Commentary

After perusing the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s Annual Report to Congress on The Nation’s Fiscal Health after it was released last month, it lay in my stack of stuff as I contemplated using the data in my blog.  I’m always concerned about getting into the weeds with boring statistics.

Listening to President Biden’s remarks in Chicago Wednesday, I decided it was time to share with you a summary of the GAO’s findings.  It was clear he was merely mouthing the words of his economic team as he spoke of Bidenomics, a strategy he claims is rebuilding the economy from the middle out and the bottom up.

Believing that the challenges he faces are “rooted in a failed trickle-down theory,” he says Bidenomics is succeeding around his vision centered around three key pillars: Making smart public investments in America, empowering and educating workers to grow the middle class, and promoting competition to lower costs and help entrepreneurs and small businesses thrive.  His appearance was again cringe worthy as he stumbled through his remarks.

While he claims “Bidenomics is already delivering for the American people,” the GAO reports “The federal government faces an unsustainable long-term fiscal future.”

With debt held by the public at about 97 percent of the GDP at the end of fiscal year 2022, even Biden’s Office of Management and Budget, Department of the Treasury and the Congressional Budget Office all agree with the GAO.

Polls of all Americans, not just Republicans, reveal the majority of voters disapprove of his handling of the economy, and 74 percent believe we are on the wrong track.

Biden’s attack on the trickle-down economics of President Reagan while in Chicago was the handiwork of his economics staff, assuming his audience there in the Midwest liberal stronghold, would agree with him.

Senators who served with then Senator Biden when Reagan took office, however, saw Biden move to the right as 12 of his colleagues were defeated when Reagan won.  Biden moved up on all of his committees, including Judiciary, where he became the ranking Democrat. 

Biden voted for Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986, which brought about the lowest individual and corporate income tax rate of any major industrialized country.

Biden even voted against continuance of the food stamp program, supported cuts in programs like federal pensions and voted against his party’s effort to plug the revenue hole left by Reagan’s tax cut.

The Reagan tax cuts saved the median-income two earner family of four close to $9,000 in taxes from what it would have owed in 1980.  The net worth of families earning between $20,000 and $50,000 annually grew by 26 percent.

African-American employment rose by more than 25 percent between 1982 and 1988, and more than half of the millions of new jobs went to women.

Reagan was a cut taxes guy who also wanted to cut spending, believing that if people had money in their pockets and incentives to invest and build a business, jobs would be created, inflation curbed and interest rates reduced.

Under Reagan, federal spending went down in 1987, for the first time in over a decade.

After experiencing Reagan’s success, how can Biden see a path for success with Bidenomics?

While average weekly earnings were up 8.7 percent after inflation under former President Trump, wage gains under Bidenomics are lost with inflation.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.