This change in Haque is really special. I’ve been reading him for a while on economics and the climate disaster on the horizon, and he is usually pessimistic (to say the least). I highlighted his essay on Pres Biden’s speech against the radical right where Haque sees is as “a speech that will change the world.” He is helping me to understand President Biden in a whole new light.
And now I very much want to encourage EVERY VOTER to read this essay on how Our President has openly declared that “trickle down economics... has never worked” and why that is so important:
The Labor Day speech was terrific, calling for the expansion of Labor Unions (from The Guardian):
Drawing on Franklin D Roosevelt’s explicit support for unions during the New Deal, Biden said: “I am encouraging unions … we need key worker protections to build an economy from the bottom up and middle out. I am sick and tired of trickle-down economics.”
Biden’s comments come amid a major resurgence for the labor movement in the US, with more support for unions than at any time in the past 60 years, especially as low-paid workers across a range of industries try unionising.
Well Haque’s newest column discusses an emerging idea: Bidenomics. And how Biden is rejecting a Washington Consensus that Trickle down will eventually work and all boasts will rise:
A thing called Bidenomics is emerging... and [it’s] pretty radical.
Biden is the first President in a very, very long time to reject trickle down economics — angrily — as the fantasy that it is. He’s one of only two who ever did, in the modern context. Just him and lonely Jimmy Carter, who never got the credit he deserved. Even Saint Barack Obama didn’t go nearly this far — and still worshipped at the altar of…
Neoliberalism. When Biden says, angrily, that trickle down economics don’t work, it matters intensely because he is rejecting something that came to be known as the Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus — formalized in the 90s, as a matter of domestic and foreign policy both — went like this: everything was to be privatized, from water to energy to healthcare, competition was to be the sole activity in the economy, profit was to be the only point of society, and all that was going to lift living standards up for everyone — even if the rich got richer first, in the end, even the average Joe would see a better life.
He has a long discussion of how these tenets have become enshrined in economic theories, how they were redefined grew mired in minutia, and became ever more esoteric. How very weird they are when applied to reality. Then he uses a very concrete example that proves his point:
And this is what happened in — to — America. Just like in the Soviet Union, the Grand Experiment wasn’t working. You see, American living standards were plummeting. Incomes famously stalled in the 70s, which meant by the 80s, Americans were working around the clock, and by the 90s, even that wasn’t enough, so debt levels began to rise. By the 2000s, though, things went into free-fall — and all those privatized basic systems, healthcare, energy, education, realized, under corporate ownership, that they could fleece people in shocking, incredible ways, with absolutely no oversight — because nobody in charge was watching reality anyways. They just had blind faith in the Grand Experiment.
Hence, the million dollar medical bill was born. Americans became people who had to choose between healthcare or a home for their families — and sometimes, chose to die, so their kids could have a roof over their heads. The world was aghast, and a little baffled. What was going on here, exactly?
He explains, quite cogently, how this has led to Rust Belt Resentment and the rise of Trumpism. Just a fine, reasoned illustration of where we are and the inevitable consequences. It is a reality check that stopped me in my tracks.
But his conclusion is one you should read for yourself, one that again makes me just a bit hopeful—just a taste though
In that Big Way that Bidenomics is a sea change — and a necessary one. And no, it’s not just empty rhetoric either — I’d be the first to say it was, if it were. But it’s being backed up with real levels of investment, though there’s a long way to go yet.