In recent weeks, the White House has been peddling the term “Bidenomics” to refer to the economic policies pursued and implemented over the past 30 months by President Joe Biden. To push what appears to be a lazy retread of the 2020 campaign’s “Build Back Better” agenda on which Biden failed to deliver, the White House is sending administration officials out on the road to try and convince Americans struggling to make ends meet that everything is, in fact, better than they think.
Ripping off the Coachella music festival’s style of promotion, the White House wants Americans to be excited about (and distracted by) the fact that Janet Yellen, John Podesta, and Marcia Fudge are coming to a city near them soon, rather than fretting about how the economy has left them worried about their immediate economic health and long-term potential.
Americans have reason to hold these concerns and not trust the president’s repetitious claims about his policies creating a supposedly strong economy. Beginning on Biden’s first day in office, “Bidenomics” saw the president kick off his administration with his war on fossil fuels and American energy independence. In the months since then, “Bidenomics” has seen 69 regulations dealing with energy and the environment finalized — making the U.S. reliant on more expensive foreign oil to meet demand. Last summer, that consequence saw gas prices in the U.S. reach the highest average in history.
Soon after, Biden’s pursuit of tax-and-spend policies saw him pass multiple massive bills that set off the inflation that handed Americans a cut to their real wages for more than two years straight.
On the day Biden was sworn in, inflation sat at just 1.4 percent. After Biden and congressional Democrats racked up more than $3 trillion on the taxpayers’ bill — apparently the initial down payment for “Bidenomics” — inflation (unsurprisingly) soared.
The White House, of course, denied inflation was an issue, claimed it would be “transitory,” and then sought to blame it on greedy corporations and even Vladimir Putin. But those attempts, like its new push to spin “Bidenomics” as a positive, couldn’t distract Americans from the reality they face as prices soared more than 16 percent under Biden.
As a result of this inflationary burden not seen in 40 years, another costly consequence of “Bidenomics” soon kicked in: interest rate hikes.
The Federal Reserve, to address decades-high inflation, began a series of interest rate hikes that saw consecutive increases for more than one year straight at the fastest pace in 40 years. Higher interest rates paired with an inflation rate that is still more than double the Fed’s target of just two percent combined to add even more economic pain for Americans.
Credit card debt — just one consequence of Americans’ attempts to keep up with the effects of “Bidenomics” — has ballooned to an average of roughly $10,000 per household for a total of nearly $1 trillion.
Despite all that, the Biden administration seems to believe it can simply tell Americans everything is going well and they’ll believe it, ignoring the economic mess they see happening around them and the personal stress “Bidenomics” has brought to their family’s budget.
Yet — and one reason why the White House is scrambling to send Biden officials out into the country to make their questionable arguments in person — polling continues to show that a clear majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy. As Townhall instructed in a previous column, “believe your ‘lying eyes’” and reject the Biden administration’s shameless spin that seeks to discount the pain Americans have felt as a result of “Bidenomics.”
