Biden is a historic president

Even among loyal Democrats (maybe them most of all) it has become popular to write Biden off as kind of a waste of time and space. Progressives consider him the enemy, while liberals consider him kind of an amiable do-nothing in the mold of, oh, maybe Warren G. Harding.

Man, do you have to ignore a lot to come up with that.  That is world-class obliviousness, in the mold of the MAGA folk who claim Trump did a great job with the economy or really fought the pandemic or really stood up toPutin.

First, there’s judges. Progressives loved saying “Oh, I’m so sick and tired of being told I should vote for Hillary because of judges,” but look where we’d be if they HAD held their noses and voted for her: that 6-3 reactionary majority is 6-3 the other way, Roe remains the law of the land, and the Voting Rights Act is back in full force, among other things. And Biden has had the most successful first 18 months for judicial appointments of any president since JFK. In his first year and eight months, Biden has appointed 76 (that means saw them through to Senate confirmation) federal judges and the Dems now have more federal judge appointments: as of September 28, the number of sitting federal judges appointed by Democrats is 406, while 385 were appointed by Republicans.

Then there’s legislation. Biden ranks among the top presidents of all time in the major legislation he’s gotten through. When you take into account that the other major legislators (Lincoln 1861-1862; Roosevelt 1933-34; LBJ 1965-66) had overwhelming majorities in both Houses, Biden probably gets credit as the most effective legislator ever to sit in the Oval office.

But where Biden truly emerges as a historic president is the reshaping of the economy that is going on totally without public awareness. I’m indebted to Heather Cox Richardson for pointing this out.

Since Reagan’s inauguration, the country has been in the grip supply side economic policy and business has been gripped by a short-term strategy of automation and outsourcing even longer. Cox Richardson points out:

Since the 1970s, authors Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport, and Ana Swanson explain, outsourcing and automation have meant that every recession has seen factory jobs disappear and never return as employers used downturns to move operations to countries with lower wage levels. This time, though, American manufacturers have not only regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic, they have also added about 67,000 more. Those numbers would be higher if the labor market weren’t so tight, a condition leading employers to offer higher wages and better benefits.

Biden has managed to do what Clinton and Obama never did: begin to undermine the supply side orthodoxy, which is based on the belief that putting more money in the hands of the wealthy—the “supply side”— would lead to investment and growth. Instead, it moved wealth dramatically upward while doing nothing to promote investment.

The other approach, followed by the three previously cited legislator-presidents, is to promote the “demand side,” based on the theory that if you put money in people’s hands they will buy things. Biden has insisted that he would build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out,” and legislation such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act have done just that.

Besides promoting growth of manufacturing (and jobs), we’re seeing signs of the reversal of long-term income distribution trends. According to Cox Richardson,

 . . .the real net worth of the bottom 50% of U.S. households has climbed 60% since Biden took office, now reaching $67,524.

And the plan to forgive significant student loan debt will continue to feed this trend, especially among low-income Black and Brown Americans – unless Republicans get their way and kill this program.

The repeal of Roe has put a little bit of spring back into the Democrats’ step. But they are missing a chance to celebrate some truly historic accomplishments by an extremely effective president who has done more for the working class than any president since FDR.

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