Susan Walsh/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s economic playbook and the future of the American economy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, December 10, 2024.
Yesterday, the Prospect ran an article by President Biden in which he justly took credit for the groundbreaking economic policies he’d advanced and implemented during his White House tenure. Just today, one of the most emblematic of those policies took effect, when the Federal Trade Commission finalized its ruling that vendors, such as hotels and concert-ticket purveyors, had to list their “junk fees” up front, rather than surprising purchasers with add-ons after they’ve already made their purchases.
This is one of those policies that the Trump administration would repeal at its own risk (though that risk might be mitigated if such outlets as Fox News and Joe Rogan declined to report it). And this raises the larger question of how much of Bidenomics—particularly those elements that marked a sea change in America’s economic direction—will endure.
There’s no doubt that a good number of the policies affecting the relationships of workers and consumers with business will be reversed. The antitrust policies of such stellar appointees as Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter aren’t likely to be continued, not with Trump’s Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors fairly foaming at the prospect of more mergers and acquisitions. Even as greater corporate concentration is sure to raise prices that will vex Trump’s voters (not to mention, everybody else), the return of a Predators’ Ball mindset will likely eclipse the ostensible populism on which MAGA is premised. When the Democrats do eventually regain power, however, there’s a fair chance that the neo-Brandeisian policies that have steered Biden’s regulatory agencies will return, if only because the monopsony control of markets will have become all the greater.
A grimmer fate, I fear, awaits workers who seek to join or form unions. Beyond question, Biden’s National Labor Relations Board has been the first since FDR’s and Harry Truman’s to enforce workers’ rights by imposing real penalties on employers who break the law to suppress their employees’ legal efforts to unionize. Trump might conceivably want to help the Teamsters’ efforts to organize Amazon, not just because Teamster president Sean O’Brien boosted his campaign, but also because Amazon’s founder and foremost shareholder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, which Trump hates for its accurate reporting on him. But that would likely require the kind of across-the-board pro-worker rulings at Trump’s NLRB that would never fly with American business in general, with Elon Musk in particular, and ultimately with Trump himself.
By contrast, the most fundamental Biden policy innovation may be the hardest to reverse: his industrial policy. Biden can rightly boast of the boom in factory construction that resulted from his Inflation Reduction Act, which is currently funding the return of manufacturing to regions of the country that private capital abandoned for the siren call of cheap labor in the developing world. Comparing Biden’s record on reindustrialization to Trump’s during his first term makes clear that the kind of government support for strategic industries that Biden promoted beats Trump’s emphasis on tariffs by a factor of a helluva lot.
As many have pointed out, however, those factories take time to be built and get up and running—meaning that the economic boost they will provide didn’t come in time to affect the outcome of November’s election. For that matter, manufacturing has become so mechanized that today’s factories employ just a fraction of the workers that the factories that dominated the economy during Biden’s and Trump’s youth did. Moreover, if new factories are to spur the economy and provide the kind of blue-collar incomes that enabled workers to support their families in the middle of the 20th century, any industrial policy going forward will have to continue to link federal support for such factories to adequate pay and benefits for their workers, as most of the Biden administration’s grants did (at Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation, but not at Gina Raimondo’s Department of Commerce). That matters because the pay advantage that the manufacturing workforce once enjoyed over other blue-collar and retail workers has vanished as the rate of their unionization has declined. Even if Trump pushes a form of industrial policy under a different name, then, don’t count on a governmental preference for decent-paying manufacturing jobs.
Unlike Biden’s industrial-policy legislation, his Build Back Better proposals to create a more adequate Child Tax Credit and affordable child care would have promptly put money into parents’ pockets, and his proposal for paid sick leave would have resonated with tens of millions of American workers. These policies couldn’t clear the barrier of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, however, meaning that the most tangible benefits of Bidenomics were limited to a reindustrialization that was only just being born.
All that said, why did the American public view Bidenomics as a failure? The high cost of basics—food and housing top the list—is the leading reason, of course. The FTC’s recent court victory that blocked the merger of Albertsons and Kroger made clear that Biden’s opposition to corporate concentration can actually combat inflationary prices, but this action came after Election Day and was generally out of the public eye. More fundamentally, voters don’t often reward governments for averting bad things. As events would have it, Bidenomics averted a huge bad thing with its massive recovery stimulus: a post-pandemic recession and slow recovery that would have seen high unemployment rates linger for years, as they did in the rest of the postindustrial world. But even a far more skillful politician than Biden would have trouble winning elections with a message of “Look what we kept from happening!”
Finally, Biden’s messaging didn’t match the scope and merits of his policies. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t just sign Social Security, the minimum wage, workers’ rights, and financial regulation into law, he sold them to the American people through repeated and persuasive “fireside chat” radio broadcasts and eloquent (though not highfalutin) speeches. By sad contrast, even before Biden’s staff began to limit his major addresses as aging took a toll on him, Biden wasn’t up to the kind of explanatory duties that the presidency requires—much less a presidency that was advancing landmark economic policies to benefit workers and consumers. It may also be that the current media landscape, in which vastly more Americans get their news, or “news,” from social media rather than, say, newspapers, has made it harder than it was in Roosevelt’s time to build public awareness of public policy. Whatever its multiple causes, the political failure of Bidenomics was partly—though by no means entirely—one of messaging.
