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The Democrat party's in-house newsletter, Politico, today asked a question that must have felt to them like an acrophobic making his first skydive with bamboo shoots under his fingernails — an almost unbearable combination of fear and torture.
"Was Bidenomics A Big Mistake?"
I sat here staring at Politico's headline question, barely blinking, for at least a minute before recovering enough to decide, "Yes, I have the perfect subject for this week's Thursday essay."
The springboard for Victoria Guida's report was a lengthy article published last week in Foreign Affairs, written by Jason Furman, chair of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers during his second term. Guida interviewed Furman about his piece titled "The Post-Neoliberal Delusion And the Tragedy of Bidenomics."
“On infrastructure, [Biden's] program has basically been a failure,” Furman told Guida. “A huge amount of money flooded into it. In some ways, it made it even harder to build with the number of requirements put on programs.”
“All of this drove up costs so much that the money that got spent was basically swallowed up by the higher costs, and then a lot of the money hasn’t even been spent.”
It isn't clear whether Furman was referencing Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law — the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — a $1.2 trillion beast that spread around enough pork to lure 19 GOP representatives and 13 GOP senators into voting for it. Shame on them, by the way. Or maybe Furman meant Biden's misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, another trillion-dollar boondoggle that was A) inflationary and B) the Green New Deal Lite in drag. Even Biden admitted as much to the latter, if belatedly.
Then there was Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, about which Furman wrote, "With U.S. GDP three percent below pre-pandemic forecasts as of the fourth quarter of 2020, an additional $650 billion in stimulus—about a third as much—would have been sufficient to fill the hole in the economy."
Furman's complaints about the "tragedy of Bidenomics" are essentially technocratic, which is more or less his entire point. Here's where he believes the Biden Cabal went wrong:
Since the 1990s, Democratic economic policy had largely been shaped by a technocratic approach, derided by its critics as “neoliberalism,” that included respect for markets, enthusiasm for trade liberalization and expanded social welfare protections, and an aversion to industrial policy. By contrast, the Biden team expressed much more ambition: to spend more, to do more to reshape particular industries, and to rely less on market mechanisms to deal with problems such as climate change. Thus, the administration set out to bring back vigorous government involvement across the economy, including in such areas as public investment, antitrust enforcement, and worker protections; revive large-scale industrial policy; and support enormous injections of direct economic stimulus, even if it entailed unprecedented deficits. The administration eventually came to dub this approach “Bidenomics.”
"In [the Biden team's] view," Furman explained, "they were turning the page on the economic policies pursued by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which the Biden team implicitly argued were too focused on free trade, too timid on deficit spending, and too reliant on the welfare state to fix the gaps left as a result."
I'm not here to critique or correct Furman's analysis. What I am here to do is to first show you that there is real intraparty dissatisfaction with Bidenomics — finally expressed after the election, naturally. I'd also like to share with you what it might mean that the intraparty dissent has gone public.
Although I would take a moment to say that Furman's memory of the Obama economy is somewhat (ahem) less rosy than mine.
The way I remember it, Obamanomics was nothing to write home about, either. Instead of the V-shaped recovery we might have enjoyed following the 2008 financial crisis, Obama's two terms were economically notable only for featuring the most tepid recovery in postwar history. I joked way back in 2009 or 2010 that Obamanomics was when you take an economy that had been knocked flat on its back, step on its throat with a jackboot of overregulation, and hit it repeatedly in the head with a big sackful of borrowed money while shouting, "WHY WON'T YOU GET UP?" Bidenomics was totally different; it used a bigger sack.
But getting back on topic, there's both more and less than meets the eye in Politico's sudden willingness to admit, at long last, what pretty much everybody else in America understood about Bidenomics.
Let's discuss briefly what Bidenomics was really about as a practical matter instead of Furman's technocratic complaints.
Sure, Biden gave us endless lip service (when he was both able and allowed to speak) about how he'd "Build back better" and our "necessary transition to clean energy" or "rebuilding the economy from the middle out" and all the rest. But the reality of Bidenomics was much uglier than the anodyne phrases used to sell it to the public.
Bidenomics was graft, theft, and the mailed fist of regulation wielded against industries (like traditional energy production) the White House disfavored — all on a scale never before seen.
Most everything Bidenomics is summed up in this one Free Beacon headline from Wednesday: "DOGE Finds $2 Billion in Taxpayer Funds Earmarked for Stacey Abrams-Linked Group." The details are even more flagrantly corrupt than the headline indicates, if you can believe that. Here they are:
The Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration awarded Power Forward Communities the grant in April 2024 as part of the agency's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program. Power Forward Communities received the green energy grant despite the fact that it was founded months earlier in late 2023 and never managed anywhere near the grant's dollar figure—it reported just $100 in total revenue during its first three months in operation, according to its latest tax filings.
Reward your allies with other people's money. Punish your enemies with miles of red tape.
Here's Data Republican's entry for Power Forward Communities, complete with the 10-figure windfall. The group's website doesn't list its principal officers, but you can bet with $2 billion of Other People's Money in the bank that it's going to be a lifetime of lucrative guaranteed employment for all of them — until and unless EPA chief Lee Zeldin claws back all ten digits.
And what does Power Forward Communities do? Nothing yet. But their $2 billion grant request is a couple hundred buzzwords worth of green energy gobbledygook. “With funds expected to start flowing into homes in early 2025, the grant will make possible the affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities,” the group claimed when the grant went through last year.
You might recall that on Day One of "his" administration, Biden canceled Keystone XL, destroying 14,000 middle-class jobs in the process. Why? Because the Left hates oil, simple as that. But an organization previously worth literally $100 — or "20 million times the organization’s reported revenue," as Zeldin put it — was granted a $2 billion taxpayer-financed slush fund for doing nothing but having a political insider like Abrams at the helm.
Destroy wealth. Hamstring wealth creation. Hand whatever remains to grubby-palmed insiders.
That's Bidenomics.
It's such banana republic stuff that I'm not sure the Republic could have survived another four years of it. I know I hammered that thought home again and again while Biden was in office, and so did pretty much everyone else here at PJ Media. DOGE giving the green eyeshade treatment to Washington's finances has, among other things, made it undeniably clear that we weren't indulging in hyperbole. The Biden Cabal truly did intend to loot the treasury and hamstring the economy until there was nothing left.
So, yes, Politico — Bidenomics was indeed a big mistake.
I don't know if we'll ever get another peek into the Biden Crime Family's financials, but I suspect the Big Guy and his various relatives-turned-bagmen got their cuts.
The question remains, however: Why now? Biden isn't just out of office; he didn't even make it all the way to Election Day as his party's nominee. He was ingloriously dumped mid-campaign by Democrat party elders, reportedly led by Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.
Don't worry about Pelosi, now an aging backbencher who seems to wield little of the clout she once did — certainly not publicly. But Obama is worth looking into a bit further. He hit the campaign trail for Harris because, for whatever reason, millions of Americans still believe he wears a halo. But his efforts this time around were lackluster, even hamfisted.
Remember him angrily scolding black men for having doubts about Harris?
Obama's trademark smooth charisma was nowhere to be found in 2024. He seemed to resent that neither Biden nor Harris was capable of sustaining his legacy, such as it is. Maybe he was angry at himself for having done such a thorough job of clearing his party's bench during the eight years of his ME! ME! ME! administration. If not, he ought to be.
Before Biden dropped out, Obama reportedly worried that Biden wasn't up to the task. The day after Biden dropped out, Obama praised him as “One of America’s most consequential presidents." And then pretty much shut up about him.
Since the election — which Biden himself seemed to scuttle out of spite by endorsing the gormless Kamala Harris and bypassing any prospect of a mini primary — Obama has had even less to say. The former president released a statement the day after Harris's loss that could hardly have said less if the page had been blank.
Post-Biden/post-Harris, the Democrat Party polls worse than it ever has, and that's according to Quinnipiac today, which usually shows a strong pro-D bias. Somebody has to save the party. That somebody is almost certainly Obama, even if only from behind the scenes. And that certainly requires not just ditching Biden — which was accomplished last summer — but ditching anything Biden-related.
Bidenomics has got to go. Or at least it must be so expertly repackaged and remarketed that the stench of Biden is completely hidden. So here's the man to put the first shovel full of dirt on the corpse of Bidenomics — Jason Furman, an old Obama hand. Furman is safely ensconced at Harvard and published his "treatise," as Politico described it, in Foreign Affairs — a Swamp mouthpiece if ever there was one. You don't have to squint to see Obama's fingerprints.
Obama might have been denied his fourth term last November, but please don't doubt that he's plotting another backdoor comeback, ala 2020.
What Furman wants is a revitalized, post-Biden Democrat Party, ready to win the White House after Trump is term-limited out. "Certainly by 2028, people are going to need [a new Democrat] agenda, and my hope is that there is an ambitious one, but with ambition tempered by a realistic understanding of macroeconomics, tradeoffs, cost-benefit, et cetera."
There's a word for what Furman describes, or at least believes he describes: Obamanomics. They just need a fresh (and preferably sub-septuagenarian) face to sell it.
Whose fresh face? What new branding? As of right now, it doesn't matter. The important thing is that no matter who the new Democrat is or whatever the old garbage is they're selling, Politico will be there to help.
Last Thursday: The End of Other People's Money
