Tormented by a Teleprompter, Biden Flails in Attempt to Shore Up His Economic Legacy

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

 

Joe Biden tempted the fates when he set out to retroactively revise his abysmal economic record on Tuesday. The angry gods of embarrassing metaphors smote the president mere minutes into reinterpretation of the historical record, short-circuiting his teleprompter. “They just turned off my — remote — I just lost electricity here,” the president stammered.

 

It was an uncomfortable moment that could happen to anyone. But the catastrophic failure of this device contributes to the sense that things are not functioning as advertised or expected. As allegories for this presidency go, this one’s uncanny. Still, the sisters of destiny shouldn’t get all the credit for the Biden administration’s reputational implosion. On that score, the president made his own luck.

 

“I came to office with a different vision for America,” Biden said of himself. “The previous administration had no plan — no real plan, really — to get us through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history,” he averred. “I’ve never been a fan of trickle-down economics. It was a hammer that was hammering working people.”

 

By contrast, Biden touted his own economic vision, but the policies he pursued were not his own. Rather, the president deferred to the very progressives he defeated in the 2020 primaries to set his economic agenda. Unsurprisingly, the imposition on the nation of a vision they had explicitly rejected did not age well.

 

“[Elizabeth] Warren’s expanding network in the upper echelons of the administration includes protégés who helped execute her aggressive oversight of big banks and other corporations as well as friends who share her views of the risks looming on Wall Street,” Politico reported at the outset of the Biden years. As the Washington Post conceded, the progressive insurgents who captured the Biden White House set out to correct what they saw as Barack Obama’s mistakes. The 44th president was too cautious, too beholden to big business, too suspicious of organized labor, and too scared to inject vast sums of capital into the economy regardless of the implications. They got what they wanted — subsidizing demand well beyond what the mid-pandemic economy could deliver. Thus, inflation spiraled.

 

The Bidenites were heedless of the pain and psychological torment people experience when they can no longer depend on the value of the money in their wallets. Rather than take their foot off the fiscal accelerator, they tried to convince Americans to blame their lying eyes. Inflation was “transitory,” they insisted, the result of the “Putin price hike.” When a rare Consumer Price Index report showed downward fluctuation in the rates of inflation, they’d claim that “our economy had 0% inflation” when the public intuitively understood that price instability is cumulative and the cost of goods hadn’t actually declined.

 

Still, leaning hard on posterity to look kindly on his record, Biden insisted that he had achieved his goals. “We got back to full employment, got inflation back down, managed a soft landing that many people thought was not likely to happen,” Biden said. “Next month, my administration will end, and a new administration will begin. The new administration’s going to inherit a very strong economy, at least at the moment.” It was a short-lived moment. The morning after Biden’s speech, November’s CPI report found prices rising for the third straight month — the fourth, if you exclude staples like food and energy.

 

More ominously, the debt bomb Biden will bequeath his successor has inched measurably closer to detonation. The asset management firm Pimco “has become more hesitant to buy long-term American government debt,” the Financial Times reported. America’s growing sovereign debt burden has raised “sustainability questions,” and the prospects for fiscal prudence under Donald Trump give them little confidence in the capacity of the American political class to manage the problem. Thus, the investment management firm is favoring shorter-term bonds that pose less of an “interest rate risk.” Investors are no longer comfortable absorbing Treasury debt on the assumption that it will be “safe” for decades to come.

 

In his address, Biden perfunctorily acknowledged the hardships over which he presided. “I know it’s been hard for many Americans to see. And I understand it,” the president insisted. “They’re just trying to figure out how to put three squares on the table.” If Biden genuinely had ever fully internalized the implications in that assertion — the notion that Americans are struggling to manage the bare essentials — he and his party would have understood how toxic it would be to promise them a “Inflation Reduction Act” that primarily injected even more capital into an overheated economy for the benefit of the Democratic Party’s “green energy” constituencies. If they understood the sense of betrayal they were courting, they didn’t care.

 

Nevertheless, the president and his defenders have hope that the full flowering of “Bidenomics” will give way to a favorable look back on this administration. “It takes time to get this done,” the president promised. Indeed, from Biden’s plan to mandate by fiat the development of a 40-year project like Taiwan’s semiconductor industry to his party’s blindness on the vast sums legal compliance and environmental impact studies subtract from infrastructure spending, it may be quite a while before anyone feels the benefits of Biden’s spending binge.

 

“But watch two, four, six, eight, ten years from now,” the president promised. There will be a “construction boom,” he forecast. The ripened fruits of the green economy — from solar panels to lithium-ion batteries to electric vehicles — will fall from their perch. Their prices now set by federal regulators, prescription drugs will become, if not more available, at least affordable for those who manage timely access to them.

 

Maybe. It’s more likely the Biden interregnum will be remembered, when it is remembered at all, as an instrumental lesson in the perils of governmental overreach. Not since the Tea Party era have Americans viewed activist government and the regulatory state with more suspicion. In the near term, the president’s legacy may be to reinvigorate the small government movement base on an objective assessment of public sector paternalism’s failures.

 

That’s not the legacy Joe Biden wants, but it’s the one he deserves. Salutary though that may be, Biden will find gratitude for his accidental achievement in short supply.