Yeah, man, it’s Joe Biden’s economy
Joe Biden wants you to pay attention to “his” economy. Is that a good thing, considering next year’s presidential election and all?
The economy is the political elephant in the room, whichever way you look at it.
The June national unemployment rate was 3.6%. The U.S. rate has not dipped below 4% for the past year-and-a-half.
(The jobless rate in Pennsylvania was 4% in May. In Fayette County, it was 4.4% For the Pittsburgh metropolitan region as a whole, the rate was 3.6%, a tick or two above the April figure.)
The administration rather gleefully points out that the Biden economy has produced 13.7 million new jobs in a little over two years in office, while his predecessor during the “boom” years 2017 to 2019 created half that number, or 6.35 million.
As for the latest inflation number, it’s 4%, after months of strenuous efforts by the Federal Reserve to bring inflation down from a peak high of 9.1 in June 2022.
Inflation. It feels imposed, arbitrary. “It feels worse than the job market feels good,” said Jeanna Smialek of the New York Times, cracking wise on the FiveThirtyEight political podcast. Might it deprive Joe Biden of a second term?
The president’s poll numbers reflect voter angst. The Associated Press recently asked Americans to rate Biden’s handling of the economy. A miserly 34% gave him passing marks.
Despite the fact that unemployment is near a 50-year low, only 30% of those polled said the economy was in good shape.
A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 55% of Americans disapprove of President Biden’s economic stewardship.
At the same time, Americans seem to think Donald Trump is the economy’s fair-haired boy.
Campaigning for president in 2016, the real estate magnet/reality TV show host plausibly argued, “My whole life has been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I can. I’m so greedy.”
Exit polling that year shows that Trump won a majority of voters who thought the economy was either “fair” or “poor.”
Commentator Ezra Klein recently declared that voters continue to trust Trump’s economic acumen. Better than Biden’s, they say.
Americans evidently still believe Trump’s implausible 2016 assertion, “I [now] want to be greedy for the United States.”
Twice indicted and the focus of at least two other criminal probes, Trump is favored to win the Republican nomination for president. The chances are pretty good that a Biden-Trump rematch is in the works.
In Chicago, late in June, the president made the case for Bidenomics, a triple-tiered edifice consisting of public investments, worker apprenticeship training and education, and an energized attack on rigged pricing and other costly-to-consumer arrangements. Over the counter hearing aids? Thank Joe Biden.
When first lady Jill Biden touches down in Pittsburgh this week, Bidenomics will be front and center.
In Chicago and elsewhere, President Biden has declared not only the coming of Bidenomics but the end, at least during his watch, of trickle down economics and four decades of federal policies and ham-handedness that “hollowed out” communities across the U.S.
“Trickle down economics has failed the country for decades,” the president said in South Carolina, where he hailed huge new federal investments in such things as roads, bridges, cyber, and computer microchips. (The hundreds of billions of dollar are only now beginning to flow, no thanks to congressional Republicans, who were nearly unanimous in opposition to a panoply of administration initiatives.)
According to the Biden definition, trickle down encompasses tax cuts for the wealthy PLUS the notion that “it didn’t matter where you made things” (hello Vietnam, goodbye Columbus). It also means “slashing public investment,” including funding for critical infrastructure.
No more, the president says, spelling the end of the rabid globalization of the American jobs market. “I believe every American willing to work hard should be able to get a job” – preferably a good paying union job – “no matter where they are: in the heartland, in small towns, in every part of the country.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.