WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden raised the final pillar of his economic agenda with the Senate’s passage of a breakthrough climate and tax package, sealing a legacy that risks being undermined by an inflation surge he’s blamed for sparking.
The success of the Inflation Reduction Act will give Democrats a rallying cry for midterm elections and joins three other key bills as a foundation of what might be called Bidenomics: a combined $3 trillion push to reshape the U.S. economy toward working families and domestic manufacturing, boost competition against China, and avert the kind of stunted recovery Biden saw as vice president.
While the results in the later bills are more modest than the big structural changes and spending plans Biden had sought — the most recent is a fraction of his "Build Back Better" proposal — they’re still greater than what seemed possible over much of the past year as potential deals were repeatedly scuttled, at times by senators from his own party.
