Smart people understand what the inflation situation was and how it was handled.
He managed to get most printed money into circulation with a huge infrastructure package, then from there worked that inflation back to respectable levels.
He managed to deplete strategic oil reserves to provide relief and work to build it back up so as not to leave us vulnerable. He was actually exceptional but will forever by judged by the liquidity printing of March 2020 working it’s inflationary way through the system.
Trump should thank the gods he lost in 2020. Can you imagine this moron dealing with double digit inflation?
> Can you have double digit inflation if they deny it ever exists?
"under sleepy joe biden we had one digit, not bad, and now some are saying we have two. two is really close to one if you think about it, i think it's a good number actually, maybe a better number really."
It is quite something. Culturally, America is so fucked up. The average American is illiterate and thinks they’re Rip from Yellowstone. Quite the combo.
But...but...our stock market has outperformed the rest of the world! The stock market guys! If my 401K is fatter that means the economy is good, right?
Intl did do better in 2025, tech is just ripping this year so all the tech bros on the stock subreddits think buying anything but S&P or Nasdaq 100 is stupid.
Literally argued with a guy over this about why I would ever invest in international stocks, dude was just like a 20 year old crazy nationalist who was barely alive during the 2008 crash and had no idea that international outperformed US from like 2000-2010.
I think a lot of housing cost is determined by local policies- especially zoning. But I’m sure deporting the workforce and tariffs on everything have helped matters. /s
As true as that is it doesn't really matter, nobody struggling in america feels better if you told them that inflation was . 5% higher in Germany or whatever.
Yep, this is exactly what my brother said. He understands that Biden crushed inflation faster and to a greater degree than any other western leader.
But because his prices went up a slight amount, he voted for Trump.
Even though Biden was literally the GOAT of post Covid recovery, everywhere in the western world, that was not good enough. He voted to get rid of the best economic leader the west has and replaced him with a multi-bankrupt corrupt felon, because his criteria for economic policy was hurt fee fees.
> He understands that Biden crushed inflation faster and to a greater degree than any other western leader.
> But because his prices went up a slight amount, he voted for Trump
Let’s not start handing out handies for the senile. You attribute to much agency to Biden, too much credit for doing something his bankster advisors did. Sure he signed off on them, but those were his donors telling him where to nod and sign. Biden is just a PR guy, the head one, hired to smile and tell us how the ruling class agenda is acshually good for working people despite our lying eyes, the crashing housing market, the giggification of the economy, the predominance of the private equity business model. And war.
But those are the rules of the game as it's designed to be played. No one is or can be an expert in everything, so what a president ideally does is solicit advice from people who ARE subject area experts, and then acts accordingly.
The fact that he took advice from economists, far from being some kind of "gotcha," is actually precisely what dwe should want.
A cabinet of former banking execs, could easily be Jamie Dimon who as the head of the business roundtable said that it is every corporations fiscal responsibility to return as much value to shareholders as is legally possible. The space for ethics and humanity in that statement is nil and is reflected in the fact that ethics course have all but been eliminated from
Econ program across the country.
All of that may or may not have been true, or might be nothing more than a detractor's wet dream. Evidence that it is not true is how much more effective his policies were than average for (D)s.
But regardless, Biden was the final decision maker and the buck stopped with him. He gets credit for all success and all failure, because he was the president.
Biden is probably the best president we’ve had in my entire life.
He wasn’t perfect, but I always try to explain to people how the inflation we experienced under Biden was pre-baked in from the Trump administration. We just didn’t feel its effects until Biden’s term.
All Biden could do after becoming president was control it, and he did a damn good job. Low and middle income earners actually saw wage increases that kept up with and, in some cases, even surpassed inflation.
I remember some of my coworkers being afraid that they’d have to pay back their COVID stimulus, so they held on to it and saved it. I explained to them that they would be paying it back, but it would be in the form of inflation over the next few years. They thought I was stupid and then went on to blame Biden for the inflation we experienced from all the money printed under Trump. Most people have goldfish memories and have no idea how anything works.
The cover of the Economist Magazine in Oct 2024 said that Joe Biden (cover photo of rocket taking off) had built an economy that "Was the Envy Of The World"
so of course, when a democrat fixes the mess, a republican came in and stole it. He cashed it all in, ran up the National debt, stole everything he could with military contracts etc. and then blamed America for a war of choice (Biden allowed them to get a bomb) that he started to conceal his Epstein crimes.
Yep. Unprecedented worldwide halting of production due to a pandemic combined with stimulus to keep people who could not work while industry was shut down fed and homed and not financially ruined was always going to cause an inflation spike.
He didn't get nearly enough credit for how left leaning he was. The IRA was and is the biggest climate legislation passed anywhere. He forgave billions of dollars in student loans. He had a very lenient stance on immigration without having the votes to actually change immigration law, and it frankly bit him. Leftists hawk on about 'the working class' and bringing back 'good jobs', but have nothing to say about the CHIPS act, which was huge for bringing semiconductor manufacturing to the US. No one on the left gives him any credit and it will forever irk me.
I think Biden is the 2nd worst president in my life because he handed the white house to Trump, undoing a lot of what Biden accomplished and leaving us in the mess we are currently in. Biden should have stepped down earlier and held an open primary but instead appointed his unpopular VP as his replacement candidate and gave her only 100 days to run. I checked Harris's website at the 60 days to go mark and Harris didn't even have a coherent or convincing platform for the every day American, only a "Wall Street approved plan" and "I'm not Trump." Her strategy was to campaign with Liz Cheney to get from votes from old school, status quo centrists, a voting bloc that no longer exist. No wonder why turnout was abysmal.
Good leaders know when to pass the torch, Biden was among the worst.
Any of Biden's economic achievements have already been undone by his malpractice of office in failing to lead Federal Law Enforcement in applying the law (the core power of the Executive Branch in our system of checks and balances) to Trump and his co-conspirators who launched a literal coup on January 6th.
This failure makes Biden the second worst president of my entire life. None of his so-called achievements have survived the return of Trump to power - which is entirely due to Biden's hypocritical and complicit refusal to enforce the law on his ruling class peers.
I agree that this was a huge failing of the Biden administration. In a perfect world Biden would have seen that Garland was unwilling or for whatever reason unable to vigorously pursue the matter in a way that was commensurate with the need of the moment, and would have fired and replaced him with someone more willing to cast aside the restraint of norms and institutionalism by which Garland felt himself bound.
Garland is by all accounts a decent man, but he was the wrong man for the moment and the fact that he wasn't replaced will rightly be seen as an almost unforgivable stain on Biden's legacy.
Clearly both Biden and Garland were operating under the erroneous assumption that the American people wanted and would embrace a return to "normalcy" in terms of the rules that govern DOJ and how it touches on electoral politics.
It was a huge miscalculation for which we are all now paying a very steep price.
I'm less charitable in my assessment. Biden and his handlers were consciously determined to avoid the precedent being set that a president could be prosecuted and convicted for any crime, including launching a coup. So Biden deliberately appointed Garland with the express purpose of slow-walking, obstructing, or otherwise doing everything possible to maintain the mere appearance of taking action while ensuring no actual progress or consequences.
Additionally, Texas' corrupt AG Ken Paxton had already been under federal indictment for five years when Biden was sworn in, was impeached by the Texas legislature, and yet under Biden the Justice Department accomplished nothing in four more years and eventually dropped the case.
Biden was very clearly complicit in preventing any application of law toward his ruling-class peers. This was more than being naive and just getting it wrong. It was deliberate.
> Biden is probably the best president we’ve had in my entire life.
Are you 11 years old? Biden did a good job at the governing, but how quickly we forget that Obama also dealt with what was supposed to be a generational crisis. Obama also hand managed a spending program (ARRA) that spent 90Bn on clean energy. He then managed to get the first major healthcare reform in generations putting us on the path (finally) to universal healthcare. He also managed to get re-elected.
I love me some Biden governing but Biden failed to lead the party well. I grant him a lot of lenience in judgement here because I firmly believe he was simply physically OK until he wasn't, and that's hard to predict and once you're in it ... extremely hard to recognize. He did eventually recognize it, and we have no idea how long it was between when it was clear he wasn't up to it and when we got to see it on that debate stage. Maybe that was literally a competency threshold he cross a few weeks prior and that only shows up here and there. I dunno. Functionally, though, he takes the hit for how it turned out. Great at governing, bad at party politics as POTUS.
Yep. Biden was terrible at selling his successes. He rarely made any attempt to explain what was causing inflation or his strategy for dealing with it. He got all the blame for something barely in his control and none of the credit for what he did to address it.
I know leftists that hate Biden for stopping that rail worker strike, but didn't know that the Biden legal team got them a new contract with nearly everything they were threatening to strike over. The only reason I know is cuz I've got a buddy in the union. That kind of thing should've been shouted from the rooftops, but either out of incompetent PR or a fear that bragging about helping workers would alienate billionaires, they kept that quiet
But who should he have told, and for what? Every body who liked him, already knew. Anybody who likes Trump/GOP, don't listen to anything anyway, and they would never change their mind.
Basically what you're saying is that Biden was incapable of adequately selling his accomplishments, which is true. Would anyone have been capable of doing so? It's a counterfactual; we'll never know.
I say this as someone who voted for him and respects the hell out of him: He could have explained everything as well as anyone could but his age sadly worked against him. He was about 10 years too late to be president.
His wisdom and the bipartisan deals he made were as good as we could have hoped for a post-Trump president but he was too old.
It's just very hard to sell "inflation could have been much worse". It's a great thing, but not a sexy line for an election. Also, swapping in Kamala led to a situation where she essentially got the blame for anything that wasn't going well, and no credit for anything that was.
Trump might thank the gods but America shouldn’t. Trump would have been far less vengeful/had less time to plot if he had won in 2020, and by 2024 would have been out of our hair for good.
Which is always crazy to me because the Biden administration sent out the fewest checks, and followed policies Trump administration began. Most of my stimulus checks had Trump’s name on them.
The issue with Trump isn't even just that he's not smart enough. Nobody is. It's that he's so self-unaware that he does not grasp that managing the US economy, or the military, or the environment, or the educational system effectively, legally and efficiently is an incredibly complex job that requires oversight of legions of subject matter experts at all levels. The President isn't the smartest guy in the room; the President has the smartest guys in the room. Also known as "The Deep State". Trump replaced the smart guys with loyalists because they kept getting in his way with their "knowledge" and "legality".
This - everything he was doing was needed, but he made a major mistake promising to give people that last stimulus package.
I’d also like to say he was a terrible manager of the U.S. government. For example, the inflation reduction and chip acts.
He literally held up TSMC fabs being built for over a year because they didn’t want to build an onsite daycare. He was so obsessed with being perfect that those fabs are now being built when Trump in office and politically he is rewarded for it.
Same deal with the IRA - where did all of that funding available for homeowner upgrades go? His own department slow walked the fucking frameworks to the states for over a year. They waited so long that he lost and now the funding was rescinded.
The man couldn’t get the fuck out of his own way. Even in the end, he was clearly in decline and had cancer but he couldn’t imagine the country being led by someone else more capable.
I would also point to the NEVI program. Perfectly reasonable idea to bootstrap a fast charger network. Billions allocated, and they built like 10 chargers by the end of Biden’s term, because the process was so convoluted.
I remember a Buutigeig interview where he said they were a lot of the power to the states to administer but just setting up the process between all 50 states was going to take longer than the three years they had.
> This - everything he was doing was needed, but he made a major mistake promising to give people that last stimulus package.
>
>
That stimulus package is what won georgia and allowed any and all progress to be done.
>The man couldn’t get the fuck out of his own way. Even in the end, he was clearly in decline and had cancer but he couldn’t imagine the country being led by someone else more capable.
That would be pretty sad. But it’s not even accurate.
The great grassroots network Stacey Abram’s and Dem Allie’s plus Clyburn endorsement were much more locally important for voter turnout/enthusiasm in GA than the stimulus.
Biden was genuinely one of the best US presidents in recent history and I'm tired of pretending he's not.
He did as much as any establishment US president possibly could have. I will say that's maybe not enough and maybe more should be done, but for that you kind of have to be in DSA or adjacent territory. Someone like Sanders, AOC or Mamadani. And while someone like that could get elected establishment democrats generally are not willing to back them and their policies.
I'm sorry but if Biden/Kamala/Hilary/Obama were too left leaning for many Americans, Sanders/AOC/Mamdani don't have a prayer of being elected any time soon. It's absurd to say establishment dems aren't willing to 'back their policies'. DSA policies usually are dem policies, they all get screwed by republicans anyway.
Remember the ACA (which was the most realistic attempt at universal healthcare anyone could have come up with) costing Dems the midterms before being whittled down to a shell of its former self? Remember Biden having to back door student loan forgiveness and 'leftists' immediately deciding student loan forgiveness didnt actually matter? Pepperidge farms remembers.
I'm not sure when anyone decided student loan forgiveness doesn't matter.
In any case, my whole point was that Biden was good, and realistically I don't think anything more will be achieved in the US. I think this is a problem, means that bigger problems aren't addressed, and is going to feed things like MAGA due to the resulting inequality, class anxiety, etc. but this is just a classic case of "centrists" not really being willing to think outside "the system" and thereby not really being able to structurally solve problems at a root level. It is what it is, it is not really Biden's "fault" or personal failure.
See, this is wrong also. What do you even mean by 'centrism'? Dems fundamentally aren't centrist, and it's insane that people think that, and are willing to blame 'centrism' instead of the fact the the median voter is uninformed, the electorate is not nearly as left leaning as leftists would like to think, and the Republican party is insane and routinely given a lot of power. Nothing is changing on a structural level because anyone who would want to change it on a structural level does not have the power to do so and probably wont anytime soon.
There will be no big fixes as long as Republicans are around and people keep voting for them, because their goals are materially, fundamentally different then Dems are. That's not the fault of Dems or 'centrism', that's just a consequence of other people with power not agreeing on how things should be.
>the electorate is not nearly as left leaning as leftists would like to think
I'm pretty sure we agree here. The median voter is basically "centrist." I do think the median voter is above all stupid and probably has an incoherent set of views that would make me contemplate self-harm, but at no point did I say the median voter is leftist.
In any case, my only real point was that Biden basically maxed out what an establishment democrat can achieve, and for anything more you would literally need a different political paradigm. Which is why I said he was one of the best American presidents, probably the best this century (he was literally more progressive than Obama and pushed the Obama administration in a better direction as VP as well).
Your giving him a lot of extra credit there. The fed worked the inflation down to respectable levels. Biden overspent but not as bad as Trump would have. The infrastructure package did not that much into circulation. The majority of that went to shareholders of government contractors. Biden true successes were more regulatory. As far as what he did as president Biden was arguably better than Clinton, which would make him the best president since JFK IMO. However his decision to run for reelection caused more harm than all of his successes combined. That is what he will be remembered for.
The biggest issue is that a lot of people seem to have got the notion in their heads that "bringing down inflation" meant prices would come down. They almost never do, they just stopped increasing. Also most of the public simply don't understand that almost all federal economic policies have a lag. Essentially Biden had to deal with the garbage Trump left him, and Trump got to take credit for Biden fixing it.
Trump would have done almost exactly the same thing Biden did: blame businesses for being greedy. He's doing it right now with big oil over the bump in gas prices caused by the war with Iran. Reasonable people know better, but there's few enough of them, and the Stans will eat it up.
And had restocked it by around 50,000 barrels as he was leaving. The restocking was taking place. Prices were lower and stable. Trend COULD have and SHOULD have kept going back up.
Now go take a look at March 2025 until today. Results may surprise you.
he should also thank the gods covid happened at all. every other government printing money they way he was planning to minimized his initial plans. I am of the belief the Iran stuff now is a way to normalize his own deficiencies again.
> He managed to get most printed money into circulation with a huge infrastructure package, then from there worked that inflation back to respectable levels.
Isn't the problem that he spent way too much money on the "rescue plan" that pumped nearly two trillion dollars into the economy that didn't need it in March of 2021? The infra package was tiny compared to this....although adding another quarter billion of infrastructure the end of that year wasn't helpful.
Looking at these numbers it feels like the inflation problem was self-inflicted.
That’s not how the money supply works. When the federal reserve created money during Covid… 3/21/2020, that act alone isn’t what backstopped the economy.
Money created achieves nothing if it’s not put to use.
It’s why Trump just gave us all checks for no reason. But the consumer directly has fairly limited impact on the economy. What Biden’s infrastructure plan did was upgrade equipment, roads, buildings, etc. Think of the impact of one construction company working a highway. You have high wages, materials purchases, equipment upgrades, police details / overtime. You stimulated the economy in ways beyond paying off a credit card or buying a tv at Best Buy.
The inflation was going to be inevitable. He utilized the inflation for a net benefit to the nation. The inflation was apolitical. How Biden decided that inflation would work its way through the system was extremely effective.
Excess demand without corresponding increase in supply is a lot of what caused inflation. The American Rescue Plan happened in March of 2021 and added 2 trillion dollars of demand to the economy that was supply constrained due to COVID logistics.
Exactly what I said…. Direct to consumer payments had little effect on money circulating through the economy.
Inflation is an inevitability of money printing. Yes, there’s supply / demand inflation. I understand that I’m an economics professor.
Money printing = inflation.
It’s the nature of our debasing currency. It’s why smart people don’t own cash they own assets. As the cash is devalued through money printing, assets reprice against the change in money supply. That’s inflation.
Think of it this way. I have an 🍎. Today it costs $1. That $1 could be looked at as a fraction of the money supply. 1/money supply.
Think back to 5th grade fractions. If I double the money supply, what has to happen to the numerator to keep the ratio the same? It has to go to $2.
Our money system is actually insanely simple and most people think it’s vastly more complicated. It’s really not. Obviously there’s some nuance, but at its core that’s what we’re talking about.
> Isn't the problem that he spent way too much money on the "rescue plan" that pumped nearly two trillion dollars into the economy that didn't need it in March of 2021?
> Looking at these numbers it feels like the inflation problem was self-inflicted.
You are absolutely correct, just a few minor details you’re mistaken about:
It was over $2 trillion, nearly 40% of the money supply
Are you suggesting that the US should have rawdogged COVID with zero stimulus whatsoever? That doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument.
The problem came in March of 2021 when vaccines were already available and Biden added another two trillion that wasn't needed. My point is that wasn't a good decision in hindsight.
It wasn’t the US decision to make lol. The Federal Reserve (a private banker) didn’t ask Trump’s permission 😂. Central banks all over the globe did it to prevent economic Armageddon.
Your point is misguided and wrong. The money HAD TO CIRCULATE. Trump’s direct relief to consumer wasn’t doing it. Money was already printed and the Fed wanted it in circulation.
Biden was a humble statesman that followed the advice of competent people. Trump is a privileged imbecile that follows his wealthiest donor requests, even the most incompetent fools.
Well, the ARP should have been smaller. Printed way too much cash that hurt little people. My family are billionaire developers from California so it was amazing, but if you were poor in bumblefuck backwoods then it was terrible. Even liberal economists admit we overheated.
He could have lifted the Trump Chinese tariffs to help consumer costs, but he had to defend from Trump/GOP on China attacks.
He should have pursued a more aggressive domestic oil policy rather than relying so heavily on petroleum reserves, but he had to defend from the Left on climate issues.
And should have enacted temporary regulatory and permitting relief for critical industries like shipping, freight, supply chain infrastructure, etc.
Just to name obvious and relatively uncontroversial examples. There’s a ton he could have done. Of course, we have to recognize the political realities, but to pretend all was perfect is ridiculous.
And I personally love Joe Biden. I’ve shared the story on this account about eating ice cream with him at Cornell before an event we both attended. We need to normalize nuanced thinking again.
He wasn't exciting, and he didn't do a lot of the really progressive stuff that the base wanted. Plus, there was obstructionism from the Republicans and moneyed classes the whole way through, so it's really easy to pass him off as a do-nothing president. But I'd say, given the amount of opposition they faced, his administration got quite a bit done and prevented a number of worse outcomes.
He didn't do anything. The Fed is the one who finally raised rates in the Summer of 2022 after the strategy of calling inflation "transitory" didn't work to lower it.
He was able to make deals with the most obstructionist opposition in modern US history (if not ever, apart from the era around the civil war). Furthermore, he didn’t just make any normal deals, he was able to pass the biggest and most extensive legislation packages in all of American history.
FDR the previous record holder, managed to also do an insane amount of legislation but he had the full Democratic Party behind him and absolute support in Congress and the Senate. Biden did not and still managed to pull through, and that in a single term, Roosevelt had 4.
He did more in a single term than most presidents who served two terms.
Biden is a lot more intelligent and skilled than people give him credit for, even as VP, he was known as Obama's dealmaker.
You should be proud of voting for Biden, and he certainly was exceptional in my opinion.
A big part of it was also massive unskilled immigration keeping wages down while the economy still expanded. No one really talks about that, even though the fed kept hinting at it.
You don’t understand monetary policy and money printing.
Fed printed the money on 3/21/2020 as a means of backstopping an economy on the brink of collapse. The money was printed. It therefore had to be circulated.
Biden chose specific and targeted areas of our infrastructure for that money to circulate. It kept people employed, it upgraded necessary infrastructure. Every single bridge and overpass in my state has been rebuilt according to modern engineering and code thanks to that bill.
Almost all of Biden's major landmark legislative bills were passed after that 9.1% peak in 2022, other than the American Rescue Act which was a response to an emergency brought about by COVID. The peak inflation was equally caused by Trump's CARES act as Biden's Rescue Act. In reality the main cause for the 9.1% peak inflation was supply chain shortages from COVID/Ukraine war.
If you're trying to say that Biden's IRA, IIJA or CHIPS act caused the 9.1% peak inflation, then you'll have issues with causality, since those passed after the inflation peak occurred (except for IIJA which was only a few months before the peak and too short a time to have been causal).
Almost all of Biden's major landmark legislative bills were passed after that 9.1% peak in 2022, other than the American Rescue Act which was a response to an emergency brought about by COVID. The peak inflation was equally caused by Trump's CARES act as Biden's Rescue Act. In reality the main cause for the 9.1% peak inflation was supply chain shortages from COVID/Ukraine war.
If you're trying to say that Biden's IRA, IIJA or CHIPS act caused the 9.1% peak inflation, then you'll have issues with causality, since those passed after the inflation peak occurred (except for IIJA which was only a few months before the peak and too short a time to have been causal).
Almost all of Biden's major landmark legislative bills were passed after that 9.1% peak in 2022, other than the American Rescue Act which was a response to an emergency brought about by COVID. The peak inflation was equally caused by Trump's CARES act as Biden's Rescue Act. In reality the main cause for the 9.1% peak inflation was supply chain shortages from COVID/Ukraine war.
If you're trying to say that Biden's IRA, IIJA or CHIPS act caused the 9.1% peak inflation, then you'll have issues with causality, since those passed after the inflation peak occurred (except for IIJA which was only a few months before the peak and too short a time to have been causal).
The disconnect comes from macro indicators vs. micro sentiment
Macroeconomically, record low unemployment, massive domestic manufacturing investments (CHIPS Act, IRA), and avoiding a forecasted recession were huge wins. But for the average household, high inflation and interest rates meant everyday life felt significantly more expensive regardless of the numbers.
The issue is that they didn't get to experience the alternative. Economists look at the data and conclude we avoided a huge recession. Laypeople don't even look at the data and conclude only that things cost more than they used to.
The clear political lesson from the Biden years is going to be that politicians shouldn’t trade inflation for lower unemployment.
When everyone’s vote counts the same, a smaller number of people hurting a lot is much better for you than a lot of people hurting a little.
Spreading the pain instead of concentrating it just makes everyone mad at you. Right or wrong, the voters very clearly decided “We’re all in this together” is not a message that works for them.
"Fuck you I got mine" is a lamentably common sentiment in politics, and if the main way to win elections becomes to regularly sacrifice some minority (be it a literal ethnic or sexual minority, or a minority of people who lose jobs, etc.) then politics is basically never again going to be about what we should do for all of us. It's going to be about who deserves to have things and who should be sacrificed for this. What kind of people do we care about? I think this is fundamentally toxic, and the only reasonable response to it is Mamdani's point about the only majority being the working class. Everything else is basically a road to fascism.
I'm not looking to get into any debate about Mamdani or fascism or Trump or capitalism or whatever (those are all tedious). I'll just say this because I think is illustrative of the trap that people very commonly fall into. It’s a handwavey, almost magical thinking instinct, that if you activate the working class (or the middle class, or the proletariat, or true Americans, or whatever) everything will be fine.
If you define your politics as something like "The only majority is the working class" (however you define it, say bottom 51% of the income spectrum) and therefore all policies must benefit it, this is the exact same error that sunk Biden. He pursued a policy of protecting employment and output, accepting as the inevitable cost of that elevated inflation. This is a policy designed to protect the working class (those that would bear the brunt of elevated unemployment) at the cost to society at large, because everyone feels inflation.
And this was awful politically. Everyone hated it, including the working class, both the working class people who a) would have been counterfactually laid off but don't observe that and instead are just mad about inflation and b) the ones who wouldn't have been laid off and so are just mad about inflation anyway.
Serving the working class above all else (or more generally, those vulnerable to unemployment) was what Biden did and it bit him in the ass. No politician for a generation will make the same mistake, I think.
Well you see, that raise I got is because I earned it, not inflation. But those rising prices are Biden’s fault - I don’t feel richer like I should from my raise.
Too many think what they are told without ever looking into whether what they're being told is accurate or not. Do that long enough, say 45+ years, and you can tell them whatever you want.
The inflation wasn't even that bad, and most investors didn't seem too worried about it. But a whole generation had never known inflation, and now any time anything costs any money at all they call it "inflation".
I had someone on Reddit tell me that the economy is the worst it has ever been right now. This was just a few days ago. Like, the complete lack of perspective to say something like that is staggering.
I’ve read people saying this job market is emphatically worse than 2008. They claimed to have lived through it. I was in high school in 2008 so idk about the job market. But maybe it’s just worse for entry level but overall it’s just meh in general.
But yea people are going around saying this is the worse job market ever, including 2008.
So 6% is normal then? 6% for less than a year isn't the worst thing in the world and I never claimed it to be, but in what world is 3 times ideal good?
lol no 6% isn't good, but when we came out of the pandemic and passed some big laws I don't think it's anything to panic about, especially when interest rates are low. Just fix the interest rates – and we did, and it went down.
Well you know better than I do then. I especially heard a lot of people say they thought it would go down (unlike in the 70s). What did your investors say?
It’s even worse than that. Real wages actually outpaced inflation during his term so most people didn’t even really feel the pinch monetarily. They came out of that with more money than they started but news media told them times were terrible and they stupidly believed it.
lets just hope shit feeling bad for individuals holds up during the following elections... wouldn't wanna have to acuse americans of hypocrisy or something...
Yep, all throughout bidens terms I'd get downvoted for stating how for majority of Americans, their daily lives have gotten harder financially.
Dnc literally ignored all micro economic indicators and thought they could gaslight their base (college educated folks) that the entire economy was amazing.
But that's objectively false. Show me the data of any quintile of income earner that was worse off at the end of Biden's term than the beginning. Show me an administration that was better for the lowest wage earners in the past 50 years. I dare you
the unfortunate lesson of the Biden years is there is no point in raising the incomes of the lowest wage earners because it will make everyone else really mad about it
In particular, the people who claim to be the most supportive of the lowest wage earners (including those earners themselves!). It's so gd frustrating.
"I'd gladly pay $1 more for a hamburger if it meant the workers received fairer wages" No! You fing wouldn't!!!
Just look at any graph comparing wages vs rent, healthcare, insurance costs, etc. All the micro bills vastly rose when compared to wages. But official inflation metrics don't capture the real rate of inflation.
Go look at us household debt shooting up. You're honestly trying to tell me the people getting paid $20 a hour or less pre covid, were better off in 2024 with that same pay?
The floor is yours, show me the real income data. 50 years to find a higher real income growth rate. Shouldn't be a problem since the Biden years were the worst ever, right?
And how do you measure real wage growth? How do we know that they have greater buying power? As much as we like to act like inflation is an objective measurement, it’s rooted in superfluous definitions that result in deceptive statements like that real wage growth is better than ever when almost nobody in that wage bracket actually feels that way.
ITT: economists salty at how wishy-washy their data is. Real wage growth and inflation are measured by utilizing things like CPI. They say that here is the basket of goods that somebody needs to live with, and if the cost of that goes up then inflation has occurred.
But guess what people don’t need a carton of milk the same way they did 50 years ago. People need smart phones and computers now just to have a job when that didn’t exist before. The idea that they’ve objectively captured the changing basket and that some numbers on a spreadsheet should beat what we all see with our own eyes is the foolish thing
Unemployment numbers don't speak to the economics of the working class, then those people are working 5 gig jobs to make ends meet. The "economy" was great for people who were already well off or were able to exploit the market before interest rates went up. It wasn't great for the average working class person and has been in a decline for the working class since Jimmy Carter. The neoliberal economics just fudges numbers and metrics to spread the lies that it works for anyone other than the billionaire class.
Yes and economists take data and manipulate data or calculations or omit data to fit the message they are trying to sell all the time. For example the way inflation is measured is constantly being messed with to show inflation lower than it actually is for normal working class people. They do not count a lot of things that are required for living, like rent and housing costs. They also fudge with unemployment numbers by counting people who are underemployed working 3 jobs or a couple part time jobs as "employed" but never release underemployed numbers. The economists never care about the working class. It's a circle jerk to keep the exploitation of the working class and global south going.
I’m not sure why you’d expect someone with 3 jobs to be counted as unemployed. There are lots of measures of unemployment though, U-6 is probably closest to what you’re interested in: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
Because people working 3 part time jobs do not get health insurance or PTO. The fact that anyone even needs to work 3 jobs to make ends meet is already a damning failure of our economy. Not to mention the homeless epidemic.
Ok, but unemployment rates aren’t trying to capture health insurance coverage rates. Nor do they claim to be.
If that’s what you care about, look that up don’t try to proxy it with unemployment rate. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-288.html
Not to be a debbie downer, but the economic changes as a result of the pandemic created a marked shift in how people actually worked. The issue is that a lot of the metrics we use to track the overall economy are outdated and can lead to views that are incongruent with reality. Attempting to use the same numbers and metrics that at least ballparked the economy, employment, inflation in the 1980's will fail dramatically in the labor market of today. 1099 work is up, gig work is up, some professions made dramatically more post pandemic and brought up a lot of the metrics. It'll be 20 years before people really see what happened and how the pandemic allowed for dramatic shifts in labor and capital extraction to occur during the crisis.
You're also dealing with a situation where the optimizations corporations created to maximize profits lead to what we refer to in graph theory as a singularly connected graph. If any singular piece of the graph breaks, the whole system kind of falls apart and leads to difficulties downstream. These types of policies have been encouraged by politicians for the past 50 years, sacrificing robustness of supply and distribution with JIT. As such, if the admin had been able to re-frame their policies as "fixing" old mistakes to make sure Americans were more secure, I feel they would have had better results in terms of zeitgeist.
All that being said, Biden did about as well as could have been expected given the tools he had access to and the legislature he was handed. I think his policies would have been significantly better if he had a couple more senators, but given his razor thin margins there he made a lot of compromises there to get necessary bills passed.
The media repeats Trump and his cabinet blaming Biden for everything bad past and present whether or not it’s true, and repeats Trump and his cabinet taking credit for everything good Biden did. So no wonder people think Biden was a big fail.
Doesn't help that a pig portion of Republicans will be decide to cross over party lines to vote for Democrats for house or Senate positions.
Dems def needs a president who actively uses social media that create a good attention. Otherwise they would have to beholden to the media to control the narrative, which Trump was able to leap over by constantly attacking and fear mongering
The 33% of Trump voters who still approve of him no matter what all said that the economy went into the toilet the day Biden took office, and then somehow magically recovered to become the best ever the day Trump took office. They're not connected to reality at all. The percentage of Democrats who swing similarly in their answers based on politics is only around 5%, for comparison. That's 33% of Americans who will always say the economy is bad if a Democrat is President. A Democrat could pay their mortgage, send their kids to college while feeding them, and set them up a retirement fund, and they'll still bite the hand that feeds since it's not their team.
We call those people idiots. The US economy fared better under Biden than the other world economies.
The US media gave Trump and his ilk free air time to spread lies about the economy under Biden without fact checking or calling them out on the BS.
Knowing what we know about the currently AI-driven economy, you could argue Bidenomics, fully implemented, would’ve set the country up, pretty well. The CHIPS act, Build Back Better, IRA, first two especially would’ve boosted domestic chip and energy generation and transmission infrastructure needed to power AI…
Democratic policies generally are. It’s a shame that 1) mainstream media is hellbent on massive disinformation campaigns against it, and 2) that people are generally too goddam stupid to see through it.
Ya cause mainstream media wasn’t pushing “vibecession” gaslighting when Biden was in office. Or also pretending he didn’t have dementia.
Calling people too goddam stupid to see through it when you’re completely delusional about Democrats is hilarious. As if every Dem president since at least Reagan isn’t also pushing neoliberal policies just like Republicans. Clinton and Obama being two of the worst offenders from both parties.
Not that it matters calling you people out though since reddit, another form of media that is just overrun by Dem misinformation campaigns / bots / mods banning anyone that isn’t a shitlib.
Democratic policies are objectively better for the economy as a whole. Statistics bear this out quite clearly looking back multiple decades. It’s a testament to the basic notion that there are policy positions where everybody can win, not just the privileged few.
Exhibit a: The far left is a magnet for stupid people. And it’s really easy to convince stupid people to never trust media from outside their bubble, and to project their own failings on to their perceived opponents.
The US economy was recovering from the post Covid-19 supply chain inflation crisis/scam just fine under Biden. I'm Canadian and wanna know why our PM Justin Trudeau became so unpopular? Our recovery was not as good as the US's was. That's it. We were both in the shitter and the US was climbing out of it much faster.
FFWD to today where our inflation rate is 2.8% vs 4.1% in the US, and our GDP growth last month would be 3.4% annually, vs ~1% in the US. And this is occurring in a country targeted the most with Trump tarrifs and economic warfare to beat us into becoming the 51st state. He really is the most incompetent leader in the history of the United States. He's a moron and a loser, who fucks up every single thing he touches. How the hell is the US losing a trade war with anyone?
As a country, we were able to weather the stop of the global economy and restart it basically overnight basically through progressive economic policy. It's an economic miracle and all we focused on was the inflation. Biden was incapable of narrating what was happening and we have Trump as a result.
>Biden was incapable of narrating what was happening
Totally disagree. These economic facts are just too brainy and unemotional for most Americans to care about. Biden could have been Robin Williams or Carl Sagan and America never would have cared.
My conservative and poor friends have no idea that the trump 2017 tax scam bill screwed them over. I have a PhD and the only reason I understand what happened is because I do my own taxes.
The US did a great job keeping the economy in balance through the COVID pandemic. But then, after a vaccine was available, we decided to issue another massive stimulus, which spiked inflation and then interest rates.
There was a global shortage that resulted from the global economy coming to a halt. The additional stimulus did cause a bit of a spike, but it also helped businesses get back on their feet. All of this was acting out of a bit of blindness as none of it had ever been attempted before. We could have probably benefitted from a bit less stimulus at the end, but it was not the driving force behind what we were experiencing, which again was better than any comparable country.
I don’t know why it doesn’t get more attention, but one of the large drivers of inflation was Trumps 2020 OPEC “deal.” He lobbied for and got a 2 year 10mbpd (more than the entire US production at the time) reduction in OPEC output. As soon as demand returned early in the Biden administration demand quickly outpaced supply. Couple this with the Ukraine invasion with 6 months of the terrible OPEC cuts and bam, inflation largely driven by high energy costs. Thanks Trump!
Look at inflation graphs. US Inflation went up well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A supply shock causes inflation on specific goods and services impacted by the supply shock. We saw broad inflation across all sectors which is consistent with demand-driven inflation rather than supply-based inflation.
The global trade network ground to a halt. Supplies of goods took a huge hit. That's why it was a global issue. We stopped the global economy and chose inflation over people falling into poverty. The options were either make people unable to buy goods or make goods more expensive since supply dropped. All sectors were impacted because we interfered with every sector of the economy. US investment wasn't causing inflation around the world, especially worse inflation than we experienced. It's true we wouldn't have had inflation without the spending bills, but we would have had millions drop into poverty instead.
As I said it started early in the Biden administration, as demand returned. People started driving again that caused energy inflation due to OPEC supply cuts. So yeah it started earlier than the Ukraine invasion but that event really put that inflation into overdrive.
I’m so tired of common sense needing explaining to the “common” people.
This country elected Trump twice, regardless of the empirical and data driven evidence that he was in power to serve the kleptocracy, and until we address the parasite of ignorance that’s attached to our collective id, we’re in for a maelstrom of self-fuckery
No ish Sherlock! See the Economist magazine’s last cover before the election—the world’s hottest economy: America. And still we let the lunatics back in to running the fed govt
I'm sure we all remember the October 2024 cover of The Economist, but just in case anyone has forgotten, it was a fat roll of US dollars with a rocket flame shooting it up to space. The headline read: "The Envy of the World". Would any sane person say that about the USA today? Think about the trajectory the USA was on less than two years ago, and the one we're on now. I'm not sure whether to attribute this administration's missteps to malice, incompetence, or a mixture of the two, but the results are staggeringly awful.
Biden had an excellent presidency, and his legacy will forever be marred by a) Dems' inability to brand their way out of a paper bag and b) the inexplicable and disastrous decision to go back on his idea of being a one-term president.
Biden, for better or worse, mostly wanted to preserve the status quo. But the group who came in after him... they just didn't seem give a damn. They either didn't care about the national and global economic order and/or they were intentionally trying to wreck it -- which they have done. The stock market may be staying afloat for now, but even that isn't going to fair well in the medium or long term.
I would argue that we're having this discussion because that's how people incorrectly viewed Biden. He was actually a trailblazer in many ways and it was mostly for good things, imo.
If Biden had only just pushed through a minimum wage increase... he would have been reelected and people wouldn't have even cared that he was losing it. But he didn't even do that. If his policies had truly been strong and broadly beneficial... even Harris would have had an easier time coasting into office after him. But that's not the way it worked out because Biden didn't fundamentally change very much at all.
It was a coordinated disinformation campaign to push the narrative that Biden was not functional and inflation was caused by his liberal policies. News organizations pushed the narrative without properly vetting all the lies coming out of the Trump campaign. Democrats did not favors by not highlighting his accomplishments instead went civil war on who was going to run for president. Voters are lazy and they can only see whats being put in front of them. They do not look into what the real numbers are and if they are getting better. By the time inflation was controlled and gas prices went down it was too late to prove things got better. We are just lucky Trump wasnt in the presidency in 2020 or we would have been so much worse off.
One thing that's generally become clear to me is that Manchin's instincts were largely right as to the scale of the later stimulus rounds that resulted in overheating, meanwhile the permitting reform he was pushing for would've resulted in voters feeling the impact of the clean energy credits and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in more tangible manner.
All tRump had to do was nothing, then win. He could have taken credit for all of Biden's hard work. He just couldn't do it folks. He had to wreck everything.
The article strikes me as sadly understandable wishful thinking.
The reality is that opinions about economic conditions are driven by prejudice far more strongly than actual economic conditions. If you have always hated Democrats and everyone you know hates them, then absolutely nothing they do will change your mind. They could create the greatest economic boom of your life and you will still believe that they only want to hurt you.
This opinion can be safely ignored coming from The Atlantic. They were pre-destined to hold this opinion due to Biden's party and the political leaning of this publication.
This is incorrect because I immediately recognized that Bidenomics would be extremely successful and most of you suckers were too busy guzzling astroturfed propaganda about globalizing the intifada to notice that Biden created a universal basic income for parents in poverty, grew incomes in the lowest quintiles more than the highest quintiles for the first and only time in American history, saw the first private sector union growth in 50 years, and made the exact kind of American infrastructure investments everyone claims they want until they actually get them. Biden is going to go down in history as an extremely successful president.
Pretty damn successful at bringing YoY inflation to 9%+, that’s for sure.
It grew the economy, sure, but at a rate much much lower than inflation, and we’re still dealing with the impacts of Biden’s inflationary policy. Plus his terrible border policy (10m illegal border crossings over 4 years is a record btw).
GLOBAL inflation was due to demand spiking during Covid recovery while supply chains were still majorly screwed up. That being said, the inflation rate in the USA was lower than most of the rest of the world and had a faster return to more normal rates as well.
This also directly led to an increase in people trying to migrate because the situation was worse in other countries.
Both crazy inflation and increased migration would have happened regardless of who was president.
Dont worry about the idiot you responded to. It is true that Biden could have and probably should have done more aboit the border, but it isnt nearly as big of an issue as it was raised as. For one this is an economy thread and immigrants are unquestionably a net positive for that.
Biden focused on far more important things like restoring the economy, navigating international issues related to Ukraine and Israel, and other post covid impacts.
If the border issue was so critical, Republicans wouldnt have voted down Langford's border bill at Trumps request. Campaigning on the issue is more important to them than actually fixing it.
Biden had reasons for the inflation and rising costs that were outside of his control, and things were rapidly improving at the end of his term. Trump's admin has nothing and noone to blame except Trump, and their numbers have been worse than Biden's every quarter.
Synchwave1 | 3 hours ago
Smart people understand what the inflation situation was and how it was handled.
He managed to get most printed money into circulation with a huge infrastructure package, then from there worked that inflation back to respectable levels.
He managed to deplete strategic oil reserves to provide relief and work to build it back up so as not to leave us vulnerable. He was actually exceptional but will forever by judged by the liquidity printing of March 2020 working it’s inflationary way through the system.
Trump should thank the gods he lost in 2020. Can you imagine this moron dealing with double digit inflation?
Emeraldw | 3 hours ago
As to your last point, we might unfortunately find out.
islandsimian | 3 hours ago
Can you have double digit inflation if they deny it ever exists?
Critical-Werewolf-53 | 3 hours ago
If you don’t measure it doesn’t exist
islandsimian | 3 hours ago
Just like that mythical "Affordability" thing
dsj79 | 2 hours ago
Quit making up words that no one has ever heard of
islandsimian | 2 hours ago
So sorry. Please Covfefe my ignorance
olyfrijole | an hour ago
"groceries"
jp_in_nj | 2 hours ago
And covid infections
tallmantim | 3 hours ago
The current administration would learn hexadecimal before admitting double digit inflation
dsj79 | 2 hours ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2026/07/30/why-the-fed-isnt-going-to-contain-inflation/
They have changed the method on getting the data
islandsimian | 2 hours ago
Admin: What sounds plausible? Okay then, what will my followers believe without waking them from their cult-like ignorance?
CoachoftheYear2025 | 2 hours ago
Term ain't over yet.
islandsimian | 2 hours ago
2026 GOP: No inflation
2027 GOP: No inflation
2028 GOP: No inflation
January 20th, 2029 12:01PM GOP: HOLY SHIT!!! Triple digit inflation!!! Those damn Dems caused this!
Melkor15 | an hour ago
In can’t really hide this kind of thing.
dust4ngel | 29 minutes ago
> Can you have double digit inflation if they deny it ever exists?
"under sleepy joe biden we had one digit, not bad, and now some are saying we have two. two is really close to one if you think about it, i think it's a good number actually, maybe a better number really."
Pockydo | 3 hours ago
>Trump should thank the gods he lost in 2020. Can you imagine this moron dealing with double digit inflation?
I mean he'd just ignore it and scream everyone else is wrong
Synchwave1 | 3 hours ago
Right? He’s screwing up a table that was perfectly set for him. We’ve seen his crises management. It’s not pretty.
TheKrakIan | 3 hours ago
I'm just bummed and mad people fell for his bullshit a 2nd time.
anonymousasu | 2 hours ago
It is quite something. Culturally, America is so fucked up. The average American is illiterate and thinks they’re Rip from Yellowstone. Quite the combo.
ceciledian | 2 hours ago
Did the same in his first term. Obama left a decent economy but Trump whined “I inherited a mess”.
greenroom628 | 39 minutes ago
> screwing up a table that was perfectly set for him
this should be the Trump motto. It perfectly describes him and everything he does.
dust4ngel | 27 minutes ago
he might imprison an olympian chosen at random and fire his attorney
ihopuhopwehop | 3 hours ago
The other thing that we dont talk about was what was going on across the world. The US faired much better compared to other economies post covid
Synchwave1 | 3 hours ago
Unlike now, where we’re lagging thanks to our own stupidity
artbystorms | 2 hours ago
But...but...our stock market has outperformed the rest of the world! The stock market guys! If my 401K is fatter that means the economy is good, right?
Synchwave1 | 2 hours ago
It grew more under Biden too lol.
Scrandon | 2 hours ago
Has it though? I thought international did better in 2025 and right now VXUS is higher than VTI by 0.1% YTD.
artbystorms | an hour ago
Intl did do better in 2025, tech is just ripping this year so all the tech bros on the stock subreddits think buying anything but S&P or Nasdaq 100 is stupid.
Literally argued with a guy over this about why I would ever invest in international stocks, dude was just like a 20 year old crazy nationalist who was barely alive during the 2008 crash and had no idea that international outperformed US from like 2000-2010.
anewbys83 | 3 hours ago
Yes, much, much better. We had a soft landing trajectory. Most didn't.
Super_Mario_Luigi | an hour ago
Lol soft landing. I remember this speaking point. How is housing doing?
dust4ngel | 23 minutes ago
there's more to CPI than housing.
Double-treble-nc14 | 13 minutes ago
I think a lot of housing cost is determined by local policies- especially zoning. But I’m sure deporting the workforce and tariffs on everything have helped matters. /s
303Carpenter | 3 hours ago
As true as that is it doesn't really matter, nobody struggling in america feels better if you told them that inflation was . 5% higher in Germany or whatever.
Hopeful-Courage-6333 | 3 hours ago
God forbid somebody think instead going with their feelings.
GamemasterJeff | 3 hours ago
Yep, this is exactly what my brother said. He understands that Biden crushed inflation faster and to a greater degree than any other western leader.
But because his prices went up a slight amount, he voted for Trump.
Even though Biden was literally the GOAT of post Covid recovery, everywhere in the western world, that was not good enough. He voted to get rid of the best economic leader the west has and replaced him with a multi-bankrupt corrupt felon, because his criteria for economic policy was hurt fee fees.
Hopeful-Courage-6333 | 3 hours ago
That sucks.
GamemasterJeff | 3 hours ago
He's always been an ahole, so I kinda expected a hot take like this from him.
He was never going to vote (D) so this was simply his mental gymnastics to explain why.
He's never been much of a deep thinker, but he's my brother and I still love him.
Even if I really don't want to be around him as much.
Hopeful-Courage-6333 | 2 hours ago
Mine was similar. But, like you said, he was my brother and I still loved him.
anchorwind | 2 hours ago
>hurt fee fees
All the fees we've incurred lately has hurt me too.
dust4ngel | 5 minutes ago
> He understands that Biden crushed inflation faster and to a greater degree than any other western leader. > But because his prices went up a slight amount, he voted for Trump
sounds like a man that never took calculus.
Kurichan77 | 2 hours ago
Let’s not start handing out handies for the senile. You attribute to much agency to Biden, too much credit for doing something his bankster advisors did. Sure he signed off on them, but those were his donors telling him where to nod and sign. Biden is just a PR guy, the head one, hired to smile and tell us how the ruling class agenda is acshually good for working people despite our lying eyes, the crashing housing market, the giggification of the economy, the predominance of the private equity business model. And war.
serpentjaguar | an hour ago
But those are the rules of the game as it's designed to be played. No one is or can be an expert in everything, so what a president ideally does is solicit advice from people who ARE subject area experts, and then acts accordingly.
The fact that he took advice from economists, far from being some kind of "gotcha," is actually precisely what dwe should want.
bemenaker | 2 hours ago
That's how it works. A good president is only good because they build a good cabinet and LISTEN TO THEM.
Kurichan77 | 2 hours ago
A cabinet of former banking execs, could easily be Jamie Dimon who as the head of the business roundtable said that it is every corporations fiscal responsibility to return as much value to shareholders as is legally possible. The space for ethics and humanity in that statement is nil and is reflected in the fact that ethics course have all but been eliminated from
Econ program across the country.
serpentjaguar | an hour ago
OK, but that's an entirely different issue. You're complaining about who Biden took advice from, not the fact that he had advisors at all.
Rhino_Thunder | an hour ago
What are you even arguing about?
GamemasterJeff | an hour ago
All of that may or may not have been true, or might be nothing more than a detractor's wet dream. Evidence that it is not true is how much more effective his policies were than average for (D)s.
But regardless, Biden was the final decision maker and the buck stopped with him. He gets credit for all success and all failure, because he was the president.
Vindaloo6363 | 29 minutes ago
It’s been talked about a great deal. It was on, like, CNN. We essentially exported our inflation.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/28/investing/fed-interest-rates-dollar-global-consequences
ChoppedScallion | 2 hours ago
The US GDP or the US citizens that had to pay for the PPP scam?
asbestosmilk | 3 hours ago
Agreed.
Biden is probably the best president we’ve had in my entire life.
He wasn’t perfect, but I always try to explain to people how the inflation we experienced under Biden was pre-baked in from the Trump administration. We just didn’t feel its effects until Biden’s term.
All Biden could do after becoming president was control it, and he did a damn good job. Low and middle income earners actually saw wage increases that kept up with and, in some cases, even surpassed inflation.
I remember some of my coworkers being afraid that they’d have to pay back their COVID stimulus, so they held on to it and saved it. I explained to them that they would be paying it back, but it would be in the form of inflation over the next few years. They thought I was stupid and then went on to blame Biden for the inflation we experienced from all the money printed under Trump. Most people have goldfish memories and have no idea how anything works.
Wayelder | 2 hours ago
The cover of the Economist Magazine in Oct 2024 said that Joe Biden (cover photo of rocket taking off) had built an economy that "Was the Envy Of The World"
so of course, when a democrat fixes the mess, a republican came in and stole it. He cashed it all in, ran up the National debt, stole everything he could with military contracts etc. and then blamed America for a war of choice (Biden allowed them to get a bomb) that he started to conceal his Epstein crimes.
gregaustex | 3 hours ago
Yep. Unprecedented worldwide halting of production due to a pandemic combined with stimulus to keep people who could not work while industry was shut down fed and homed and not financially ruined was always going to cause an inflation spike.
Activeenemy | 2 hours ago
His team was great, he knew the right people and how to delegate.
Sryzon | an hour ago
Shout out to Blinken and Katherine Tai
7Betafish | 2 hours ago
He didn't get nearly enough credit for how left leaning he was. The IRA was and is the biggest climate legislation passed anywhere. He forgave billions of dollars in student loans. He had a very lenient stance on immigration without having the votes to actually change immigration law, and it frankly bit him. Leftists hawk on about 'the working class' and bringing back 'good jobs', but have nothing to say about the CHIPS act, which was huge for bringing semiconductor manufacturing to the US. No one on the left gives him any credit and it will forever irk me.
Wirse | an hour ago
You’re right about the very lenient stance on immigration.
Calm_Situation_1131 | an hour ago
I think Biden is the 2nd worst president in my life because he handed the white house to Trump, undoing a lot of what Biden accomplished and leaving us in the mess we are currently in. Biden should have stepped down earlier and held an open primary but instead appointed his unpopular VP as his replacement candidate and gave her only 100 days to run. I checked Harris's website at the 60 days to go mark and Harris didn't even have a coherent or convincing platform for the every day American, only a "Wall Street approved plan" and "I'm not Trump." Her strategy was to campaign with Liz Cheney to get from votes from old school, status quo centrists, a voting bloc that no longer exist. No wonder why turnout was abysmal.
Good leaders know when to pass the torch, Biden was among the worst.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 2 hours ago
Any of Biden's economic achievements have already been undone by his malpractice of office in failing to lead Federal Law Enforcement in applying the law (the core power of the Executive Branch in our system of checks and balances) to Trump and his co-conspirators who launched a literal coup on January 6th.
This failure makes Biden the second worst president of my entire life. None of his so-called achievements have survived the return of Trump to power - which is entirely due to Biden's hypocritical and complicit refusal to enforce the law on his ruling class peers.
serpentjaguar | an hour ago
I agree that this was a huge failing of the Biden administration. In a perfect world Biden would have seen that Garland was unwilling or for whatever reason unable to vigorously pursue the matter in a way that was commensurate with the need of the moment, and would have fired and replaced him with someone more willing to cast aside the restraint of norms and institutionalism by which Garland felt himself bound.
Garland is by all accounts a decent man, but he was the wrong man for the moment and the fact that he wasn't replaced will rightly be seen as an almost unforgivable stain on Biden's legacy.
Clearly both Biden and Garland were operating under the erroneous assumption that the American people wanted and would embrace a return to "normalcy" in terms of the rules that govern DOJ and how it touches on electoral politics.
It was a huge miscalculation for which we are all now paying a very steep price.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 35 minutes ago
I'm less charitable in my assessment. Biden and his handlers were consciously determined to avoid the precedent being set that a president could be prosecuted and convicted for any crime, including launching a coup. So Biden deliberately appointed Garland with the express purpose of slow-walking, obstructing, or otherwise doing everything possible to maintain the mere appearance of taking action while ensuring no actual progress or consequences.
Additionally, Texas' corrupt AG Ken Paxton had already been under federal indictment for five years when Biden was sworn in, was impeached by the Texas legislature, and yet under Biden the Justice Department accomplished nothing in four more years and eventually dropped the case.
Biden was very clearly complicit in preventing any application of law toward his ruling-class peers. This was more than being naive and just getting it wrong. It was deliberate.
joshTheGoods | an hour ago
> Biden is probably the best president we’ve had in my entire life.
Are you 11 years old? Biden did a good job at the governing, but how quickly we forget that Obama also dealt with what was supposed to be a generational crisis. Obama also hand managed a spending program (ARRA) that spent 90Bn on clean energy. He then managed to get the first major healthcare reform in generations putting us on the path (finally) to universal healthcare. He also managed to get re-elected.
I love me some Biden governing but Biden failed to lead the party well. I grant him a lot of lenience in judgement here because I firmly believe he was simply physically OK until he wasn't, and that's hard to predict and once you're in it ... extremely hard to recognize. He did eventually recognize it, and we have no idea how long it was between when it was clear he wasn't up to it and when we got to see it on that debate stage. Maybe that was literally a competency threshold he cross a few weeks prior and that only shows up here and there. I dunno. Functionally, though, he takes the hit for how it turned out. Great at governing, bad at party politics as POTUS.
AdZealousideal5383 | 3 hours ago
Yep. Biden was terrible at selling his successes. He rarely made any attempt to explain what was causing inflation or his strategy for dealing with it. He got all the blame for something barely in his control and none of the credit for what he did to address it.
weealex | an hour ago
I know leftists that hate Biden for stopping that rail worker strike, but didn't know that the Biden legal team got them a new contract with nearly everything they were threatening to strike over. The only reason I know is cuz I've got a buddy in the union. That kind of thing should've been shouted from the rooftops, but either out of incompetent PR or a fear that bragging about helping workers would alienate billionaires, they kept that quiet
FrozenEagle127 | 2 hours ago
But who should he have told, and for what? Every body who liked him, already knew. Anybody who likes Trump/GOP, don't listen to anything anyway, and they would never change their mind.
serpentjaguar | an hour ago
Basically what you're saying is that Biden was incapable of adequately selling his accomplishments, which is true. Would anyone have been capable of doing so? It's a counterfactual; we'll never know.
TheGoldenMonkey | an hour ago
I say this as someone who voted for him and respects the hell out of him: He could have explained everything as well as anyone could but his age sadly worked against him. He was about 10 years too late to be president.
His wisdom and the bipartisan deals he made were as good as we could have hoped for a post-Trump president but he was too old.
AreaPrudent7191 | an hour ago
It's just very hard to sell "inflation could have been much worse". It's a great thing, but not a sexy line for an election. Also, swapping in Kamala led to a situation where she essentially got the blame for anything that wasn't going well, and no credit for anything that was.
Deep-Ad5028 | 7 minutes ago
He was too old to shout out his achievements in rallies. Unfortunately that's part of the job of potus.
Swimming_Agent_1063 | 3 hours ago
Trump might thank the gods but America shouldn’t. Trump would have been far less vengeful/had less time to plot if he had won in 2020, and by 2024 would have been out of our hair for good.
anewbys83 | 3 hours ago
Which is always crazy to me because the Biden administration sent out the fewest checks, and followed policies Trump administration began. Most of my stimulus checks had Trump’s name on them.
gregaustex | 3 hours ago
The issue with Trump isn't even just that he's not smart enough. Nobody is. It's that he's so self-unaware that he does not grasp that managing the US economy, or the military, or the environment, or the educational system effectively, legally and efficiently is an incredibly complex job that requires oversight of legions of subject matter experts at all levels. The President isn't the smartest guy in the room; the President has the smartest guys in the room. Also known as "The Deep State". Trump replaced the smart guys with loyalists because they kept getting in his way with their "knowledge" and "legality".
Open_Pollution_8038 | 3 hours ago
This - everything he was doing was needed, but he made a major mistake promising to give people that last stimulus package.
I’d also like to say he was a terrible manager of the U.S. government. For example, the inflation reduction and chip acts.
He literally held up TSMC fabs being built for over a year because they didn’t want to build an onsite daycare. He was so obsessed with being perfect that those fabs are now being built when Trump in office and politically he is rewarded for it.
Same deal with the IRA - where did all of that funding available for homeowner upgrades go? His own department slow walked the fucking frameworks to the states for over a year. They waited so long that he lost and now the funding was rescinded.
The man couldn’t get the fuck out of his own way. Even in the end, he was clearly in decline and had cancer but he couldn’t imagine the country being led by someone else more capable.
notjim | 3 hours ago
I would also point to the NEVI program. Perfectly reasonable idea to bootstrap a fast charger network. Billions allocated, and they built like 10 chargers by the end of Biden’s term, because the process was so convoluted.
asuds | 3 hours ago
I don’t think that’s a correct assessment. They wanted a coordinated system that would be actual functional network. That’s takes time unfortunately…
dacommie323 | 2 hours ago
I remember a Buutigeig interview where he said they were a lot of the power to the states to administer but just setting up the process between all 50 states was going to take longer than the three years they had.
HumorAccomplished611 | 3 hours ago
> This - everything he was doing was needed, but he made a major mistake promising to give people that last stimulus package. > >
That stimulus package is what won georgia and allowed any and all progress to be done.
>The man couldn’t get the fuck out of his own way. Even in the end, he was clearly in decline and had cancer but he couldn’t imagine the country being led by someone else more capable.
Insane take.
StrangrDangerRanger | 3 hours ago
So, vote buying with stimulus?
That would be pretty sad. But it’s not even accurate.
The great grassroots network Stacey Abram’s and Dem Allie’s plus Clyburn endorsement were much more locally important for voter turnout/enthusiasm in GA than the stimulus.
Open_Pollution_8038 | 3 hours ago
That stimulus package won them Georgia and cost them a Trump presidency with a Republican Congress.
Definition of phyric victory.
thizzydrafts | 3 hours ago
So Biden will be the Jimmy Carter if this/our generation.
Eric848448 | 2 hours ago
I say we’d all be better off if he had been reelected in 2020. The shitshow would have gone on without a 4-year break to regroup.
GalaXion24 | 2 hours ago
Biden was genuinely one of the best US presidents in recent history and I'm tired of pretending he's not.
He did as much as any establishment US president possibly could have. I will say that's maybe not enough and maybe more should be done, but for that you kind of have to be in DSA or adjacent territory. Someone like Sanders, AOC or Mamadani. And while someone like that could get elected establishment democrats generally are not willing to back them and their policies.
7Betafish | an hour ago
I'm sorry but if Biden/Kamala/Hilary/Obama were too left leaning for many Americans, Sanders/AOC/Mamdani don't have a prayer of being elected any time soon. It's absurd to say establishment dems aren't willing to 'back their policies'. DSA policies usually are dem policies, they all get screwed by republicans anyway.
Remember the ACA (which was the most realistic attempt at universal healthcare anyone could have come up with) costing Dems the midterms before being whittled down to a shell of its former self? Remember Biden having to back door student loan forgiveness and 'leftists' immediately deciding student loan forgiveness didnt actually matter? Pepperidge farms remembers.
GalaXion24 | an hour ago
I'm not sure when anyone decided student loan forgiveness doesn't matter.
In any case, my whole point was that Biden was good, and realistically I don't think anything more will be achieved in the US. I think this is a problem, means that bigger problems aren't addressed, and is going to feed things like MAGA due to the resulting inequality, class anxiety, etc. but this is just a classic case of "centrists" not really being willing to think outside "the system" and thereby not really being able to structurally solve problems at a root level. It is what it is, it is not really Biden's "fault" or personal failure.
7Betafish | an hour ago
See, this is wrong also. What do you even mean by 'centrism'? Dems fundamentally aren't centrist, and it's insane that people think that, and are willing to blame 'centrism' instead of the fact the the median voter is uninformed, the electorate is not nearly as left leaning as leftists would like to think, and the Republican party is insane and routinely given a lot of power. Nothing is changing on a structural level because anyone who would want to change it on a structural level does not have the power to do so and probably wont anytime soon.
There will be no big fixes as long as Republicans are around and people keep voting for them, because their goals are materially, fundamentally different then Dems are. That's not the fault of Dems or 'centrism', that's just a consequence of other people with power not agreeing on how things should be.
GalaXion24 | an hour ago
>the electorate is not nearly as left leaning as leftists would like to think
I'm pretty sure we agree here. The median voter is basically "centrist." I do think the median voter is above all stupid and probably has an incoherent set of views that would make me contemplate self-harm, but at no point did I say the median voter is leftist.
In any case, my only real point was that Biden basically maxed out what an establishment democrat can achieve, and for anything more you would literally need a different political paradigm. Which is why I said he was one of the best American presidents, probably the best this century (he was literally more progressive than Obama and pushed the Obama administration in a better direction as VP as well).
Winter_Swan5104 | 2 hours ago
On top of him actually owning his legacy for once, he’d be done right now. Or on a third term. Who knows? 12 years of him front and center is awful.
13143 | an hour ago
I think he'll be judged more for not being more aggressive at countering Trump then for his economic recovery.
goodknight94 | an hour ago
Your giving him a lot of extra credit there. The fed worked the inflation down to respectable levels. Biden overspent but not as bad as Trump would have. The infrastructure package did not that much into circulation. The majority of that went to shareholders of government contractors. Biden true successes were more regulatory. As far as what he did as president Biden was arguably better than Clinton, which would make him the best president since JFK IMO. However his decision to run for reelection caused more harm than all of his successes combined. That is what he will be remembered for.
Consistent_Laziness | an hour ago
I won’t have to imagine he keeps going we may get to find out.
AreaPrudent7191 | an hour ago
The biggest issue is that a lot of people seem to have got the notion in their heads that "bringing down inflation" meant prices would come down. They almost never do, they just stopped increasing. Also most of the public simply don't understand that almost all federal economic policies have a lag. Essentially Biden had to deal with the garbage Trump left him, and Trump got to take credit for Biden fixing it.
ApplicationCalm649 | 52 minutes ago
Trump would have done almost exactly the same thing Biden did: blame businesses for being greedy. He's doing it right now with big oil over the bump in gas prices caused by the war with Iran. Reasonable people know better, but there's few enough of them, and the Stans will eat it up.
colemab | 44 minutes ago
>He managed to deplete strategic oil reserves to provide relief and work to build it back up so as not to leave us vulnerable.
Biden took office on January 20, 2021. SPR on 01/22/21 was 638,086. He left Office on January 20, 2025. SPR on 01/24/2025 was 394,814.
Therefore he drained 243,272 out of the SPR during his term.
Source: Weekly U.S. Ending Stocks of Crude Oil in SPR (Thousand Barrels) https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCSSTUS1&f=W
Synchwave1 | 40 minutes ago
And had restocked it by around 50,000 barrels as he was leaving. The restocking was taking place. Prices were lower and stable. Trend COULD have and SHOULD have kept going back up.
Now go take a look at March 2025 until today. Results may surprise you.
Loud_Judgment_270 | 3 hours ago
Who was president March of 2020?
Xiipre | 3 hours ago
That's what he is saying...
Dysth | 3 hours ago
Not sure if this question is meant to be rhetorical, but to answer your question:
DJT was president in March 2020. It’s when covid was declared a pandemic and states began implementing shutdowns in response.
pushaper | 2 hours ago
> Trump should thank the gods he lost in 2020
he should also thank the gods covid happened at all. every other government printing money they way he was planning to minimized his initial plans. I am of the belief the Iran stuff now is a way to normalize his own deficiencies again.
WatersEdge2 | 3 hours ago
> He managed to deplete strategic oil reserves to provide relief and work to build it back up so as not to leave us vulnerable.
Did he really replenish the oil reserves? Doesn't look like it. https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_ending_stocks_of_crude_oil_in_the_strategic_petroleum_reserve
Maybe a small tick up.
EphEwe2 | 3 hours ago
Joe was a whale that made us a ton of money. https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/president-joe-biden-oil-trader-extraordinaire-e97947fb
YPCrumble | 2 hours ago
I'm not following what you mean by this:
> He managed to get most printed money into circulation with a huge infrastructure package, then from there worked that inflation back to respectable levels.
Isn't the problem that he spent way too much money on the "rescue plan" that pumped nearly two trillion dollars into the economy that didn't need it in March of 2021? The infra package was tiny compared to this....although adding another quarter billion of infrastructure the end of that year wasn't helpful.
Looking at these numbers it feels like the inflation problem was self-inflicted.
Synchwave1 | an hour ago
That’s not how the money supply works. When the federal reserve created money during Covid… 3/21/2020, that act alone isn’t what backstopped the economy.
Money created achieves nothing if it’s not put to use.
It’s why Trump just gave us all checks for no reason. But the consumer directly has fairly limited impact on the economy. What Biden’s infrastructure plan did was upgrade equipment, roads, buildings, etc. Think of the impact of one construction company working a highway. You have high wages, materials purchases, equipment upgrades, police details / overtime. You stimulated the economy in ways beyond paying off a credit card or buying a tv at Best Buy.
The inflation was going to be inevitable. He utilized the inflation for a net benefit to the nation. The inflation was apolitical. How Biden decided that inflation would work its way through the system was extremely effective.
YPCrumble | an hour ago
The idea that the consumer has limited impact on the economy doesn't make sense. Look at excess savings, for instance https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/excess-savings-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-20221021.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Excess demand without corresponding increase in supply is a lot of what caused inflation. The American Rescue Plan happened in March of 2021 and added 2 trillion dollars of demand to the economy that was supply constrained due to COVID logistics.
Synchwave1 | an hour ago
Exactly what I said…. Direct to consumer payments had little effect on money circulating through the economy.
Inflation is an inevitability of money printing. Yes, there’s supply / demand inflation. I understand that I’m an economics professor.
Money printing = inflation.
It’s the nature of our debasing currency. It’s why smart people don’t own cash they own assets. As the cash is devalued through money printing, assets reprice against the change in money supply. That’s inflation.
Think of it this way. I have an 🍎. Today it costs $1. That $1 could be looked at as a fraction of the money supply. 1/money supply.
Think back to 5th grade fractions. If I double the money supply, what has to happen to the numerator to keep the ratio the same? It has to go to $2.
Our money system is actually insanely simple and most people think it’s vastly more complicated. It’s really not. Obviously there’s some nuance, but at its core that’s what we’re talking about.
JPowJunior | an hour ago
> Isn't the problem that he spent way too much money on the "rescue plan" that pumped nearly two trillion dollars into the economy that didn't need it in March of 2021?
> Looking at these numbers it feels like the inflation problem was self-inflicted.
You are absolutely correct, just a few minor details you’re mistaken about:
It was over $2 trillion, nearly 40% of the money supply
The year was 2020
POTUS was Donald Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act
YPCrumble | an hour ago
Are you suggesting that the US should have rawdogged COVID with zero stimulus whatsoever? That doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument.
The problem came in March of 2021 when vaccines were already available and Biden added another two trillion that wasn't needed. My point is that wasn't a good decision in hindsight.
Synchwave1 | an hour ago
It wasn’t the US decision to make lol. The Federal Reserve (a private banker) didn’t ask Trump’s permission 😂. Central banks all over the globe did it to prevent economic Armageddon.
Your point is misguided and wrong. The money HAD TO CIRCULATE. Trump’s direct relief to consumer wasn’t doing it. Money was already printed and the Fed wanted it in circulation.
StrangrDangerRanger | 3 hours ago
I was a Biden voter, but let’s be serious.
Exceptional is not the word to use at all. Jesus. Can anyone be impartial and objective today?
You’re absolutely right that Trump (and the rest of us) are lucky that we didn’t have him in the drivers seat at that moment though.
LimpAd4924 | 3 hours ago
Biden was a humble statesman that followed the advice of competent people. Trump is a privileged imbecile that follows his wealthiest donor requests, even the most incompetent fools.
mikebootz | 3 hours ago
What could he have done better with regards to inflation?
StrangrDangerRanger | 3 hours ago
Well, the ARP should have been smaller. Printed way too much cash that hurt little people. My family are billionaire developers from California so it was amazing, but if you were poor in bumblefuck backwoods then it was terrible. Even liberal economists admit we overheated.
He could have lifted the Trump Chinese tariffs to help consumer costs, but he had to defend from Trump/GOP on China attacks.
He should have pursued a more aggressive domestic oil policy rather than relying so heavily on petroleum reserves, but he had to defend from the Left on climate issues.
And should have enacted temporary regulatory and permitting relief for critical industries like shipping, freight, supply chain infrastructure, etc.
Just to name obvious and relatively uncontroversial examples. There’s a ton he could have done. Of course, we have to recognize the political realities, but to pretend all was perfect is ridiculous.
And I personally love Joe Biden. I’ve shared the story on this account about eating ice cream with him at Cornell before an event we both attended. We need to normalize nuanced thinking again.
Firetalker94 | 3 hours ago
He got the inflation rate down faster than any other nation in the world. We were on the right track to a very strong recovery.
Mikestopheles | 3 hours ago
He wasn't exciting, and he didn't do a lot of the really progressive stuff that the base wanted. Plus, there was obstructionism from the Republicans and moneyed classes the whole way through, so it's really easy to pass him off as a do-nothing president. But I'd say, given the amount of opposition they faced, his administration got quite a bit done and prevented a number of worse outcomes.
klingma | 3 hours ago
He didn't do anything. The Fed is the one who finally raised rates in the Summer of 2022 after the strategy of calling inflation "transitory" didn't work to lower it.
sereneandeternal | 3 hours ago
He was able to make deals with the most obstructionist opposition in modern US history (if not ever, apart from the era around the civil war). Furthermore, he didn’t just make any normal deals, he was able to pass the biggest and most extensive legislation packages in all of American history.
FDR the previous record holder, managed to also do an insane amount of legislation but he had the full Democratic Party behind him and absolute support in Congress and the Senate. Biden did not and still managed to pull through, and that in a single term, Roosevelt had 4.
He did more in a single term than most presidents who served two terms.
Biden is a lot more intelligent and skilled than people give him credit for, even as VP, he was known as Obama's dealmaker.
You should be proud of voting for Biden, and he certainly was exceptional in my opinion.
Material_Key5935 | 2 hours ago
A big part of it was also massive unskilled immigration keeping wages down while the economy still expanded. No one really talks about that, even though the fed kept hinting at it.
Sadly that’s also why we got trump again.
DisneyPandora | 3 hours ago
This is stupid. Biden signed a 2 trillion dollar stimulus that made inflation way worse than Trump
Synchwave1 | 3 hours ago
You don’t understand monetary policy and money printing.
Fed printed the money on 3/21/2020 as a means of backstopping an economy on the brink of collapse. The money was printed. It therefore had to be circulated.
Biden chose specific and targeted areas of our infrastructure for that money to circulate. It kept people employed, it upgraded necessary infrastructure. Every single bridge and overpass in my state has been rebuilt according to modern engineering and code thanks to that bill.
mrbasedballed | 3 hours ago
jfc
Hopeful-Courage-6333 | 3 hours ago
Yes, you’re correct. This is stupid.
adamdoesmusic | 3 hours ago
Good thing smart people aren’t making literally any of the decisions currently amirite
Synchwave1 | 3 hours ago
We’ll fix it in November…. AGAIN 🙄.
adamdoesmusic | 3 hours ago
We’ll certainly try.
Personally I’m campaigning for the Cholesterol/Heart Disease ticket to win us some political victories asap. Even got the champagne chilling.
Acsnook-007 | an hour ago
Joe Biden created 40 year high inflation (9.1%) and over $5 average gasoline prices. Love the revisionist history!
Joe Biden inherited an inflation rate of 1.4%. We've been nowhere near this since the Biden debacle.
SuperAwesomeBrah | 51 minutes ago
What did Biden do that caused inflation?
Petrocrat | 45 minutes ago
Almost all of Biden's major landmark legislative bills were passed after that 9.1% peak in 2022, other than the American Rescue Act which was a response to an emergency brought about by COVID. The peak inflation was equally caused by Trump's CARES act as Biden's Rescue Act. In reality the main cause for the 9.1% peak inflation was supply chain shortages from COVID/Ukraine war.
If you're trying to say that Biden's IRA, IIJA or CHIPS act caused the 9.1% peak inflation, then you'll have issues with causality, since those passed after the inflation peak occurred (except for IIJA which was only a few months before the peak and too short a time to have been causal).
Petrocrat | 44 minutes ago
Almost all of Biden's major landmark legislative bills were passed after that 9.1% peak in 2022, other than the American Rescue Act which was a response to an emergency brought about by COVID. The peak inflation was equally caused by Trump's CARES act as Biden's Rescue Act. In reality the main cause for the 9.1% peak inflation was supply chain shortages from COVID/Ukraine war.
If you're trying to say that Biden's IRA, IIJA or CHIPS act caused the 9.1% peak inflation, then you'll have issues with causality, since those passed after the inflation peak occurred (except for IIJA which was only a few months before the peak and too short a time to have been causal).
Petrocrat | 44 minutes ago
Almost all of Biden's major landmark legislative bills were passed after that 9.1% peak in 2022, other than the American Rescue Act which was a response to an emergency brought about by COVID. The peak inflation was equally caused by Trump's CARES act as Biden's Rescue Act. In reality the main cause for the 9.1% peak inflation was supply chain shortages from COVID/Ukraine war.
If you're trying to say that Biden's IRA, IIJA or CHIPS act caused the 9.1% peak inflation, then you'll have issues with causality, since those passed after the inflation peak occurred (except for IIJA which was only a few months before the peak and too short a time to have been causal).
VacanyeraYT | 3 hours ago
The disconnect comes from macro indicators vs. micro sentiment
Macroeconomically, record low unemployment, massive domestic manufacturing investments (CHIPS Act, IRA), and avoiding a forecasted recession were huge wins. But for the average household, high inflation and interest rates meant everyday life felt significantly more expensive regardless of the numbers.
NoCoolNameMatt | 3 hours ago
The issue is that they didn't get to experience the alternative. Economists look at the data and conclude we avoided a huge recession. Laypeople don't even look at the data and conclude only that things cost more than they used to.
OkCluejay172 | 2 hours ago
The clear political lesson from the Biden years is going to be that politicians shouldn’t trade inflation for lower unemployment.
When everyone’s vote counts the same, a smaller number of people hurting a lot is much better for you than a lot of people hurting a little.
Spreading the pain instead of concentrating it just makes everyone mad at you. Right or wrong, the voters very clearly decided “We’re all in this together” is not a message that works for them.
GalaXion24 | an hour ago
"Fuck you I got mine" is a lamentably common sentiment in politics, and if the main way to win elections becomes to regularly sacrifice some minority (be it a literal ethnic or sexual minority, or a minority of people who lose jobs, etc.) then politics is basically never again going to be about what we should do for all of us. It's going to be about who deserves to have things and who should be sacrificed for this. What kind of people do we care about? I think this is fundamentally toxic, and the only reasonable response to it is Mamdani's point about the only majority being the working class. Everything else is basically a road to fascism.
OkCluejay172 | an hour ago
I'm not looking to get into any debate about Mamdani or fascism or Trump or capitalism or whatever (those are all tedious). I'll just say this because I think is illustrative of the trap that people very commonly fall into. It’s a handwavey, almost magical thinking instinct, that if you activate the working class (or the middle class, or the proletariat, or true Americans, or whatever) everything will be fine.
If you define your politics as something like "The only majority is the working class" (however you define it, say bottom 51% of the income spectrum) and therefore all policies must benefit it, this is the exact same error that sunk Biden. He pursued a policy of protecting employment and output, accepting as the inevitable cost of that elevated inflation. This is a policy designed to protect the working class (those that would bear the brunt of elevated unemployment) at the cost to society at large, because everyone feels inflation.
And this was awful politically. Everyone hated it, including the working class, both the working class people who a) would have been counterfactually laid off but don't observe that and instead are just mad about inflation and b) the ones who wouldn't have been laid off and so are just mad about inflation anyway.
Serving the working class above all else (or more generally, those vulnerable to unemployment) was what Biden did and it bit him in the ass. No politician for a generation will make the same mistake, I think.
NoCoolNameMatt | 7 minutes ago
It was great polic,y though!
It was bad politics.
BravinatorLX2 | an hour ago
how about we use fascism, but against people like that?
Darkpumpkin211 | 20 minutes ago
https://theonion.com/like-hell-were-all-in-this-together-1819583553/
NoCoolNameMatt | 6 minutes ago
100 percent correct.
runningraider13 | 3 hours ago
Well you see, that raise I got is because I earned it, not inflation. But those rising prices are Biden’s fault - I don’t feel richer like I should from my raise.
BasvanS | 2 hours ago
I’m happy if people return Trump with the favor, but I’m not holding my breath.
ianitic | 5 minutes ago
Only the good parts are Trump and only the bad parts are Biden /s
yrotsihfoedisgnorw | 2 hours ago
Too many think what they are told without ever looking into whether what they're being told is accurate or not. Do that long enough, say 45+ years, and you can tell them whatever you want.
CommonwealthCommando | 3 hours ago
The inflation wasn't even that bad, and most investors didn't seem too worried about it. But a whole generation had never known inflation, and now any time anything costs any money at all they call it "inflation".
Neither_Cap6958 | 3 hours ago
I mean CPI hit 6% during Biden.
CommonwealthCommando | 3 hours ago
The fact that we think 6% for 1 year is bad makes my point exactly.
DJanomaly | 2 hours ago
I had someone on Reddit tell me that the economy is the worst it has ever been right now. This was just a few days ago. Like, the complete lack of perspective to say something like that is staggering.
A_hasty_retort | an hour ago
Oh my, that sweetsweet summer child, 2008, 2001, 1987, shall I go on???
TheMauveHand | an hour ago
Remember, these are the people that think the US economy was sunshine and lollipops between 1945 and Reagan.
Consistent_Laziness | an hour ago
I’ve read people saying this job market is emphatically worse than 2008. They claimed to have lived through it. I was in high school in 2008 so idk about the job market. But maybe it’s just worse for entry level but overall it’s just meh in general.
But yea people are going around saying this is the worse job market ever, including 2008.
CommonwealthCommando | 14 minutes ago
That's actually so cute. I hope they handle the next dip ok.
Neither_Cap6958 | an hour ago
So 6% is normal then? 6% for less than a year isn't the worst thing in the world and I never claimed it to be, but in what world is 3 times ideal good?
CommonwealthCommando | 18 minutes ago
lol no 6% isn't good, but when we came out of the pandemic and passed some big laws I don't think it's anything to panic about, especially when interest rates are low. Just fix the interest rates – and we did, and it went down.
Adventurous_Class_90 | 2 hours ago
And that was caused by supply crunches that Biden had zero control over. More blame lies with the 6-sigma JIT logistics MBAs than with politicians.
Neither_Cap6958 | an hour ago
Really? Cause in my experience and according to souclrces most supply chains were back to norma early to mid 2023 and CPI was at the highest mid 2024.
Fuck_Mark_Robinson | 37 minutes ago
Really? I work with institutional investors and they wouldn’t shut up about inflation and how the sky was falling during Biden’s administration.
CommonwealthCommando | 17 minutes ago
Well you know better than I do then. I especially heard a lot of people say they thought it would go down (unlike in the 70s). What did your investors say?
Fulaw60 | 2 hours ago
It’s even worse than that. Real wages actually outpaced inflation during his term so most people didn’t even really feel the pinch monetarily. They came out of that with more money than they started but news media told them times were terrible and they stupidly believed it.
BravinatorLX2 | an hour ago
lets just hope shit feeling bad for individuals holds up during the following elections... wouldn't wanna have to acuse americans of hypocrisy or something...
Mckesso | 10 minutes ago
My money went further in 2024 then it does now. I felt better each year financially from 2022-2024 which has since stalled and backtracked.
teshh | 3 hours ago
Yep, all throughout bidens terms I'd get downvoted for stating how for majority of Americans, their daily lives have gotten harder financially.
Dnc literally ignored all micro economic indicators and thought they could gaslight their base (college educated folks) that the entire economy was amazing.
jimmiejames | 3 hours ago
But that's objectively false. Show me the data of any quintile of income earner that was worse off at the end of Biden's term than the beginning. Show me an administration that was better for the lowest wage earners in the past 50 years. I dare you
aquarium_drinker | 3 hours ago
the unfortunate lesson of the Biden years is there is no point in raising the incomes of the lowest wage earners because it will make everyone else really mad about it
jimmiejames | 3 hours ago
In particular, the people who claim to be the most supportive of the lowest wage earners (including those earners themselves!). It's so gd frustrating.
"I'd gladly pay $1 more for a hamburger if it meant the workers received fairer wages" No! You fing wouldn't!!!
Consistent_Laziness | an hour ago
I’m 100% worse off NOW than I was in 2023 or 2024. I’ll take Biden back in half a heart beat.
teshh | 3 hours ago
Just look at any graph comparing wages vs rent, healthcare, insurance costs, etc. All the micro bills vastly rose when compared to wages. But official inflation metrics don't capture the real rate of inflation.
Go look at us household debt shooting up. You're honestly trying to tell me the people getting paid $20 a hour or less pre covid, were better off in 2024 with that same pay?
jimmiejames | 3 hours ago
Ok, you're a secret inflation truther. There's nothing we can discuss. We might as well argue over who won the 2020 election.
Household debt also did not shoot up. You can look these things up instead of making up conspiracies that (for some reason) make you feel better
teshh | 3 hours ago
Household debt https://www.statista.com/chart/19955/household-debt-balance-in-the-united-states/?srsltid=AfmBOor0KwI2cjsO4TzqJ2PqO53nmUKnxLAMXuwS1QaAWtYT7wfJnaLO
Rent https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-year
Credit card delinquency rates https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCCLACBS
Median home price https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
Food prices https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm
Keep your head in the sand though.
runningraider13 | 2 hours ago
Household debt looks pretty consistent rate of change since 2015?
Rent rate of increase looks pretty in line with CPI.
Credit card delinquencies look below average historically.
Housing is a serious problem, but again I’m not really seeing significant changes in the rate of change.
DisneyPandora | 3 hours ago
It’s objectively true
jimmiejames | 3 hours ago
The floor is yours, show me the real income data. 50 years to find a higher real income growth rate. Shouldn't be a problem since the Biden years were the worst ever, right?
Giraff3 | 3 hours ago
And how do you measure real wage growth? How do we know that they have greater buying power? As much as we like to act like inflation is an objective measurement, it’s rooted in superfluous definitions that result in deceptive statements like that real wage growth is better than ever when almost nobody in that wage bracket actually feels that way.
runningraider13 | 2 hours ago
When data and vibes conflict, it is the data that is wrong.
Giraff3 | an hour ago
ITT: economists salty at how wishy-washy their data is. Real wage growth and inflation are measured by utilizing things like CPI. They say that here is the basket of goods that somebody needs to live with, and if the cost of that goes up then inflation has occurred.
But guess what people don’t need a carton of milk the same way they did 50 years ago. People need smart phones and computers now just to have a job when that didn’t exist before. The idea that they’ve objectively captured the changing basket and that some numbers on a spreadsheet should beat what we all see with our own eyes is the foolish thing
runningraider13 | an hour ago
They change the basket of goods and the relative weightings to better reflect the current reality all the time.
Is it perfect? No, no one claims it is.
Is it more accurate than vibes, or what you think “we all see with our own eyes”? Yes.
bullhead2007 | 3 hours ago
Unemployment numbers don't speak to the economics of the working class, then those people are working 5 gig jobs to make ends meet. The "economy" was great for people who were already well off or were able to exploit the market before interest rates went up. It wasn't great for the average working class person and has been in a decline for the working class since Jimmy Carter. The neoliberal economics just fudges numbers and metrics to spread the lies that it works for anyone other than the billionaire class.
Jaxues_ | 3 hours ago
Do you know anyone working 5 jobs?
runningraider13 | 3 hours ago
Remember, if you don’t agree with the data it’s probably faked
bullhead2007 | 3 hours ago
Real lived experiences are more important to me than what neoliberal economists use to justify their economic system.
runningraider13 | 3 hours ago
You know what they call very large numbers of “real lived experiences”? Data
bullhead2007 | 3 hours ago
Yes and economists take data and manipulate data or calculations or omit data to fit the message they are trying to sell all the time. For example the way inflation is measured is constantly being messed with to show inflation lower than it actually is for normal working class people. They do not count a lot of things that are required for living, like rent and housing costs. They also fudge with unemployment numbers by counting people who are underemployed working 3 jobs or a couple part time jobs as "employed" but never release underemployed numbers. The economists never care about the working class. It's a circle jerk to keep the exploitation of the working class and global south going.
runningraider13 | 3 hours ago
Housing is definitely included in inflation…
“The index for shelter, the service that a housing unit provides its occupants, is one of the largest parts of the CPI market basket”
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-and-rent.htm
I’m not sure why you’d expect someone with 3 jobs to be counted as unemployed. There are lots of measures of unemployment though, U-6 is probably closest to what you’re interested in: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
bullhead2007 | 3 hours ago
Because people working 3 part time jobs do not get health insurance or PTO. The fact that anyone even needs to work 3 jobs to make ends meet is already a damning failure of our economy. Not to mention the homeless epidemic.
CFLuke | 2 hours ago
How many people do you think actually work three jobs? Since it's such a massive problem surely you have some data for it.
runningraider13 | 2 hours ago
Ok, but unemployment rates aren’t trying to capture health insurance coverage rates. Nor do they claim to be.
If that’s what you care about, look that up don’t try to proxy it with unemployment rate. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-288.html
sanitylost | an hour ago
Not to be a debbie downer, but the economic changes as a result of the pandemic created a marked shift in how people actually worked. The issue is that a lot of the metrics we use to track the overall economy are outdated and can lead to views that are incongruent with reality. Attempting to use the same numbers and metrics that at least ballparked the economy, employment, inflation in the 1980's will fail dramatically in the labor market of today. 1099 work is up, gig work is up, some professions made dramatically more post pandemic and brought up a lot of the metrics. It'll be 20 years before people really see what happened and how the pandemic allowed for dramatic shifts in labor and capital extraction to occur during the crisis.
You're also dealing with a situation where the optimizations corporations created to maximize profits lead to what we refer to in graph theory as a singularly connected graph. If any singular piece of the graph breaks, the whole system kind of falls apart and leads to difficulties downstream. These types of policies have been encouraged by politicians for the past 50 years, sacrificing robustness of supply and distribution with JIT. As such, if the admin had been able to re-frame their policies as "fixing" old mistakes to make sure Americans were more secure, I feel they would have had better results in terms of zeitgeist.
All that being said, Biden did about as well as could have been expected given the tools he had access to and the legislature he was handed. I think his policies would have been significantly better if he had a couple more senators, but given his razor thin margins there he made a lot of compromises there to get necessary bills passed.
ceciledian | 2 hours ago
The media repeats Trump and his cabinet blaming Biden for everything bad past and present whether or not it’s true, and repeats Trump and his cabinet taking credit for everything good Biden did. So no wonder people think Biden was a big fail.
ScoffersGonnaScoff | 2 hours ago
Propaganda works. It’s destroying us
Ok-Piece-2546 | an hour ago
Doesn't help that a pig portion of Republicans will be decide to cross over party lines to vote for Democrats for house or Senate positions.
Dems def needs a president who actively uses social media that create a good attention. Otherwise they would have to beholden to the media to control the narrative, which Trump was able to leap over by constantly attacking and fear mongering
Comfortable-Ad-3988 | 2 hours ago
The 33% of Trump voters who still approve of him no matter what all said that the economy went into the toilet the day Biden took office, and then somehow magically recovered to become the best ever the day Trump took office. They're not connected to reality at all. The percentage of Democrats who swing similarly in their answers based on politics is only around 5%, for comparison. That's 33% of Americans who will always say the economy is bad if a Democrat is President. A Democrat could pay their mortgage, send their kids to college while feeding them, and set them up a retirement fund, and they'll still bite the hand that feeds since it's not their team.
ravheim | 2 hours ago
We call those people idiots. The US economy fared better under Biden than the other world economies. The US media gave Trump and his ilk free air time to spread lies about the economy under Biden without fact checking or calling them out on the BS.
standupguy152 | 2 hours ago
Knowing what we know about the currently AI-driven economy, you could argue Bidenomics, fully implemented, would’ve set the country up, pretty well. The CHIPS act, Build Back Better, IRA, first two especially would’ve boosted domestic chip and energy generation and transmission infrastructure needed to power AI…
emi_fyi | an hour ago
thats a really great point. oopsies!
hooligan045 | 3 hours ago
Democratic policies generally are. It’s a shame that 1) mainstream media is hellbent on massive disinformation campaigns against it, and 2) that people are generally too goddam stupid to see through it.
SpezRuinedHellsite | 3 hours ago
> mainstream media is hellbent
Mainstream media is taking marching orders from their billionaire owners. They are not doing this for the love of the game.
thursdaysocks | 2 hours ago
Always has been clear to those paying attention. Follow the money, it never lies.
purz | 2 hours ago
Ya cause mainstream media wasn’t pushing “vibecession” gaslighting when Biden was in office. Or also pretending he didn’t have dementia.
Calling people too goddam stupid to see through it when you’re completely delusional about Democrats is hilarious. As if every Dem president since at least Reagan isn’t also pushing neoliberal policies just like Republicans. Clinton and Obama being two of the worst offenders from both parties.
Not that it matters calling you people out though since reddit, another form of media that is just overrun by Dem misinformation campaigns / bots / mods banning anyone that isn’t a shitlib.
hooligan045 | 2 hours ago
A little riled up, are we?
Democratic policies are objectively better for the economy as a whole. Statistics bear this out quite clearly looking back multiple decades. It’s a testament to the basic notion that there are policy positions where everybody can win, not just the privileged few.
purz | an hour ago
Whatever helps you sleep at night
hooligan045 | an hour ago
You mean being able to accurately interpret basic economic data instead spewing whatever your favorite outrage media outlet tells you to believe?
Thanks for bringing absolutely fuckall to the convo bud. Now go have a graham cracker and sit in the corner while the adults talk.
Impossible_Ad7432 | an hour ago
Exhibit a: The far left is a magnet for stupid people. And it’s really easy to convince stupid people to never trust media from outside their bubble, and to project their own failings on to their perceived opponents.
Cheezeball25 | an hour ago
And which media is far left again? I'd love to know
TheMauveHand | an hour ago
At some point one must consider that sufficient quantities of ignorance might be better explained if understood as malice.
Tribe303 | an hour ago
The US economy was recovering from the post Covid-19 supply chain inflation crisis/scam just fine under Biden. I'm Canadian and wanna know why our PM Justin Trudeau became so unpopular? Our recovery was not as good as the US's was. That's it. We were both in the shitter and the US was climbing out of it much faster.
FFWD to today where our inflation rate is 2.8% vs 4.1% in the US, and our GDP growth last month would be 3.4% annually, vs ~1% in the US. And this is occurring in a country targeted the most with Trump tarrifs and economic warfare to beat us into becoming the 51st state. He really is the most incompetent leader in the history of the United States. He's a moron and a loser, who fucks up every single thing he touches. How the hell is the US losing a trade war with anyone?
Describing_Donkeys | 3 hours ago
As a country, we were able to weather the stop of the global economy and restart it basically overnight basically through progressive economic policy. It's an economic miracle and all we focused on was the inflation. Biden was incapable of narrating what was happening and we have Trump as a result.
Medical-Button-5493 | 3 hours ago
>Biden was incapable of narrating what was happening
Totally disagree. These economic facts are just too brainy and unemotional for most Americans to care about. Biden could have been Robin Williams or Carl Sagan and America never would have cared.
My conservative and poor friends have no idea that the trump 2017 tax scam bill screwed them over. I have a PhD and the only reason I understand what happened is because I do my own taxes.
TheMysteriousSalami | 53 minutes ago
The problem is most people are morons
Dry-Interaction-1246 | 3 hours ago
The bar for success vs this shitshow administration is very low indeed.
donutello2000 | 3 hours ago
The US did a great job keeping the economy in balance through the COVID pandemic. But then, after a vaccine was available, we decided to issue another massive stimulus, which spiked inflation and then interest rates.
Describing_Donkeys | 3 hours ago
There was a global shortage that resulted from the global economy coming to a halt. The additional stimulus did cause a bit of a spike, but it also helped businesses get back on their feet. All of this was acting out of a bit of blindness as none of it had ever been attempted before. We could have probably benefitted from a bit less stimulus at the end, but it was not the driving force behind what we were experiencing, which again was better than any comparable country.
lost-American-81 | 3 hours ago
I don’t know why it doesn’t get more attention, but one of the large drivers of inflation was Trumps 2020 OPEC “deal.” He lobbied for and got a 2 year 10mbpd (more than the entire US production at the time) reduction in OPEC output. As soon as demand returned early in the Biden administration demand quickly outpaced supply. Couple this with the Ukraine invasion with 6 months of the terrible OPEC cuts and bam, inflation largely driven by high energy costs. Thanks Trump!
donutello2000 | 2 hours ago
Look at inflation graphs. US Inflation went up well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A supply shock causes inflation on specific goods and services impacted by the supply shock. We saw broad inflation across all sectors which is consistent with demand-driven inflation rather than supply-based inflation.
Describing_Donkeys | an hour ago
The global trade network ground to a halt. Supplies of goods took a huge hit. That's why it was a global issue. We stopped the global economy and chose inflation over people falling into poverty. The options were either make people unable to buy goods or make goods more expensive since supply dropped. All sectors were impacted because we interfered with every sector of the economy. US investment wasn't causing inflation around the world, especially worse inflation than we experienced. It's true we wouldn't have had inflation without the spending bills, but we would have had millions drop into poverty instead.
lost-American-81 | an hour ago
As I said it started early in the Biden administration, as demand returned. People started driving again that caused energy inflation due to OPEC supply cuts. So yeah it started earlier than the Ukraine invasion but that event really put that inflation into overdrive.
trainsacrossthesea | 2 hours ago
I’m so tired of common sense needing explaining to the “common” people.
This country elected Trump twice, regardless of the empirical and data driven evidence that he was in power to serve the kleptocracy, and until we address the parasite of ignorance that’s attached to our collective id, we’re in for a maelstrom of self-fuckery
PeeGee10 | an hour ago
No ish Sherlock! See the Economist magazine’s last cover before the election—the world’s hottest economy: America. And still we let the lunatics back in to running the fed govt
olyfrijole | an hour ago
I'm sure we all remember the October 2024 cover of The Economist, but just in case anyone has forgotten, it was a fat roll of US dollars with a rocket flame shooting it up to space. The headline read: "The Envy of the World". Would any sane person say that about the USA today? Think about the trajectory the USA was on less than two years ago, and the one we're on now. I'm not sure whether to attribute this administration's missteps to malice, incompetence, or a mixture of the two, but the results are staggeringly awful.
nuxenolith | an hour ago
Biden had an excellent presidency, and his legacy will forever be marred by a) Dems' inability to brand their way out of a paper bag and b) the inexplicable and disastrous decision to go back on his idea of being a one-term president.
All policy, and zero politicking
NihiloZero | an hour ago
Biden, for better or worse, mostly wanted to preserve the status quo. But the group who came in after him... they just didn't seem give a damn. They either didn't care about the national and global economic order and/or they were intentionally trying to wreck it -- which they have done. The stock market may be staying afloat for now, but even that isn't going to fair well in the medium or long term.
rogun64 | 35 minutes ago
I would argue that we're having this discussion because that's how people incorrectly viewed Biden. He was actually a trailblazer in many ways and it was mostly for good things, imo.
NihiloZero | 15 minutes ago
If Biden had only just pushed through a minimum wage increase... he would have been reelected and people wouldn't have even cared that he was losing it. But he didn't even do that. If his policies had truly been strong and broadly beneficial... even Harris would have had an easier time coasting into office after him. But that's not the way it worked out because Biden didn't fundamentally change very much at all.
discgman | 2 hours ago
It was a coordinated disinformation campaign to push the narrative that Biden was not functional and inflation was caused by his liberal policies. News organizations pushed the narrative without properly vetting all the lies coming out of the Trump campaign. Democrats did not favors by not highlighting his accomplishments instead went civil war on who was going to run for president. Voters are lazy and they can only see whats being put in front of them. They do not look into what the real numbers are and if they are getting better. By the time inflation was controlled and gas prices went down it was too late to prove things got better. We are just lucky Trump wasnt in the presidency in 2020 or we would have been so much worse off.
SockDem | an hour ago
One thing that's generally become clear to me is that Manchin's instincts were largely right as to the scale of the later stimulus rounds that resulted in overheating, meanwhile the permitting reform he was pushing for would've resulted in voters feeling the impact of the clean energy credits and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in more tangible manner.
Green-Collection-968 | 26 minutes ago
All tRump had to do was nothing, then win. He could have taken credit for all of Biden's hard work. He just couldn't do it folks. He had to wreck everything.
sddbk | 2 hours ago
The article strikes me as sadly understandable wishful thinking.
The reality is that opinions about economic conditions are driven by prejudice far more strongly than actual economic conditions. If you have always hated Democrats and everyone you know hates them, then absolutely nothing they do will change your mind. They could create the greatest economic boom of your life and you will still believe that they only want to hurt you.
Major_Shlongage | 2 hours ago
It was not.
This opinion can be safely ignored coming from The Atlantic. They were pre-destined to hold this opinion due to Biden's party and the political leaning of this publication.
Popular-Departure165 | 4 minutes ago
Got any evidence to support your assertion, or is "It was not." the upper limits of you critical thinking skills?
scamp9121 | 2 hours ago
Whoa, what are you doing here in the echo chamber?
Terrible_Bee_6876 | 45 minutes ago
This is incorrect because I immediately recognized that Bidenomics would be extremely successful and most of you suckers were too busy guzzling astroturfed propaganda about globalizing the intifada to notice that Biden created a universal basic income for parents in poverty, grew incomes in the lowest quintiles more than the highest quintiles for the first and only time in American history, saw the first private sector union growth in 50 years, and made the exact kind of American infrastructure investments everyone claims they want until they actually get them. Biden is going to go down in history as an extremely successful president.
Imaginary_Zone_4319 | 3 hours ago
Pretty damn successful at bringing YoY inflation to 9%+, that’s for sure.
It grew the economy, sure, but at a rate much much lower than inflation, and we’re still dealing with the impacts of Biden’s inflationary policy. Plus his terrible border policy (10m illegal border crossings over 4 years is a record btw).
Ihaveasmallwang | 3 hours ago
GLOBAL inflation was due to demand spiking during Covid recovery while supply chains were still majorly screwed up. That being said, the inflation rate in the USA was lower than most of the rest of the world and had a faster return to more normal rates as well.
This also directly led to an increase in people trying to migrate because the situation was worse in other countries.
Both crazy inflation and increased migration would have happened regardless of who was president.
Hawkballzzzz | 3 hours ago
Dont worry about the idiot you responded to. It is true that Biden could have and probably should have done more aboit the border, but it isnt nearly as big of an issue as it was raised as. For one this is an economy thread and immigrants are unquestionably a net positive for that.
Biden focused on far more important things like restoring the economy, navigating international issues related to Ukraine and Israel, and other post covid impacts.
If the border issue was so critical, Republicans wouldnt have voted down Langford's border bill at Trumps request. Campaigning on the issue is more important to them than actually fixing it.
Biden had reasons for the inflation and rising costs that were outside of his control, and things were rapidly improving at the end of his term. Trump's admin has nothing and noone to blame except Trump, and their numbers have been worse than Biden's every quarter.
clorox_cowboy | an hour ago
"Trump's admin has nothing and noone to blame except Trump, and their numbers have been worse than Biden's every quarter."
They'll just keep blaming Biden. Their voters don't read, so they won't question it.
baverdi | an hour ago
What policy was inflationary?
madeapizza | an hour ago
But who would clean our toilets if we don’t allow ten million illegals in our county? - /r/politics and /r/economics