An old school president

As President Biden laid out in a key domestic policy speech this past week in Chicago, his administration is leading what amounts to an economic revolution that is already remaking America’s heartland for the better.
Since the 1980s and the advent of Reaganomics, America lived under a general bipartisan belief that economic policy should be limited to the promotion of the free market and implementation of wide-open trade deals that promoters argued would help America’s economy and its communities by allowing the export of more American-made goods.
Yet, as we learned painfully over the years, it was solid middle-class jobs that left our shores more than goods, leaving once prosperous communities across the Midwest struggling like never before.
Unfortunately, Presidents from Reagan to Obama went down this path, even as the evidence of the fallout piled up in the Rust Belt. Abandoned factories. Growing joblessness. Falling home values. Increasing despair. Declining life expectancy, led by a rise in suicides.
Donald Trump called it American Carnage, and he tapped the anger that many felt toward the free-market policymakers who brought us this economic disaster to win the White House in 2016.
The trouble was, Trump had no clue how to fix the problem, and even if he had he was aligned with a Republican Party utterly wedded to trickle-down, which was the basis of Reaganomics. Trump promised he would reinvest in America and rebuild the country’s infrastructure and manufacturing base, but delivered only more tax cuts for the wealthy because that’s the only thing Republicans consistently deliver when handed power.
While most of the public seems blissfully unaware, President Biden has actually delivered on a remarkable set of economic policies that responded effectively to the challenges posed by the years of neglect of U.S. industries, the challenges of climate change, and the economic disruptions posed by the COVID pandemic.
In his recent speech, the president referred to this set of policies as Bidenomics, as a means of branding this new direction for the economy.
For the first time in decades, we have an administration that is willing to implement true industrial policy. For far too long, our policymakers foolishly relied on the make-believe of the market’s “invisible hand” to determine how the nation’s economic resources and its rewards were allocated. The result was a disaster for all but the wealthiest.
Finally, we have an administration that recognizes that we can do better when we consciously direct resources where they can do the most good, for our communities, for our workers, for our environment, and for our nation’s security. Biden and his economic advisors recognize that by shipping our manufacturing overseas, we lost our ability to innovate new technologies and protect our supply chains during crises, as was revealed during the pandemic. Now, thanks to the administration’s policies, like the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, we’re bringing that manufacturing base back to America. A recent report from the Treasury Department noted that real spending on the construction of new manufacturing plants in the U.S. has doubled since Biden’s policies took effect. Companies in the U.S. are investing twice as much building new manufacturing facilities today than they were under the Trump administration. While Trump went around bragging about his inflated accomplishments, Biden has quietly done the hard work of crafting and winning passage of new laws that are actually rebuilding our economy.
Despite the rhetoric from Republicans, the results of Bidenomics have been remarkably impressive to date. In the first 29 months of Biden’s presidency, the U.S. economy has created an astonishing 13.4 million new jobs— more than any previous president oversaw in a full four-year term. Trump, who bragged constantly about job creation under his administration, oversaw the creation of a relatively meager 5.2 million jobs in the first 29 months of his administration before all those jobs, and more, were wiped out by COVID.
The unemployment rate under Biden is lower than at any point in half a century and the U.S. is experiencing economic growth that surpasses virtually any other Western nation. And as the new manufacturing capacity begins to address supply shortages, inflation has been cut by half in the past year even as the economy has remained surprisingly strong. Wages are now growing faster than inflation, which is good news for workers.
Biden has been reluctant in some cases to tout his successes in part because he recognizes that a quiet approach is often much more effective than a loud mouth when it comes to achieving results. Biden is old school, who spent the vast majority of his political life in a Washington where politicians mostly came to get things done and where compromise wasn’t a dirty word. America is reaping the benefits of Biden’s experience. He is remaking America’s economy for the better.