Campaign talk is cheap, but if President Joe Biden meant any of his 2020 talk of uniting Americans, he’s clearly succeeding, just not in the way he intended. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week showed that just 40% of Americans approve of the president’s performance, while other polling has consistently shown Vice President Kamala Harris’ favorability rating to be historically low.
Concerns about the economy, plagued by inflation which has eroded the spending power of all Americans, rightly persist. And on that front, the Biden administration has offered little to give Americans hope.
As Reuters’ Josephine Walker notes in her analysis of the Reuters/Ipsos poll, “The White House in recent weeks has kicked off a series of events aimed to lift Americans’ dour mood about the economy, touting what it calls the Democratic president’s ‘Bidenomics’ agenda.”
As economist Veronique de Rugy noted in these pages on Sunday, Bidenomics hasn’t brought anything new to the table but more spending and more cronyism.
While the Biden administration and Democratic Party operatives like to point to the surge in new jobs created since Biden’s election, what they never want to acknowledge is that the main reason so many jobs were created since January 2021 is because of the easing of state government restrictions on job-creators amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Likewise, the Biden administration no doubt shares in some of the blame for the inflation which has fallen hardest on lower- and middle-income Americans. The Biden administration spent wildly prior to the Republican takeover of the House, which no doubt contributed to the classic inflationary problem of too many dollars chasing too few goods.
Meanwhile, the administration’s chief policy preferences have included a failed and illegal attempt to erase hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans debt, and successful but questionable subsidies for electric cars and the semiconductor industry.
Bidenomics, in short, isn’t helping the ordinary American. Nor is there any reason to believe it can.
“Bidenomics will make a few fat cats happy, but the result will be higher prices, slower growth and fewer jobs,” noted de Rugy. “The rest of us will be left with a sour taste in our mouths, slimmer pocketbooks and heightened worries for the future.”
That’s clearly how most Americans are feeling right now. And there’s little evidence, heading into an election year, that Biden can meaningfully turn that perception around.
Republicans obviously dropped the ball in fully capitalizing on this clear weakness in the last midterms. It remains to be seen if they can do so next time.
— Tribune News Service
