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Bidenomics

Industrial Policy Is A Good Idea, But So Far We Don’t Have One

In a remarkable and comprehensive book, forthcoming from Cambridge, Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher provide a theoretical, historical, and up-to-date review of industrial policies, in the United States and elsewhere, as well as a decent summary of the main Biden initiatives: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act, as of late 2023. Their goal is to justify, defend, and extend the case for industrial policies, which they do with admirably fair attention to unsuccessful past cases. Mine in this essay is narrower: mainly to describe the specific goals of President Biden’s programs.

Bidenomics And Its Discontents

Unemployment is low. Inflation has fallen. Real earnings are rising. GDP growth has held up—so far. The economists are happy, but for some reason the voters are not! It must be their own ignorance and obtuseness—so says Paul Krugman, house economist of The New York Times. The other possibility—however horrible to contemplate—is that perhaps the voters are sensible and the economists are obtuse. And perhaps the indicators on which economists rely no longer mean what economists suppose them to mean. Take the unemployment rate. It is a ratio of those seeking work to the whole active labor force.

Reading The Mess The Democrats Have Made

At writing, we are 16 months and five days from the 2024 presidential election. If a week is a long time in politics, there is too strong a chance that the interim upon us will prove one of awful eventfulness. In my read, the risk of brazen lawlessness in the upper reaches of power and, in consequence, a constitutional crisis, is now greater than at any point in the postwar period. It is time to brace ourselves against this eventuality. Is there any other plausible conclusion as things now stand? I do not see one. Two reasons: One, the Democrats have emerged since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 as a party of liberal authoritarians intent on imposing their political hegemony on our republic by whatever means this project requires.

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