A storm of woes haunts the Biden presidency
*COVID-19 Original
*COVID-19 Delta
*Fox News
*Divisive social media
*Donald Trump
*Russia
*Countless claims that Biden lost the 2020 election, believed by 78%
of Republicans
*Trump toadies Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, et al
*Trump thugs Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, et al
*Senate obstructionist Republican team, head thug Mitch McConnell
*Senate obstructionist pseudo-Democratic tag team Manchin-Sinema
*Militant House progressives
*Pigheaded House moderates
*Anti-Mask rebellions
*Anti-Vaccine rebellions
*Republican governors taking every opportunity to undermine his authority
*Anti-democratic Republican state legislatures
*Sinister conspiracy theories
*Bloodthirsty crazed dupes of conspiracy theories
*Threats against his life rising along with deadly threats against all office-holding Democrats (and some non-Democrats who refuse to be intimidated by the thugs)
*Emboldened white supremacists
*Irresolute Attorney General
*Bungled Afghanistan pullout
*Chinese saber-rattling
*A tsunami of pandemic-rebound shopping
*Oil price shocks
*Clogged supply chains
and now . . .
The headline in the November 10, 6:24 pm story in The Hill was: “Biden Gets Inflation Gut Punch.” Sure enough, just when it looked like a coalition of moderates and progressive Democrats was going to stitch together enough of the remains of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation to have all House Democrats call it a win, along comes inflation to poison the deal.
The result of too many dollars chasing too little capacity as the economy ramps up boosts inflation, and makes big government spending—of the magnitude that would benefit Americans up and down the economic ladder—enough of an inflation risk to stall or starve Biden’s Build Back Better legislative agenda.
That the inflation is very probably temporary doesn’t help to hold prices in check now, and makes any big spending package such as Build Back Better appear irresponsible. And no one really knows how long inflation will continue to simmer, either with or without passage of Build Back Better in its present form.
Of course pseudo-Democrat Senator Joe Manchin has jumped on the opportunity to broadcast his doubts about major spending bills to the public (couched in terms of concerns about inflation) while undermining the President. In case you are paywalled out of the Washington Post article, here’s the key passage from Manchin’s statement, critical of the leader of his own party:
“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse,” Manchin said in a statement Wednesday. “From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and D.C. can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.” Manchin was making a cutting reference to earlier claims by the White House that rising prices were a transitory side effect of the economy’s emergence from the pandemic.
The “cutting reference” implies that big federal spending would worsen inflation even more. No matter the fact that in the long run, Build Back Better would bring great benefits to a majority of the American public. You can’t sell long-term benefits to the American electorate, especially when they’re in economic pain in the present.
Add to all these woes—for most of which Biden bears little responsibility—is a Gallup Poll finding that the majority of Americans think the government is doing too much.
Note in the accompanying chart the volatility of the poll responses over time. Even after the government in 2009 prevented a deeper recession with a big stimulus (which many experts believe was still too small for a robust recovery), support for government spending continued to drop. It revived briefly as we crawled out of the worst of the pandemic last winter, and fell again within the past few months. (One wonders where this public thinks the money to provide free COVID vaccines came from. Not the COVID relief act?)
Lesson: the long-lived pall of Reaganism continues to obscure the positive role that government can play. The pall has persisted in America for forty years despite all the evidence that it brings us more economic pain than pleasure (to 90% of us anyway), and with that track record it can be expected to persist indefinitely.
Passage of Build Back Better may be doomed by a constellation of woes for which Joe Biden bears little or no responsibility. And if it fails, the Republicans who have been doing their damnedest to wreck his presidency will have plenty of ammunition to attack Biden on the economy next year. If they win in 2022, legislative paralysis will worsen and Donald Trump’s promise in 2024 to fix it will become more attractive to voters with short memories—that’s the voters who appear to be the decisive bloc in U.S. national elections.
Politics aside, Joe Biden has had his share of personal tragedy: his first wife and daughter dying in an auto accident, and his son Beau dying of cancer in 2015 at age 46.
Now he has to deal with the worst domestic strife since the Civil War.
Somehow, he’s dealing with it. Some of us may criticize aspects of how he’s doing it, but the fact that he continues at all is inspiring, and worthy of our thanks.
I can’t help wondering whether God, having thrown so many blows at Joe Biden, may be making him a test case, as with Job in the Old Testament. A bit of overkill, I say. Devout Catholic Biden has plenty of good reasons to start his prayers with “Why me?” He did have a crisis of faith after the auto accident that killed his wife and daughter. Whatever it is that enables him to get up in the morning and face the public now (who among us could do that?), the country had better pray that it endures.
It may be more apropos to frame his plight as a quarrel between multiple gods such as oversaw the Trojan War. Some of those gods seem to have it in for him while a minority give him hope to carry on. The way things are going, it’s the god of chaos, strife, and discord—Eris in the Greek pantheon—who has the upper hand.
==== Afterword on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)===
MMT can show a way out of the financial mess we’re in. Better, can point the way to prosperity for all. Having burdened many readers with three posts on Modern Monetary Theory in the past, I won’t do much more here than refer you to my original one AND add a video below by investment banker Ramin Nakisha that may explain MMT more clearly than any I have steered you to before. A good use of 22 minutes if you are still perplexed about MMT and why deficit spending is good. Along the way, he promotes Stephanie Kelton’s book which I highly recommend.
What you always have to keep in mind with MMT is that federal debt is very different from personal debt, local government debt, state debt, and corporate debt. Having a “debt ceiling” for federal spending is fiscal nonsense, and harmful. For why that is, listen and read up.