Joe Biden announced his re-election campaign today through a YouTube video, which as far as I know, has never been done before since most people running for the highest office in the land have given live speeches in front of people, but not Mr. Biden. The big theme is apparently "let's finish this job," which to me is a very scary thought. Just saying!
Most Americans are not better off than they were two years ago and I don't think that's going to change in the next year and a half. Mr. Biden failed to mention inflation in his re-elect video or the fact that real wages or take-home pay for typical working families have fallen essentially every month he has been president.
Falling real wages are the source of American pessimism in poll after poll showing the source of unhappiness and while Mr. Biden didn't mention it in his video, he's going to have to deal with it on the campaign trail. That is, if he ever goes on the campaign trail live and in person.
The economy in his first full year in office, 2022, grew by less than 1%, while the inflation rate jumped 6.5% after rising over 9% for a good part of the year and to this day it remains the highest inflation rate in four decades.
We are mired in stagflation with a risk of recession and that's why polls keep telling us Americans are mighty worried about the future and their kids' future and their grandkids' future. Mr. Biden has waged war on fossil fuels based on a far-left Green New Deal ideology that does not comport with the science or the actual facts.
Lately, he wants to end the internal combustion engine and shift everybody to electric vehicles, but at the same time slash electricity power output by as much as two-thirds. Go figure! More electric cars, less Electricity, all in the name of radical climate policy.
Fiscally, he has slapped on more federal spending and regulations than anything we've ever seen. Big government socialism, or as Steve Forbes puts it, modern socialism through the regulatory state, unelected bureaucrats.
As former Senator Phil Gramm put it today in the WSJ, "tilting the scales of cost benefit analysis to social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, but no serious economic analysis."
Besides shutting down the car business and the fossil fuel industry, Mr. Biden's regulators have gone after airlines, trucking, railroads, energy, communications, student loans, banks, credit cards, childcare mandates, family benefits, paid leave, unions, even recently punishing middle-class homebuyers with good credit in order to reward high-risk borrowers like the ones that brought down the financial system 15 years ago.
Mr. Biden has gone way beyond the Obama Administration and that is why we face continued below-2% economic growth, instead of the 3.5% that governed the U.S. for roughly 70 years after World War II.
He has spent and borrowed something like $6 trillion in just two years, alongside the regulatory binge and he has proposed a $5 trillion tax hike on the most productive job creators in society.
His social policies have attacked parents in schools, left open the southern border to millions of illegals, along with an epidemic of drugs and crime. His foreign policy was a disgrace as he fled Afghanistan and he has supported an unheard-of politicization of the legal and justice system.
The video accused MAGA Republicans of tax cuts for the rich, denying freedom, denying equity, denying love, burning books, all fabulous stuff although unsupported, charges. Listen for yourself:
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BIDEN CAMPAIGN VIDEO: "MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms: cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote."
He hasn't lifted a finger to help blue collar workers or traditional families and he has supported the most extreme gender and sex education anybody has ever seen. There's virtually no merit in Mr. Biden's socialist eco-system. No merit whatsoever! It's all about diversity, equity and inclusion, along with his big government socialist economics. Whether in person or on video, it's not going to work, Mr. Biden and I'll just say: Save America. Retire Joe Biden.
This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the April 25, 2023, edition of "Kudlow."
