President Joe Biden vowed Wednesday to restore the American dream in a speech supporting his “Bidenomics” strategy, which he claims will end decades of Republican economic thinking that benefits the wealthy.
“Bidenomics is about the future. Bidenomics is just another way of saying restore the American dream,” the Democrat said in Chicago.
The half-hour address aimed to reach out to working and middle-class Americans, many of whom had defected from the Democratic Party to support nationalist right-winger Donald Trump.
Biden emphasized hundreds of billions of dollars in public expenditures in infrastructure and high-tech industries during his first two years in office.
He addressed Trump’s supporters directly, referring to how globalization had decimated US manufacturing areas and stripped workers of “dignity, pride, and hope.”
Without naming Trump, whom he beat in 2020 but may face again next year, Biden said Republican leaders had ruined the country by cutting taxes on the affluent in the mistaken notion that the benefits will later “trickle down” to ordinary people.
“Bidenomics,” he said, is a “fundamental break with the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now.”
The Democrat’s speech, heavily promoted by the White House, also saw him take credit for a powerful US recovery from the Covid pandemic shutdown and subsequent supply chain nightmares.
“The US has the highest economic growth rate of leading economies,” he said. It’s a bold, potentially risky move for Biden to put the economy at the center of his re-election platform, brushing aside months of warnings that the world’s biggest economy might still hit a post-pandemic recession.
Putting his name to it is even more daring, with Bidenomics openly mimicking and contradicting Republicans’ long-cherished Reaganomics, in reference to Ronald Reagan’s 1980s boom.
“Biden and the Radical Democrat Congress singlehandedly created the highest inflation in a decade,” Trump stated in a written response to Biden’s speech, falsely alleging that his opponent had brought about “the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.”
