The ‘Bidenomics Worked’ Sham Kicks Into High Gear For 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/02/the-bidenomics-worked-sham-kicks-into-high-gear-for-2024/

Bidenomics boosters in the media and on Wall Street are everywhere to be seen these days, selling the election-year idea that our president’s economic policies have somehow triumphantly raised our economy Phoenix-like from the ashes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A sampling of headlines going back to last summer show the adulation for Bidenomics among our supposedly objective economic cognoscenti (Latin for “know-it-alls”):

Bidenomics Is Real Economics,” Time Magazine.

Bidenomics is working,” New York Magazine.

And our over-the-top favorite: “Bidenomics’ critics are being proven wrong. Happy days are here again,” Fortune Magazine.

We could go on, but why bother? Popular pundits, media mavens and left-leaning economists are all selling you a bill of goods.

But Bidenomics isn’t a coherent philosophy, founded on clear principles; it’s a marketing strategy, a series of policy moves intended to move America ever-closer to socialism.

Indeed, this pretty much describes what’s gone on the last three-plus years. Democrats, with unwitting help from foolish Republicans, collapsed the economy to “save” us all from COVID-19, while using it as a pretense for unparalleled centralized control over the nation.

As the American Institute for Economic Research remarked:

(Starting in April 2021) the Biden administration pushed through a COVID-19 relief bill that had little to do with COVID relief, and much to do with seizing the commanding heights of the economy. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of November 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of August 2022 continued the profligacy and increased government control of the economy. The Chips and Science Act (also passed in August 2022) continued the protectionist trend towards national industrial policy.

But did those policies work? Well, they certainly increased inflation. Since the advent of the Bidenomics binge, prices have surged by nearly 18% overall, and closer to 30% for energy and food, key staples for the average American family. The impact has been a disaster for all, but especially those at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

Moreover, here’s how well Bidenomics “is working”: In our January I&I/TIPP Poll, two-thirds of Americans said they now live “paycheck to paycheck,” and another quarter said they have zero savings for emergency.

Any wonder that Biden suffers the worst presidential approval ratings ever?

Spending $6 trillion in borrowed and newly printed money hasn’t brought the economy back; it has only brought inflation and now mass layoffs. By shutting everything down, Bidenomics killed millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in output virtually overnight. But its Democrat supporters now claim credit for a comeback from a calamity they caused.

Let’s take the most recent GDP report as an example. It displayed what appeared to be sparkling growth of 3.3% amid declining rates of inflation. The Biden administration brags that for all of 2023, the economy grew 2.5%.

Nice numbers, but the growth isn’t real. It’s fueled by government borrowing and spending, not actual private-sector business growth.

As Heritage Foundation economist Peter St. Onge put it, “Fresh GDP numbers came in and it was a blowout. The kind of blowout that only a $2.7 trillion government deficit can buy while the private economy crumbles around it. Another couple blowout GDP reports like this and Americans will be living under an overpass.”

“In the past 12 months, the federal deficit increased by $1.3 trillion,” he added. “Yet we only got half that in GDP — about $600 billion. In other words, everything else shrank. It’s even worse for that brave and stunning Q4 — there we got just $300 billion in extra GDP for — wait for it — $834 billion of new federal debt.”

Are we getting bang for the government’s buck? The edgy financial website ZeroHedge did the fourth-quarter math:

“(W)hile Q4 GDP rose by $329 billion to $27.939 trillion … over the same time period, the U.S. budget deficit rose by more than 50%, or $510 billion … the increase in public U.S. debt in the same three month period was a stunning $834 billion, or 154% more than the increase in GDP. In other words, it now takes $1.55 in budget deficit to generate $1 of growth … and it takes over $2.50 in new debt to generate $1 of GDP growth!”

In just a couple years, the amount our federal government spends just to pay off its debts has exploded to more than $1 trillion from an already-huge $517 billion in 2020. That will only grow. That can only mean higher taxes, more inflation, less wealth, and slower economic growth.

Last year’s $1.7 trillion government deficit guaranteed a continuing expansion of U.S. funny money for the foreseeable future. This year, an estimated $7.6 trillion in U.S. debt has to be refinanced. Who’ll buy it?

The world has only so much hunger for U.S. debt, so this can’t go on forever. What happens when the music ends and that last chair is already filled? The U.S. taxpayer and workers will be left standing.

So, no, Bidenomics hasn’t saved us. Indeed, it’s what did the economic damage in the first place. Americans know this, which is why Biden lags behind former President Donald Trump in most polls, and why Biden’s favorability ratings are in the gutter.

Voters are right to distrust what’s marketed these days as “Bidenomics.” It’s an economic fraud, a sure path away from economic freedom and toward the failed socialism that the far left has always wanted to force on us.

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