Among President Joe Biden’s many swings at Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans in Thursday’s State of the Union address, Americans should relisten to his full-throated defense of his progressive economic agenda. While polls show voters trust Republicans more on the economy, the truth is Biden and his administration are most concerned about helping our wallets — unless, that is, your definition of a healthy financial environment is one in which the rich benefit and everyone else makes do with mere scraps.
Biden’s fight with Trump and the Republicans over all of our bottom lines acknowledges two truths: Not only has decades of trickle-down economics failed us, but a growing economy needs a financially healthy middle class. To achieve that security, most of us need a helping hand, whether through a subsidy or government policy and regulation. This agenda is enormously popular with the American people. It’s Donald Trump and Republicans who stand in the way of goals that even their own base often favors.
As Biden pointed out in his address, “Wall Street didn’t build America.” But that doesn’t stop Republican politicians from letting it effectively dictate policy.
As Biden pointed out in his address, “Wall Street didn’t build America.” But that doesn’t stop Republican politicians from letting it effectively dictate policy on everything from taxes to health care. This is how we got the Trump-era tax cuts, which showered benefits on the 1 percent and the largest and most powerful corporations. Biden wants to fix this imbalance: On Thursday, he proposed increasing the corporate tax rate to 21 percent and instituting a minimum 25 percent tax on billionaires. This would go not just a long way toward tackling budget deficits but would give us the funds to properly invest in education, health care and housing.
The business lobby’s control over the GOP is also why people in United States pay multiples more for prescription drugs than any other country, a gap that Biden — not the GOP — is tackling. It’s Biden's administration that, beginning next year, will limit seniors’ out-of-pocket spending on needed medications to $2,000 — and it is Biden who announced Thursday night that he wants to expand that policy to all of us. It’s Biden who capped insulin prices for those on Medicare at $35 a month and pushed legislation that gave Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices on high-cost drugs — something not one single Republican in Congress supported.
Meanwhile, corporate America and Wall Street — with an assist from Republicans — are fighting Biden’s attempts to stop junk fees, the practice of tacking hidden or impossible-to-avoid surcharges to basic transactions that bleeds American bank accounts while leaving us feeling like we're being played for fools at the same time.
Democratic and Republican voters alike support these initiatives. A poll released earlier this week by Blueprint, a Democratic strategy group founded last year by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, found an astonishing 84 percent of voters want to give the Medicare system the power to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs. And another poll, conducted by the American Economic Liberties Project with Lake Research Partners, shows nearly 8 out of 10 voters say they would be more likely to support state legislators who vote to end junk fees.
So why don’t Americans’ views of Biden reflect this? Well, people really hate inflation, and for a time that overwhelmed Biden’s record elsewhere. But it’s also likely that as people have tuned out of political news, they are simply less likely to know who is proposing what policies, even ones they strongly support. The Blueprint poll offers some evidence for this theory, finding, for example, that barely 4 in 10 even knew about Biden’s junk fee initiative.
Inflation is waning. The stock market is soaring. Unemployment is low. The racial wealth gap is falling. And consumer confidence is on an upswing.
Then there’s Republicans’ disingenuous attacks on the president’s record. Take Sen. Katie Britt’s (literally) breathless response to Biden’s address, in which she highlighted an Alabama retiree working at a gas station in his 70s because he couldn’t afford both food and medication. She did not mention that Biden — not her party — is supporting and passing legislation to help seniors with their medical bills. (Something else worth noting: It is mostly, though not exclusively, Republicans who support plans to raise the Social Security retirement age.)
Here’s the reality: Biden’s “middle out and bottom up” economy is working. Inflation is waning. The stock market is soaring. Unemployment is low. The racial wealth gap is falling. And consumer confidence is on an upswing.
Little wonder Republicans need to resort to stretching the truth and insinuating that the octogenarian Biden isn’t up to the job. As the State of the Union address proved, nothing could be further from the truth. Republicans may feel they were able to turn “Bidenomics” into a punchline, but it’s beginning to look like Biden will get the last laugh.