Spending Is Not Going to Save the Democrats

A merica has a message for Joe Biden: Your money is no good here.

Americans like Joe Biden, personally. At least, that’s what they tell the pollsters: A majority of Americans surveyed by Pew say they believe Joe Biden stands up for what he believes in and that he cares about the needs of ordinary people. A small majority of Americans even say — against a superabundance of contrary evidence — that Joe Biden is honest.

But in the same survey, a majority of Americans also say that they do not believe the president to be “mentally sharp.” And other polls bring even worse news: In a Yahoo News/YouGov poll, 77 percent of Americans say that they are suffering from the effects of inflation, and a strong majority of them blame President Biden. That 77 percent figure is worth repeating: When you start brushing up against 80 percent in an issue poll, you can consider that effective unanimity. Only 18 percent of Americans say Biden is doing enough to deal with inflation.

And the hits keep coming. Biden’s poll numbers have been down there with oral surgery and syphilis for a while, but he is now below 50 percent with young (18–29) voters, the majority of whom tell pollsters from the Harvard University Institute of Politics that they are “fearful” about the future. These young voters aren’t regretting the outcome of the 2020 election — though Biden may be at 46 percent approval among them, Donald Trump is way down at 30 percent — but they are disappointed. Over at the CNBC All-America Economic Survey, Biden’s overall approval is down to 41 percent, only 37 percent think he is doing a good job on the economy, and, for the first time, more Americans disapprove than approve of his handling of Covid, 48 percent to 46 percent.

Presidents are not supernatural figures, and neither the economy nor the Covid-19 epidemic bends to their whim, as much as Americans insist on thinking of everything from recessions to hurricanes as divine judgments on the president. But Joe Biden takes as messianic an attitude toward the presidency as anybody else does, so it is inevitable — and not unfair — that he will be judged on those terms.

President Biden and the rest of official Washington have the same fundamental problem: The persistent Covid-19 epidemic and the new top issue for voters — inflation — are two problems that we cannot spend our way out of. And because every elected official with any real power in Washington right now is a Democrat, the Democrats are facing a real Judgment Day come next November, with Republicans enjoying their largest polling lead in the midterms since the first year of the Reagan administration.

But if Republicans do pull off a big takeover in the midterms, they will find themselves in much the same pickle, as would any future Republican president inheriting an inflation problem from Biden. Ronald Reagan’s approval ratings got all the way down to 35 percent as he stuck with the bitter economic medicine necessary to end the double-digit inflation that was pummeling the economy when he took office — inflation was 13.5 percent when Reagan was elected in 1980, almost twice the inflation that is immiserating Americans today. Inflation is not popular, but neither are the policies that reduce it: The Fed jacked interest rates up to 20 percent in 1981, which was great if you were investing in Treasury bonds but terrible if you were one of the one in ten American workers who endured unemployment in the consequent recession. Republicans did not advance their cause in the 1982 midterms, losing 27 House seats and a senator; the political miracle is that it wasn’t a complete wipeout, that the Senate remained under (diminished) Republican control while the House remained under (augmented) Democratic control.

As it turned out, staying the course and paying a political price in the short term was the right thing for President Reagan, whose approval ratings recovered in parallel with the performance of the economy. By 1984, inflation was down to a manageable 4.3 percent, and Reagan was reelected in a crushing 49-state landslide. (Recount Minnesota!) Reagan won almost 60 percent of the total vote nationwide, a performance no subsequent candidate has even come close to matching.

You can spend your way into an inflation problem, but you can’t spend your way out of one. Republican practitioners of the “Two Santa Claus” school of politics will lament the fact that you cannot cure inflation with tax cuts, either.

Spending is just no good against inflation. And most of what government spending can do against Covid-19 already has been done. That’s a big problem for Biden et al.: All Democrats have going for them politically is a big bucket of other people’s money they are willing to ladle out. (They are not a party of ideas, perhaps due to the fact that the Left’s last big idea killed 100 million people in the 20^th century. Oops!) Because Joe Biden is a creature of the Senate, his natural inclination is to look for something to throw money at. And Americans like having money thrown at them, which is why so many Democrats are mystified by Biden’s political decline. (How many “Biden’s policies are popular, so why isn’t Biden popular?” articles have you seen? Twenty? Sixty?) So, why isn’t this working?

It isn’t working because it doesn’t work.

The Americans who elected Joe Biden thought that if they threw out Donald Trump, then new and more responsible policies would tame the Covid-19 epidemic, the economy would thrive, and life would go back to — oh, how you miss it when it’s gone! — normal. One of the reasons they believed that is because Biden and his media allies told them so. But now Biden is president, the epidemic persists, the most important variables in its course are not changes in federal policy, and the invasive, non-spending policies the Biden administration favors, such as vaccination mandates, are unpopular and unworkable, and would require legislative and political buy-in that Biden isn’t going to get. So the federal government’s main contribution to fighting Covid-19 from here on out apparently is going to be annoying the hell out of airline passengers. And, worse, the Democrats have managed to resurrect serious inflation, an economic virus to which Americans had thought themselves immune, a ghastly relic from the bad old days of Walter Mondale and other icons of failure Democrats would rather not be thinking about.

Biden has a million things he’d be happy to spend some money on and see if he can buy himself some love, or at least a midterm result that is something other than a fiasco. Unfortunately, the problems at the top of our national to-do list just now require something more than shoveling great quantities of money out the door. Democrats may be shocked and scandalized to learn that this is not enough. In fact, they don’t quite seem to believe it, yet. Perhaps the American people, currently getting poorer at an annualized rate of 6.8 percent, will persuade them next fall.