In Defense of Bidenomics

Honest

Joe Biden’s economic record is good, actually.

BY RYAN COOPER
AUGUST 19, 2024

With Kamala Harris now the Democratic nominee for president, and her polling looking rather favorable, attention turns to what she might do in office. The consensus view in the Democratic Party probably is that Harris should largely follow the trail blazed by Joe Biden. In party circles, he’s thought to have had an unusually successful presidency, especially given his razor-thin margins in Congress, besides which he stayed on decent terms with all party factions (until the nonideological dispute over whether he should drop out). Many of his proposals died in the Senate, but that means they’re ready to be picked back up.

SNIP
President Biden’s stimulus led to the fastest recovery from a recession in at least four decades.

Chait displays a similarly evasive pattern on climate and industrial policy. He praises the climate bits of the Obama stimulus to the rafters, calling it “the largest green-energy-subsidy program in American history ($90 billion of the stimulus), bolstering a fledgling domestic wind sector and creating a solar industry virtually from scratch.”

Yet when Chait turns to Biden’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, he again does not mention its size—which is (depending on the analysis) something like three to ten times larger. As my colleague David Dayen explains in detail, it is simply a colossal bill—so big, for instance, that the $20 billion green bank that Hundt actually did get this time, which would account for about a fifth of Obama’s climate package, has barely even been noticed among the various multi-hundred-billion-dollar programs. Thanks to this and other laws, the green-energy transition is going gangbusters. More solar has been installed under Biden than all previous presidents combined. Grid-connected battery capacity doubled in 2023 and is projected to double again in 2024. The EV share of car sales doubled between 2021 and 2023, to 10 percent.

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-08-19-in-defense-of-bidenomics/