One of the recurring questions on presidential polls asks respondents for their perceptions of economic performance.
Although Kamala has bested Trump in a couple of recent polls, it has really rankled me that so few Americans have recognized and/or appreciated either the damage Trump did to the economy or the Biden administration’s incredibly successful management of it–management that financial markets and economists acknowledge was masterful, and brought the U.S. out of the pandemic downturn faster (and better) than any other country.
Knowledgable observers compare Biden’s performance to that of FDR. He will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential Presidents. In my humble opinion, the lack of popular recognition of his performance is attributable to his relative lack of oratorical skills–if Biden had the oratorical gifts of an Obama, perhaps a general public fixated on celebrity, salesmanship and hype (and too lazy to consult evidence and data) would have appreciated the extent of his administration’s accomplishments.
The Democratic convention got underway Monday, and in his speech, Biden justifiably reminded listeners of his “greatest hits.” In a column about the convention and the speech, Jennifer Rubin focused on Biden’s economic and foreign policy performance, noting the historic pieces of legislation Biden managed to pass even when the House of Representatives was in the hands of a partisan–and looney– GOP: measures on infrastructure, microchip manufacturing, and green energy investment. Cost controls on insulin and a variety of prescription drugs for Medicare patients. A massive operation to immunize Americans against the coronavirus, despite what Rubin called–accurately– “irrational and destructive” Republican opposition. That operation saved thousands of lives in addition to allowing the U.S. economy to recover.
These domestic successes accompanied equally impressive foreign policy accomplishments: “repairing and expanding NATO, arming Ukraine, reestablishing the United States’ credibility on the international stage, new and reinvigorated alliances to check China’s power).”
Kamala Harris has been part of the Biden administration, and can be expected to continue the policy approaches that have been so successful. There will be some “tweaks,” but she has administration “bragging rights.” She is running on four years of demonstrated, excellent performance.
So, you might ask, what are Donald Trump’s “bragging rights?” My sister recently listed them, and seeing them all in one list was–shall we say–edifying:
First President in history to serve a full term and increase the deficit every year he was in office.
First President in history to maintain a debt to GDP ratio over 100% for his entire term
Highest annual budget deficit.
Most added to the national debt in a single term.
Most new unemployment claims.
Largest single day point drop in the history of the Dow.
First President in almost a century to lose jobs in his first term.
Longest government shutdown in history (and he did that while his own party controlled both chambers of Congress).
In addition to that dismal economic performance, Trump was also the first President to lose the popular vote twice, the first to maintain a net negative approval rating for his entire term, first to be impeached twice (with bipartisan support for his conviction after both impeachments) and, as we know, the President with the most indictments, guilty pleas, and criminal convictions of members of an administration.
The first to be a convicted felon.
The only people who cheered Trump’s economic policies were the super-rich, who benefitted from his tax cuts–cuts that placed the tax burden squarely on the middle class, and further enriched the wealthiest Americans.
Talk about “sucking all the oxygen out of the room…” The four indictments of Trump have consumed most of the media, masking what would otherwise be a greater emphasis on administration actions and policies, and overwhelming what ought to be applauded as the enormous success of “Bidenomics.”
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is one year old; it is central to “Bidenomics.” A recent Treasury Department analysis found that it has incentivized unusually strong business investment–investment Axios recently called a “tailwind for economic growth.”
Together with the bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act, the IRA has especially spurred investments in manufacturing and clean energy. According to Treasury officials, evidence shows that private investment has held up, even in the face of increases in interest rates. And the report also noted that most counties where IRA-related investments have been announced are areas where college graduation rate, employment and wages are lower. In other words, Republican, largely rural areas.
The IRA was the eventual form President Joe Biden’s initial “Build Back Better” plans took. It offered to lower Americans’ energy costs with a 30% tax credit for energy-efficient windows, heat pumps, or newer models of appliances; capped the cost of drugs at $2,000 per year for people on Medicare; and made healthcare premiums fall for certain Americans by expanding the Affordable Care Act.
By raising taxes on the very wealthy and on corporations and bringing the Internal Revenue Service back up to full strength so that it can crack down on tax cheating, as well as saving the government money by permitting it to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, the IRA was expected to raise $738 billion. That, plus about $891 billion from other sources, enabled the law to make the largest investment ever in addressing climate change while still bringing down the federal government’s annual deficit.
“This is a BFD,” former President Barack Obama tweeted a year ago.
It is a “BFD,” and it is extremely frustrating that reporting on its effects has been smothered by a combination of “it bleeds so it leads” reporting and the massive amounts of propaganda “flooding the zone” ala Bannon.
The law has driven so much investment in U.S. manufacturing that the CEO of U.S. Steel recently suggested renaming it the “Manufacturing Renaissance Act.” Manufacturers have been returning previously off-shored production to the U.S., bringing supply chains back to the U.S. And as Richardson emphasized,
These changes have meant new, well-paid manufacturing jobs that have been concentrated in Republican-dominated states and in historically disadvantaged communities.
The IRA has also been enormously consequential to the fight to tame climate change.
Scientists Alicia Zhao and Haewon McJeon, who recently published an article in Science, today wrote that the IRA “brings the US significantly closer to meeting its 2030 climate target [of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50–52% below 2005 levels], taking expected emissions from 25–31% below 2005 levels down to 33–40% below.”
Republican presidential candidates have—predictably–refused to credit the act with these results; Richardson quoted former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who called the IRA “a communist manifesto,” although, with their usual hypocrisy, “Republicans have been eager to take credit for IRA investments in their districts without mentioning either that they voted against the IRA or that they are still trying to repeal it.”
The Environmental Defense Fund recently issued a statement rebutting several of the Republican misrepresentations–okay, lies–about the IRA. The organization noted the difficulty of getting factual information out:
The truth takes about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as false stories do. Six. Times. Longer.
And this is from a study that is a few years old, before the global pandemic and the 2020 U.S. election — events that caused an explosion of lies online by Bad Actors.
A simple google search brings up dozens of reports from highly credible and nonpartisan sources, confirming the truly massive economic and environmental benefits triggered by the IRA, and the fact that those benefits are being felt in parts of the country that have previously been left behind.
Those reports won’t reach the millions of Americans glued to Faux News and its clones, or the other millions who have turned off the news because they no longer know what or who to believe–a situation that explains Biden’s low approval numbers.
My middle son said it best. In a conversation a while back, he said “Biden is the first President I’ve voted for who vastly exceeded my expectations.”
To quote Barack Obama, Biden’s Presidential performance has been a BFD. Too bad so few Americans understand that.
Let me begin this post with an admission: I am older than Joe Biden, so I know a little something about the diminishing energy levels that accompany aging. I sometimes (okay, often) blank on words. On the other hand, I have a significant well of life experience to draw on, and so far, at least, I’m reasonably confident that the lessons of that lifetime have more than compensated for the relatively minor deficits of aging.
And I am over the constant media handwringing about Biden’s age.
Sure, given the challenges of aging, I wish Biden was younger–but after looking at what he has accomplished over the past three years by drawing on his lifetime of political and governmental experience, I realize that significant trade-offs would be involved. (Unlike Trump–who is only 4 years younger– Biden spent his time acquiring the knowledge and skills that have made him a very consequential President.)
In the last three years, America’s economy has added more than 13 million jobs—including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs. We’ve unleashed a manufacturing and clean energy boom. In 2021 and 2022, more than 10 million applications were filed for new small businesses—the strongest two years ever recorded. Since the pandemic, America has had the strongest growth of any leading economy in the world. Inflation has fallen for 11 straight months.
As my middle son observed, “Biden is the first President I’ve voted for who has exceeded my expectations.”
Nobody seems to have noticed this, but over the course of the spring, the country’s four leading freight rail carriers agreed to grant the vast majority of their workers paid sick days.
Everybody remembers what happened last December. The workers threatened to strike over such days, among other issues. President Biden, generally very friendly toward labor, made it illegal for the workers to strike. He was criticized by unions and workers and fellow Democrats and liberal media outlets, this one included….
When the workers prevailed, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers explicitly acknowledged that the Biden administration had
played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement. Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
As the article argued, the administration needs to start “making big show” of such accomplishments.
Biden has been a terrific president. The big legislation. The way he played Kevin McCarthy on the debt deal. The global leadership against Putin. The plain human decency restored to the White House after four years of self-obsessed thuggery. Oh—the 13 million jobs created since he took office, which is more jobs in 28 months than created under any other president, in all of our history, in a full four-year term.
As Jennifer Rubin recently wrote in the Washington Post, Biden has an economic record that has been working far better than most people anticipated but that the electorate doesn’t yet recognize.
The economy has created 13 million jobs, inflation has been more than cut in half, huge investments are being made in infrastructure and green energy, wage growth has begun to outpace inflation, the first drug price controls are going into effect and the biggest corporations will finally be forced to pay something in federal taxes. Yet polls show voters incorrectly think we are in a recession and remain negative about the economy.
As Robert Hubbell recently reminded us, “The constant hum of investigations into Trump’s many crimes is obscuring one of the great modern presidencies.”
Historians will look back in wonder at what Biden achieved in a presidency that began mid-pandemic before the smoke of a failed coup and insurrection had cleared. Despite those obstacles, his legislative record rivals or exceeds that of every president since FDR—a president who was mired in controversy throughout his tenure.
The Biden Administration has a three-part vision: targeting investment, empowering workers, and promoting competition. That vision includes enforcing antitrust rules and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. (Recent results: cheaper insulin and real wage growth.)
As the New Republic reminds us,
Liberals have a list of 50 things they want government to do, and they want those things done fast and to completion. Conservatives have a list of about two things they want government to do: Cut taxes, and punish people they disapprove of morally. For a presidential administration, satisfying that first group is a lot harder than satisfying the second
As someone has pointed out, It’s not how old you are. It’s how you are old.
Republican hysteria about immigration at the southern border is both stupid and racist: Stupid, because most people who are in this country illegally have flown in and overstayed their visas, and racist because–hey!–it’s the GOP and those people at the southern border tend to be brown.
The GOP’s anti-immigrant fervor isn’t so different from the anti-immigrant hatred documented by Ken Burns in “America and the Holocaust”–only the targets have shifted. A little.
In light of DeSantis and Abott’s recent efforts to prove that “libtards” don’t understand the terrible threat posed by brown people trying to escape horrific situations, I thought I’d share some inconvenient things called “facts.”
I know facts are out of fashion these days, but it is instructive to look at the actual impact of immigration. As David Brooks wrote a few years back, “when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.”
So what are the facts—as opposed to the xenophobic fears? A couple of years ago, I did some research; this is what I found then.
Immigrants make up about 14% of the U.S. population; more than 43 million people. Together with their children, they are about 27% of us. Of the 43 million, approximately 11 million are undocumented.
What anti-immigrant activists like to call “chain migration” is actually family re-unification and it applies only to close relatives; of the people granted permanent residency in 2016, about two-thirds fell into that category.
Immigrants made up 17% of the U.S. workforce in 2014, and two-thirds of those were here legally. Collectively, they were 45% of domestic workers, 36% of manufacturing workers, and 33% of agricultural workers. Those percentages help to explain why state-level efforts to curb immigration have come back to bite them: in Alabama a few years ago, when the state passed a draconian new immigration law, crops rotted in the fields. Farmers couldn’t find native-born residents willing to do the work.
Right now, restaurants are desperate for waitstaff and kitchen help.
Despite the hateful rhetoric from the GOP, most Americans today consider immigration a good thing: in 2016, Gallup found 72% of Americans viewed immigrants favorably, and as many as 84% supported a path to citizenship for undocumented persons who met certain requirements. Another poll showed that 76% of Republicans supported a path to citizenship. (It’s worth noting that such support was higher than the 62% who supported a border wall.)
What about the repeated claims that immigrants are a drain on the economy? The data unequivocally shows otherwise. As the Atlantic and several other sources have reported, undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars into Social Security for benefits they will never receive. These are people working on faked social security cards; employers deduct the social security payments and send them to the government, but because the numbers aren’t connected to actual accounts, the worker can never access the contributions. The Social Security system has grown increasingly—and dangerously– reliant on that revenue; in 2010, the system’s chief actuary estimated that undocumented immigrants had contributed roughly 12 billion dollars to the program.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that approximately half of undocumented workers pay income taxes, and all of them pay sales and property taxes. In 2010, those state and local taxes amounted to approximately 10.6 billion dollars.
The most significant impact of immigration by far has been on innovation and economic growth. The Partnership for a New American Economy issued a research report in 2010: the key findings included the fact that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, companies founded by immigrants and their children employ more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generate is greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.
The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.
On economic grounds alone, then, we should welcome immigrants. But not only do we threaten undocumented persons, we make it incredibly difficult to come here legally. If there is one fact that everyone admits, it is the need to reform a totally dysfunctional and inhumane immigration system. Based upon logic and the national interest, it’s hard to understand why Congress has been unwilling or unable to craft reasonable legislation.
Of course, logic and the national interest have been missing from Washington for some time. Compassion went with them.
It feels as if I’ve been on “lockdown” forever, and I know others are equally “over” a pandemic that is anything but over. There just aren’t that many rooms to be deep cleaned, that many books to be read, or–in my case–that many blogs to be written.
The rest of the time, then, becomes available for worrying.
I’ve been particularly concerned about what will happen to the center of my city in the wake of Covid-19. My husband and I moved to downtown Indianapolis in 1980, when things were still pretty sketchy, and we’ve celebrated the subsequent rebirth of a flourishing urban core. We’ve been excited to see new homes and apartments being built, we’ve marveled at our inability to patronize all of the new restaurants and bars (although we really tried!). We’ve worried as online retailing has reduced the number and variety of shops. And we were heartbroken when we drove past all the boarded-up windows in the wake of the one protest that included such destruction.
Predictions about “what will come next” are everywhere. Most aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on (or the bytes they represent), but I tend to respect the scholars at the Brookings Institution, who’ve weighed in with their analysis.
The Brookings report suggests that COVID-19 will accelerate or intensify many trends that are already underway, which makes a lot of sense to me.
The report noted that retailers, along with their landlords and suppliers, were already “responding to multiple industry-wide trends” (aka “in a world of hurt”) before the coronavirus. Trump’s tariffs hurt an industry that was already reeling from shifts in consumer demand from products to experiences, e-commerce, and the sharing economy. The pandemic is accelerating an already pressing need to embrace new models.
The report is light on specifics, but does predict that profit-sharing leases will be an “increasingly important tool to help new businesses get started, survive slowdowns, and provide a return to landlords who invest in their tenants’ success.”
The report’s predictions about food really comforted me. (Comfort food? Sorry…)
Convergence and hybridization will accelerate in food retail, which will return to be a “revitalizing force in urban life.” IKEA was already a furniture showroom, warehouse, and restaurant. High-end grocers were encouraging shoppers to have a beer. Restaurants were increasingly not just dine-in, but fast-casual or mobile food trucks. Whether through app-based delivery or prepared foods from wholesalers such as Costco, Americans will return to eating much of their food prepared outside the home. In 2017, jobs in leisure and hospitality (which includes all bars and restaurants) grew to outnumber jobs in retail trade. The pandemic is a setback, but not a reset.
On the negative side, the researchers expect that the 50- million- plus low wage workers will continue to face unsupportable housing costs– and that households that previously strained to pay rent will find it impossible. They also see worse labor market outcomes for older workers who lose their jobs.
So what does all of that portend for cities?
Some urban dwellers who have decamped to less dense areas will undoubtedly stay there permanently, “irrespective of the many amenities and agglomeration economies urban centers have to offer.” But the researchers note that the period following the Great Recession saw major metros gain more population than their suburbs
Why was this happening in a tepidly recovering economy? A good deal was attributable to young adult millennials. Unable to find jobs and housing in large stretches of the country, they found urban centers attractive. Eventually, the economy rebounded, jobs dispersed and many young adults dispersed with them. But large metro areas still prospered even with slower growth, as Brookings’s Metro Monitor 2020 revealed.
What does this mean for the post-COVID-19 period? Much will depend on Gen Z, an educated and racially diverse generation with strong urban roots.
In other words, if Gen Z wants and needs what urban life has to offer, they’ll opt to remain.
We will face huge challenges once the pandemic is over and Trump is (fingers crossed) a horrific memory. We will need to restore a functioning and ethical federal government, address our enormous inequalities with social investment and a comprehensive, adequate social safety net–and continue the work of making our cities vital, livable places to live and work.
