Once upon a time, Joe Biden was running for reelection on the idea that the economy was doing so well that voters would reward him with a second term. The president’s plan was to remind Americans of what he did for them. He even had a memorable catchphrase: Bidenomics.

Bidenomics never caught on, mostly because the electorate could not hear the message through the din of news coverage about Biden’s advanced age. The Washington press corps had decided nothing was more important. Biden would be 86 years old by the time his second term ended. Stories about what he accomplished in the past always featured doubt about what he could accomplish in the future.

He’s out now, but there’s a lesson here. Bidenomics was bad PR for Biden, but it was transformational policy for the rest of us. The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates for the first time since 2020. The stock market hit record heights for days in a row. The economy grew by a stunning 3 percent and inflation is expected to fall to 2 percent. It’s so good, in fact, that people who do economics professionally say that they have rarely seen an economy perform as well as this one does.

“There is no denying it,” Mark Zandi of Moody Analytics, said today.

This is among the best performing economies in my 35-plus years as an economist. Economic growth is rip-roaring, with real GDP up 3 percent over the past year. Unemployment is low, at near 4 percent, consistent with full employment. Inflation is fast closing in on the Fed’s 2 percent target. Grocery prices, rents and gas prices are flat to down over the past more than a year. Households’ financial obligations are light, and set to get lighter with the Fed cutting rates. House prices have never been higher, and most homeowners have more equity in their homes than ever. Corporate profits are robust, and the stock market is hitting a record high on a seemingly daily basis. Of course, there are blemishes, as lower-income households are struggling financially, there is a severe shortage of affordable homes, and the government is running large budget deficits. And things could change quickly. There are plenty of threats. 

But in my time as an economist, the economy has rarely looked better.

That historic success is borne of a historic crisis. 

Joe Biden came into office in the middle of a national emergency. He knew right away that the economic fallout from the covid pandemic was rooted in more than disease. The trouble was old ways of thinking, chiefly that widespread prosperity trickles down from the very top. 

The president had to make a choice. 

He could provide covid relief to the American people in the short term but allow a broken system to stay broken. Or he could lead the transformation of “the way our economy works over the long term – to write a new economic playbook,” as he put it in a recent speech.

That playbook, he said in the speech, calls on the government to:

• grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up. 
• put workers first.
• support unions.
• leave no one behind. 
• fair competition. 
• invest in all of America and in all Americans.

That new economic playbook is Bidenomics. The vice president is now building on that success in her own bid for president. She isn’t calling it Bidenomics, of course. She’s calling it the “opportunity economy.”

And so far, it’s proving popular. 

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— The Editorial Board (@johnastoehr) September 30, 2024

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The Guardian did a survey on 12 policies, six from Harris and six from her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. Respondents were not told which policy was proposed by which candidate. The most popular policy comes from the “fair competition” section of the book of Bidenomics – a federal ban on price-gouging on food and groceries.

Nearly half of respondents said it would “strengthen the economy.”

The popularity of a price-gouging ban suggests that Harris figured out something the president never did. She understands that when people talk about the economy, they don’t really mean the economy. They mean their personal situations, their own expenses, are a hardship.

That’s where Biden and Harris part ways. Bidenomics focused on the macro: inflation, jobs and growth. But the “opportunity economy,” while it builds on Bidenomics, focuses on microeconomics, especially the cost of things. People are getting sticker-shocked to death at the supermarket. They hate it. Naturally, they love a ban on price-gouging.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether her solutions will solve problems. But no one can say she’s not taking the problem seriously. That stands in contrast to her opponent, who never met a problem he didn’t exploit for his own benefit, making the problem even worse.

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His main solution to the problems ailing America is deporting 20 million “illegal immigrants.” That would drive up the price of groceries even more, as migrants are mainly the people who harvest our food. The solution to that, according to Trump, is slapping tariffs on food imports. This, in theory, would push farmers to produce more crops. That sounds great until you realize there’s no one around to pick them.

We can pick apart Trump’s “policies” all day, but why do that? As Harris said during an interview with MSNBC last week: “Frankly, and I say this in all sincerity, he’s just not very serious about how he thinks about some of these issues. And one must be serious and have a plan that’s not just a talking point ending in an exclamation at a political rally.”

Of the six Trump proposals polled by The Guardian, only one reached the top five, his “plan” to cut taxes on Social Security benefits. All the others were Harris ideas. Along with the price-gouging ban, they were expanding the child tax credit; tax breaks for small businesses; and raising the capital-gains tax on people earning more than $1 million. 

(Trump’s plan to deport workers is more popular with Trump’s base than with anyone else, but it isn’t that popular. The Guardian found only 43 percent of Republicans said it would be good for the economy.)

Bidenomics is a set of serious policies that never became popular. 

Harris is on track to correct that

Hers are serious and popular.