If you needed a metaphor for President Joe Biden’s economic recovery, or even his presidency, you just got it on Friday. The very day the president went to Pittsburgh to talk about infrastructure, a bridge collapsed.
If you have a bridge on your commute, you would do well to keep an eye on whether Biden has plans to visit your town.
Yes, we are joking, of course. But the bridge metaphor works because Biden has a track record of making everything he touches worse. Between his staggeringly incompetent exit from Afghanistan and his deplorable conduct in handling the border crisis he created, Biden is really stinking up the joint. But it is the economy where he is arguably doing the most damage.
The current economic recovery, it must be admitted, was already well underway by the time Biden took office. We noted as much at the time, knowing he would try to claim the credit. The nation was already building back without any more inflationary spending needed. The United States had added 17 million jobs between the pandemic low of April 2020 and Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, and there was no inflation yet in sight.
Sadly, Biden has both slowed and imperiled that recovery through his own deliberate decisions. This includes his dogged insistence upon unnecessary additional inflationary spending, his death grip on the nation’s formerly booming oil and gas industry, and his administration’s neglectful attitude toward such critical matters as the commercial supply chain and the rule of law.
Biden has tried hard to flog what economic data he can (most recently, GDP growth numbers that beat expectations) to make it seem like the economy has never been stronger. So all those people who believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction (roughly 70% this month) and those who disapprove specifically of Biden’s handling of the economy (as high as 60% in polls last week) must just have something wrong with them. It couldn’t possibly be that there is something wrong with their stumbling, bumbling president or the policies he espouses.
Consider for just a moment the implications of what Biden was saying last week. The economy is so incredibly good that he has been spending the last several months desperately trying to get $5 trillion in additional deficit spending to rescue it from ruin. Even the most dedicated disciples of John Maynard Keynes must scratch their heads at this — in what universe does that make any sense?
It is instructive to compare Biden’s predicament with inflation to that faced by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reagan inherited a very serious inflation problem — in 1980, the year before he took office, inflation was 13.5%.
Reagan attacked inflation head-on, knowing it would hurt him politically. He fully supported Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in his imposition of brutally high interest rates. The average home mortgage reached 16.6% in 1981 — hardly imaginable today. The subsequent economic misery cost Reagan’s political party dearly in the 1982 midterm elections, but it was worth putting the country ahead of politics. The boom that quickly followed not only guaranteed Reagan’s easy 49-state reelection in 1984, but also lasted through the turn of the century.
Inflation would never rear its ugly head again — at least not until Biden. On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis pegged last year’s inflation rate at 5.8% — a 39-year high.
In sharp contrast with Reagan, Biden played a large part in creating his own inflation problem. His policies caused gas prices to rise, and he signed an unnecessary, inflationary round of extra stimulus spending immediately after taking office.
Unlike Reagan, Biden did not inherit an ailing economy. He inherited a fast-recovering economy. All he had to do was stand back and let things return to normal as people got the newly available vaccines and businesses reopened. He couldn’t manage that.
Biden can claim all he wants that the economy is in great shape. But he must wonder, if only to himself, why everybody seems to feel otherwise. He ought to wonder why so many people have voluntarily stopped working.
While he’s at it, he ought to ask why nine of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates are right-to-work states governed entirely by Republicans, which have largely worked to counteract his policies. For that matter, he ought to ask why eight out of the 10 states with the worst unemployment rates are governed entirely by Democrats supporting Biden’s national agenda.
When Biden comes to town, even the bridges collapse. So be careful where you drive.
