A Cautionary Tale for Those Who Dislike the Biden Economy

As noted in a post earlier this week, many on the political right continue to whine and carry as if America's economy is in terrible straights and in nothing short of delusion claim that Donald Trump could better manage the economy.  Such thinking, which is constantly fanned by Fox News, a/k/a Faux News. and other far right propaganda outlets that pretend to be "news" outlet  It also requires that one have amnesia and for get that Trump/Republicans tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations drastically increased the federal deficit and that Republicans' "reverse Robin Hood" agenda would slash the social safety net and harm poor whites in red states the most.  Nonetheless, these people support Trump because he legitimizes their racial hatreds, homophobia, and white Christian nationalism. Yes, inflation - which has come down significantly - remains a concern but Trump and MAGA cultists refuse to recognize the corporate greed driving food prices as well as the reality that America cannot unilaterally control oil prices.  They also utterly ignore the investments in infrastructure and industrial plant that the Biden administration has made, increasing employment and strengthen to economy for the longer term - indeed. Republicans are bragging about these investments in the districts even though they voted against the funding, apparently believing (probably correctly) that their constituents are too stupid to know they are being duped.  A piece at Salon looks at the economy and Trump/Republican deception:

You’re unhappy with this economy? OK, that’s your right. But you should seriously consider whether you want the available alternative.

Last November, I wrote what I thought was a modest commentary about how the Biden economy was doing remarkably well, at least by most standard macroeconomic measures, and much of the corporate media wasn’t reporting about it. Job numbers were historically high, unemployment low and the U.S. had done the best of all G-7 economies in bringing down inflation resulting from the worst pandemic years.

I was careful to note that my wife and I, and members of our daughters’ generation, were still feeling economic pain around the cost of food and housing, and that many younger people felt they could not get their lives started due to student debt and high housing prices. 

I got considerable grief from readers for that one, but I stand by what I wrote about the Biden administration’s active economic moves and a renewed focus on industrial policy to accomplish goals that simply cannot be left to “the marketplace.” Leaving infrastructure work to the marketplace is how America wound up with so many embarrassing airports, shaky bridges and poky, increasingly dangerous trains. There are things we must do together.

As I wrote at the time, Biden’s manufacturing plan invests in rural areas and will transform local economies:

He’s the first president in many decades to stand with organized labor and support its fight for better wages and benefits. He continues to work on alleviating the crushing student debt that limits so many young adults’ lives. He has taken on Big Pharma, moving to lower prescription drug prices and health care costs for older Americans. He is working to stop the junk fees hidden in so many transactions. He rejoined the Paris climate accords and has done far more to address that crisis than any previous president.

The general economic news has only improved since then, including strong jobs numbers for March and April. As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg writes, the U.S economy typically does much better when a Democrat is in the White House.

Although inflation for consumer goods rose slightly in March, which is not good news for anyone, the Federal Reserve has done a good job in carefully bringing inflation down after the supply-chain disruptions and supermarket price hikes of the pandemic. Remember the corporate media braying endlessly about the coming recession? Well, it never came.

So here we are: The macroeconomic indicators look great, but your household budget may remain a struggle. Gas prices keep rising, but that's largely the result of decisions made in Saudi Arabia and Russia, well beyond the Biden administration’s control. 

But here’s what I wasn’t thinking about enough when I wrote that earlier commentary: People in this country are kept unsettled and economically stressed by living with a threadbare social safety net, one relentlessly under attack by Republicans. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, as a frightening number of Americans do, there is no room for higher food, housing or fuel costs. Long before either Biden or Trump occupied the White House, living costs were rapidly outpacing rising incomes.

The economic benefits of the massive Infrastructure Bill and the strategic CHIPS Act are just now beginning to be realized, with much of the funding specifically targeted to help create jobs in rural areas of so-called red states. (The White House has an interactive map explaining all the efforts across the country.)

Those economic benefits are twofold: the immediate well-paying jobs and then, down the line, the new or rebuilt roads, bridges, airports, public transit, waterway infrastructure, broadband internet and microchip factories that will serve us for decades.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, one of the unsung heroes of the Biden team, is working to keep monopolistic companies from harming consumers and workers through price-fixing schemes, non-compete agreements and other underhanded tactics. If you didn’t catch Khan on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart recently, it's well worth your time.

Khan does an outstanding job of taking apart Republicans’ insincere claims about fixing the economy and supporting the working class when she explains how complex the task of protecting workers and consumers is, and how badly the FTC is outgunned by the big corporations aligned with Republicans.  

So, as everybody knows — to borrow Trump’s favorite rhetorical device — the notion that Republicans do better with the economy is a worthless statement clause, one might say, in the GOP’s continuing contract on America, one that has duped people for decades by merely employing the propagandist’s trick of repetition.

But since we have more or less been promised an authoritarian economy if Trump prevails in this fall’s election, how well do those work? 

Not too well, especially if we’re talking about authoritarian governments that were formerly democracies. Such economies tend to be heavily based on one or two commodities, as with Russia, whose main exports are petroleum and, I’m pretty sure, corruption. Authoritarian governments tend to manage their economies about as poorly as Republicans have in the modern era, which makes perfect sense when you consider that Republicans are not moved by expertise or evidence but by ideology, such as the thoroughly discredited idea that tax cuts for the wealthy will somehow “trickle down” to benefit the average Jane and Joe. And Republicans' fallback argument that they are better with the annual deficit or the national debt is just silly. They have made both things dramatically worse, and mostly decry the national debt so they can further slash the social safety net.

Over the decades, Donald Trump has drummed into his fans’ minds the idea that he is a great businessman. By all accounts — and from every shred of evidence we have seen over the past four decades — he’s anything but. He is certainly a profligate money-burner who keeps being propped up by shady foreign banks, shadowy individuals and organizations and billionaire supporters. (Remember how Donald Trump Jr. bragged that the Trump Organization saw a lot of money pouring in from Russia?) He’s so inept at business that even his casino “empire” went under — in no small measure because he used it (as he did the presidency) to enrich himself.

That’s the “strongman” MAGA believers want in charge of the economy? As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte notes, “Trump supporters mistake petulance for strength.”

He appears ready to follow the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for replacing expert civil servants with a legion of loyalist lackeys, ditching climate science, imprisoning or expelling immigrants who are crucial to the economy, cutting taxes further and reducing Social Security and Medicaid benefits, forcing a misogynistic theocracy on a nation founded on the separation of church and state, and turning our back on historical allies around the world. Oh and, first and foremost, getting revenge on all of Trump’s enemies.

Does anyone actually think that living in that kind of country under that kind of leader would make his or her life better?

Trump himself seems aware, after his own fashion, that things have improved greatly under Biden. After all, he has openly wished for the U.S. economy to crash before the November election.