IMO, the Biden administration is going to go down as one of the greatest in modern American history.
It's one thing to do well in easy conditions. But the true measure is how you handle challenging conditions, and few terms have been more challenging than the last 4 years.
Feels like the effects of the IRA and Chips act will pump up construction jobs as factories get built in the short term.
But whether all that activity generates products and supply chains that are globally competitive is still a big question. I don't think the US is anywhere close to being out of the woods.
The Biden administration is behind a few big bills:
1. The Infrastructure Investment Bill
2. The Inflation Reduction Act
3. The CHIPs Act
The name of 2 is a bit of a misnomer (extremely common in US politics to give bills misleading names to make then more popular).
Between them, he significantly increased government investment in domestic infrastructure, green energy, and the semiconductor industry.
Short term, that has probably been a big part of the magic formula that has kept unemployment low while interest rates have been high in order to combat inflation.
It's easy to forget that, in the US last spring (1) there was widespread fear of a sharp recession, and (2) Signature and Silicon Valley Bank failed within 48 hours of each other. Many smart people who lived through the 2008 crisis were saying, "Here we go again." Yet here we are. Whatever strategy Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell did execute seems to be working.
It's nearly miraculous really. Every market maker was calling for a hard recession. SVB looked like the beginnings of a bank run. Instead we are at damn near full employment, gas is cheap, the supply chain is normalizing and stock keep ticking up.
I think back then assumption everyone made was low interest rates were the prime cause of inflation. Increasing rates to control inflation caused the bank failures.
What they have realized and said since, is the high prices were not just interest rate related, but due to supply chain shocks that happened due to covid+ukraine russia+china drama etc.
Once supply chains settled down as they do after the initial chaos when war starts prices started dropping. I am not an economist so take everything above with a pinch of salt.
Wow I was under the impression it began in 2020 while Trump was still president. I could’ve sworn much was made about his policies about it and I thought I remembered that he actually contracted it while in office. Must’ve been dreaming. Thanks for the clarification.
OP clearly was using four years to describe Biden’s term to support the idea that he will go down as the greatest President in history. But even if you want to just look at the full covid period it doesn’t belong in the same sentence as the rest of those events. The past decade has been likely the most calm period in American history. But let’s pretend it was the darkest period of the past 400 years lol
> civil war, Great Depression, Cuban missile crisis, world war 2
Modern American history means last ~50 years. So that rules these out. Biden is great, but he's not going to ever come close to displacing Lincoln at the top of the heap.
COVID alone would have been one of the greatest crises of the last 50 years, but Biden's administration also had several others to deal with on top of COVID. (remember that 2022 was COVID's worst year).
The only comparable challenges in the last ~50 years would have been the Great Inflation and GFC. Carter did a smash up job appointing Volcker to fix the Great Inflation, but the fact the crisis festered for 15 years prior is a particularly bad smell.
The GFC is a great comparison. A stronger quicker response would have ameliorated it greatly. The last 4 years was handled well because Biden was part of the GFC response and learned from their mistakes.
It's one thing to do well in easy conditions. But the true measure is how you handle challenging conditions, and few terms have been more challenging than the last 4 years.