Biden is still crazy after all these years
Joe Biden is not a general, but he suffers from the general’s curse. always fighting the final war.
The US economy has taken a hit Persistent shortage of labor demand for about 10 years after the financial crisis. Perhaps the problem began long before China succeeded in expanding its economy and attracting manufacturing jobs from the United States and other countries through predatory mercantilist policies.
After the bursting of the mortgage bubble and the near-collapse of the financial sector, underemployment seemed to become an embedded feature of the economy. The unemployment rate rose from 4.7% in the summer of 2007 to 10% in the fall of 2009. American lives are being destroyed at an unprecedented pace.
of The Great Recession was unusually long.; and even after it officially ended in the spring of 2009, the recession-like situation continued. Economic growth was sluggish, and fears of a “double dip” persisted for years. There has been no recovery in employment as typically seen after a recession, leading to the idea that we are suffering from a “jobless recovery.” In the end, it took a decade for unemployment to recover in the penultimate summer of George Bush’s administration.
For most of that decade, Joe Biden served as vice president.of The Obama administration cannot revitalize the American economy It seems to have left a deep and lasting impression on him. The conventional wisdom among Democrats and many economists was that the administration’s failure to pursue further policy was to blame. stimulating economic policyBasically, the main reason was the high level of deficit spending.
This was a very convenient thesis for the left wing of the Democratic Party. Instead of calling for a fundamental rethinking of progressive approaches to economic policy, it led to the idea that the problem was simply economic policy. We weren’t doing enough progressive things.. We should have spent more, we should have redistributed more, we should have pushed for more green transition policies, progressives told themselves. The real culprit was not their own economic policies, but their failure to pursue them more rigorously, made worse by obstruction by Republicans and the Tea Party.
Learn the wrong lessons from the last crisis
It was clear to many outside the Democratic left-wing bubble that this was a shallow view of the American economy. For example, it largely ignored China’s role.and China is desperate to absorb demand from the rest of the world To enable economic growth at home, US policies aimed at stimulating demand have had the effect of increasing jobs in China rather than jobs in the US.
Tax policies that could help encourage domestic investment, such as corporate and capital gains tax cuts, were (and are) anathema to progressives. As a result, they unwilling to support budgetary compromises That could have traded the tax cuts favored by pro-growth Republicans for the more expansive spending policies favored by the left. And instead of thinking that economic and climate regulations would be a drag on the economy, the left argued that someday they would somehow create opportunities for more growth.
Vice President Joe Biden (left), President Barack Obama (center), and May Hsu, president and co-owner of Chesapeake Bay Candle Co., at an event entitled “Insourcing America’s Jobs” in Washington, D.C. Arrived at the start of the roundtable discussion. January 11, 2012. (Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
When Donald Trump was elected president, progressives were convinced that his economic policies would be disastrous. They predicted inflation, the collapse of financial markets, rapid rises in interest rates, and worsening inequality.
Instead, inflation fell below the Fed’s target even as unemployment continued to fall, ultimately hitting its lowest level in 40 years. The stock market soared. Tariffs begin to restore confidence in American businesses He believed that U.S. policy would not leave it vulnerable to the depredations of Chinese mercantilism. as a result, The budget deficit actually served to stimulate domestic labor demand. Not in orbit around Beijing.
The wrong response to the pandemic
The onset of the pandemic, at least initially, caused unemployment to spike. Democrats argue, and many seem to believe, that President Trump has somehow worsened the economic effects of the pandemic. This seemed to reflect their belief that the U.S. economy could not recover from its downturn without strong government power, a misguided lesson they took to heart during the Obama era. No matter how large the stimulus package was offered under the Trump administration, it will never be enough. that underemployment is the natural state of the economy This always had to be compensated for by an even larger deficit.
Biden entered the White House with a campaign mandate to increase stimulus spending, believing it was an economic necessity.his advisor Pushed forward with the kinds of policies he believed were necessary in 2009– instead of paying close attention to how much the economic situation has changed in 12 years. The loudest alarmists were Democrats like Larry Summers, who dismissed warnings about inflation as little more than Republican fear-mongering.
President Joe Biden speaks during the Inflation Control Act Celebration on the South Lawn of the White House on September 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
The result of fighting the crisis of 2009 in 2021 is Worst inflation in 40 years. So when the Fed finally woke up to the problem of soaring price levels, it was forced to raise interest rates at a pace not seen since Paul Volcker led the central bank. This sudden change has caused chaos in the housing market, trapping homeowners with low-interest mortgages in their current homes, pushing housing affordability to an all-time low, and ironically forcing homebuyers into new By driving into the housing market, it stimulated demand for labor and materials. .
Opinion polls not only show that the public disapproves of Biden’s leadership on the economic front, but also show that Trump has a lead of more than 20 points over Biden on economic issues, leaving Democrats deeply disappointed. are doing. They start making up all sorts of incredible theories about: Why don’t people trust Biden more? Instead of focusing on economic recovery and lower unemployment, they continue to focus on the pain caused by inflation.
Many on the left believe that the public’s disapproval of Biden and Dissatisfaction with the economy is the result of disinformation. If the media only emphasizes the positive aspects, the public will realize how great and brilliant the Biden economy really is. This notion is completely undermined by the fact that consumers of mainstream media and business news have a much more positive view of the economy than those who get most of their news about the economy from personal experience. Masu. According to a University of Michigan consumer survey.
The real explanation why the public doesn’t appreciate Bidennomics is simple. This is because the problem of persistently high unemployment rates was the problem of the previous crisis. The issue was resolved before the pandemic, while Donald Trump was president. Stubbornly high inflation is today’s problem. The reason the nation does not recognize Biden’s leadership is because he has fought past wars and is losing the war we are in. It’s as if George W. Bush expected Vietnam to be so prosperous that people wouldn’t notice how bad things were in Iraq. The country and Poland were no longer under Soviet control.
President Joe Biden speaks about the Bidennomics agenda in Washington, DC, on October 23, 2023 (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
The Biden administration’s election-year proposals are far out of sync with the nation’s economic needs. It offers tax breaks to homebuyers, but this is an inflationary policy that is likely to push home prices even higher. Student loan forgiveness is similarly inflated, and much of that money is likely to end up in the pockets of landlords who rent apartments to new graduates. The administration’s proposed tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations will not stop inflation for the simple reason that most of them would be a tax on savings. All this nonsense about climate change is highly inflationary.
Americans want economic policy to address inflation — and Biden only preaches about greed Complaints about candy bar shrinkage. Meanwhile, his supporters argue that dissatisfaction with the economy is a form of insanity, or the result of the media somehow being biased towards poor Joe.
