Launched in the race for his re-election in 2024, the American President, Joe Biden, has bet everything on the solidity of the American economy and the revival of its industry, the fruit, according to him, of its ” Bidenomics “, name he gave Wednesday to his reforms during a speech in Chicago.
Moreover, his reforms must make it possible to “restore the American dream”, assured the American president, for whom it is a question of investing “in our people”. “We are strengthening the middle class and we want growth that benefits everyone,” he said.
“For 40 years, the trickle-down theory has limited this dream. THE Bidenomics are the future, they are another way to restore the American dream, because it has worked in the past,” Biden said.
Joe Biden also sees it as the cause of the strong recovery of the American economy, after the shutdown caused by the pandemic and then the disruption of global supply chains. ” THE Bidenomics are the will to completely rebuild the economy along three fundamental axes: to make smart investments, to strengthen the middle class through education, and to help small businesses in order to stimulate competition”, he added to describe his major reforms.
The choice to place the economy at the heart of his campaign is however bold and potentially risky for Joe Biden, as the world’s largest economy could still experience recession in the second half of the year.
And associating its name with it in this way is even more so, by promoting its Bidenomicsreferring to Reaganomicsthe economic boom of the 1980s that occurred under President Ronald Reagan, which remains the benchmark for Republicans.
Before leaving Washington for Chicago, the American president had already been provocative, explaining to the press to hear “every month that the recession is forecast for the next”, while now the consensus is “that we will not experience the recession”. .
Bidenomics versus Reaganomics?
For the moment, the speech has some difficulties to be heard, mainly because of the persistent inflationary pressure in a country accustomed for decades to a weak rise in prices.
An opinion poll carried out in May for ABC and the washington post even placed former President Donald Trump 18 points ahead of Joe Biden on the question of the best to manage the economy.
For his predecessor, who was also a candidate for the Republican primary, the Bidenomics instead “created the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.” “Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress have created the highest inflation in decades. […] The inflation and high interest rates that Biden has created have caused a banking crisis, a disaster of historic proportions,” Donald Trump said in a statement.
The White House stresses that inflation is on the downward slope, albeit slowly but persistently, and that Bidenomics are changing the rules of the game, to the benefit of the middle class.
The major investments voted by Congress during the first two years of the president’s mandate have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into energy transition and semiconductors, but also infrastructure, for which no less than 550 billion dollars are planned. .
According to Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, Joe Biden is using public finance as a catalyst to “create a boom in private sector spending on building factories”, where economic policy during the Reagan era had led to the abandonment of industrial cities under the effect of relocation and the abandonment of ambitious infrastructure projects.
According to her, the financing of high-speed Internet connection throughout the territory is thus a reminder of the massive electrification effort carried out under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to modernize the country in the 1930s.
As for the possibility that voters end up buying into the argument of the Bidenomicsit will largely depend on their concrete observation, or not, of the effect of spending near their homes, estimated with the press Olivia Dalton, deputy spokesperson for the White House.
“We see diggers in action, private investment coming back into our country, we see millions of jobs being created. It is now a question, with all these successes, of conveying the President’s message and of showing the Americans that all this is the fruit of the Bidenomics “, she explained.
“And this is only the beginning of their effects,” said M.me Dalton.