Joe Biden came into office with grandiose plans. The pandemic gave him the perfect opportunity to do so, and he set about implementing a far-left-wing agenda that was going to finish the job of "transforming America" that his former boss, Barack Obama, set out to do.
More than $5.5 trillion later, America emerged battered by inflation, exhausted by new rules and regulations that stifled the nation's entrepreneurial spirit, and enraged by the chief executive's callous disregard for the pain he caused the people of the United States.
Recall Barack Obama's famous "You didn't build that" speech, where Obama sought to show entrepreneurs that far from being independent business people, the real hero in their struggle to build a business was the government.
"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help," he said. "There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."
To credit a teacher with inspiring (?) a former student to build a successful business is balmy. The teacher would have taught the student anyway (and there are plenty of examples of a teacher destroying dreams rather than helping a student realize them). The government would have built the roads and bridges anyway. Besides, businesses pay taxes to fund education and build roads and bridges. Saying, "You didn't build that" to a small businessman was humiliating.
But for Biden, much of that $5.5 trillion went into the pockets of his union friends, especially teachers who used it to increase their numbers while students were rejecting public education.
Biden's investments over the last four years, especially in green boondoggles such as high speed rail, only cemented his legacy. "He didn't build that" may very well be his epitaph.
The money was authorized, but the projects didn't come to completion. As Politico reported last month in an overview of Biden's signature green energy infrastructure projects, "a $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states." According to Politico, Congress authorized more than $1 trillion in spending for Biden's major climate, clean energy, and infrastructure programs, but more than half of it "has yet to be obligated or is not yet available for agencies to spend." Many of the big projects that received either subsidies or tax breaks under Biden are still essentially imaginary, and some may not happen at all, depending on what President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress choose to pursue.
Biden came into office with enthusiastic, radical progressives proclaiming a new "progressive era" in American politics. All they had to do was deliver on their promises.
Democrats, this argument went, needed to do more than just talk about issues people already liked. They needed to push an agenda that made a real, visible difference in people's lives. They needed to demonstrate that they could deliver in ways that mattered.
Yet as Biden exits the Oval Office, it's clear he failed to deliver.
That "progressive era" died aborning as inflation ravaged the economy, emptied the wallets of Americans, and robbed the people of their future prosperity. That Biden and his clueless radical friends never understood the connection between their policies and inflation would have been a tragedy if no one had warned them about it. But Republicans, many Democrats, and the business community shouted their warnings from the rooftops, and Biden ignored them.
That is Biden's legacy. And we'll be a long time paying for it.
