It’s the 20th of January, President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration day. I want to use this time to take a look back at now former President Joe Biden’s legacy as president. A president’s decisions echo through the centuries, so we won’t know his real legacy until at least a decade from now. But this will be a great article to refer back to in the future to see what I thought in the moment.
Stimulus and Inflation
During the 2020 pandemic, American business was negatively impacted as a side effect of combating COVID. To relieve the situation, the U.S. Government, under the leadership of Donald Trump, signed the CARES Act into law. The act gave Americans $2.2 trillion of economic stimulus, the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history. Joe Biden took office in January 2021, and less than two months later, in March, he signed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package. COVID’s negative impact and all of this economic stimulus came with a very familiar side effect: inflation.
For the rest of his presidency, Joe Biden’s administration and the Federal Reserve were stuck dealing with this problem of inflation. It would also be one of the Republicans’ main talking points against Biden. It was an funny criticism because COVID happened on Trump’s watch, and Republicans contributed at minimum $2.2 trillion to that inflation; Republicans were throwing stones from a glass house. Unfortunately for Biden, both he and his cabinet were very poor communicators and could not get that point across to the American people. So, he just took the blame for all of it. The game is the game.