“Bidenomics is Working: The President’s Plan Grows the Economy from the Middle Out and Bottom Up — Not the Top Down” is the lengthy title of a concise mid-June paper summarizing the White House view of the mid-2023 American economy, the role of policies to date in creating it, and the ways to build on success. The document — BiW for short — is a mix of political “messaging,” data points, and policy advocacy organized as follows:
1. Our successes so far: The strong 2023 economy, with its post-COVID recovery, its low unemployment rate and new manufacturing jobs, and its strong wage growth, emerged not by accident, but as the intended consequence of “Bidenomics.”
2. Their gloomy alternative, summarized as “the failed trickle-down policies of the past” — BiW uses the phrase “trickle-down” five times to make sure you’ve noticed — and specifically dates this “past” in President Biden’s accompanying July 6 speech to a point forty years ago, somewhere in the first Reagan term, at which Americans “walked away from how this country was built.”
3. The next phase: A “three-pillar” program to seal the achievement: (a) revival of large-scale public investment, (b) worker empowerment, particularly through encouraging labor union organization, and (c) promoting “competition” in the domestic economy.
3a. A fourth policy point, not labeled a “pillar” or highlighted at the top of the document, and so looking a bit sad and alone: deficit reduction and inflation-fighting.
Taken together with the July speech, BiW represents the first draft of the administration’s economic case for re-election — and a lot of it is very good. BiW effectively describes the role of the Biden administration’s policies in reviving the COVID-stricken economy of 2020. It selects the right audience in America’s large and somewhat disaffected working class. And its policy “pillars” are an interesting start with some useful new mid-tier ideas.
But BiW also has gaps. Its vision of the “working class” focuses so intently on manufacturing and construction workers that it mostly misses the much larger non-industrial working class. Its take on the 2024 Republican alternative is off — the opposition’s program is much more likely to be a Trumpist “big-government right” program than Reagan-era budget cutting and market fundamentalism — and its description of the past 40 years as an unbroken period of “trickledown” is intellectually lazy and carries some political risk. Finally, BiW’s policy “pillars” are only a start; while they do showcase some good mid-tier ideas, they’re a bit thin, overly skewed toward government solutions, and unfortunate in the second-class status they implicitly assign to fiscal responsibility and inflation-fighting. What follows are unsolicited but friendly thoughts on ways to fill the gaps, as the administration’s economic wonks and messaging experts develop the second draft.
