Bidenomics, with its obsolete preference for big-government central planning, certainly proved lucrative for its namesake Joe Biden’s cronies and political favorites.
For everyday Americans and our innovation economy, however, not so much.
To illustrate, following four years of Bidenomics the average American family pays nearly $20,000 per year more for the same basket of goods and services than they did four years ago when Biden entered office and implemented his disastrous economic agenda.
Nevertheless, Biden took to the podium this week in trademark tone-deaf fashion to claim false economic triumph and plead against the reversal of his policies:
After decades of trickle-down economics that primarily benefitted those at the very top, we’ve written a new book that’s growing the economy. The middle-out and the bottom-up. That benefits, thus far, everyone. And that’s going to be the test going forward.
Closing that Bidenomics book, however, is precisely why voters resoundingly cast him and his party out of the White House and both houses of Congress.
Unwilling to accept that rejection by the American electorate, the Biden White House is instead frantically shoveling taxpayer dollars out the door toward its political favorites. “We have 42 days left to sprint to the finish line,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients brazenly boasted.
That outrageous and arrogant approach of empowering federal bureaucrats rather than free markets and free people to boost economic growth and innovation will only deepen the problem and make recovery under the next administration more difficult. Rewarding economic losers on the basis of political favoritism must be ended, not accelerated.
Yet the Biden administration is stepping on the gas, no pun intended. Namely, it just rewarded failing electric vehicle maker Rivian Automotive, one of its political favorites, with $6 billion in new loans.
Equally outrageous is the Biden administration’s mismanagement of a program about which it often boasts, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act.
Although well-intentioned, the CHIPS Act offers the latest cautionary tale of a program that fell victim to the Department of Commerce’s social activism and defective central planning.
Specifically, as damningly detailed by Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson in The Hill, Biden Commerce Department technocrats imposed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates on CHIPS Act grant recipients. Such mandates included requirements that companies like Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), and Samsung satisfy a left-wing wish list, including affirmative action programs of the sort that the United States Supreme Court has increasingly ruled unconstitutional.
Accordingly, Senator Ted Cruz (R – Texas) and fourteen fellow Senators rightly demanded that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo abandon those irrelevant and illegal mandates in favor of actually implementing the CHIPS Act in an efficient manner to achieve its underlying goals.
“The CHIPS Act,” their letter read, “was passed by Congress for the purpose of reversing the decline of the domestic semiconductor industry. Instead, your Department has included in the NOFO extraneous environmental-social-governance (ESG) requirements that seek to enact progressive policies that had been previously rejected by Congress.”
Those far-left policy preferences included child care requirements, pro-union labor provisions, affirmative action programs, subsidized housing and mass transportation mandates, stock buyback and dividend regulations, government confiscation of so-called “excess profits” and extremist environmental “Green New Deal” demands.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s mismanagement of the CHIPS Act continued to reward Intel despite its accumulating performance failures, strategic miscalculations, and mass layoffs. Those giveaways included billions of dollars of CHIPS Act funding, a $25 billion tax incentive,e and up to $11 billion in federal loans.
Obviously, the Biden administration prefers to reward political favorites rather than success in the marketplace.
Now, rather than learn from its mistakes and correct course, the Biden administration instead seeks to double down on its failed policies in its remaining days.
Bidenomics remains, at its core, an agenda of bigger government run by partisan appointees who care more about imposing a social agenda than cultivating economic growth and innovation. The bigger the government, the greater its power to artificially pick winners and losers. The smaller the government, the less able it is to engage in cronyism, allowing markets to flourish.
That latter course worked well before Biden’s arrival, and that’s what the American people chose to endorse in this year’s election.
Our elected leaders must accordingly do whatever they can to stop this last-minute “sprint to the finish line” by Biden cronies and reverse it as necessary beginning in January.
Timothy H. Lee is Senior Vice President of legal and public affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom.
Reprinted with permission from Center For Individual Freedom (CFIF) – By Timothy H. Lee
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.