"In the United States, Joe Biden’s administration pursued a high-growth, high-employment strategy for pandemic relief, pledging trillions of dollars over the first two years of his presidency to invest in clean energy, domestic infrastructure, and working families. The result of all that work could not win Democrats the 2024 election, but as the Journal notes, it did create what is today “a remarkable economy” with “the wind at its back.” The labor market hasn’t been this strong for this long in 50 years, wage gains have been outpacing inflation for 18 months (longer for lower-income workers), and investments in domestic-microchip and electric-vehicle production are beginning to pay dividends. It’s “the envy of the world,” “bigger and better than ever,” leaving “other rich countries in the dust.” Sometimes your best just isn’t good enough."
I like Carter taking shots at Klein and Yglesias, especially for the deregulation fetish they make out of Nimby housing zoning. And I also especially liked his refs to Summers and Furman as mockable villains. Someone with a platform, an influencer, should be regularly saying as much. And I like his plainspoken defense of Bidenomics but maybe, additionally, we ought to mention that 40% of the inflation squeezing consumers pocketbooks has been attributed to corporate greedflation and the Fed's steep increase in interest rates, that pushed home mortgages and car loans beyond what many could afford, was actually intended to curb household spending, tamp down wage increases, and expected to cause a recession and more unemployment. We don't know for sure but there's a good chance that Biden's spending, his big investments in domestic chip production and green infrastructure actually helped stave off the expected recession. In other words, voters just picked the party most firmly behind the unfettered corporate rule making the post-pandemic economy harder on the working classes and rejected the party obviously doing the most to minimize the cost of living increases the post-pandemic economy put on the working classes. It may be a political rule, an involuntary reflex in the body politic that electorates vote against incumbents when going through inflation and rising costs of living but the third, and most successful, coup attempt of the Grump era was billionaire conservative media discrediting Bidenomics with the public and getting a razor thin majority to ignore, if not cheer on, Grump's flagrant bigot violence and non-stop financial fraud and criminal corruption. We'll have to await the outcome of these grave political economic machinations, what happens in the midterms, or 2028, but this looks like one way you lose a democracy and end up a party dictatorship.
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