Glad to see someone recognizes this.
By James Pethokoukis The Week
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took pains to distinguish Bidenomics from Reaganomics. Maybe don’t draw that line too bright.
The last time U.S. inflation was raging, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan promised that cutting income taxes and business regulation would stabilize the volatile American economy, then get it growing like gangbusters. Voters believed the GOP nominee enough that they gave him a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Now, with prices soaring again, it seems President Biden is promising much the same thing — though he claims his version of “supply-side economics” is different from Reagan’s.
In a speech last Friday to the World Economic Forum, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the Biden administration is aiming to create a more productive economy by focusing on issues like the supply of workers and the quality of our infrastructure, an approach she called “modern supply-side economics.” As Yellen went on to explain, “Our new approach is far more promising than the old supply-side economics, which I see as having been a failed strategy for increasing growth.”
It’s an interesting bit of rhetorical and policy framing by Yellen, whose previous job was Federal Reserve chair. First, the descriptive phrase “supply-side” economics may remind some older voters — especially those who twice pulled the lever for the Gipper — of a previous time when an elderly president used smart policy to steady a flailing economy.
More important, I think, is the message that Yellen is trying to send to the broader electorate, as well as to influential economic thinkers and policymakers: that Bidenomics, both the infrastructure bill that passed and the Build Back Better social spending and climate bill that’s moribund, is about fixing the economy’s deep fundamentals, not simply flooding it with government spending.
