Bye Bye Biden

Joe Biden's initiatives added over $7 trillion in national debt, led to the highest inflation in 50 years, and to the slowest GDP growth rates since the Great Depression.

Thursday, January 23^rd, 2025

Bill Bonner, writing from Baltimore, Maryland

We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing—by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.

—David Brooks

Poor Joe Biden. He shuffles off stage... almost completely forgotten, just hours after having been the world’s most powerful man. He has been pulled from the show.

Let’s recall him... before he disappears, like an old shoe swept away at high tide.

Not that there is anything about the man worth remembering. His career was not marked by courage, grace or intelligence. As a member of the Senate for half a century, he was just a willing, even eager, water carrier for the powers-that-be. Almost every dumb proposal, law, budget and program that pains us today has a greasy smudge of his fingers on it.

When he was elected, in 1972, the US owed $450 billion. Now, the debt is 80 times higher. Properly invested, that $36 trillion would have gone a long way. It would have built 180 million modest houses, for example. Or, at 5%, it should be paying the US $1.8 trillion in dividends each year. Instead, it was spent on misadventures overseas and stimmy bamboozles at home — most of them approved by Joe Biden. And today, ‘We the People’ don’t get $1.8 trillion in dividends... instead, we pay that much in interest... for which we get nothing.

It’s not pronouns, Panama, or presidential pardons that are most likely to trip up Team Trump. It’s ‘boring policy issues.’ And the legacy of Joe Biden, along with George Bush, Barack Obama and Trump himself. The interest expense on US debt has approximately doubled in the last three years. Soon, it will overwhelm us.

Federal deficit spending over the last eight years has driven interest expense on the debt above defense spending, something that only previously happened at much higher interest rates

And there are only two ways to deal with it. The first and only honest way of bringing it under control is the way Javier Milei is doing it in Argentina. Balanced budgets, he says, are ‘non-negotiable.’ No more deficits. No increase to the national debt. Pay as you go.

The other way is the Biden way… let ‘er rip. Keep on spending. Biden, in his four years, added almost as much debt as Trump ($8.4 trillion for Trump, $7.9 trillion for Biden, roughly).

The first thing we see, looking back at four years of Biden’s presidency, is an almost relentless falsity. Everything he did, said, or failed to say was based on cowardice and mendacity. Even the things said about him were mostly lies. Here’s Kamala Harris:

“Joe Biden’s legacy of accomplishment over the last three years is unmatched in modern history.”

Not so. His accomplishment merely added to those of other 21st century presidents, including the one who both preceded and succeeded him. Otherwise, his policies were predictable... fruitless... and maybe criminal.

When Joe Biden ran against Trump in 2020, his promise was that he offered voters a change of direction. The dumbest thing he did was not keeping that promise.

Coming into office in 2021... he could have easily told the truth. By then, it was obvious. The fight against the Covid virus was a fool’s errand. It didn’t do any good to shut down the economy... the virus didn’t care. Sending out trillions in fake-money on false pretenses — the ‘stimmy’ checks’ — was another colossal error.

Taken together with tax cuts and tariffs, these initiatives added over $7 trillion in national debt... led to the highest inflation in 50 years... and to the slowest GDP growth rates since the Great Depression.

Biden could have distanced himself from the wreck. Instead, like a driver following too close in the fog, he added to the pile up. He stuck with Trump’s tariffs, ramped up spending and amplified the Covid hysteria.

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” and “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.”

None of it was true.

Then, Biden offered more money. The American Rescue Act was the third round of stimmy checks, with $5,600 per family of four.

That was almost immediately followed by his $1.2 trillion ‘infrastructure bill’... and his CHIPS act. And then came yet another huge mistake. Forbes:

President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 into law on Aug. 16.

While its name claims it will tame soaring inflation, estimates show that the bill likely won’t do much to pull down the inflation rate... CBO estimates it will have a “negligible effect on inflation” in 2022, and in 2023 it will change inflation somewhere between 0.1 percentage point lower and 0.1 percentage point higher than it is currently.

Rather than draw attention to the real reasons for the inflation of 2022, Biden signed more jackass spending bills. – each one designed to be easy-to-understand, but fundamentally fraudulent and idiotic. Then, as Larry Summers warned, inflation was not Trump’s problem; it was his problem...

And it was bye-bye Team Biden.

Regards,

Bill Bonner