Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about jobs during a visit to semiconductor manufacturer Wolfspeed Inc., in Durham, North Carolina, March 28, 2023.
It is a lie universally acknowledged as truth that the government is slow, that if you want something done quickly, you turn to the private sector.
Of course, there are a plethora of instances in which government is slow. Consider, for instance, the efforts of the National Labor Relations Board to compel companies to pay workers whom they’ve illegally fired for trying to unionize. Lawbreaking companies can drag this out for years. Of course, that’s because, beginning with the Taft-Hartley Act 75 years ago, companies and their handmaidens in Congress and the courts have stripped the NLRB of the power to enforce this law expeditiously. When the government is slow, that’s often because powerful private-sector actors have slowed it down to their own advantage.
But sometimes, government can be more swift and effective than its critics can even imagine, as the implementation of the three signature pieces of Biden administration/Democratic Congress legislation is now demonstrating. The Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have spurred the economy, which grew by 2.4 percent in the last quarter, well beyond anything the private sector could have accomplished by itself, and in less time than establishment economists thought possible. America is building factories again: The spending on factory construction is up by 76 percent from last year. Business spending on all forms of infrastructure—not just factories but also transportation equipment, software, and the like—is up by 56 percent. Through the magic of Keynes’s multiplier effect, government subsidies and outlays of roughly $300 billion on such projects have led to an increase in business investment of an additional $500 billion. And bolstering all this investment is the consumer purchasing power that has resulted from Biden’s initial stimulus legislation, which ended the COVID recession much more quickly than any recession in American history and yielded near record-low unemployment and levels of labor force participation not seen in many years.
Biden has sometimes been compared to Franklin Roosevelt for his efforts to renew and expand the kind of social insurance and worker empowerment initiatives that FDR undertook. I’d argue that it’s the scope, speed, and success of his public investments that most resemble Roosevelt’s. Facing the actual prospect of mass starvation in the winter of 1933-1934, FDR’s public-works program managed to employ three million Americans—in a nation of 130 million—in just 60 days. The defense spending that began in 1940 in response to the very real threat of the fascist control of all Eurasia built an army that then ranked 39th in the world in size into one that was the world’s largest by 1944, at which time the nation’s production of planes, ships, and tanks exceeded the combined total of all other nations’.
Learning not just from Roosevelt’s successes but also from the failure of the Obama administration to highlight the projects that its stimulus spending had created, Biden and Democrats are now volubly touting the projects that their own stimulus programs have engendered, many of which are already springing up. Given the public’s skepticism about the effects and durability of this economic revival, and the Republicans’ insistence that no such revival exists, Biden & Company know they will have to keep making this case straight through November of next year.
That said, can we acknowledge that Bidenomics is not only successful but speedy? Yes, we can.
