“Unions built the middle class,” says man who plainly knows no American history before 1900.
Joe Biden’s litany of accomplishments – taxpayer-provided carveouts for favored businesses and trade protectionism schemes to benefit preferred industrial workers – demonstrates to all who need to hear it that Democrats will always outbid Republicans when it comes to industrial policy.
A major auto union president named Shawn Fain is just altogether too suggestive.
By the standards of what we usually get from Joe Biden, this is fired up, passionate, and nostril-flaring angry. But there’s no getting around it – he enunciates much less than he used to, his words run together — “agreatfainandagreatlaboryuun.” This isn’t the only reason people feel like Biden’s too old for another four years, but it probably hurts him.
“They’re cheering on that money coming in,” Biden says of the bipartisan infrastructure law. Yep, it’s coming in all right. And it has caused inflation in the construction sector. And in an economy with no labor market slack, it has pulled workers off of more productive jobs and sent contractors scrounging for workers. A bunch of contract authority expires in the next two years, and a lot of contractors are going to come back to Congress and say, “Hey, remember that project we started? Yeah, it costs way more than we thought. We’re going to need more money to finish it.”
Credit where due: I like Biden’s pocket square.
Biden is hitting competent-seeming campaign beats insofar as he’s a man with a 39 percent approval rating who seems frail and not-quite-there much of the time, trying to dig himself out of that hole. The speech does not fit the occasion, but (to over-hammer on this) tonight is one of the few 2024 campaign events we’re actually going to get this year from Joe Biden.
“I inherited an economy that was on the brink.” Nope, he inherited an economy that was improving.
It’s long past time for politicians to retire the “creating jobs” talk from the Great Recession recovery. Just as there was before the pandemic, there are now more jobs than there are workers to fill them.
“The racial wealth gap is the smallest it’s been in 20 years,” Biden informs public to the sound of gulps among America’s DEI professionals.