The White House and President Joe Biden‘s 2024 reelection campaign are betting that a simple slogan will help carry the president to a second term.
“Bidenomics,” the new catchphrase for the president’s wide-ranging economic priorities, is a contrast with the “Reaganomics” of President Ronald Reagan, which Republicans associate with a sustained economic boom and U.S. victory in the Cold War but Biden characterizes as “trickle-down economics.”
A BURNING ISSUE: BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS LOOK TO COMBAT EXTREME HEAT ACROSS THE US
Reagan, and his supporters, stressed the need to balance the federal budget, slow government spending, and lower taxes. His supporters, and conservatives in general, argue that those pillars, coupled with slashing government business regulations, would spur free market expansion and reverse the high inflation that defined the American economy in the late 1970s.
Biden’s plan, however, thoroughly rejects the Reagan line. Rather than reducing the federal budget, the president is looking to boost spending, specifically for social welfare programs, to help communities the administration says were left behind from the economic boom of the 1980s and ’90s.
Biden says he wants to build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out” rather than from the top down.
Bidenomics is also directly tied to the president’s green energy push. Biden has stated his desire to fully decarbonize the United States by 2050 and transition at least two-thirds of all cars on American roads to electric vehicles in the next decade. Hundreds of billions in direct spending and private incentive programs included in Biden’s major legislative spending packages, like the bipartisan infrastructure law, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS and Science Act, are aimed at boosting American manufacturing of green products and their components.
The president would increase taxes on upper-income earners and corporations and use that new revenue to fund infrastructure projects across the country while incentivizing private corporations with lucrative grant programs to reshore manufacturing and other tech-focused jobs.
Critics routinely cite inflation and the growing federal deficits as the main knocks against Biden’s plan.
Just months into Biden’s first year in office, prices across nearly all commercial goods skyrocketed. Much of that was attributed to the lagging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but even some Democrats agree that Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which was passed on a strictly partisan vote and poured trillions into an already overheated economy, drove year-over-year inflation to levels not seen in decades.
The president has stated that balancing the budget is a top priority for his administration, but congressional Republicans and other political opponents argue that his policies don’t match that rhetoric, given the way Biden’s legislative spending packages lean into future flexible regulation of critical industries.
However, inflation has slowly but steadily ticked down throughout the past year and currently sits at the lowest level in two-plus years. Consumer sentiment has also shot back up, with 41% more people feeling positive about the economy than at this time last year, according to the University of Michigan.
And though the Federal Reserve still raised interest rates to 5.5% in July, the highest level in more than twenty years, Chairman Jerome Powell has also stated that the Fed no longer believes the economy will fall into a recession as it continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have started touting public investments allocated through Biden’s spending bills in their home districts, a fact that the president himself and top White House officials frequently point to during official events.
Furthermore, a historically strong labor market — unemployment has hovered around 4% for months — and moderate wage growth have allowed the president to continue touting his economic bona fides, even as prices remain above their pre-pandemic levels.
Combined, these factors have cut the teeth out of some of Republicans’ critiques of Bidenomics as just “socialist” handouts. GOP lawmakers have often instead focused on the president’s age and alleged corruption in his family’s past business dealings.
“If you find it hard to pinpoint what congressional Republicans’ message is right now, you have a lot of company,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “As the strength of the American economy under Joe Biden’s leadership is reinforced with new data every week, House Republicans’ argument in favor of trickle-down welfare for the rich disintegrates more and more.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The White House specifically argues that attempts to investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s son, have sprung out of the successes of Biden’s economic agenda.
“Apparently, this clown carousel wasn’t weird enough. Now House Republicans are channeling their frustrated energy into a measured and purposeful urge to impeach … someone … somewhere … for something,” Bates continued. “The bottom line is this. The subtitle to everything that makes up congressional Republicans’ disjointed message is this: ‘Bidenomics is working.'”
