Biden definitely could have done more to make ordinary folk feel the economic benefits to a greater extent.
But I do think there is an issue in that the idea that left-leaning politicians are “bad” at economics/fiscal policy and that right-leaning ones are “good” at it, is just hard coded into public and media consciousness.
Centre-left govts that are doing good stuff economically never seem to get any credit and when the slightest thing goes wrong it’s all “socialists who’ve never run a business before can’t run an economy brrrrr”.
Meanwhile people just assume centre-right politicians will do a better job even when they are being quite incompetent. And when things go wrong the media always seems to point to extraneous factors.
If Truss/Kwarteng had been Labour we’d hear no end of it. It’d still be making headlines in the right-wing press. Nick Robinson would bring it up in every interview. Blokes in pubs would be bringing it up as a reason not to trust the left well into the 2050s.
In reality it now seems to have disappeared from public discourse even though it was quite a remarkable event that is still having impacts on us today.
Biden definitely could have done more to make ordinary folk feel the economic benefits to a greater extent.
But I do think there is an issue in that the idea that left-leaning politicians are “bad” at economics/fiscal policy and that right-leaning ones are “good” at it, is just hard coded into public and media consciousness.
Centre-left govts that are doing good stuff economically never seem to get any credit and when the slightest thing goes wrong it’s all “socialists who’ve never run a business before can’t run an economy brrrrr”.
Meanwhile people just assume centre-right politicians will do a better job even when they are being quite incompetent. And when things go wrong the media always seems to point to extraneous factors.
If Truss/Kwarteng had been Labour we’d hear no end of it. It’d still be making headlines in the right-wing press. Nick Robinson would bring it up in every interview. Blokes in pubs would be bringing it up as a reason not to trust the left well into the 2050s.
In reality it now seems to have disappeared from public discourse even though it was quite a remarkable event that is still having impacts on us today.
Ed Balls