Joe Biden will serve out the remaining months of his four-year administration. Just because he decided not to stand for a second term, and just because he is rubbish at debating, does not mean he is incapable of continuing the job he has been doing, pretty successfully for the past three-and-a-half years, whatever Donald Trump et al might tell you.
And therein lies the main point of contention in this upcoming election. The Republicans are claiming that his presidency has been a failure. Hell, Trump say it has been the worst presidency EVER, despite a consensus among non-partisan historians that, actually, Trump's presidency was the worst. Indeed, history tells us that Democratic presidencies in general handily out-perform Republican ones in economic terms.
The fact of the matter is that Biden has presided over a very successful American economy. So, much so that the label "Bidenomics" has been applied to his policies (it started off as a pejorative description by Republican critics, before being reclaimed by proud Democrats). This is the first such label since "Reaganomics" back in the 1980s, and it is indeed almost as revolutionary.
Republicans still speak of Reaganomics in hushed respectful tones, and Reagan is usually still revered as the greatest Republican leader of the country, even though the modern neo-con Republican party has very little in common with Reagan's Republicanism, which dates from a gentler, kinder era.
Reaganomics was based on the concept (largely discredited these days) that prosperity trickles down from the top. Thus, we should put our trust in the "invisible hand" of the market to fairly and efficiently distribute resources, and the state should interfere as little as possible with the private sector's running of the economy. It was a theoretical philosophy marked by the real life policies of tax cuts, wage suppression, and deregulation. Trillions of dollars moved from the poorest 99% to the top 1% as a direct result.
Bidenomics, on the other hand, is based on three main tenets: public investment, empowering workers, and promoting competition. It realizes that prosperity and a strong economy grow from the bottom up and the middle out, not from the top down. "When the middle class does well, everybody does well", as Biden often says.
Thus, public investment can actually attract more private sector investment, rather than "crowding it out" as Reagan believed, and that has turned out to be true, as evidenced by the achievements of the Inflation Reduction Act in green energy and cleantech and the CHIPS and Science Act in computer technology.
Biden has actively strengthened labour unions, rather than trying to break them as Reagan did, and has largely cleared the logjam of stagnant labour wages of the last forty years, resulting in higher employment and happier workers.
And, on competition, Biden has aggressively enforced anti-trust laws, rather than just looking the other way as a few mega-companies divide up the spoils of whole industries, so that the "efficiencies" of big business do not also come with unacceptable amounts of economic and societal risk.
So, it turns out that higher wages do not actually kill jobs, deregulation does not automatically boost competition and innovation, and there is no evidence to support the claim that cutting top tax rates stimulates economic growth (the Time article links to other articles on these matters).
And, as the article also concludes (as do articles in The Guardian and other thoughtful outlets), "Bidenomics is working", even if Biden fails to get credit for it from polls and voters. Most Americans do not seem to be able to see past the fact that things cost more and their mortgage rate is high. But inflation, and the resulting increase in interest rates, is a worldwide problem resulting from the pandemic, war in Ukraine, etc, over which Biden had little or no control. Even so, inflation has now been largely tamed (note, that DOESN'T mean that prices will actually fall - economists are not magicians!) and interests rates are expected to start falling soon as a result.
In the meantime, economic growth in the USA has accelerated (at a time when many economists were predicting a recession), consumer spending is solid, employment is high, real wages have improved, wage inequality has reduced, child poverty rates have fallen, crime rates are down, manufacturing industry has seen a renaissance, major stock indexes are constantly breaking records, etc, etc.
Nevertheless, Americans are stubbornly downbeat about the economy under Biden. Bearing in mind that the good times they remember under Trump (pre-pandemic, anyway) were largely generated by riding the coattails of an extended economic recovery under Barack Obama, and that Biden was tasked with dealing with significant challenges after the pandemic and four years of Trump, they should be a lot more appreciative of life under a Democrat government than they actually are.
History will probably judge Joe Biden more favourably than the average guy on the American street. Maybe Kamal Harris will do a better PR job on the economy under the Democrats than Biden did, and a better job of countering the lies, inaccuracies and half-truths Trump & Co has been spreading. Let's hope so, for all our sakes.
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