The stock market has since undone much of the damage caused by Monday’s sell-off , alleviating concerns of an imminent recession , but economic danger lights are still flashing.
The unemployment rate has risen steadily every month since January and is now almost a full point higher than it was last year, consumers overstretched on their credit cards are missing payments at near-record rates, and housing is still unaffordable for most people.
This made Monday an odd time for senior adviser Gene Sperling to leave the White House, but President Joe Biden tried to make the best of it by claiming “our economy was reeling” when Sperling was chosen to implement Biden’s $2 trillion American Rescue Plan. “I knew I needed an American Rescue Plan coordinator with the expertise and experience to hit the ground running,” Biden continued. “I’m glad I chose Gene Sperling.”
Whether or not anyone could have effectively implemented Biden’s $2 trillion sugar rush without causing inflation is in doubt. What is not in doubt is that Biden is either lying or suffering from dementia when he claims the economy was “reeling” when he took office. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While the COVID shutdowns did cause the U.S. economy to shrink and the unemployment rate to skyrocket, both economic measures were already recovering by the summer of 2020. Both job and economic growth were already booming, and had been for months, long before Biden ever took office.
Despite warnings from Obama-era Democratic Party economists like National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman, and auto bailout czar Steve Rattner that pouring $2 trillion in deficit spending onto an already red-hot economy was guaranteed to cause inflation, Biden went ahead and did it anyway, apparently convinced by sycophantic historians that he could be the next Franklin Roosevelt.
The resulting worst inflationary crisis in 40 years has been a disaster for working people, and their real wages are still 4% lower than they were when Biden took office. But as bad as inflation was under Biden — inflation caused by Biden’s hubristic spending — it is important to recognize that both the deficit spending and resulting inflation would have been far worse under a President Kamala Harris.
According to credible reports , Harris wanted a much larger $4 trillion stimulus package, including spending not just on hard infrastructure such as roads and bridges but also through massive handouts to the healthcare industry and secular daycare providers. Biden reportedly dismissed Harris’s outlandish proposals immediately, thus avoiding even worse economic pain than he ended up causing.
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But if Harris wins in November, Biden will not be there to check Harris’s radical left-wing instincts. If Harris wins, there will be no adult in the room to tell her that decriminalizing illegal immigration, giving free healthcare to illegal immigrants, and banning plastic straws are all truly terrible ideas.
Biden has truly earned his historically low economic approval rating. Harris’s would only be far, far worse.
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