President Biden, a month after the disastrous outcome of the election, touted his administration’s economic record at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Tuesday. “Most economists agree the new administration is going to inherit a fairly strong economy,” Biden said. “It is my profound hope that the new administration will preserve and build on this progress.”
It was the kind of message that Vice President Kamala Harris could have used in her unsuccessful bid for the White House, though she was somewhat hampered by indecision, unsure at times how to praise her role in the Biden administration and at the same time take a step away.
Stressing the positive developments of the Biden administration may have been futile anyway given voters’ concerns about inflation, housing prices and the cost of living, and perhaps most critical, the failure of Democratic voters to turnout as they had done in the previous presidential election.
Biden explained how his administration had reversed the trickle-down economics of the previous decades and currently growing the economy from “the middle out and the bottom up,” rather than fattening the bank accounts of wealthy Americans.
He also emphasized the extent to which his administration had vastly improved the creation of jobs, more than 16 million, recorded the lowest unemployment of any administration in half a century, and experienced the smallest racial wealth gap in a score of years.
Overall, there was nothing new about this speech since portions of it were echoed during Harris’s run for office, though not stressed enough. This may be Biden’s farewell economic address, doing as much as he can to appear as if he’s making substantive gains, particularly for the middle class.
