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In two and a half weeks, Joe Biden will, as is the tradition, attend the inauguration of the person whom the American people freely elected to replace him in the White House. Joe is a pretty courteous guy that way, big on upholding norms. His predecessor in office certainly didn’t offer Biden the same courtesy on January 20, 2021, as you may recall. Honestly, we were all fine with that fucker staying away.
We aren’t as polite as Joe Biden is, so we intend to spend that day observing the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and not watching cable TV news. (Wonkette will have something posted for the holiday, but it will be a Naug-Free Zone.)
But before Joe Biden leaves, we’d just like to remind you again what a remarkable thing he managed after his own inauguration four years back, during a pandemic that was not yet under control. Mind you, if facts mattered we wouldn’t be seeing the return to office of a guy whose political choices made the pandemic far worse than it had to be.
Joe Biden’s economy, to put it in the sometimes complex language of economic analysis, kicked ass, and will likely keep kicking ass until Trump screws it up by giving everything away to the billionaires who elected him. Biden protected vulnerable Americans from losing everything during the pandemic crash and set up an economic recovery that continues to be, as The Economist put in October 2024, “the envy of the world.” Similar articles ran in The Atlantic (“The U.S. Economy Reaches Superstar Status”) and even the Wall Street Journal (“The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy”).
Yes, there was inflation, especially in 2022 as we emerged from the pandemic. It was painful, especially when it came to the cost of groceries, housing and rent. It hit all over the world, but the US brought inflation down more quickly than any other industrial economy. What’s more, as inflation came down, wages continued to rise, resulting in higher real wages.
And unlike in previous recoveries, the highest rate of wage growth came at the lower end of the wage scale. In an October 2024 report, the White House Council of Economic Advisers noted,
Workers in industries with the lowest initial average wage saw the biggest percent gains over the last five years. For example, restaurant and hotel workers in the leisure and hospitality sector saw a nearly 35% cumulative increase in wages, starting from the lowest base of about $17 dollars.
Workers at the top end of the scale, in IT and utilities, also saw wage growth, although it was more modest.
Economist David Doney noted on Christmas day that
Under President Biden, workers have the highest real hourly wages on average among the last 11 presidents. Despite inflation, workers have never been better off because wages have grown so very much. Merry Christmas!
Let’s just underline this: Highest real hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, going back to LBJ, a president I don’t even remember. (My political consciousness in kindergarten was lousy, to be sure.)
The US also saw a manufacturing boom, thanks to Biden’s industrial policy, with its emphasis on building US supply chains for tech and clean energy. 800,000 new manufacturing jobs, and a boom in construction of new factories, too. (Paradox time: The new jobs for workers in all those factories can’t start until they’re built. Trump will no doubt take credit for them. Or he may wreck those industries through policy reversals.)
The Biden administration and the Harris campaign certainly got that information out at every opportunity, while acknowledging that high prices still hurt, and that we should all be able to make a decent living, and that the cost of housing and rent (one of the top drivers of inflation) is too damn high.
Biden’s (and Harris’s) economic numbers kept getting better, but the poll numbers, and Americans’ perceptions of the economy, never caught up. In a February 2024 poll by Monmouth University, only 22 percent of Americans said Biden deserved “a great deal of credit” for economic growth, and
Among middle class families, 16 percent say Biden’s policies have benefitted them a lot, while 33 percent say they have benefitted them a little. Forty-five percent say they have not benefitted them at all and 7 percent aren’t sure.
To be clear, the greatest influence on what people thought about the economy was their partisan alignment. Republican-leaning voters thought the economy was terrible. In one June 2024 poll, a whopping 59 percent of people thought we were actually in a recession!
There was a lot of talk of the “vibecession,” which was denounced as being insensitive to people struggling to get by.
When Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, polls suggested — for a while at least — that voters now trusted her on the economy more than they did Biden, although it was the same damn economy. She talked at every opportunity about her economic plans, the first of which focused on tackling high grocery and housing costs. (Haha, we are saying a silly thing. Everyone knows Harris had no policies, she just kept robotically telling everyone that she was raised in a middle class family.)
Unfortunately, it was very easy to get Americans — or at least extremely online Americans, who are very definitely not typical Americans — to talk about whether Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio.
It was difficult to get any Americans to believe that employment was pretty good and that it was Morning In America, although when that famous/infamous Reagan ad aired in the fall of 1984, the unemployment rate was around 7.4 percent.
In October of 2024, when people were really gloomy about the economy, the unemployment rate was 4.1 percent. Good morning!
And for our sins, we elected Donald Trump again, this time apparently on purpose.
It wasn’t just full employment and a faster drawdown of inflation than the rest of the world. It was “little things,” like hotels and concert arenas having to tell you the actual price, not the “before the million fees price.” It was airlines having to refund your money if they accidentally forgot to put you on a plane. It was stopping giant grocery mergers that would have hurt competition and boned grocery shoppers. It was capping seniors’ medications at $2000 out of pocket per year. It was, despite the Supreme Court killing it a thousand different ways, canceling billions in student debt, at least for the old folks who were still paying their loans into their 50s. (Like us!) It was everything consumer rights folks had asked for, in just four years. Did anybody notice? Well, we did!
Now it’s going to become Trump’s economy. As Barack Obama pointed out all summer, one reason people remember the pre-pandemic economy so fondly is that Trump started out with Obama’s good economy, which Trump then distorted in favor of the super rich with his tax cuts.
This time, Trump is inheriting an even better economy from Joe Biden. Crom only knows what he’ll do with it. He’s promised to drive it off a cliff with huge tariffs on everything, although we notice he isn’t talking about tariffs quite so much now that he’s won. At the very least, we’re almost certain to see the economy tilt even more in favor of the very wealthiest Americans, with another huge tax cut all but a certainty.
Whatever happens, you can be fairly certain Trump will tell us it’s wonderful. And a whole lot of us seem inclined to believe him, or at least, if they aren’t doing great, to blame Joe Biden for it as long as they need to.
[Economist / Atlantic / Manufacturing Today]
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