CLOWARD AND PIVEN SMILE: The Bankruptcy of Bidenomics. Biden’s economic policies gave us three years of excessive, wasteful, and poorly targeted federal spending.
Higher deficits, meanwhile, mean more spending on interest: “Rising interest rates and persistently large primary deficits cause interest costs to almost triple in relation to GDP between 2023 and 2053,” the CBO noted. Small wonder that Biden stopped bragging about the deficit.
Much of Biden’s presidency has been defined by this sort of memory-holing, when the president uses dubious evidence to give himself credit and then moves on when the story changes. Indeed, the word Bidenomics itself eventually fell to this sort of revisionist political marketing.
After his Chicago speech, the president traveled the country making the case for Bidenomics. It wasn’t successful. Polls found that a clear majority of even Democratic voters were unhappy with the economy. In a November New York Times/Siena survey, just 2 percent of respondents rated the economy as excellent. Literally zero surveyed voters under 30 in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin gave the economy top marks. Biden administration officials themselves seemed dismayed by the limited results of the president’s policies: In late 2023, an unnamed White House official told CNN the president was immensely frustrated about the slow rollout of infrastructure projects that Biden had hoped to show off.
Biden used the word Bidenomics more than 100 times in various speeches, according to NBC. But by late November, the term had entirely disappeared from his prepared remarks. Democrats had reportedly decided that their economic messaging would instead revolve around the more generic phrase “people over politics.” One marketing gimmick would be replaced with another—because Bidenomics wasn’t working.
NBC, huh? Here’s why economists don’t expect trillions of dollars in economic stimulus to create inflation.
—Headline, CNBC, July 23rd, 2020.
