Matt Rourke/AP Photo
At the outset of his presidency, Joe Biden faced a choice. He could follow the model of the early Obama presidency, which responded to the historic job losses of 2008-2009 with a measured stimulus package big enough to stanch those losses but too small to power a rapid recovery, or opt for a massive stimulus that would engender record levels of job creation in the wake of the pandemic’s huge job losses, while also risking some economic overheating.
Biden chose the massive option. His economic team was all too aware of the deficiencies of the 2009 Obama stimulus, which the Republican victories in the 2010 midterm elections made impossible to enlarge. In consequence, it took nearly a full decade for unemployment to drop to low levels, and stranded millions of millennials in lower-paying and less stable employment than might have otherwise been the case. The progressive economists both within and without the Biden White House persuaded the new president that he could spare the country from another bout of prolonged rehab with a stimulus so large it would jump-start purchasing and employment.
The policy worked. The economic recovery from the COVID recession was the swiftest in the nation’s history. Economic historians may well come to view it as no less important than Biden’s revival of industrial policy.
And yet, this achievement has had no apparent impact on today’s election.
To be sure, the size of the stimulus was one of many factors contributing to the price increases that have had a very real impact on today’s election. When we consider the public’s reactions to, and awareness of, the various consequences of that stimulus, the reason for that disparity of political consequences becomes readily apparent: The public—any public—seldom rewards a policymaker for a policy that kept some maladies at bay. Politicians run for office touting the good things they’ve done; there’s seldom an upside in touting how they prevented bad things from happening, since the public’s consciousness (at best) is limited to occurrences (either real or, given today’s Republican Party, fictitious). Prices are palpable, as averted recessions are not.
That’s why the union precinct walkers I accompanied in Las Vegas last month, although they had many pro-Harris talking points, didn’t say that Biden’s push for a quick recovery was the key reason why the tourist trade on which Vegas depends had bounced back as much as it had—despite the fact that it’s uncontestably true. The prices that vex Vegas voters, most particularly in housing, by now have nothing to do with Biden’s economic policies (much less Harris’s), but to raise Bidenomics as a topic is likely to turn the discussion to prices nonetheless.
Harris, of course, has tackled the issue of prices with her attacks on price-gouging on supermarket shelves, and on Wall Street’s increasing control of the housing market, and by pledging to extend Biden’s price reductions on medications. But the signal macroeconomic achievement of the Biden presidency—which put the American economy in far better shape than any other major nation’s—is, quite understandably, not a topic of her discussion. In politics, the rewards for what didn’t happen are all but nonexistent.
