Right now, Joe Biden’s biggest enemy in the 2024 election is Joe Biden.
If you are an incumbent president, there are many possible recipes for success in re-election—but slow and declining economic growth topped with persistently high inflation is not one of them.
The economic news is ugly for the country, which will get over it eventually, and even uglier for Joe Biden, who may not get over it at all.
After two consecutive quarters of “Don’t Call This a Recession!” GDP contraction, growth had got up to more than 3 percent in the third quarter of last year, and then it declined to 2.6 percent in the next quarter, and then declined even more, to a meager 1.1 percent, in the most recent quarter. The economy moves in years-long cycles—small comfort to a frail 80-year-old man with an election in 555 days.
Nobody cares about GDP. Everybody cares about payday.
But when it comes to paychecks, stagnation would be an improvement: Real wages (meaning inflation-adjusted wages) for Americans overall today are $10 a week lower than they were when Joe Biden took office. Real wages for men are $18 a week lower; real wages for African Americans are $9 a week lower.
Inflation, meanwhile, remains bananas. (Bananas? Yes: Real wages are down, and the price of bananas is up 6 percent.) While inflation in energy and goods has slowed down a little bit, inflation in services continues to run hot. Services mean everything from an Uber ride to medical care to airfares, and that inflation rate is running at more than 7 percent.
That’s going to hurt summer vacationers: As of March, airfares were still 10% above their pre-COVID level; hotel prices were up 19%; food away from home was up 24%; car rental fees were up more than 50%.
Joe Biden ran for president as a “return to normal” guy after the convulsions of the Trump presidency, and even boasted that he would be—in the stupid language of modern politics—a “unifier.” Nobody ever took that bipartisanship stuff seriously: Biden is, after all, the cynical buffoon who once told a black audience that the mild and moderate Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”
But there was some hope that the Biden team, if not Biden himself, would achieve a level of basic competence—the steady hand on the tiller that so often seemed absent under Trump.
But this new normal is not the normal Americans wanted to return to. Inflation is still running at about twice what it has for the past couple of decades, and GDP growth is currently at half what it averaged in the George W. Bush years.
It would take a very special set of political skills for an energetic and talented politician to overcome the deficit Biden is in. Joe Biden, who ran for the presidency four times between the ages of 44 and 77 and finally won the office after a truly unlikely series of events—a worldwide viral epidemic, the mental meltdown of the game-show host who preceded him in the office, and an amazingly vacuous Democratic primary field—does not give the impression of being a political Hercules at rest.
Instead of a return to normal, Biden has done his best to keep the country in a state of constant emergency, making the inflation problem worse with catastrophically incontinent spending measures, continuing Trump’s imbecilic protectionism, and constantly threatening a fundamental overhaul of an economy that really needs, most of all, a few years of peace and quiet that will give it time to heal.
The less we hear from Biden, the better for everyone—including Biden.
For once, it is the Republicans who are behaving at least half-sensibly. The GOP debt-ceiling bill would put a 1% limit on increases in discretionary spending (“discretionary” means that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would not be affected by the cap).
It would also claw back some $30 billion in unspent COVID-relief money—it is a very sensible policy to stop emergency spending when the emergency has stopped.
Additionally, the bill also would impose some modest work requirements on able-bodied welfare recipients—a policy that achieved decent but positive results when Biden voted for it back in the 1990s. Biden should agree to all of that, because it is good policy and good politics both. A reasonably intelligent bipartisan consensus on a routine matter such as reducing debt is precisely what the country needs right now.
And if Biden wants to take a nap afterward, that probably would be good politics, too.
