chicago:
President Joe Biden vowed Wednesday to restore the American dream in a speech promoting his “Bidenomics” policy, which he said will mark a clear break from decades of Republican economic thinking in favor of the wealthy.
“Bidenomics is about the future. Bidenomics is just another way of saying, restore the American dream,” the Chicago Democrat said.
The half-hour speech was designed to reach working and middle-class voters vital to Biden’s reelection hopes in 2024 — many of whom have drifted away from the Democratic party to support populist right-wing Donald Trump.
Biden highlighted hundreds of billions of dollars in public investment during his first two years in office to renew infrastructure and jump-start high-tech manufacturing.
He aimed squarely at Trump’s grassroots by referring to how globalization had destroyed American industrial communities and robbed workers of “dignity, pride, and hope.”
Without naming Trump, whom he defeated in 2020 but could meet again next year, Biden said Republican leaders had brought down the fall with tax cuts for the wealthy in the belief that the benefits would “trickle down” to the common people later.
“Bidenomics,” he said, is a “fundamental break with economic theory that has failed the American middle class for decades now.”
The Democrat’s speech, which was heavily promoted by the White House, also credited the US for a strong recovery from the Covid pandemic shutdown and subsequent supply chain nightmares.
“The US has the highest economic growth rate among the leading economies,” he said.
It is a bold, potentially risky move by Biden to put the economy at the center of his re-election platform, brushing aside months of warnings that the world’s largest economy is still slipping into a post-pandemic recession.
Putting his name on it is even more daring, with Bidenomics deliberately repeating and refuting Republicans’ long-held Reaganomics, referencing the boom of the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
“Biden and the Radical Democrat Congress have single-handedly created the highest inflation rate in a decade,” Trump said in a written post in response to Biden’s speech, falsely claiming that his opponent was “experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great depression” had caused.
– Bidenomics or Reaganomics? –
So far, the sales pitch has struggled to come through – largely because of continued inflationary pressures on a country that had become accustomed to modest price increases.
In fact, a May poll by ABC News/Washington Post found Biden’s scandal-ridden Republican predecessor Trump was 18 percentage points ahead of who best controlled the economy.
But the White House says inflation is slow but steady and that Bidenomics is changing the playing field in a way that benefits the middle class.
Massive spending bills passed by Congress during Biden’s first two years in office are pumping money into green energy technology, semiconductors and no less than $550 billion to renew the country’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure.
National Economic Council executive director Lael Brainard told reporters Tuesday that the Reagan-era trickle-down theory led to the erosion of U.S. industrial cities with offshoring and the abandonment of ambitious infrastructure upgrades.
In contrast, Biden is using government funding as a catalyst for an “explosion of private sector spending in the construction industry,” she said.
Brainard touted funding for broadband Internet expansion to every corner of the United States as an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s epic electrification program to modernize the country in the 1930s.
As for getting voters to join the Bidenomics pitch, that will come as Americans begin to see the funds begin to work, said White House deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton.
“We see spades in the field, we see private investment coming back to our country, we see millions of jobs created. So now is the time, with all those accomplishments, (when) the president can take this message to the American people and say that this is what Bidenomics is,” Dalton said.
“We’re just now starting to feel the impact.”
Biden told supporters at a separate event in Chicago that he is “looking forward” to the re-election battle.
‘Do you know why? Because we have a story to tell,” he said. “We’re not just changing the country, we’re transforming the country.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)