Congratulations to Joe Biden, albeit in a negative way.
He has joined Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover in having zero positive economic accomplishments.
Here’s my assessment. Plenty of anti-growth policies over the past four years, but absolutely nothing in the pro-growth column.
This is embarrassing. Even Barack Obama, FDR, George W. Bush, and Woodrow Wilson managed at least one good policy during their tenure (even if it happened in spite of them).
By contrast, there’s nothing positive to say about Biden’s time in office.
Lots of spending (the fake stimulus and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act) and lots of cronyism (the infrastructure boondoggle, the semiconductor industry giveaway, and the green energy handouts), along with more intervention (on antitrust).
If I wanted to make Biden look less worse, I would remove inflation since the bad monetary policy started under Trump. But since it continued under Biden, I think it belongs as one of his anti-accomplishments.
I also could remove Trump’s protectionism from the list since that was, obviously, Trump’s fault. But Biden and his people made a deliberate decision to continue those bad policies, so that counts as an anti-accomplishment.
By the way, I was going to wait until January 20 of next year to write this column, but I couldn’t resist addressing the issue today because I got agitated reading a column in the Washington Post by Eduardo Porter.
He wrote that Biden had good policies and that it’s a mystery how Trump won. I’m not joking. Here are some excerpts.
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan at the dawn of Joe Biden’s presidency…looked like exactly the right bet… The burst of industrial policy that followed (the Chips and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act) appeared equally adroit… His administration’s pugilistic approach to antitrust enforcement was a sensible way to build Biden’s credibility as a champion of the working stiff, ready to take on the Man. Even the language about rebuilding the economy, “from the bottom up and the middle out,” had a promising ring, befitting the sense of grievance directed at Washington’s long embrace of the trickle down. …a week before the election, the White House released a report congratulating itself for the economy’s stellar growth…
And yet it all came to naught. Only 18 percent of voters who identified the economy as their most important concern chose Kamala Harris, according to exit polls. More than two-thirds of voters deemed the state of the economy to be not good or poor, and 70 percent of them picked Trump.
Porter wants readers to conclude that Biden delivered good policies, but he conveniently fails to provide compelling evidence.
He claims voters should be happy that inflation came down while ignoring the fact that it went up in the first place.
He claims voters should be happy about the unemployment rate, but he ignores the equally important employment rate.
Most important, he fails to address the elephant in the room, which is the fact that families, at best, were on a treadmill during the Biden years. There was little of no increase in household income after adjusting for inflation.
P.S. There must be mass delusion at the Washington Post. One of the paper’s reporters claimed earlier this year that Biden produced a “booming” economy. And the New York Times isn’t any better.
P.P.S. Regarding presidential rankings on economic policy, only Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had unambiguously good records, while Trump’s first term was an incoherent mix of good and bad. I didn’t do an official ranking of the Bush 41 (George H.W. Bush), but he would have a dismal score (like his son).
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