Joe Biden’s Bidenomics is a Lie – It’s a fairly understood concept among voters that politicians lie.
Further, it’s a sadly accepted notion that, when Democratic Party politicians lie, the media, academia, and much of elite society not only spread the lies but protect the Democrats from being dinged by fact-checkers and Republicans alike.
As the already contentious 2024 Presidential Election gets underway, with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris running as the presumptive nominees of the Democratic Party, Biden, and his fellow Democrats are going to have to do everything they can to stay competitive with voters.
Because, as it stands, Joe Biden and his running-mate, Kamala Harris, are the two least popular politicians to run for reelection in decades.
Bidenomics vs. Reaganomics
A key plank in Joe Biden’s burgeoning reelection campaign has been his blandly titled “Bidenomics” policies.
If Republican President Ronald Reagan’s visionary economic program was defined by tax cuts for the upper wage earners and massive deregulation of industry to spur wider economic growth that benefited all Americans, then President Biden’s economic policies involve a far greater degree of state interference with and influence over the economy.
In essence, Bidenomics is the so-called “answer” to the Libertarian economic preferences that have dominated America’s political and economic systems since the 1980s.
Biden’s economic policies represent a return to the halcyon days of “Progressive” presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson, with their massive tax-and-spend policies that were designed to ameliorate economic woes (but often, as economist Burton Folsom, Jr., showed in his works, exacerbated the economic woes of most Americans).
Thus, Bidenomics is the Democratic Party’s great economic revenge upon their Republican foes after decades of Reaganomics being the defining feature of economic policy.
Unlike Reaganomics, however, Bidenomics has been slow to take off and live up to its promise (or its massive cost). The Biden Campaign, desperate to tout the forty-sixth president’s turgid record as anything other than the turd it is, has glammed onto a recent data point showing that wage growth has outstripped inflation in the United States.
President Biden gleefully highlighted this point in a recent speech in Maine and is now taking a victory lap.
Alas, the victory lap is unfounded because, as is often the case with these sorts of claims during the Biden years, the claim is inaccurate. Biden’s people know that it’s an incorrect interpretation of events. Yet, they don’t care. Nor do any of Biden’s supporters or the wider elite ecosystem that’s been protecting President Biden since he first ran for president four years ago.
For the Democrats, it’s all about the pursuit of power at all costs. Historically, Americans vote with their wallets. The economy is not doing well. Just ask your average American if they’re spending more, or less, on basic groceries than they were four years ago.
I think you know the answer you’d get (and President Biden wouldn’t be too happy with most of those answers, by the way).
The Big Economic Lie
To avoid being held accountable for an abysmal economy, Biden and his people are simply lying and manipulating their way out of reality by crafting a comprehensive narrative that completely eschews the truth in favor of the idea that Bidenomics will save us.
The Biden Administration cherrypicked two data points, one from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic under President Donald Trump’s reign and one from June 2022. In those two instances, yes, wages outpaced inflation.
Yet, that’s a misleading way of looking at things.
A better, fairer gauge would be to look at wages and inflation from when Joe Biden was sworn in as president to the present. When one looks at the entirety of inflation and wage levels since January 2021, one sees that inflation has consistently outpaced wages.
Generally speaking, wages have risen 12 percent to inflation, which as exploded at a 16 percent clip since January 2021.
Joe Biden Lied and the Economy Died
This isn’t the first time that the Biden people have manipulated economic data. At the end of 2022, there were rosy growth numbers for the economy that, just a few months later, had to be revised down. Similarly, the Biden Administration has had to repeatedly change data on employment levels in the country.
What’s more, the very definition of a recession has been conveniently changed by Biden’s economists in order to make the economy look better than it really is.
All this to protect a man who is probably the worst president in the modern age (because, if people were allowed to clearly see Biden for being as awful as he really is, the elite would be at risk of having to deal with another Trump term in office which they cannot abide by).
President Biden is not an honest actor.
The economy is the most important area of public life for any American. We need an open and correct understanding of the true state of our economy so that we can elect leaders who will enact policies that will benefit everyone. Biden is obfuscating to prevent a voter backlash to what should be the obvious failure of Bidenomics. Republicans cannot let him get away with this grotesque, manipulative lie in 2024.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
From 19FortyFive