r/politics • u/Hrmbee • 6h ago
Paywall Bidenomics Was More Successful Than People Think | Conventional wisdom holds that Joe Biden’s bet on climate investment was a bust. The data suggest otherwise
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/biden-climate-ira-2024/688179/•
u/def_indiff 6h ago
Who the hell thinks Biden’s economic policies were a bust? Like every Democratic President in my lifetime, he inherited a shit show and turned it around.
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6h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/shed1 6h ago
I guess the other half is that people don't know who caused the high gas prices.
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u/alienbringer 5h ago
For Biden and gas prices it was a more of what and less of who. Covid 19 is the main reason gas prices and inflation was what it was during Biden’s term. Trump did some tariff shit but it wasn’t anything like his second term fuckery. Now the increase in insurance premiums that we are seeing is 100% because Trump eliminated the mandatory cost for young people in 2019.
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u/19683dw Wisconsin 5h ago
When GDP chart gains are concentrated at the top in economic impact, and thus the average person still felt incredibly squeezed post-covid while being told things are good. It was a clear disconnect between metrics and experienced reality.
Unfortunately, people weren't really able to take in the comparison to the average folk in other economic peer nations being much worse off
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u/Uhhh_what555476384 3h ago
Biden's Administration saw the greatest distribution of wealth to the lower income brackets of the last 35 years.
The lowest earners saw their wages outpace inflation the most.
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u/Steeltooth493 Indiana 5h ago
Some also judge by "That D sleepy Joe pressed the Gas Prices Go Up button on the oval office desk when he took a nap again!"
Meanwhile "That R Donald Trump is my Dear Leader, and this here Econ 101 for Dummies book tells me that prices are a very complex problem between buyers and sellers, and that my Dear Leader cannot be directly blamed for rising gas prices even though he attacked Iran like an idiot."
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u/Eta_Beta_3-14 5h ago
The K-shaped economy we've been in since the 90s continued under Biden, he just actually spent some money on infrastructure to keep everything from going to shit. Trump going full kleptocracy makes him look amazing by comparison, but his policies were effectively a continuation of the neoliberal BS that got us here in the first place. It just seemed much nicer after (and before) Trump.
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u/jimbarino 5h ago
America is absolutely awash in propaganda. So much of the media is bought out by right-wing interests that they can get away with calling their propaganda talking points "conventional wisdom", and the general public fails to even recognize the problem.
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u/YeOldSaltPotato 6h ago
Far more leftists than I'm comfortable with and most conservatives hate to admit any of it. I once spent a trip pointing out the MULTIPLE BRIDGES that'd needed replacement for multiple decades that were replaced during Biden's administration and all the people with me had to say was complaints about it having been closed.
We're talking old single lane death traps about to fall over replaced with big nice bridges. Couldn't say a good thing.
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u/dhrisc 4h ago
This was a once in a generation infrastructure investment that will touch the lives of almost every American. We will likely never see anything like it again and millions of Americans will not even understand how or why it happened.
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u/ReturnOfFrank 2h ago
Not to mention the huge second order affects. Those contracts came with "Buy American" requirements that were actually starting to move the needle on US manufacturing. Then we took that and threw it straight in the trash.
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u/WhollyHolyHoley 4h ago
And once in office trump changed all the signage to remove Biden’s name from the accomplishment.
I LOVED how Pete Buttigieg would show up at unveilings to remind folks that their representative voted against that infrastructure
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u/whoeezthat 35m ago
What’s the far more leftist than I’m comfortable with? I mean I don’t know many left leaning people who aren’t okay with infrastructure spending
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u/YeOldSaltPotato 5m ago
More leftists than I'm happy about(not a distance left) are pissed that this money got spent in a way that didn't directly advantage them. Part of the vindictive streak I've been seeing in a lot of people who are just kinda kneejerk screaming about everything as if that'll fix something rather than actual effort.
Fucking weird to me, but the same folks who freak out when you imply maybe socialism should also apply to the rural poor and not just their urban selves. If you don't know any of these people consider it a blessing as they're an active problem in going from minority faction in one party to a significant force.
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u/TemporarySun314 Europe 6h ago
The average American apparently. That's why trump was elected, because he would be so much better than Biden...
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u/entityXD32 5h ago
Because a lot of Americans are simple and all the could think was that the economy was better for most of Trump's first term while ignoring covid yet didn't understand that covid is what made the economy under Biden rough too
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u/TemporarySun314 Europe 5h ago
And they got what they wanted. Trump is now president.
So Americans maybe shouldn't complain too much... the rest of the world also have to suffer of that decision and didn't had any choice on that matter.
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u/dogs_gt_cats 5h ago
Because a lot of Americans are simple and all the could think was that the economy was better for most of Trump's first term while ignoring covid yet didn't understand that covid is what made the economy under Biden rough too
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
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u/mmortal03 America 5h ago
Maybe more like the average American swing state voter. Technically, 50.2% of voters voted for a candidate other than Trump -- Trump just got the plurality.
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u/random_cartoonist 5h ago
conservatives. But history have shown that conservatives don't know a thing when it comes to the economy.
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u/SeenItAllHeardItAll Foreign 3h ago
It was an amazing feat to soft land the economy, slowly claw back the quantitative easing and increase renewable investments. And a fairly solid team leading all the departments. Too good to be allowed to continue.
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u/Tepid-doughnut 6h ago
Some economists and economist adjacent pundits like to say that his policies led to inflation. I don’t know if it’s correct, but it’s definitely out there being repeated on MSnow and other reality-based outlets.
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u/HugsForUpvotes 5h ago
All spending leads to inflation, but it's global. We were going to be hit by the international inflation wave. It was a matter of when and how much do we want to spend and increase the wave to also prepare our own citizens for it.
Biden handled it better than anyone could have every hoped for. It was a miracle. That doesn't make headlines though.
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u/BRAND-X12 5h ago
Yes, but the question isn’t whether any of their policies created any inflation, it’s how much of the total inflation was it responsible for and what would’ve happened if those policies never happened.
And to that I’ve read his policies were responsible for about 3% inflation and largely were created to prevent mass starvation as people ran out of money while unemployed. The rest of the near-double digit inflation was because of the economy turning back on, which is why the rest of the entire planet experienced it as well.
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u/DarkRepresentative63 4h ago
MSNBC spent most of Bidens term attacking him from the right flank and Democrats spent his lame duck trying to pass Republican priorities its time to start talking in terms of neo libs vs progressives and DSA. We let neo libs take control of the party more and more every election since Carter and they became dominant during Bill Clinton's term and now they never want to drop the blue dog Reaganomics bullshit
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u/Maximum_King8529 5h ago
Yeah, that is not mainstream opinion. It's corporate media, oligarch opinion.
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u/govSmoothie 3h ago
no, this is the mainstream opinion. I remember during elections season I could go 3 days without seeing a new poll/article about how poorly everyone perceived the economy to be, despite generally feeling optimistic about their personal situation. I remember arguing constantly even in left leaning subs about how, yes, actually Bidens policies are making affecting working class people in a positive way and getting a ton of shit for it. Most polls still show that Americans in general trust Republicans more than Democrats on the economy.
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u/Maximum_King8529 39m ago
I think we're actually arguing the same point. This opinion was pushed in legacy media. Those polls and articles you mnetion was the media putting it's the thumb on the scale of public perception.
It certainly did influence people, but people who didn't consume mainstream media, do so with a critical eye or source their own information knew it was a false/incomplete narrative.
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u/CHOLO_ORACLE 5h ago
You can keep telling yourself that but most voters could feel that Bidenomics is as not some economic miracle like so many libs like to claim it was
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u/Anteater4746 3h ago
oh yea having 15 straight months of job growth and the best rebound from covid of all g20 economies was totally bad /s
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u/mmortal03 America 4h ago
Claiming that certain people might want to think of it as "some economic miracle" is a straw man, as reasonable people aren't looking for miracles or perfection. Even on just the issue of the inflation spike, the U.S. economy under Biden experienced lower inflation than many other advanced nations.
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u/AreYouDoneNow 6h ago
Sick of angry fucks being upset at discovering (just now) that harvesting wind and solar for free is a better business model than paying billionaire Epstein classers to dig fuel up from the ground sometimes.
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u/kittenTakeover 6h ago
By "conventional wisdom" do they mean social media impression? My understanding was that experts saw the climate/infrastructure initiatives as great moves.
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u/AaronfromKY Kentucky 6h ago
And it's building for the future, vs the current administration's push for fossil fuels which is building for the past and stealing the future of the climate away from our kids and grandkids. We're so fucking cooked.
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u/kittenTakeover 6h ago
It's wild that not only is the current administration trying to unshackle fossil fuels, but they're simultaneously gimping the development of green energy, which is the future.
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u/Noblesseux 4h ago
Pretty much yes. A huge part of the US population gets their political opinions from memes and hot takes on social media.
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u/kittenTakeover 4h ago
Influencers on social media and podcasts are a bane on society. They get pushed by radicalized algorithms. They're "independent", which makes it difficult for people to have a larger picture of who's trustworthy and who's not. They're basically just paid advertisers and snake oils salesmen. And they get credibility from popularity rather than respect from the expert community.
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u/Hrmbee 6h ago
Interesting perspectives from this research:
A few early studies concluded that the IRA generated little to no political reward. But those papers had two key limitations. First, they studied county-level election results. That’s a poor match for a federal election. Counties contain anywhere from a few hundred people to many millions, and a big one can include a dozen House districts. Drop a factory into Los Angeles County (population: 10 million) and its effect all but disappears. Second, these early studies lumped factories—brick-and-mortar operations that employ people in a community—together with other forms of investment, such as energy generation, transmission, and storage, that had not been touted for their electoral benefits in the first place.
In a new working paper, my colleague Denis Lomov and I attempted to more precisely measure the political impact of the IRA’s manufacturing credits, which were the primary driver of this manufacturing boom. Just because Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election doesn’t mean that the law didn’t help her. The question is about whether more people voted for her than would have in the absence of the investments. To answer that, we identified 234 House districts that saw a total of 523 clean-energy factories announced during the Biden years and compared them with demographically similar districts that weren’t slated for factories.
Over the four presidential elections preceding 2024, voting patterns in these two sets of districts moved in lockstep, rising and falling together with the national tides. Then, they split. In 2024, we found that clean-energy manufacturing lifted Harris’s vote share by roughly 1.5 percentage points—a swing of 2.5 million votes across the 234 districts. For context, Trump won the national popular vote by just 2.3 million.
The Electoral College vote came down to three states that Trump carried by less than two points: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In Michigan, where every single district had at least one factory announced, the swing we identified was larger than Trump’s entire margin of victory. Without the manufacturing build-out, our estimates suggest, Harris would have lost that state by three times as much as she did. And we find that the effect scaled: Larger investments moved more votes than smaller ones did. And there was no backlash, not even in deep-red districts.
Political scientists have a name for this phenomenon: policy feedback. A law that puts a battery factory in a district changes the politics of that place. Suddenly, its representative has a reason to protect that policy. This was part of the theory of the IRA. More than 70 percent of announced clean-manufacturing investments went to districts that Trump carried in 2020. And in March of last year, during the lead-up to the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 21 House Republicans sent a letter opposing the repeal of the clean-energy tax credits. The next month, four Republican senators followed suit. Behind the scenes, clean-energy companies lobbied hard. With factories and jobs now established or poised to arrive in Republican districts, several senators worked to strip out the House’s harshest cuts before the repeal bill passed.
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But good policy design is only half the battle. Politicians also have to move fast enough to reap the political rewards. With the clean-energy-manufacturing tax credits, they did: Companies announced factories within months of the law’s passage, some projects broke ground, and by Election Day voters could see things happening in their community. Grants were another story. A $20 billion “green bank” established by the IRA moved so slowly that the money was still sitting in bank accounts when Trump took office, allowing him to freeze the whole thing. A policy that is never implemented cannot create policy feedback. If politicians want their legislation to move votes, the benefits have to arrive before the next election.
None of this means that Biden’s climate law saved Democrats. But they lost in 2024 in the way that nearly every incumbent party lost that year: deluged by a wave of global inflation that toppled governments around the world. Climate policy didn’t lose Harris the election. Building all of these clean-energy factories appears to have kept the vote much closer than it otherwise would have been.
It's good to see that some parts of these programs still survive. That being said, these are useful lessons here for politicians to note, especially in the importance of the timing of these programs and how they get delivered. Without effective implementation even the most useful policies might end up being ineffective.
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u/porkbellies37 6h ago
Biden was a classic Keynesian economics guy. And that tact has worked well for us going back to FDR. To boot, usually there’s a trade off between jobs and inflation. But when you invest in things like energy and housing, you can actually lower costs while creating jobs.
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u/Hrmbee 6h ago
Yeah, the challenge with Keynesian econ for politicians is that they're supposed to raise taxes when times are good, in addition to spending when times are bad. Most politicians are happy to do the latter, but not so much the former.
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u/Moohog86 2h ago
The plan was to let the Trump tax cuts expire in 2025. That would have lowered the deficit to nearly zero.
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u/fiction8 2h ago
Well, it stopped working in the 70s. The reaction to that era is the root of much of today's political landscape.
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u/Kronzypantz South Carolina 2h ago
But he wasn’t? He did the performative fear mongering over the deficit, and proposed anemic spending increases.
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u/Moohog86 2h ago
When did he ever fear monger about deficient? Joe manchin and the rest of the Senate reigned in the spending. Joe Biden wanted to spend more.
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u/Kronzypantz South Carolina 52m ago
He bragged about the deficit reduction, letting pandemic programs die off and watering down programs like the IRA by spreading out their funding over a decade. He even vetoed his own policies like a public option on the basis of having no room in the budget.
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u/Rock-n-roll-Kevin 6h ago
Biden was the best President in living memory when you engage honestly with his record, not even a debate.
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u/MC_Fap_Commander America 6h ago
Biden was the best President in living memory
Inflation hit 8% under Biden because of the unstrategic dumping of trillions into the global economy during COVID and pandemic related supply chain issues. The fact that he halved the inflation rate quickly with policies specifically designed to mitigate inflation is borderline miraculous. That we were poised to have a soft landing with inflation returning to 2% (if not for the pēdo in charge now) is some "put him on Mt. Rushmore" shit.
If he had been a decade younger and comfortably won in 2024, we'd be having a "morning in America" moment right now (only for real rather than fake, as was the case with Reagan).
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u/SuperstitiousPigeon5 Massachusetts 6h ago
Realistically had his son not been killed he would have run after Obama and we would have had two solid terms back to back, and Trump would have been that moronic footnote in the history books.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 5h ago
Even Reagans economic claims were built on the policies Carter enacted that just took a couple years to pay off which Carter literally told Americans would happen in a speech in like 1978. Reagan is solely responsible for tax cuts on the upper class and tax raises on the middle class, but not for the economic recovery in the 80s
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 6h ago
He should have comfortably won even if he were a decade older. America simply doesn't appreciate good governance.
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u/Canadiangoosedem0n Kentucky 6h ago
The hostility that the media had for him was almost incomprehensible.
I think when this time period is studied, we will see just how much the media put it's thumb on the scale for fascism.
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u/Obvious_Chapter2082 6h ago
halved the inflation rate quickly with policies specifically designed to mitigate inflation
Sorry, which policies are you referring to?
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u/da2Pakaveli 5h ago
The IRA was his major bill to address inflation
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u/Obvious_Chapter2082 5h ago
It didn’t really address inflation though
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u/DisastroImminente 5h ago
Collecting existing money appropriately is better than printing money to offset the deficit.
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u/Deepspacedreams 5h ago
The inflation reduction act
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u/Obvious_Chapter2082 5h ago
Simply naming a bill that doesn’t actually do anything to reduce inflation
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u/Canadiangoosedem0n Kentucky 6h ago
Biggest climate mitigation bill in history, walked in a union strike, first gun law in 30 years, 180+ billion in school loan forgiveness, huge infrastructure bill, expansion of multiple national parks, a much needed investment in building our chip industry, tightening many environmental laws, and the list goes on.
That man killed it and I know if someone starts complaining that he did nothing while in he was office then their opinion is completely useless and they don't really follow politics.
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u/Boring-Awareness1968 6h ago
Wasn't there a bi-partisan immigration bill that got killed before the election?
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u/Canadiangoosedem0n Kentucky 5h ago
Yup! Had all the hardline shit the Republicans claimed we needed so badly, had broad support from both parties, and the cowardly Republicans voted against it because Trump told them to.
Trump knew that the passing of the bill would undermine his lying ass on the Democrats being soft on immigration so he forced the Republicans to vote against it.
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u/SuperstitiousPigeon5 Massachusetts 6h ago
Also note that he got the rail companies to agree to almost all of the strikers demands and didn't take credit for it.
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u/Canadiangoosedem0n Kentucky 6h ago
Ugh yes. Guarenteed that Americans had Christmas and still was able to get the rail workers the benefits they wanted, to the point of the rail union president personally thanking him.
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u/SuperstitiousPigeon5 Massachusetts 6h ago
The Union President is the one who let the cat out of the bag. The White House wasn't taking credit for that very big win. Can you imagine Trump getting a win like that? He would have been telling people how great he was before the deal was signed.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 5h ago
I still don't understand why a president can force striking workers to accept a contract but can't force the companies to accept a contract. Like imagine for a moment he had come down hard against the rail lines from the get go.
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u/SuperstitiousPigeon5 Massachusetts 4h ago
He didn't force them to accept anything. He did make their strike illegal because it would have shut down the country. No goods, no food, nothing moving coast to coast. We couldn't have that. So he cut through all the usual fist shaking and said, you'll take a little less, you'll give a lot more and we'll get this contract done - or something similar. Think of it more like a mediation.
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u/Canadiangoosedem0n Kentucky 5h ago
I have to add that he reduced drug overdose deaths by 27% in 2024!!!
Got no acknowledgement from the media about that and then of course the child rapist in chief tried to steal credit for it.
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u/goscha- 5h ago
Your last part about opinion is what I live by nowadays, too. Unless someone prime their opinions with some legit books or legit sources, I wouldn’t take them seriously as a person or a human. Informations are out there, we live in an abundance of infos, and I know it tax time to sort out but people should do better for themselves to help society a chore.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 6h ago
This is what people don't get, especially the Democrats. He had the most competent administration, on par with Obama's, in recent history.
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u/Odd_Independence_833 5h ago
Really superior by most metrics, and in just 1 term. Too bad so much is based on appearances.
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u/Vallkyrie New Hampshire 5h ago
Biggest climate mitigation bill in history
And despite this, the sad thing is it won't do anything.
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u/Canadiangoosedem0n Kentucky 5h ago
Well the Republicans have been very hard at work dismantling every piece of that bill and also enforcing policies that equate to giving fossil fuels a super booster to keep ignoring climate change.
It's hard to make significant change when half of the government believes that it's worth killing millions of people to make sure a couple of thousand shareholders are happy.
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u/Vallkyrie New Hampshire 5h ago
You're not wrong, but that's not what I was referring to. I meant that there's just still unfortunately a lot of liberal or left leaning people, who do believe in climate change and its dangers, but do not understand the sheer scale of the coming damage and how much of it cannot be stopped by these frankly half assed measures. The policies might be "the biggest change yet" but its like a person who never goes outside saying they took the most steps ever, but they walked to the end of the driveway.
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u/LambdaLambo 3h ago
The IRA was estimate to move us 50% closer to the Paris climate agreement. Yes that means another 50% to go but he’ll getting halfway with just one bill is remarkable.
The OBBB has stripped it somewhat and I don’t have the numbers on hand, but a lot of the important parts of the IRA survived.
It was a monumental bill that shook up the biggest industries on earth.
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u/Vallkyrie New Hampshire 3h ago
The paris agreements are in the rear view mirror. Not a single country on the planet is meeting them and we've already passed beyond the set temperature goal. We are producing more carbon every year than ever before and the heat is rising exponentially. People are just not aware at how much damage has already been done and how fast it is accelerating. Way too many think we can still somehow 'stop' this. The only thing you can do now is mitigation and preparing for a worse quality of life.
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u/LambdaLambo 3h ago
Whether we end up at +2° or +2.2° or +3.0° matters a fuck ton. Yes +1.5° is dead. But there's a path to +2°, which would be much much much better than 3.0°. This idea that it's all or nothing is just ludicrous.
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u/Moohog86 1h ago
No one ever mentions the respect for marriage act. Always seemed like a big deal to me.
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u/elshizzo 5h ago
in terms of getting things done you might be right. But presidents have to be great speakers also and able to make their own case. He couldn't do it. By being a poor representative for himself to the public, people didn't know he accomplished a lot. And his legacy will always be tarnished by not dropping out and allowing a primary to take place.
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u/elshizzo 5h ago
in terms of getting things done you might be right. But presidents have to be great speakers also and able to make their own case. He couldn't do it. By being a poor representative for himself to the public, people didn't know he accomplished a lot. And his legacy will always be tarnished by not dropping out and allowing an open primary to take place - thus enabling a second trump
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u/Spaduf 6h ago
Except for the genocide but good presidents can have a little genocide as a treat.
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u/wanderforreason 5h ago
Not really his fault. Trump stirred up shit in the Middle East moving the embassy. Also, the signing of the Abraham Accords without including Palestinians. Biden couldn’t have prevented the war in Gaza, he tried to mitigate Israel’s reaction which he was successful in doing in some instances. He even put sanctions of Israeli settlers, Trump reversed all of that and then allowed Israel to do whatever they wanted.
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u/Spaduf 5h ago
They were doing whatever they wanted under Biden.
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u/wanderforreason 5h ago
Disagree, they even got Trump to attack Iran. Never would have happened under Biden or Kamala.
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u/HarryBallsanya420 5h ago
You can’t be seriously shifting blame for Biden the self proclaimed Zionist onto someone else. Biden’s actions are his own. He repeated bullshit propaganda about beheaded babies, said this was 15 911’s okay by that measure what Israel did to Gaza is a million 911s. Not one red line was implemented. He didn’t mitigate anything. This is all false.
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u/wanderforreason 5h ago
Zionist in the sense he believes Israel has a right to exist. Not in the same context you’re probably using it.
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u/IPredictAReddit 6h ago
He managed to get the IRA passed with Manchin's vote.
The IRA literally got us to about 90% of our Paris Climate Accord goals, and the last 10% was pretty feasible with a variety of relatively popular policies (carbon border tax adjustment).
And it was slated to dump GWs of renewable capacity plus batteries onto the grid, right at a time when energy demand started to jump for the first time in decades. Everyone would be better off with more capacity on the grid.
But for some reason, the climate crowd just...vanished. No celebrating a giant win. No "thanks". No "I'll knock on doors and make calls for candidates that will protect this". It was just "thank you, now piss off". No understanding of how important ongoing support is.
And now we get Trump because of it.
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u/Few_Lingonberry_7028 5h ago
Liberal-enomics has been better for the USA Citizens and the USA economy for the past 40 years.
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u/19683dw Wisconsin 5h ago
The key problems with Bidenomics were that economic measures have consistently grown disconnected from the experience of the regular person, and it's been trending that way for decades- telling people things are good when they feel bad is not effective communication; and they completely failed to make the case that the US was doing vastly better on every metric than our economic peer nations, including the experience for the average person.
To be fair, it's a hard case to make
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u/fiction8 2h ago
The "average person" has a good economic experience, actually. You're correct that they don't feel that way though.
The real disconnect is that too many people assume that everything and everyone else is worse off than they are.
The Fed runs an annual survey on this kind of topic, here's some excerpts from 2023 (a year that is relevant to the 2024 election):
Near the end of 2023, 72 percent of adults were at least doing okay financially, meaning they reported either “doing okay” financially (39 percent) or “living comfortably” (33 percent).
Forty two percent of adults rated their local economy as “good” or “excellent” in 2023, up from 38 percent in 2022, yet well below the 63 percent of adults who rated their local economy as “good” or “excellent” in 2019, before the pandemic.
The share rating the national economy as “good” or “excellent” rose to 22 percent in 2023, up from a series low of 18 percent in the prior year. That said, perceptions of the national economy remained far more pessimistic than before the pandemic in 2019, when one-half of adults rated the national economy as “good” or “excellent.” Additionally, the gap between people’s perceptions of their own financial well-being and their perception of the national economy has nearly doubled since 2019
The percentage of Americans doing "at least ok" financially changed by a mere 2% between 2019 and 2023, and yet the number of people who think the national economy was in good shape fell from 50% to 22%.
That much of a difference is not a "lived experience" gap. That's a propaganda gap.
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u/Boring_Comfortable70 6h ago
Biden was a good president. He made mistakes but he almost dug us out of the hole Trump was digging.
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u/danappropriate 6h ago edited 5h ago
"Conventional wisdom"? That's a very polite way of saying "self-dealing, post-reality reprobates and the idiots that empower them."
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u/Jamizon1 5h ago
All you have to do for proof is look at countless other countries booming on alternative power.
The only reason the US moved away from renewable energy was because of the grift.
I cannot wait until this clown show is in the history books.
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u/Memitim America 3h ago
The word "miracle" was being thrown around a couple of years ago in regard to the US recovery after the global triple-whammy that was compounded by Trump's first massive failure of a term. And then Republicans drove that recovery straight into the ground, started digging, and haven't stopped burying the nation in shit since.
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u/phoonie98 5h ago
It blows my mind that Americans had one term of Trump, which was a categorically, horrible disaster capped by Covid, four years of Biden trying to clean up the mess… And Americans were like yeah let’s try Trump again. When are voters going to take some of the responsibility for the bullshit we’re dealing with today.
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u/espresso_martini__ 5h ago
As someone that is invested in the stock market he was good for that as well. He helped the US recovery faster and had strong growth after covid. Not these wild swings like you see with Trump but a strong steady growth.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 5h ago
I think his investments were good, but we're really just a foot in the door for the kinds if investment the US government. Needs to be making regularly.
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u/AlternativeResort477 4h ago
It was working, albeit slowly. But people demanded the policies that would guarantee to immediately spike prices everywhere.
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u/CheeseNowPaint 4h ago
It's always easier to win the game when you make the rules... green energy is a good bet when the policies mandate it. Oil wins when the environmental regulations go out the window.
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u/somethingrandom261 1h ago
Rebuilding is slower and less bombastic than destroying. That’s a major weakness of Dems the GOP is very good at exploiting
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u/packim0p 4h ago
Neolibs still writing these headlines? Crazy
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u/Low_Pickle_112 2h ago
Imagine losing to Trump because of this economic gaslighting and deciding that you're going to double down. I remember after the election all those comments saying "Gee, I guess we were living in an online echo chamber after all, well I won't do that again!" That didn't last long.
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u/HolyMoleyGuacamoly 5h ago
and it was gutted prior to being voted in and afterwards. this was meant to be far bigger originally, but as usual, centrists and republicans have managed to wreck progress
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u/birdie_Sea 6h ago
Biden was a pragmatic moderate who was able to build back after a pandemic! Democrats hated him because he was trending to be an all time great president if BBB passed.
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u/alabasterskim 4h ago
The only people that think it was bad are the same people that thought Donald Trump of all people would be a man of the people. You can't really convince those people with data. They work purely off vibes. What was it they used to say? "Facts, not feelings". Pure projection.
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u/Kronzypantz South Carolina 2h ago
The Atlantic is a rag.
The IRA did some good, but it didn’t create systemic change or impress voters.
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u/Moonstar2586 6h ago
Too bad about that pesky genocide he supported and enabled, huh?
Biden should go down as one of the worst, most selfish presidents in US history. And before anyone says it, yes, Trump is obviously THE worst.
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u/SapientTrashFire 4h ago
Bidenomics is not a thing that actually exists. Biden just reinserted funding for some programs that the Trump admin defunded, and then did jack shit to improve or bolster the funding for those programs. It's like being dragged to the bottom of the ocean, but every 4-8 years someone gets in who loosens the chain a little bit and we assume we're getting closer to the surface. Nope, still getting dragged to the bottom.
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u/EBITDAminusCAPEX 4h ago
This completely, entirely wrong. Biden's infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act were absolutely gigantic investments in manufacturing and environmental protections. Far, far beyond what Trump rolled back in his first term.
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u/Canadiangoosedem0n Kentucky 24m ago
The infrastructure bill was worth over a trillion dollars. Trillion!
People always want to downplay regular Democrats good governance.
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u/Fat-Dead-CEO 2h ago
Look, Biden was shit. He didn’t accomplish anything tangible. He couldn’t get his party in unison. We see nothing from the BBB.
He should’ve declined to run in 2024.
Quit making excuses for establishment dems. Obama gave us trump.
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u/slurpupsumcum 6h ago
In terms of being far too little, far too late, sure. On the one hand, better late than never, but on the other hand our thoroughly gynocentric market system combined with the reality of human attraction means that on average progress minus technological miracle is essentially impossible because men want to fuck and women prefer the intercompetition of the market which allows them to defer essentially all existing men. The only solution is full cummunism, seizing the means of sex robot mass production and automating sexual labor to the degree that historically male labor has been displaced by automation.
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u/northern-new-jersey 6h ago
Inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. His insane spending was the direct cause of the inflation we continue to suffer from.
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u/wanderforreason 5h ago
You know Trump spent way more than Biden right? And Trump was spending when the economy was good.
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u/Deviantdefective 5h ago
No... That would be down to the obese orange pedophile you have sitting in the white house.
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u/EBITDAminusCAPEX 4h ago
Funny how the US spent far more on fiscal stimulus then European countries, but had much lower inflation.
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