President Biden and his surrogates have been taking a victory lap, celebrating the administration’s economic accomplishments and “Bidenomics,” a media invention that the White House claimed for itself this summer. As Biden touts his economic record, bragging rights extend to…a U.S. economy that is rebounding from the pandemic faster than the rest of the developed world; almost $100 billion invested in domestic manufacturing jobs in 2023; inflation rates plummeting from the 9% range to around 4.0%; and a 3.7% unemployment rate that is the lowest since the 1960s.
Bidenomics, as unveiled by the White House in a speech in Chicago last week, aims to build the country’s economy by strengthening the middle class. Biden himself has offered it as an explicit repudiation of trickle-down economics, which was famously dubbed “Reaganomics” in the 1980s. He’s been making this broad strokes argument since the 2020 campaign trail. In his first address to a joint session of Congress two years ago, he said simply that “trickle-down economics has never worked,” but he has never adopted the media portmanteau about his economic philosophy until now.
