President Joe Biden is back on tour, touting his economic agenda – dubbed “Bidenomics,” while he emphasized the importance of the country’s infrastructure.
“How can you have the best economy in the world and not have the best infrastructure in the world,” Biden said in a speech in South Carolina on Thursday.
He added, “On my watch, we’re making infrastructure a decade headline,” and said under former President Trump, infrastructure was essentially a “punch line.”
The president also used his speech to take direct aim at one of his most vocal critics, Republican Georgia firebrand Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“Since I took office, we’ve seen over 60 domestic manufacturing announcements all across the solar supply chain. One of the biggest is in Dalton, Georgia,” said Biden. “You may find it hard to believe, but that’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district. I’ll be there for the groundbreaking.”
Differing Views of Bidenomics
The president has framed his vision of Bidenomics as being “rooted in what always worked best for this country: investing in America. Because when you invest in our people, when you strengthen the middle class, we see stronger economic growth that benefits everybody.”
The White House has also described Bidenomics as a three-pillar plan that centers on making smart public investments, empowering and educating workers, and promoting competition to lower costs to help small businesses thrive.
The Biden administration has also characterized the plan as building the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up,” rather than through trickle-down economics – a reference to the heart of President Ronald Reagan’s policies, which continue to be embraced by many Republicans.
Yet, “Bidenomics” has also become a target for critics of the president, while it has become a catchall pejorative term for the economic woes that exist under the current administration – notably high inflation.
“Bidenomics is when you attempt to bankrupt small businesses, driving up inflation to a 40-year high while pushing up interest rates to make capital inaccessible to Main Street. It’s about overburdening and overregulating small businesses, costing them hundreds of billions of dollars.,” noted a graphic shared on Twitter by the GOP-controlled House Small Business Committee in response to another tweet from the president.
Others have suggested that instead of curing the inequality that Bidenomics has tried to combat, it could prolong it. That was the argument made by Allison Schrager, Bloomberg opinion columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
“Aspects of Bidenomics also risk delaying progress,” Schrager wrote. “High spending can be inflationary, which takes a bigger bite out of middle-class consumption and wealth compared with richer households. Industrial policy risks diverting capital and talent from the sorts of businesses springing up all over the country and into less fruitful government boondoggles.”
She added that the market, not government intervention, could play a bigger role in equalizing the technology-driven economy of today.
Yet as Biden hits the road to tout his economic agenda, it comes as the GOP candidates will be sharing their vision for the future of America. In the end, it will still be the voters who decide next year which path the country should take.
Author Experience and Expertise
A Senior Editor for 19FortyFive, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer. He has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites with over 3,200 published pieces over a twenty-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. You can follow him on Twitter: @PeterSuciu.
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