Joe Biden is crushing it.

In Chicago today, President Joe Biden gave a historic speech at the Old Post Office Building downtown. In it, he was crystal clear that he has launched a new economic vision for the United States to stand against that of today’s Republicans. As he has said since he took office, he intends to build the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up instead of just the top down.”

His vision, he said, “is a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now.”

That theory is “trickle-down economics,” the idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy and for corporations while shrinking public investment in infrastructure and public education will nurture the economy. Under that theory the most important metric was a company’s bottom line, Biden pointed out, so companies reduced costs by taking factories and supply chains overseas to find cheap labor, leaving “entire towns and communities…hollowed out.” It also meant cutting taxes, which led to dramatic cuts in public investments in infrastructure, research, social programs and so on, with the idea that concentrating money in a few hands would prompt private investment in the economy. That investment would, the theory went, provide more jobs and enable everyone to prosper.

This is the worldview that the Republicans have embraced since 1980 and that, Biden said, has “failed the middle class. It failed America. It blew up the deficit. It increased inequity. And it weakened…our infrastructure. It stripped the dignity, pride, and hope out of communities one after another…. People working as hard as ever couldn’t get ahead because it’s harder to buy a home, pay for a college education, start a business, retire with dignity. [For] the first time in a generation, the path of the middle class seemed out of reach,” Biden said.  

“Today, the U.S. has had the highest economic growth among the world’s leading economies since the pandemic. We’ve added over 13 million jobs, more jobs in two years than any president has added in a four-year term.​ And folks, that’s no accident.

“That’s Bidenomics in action,” Biden said in a 37-minute speech in the Old Post Office’s lobby.

By the numbers: Gross domestic product grew at a 2% annualized rate in the first quarter, a notable upward revision from the most recent estimate of 1.3% (and the first estimate of 1.1%). The quicker pace is a result of stronger growth in exports and consumer spending, particularly on services.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden vowed Friday to push ahead with a new plan providing student loan relief for millions of borrowers, while blaming Republican “hypocrisy” for triggering the day’s Supreme Court decision that wiped out his original effort.

Biden said his administration had already begun the process of working under the authority of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which he called “the best path that remains to provide as many borrowers as possible with debt relief.”

In the meantime, since student loan-payment requirements are to resume in the fall, the White House is creating a
n “on ramp” to repayment and implementing ways to ease borrowers’ threat of default if they fall behind over the next year.

AvgMSUJoe wrote:He's always said he didn't want to alter the court. Wonder if this shit changes his outlook. Get majorities in 2024 (thanks trump)... then pack it?

It turns out that economic systems — just like political decision-making systems — that are driven from the bottom up are far more resilient than those dictated from the top-down, and Biden brought the proof.

Wednesday night, President Biden gave a speech in Chicago that was almost entirely ignored by our corporate media. It should have been front-page news, because he not only declared war on Reagan’s neoliberalism, but he also declared major victories on the road to recovering an American economy that works for everybody, not just the morbidly rich:

“I’m here in Chicago today,” Biden said, “for the first quarter of the 21st century, to talk about the economic vision for this country: the economy that grows the economy from the middle out and the bottom up instead of just the top down. When that happens, everybody does well. The wealthy still do — (applause) — everybody does well. The poor have a ladder up, and the wealthy still do well. We all do well.”

Biden then went straight for the jugular, calling out Reagan’s rejection of the New Deal and the Great Society and the GOP’s replacement of them with neoliberalism in the most blunt of terms:

“This vision is a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now. It’s called trickle-down economics — fundamental economics, trickle-down. The idea was — it’s the belief that we should cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations — and … I’m tired of waiting for the trickle-down. It doesn’t come very quickly. Not much trickled down on my dad’s kitchen table growing up.”

Biden also pointed out how Reagan established the model for gutting our government. Ron DeSantis was simply following in Reagan’s footsteps when, this week, he promised to eliminate the departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, and the IRS if he becomes president.

It’s the modern Republican way: Trump got rid of almost half the scientists at the EPA, laid off workers at the IRS and Social Security administration, and filled the Justice Department with rightwing neofascists who still resist investigating many of his crimes.

The employment to population ratio, which the World Bank considers an indicator of how efficiently the economy supplies jobs for people who want to work, was 80.9% for people 25 to 54 years old, the highest it’s been in more than 20 years. Women’s employment to population ratio was 75.3%, exceeding its high before the pandemic of 74.6%.

In the past two years, according to a recent working paper by economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew, Biden’s policies have wiped out a quarter of the inequality built in the previous forty. And at the same time that Biden’s resurrection of the liberal consensus of the years from 1933 to 1980 is illustrating that the economic problems in the country were the fault of Republican policies rather than of marginalized people, the extremism of those angry Republican footsoldiers is revealing that they are not the centrist Americans they have claimed to be.

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin summed up the day’s news when she tweeted: “3% inflation. NATO growing and more solid than ever. huge investment in tech and infrastructure. And Rs? Screeching about Hunter Biden's laptop and defunding the FBI. Simply pathetic.”

The Republican Party is now “handcuffed to Donald Trump,” Marshall writes.

President Biden’s policy of focusing on his job while letting the Republicans define themselves might be a smart strategy.

“They said, ‘Why am I so pro-union?’” the president recounted. “And I said, ‘Because it helps you.’ It really does. Think about it. The total cost of a major project goes down when you have the best workers in the world doing it. Not a joke. It’s true.”

In fact, small businesses have boomed under this administration; there were 10.5 million small business applications in its first two years and those numbers continue strong.


This is the same pattern the U.S. saw during the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century and during the New Deal of the 1930s. In both of those eras, established business leaders insisted that government regulation was bad for the economy and that any attempts to limit their power came from workers who were at least flirting with socialism. But in fact entrepreneurs and small businesses were always part of the coalition that wanted such regulation. They needed it to level the playing field enough to let them participate.

The effects of this turnaround in the government’s approach to economic consolidation is a big deal. It is already having real effects on our lives, and offers to do more: saving consumers money, protecting workers’ wages and safety, and promoting small businesses, especially in rural areas. It’s another part of this administration’s rejection of the top-down economy that has shaped the country since 1981.

When discussing the agenda known as “Bidenomics,” liberals often treat the Rust Belt as the ground zero of U.S. presidential politics. Because of lingering trauma from Donald Trump’s 2016 victories in the region, they look for signs that President Biden’s efforts to rebuild the nation’s manufacturing base might again put the region firmly in the blue column for the long term.

But that focus misses a story hiding in plain sight. Bidenomics has the potential to reshape presidential politics in another way: by hastening a transformation that’s making Sun Belt states such as Arizona and Georgia increasingly important to the Democratic path to an electoral-college majority.

Those two states are seeing outsize gains from three major economic bills that Biden signed in 2021 and 2022, which are spurring massive investments in green energy, semiconductor manufacturing and infrastructure.

President Biden appears to think he can negotiate with these people who want to remake America in Pinochet’s image (with the same type of Chicago School neoliberal advisors who helped Pinochet turn Chile into an autocratic nightmare).

He’s wrong.

sεяεηιτλ wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-democracy-dies-the-first-month-6a3

Trump seems to be upping his usage of the word Fascism and fascists to his base. He and his people are fascists, without a doubt, but this exposure of the word by Trump to his base are brainwashing them so they feel they know what it means without actually knowing what it means, therfore they couldn't possibly be fascists. He's trying to make the word lose its power. I really can't fathom just how fucked in the head you have to be to recognize that, accept that you are fascist, and then run with an insidious campaign against the word to brainwash your fans to think they couldn't actually be fascists. This guy is literally attacking our country in slow motion. Slowly, and then fast he will pounce. Get ready