President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that he is leaving President-elect Donald Trump with “the strongest economy in modern history” and “the envy of the world,” while warning that efforts by the next administration to reverse his economic policies would cause significant harm to Americans’ pocketbooks.
Biden gave a major speech at the Brookings Institution think tank about the economic legacy he will leave behind after only a single four-year term.
He talked about how he came into office with a “fundamentally different theory” from the “trickle-down” beliefs that have dominated economic policy since Ronald Reagan and modern conservatism rose to power in the 1980s.
To help the U.S. economy grow “from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down,” Biden talked about how he pushed Congress to pass the American Rescue Plan Act soon after he became president.
He also talked about the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy and climate spending package that ended his first two years in the White House.
He said that these huge investments have led to a record-high number of people wanting to start their own small businesses, a record-low unemployment rate, and an economic “soft landing” where inflation has dropped to or below 2%, which was the level before the pandemic.
“From the crisis we took over four short years ago, we have come a long way.” I think that the economic orthodoxy that has failed this country for a long time has led to fewer jobs, less economic growth, and bigger deficits. Not only did we beat the pandemic, but we also went against it, Biden said.
“I thought that the best way to build an economy was to invest in it from the bottom up and the middle out.” Putting money into American goods and people is better than giving tax breaks to the wealthy.
Biden also said that he thought it was “long past time for America to make a generational investment in our infrastructure and our manufacturing base, the technological edge in our clean energy future.”
However, he admitted that many Americans have had trouble seeing the value in what he did because they are having their own financial problems.
“But I think it was the right thing to do…not only to get America out of the economic mess that a pandemic caused, but also to make America stronger for the future.” “That is what we did,” he said.
But at the same time, the 46th president warned the 47th, who ran for and won a second non-consecutive term as president—the first person to do so in more than a century—that he would put in place high tariffs that most economists say would make inflation worse again and ruin the economy Biden is leaving behind.
According to all signs, the new administration wants to return the country to “trickle down” economics and give another tax cut to the very rich that will not be paid for or will have a real cost, Biden said. He warned that this would lead to “massive deficits or significant cuts in basic programs of healthcare, education, and veterans benefits.”
Adding to that, he said, “Trump seems set on putting high, universal tariffs on all imported goods brought into this country because he thinks wrongly that other countries will pay for those tariffs, not American consumers.”
“I think this choice is a big mistake,” he said.
Biden said that he agreed with the late Republican president Ronald Reagan when he said that “facts are stubborn things.” He also offered “a set of benchmarks” to compare Trump’s actions to those of the last four years. Reagan had quoted founding father and second president John Adams.
He said, “While I was president, we made 60 million new jobs in the United States.” What will the next president do to make jobs? Or like Herbert Hoover being the only president whose administration lost jobs? During my time in office, the average unemployment rate has been the lowest in 50 years. “Will there be more or less unemployment in four years?”
Biden talked about inflation and said that his administration had lowered it despite “worldwide effects of the pandemic, Putin’s war in Ukraine, and supply chain disruptions.” He left it close to 2% for Trump to handle.
“Where will prices be when the next president leaves office?” These simple, well-known economic measures are used to see how strong an economy is and how well or poorly a president’s four years in office went. They are not political or ideological views. “They are just facts,” he said. “Stubborn facts,” as President Reagan put it.
At the end of his speech, Biden said that he hoped Trump would find it hard to undo many of the infrastructure and economic investments that his administration had made. This is because many of these investments were made to help places that support Trump’s Republican Party.
“I knew people would be mad, but the red states needed more because of the choices they made and where they live,” he said.
He asked, “Will the next president stop a new factory that will make thousands of jobs in Liberty, North Carolina? He is building a new solar factory in Carterville, Georgia. Will he shut it down? Are they going to do that? Will he not let seniors in red states get the $35 a month insulin they need?
“I think that presidents could only lead America if they led the whole country.” And I think the economy I am leaving now is the best and strongest in the world. Other people could do better than me, though, so I am not saying it was perfect. But I do think it is better for all Americans.