This article originally appeared in National Review.
By Jon Hartley, August 26, 2024
President Biden’s exit from the 2024 presidential race was long overdue. The Biden family, the White House, and supportive media apparently hid his declining mental state for years from the public — including from Democratic primary voters, who have had no say in their new nominee. Vice President Kamala Harris locked up the party’s nomination within 48 hours of Biden’s stepping aside.
Many Democrats are now commending Biden for bowing out of the race, and seeking to assess the significance of the Biden presidency. To some admirers, Biden has been “one of America’s most consequential presidents.” Consequential perhaps, but in a good way or bad? On top of foreign-policy blunders such as the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the failure to deter Russia from invading Ukraine in 2022, Biden’s economic record is far from impressive.
Particularly for a Democratic (or Democratic-leaning) voter, one way of measuring that record might be to ask: Are those below the median income truly better off than when Biden took office?
It may be quite some time before we will know for what, economically speaking, his presidency will be most remembered. But for now, runaway inflation looms very large. His presidency saw an inflationary surge that reached levels not seen since the 1980s (inflation also often hits those below the median income hardest). The flip side of that surge was a decline in real average hourly earnings, as nominal wage growth failed to keep up with rising prices. Headline inflation peaked at about 9 percent in June 2022. That number was shockingly high — although seemingly well below past peak inflation rates of 14.6 percent in April 1980 — after decades in which inflation had seemed to be tamed. Larry Summers and his co-authors, however, have argued that changes to the calculation of CPI in 1983 understates inflation rates today vs. before the methodological change (an apples-to-oranges comparison). Their calculations suggest that the early 2020s inflation is very much on the same scale as the peak waves in the 1970s and 1980s.
