In defense of "Bidenomics"

 So, I've been thinking lately and I've kind of realized that one of the reasons I feel so defensive of Biden this election cycle is because I recognize that if he goes down, so does support for my ideal economic system and way of doing things. 

After all, Americans' often cite inflation as their #1 issue, and having talked to a lot of people, a big thing that people are blaming the inflation on is too much pandemic money. It's those darned $1400 checks, or extended unemployment money making it where we injected tons of cash into the economy causing tons of inflation, or that it made people lazy where they don't want to work any more. A lot of this is pure nonsense. The real causes were a combination of supply chain issues post COVID as well as corporate greed, but I also realize this. The right is trying really hard to sabotage the idea that giving money to people is a good thing, and my whole economic ideology is based around giving money to people. They also like to blame inflation on workers being lazy because of the money while I want to make work more voluntary so that we don't have to work as hard in the future. As such, I kind of realize that if Biden's relatively mild and milquetoast actions are blamed for inflation, and the republicans are able to spin this narrative that everything related to current problem is Biden's fault, that Trump's economic ideas are the bees knees, and that Biden's ideas should never be repeated again, then that means that my own ideas are dead in the water. As such, I feel a need to discuss the inflation issues, and the similarities between my ideas and Biden's, as well as ideas we practiced during COVID in general. 

The real cause of inflation

To me, I would say the real cause of inflation is the economic shocks caused by 2020 and 2021. The economy is normally a fine tuned machine. We use the federal reserve as a pacemaker to target the proper amount of jobs that exist in the economy, in order to balance between inflation and unemployment. If unemployment gets too low, excessive worker bargaining power might drive up the price of labor, and this drives up the cost of everything. In order to control the inflation rate, we sometimes try to induce more unemployment, such as what we did in 1982 to get stagflation under control. There are situations where high unemployment and inflation can exist simultaneously, such as stagflation, which was caused by an oil crisis in the 1970s, but generally, the inverse relation between unemployment and inflation is known as the phillips curve, and it was the basis of the Keynesian economic ideology practiced during the new deal, and to a lesser extent, it's still practiced today via how the federal reserve targets the interest rates. Dean Baker, the author of "The End of Loser Liberalism" often talks about how we need to have a slightly less inflation conscious monetary policy in order to improve worker bargaining power. I agree, of course, although my own policies are a lot more pandemic era-like than his. We'll get to that a bit later.

Anyway, in 2020, when the pandemic hit, we shut down much of the economy. We made the workers necessary for the functioning of the economy keep working, we laid off those who were "nonessential", and we made as much stuff remote as humanly possible to minimize human physical contact that would spread COVID. This caused the unemployment rate to skyrocket to 14% and GDP to crater by around a third (nonessential workers made up about a third of the economy). The conservatives, by the way, protested these actions. They literally were talking about sacrificing grandma for the sake of the economy in a sick sociopathic display of profits over people. I'll get into their motivations more later, and where they were coming from, and where they're coming from now, but long story short, they basically saw this shift away from work as a fundamental threat to their ideology so they worked to sabotage all progress on the left. 

Anyway, a year later, under president Biden, the economy reopened. And suddenly everyone wanted to hire at once. And everyone wanted to spend money at once. And there was too much demand, following too few goods. You could claim it was stimulus, but honestly, the ones who needed $1400 checks and pandemic era unemployment the most were probably not the ones spending in my opinion. The primary people spending were middle class households who had simply saved money through covid and wanted to go back to normal right away all at once. Everyone wanted to go on vacation. Everyone wanted to go out to denny's after church on sunday. Everyone wanted to catch up on the world that had shut down a year ago. A lot of people didn't enjoy being cooped up in their house doing nothing, so there was a massive surge of demand. There was a massive surge of businesses looking to hire workers, and the economy came back too strong. We just didn't have enough workers to fill the positions, and suddenly we started blaming everyone on pandemic money and lazy people not wanting to work. In reality, as I see it, it's not lazy people not wanting to work that's the problem here. It's the fact that there were too many jobs for the amount of demand that existed. If the economy opened slowly over the course of a year, perhaps the inflationary spike wouldn't have happened, but what happens when you stretch and the snap a rubber band over and over again? Well, eventually it breaks, and in a sense, that's what happened here. The economy is normally this fine tuned machine, and suddenly after reopening, all of the variables were out of whack. Shocking the economy is one of the worst things you can do to it. While changing things slowly, over time, can produce good results, suddenly closing the economy all at once caused an apocalyptic recession, and then reopening it all at once caused a surge of demand and inflation. It took years to get back to normal, and corporations decided to exploit that by, quite frankly, price gouging. Yes, corporations decided to hike things just to exploit the situation and make it worse are the huge reason why things got worse. The money didn't go to workers and wages as much, it mostly went to corporate profits. Conservatives will argue that if we had no pandemic era stimulus that this wouldn't have happened, but I think this is just fundamentally wrong. While obviously, people having money is going to contribute a little to inflation, and I would argue, to some degree, some inflation is a sign of a healthy middle class that can afford to spend money on goods and services, $1400 isn't even enough to cover one month's rent, and pandemic era unemployment went to those who were unemployed and needed the money to live. It also only lasted 6 months, so people were running out not long after COVID ended. Clearly stimulus money is a drop in the bucket here. The problem with the economy is much more fundamental and comes from all of the variables that are normally tuned to specific economic conditions being thrown out of whack by shutting the entire economy down and turning it on again. And the solution to that inflation is difficult to implement. Some want to use the federal reserve to ramp up interest rates to contract the number of jobs available. This would impose "worker discipline" on people, ie, throw people out of work, and then make them more willing to accept low wages and poor working conditions. Biden has resisted doing this, knowing that it would cause a lot of pain to people, with unclear benefits. While it might eventually force businesses to stop price gouging as much, it would do so by severely limited how much money people had, because they couldn't find work. So Biden has been just, kind of waiting out the inflation, hoping it passes and doesn't threaten his reelection. 

Why it matters to in particular

As a Yang styled human centered capitalist with an anti work streak to my politics, a lot of my ideas have parallels with the current situation. I also want to separate workers into essential and nonessential categories, and shift toward a world where people work less. I too want to give people money for doing nothing but sitting on their butts. The difference is I would not force people to quit their jobs due to a global pandemic, nor would I condition the money specifically to being unemployed (basic income would be given to everyone whether they work or not). From there, i would let people choose. Work, don't work, work part time, do what you want. In a sense, I kinda LIKED the pandemic. I don't like normal economic life under capitalism. I'm sorry, I don't. The simple life of the government giving me money and me not having to work appeals to me, and it always has. I've known, even before COVID, that we could shift the economy in such a way, and if anything, I saw COVID as a trial run for my ideas in a sense. Obviously, it's not a 1:1. I would expect the number of people who stop working being far smaller than existed under covid, as most would still prefer to work in some capacity. I would expect the inflationary effects to be less. I would expect, assuming we phase in ideas over time, virtually no shocks that mess up the economy. I mean, to me, the ideas I believe in are sound. We can give people a UBI, make work more voluntary, and allow people to choose to live as they want to live, with far fewer problems than existed under COVID. it's just a matter of implementing the ideas PROPERLY.

I also like things that happened during COVID like remote work. I think that it makes peoples' lives easier and more pleasant. I don't value the office. I dont value bosses watching over their workers like hawks to make sure they're not "time thieves". I don't value dress codes and office culture and commutes. I value the end result of productivity. That is all. The easier way of doing things, the better. But, many wanted to keep things the same. They didn't want change, and it's about control. 

Some people don't want a new world without work

The fact is, since 2020, the right has been waging a culture war against pandemic era policy, and obviously, Bidenomics. Conservatives have a simple economic perspective. They want a small government economy with low taxes, no wealth redistribution, and everyone works and pulls their own weight. Work ethic is very important to the right, and they quite frankly saw pandemic era policy as a threat to their value system.

Think about it. Overnight, we just stopped forcing people to work. We just started giving people checks for doing nothing. We encouraged them to sit on the couch and watch Netflix for the good of the country. We encouraged them to work remotely and stop going to the office. Maybe that hobbled out of bed at 7:59 AM in their PJs, turned on their PC, and clocked in at 8. Maybe they got their work done by noon and spent the rest of the day off. Maybe they worked in their PJs all day instead of a suit. Maybe people would eventually grow accustomed to such a lifestyle and not want to go back to normal. 

The right realized this was a threat to their value system and way of life, so they fought like hell to go back to normal at all costs. To reopen the economy, to not shut anyone down, and if people died, they died. I'm serious, GOP officials argued that sacrificing the elderly and sick for the good of the economy was a sacrifice they were willing to make. For them, this is ideological and cultural. They fear this new world where we move away from everyone working all the time, so they actively attempted to sabotage it, and after the economy reopened, they quickly sought to go back to normal as quickly as possible.

But it didn't stop there, as inflation surged, the attacks started. It's all the government money. Those darned $1400 checks, pandemic unemployment. No one wants to work any more. I know such and such who knows such and such and he said he didn't wanna work because of Biden's pandemic era unemployment, blah blah blah, it just continues nonstop. And as inflation continues to rage, they're droning on and on about how if Trump were still in office this wouldn't have happened (it would have), and that this is all Biden's fault and blah blah blah.

And sadly...people believe them. Presidents often get blamed for economic conditions regardless of whether it's their fault or not, and they're really hammering Biden on this, blaming inflation on pandemic era policies and Biden's stimulus. And I kind of realize if the GOP gets away with this smear, it's game over. Any progressive economic policies that Biden tried to implement, or anything that remotely resembles a UBI will be dead in the water. The GOP will just go "remember the Biden years? Do you want to try that again?" and people will believe them. I know this because we've seen this before. This is what they did to Carter. They treated Reaganomics like it was the end all be all of all good economics while everything Carter did was horrible. Reaganomics and modern conservative ideology is actually a repudiation of the remnants of new deal ideology that existed at the time. And it took 40 years of conservative rule for us to even get back to discussing this stuff.

This is why I'm being defensive of Biden and the democrats in 2024, I fully recognize that under the current circumstances, if Biden loses, the argument won't be that Biden wasn't progressive enough and he needed to do more to win back voters. The argument will be that Biden did TOO MUCH, and that we need to go back to Trump and his MAGA approach. Seriously a lot of voters act like Trump was some sort of economic genius and that his policies are exactly what we need. And if we throw Biden to the wolves this election cycle, the left might not come back from this for decades. The democrats will be forced to move to the right to appeal to those suburbanite voters fleeing the GOP, while the populists stay with Trump, and that's our economics for the next 30-40 years. There will be no left wing movement. The democrats will stay hard neoliberal and third way, and the republicans will be more reaganomics with a populist twist. And that's ignoring the threat Donald Trump presents to democracy itself.

Vote like your life depends on it

 I know it's tempting to vote third party. I know that Kyle Kulinski recently endorsed Jill Stein over the weekend. And I know it's tempting to wanna vote for someone like Stein. The greens might not be amazing on UBI, but they nominally support it in their platform. Idk how serious they are about it, but they do support it. They also support medicare for all, free college, and a lot of other amazing policies that I either partially or full throatedly support. But....again, if we don't back our guy in the democrats (Biden), the fear I have is that given the greater opposition from Biden comes from the right, and it's mostly over inflation, and a lot of people are being driven to trump over inflation, the narrative will just end up in such a way that Biden gets "jimmy cartered". He gets blamed for everything that went wrong in the recovery from COVID, and then we can't have nice things electorally, like, ever. 

So...yeah. for the love of god, vote for Biden. I gotta defend Biden. As I see it, the success of my ideas and ideology is tied to Biden whether I like it or not. Because if the country won't tolerate Biden, how will they ever tolerate my ideas? And yeah. That's yet another reason why I have to endorse Biden. I'm playing defensive this time, guys. I feel like I gotta save Biden's legacy here. Because if his legacy is that of Jimmy Carter's, say goodbye to any nice things in our lifetime.