Why working families aren’t sold on Bidenomics

The U.S. economy presents a frustratingly mixed picture. Viewed from some angles — low unemployment, rising wages and bullish financial markets — it conveys strength. From others – high prices, interest rates and debt — it looks heavily burdened and susceptible to recession. 

While economists debate whether the glass is half empty or full, the public’s verdict is clear. Americans are strikingly pessimistic about the nation’s economy, with only 30 percent describing it as good.  

The White House thinks it’s found just the thing to lift the country’s glum spirits — a new economic doctrine. In recent weeks, President Biden and his advisors have been touting “Bidenomics” as a bold new departure from the “trickle-down” theories that supposedly held sway over the past 40 years. 

This grandiose claim hardly seems fair to the Democrats who occupied the White House for 16 of those years. Did the Obama-Biden administration really embrace the tax-cutting, trickle-down policies of Ronald Reagan and subsequent Republican presidents? 

It also strikes a jarringly self-congratulatory note at a time when middle and low-income Americans are struggling with high living costs. The political class may find dueling economic doctrines scintillating, but what working families want is relief from hefty price increases for everyday goods and services that are gouging holes in their disposable income. 

Instead, Bidenomics seeks to change the subject by focusing public attention on Biden’s big public investments in economic infrastructure, clean energy and silicon chips. These are impressive achievements, though their real-world effects are only beginning to be felt.  

Team Biden has fanned out across the country to highlight new construction and broadband projects. He’s clearly having a grand time doing that in red states and districts represented by Republicans who voted against his big bills, but now want to share credit for their results. 

GOP hypocrisy aside, the president can rightly say that the U.S. economy is in much better shape now than when he took office in 2021. The COVID recession is behind us, the jobless rate (3.6 percent) is at a 50-year low, and wages are growing briskly — up 4.4 percent in June.   

If any economic theory is at work here, however, it’s not Bidenomics but good old-fashioned Keynesian economics. Biden went big on fiscal stimulus, signing into law (and executive actions) over $4 trillion in federal spending for COVID relief, infrastructure, rural broadband, semiconductor research and development, clean energy subsidies and more.  

All this pump priming goosed demand and sped economic recovery. Running the economy “hot,” however, has downsides. Inflation is a global phenomenon, but studies show that Washington’s spending surge contributed significantly to soaring prices here. It’s also created colossal federal deficits expected to average about $2 trillion a year over the next decade.  

To cool off the economy, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates 10 times since March 2022. That’s helped push the core inflation rate down from over 9 percent a year ago to around 5 percent. But the Fed’s target is 2 percent, so it will likely have to keep bumping up interest rates just enough to avoid tipping the economy into recession.  

It’s a delicate balancing act. Higher interest rates will further tighten credit for consumers, businesses and homebuyers, slowing economic growth. They’ll also drive Washington’s borrowing costs through the roof: By decade’s end, interest on the national debt is expected to exceed defense spending. 

Bidenomics doesn’t confront these fundamental economic challenges. Instead, by extolling the administration’s “unprecedented investments,” its aversion to expanding trade and its embrace of industrial policies to seed new green tech industries, it offers what one progressive admirer calls a “muscular, government-forward approach” to equitable and green growth.  

What makes Bidenomics attractive to progressive elites, however, risks severing it from working-class aspirations for lower prices and housing costs and more abundant economic growth. Just 34 percent of the public approves of Biden’s handling of the economy. Voters also give Republicans a 12-point advantage when asked which party they trust on economic issues.   

As he takes credit for the payoffs from his big investments, Biden would be wise to use his famous empathy to continually acknowledge the bite high prices are putting on household budgets.   

He also should put credible ideas for lowering inflation and debt at the center of Bidenomics. One way to show he’s serious would be to abandon attempts to resurrect his costly ($400 billion) and ill-targeted student debt cancellation scheme. Another would be to set up an inflation commission to rebuild the nation’s fiscal reserve and “right-size” policymakers’ response to future recessions.  

Other anti-inflation and pro-growth steps could include relaxing Buy American provisions; lifting the Trump tariffs that raise the price of imported goods, rekindling digital trade talks with the U.K., Europe and Asia, and pushing Congress to pass permitting reforms to speed up the glacial pace of building new infrastructure and clean energy projects. 

A serious examination of market concentration is welcome, but the president should instruct his regulators to stop waging war on the most robustly competitive and innovative part of the U.S. economy: the digital e-commerce sector. As documented by Progressive Policy Institute chief economist Michael Mandel (I am president and founder of Progressive Policy Institute), the high-tech sector has kept prices low and has been the most prolific source of good new jobs for U.S. workers.  

Above all, in selling Bidenomics the White House should aim at the right target. The people Biden needs to persuade aren’t progressive activists but the swing voters who will decide the next election — suburban independents and moderates repelled by GOP extremism, whites and Hispanics without college degrees and voters who live in export-reliant rural areas.  

What might move more of them into the Democratic camp isn’t the “reframing” magic of Bidenomics, but the felt experience of falling prices, more affordable housing, real wage gains and faster economic growth.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).