The President of the United States, Joe Biden, landed in a Chicago covered in smoke from the fires in Canada on Wednesday morning to deliver a speech on his economic policy. “They call it bidenomics. “I don’t know what the hell that is, but it works,” the president said at a rally in Philadelphia on June 17, using the phrase he is now using for the first time. Affected by inflation, citizens – that is, voters – do not seem too convinced. The visibility of the economy is comparable to that of Chicago. Economists don’t know if a soft landing or a recession is imminent.
“Bidenomics is about building the economy from the middle and bottom up, not top down, and introduces three fundamental shifts. First, make smart investments in America. Second: Educate and educate American workers to expand the middle class. And third, encourage competition to cut costs and help small businesses,” Biden said in a speech just over half an hour.
Despite the spectacular scenery, this Wednesday’s intervention at Chicago’s Old Post Office was rather lackluster due to lighting and sound issues. A rather somber Biden against the light, whose voice was lost at times and thundered at times, has defended the economy’s gains.
“Today, the United States is experiencing the highest economic growth among the world’s major economies since the pandemic. We’ve created more than 13 million jobs, more jobs in two years than any other president in a four-year term. And friends, this is no coincidence. It’s bidenomics in action,” he said.
The different and most successful aspect of Biden’s policy is to encourage infrastructure and aid investment in key sectors such as microprocessors or clean energy, with an approach of some economic protectionism to large-scale projects. The Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act were his major legislative successes in economic matters. In addition, it has averted the risk of a payment freeze with a favorable debt ceiling agreement
Biden points to the recovery of the jobs destroyed by the pandemic, although that had more to do with the timing of taking power in the White House than his own politics. In any case, the president presents himself as a defender of workers and the middle class and describes himself as the most pro-union president in history.
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On the other hand, its fiscal stimulus to weather the pandemic fueled excess demand and helped inflation rise as the war in Ukraine and the supply chain standstill curtailed supply. In both price stability and the orderly progress of the economy, the role of the President and his administration is often less crucial than that of the Federal Reserve, but citizens vote for him, not the Fed Governor, but for him as a White House tenant.
Democrats achieved a much better-than-expected outcome in the November 2022 legislative sessions thanks to two arguments: defending democracy against extreme Trumpism and abortion after the Supreme Court ruling overturned it as a constitutional right nationwide. Its greatest disadvantage at the time was the rapidly rising inflation, which was far higher than today and put other economic achievements in the shade.
Campaign for 2024
Now that the pace of price increases has slowed, Biden also wants to use the economy as an electoral argument with a view to the 2024 election. He showed this at an event in Washington on the same day that he announced his re-election campaign. and he followed that line 10 days ago at a rally in Philadelphia.
Biden will thus be able to design a campaign based on three axes: democratic values (a mine, versus Trump); the right to an abortion – which he defends but is not very comfortable with: “I am a devout Catholic. “I don’t particularly like abortion,” he admitted in a behind-closed-doors act on the outskirts of Washington this Tuesday –; and the economy.
With the start of his re-election campaign and the improving economy, Biden’s job rating rose four percentage points to 43% in the last month, the highest since August 2022, according to a poll released this week by Gallup, one of the top polling firms and the one driving the popularity longest measured by presidents. The revival comes two months after he received the lowest approval rating of his presidency. Still, 54% of American adults disapprove of his performance. The fieldwork was conducted between June 1 and June 22, shortly after the debt ceiling suspension agreement.
Nonetheless, public perception of Biden’s economic policies remains poor. A newly released poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that only one in three American adults (34%) approve of their financial management. According to that poll, while 72% of Democrat voters approve of his job overall, only 60% approve of his management of the economy, and this comes at a time when inflation has fallen to less than half of last year’s levels and unemployment has peaked at its lowest value for half a century. Interestingly, Donald Trump garnered 90% approval ratings from Republicans even as unemployment skyrocketed.
The dramatic thing for Biden is that this low approval rating comes at the economically best time of his tenure, and that the threat of a recession ahead of the 2024 presidential election is still very much present as the Federal Reserve still has a few dots on the form from raising interest rates to curbing inflation trigger. In any case, it’s the recession that doesn’t happen. “I’ve heard every month that there’s going to be a recession next month,” Biden said Wednesday. “I don’t think that’s the case,” he added.
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