Summary
President Joe Biden highlighted his administration’s economic record, citing consistent job growth and a 2.7% inflation rate drop from its 2022 peak.
December’s jobs report showed 256,000 new jobs and declining unemployment, signaling steady economic growth.
However, inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, and interest rates remain high, impacting homebuyers and businesses.
Public pessimism lingers on affordability as Biden passes a largely strong economy to his successor, Donald Trump.
There’s also a part of this that could, if you were naive, be solved with time. My job gave me a solid raise last year, 4.9%. Assuming four years of Harris status quo could get inflation down to ~2.5%, and assuming I can maintain similar raises each year, I’d likely recover from the pandemic within the next four years. Inflation is a necessary evil, but when managed over time, it isn’t a big issue. Should work for everyone right, stupid Trumpies just don’t understand long-term economics!
Except it ignores that corporations are colluding in duopolies across many industries to steadily raise their prices above inflation to maintain profit growth. It ignores that landlords are treating maximum rent hikes as the expectation rather than the exception. It ignores that climate change is globally impacting our supply lines for food.
Inflation being healthy doesn’t mean a damn thing when unchecked capitalism is left rampant. The Biden administration, to their credit, did weakly try to fight corporate interests. However, they did nothing to fight the fully captured Supreme Court, which made Biden’s efforts so pitiful they resemble a controlled opposition.
Biden did elect a very effective FTC chair. She’s done some great work breaking monopolies and monopolistic practices.
The problem, as I alluded to, is that the Supreme Court is starting to hear the lawsuits filed in response to those policies and is striking them down as unconstitutional. It’s quite likely that things like NDAs being unenforceable will also get overturned.
Everything Biden accomplished has either been grossly undermined, hindered, or reversed by the current corrupt Supreme Court. Completely ignoring them for his full four years, especially after Roe V Wade, was pure incompetency. Again, it gives credence to the idea of a controlled opposition. He was allowed to say and do some progressive things, but anything that stepped over the line the Supreme Court would stop. He could have packed the courts, used the big public outcry against the courts legitimacy to pack it with additional judges, and actually make a meaningful change to our country’s fate.
Instead, Joe Biden will be remembered as a vain fool who gave the country to fascism. Nothing else he accomplished will matter, if any of it is still left.
Undermined by the supreme court? What is he supposed to do about that it’s a separate branch of government.
The only people to blame for trumps election is the people who voted for him or a 3rd party. Joe Biden will be remembered badly because the right wing were incredibly successful in getting their attacks to propagate through the pop culture.
President has the right to nominate more judges. And with control of the Senate, they could have been sworn in. He wasn’t helpless, he just chose not to use the power he had.
He cant usurp judges with no reason other than political alignment. The bar for getting rid of a judge is extremely high and has only been done once in the history of the US in 1800s. Biden did all that he could he nominated a great judge when Stephen Breyer stepped down. The things you ask of Biden are out of the realm of possibility.
Never said anything about getting rid of existing judges. Did you know there is NO RULE limiting the Supreme Court to 9 judges?
The Judiciary Act limits the amount of Judges.
Only in a capitalist system, that requires the exploitation of labor…
It’s required in any system that uses a fiat currency. Maybe a fiat currency is evil incarnate, but it also offers a lot of conveniences. Personally, I think I’d prefer having some number that translates my labor into spending units, and fiat currency works about as well as anything else when carefully managed.
How about non-transferable labor vouchers?
Even in a system with fiat currency, inflation is not a requirement. Its only a requirement under a capitalist system, that demands profits rise constantly.