B idenomics has been a big-government agenda. Its policy foundation consists entirely of big spending bills: The 2021 infrastructure law ($1.1 trillion), the American Rescue Plan Act ($1.9 trillion), the Inflation Reduction Act (initially $400 billion, now $1 trillion and rising), and the CHIPS Act ($280 billion). And if it wasn’t for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the spending would have been trillions of dollars higher. All of these laws have sought to help the economy by directing federal money where politicians and bureaucrats see fit.
The infrastructure law was based on the idea that infrastructure was “crumbling” (it wasn’t) and the solution was more taxpayer money. “For far too long, Washington policymakers have celebrated ‘infrastructure week’ without ever agreeing to build infrastructure,” the White House said after the bill passed Congress. The American people were supposed to have been crying out for more infrastructure spending, and government finally delivered it for them.
The American Rescue Plan Act was an entirely Democratic effort from start to finish, using the already-over Covid recession as cover to expand the federal government. This was the fulfillment of Biden’s transition-team fantasies about becoming the next FDR or LBJ. The law “changes the paradigm,” Biden said at the White House after signing it. “For the first time in a long time, this bill puts working people in this nation first.”
The CHIPS Act was framed as a savvy response to China’s industrial policy, necessary for national security and the restoration of American manufacturing. The law was necessary because “America stopped investing in America,” Biden said. It was pro-business, too. “We learned that companies will follow if the federal government will invest in industries that we know we need,” Biden said.
The Inflation Reduction Act was about health care and climate change, two things voters were supposed to care about that Democrats had an advantage on over Republicans in opinion polling. And it was framed as fiscally responsible, with Biden touting dubious estimates of deficit reduction every chance he got.
The whole agenda has been advertised with one of Biden’s favorite phrases: rebuilding the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out.” He has villainized the wealthy as tax-dodgers and looters and valorized the middle class and the poor as victims. His has been a big-government agenda, undertaken in populist terms.
And people hate it.
“Bidenomics” went from being a marketing term used by Democrats to get Biden reelected to being the subject of a website by free-market group Americans for Prosperity making the case against Biden’s agenda. As the White House has all but stopped using the term, Republicans have been picking it up more and more. Biden’s approval rating on the economy is 18 points underwater, and only 28 percent of voters think Biden’s policies have helped the economy.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. The tastemakers in the media, at political-consulting firms, and at the major philanthropic foundations had all decided that people were tired of hearing about free markets. Americans were victims of globalization, the wealthy, and creative destruction, they said, and government needed to step in. All that limited-government stuff was so 2010, or worse yet, “zombie Reaganism.”
So Biden listened and gave the people what the tastemakers said the people wanted. Perhaps that is to be expected from a Democratic president. But some Republicans have followed his lead.
Some Republicans in Congress voted for the infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act under the same rationale as Democrats. Some Republicans have favored Biden’s protectionism in trade policy, as it has been a continuation of Trump’s. Some Republicans have tried to play nice with labor unions, an integral part of the progressive movement that Biden has rewarded whenever possible. Some Republicans have spoken positively of industrial policy as Biden’s administration has carried it out on green energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductors.
Instead of doing Bidenomics with conservative characteristics, Republicans should return to their roots and offer something entirely different from what politicians have been doing for the past four years.
As regulatory analyst Dan Goldbeck has calculated, the Biden administration has so far implemented regulations expected to cost $1.47 trillion. That’s a ton, even compared with the Obama administration, which had made only $304 billion worth of new regulations through the same point in its first term.
Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the advocacy group led by Mike Pence, points out in a new policy document that the Biden administration has used its regulatory powers to push its unpopular environmental agenda. Progressives’ “war on things that work,” from dishwashers to gasoline-powered cars, has rubbed voters the wrong way, giving conservatives an opportunity to make the case for more comprehensive deregulation.
As AAF points out, the Supreme Court’s 1984 Chevron decision has allowed a lot of this bureaucratic overreach to persist, and its days might be numbered. The originalists on the Supreme Court are likely to at least limit, if not fully overturn, the doctrine from that case that allows bureaucratic agencies to interpret the law and, in practice, maximize their power. The next Republican administration will have opportunities for regulatory reform that were not available to previous Republican administrations.
Reining in the regulatory state is popular. AAF notes that 54 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup think government does too much, and “since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, more Americans have stated that the government is doing too much rather than too little every single year aside from 2020.” Every year since 2001, the share of Americans who said there was too much regulation on business has been higher than the share who said there was too little. Additionally, Gallup found that 57 percent of Americans think the federal government has too much power, compared to 7 percent who think it has too little.
The big-government approach is essentially siding with the 7 percent over the 57 percent. Policy should never be made by opinion polling alone, and limited government would still be right if only ten people supported it. But the notion that limited government and free markets are hopelessly unpopular and conservatives need to create their own version of big-government policies to remain electorally competitive is wrong.
The big-government proponents of Bidenomics are trudging against public opinion. They have had almost four years to try their agenda, and it isn’t taking. Conservatives must provide the free-market alternative. Nobody else will.