israel, 2023 was the worst year in its history. 2024 was a bounce-back year.

Israelis endured much suffering, to be sure. Hostages remained in captivity and some died. Cities were bombed, albeit with much less death and destruction than might have been expected. The economy suffered.

However, Israel dealt enormous blows to all of the main adversaries that seek its destruction. Hamas, though not eliminated, is a pitiful shell of what it was. Hezbollah took a huge beating.

The hostile regime in Syria was toppled from within. Israel shouldn’t be sanguine about what comes next in Syria and, fortunately, Israel isn’t. Instead, it has taken out much of Syria’s military capacity.

The demise of Assad makes Israel less vulnerable to Iran and, frankly, Iran more vulnerable to Israel. More importantly, Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Iran’s air defense system are said to have left Iran defenseless against future attacks.

Iran, in fact, had a terrible year. Its main proxies were crippled. Its vulnerability to attack through the air was exposed. Its economy is in awful shape and likely to get worse when Trump imposes new sanctions.

The downside for Israel and America is that, in desperation, the mullahs will probably accelerate their efforts to develop nuclear weapons with which to strike Israel. If they succeed, 2025 could be a very bad year.

But perhaps Israel will strike Iran’s nuclear program hard. And maybe the Trump administration will help it do so. This was never going to happen under Biden or Harris — another reason to applaud the election result.

2024 was a terrible year for Ukraine. The amount of death and destruction the Ukrainians endured is hard for me to imagine.

But Ukraine wants to stay in the fight. And despite some setbacks, it was able to, with the help of its allies including the U.S. As bad a year as Ukrainians experienced, a Russian victory would have been far worse — from Ukraine’s perspective and, in my view, from ours.

Russia had a bad year. This report from the Kviv Independent says that Russian losses reached record highs in November and December of this year. Russian losses, it says, exceeded 45,000 troops and $3 billion worth of equipment in November.

There’s a good chance these numbers are inflated, but I have no doubt that Russian losses are staggering.

Russia did take Ukrainian territory in 2024 but the gains were relatively small and came at great cost. They have also been offset to a limited degree by territory in Russia that Ukraine has seized, though Russia seems to be in the process of retaking much of that territory.

Meanwhile, Russia lost its key ally in the Middle East with the fall of Assad. And its economy has become dangerously distorted due to the war effort and Western sanctions. Inflation has soared, reaching 9 percent according to official estimates, but closer to 20 percent for many households. The central bank has responded with a key interest rate of 21 percent.

China’s economy also seems to be struggling, but I can’t say with any confidence that China had a bad year — economically or otherwise. Arguably, the worst thing about 2024 from China’s perspective was Trump’s electoral victory. But that remains to be seen.

I hope our readers had a very good 2024 and have an even better 2025.