BIDEN’S LEFT TURN
So-called moderate cozies up to Dem flank
After Joe Biden was elected president, I had a conversation with a Wall Street banker friend who is deeply involved in Democratic politics. He could see I was worried. He knew my views about Trump: didn’t like his tone, his Twitter noise and the antics of Jan. 6.
I thought his trade policies were often self-defeating, but generally I liked what he did with the economy. The policies actually worked: With tax cuts and deregulation, wages rose for the working class for the first time in years. Pre-pandemic, there was non-inflationary growth. Hell, for all of Trump’s foibles when it came to COVID he was on the way to distributing effective COVID vaccines produced under his watch.
Yes, Biden had a record as a moderate and for working with Republicans. But he was, let’s say, not the guy he was even when he was Obama’s veep. He was weak and the left was ascendant in Democrats’ policymaking. Won’t crazies like AOC and Bernie Sanders have a big say in how to run things, I asked.
His answer was assuring, at least for a few weeks. He said the smart guys would be in charge — people who knew how to get things done, particularly on the economy. Think Robert Rubin, the old Goldman Sachs chief and legendary economic moderate who understood that even progressive governments needed business to flourish to succeed.
Rubin helped Bill Clinton steer the raging 1990s economy. Biden would surround himself with similar people who were — at bottom — pragmatists, my banker friend said at the time. People like himself, who would prioritize solving some big problems, including ending the pandemic.
Broken promises
Painfully, this is not what happened. The Biden White House in policy and appointments is one that AOC would love more than Bill Clinton. Barack Obama would appear to be too moderate for the apparatchiks who are being put in place, day after day, to maneuver a $25 trillion economy around inflation, COVID and who-knowswhat’s coming our way.
I say this as the Biden administration is bungling yet another response that is certainly stifling the economy: getting testing materials and therapeutics to battle another COVID wave. For months it should have been an all-consuming task given the stakes involved.
COVID waves cause sickness and economic misery as we are seeing in real-time. The economy is being weighed down with labor shortages, long waits at the airport and hospital staffs thinning out because of COVID quarantines and a lack of tests. Monoclonal antibodies work with most variants, but for some reason they’re nowhere to be found.
Oddly, with all this playing out 24-7, the president has been bragging a lot about the economy — like someone slipped something funny into his ice cream.
He omits basic economic facts: that despite wage and GDP growth, inflation is eating into both. Businesses still can’t find workers.
His CDC shortens the COVID quarantine to five days but says you must test negative when there are no tests available.
On Friday, the Labor Department said hiring actually slowed in December, and that was before the full impact of Omicron hit the workforce. Not good. Even worse, it underscores the incompetency we’re stuck with at least for another three years.
Far from populating his economic team with a new generation of Bob Rubins, Biden is channeling his inner socialist that he somehow discovered after 79 years on this planet.
To commemorate the Jan. 6 riots, he gave a bizarrely partisan speech as if that’s what the country needs in a time of peril.
He sidelined the wasteful Build Back Better spending monstrosity, but he’ll undoubtedly roll it out a bit later. For now, he’s pushing for voting rights that have been imaginarily denied while hospitals have in reality seen a surge in COVID-related cases.
Socialist slippery slope
Also last week, Biden also stealthily returned to populating his economic team with lefties, people who would like nothing better than to impose regulations and taxes that re-engineer the market economy toward socialism.
The latest: plans to renominate someone named Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission.
Sohn is very smart and very passionate about media and telecom issues. She’s also someone who is progressive to the point of socialism. She will have a seat on one of the most economically important pillars of government regulation.
For a little context: The FCC provides oversight of the biggest US industries: technology, telecommunications and media.
Sohn is a longtime telecom lawyer, progressive advocate and co-founded the telecom advocacy group called Public Knowledge, which has received some funding from billionaire closeted socialist George Soros.
An earlier nomination to the FCC was pulled before Christmas — not because her bona fides didn’t sit well with Senate Republicans, but because even moderate Democrats were queasy.
You would think that would be enough for the president to move on, nominate someone less toxic. It wasn’t. Where’s Robert Rubin when you need him?