Dark Brandon’s re-election campaign has unofficially enlisted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greeene (R-GA) to promote “Bidenomics,” a term even the president avoided until a couple of weeks ago. In the video ad Greene, in her perkiest voice, says President Biden “actually finished what FDR started and LBJ built on …”
In his speech finally giving the term his embrace, Biden said his economic policy is to “move from trickle-down economics to what everyone from The Wall Street Journal to the Financial Times call ‘Bidenomics.’”
The Hustings began using “Bidenomics” early on, as well. But there’s something about this recent embrace of the term — and perhaps its the cheeky appropriation of MTG’s out-of-context “endorsement” of the White House’s economic policy — that seems to diminish it into something less than it is.
We jumped on the term early on because Bidenomics represents the biggest paradigm shift in the U.S. economy since Reaganomics hit Washington some 40 years ago. For those of you too young to remember, Reaganomics was not just the use of tax cuts for business and business leaders with the idea this would benefit the working class and poor who work for them — “trickle-down” — the full eradication of FDR’s New Deal policies of 50 years earlier and LBJ’s Great Society 30 years after the New Deal.
Free market economists and American business leaders had been fighting back against the New Deal as a form of “socialism,” if not “communism” from the Great Depression through Carter-era malaise.
A counter-attack? Not so much, until about now. Bill Clinton was a true centrist, even if the first year of his administration was dedicated to health care reform. Barack Obama got that health care reform in the form of the Affordable Care Act. His bank and automaker bailouts had begun at the end of the George W. Bush administration, and Obama’s stimulus plan was blunted to not-quite-Keynesian levels by the new Tea Partiers on Capitol Hill.
Biden has gone well beyond that with his American Rescue Plan, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act. But can he fully reverse Reaganomics without raising taxes on the ultra-rich? That would take re-election to a second term along with a shift in the House back to a Democratic majority, and assumes tax hikes could be folded into a filibuster-proof bill.
Debating the pros and cons Bidenomics v. Reaganomics might be just what the nation needs now to better understand the traditional differences between the Democratic and Republican parties, if only they could get over arguing about culture war issues.
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This is the sort of discussion the Editorial We hope to spark at The Hustings, alongside daily arguments over the latest political news and gossip. Keep up with us at https://thehustings.news and drop us a line at editors@thehustings.news.
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