How Bidenomics Can Beat Maganomics
The president needs to narrow the focus of his economic strategy and emphasize the need to cut the deficit by taxing the rich.
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Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
The latest coinage from President Joe Biden — something called “Maganomics” — cleverly seeks to link the procedural extremism of Donald Trump with the regressive policy of congressional Republicans. It’s a promising message, but it would be more convincing if the president’s own eponymous economic strategy, Bidenomics, were more focused.
In a speech delivered Thursday with an accompanying memo, Biden tried to contextualize a potential government shutdown by citing the fiscal proposals of the Republican Study Committee, which is a caucus comprising nearly 80% of House Republicans. This proposal, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, features almost $5 trillion in regressive tax cuts — offset by reducing spending on health care for low-income families, raising the retirement age for Social Security, and finding “more than $5 trillion of discretionary spending savings, almost all of which comes from nondefense discretionary cuts that have some specific proposals but not nearly enough to achieve that total.”