Biden’s Unrealistic Optimism

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

 

President Joe Biden, still in isolation but reportedly recovering well from Covid-19, offered a bold prediction on Monday that could look quite foolish by the end of the week:

 

We’re not gonna be in a recession in my view. The employment rate is still one of the lowest we’ve had in history to the 3.6 [percent] area. We still find ourselves with people investing. My hope is we go from this rapid growth to steady growth and uh, so see, we’ll see some coming down. But I don’t think we’re going to, uh ,God willing, I don’t think we’re going to see a recession.

 

As discussed yesterday, on Thursday morning, the U.S. will learn if we’ve experienced two consecutive quarters of the GDP shrinking — the traditional definition of a recession. (The RNC recalled Biden’s economic adviser Jared Bernstein defining a recession as GDP “crossing zero” back in 2019; by that standard, we’re already in recession, with last quarter’s 1.6 percent decline.)

 

Note that Biden thinks, “We’ll see some coming down” from a quarter of 1.6 percent decline, but also insists that won’t be a recession.

 

This weekend, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen and other Biden administration officials offered the unconvincing spin that, even though two consecutive quarters of GDP decline is the traditional definition of a recession, it doesn’t count as an official recession unless the National Bureau of Economic Research confirms it — a process that could take up to a year.

 

The American people aren’t waiting for a panel of economists to draw conclusions about the state of the economy. Investor’s Business Daily regularly asks whether the U.S. is in a recession, and found this month that, “A clear majority of Americans — 58 percent — think the U.S. economy is in a recession, up from 53 percent a month ago and 48 percent in May, the July IBD/TIPP Poll finds. As inflation cancels out wage gains, the near-term outlook for personal finances just hit a record low for the survey back to February 2001.”

 

Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit argues that Biden doesn’t have much choice but to offer economic happy talk; the president publicly acknowledging the likelihood of a recession could worsen Americans’ economic pessimism. (Then again, judging by the stats from that Investor’s Business Daily poll, economic pessimism is pretty darn high and can’t get much worse. At some point, doesn’t unrealistic happy talk from officials exacerbate economic pessimism? A leader who won’t acknowledge the problem doesn’t have much chance of solving the problem.)

 

The real problem for Biden is that this is just the latest chapter in a long, long story of him insisting that everything is going to be fine and then being proven wrong — often quickly. When Biden and his team are confronted with a problem, their reflexive instinct is to insist it isn’t really a problem:

 

·         Early in his presidency, Biden insisted that that there was nothing significant about a sudden surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border in late winter: “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.” Under Biden, illegal border crossings and attempted crossings have reached their all-time highs, hitting new records, month after month.

 

·         Biden’s public assessment of Afghanistan in July 2021 was infamously inaccurate: “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.” “The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.”

 

·         Back on July 19, 2021, Biden declared that: “Some folks have raised worries that this could be a sign of persistent inflation. But that’s not our view. Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen are — were expected and expected to be temporary. . . . There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist. That’s totally different.”

 

·         Then in December, Biden declared of inflation, “I think it’s the peak of the crisis. . . . Developments in the weeks after these data were collected last month show that price and cost increase are slowing. I expect more progress on that in the weeks ahead.” Inflation was 7 percent then, and it is 9.1 percent now.

 

·         Also in December, Biden addressed the buildup of Russian forces on the border of Ukraine: “What I am doing is putting together what I believe will be the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Mr. Putin to go ahead and do what people are worried he will do. That’s in play right now.” Apparently, those initiatives didn’t make an invasion difficult enough.

 

·         Also in December, Biden insisted the supply-chain crisis that everyone warned about had never materialize: “The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur. Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered, shelves are not empty.” Yet the supply-chain problems continued into 2022.

 

·         Also in December — this was a bad month! — Biden pledged that Americans would get 500 million free Covid-19 tests. Those tests didn’t start shipping until February, after the Omicron wave had surged through American households.

 

·         In May, Biden said, “I think we’re going to be, in a matter of weeks or less, getting significantly more formula on shelves.” But since May, the formula shortage has actually gotten worse, not better.

 

No one makes Joe Biden say these things. He deliberately chooses to make predictions that everything is going to turn out great in the face of giant mountains of counterevidence. On those rare occasions when someone presses Biden about his wildly erroneous predictions, like when Lester Holt of NBC News asked Biden about his prediction that inflation would be temporary, Biden got snippy and called him “a wise guy.” When Biden’s predictions turn out to be wrong, he explains he would have had to be a “mind reader” to get it right. (What he really means is clairvoyant, or having the ability to see the future, not to read minds.) In Biden’s mind, when things don’t go the way he planned, it’s just bad luck.

 

After a while, it’s not bad luck; it’s bad judgment.

 

Reportedly, Biden whines to aides that, “Everything landed on his desk but locusts.” What did he think the presidency would be? An endless parade of aides and officials marching into the Oval Office with good news?

 

A positive attitude can be a great strength, but what Biden keeps exhibiting is a certain naïve, unrealistic faith that everything will work itself out.

 

When asked about the possibility of a recession, Biden could have been more honest and said that he simply didn’t know what the new GDP numbers would be, but that he knew inflation was hurting Americans and he would continue to adjust his policies to reduce it. Instead, Biden and his team keep insisting that America can’t possibly be in a recession because unemployment is low. This is like a student getting a bad score on a test and insisting that the grade can’t be low because they answered some of the questions right.