“Bidenomics” and the tricky art of selling an idea

Make Me Smart June 29, 2023

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Kimberly Adams 

Hello, I’m Kimberly Adams, welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense. It is June the 29^th, almost to the end of the month.

Kai Ryssdal

Almost end of the month, almost the end of the week. Cannot get there soon enough.

Kai Ryssdal

Anyway, I’m Kai Ryssdal. So thanks for joining us. Something a little bit different on the pod today. We’re working on some new segments, don’t have a name or a brand or anything at all like that yet, but here’s what’s gonna happen today, anyway. We’re gonna play a piece of audio from the news of the week that caught our attention. And then we’ll talk about it just a little bit and you know, do a little reaction.

Kimberly Adams

Okay, we’ve got the first one ready to go. This is from President Biden’s big speech in Chicago yesterday about well, you’ll hear what it’s about.

President Biden

Bidenomics is about building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.  And there are three fundamental changes that we decided to make with the help of Congress and been able to do it: first, making smart investments in America; second, educating and empowering American workers to grow the middle class; and third, promoting competition to lower costs to help small businesses.

Kimberly Adams 

Bidennomics. So let’s be abundantly clear. This was a campaign speech. Right? And if you were hoping that, you know, we had a ways to go before we got deep into election campaigning, no, not, not at all. This was solidly a campaign speech and what was so interesting about this speech and the deluge of messaging around it, because the Biden campaign, the White House, were sending out press releases, they were sending out talking points, they had prep calls, everything they wanted everyone to be saying Bidennomics all day every day, and for the most part, the media obliged. Sure. It’s a branding ploy to, as we talked about on the show yesterday, kind of contrast the Biden perspective on the economy to Reaganomics, and the sort of trickle down versus bottom up or middle out or whatever. What I think is so super fascinating about this strategy of messaging around the economy for the campaign, is that usually, and I say this, as somebody who has been covering presidential elections since 2000, there is a concrete thing that a president will want to latch on to as their economic win: jobs, economic growth, business formation, trade, something that people can see and that you can show pictures of. The Biden campaign is trying to market an idea and a perspective of how the American economy should run. And that is going to be so much harder, because even though they have had some economic wins, like, you know, somehow helping us pull the economy out of the worst pandemic, since, you know, the early 1900s, that there’s so many disparate parts to what those successes look like. And a lot of them are open to interpretation. It’s a little bit hard to sort of pin down. Here’s the thing that we did. And so instead, we’ve got this idea…

Kai Ryssdal

This, this brand, right, yeah. So two quick additional thoughts to what Kimberly said, all of which I wish to associate my with, myself with. But the first one is, you know, so Reaganomics was all about getting the government out of the economy, right. Bidenomics. I mean, he was explicit about this as he was running, right? We’re going to get the government more involved in the economy. So that’s the sort of the historical counterpoint. The second thing and the reason this just really reverberates, I think, if you follow this stuff, is that two weeks ago, as the Republicans were using Bidenomics in a pejorative way, Biden was asked, you know, what do you think about Bidenomics? And he said, Yeah, I don’t know what the hell that is. And here he is. Now two weeks later, his advisors having said, “you know what we need to grab on to this thing and run with it because the economy is doing fundamentally well, but people don’t believe it.” And now it’s his thing. And he’s co-opting the Republicans, which is just an interesting little political sleight of hand.

Kimberly Adams

Well, and it’s one that they’ve done before, because this came up when I was talking to people about this yesterday. This is an exact repeat of Obamacare. When Biden was vice president, the Republicans, were using the term Obamacare to refer to the ACA, which I don’t even remember what ACA stands for American. Yeah, God, what was that? Anyway, it was the big health care law.

Kai Ryssdal

Affordable Care Act.

Kimberly Adams

Affordable Care Act. Thank you. Affordable Care Act. Biden adminstration, sorry, the Obama administration had been calling it the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans pejoratively started calling it Obamacare. And Obama was like, “Yeah, I do care and own was incredibly successful.” And so Biden’s team clearly remembers that and is doing the same thing. Co-opting the term to stop Republicans from using it against them later, or anymore. Yeah, it was so funny.

Kai Ryssdal

All right.Here’s the next one. This is Jay Powell, who is chairman of the Federal Reserve, talking a week or so ago, on Capitol Hill, the House Financial Services Committee.

Jay Powell

We do see payment stable coins as a form of money. And in all advanced economies, the ultimate source of credibility in money is the central bank. And we believe that it would be appropriate to have a quite a robust federal role in, in what, what what happens in stable coins going forward and that leaving us with a weak role and allowing a lot of private money creation at the state level would be a mistake.

Kai Ryssdal

So stable coins are kind of digital currency that are supposed to be more stable because they are pegged to the value of an underlying stable currency, in most cases of the US dollar. There’s lots of talk about digital currencies. There’s lots of talk about central bank digital currencies, this was the Fed Chair responding to a question about that on Capitol Hill a couple of weeks ago. And here’s what you see Jay Powell saying, reading between the lines, “you’re going to have private digital currencies over my dead body,” right. “I’m, I’m in charge of the money in this economy, not anybody else.” And if you expand this out a little bit, you have to widen the lens a little bit to get into crypto and what that implies for the value of actual tangible, fiat currency money that the central bank distributes, you can see this as a small move by the Fed chair to say, “You know what, we’re going to take an interest in this because the money is ours.” It’s not, it’s not going to be privately held as it were.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, and what’s interesting about this particular quote, is the mention of the state level, which is something I had not heard before, because we’ve talked tons about, you know, sort of stable coins and in digital currencies in the private market, right, or from individual users. But the idea of states creating their own digital currencies, like takes us back to the Civil War. You know, when pre-Civil War, the union- you’re the history buff here, you can tell me the exact details of this- but lots of individual states and territories at the time had their own currencies, and it was a mess about what was being accepted where. And so the idea of you know, there being digital versions of state level currency, I can see why Powell is like, Absolutely not.

Kai Ryssdal

Very, very bad. Not doing it.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah. Okay. Juan Carlos, let us get to this last one, which is from what was apparently a very raucous New York City meeting on rent increases.

Woman from NYC meeting

Do you think it’s humane to work every day, all day just to make ends meet? I work every day Monday to Sunday 8am to 10pm. Do you think I have a life? I have to survive. I just left work to come here to speak up for the people that couldn’t come here. Do you think that’s fair? … Thank you for your testimony … No, I’m not finished. Because you the rent guidelines board which  you started in 1960 to help us and hear us from the tenants and instead rent has risen. What are you doing to support us? I implore you to not increase the rent and roll the — rollback the rent.

Kimberly Adams 

So you know, go ahead.

Kai Ryssdal

No, go ahead.

Kimberly Adams

Well, I mean, they’re talking here about sort of the the rent control rules in New York City, but you could probably replay this in cities, all over the country where the cost of renting is just becoming so unaffordable at the same time, that homes, buying a home is incredibly unaffordable for a lot of people. And this idea that, you know, you’re supposed to be working all day every day to just barely survive is. I mean, I can’t imagine because like, you know, in most cities you can’t make, even above the minimum wage and afford to rent an apartment the size of like a normal person or family.

Kai Ryssdal

Right. So let’s quantify this for a second right there are give or take a million people in the city of New York, something like 2 million of them, which is a quarter of the population, live in rent stabilized apartments and those rents are going up 2 to 3% a year. And as Kimberly said, when you’re trying to make the rent as it were, by working full time and raising your kids, and on a minimum wage job, that is not happening, that is not happening. So it’s a big deal. And you know, New York is big. And what happens in New York will trickle out to other cities.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah. All right, we’ve got one more before we go. And this is from a story that NBC News did about this ongoing lawsuit in the state of Montana, where young people are suing the state for failing to address climate change. And here’s one of NBC News reporters talking to one of the kids.

Reporter

What do your parents think, Mikah?

Mikah

At first they were kind of skeptical because, you know, it’s kind of weird to let your, at the time I was 11 join a lawsuit against the State of Montana.So I’d say they were more actually against me joining it.Not because they disagreed with the case at all, but just because they weren’t sure if it was the right thing for an 11 year old to do. So I convinced my parents to, you know, let me join the case.

Kimberly Adams 

The defense arguments for this case are, you know, just about to get going or I think they just started. And I’m trying to imagine sort of like how parents would approach this, because this is going to be something that goes on for years and years. And you really want your kid caught up in this. But at the same time, you know, what else might work? And lots of people have tried to sue for climate change related things: sue the government, sue states, do stew city, sue cities- and we’re all stewing in various things right now, as I look out the window at all of the smoke in DC. But standing is consistently a really difficult challenge for these cases. Who has the right to sue whom, over something that is so big and so multifaceted as climate change. And at least so far, it seems like these kids in Montana have a case that is moving forward. And that will be super fascinating to watch.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, I mean, they’re, you know, it’s their future more than ours. If you could just put sheer, you know, chronological time on it. Anyway, anyway. So there you go.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, that is it for us, today. We are gonna be back tomorrow for economics on tap. We do hope that you will join us. We’re going to be live streaming starting at 3:30 Pacific, 6:30 Eastern on YouTube. Please join.

Kai Ryssdal

If you want to find out what the team is reading and drinking this week sign up for the Make Me Smart newsletter out every Friday morning. You can find it and all the other Marketplace newsletters at marketplace.org/newsletters.

Kimberly Adams

News letters.

Kai Ryssdal

I don’t know why I do that. It’s all one word newsletters.

Kimberly Adams

Yes. Make me smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s episode was engineered by Juan Carlos Torado. Ellen Rolfes writes that newsletter that we were just talking about and our intern is Niloufar Shahbandi.

Kai Ryssdal

Marissa Cabrera is the senior producer of this podcast. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts and Francesca Levy is the director, executive director of this whole smash.

Kimberly Adams

The whole shebang.

Kai Ryssdal

The whole thing.