Biden's First Year
A year of failures.
One Year Later
Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of Joe Biden’s presidency. As I watched the inauguration ceremony last year, I compared Inauguration Day to Opening Day for baseball.
Looking back, I can’t think of a better description of how I felt this time last year as Joe Biden was sworn in as president. I’ll admit that I was not much of a fan of Joe Biden- I certainly didn’t vote for him- but I couldn’t help but have some hope that maybe his presidency would be surprisingly not bad. My expectations were extremely low so I couldn’t help but think maybe Joe Biden would exceed them, especially considering he was supposed to be more moderate.
And yet, I cannot help but recognize that my initial skepticism regarding Biden’s presidency was not just warranted but has been justified. To be clear, this is not meant to be a “remember back in the good ole days when Trump was in charge” piece. My critique of Biden is not to make Trump look more appealing or promote him in the slightest bit. I want to focus solely on Biden to determine whether he has had a successful first year or not.
The reality is that I want Biden to be a successful president. I’m not interested in Joe Biden failing as a president because that means the country as a whole suffers. I don’t get any satisfaction from “being right” about Biden if it means that my life and the life of those I care about is worse off.
I also don’t want to blame Biden for circumstances out of his control. In particular, I don’t think Biden is to blame for the continued presence of COVID and its impact on the lives of Americans. There is nothing that Joe Biden, or any other president, could have done to prevent the development/spread of the Delta and Omicron variants and most COVID policies are enacted at the state level which Joe Biden has no control over. I don’t see much benefit in criticizing Biden for something that would not be much different even if the best of presidents was in charge.
Putting aside COVID, I still can’t help but evaluate Biden’s first year as mostly full of failures and limited successes. I don’t think the failures of Biden’s first year are mere marks on his record either but stains that will have lasting consequences. His primary failures, spending/inflation, foreign policy, and faith in our elections, cannot be immediately reversed even if he were to change course tomorrow.
Spending
There are many people who are holding Biden responsible for the rise in inflation that has occurred in recent months. It seems like a logical argument considering inflation hasn’t been a worry for the better part of four decades but it has begun anew under Biden. However, I don’t blame Biden for inflation in general because prices were bound to fluctuate with the onset of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that shut down the world. Supply has been limited and demand has only grown stronger which guarantees prices will go up.
There is little that Biden can do to prevent prices from increasing as long as supply chains are out of whack and the labor market is tight. This means that my expectations for what a president should do to address inflation are pretty low: just don’t make it worse. The world economy is way too complex for one man, no matter how powerful, to fix it so I don’t expect them to. But, one man with a lot of power sure can make it worse, which is exactly what Biden did when he signed a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill into law.
With the supply of all goods limited, Biden signed into a law a bill that injected new money into the economy and directly increase demand by sending direct payments to most Americans. I’m not an economist so I can’t figure out what percent of the current inflation rate is a product of the COVID relief bill, but the law of supply and demand means it certainly has contributed to inflation in some capacity. In other words, Biden hasn’t even met my extremely low bar of dealing with inflation because he made it worse.
The $1.9 trillion relief bill also came at a time when the national debt had already skyrocketed and government spending had gone through the ceiling. The United States’ current debt to GDP ratio is now over 130%. Previously, the debt to GDP ratio had stayed below 65%, from the end of WWII until the start of the Great Recession. For over a decade now, the United States has spent money at a rate that is unfathomable and hasn’t been seen really in its history. It is also unsustainable.
“Budget-hawks” have been decrying the imminent collapse of the American financial system if spending is not reigned in every year for the last decade. They have been proven wrong over and over again as everything has continued to operate as usual in spite of continued spending. However, there is an old adage that is attributed to a few different people (but is supposedly originally from Ernest Hemingway) that says bankruptcy comes on “gradually and then suddenly.” Bankruptcy is a gradual process until it reaches a tipping point that accelerates the process until it can’t be stopped.
This is the precarious situation that America finds itself in. An illustration I’ve heard has compared America’s current debt crisis to walking down an infinite hall, that is pitch black, with a gaping hole that leads to an abyss. You have no idea when the hole will come, you could walk for years, but you know it’s there and if you keep walking eventually you will fall through. America may be able to spend at these levels and accrue this debt for many more years. At some point though, they will reach a tipping point or the hole in the hallway. When that happens, it will be too late to change the consequences. Biden may not have started this process, but he certainly sped it up with the passage of the COVID relief bill.
Foreign Policy
I will admit that I probably care more about foreign policy than the average American voter, but most Americans are aware of Biden’s foreign policy record as president, which is never a good sign. The prime example of Biden’s foreign policy failures is the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. I won’t go into much detail here since I wrote a newsletter detailing the fallout which you can read here and wrote another newsletter explaining why the entire policy of leaving was wrong.
Essentially, the United States was not only embarrassed on an international scale because of the chaotic evacuation, but Americans are less safe due to Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan. Terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda, have a safe haven in Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban where they can congregate and plan attacks on America like before 9/11.
The Afghanistan withdrawal also demonstrated to the rest of the world that the American willpower to fight simply isn’t there. To emphasize, Afghanistan was not merely a “foreign war” but was the result of a direct attack that killed thousands of Americans. If American leadership could not sustain a focused fighting effort in such a circumstance, then why would American leadership be able to sustain a focused fighting effort in any other context. Thus, foreign adversaries are more likely to be aggressive in pursuit of their ambitions because they don’t fear an American military response.
This isn’t a theoretical point, as it is currently being played out at the Russia-Ukraine border. Russia, according to reports, has amassed over 100,000 troops along its border with Ukraine and is very likely to initiate an invasion into the country. While this could just be Vladimir Putin puffing up his chest a little bit, American intelligence seems to believe the threat of invasion is not just a possibility, but eminent. Such aggressive actions by Russia likely would not be possible if Biden had been resolute in ensuring the Taliban did not take back over Afghanistan. To make matters worse, Biden seemingly gave Putin the green light for a “minor incursion” into Ukraine by acknowledging that divisions among NATO members would be exposed. I’m not a military genius but exposing a potential weak point in an alliance does not seem like a winning military strategy.
Biden is particularly to blame for foreign policy failures because he is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Nothing happens if he does not allow it, which means he bears ultimate responsibility when things fail. On top of that, foreign policy and commanding the armed forces is responsibility number one of any president. I have an incredibly limited scope of what I deem proper presidential power and national defense is as straightforwardly proper as it gets. If the president is to be judged on any one thing, it ought to be foreign policy, and Biden can’t be judged any other way than a failure.
Faith in Elections
Finally, I wasn’t going to include this section until Biden gave his speech on voting rights in Georgia on January 11th, but it certainly must be included in his list of failures from his first year. A few weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter that was basically a reflection on January 6th and all the lessons we should learn from it. At the heart of that newsletter was my disdain for Trump’s undermining of the 2020 election by lies that the election was stolen. I thought (and still think) Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen were immensely damaging to the country and the worst aspect of his presidency because they created doubt about the integrity of our elections.
Then, Biden essentially did the same thing in his speech. Most people agree that one of the main reasons Biden was elected president is because he wasn’t Trump and people largely were sick of Trump. That may have been true in November 2019, but Joe Biden in his speech on January 11th, 2022 resembled Donald Trump more than ever by continuing to cast doubt on election integrity in this country.
Biden said regarding Georgia,
But with this new law in Georgia, his loyal- — his [Trump] loyalists will be placed in charge of state elections. What is that going to mean? Well, the chances for chaos and subversion are even greater as partisans seek the result they want — no matter what the voters have said, no matter what the count.
Biden about various Republican state voting bills,
Their endgame? To turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion — something states can respect or ignore.
And more:
The facts won’t matter; your vote won’t matter. They’ll just decide what they want and then do it.
Inherent in all of these statements is the idea that unless the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts are passed, democracy in America will be threatened because no election will be legitimate. What is the explanation if these bills don’t pass and Democrats lose any elections in 2022? They must have been stolen by Republicans.
This kind of rhetoric was despicable when Trump did it and continues to be despicable when Biden does it. As January 6th demonstrated, lies about election integrity can have serious consequences. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Republican or Democrat who makes them.
With 3 years remaining, Biden has plenty of time to reverse course and have an ultimately successful presidency. However, the failures in his first year (while still having negative consequences) seem to foreshadow only more serious failures to come.
God Bless,
Hunter Burnett