Why did Bidenomics fail to deliver at the polls? - WaPo

[question everything]

So many things about the strategy made so much sense. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan at the dawn of Joe Biden’s presidency, which prevented a surge in poverty and joblessness as the covid-19 pandemic ravaged the economy, looked like exactly the right bet — especially given memories of the Obama administration’s timid response to the housing crisis of 2008 and the deep recession that ensued. The burst of industrial policy that followed (the Chips and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act) appeared equally adroit — a strategy to address the plight of the many White workers without a college degree who turned out for Donald Trump in 2016 and, as conventional wisdom would have it, were devastated by the culling of factory jobs.

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But Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has, to my mind, the most compelling proposition: Bidenomics’ idea of the “working class” is outdated by a few decades.

Manufacturing employs only about 13 million of the nearly 160 million workers toiling outside of farms. Fewer than 1.4 million of those are represented by unions. The industrial policies and the trade barriers, speeches at the picket line and talk of factories returning to left-behind rural areas, were all aimed at a small corner of American society.

“A policy that promises to restore the middle class by bringing manufacturing back is not only unrealistic,” Rodrik wrote for Project Syndicate. “It also rings hollow, because it does not align with workers’ aspirations and everyday experiences.”

There are nearly 16 million workers in retail trade, 17 million in leisure and hospitality, almost 18 million in health care. For sure, they benefited from some of Biden’s policies. But incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act for contractors to work with union labor did nothing for them. So perhaps the lesson for some future Democratic administration hoping to assist the working class is not necessarily that populist policies don’t work. It is that these policies need to be aimed at what America has become, not what it was a bunch of decades ago.

https://wapo.st/4iVc7uU