Biden’s ‘Dark Winter’ Is A Warning About His Economy, Not The Virus
Should President Donald Trump’s election challenges fail to keep Joe Biden out of the White House, it’s a certainty that bleak days will be ahead. We’re staring into the barrel of at least four years of sclerotic economic growth.
Six days after the election, Biden, employing the Democratic Party strategy of sowing fear whenever possible, warned that the country is facing a long night.
“Before the surge in COVID cases we predicted, many predicted, and the deaths rise that we’ve seen in December … we head into a very dark winter ahead,” he said.
He also lamented the “grim” jobs report, which showed “an economy that is stalling.” Employment grew by only 245,000 in November, “well below the 440,000 expected by economists and a sharp drop from the 610,000 reported in October,” CNBC reported.
“We remain in the midst of one of the worst economic and job crises in modern history,” said the man who as vice president oversaw one of the weakest economic recoveries in U.S. history.
Apparently it never occurred to Biden and his handlers that government intervention, not the virus, caused 2020’s downturn. Nor have they even begun to understand that Democrats’ economic policies, filled with steep, punitive taxes, and impossible-to-jump regulatory hurdles, are a slow-motion march of the economic lockdowns that almost instantly paralyzed the economy this year.
A lack of optimism in a Biden economy is not ours alone.
“Wall Street investors largely believe a Joe Biden presidency could mean lower stock-market returns,” says another CNBC report, this one highlighting the network’s survey of “more than 100 chief investment officers and portfolio managers.”
“Two-thirds said the first four years of Biden will be worse for stocks than Trump’s term,” according to the results.
Should we care about stock performance? Of course we should. Wall Street and Main Street USA meet at a large and busy intersection. More than half of the country – 55% – owns stock. That’s down from the two-thirds that owned stock in 2002. But still more than enough for stock performance to count.
The concerns cited by the CIOs and managers should be alarming even to those who aren’t shareholders. If Biden is able to reverse the Trump tax cut (and increase taxes by several trillion), as well as unwind the administration’s critical regulatory relief, the economy that was recovering strongly from the lethargic Obama years during Trump’s first three years will stagnate, likely even decline.
Other developments that would hurt the economy include:
- Biden’s New Green Deal Lite.
- A government-run banking system that would “would undermine private banks, moving the U.S. closer to the socialist ideal of a nationalized financial sector.”
- The possibility Biden will close the economy to the extent that he can, even though 2020’s lockdowns punished the economy and did nothing to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.
An analysis of Biden’s economic agenda published by the Hoover Institution says it “reduces full-time equivalent employment per person by about 3%, the capital stock per person by about 15%, real GDP per capita by more than 8%, and real consumption per household by about 7%.”
Economist Stephen Moore, is convinced, as are we, that “Biden’s anti-biz agenda would wreck the economy,” while Tim Worstall, a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, believes, with reason, Biden’s proposals “will wreak havoc on the economy.”
We’ve said before but it needs to be said again (and again): ”Every major policy Biden campaigned on is anti-growth. … Biden boasts of an FDR-scale agenda without realizing that it was Franklin Roosevelt’s reckless interventions that extended and deepened the Great Depression.”
A dark winter. A dark spring. Darkness until the Democrats are stripped of their political power to choke the economy. Bidenomics are not a promise but a threat.
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