Democrats claim 81-year-old Biden is a great president. But his biggest fails have nothing to do with age
When Joe Biden drops out of the race, as I believe he will, Democrats will spend at least 48 hours publicly proclaiming him a great president. Privately, they’ll thank the “Lord Almighty” for pushing Joe to step aside.
They know that Biden has not been a great president – far from it. If he were, he would not have earned the lowest approval ratings of any modern-era president. Biden has presided over a White House that is dishonest, secretive, insular and incompetent.
Joe Biden’s problems started way before his disastrous debate against former President Trump. And, age had nothing to do with his most spectacular failures. The public soured on Biden initially because of the calamitous and deadly pull-out from Afghanistan, orchestrated apparently by the Commander-in-Chief himself. They further abandoned him over inflation, which the White House blamed on everyone and everything but Biden’s reckless spending. They also turned negative on the president when millions came into the country illegally and the White House ignored the crisis until it turned into voters’ number one concern. Only then did Biden take action.
The president claimed in his interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he had accomplished his three goals since 2020 – “Restore some decency to the office, restore some support for the middle class instead of trickle-down economics both from the middle out and the bottom up the way the wealthy still do fine, everyone does better, and unite the country.”
Many would disagree about “restoring decency,” especially with the vulgar Pride eventsthat have disgraced our nation’s White House, or with reports that Biden’s disreputable son Hunter is attending meetings there. But there is zero dispute about the plight of the middle class under Biden; they have seen their quality of life and their real incomes drop as inflation has overtaken wage gains for much of Biden’s presidency. In January 2021, when Biden took office, the nation’s real disposable personal income amounted to $18,107; as of May, that had fallen to $16,999, according to the St. Louis Fed.
Moreover, in a recent poll of 2,500 Americans, 65% of those earning more than 200% of the federal poverty level — or at least $60,000 for a family of four, which is considered middle class — said they are struggling financially.
Does Joe Biden really think he has united the country? Surveys indicate Americans think our nation is more divided than ever before. A shocking Marist poll in May showed nearly half the U.S. thinks we are heading for another civil war.
What Biden has done to earn the plaudits of his fellow Democrats is to spend outrageous amounts of taxpayer money, more than any other administration, much of it to buy votes. Unprecedented and unneeded government spending has propped up economic growth but also seeded damaging inflation.
Consider:
1. Annual government spending in May reached $6.5 trillion, down only $1.1 trillion from the record set in March 2021. That year’s COVID-era outflow was fueled by emergency relief measures passed by Congress to keep the U.S. economy afloat. There is no such emergency today, nor was there when Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
2. The federal deficit has reached $1.6 trillion over the past twelve months, or 6.2% of GDP. This, again, is emergency-level spending not seen except during World War II and at the height of the COVID shut-down. There is simply no excuse for racking up such huge deficits, which are inflationary.
3. Joe Biden and his political allies have not retreated from their outrageous spend-a-thon, most recently vowing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to cancel even more student loans, and proposing an election-year budget of $7.3 trillion. That reckless sum includes even more new programs. He wants to give people thousands of dollars to help them buy houses, which are today unaffordable for most people thanks to Bidenflation, and to provide free childcare. The wish list never ends.
Joe Biden’s incompetent White House is not capable of actually putting the money to work. Successful investment of taxpayer funds might burnish Joe Biden’s “great president” talking points, but they are only good at wrestling it away from hard-working Americans. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttagieg’s mortifying admission that he’d managed to build only 7 or 8 EV charging stations with a $7.5 billion budget, after two years of trying, says it all.
Politico published a story in May about the White House struggling to spend the $1.6 trillion that has been approved by Congress to fight climate change and update America’s infrastructure. That whopping sum, as Politico described it, was meant to “create green jobs, outcompete China – and maybe catapult [Biden] to a second term.”
At the time of their report, of the $1.1 trillion authorized by Congress, the White House had spent less than 17% over the past two years. The slow roll-out is understandable; the White House is full of ideologues and weak on business managers. As Politico noted, the pace of disbursements has picked up, not because the climate change threat is urgent, as we are so often told, but because Democrats fear that former President Donald Trump might return to the White House.
If that happens, it is almost certain that some of the gargantuan bills will be plucked for any remaining cash, with the funds going to narrow our deficit. Last year, Trump promised on his website to “use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings… This will help quickly to stop inflation and slash the deficit.”
And that will be the end of Biden’s legacy, as well as the chatter about him being a great president.
Published on Fox News
