Latest / Politix / Joe Biden Beat The Trump Crime Wave

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Joe Biden Beat The Trump Crime Wave · Politix

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Trump is the sort of like a moral sinister type person who like I would not be
0:04
SPEAKER_00: surprised if we learn sometime after the fact that like affiliates of the Trump
0:09
SPEAKER_00: campaign were gaming out ways to gin up riots in Chicago during the Democratic Convention.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: Call me a conspiracy theorist if I'm disproven, but like it would be completely in character.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: And like I just don't feel like this facet of Trump's nihilism matters.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: gets brought to bear on the discussion of like, why did crime go up in the first place?
0:37
SPEAKER_00: Hey, everyone, you're listening to a free preview of the politics podcast.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: In this episode,
0:42
SPEAKER_00: we discuss the enticing idea that Democrats can begin taking victory laps on two
0:47
SPEAKER_00: issues that have unfairly dogged them for the last several months,
0:51
SPEAKER_00: the economy and crime.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: We're going to assess the origins of things like inflation and the 2020 crime wave
0:58
SPEAKER_00: and the current state of affairs with as much nuance as we can,
1:02
SPEAKER_00: but also talk about where the outer limit of acceptable partisan spin lies,
1:07
SPEAKER_00: since that's where Democrats should probably be spending most of their time.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed the conversation.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: And if you want to hear the whole thing, you can upgrade your subscription to paid at politics.fm.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Hey, everyone.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Politics Podcast.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm Brian Boitler.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: And I'm Matthew Iglesias.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: So since last we potted, we received two, I think, important pieces of news.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: First is that inflation in the most recent government data came in below where we'd
1:38
SPEAKER_00: expect it to be for the Federal Reserve to rise.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: cut interest rates in pretty short order.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: And second is that violent crime from FBI statistics is way down from its Trump COVID era highs.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: It's even down well below where it was when Donald Trump took office in 2017.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: So the two sets of questions we're interested in now are,
2:01
SPEAKER_00: on one hand,
2:02
SPEAKER_00: should Joe Biden and Democrats take credit,
2:04
SPEAKER_00: do a victory lap?
2:06
SPEAKER_00: And what should that look like if they do?
2:09
SPEAKER_00: And then on the other hand, what actually happened?
2:12
SPEAKER_00: Who's responsible for the crash of 2020, the recovery, inflation?
2:18
SPEAKER_00: What or who caused the crime wave?
2:20
SPEAKER_00: And does Biden really deserve credit for reversing it?
2:24
SPEAKER_00: Whether he claims it or not, is that a fair question?
2:27
SPEAKER_00: thing.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: Matt, what do you think?
2:29
SPEAKER_01: You know,
2:30
SPEAKER_01: the economy is like a tough needle for Biden to thread at this point,
2:34
SPEAKER_01: as has been for a long time.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, good news recently is better than bad news, and they can hope for some future improvements.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: The crime one, I feel like, is an easier sort of
2:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
2:48
SPEAKER_01: it's easier substantively,
2:49
SPEAKER_01: I think,
2:50
SPEAKER_01: to say that,
2:51
SPEAKER_01: like,
2:51
SPEAKER_01: Biden's policies played a meaningful role in driving crime down.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: Also, just, like, by the numbers, right?
2:58
SPEAKER_01: Like...
3:00
SPEAKER_01: Crime went up, which made the crime issue more relevant to people.
3:05
SPEAKER_01: And tough on crime is like a good Republican issue.
3:08
SPEAKER_01: But like factually, Trump was president when crime went up.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: And then crime has been going down across multiple years since Biden took office.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: And I think there's like a really sound political and substantive argument that you
3:24
SPEAKER_01: could make about that.
3:25
SPEAKER_01: It's always risky for a Democrat to deliberately drive up the salience of law and order issues.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: So I don't think it's a total, total no-brainer.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: But I'm 100% comfortable putting down on paper Donald Trump's approach to crime control,
3:42
SPEAKER_01: discredited policing,
3:44
SPEAKER_01: made things worse.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: Biden took office and...
3:48
SPEAKER_01: actually found a wise middle ground between Trump's advocacy for dirty cops and
3:54
SPEAKER_01: leftists' advocacy for de-policing,
3:57
SPEAKER_01: and it worked.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: And we're on pace in 20...
4:01
SPEAKER_01: We don't know what's going to happen over the summer,
4:03
SPEAKER_01: but so far in 2024,
4:06
SPEAKER_01: homicides have been occurring not just at a lower rate than in 2020,
4:10
SPEAKER_01: but at a lower rate than in 2017,
4:12
SPEAKER_01: right?
4:12
SPEAKER_01: So like...
4:14
SPEAKER_01: fully reversing an uptick in crime that happened in the last two years of Barack Obama,
4:20
SPEAKER_01: getting America back on the track we were on with Bill Clinton,
4:24
SPEAKER_01: with early Obama,
4:26
SPEAKER_01: by going back to the well of like classic democratic policies of funding community policing,
4:32
SPEAKER_01: doing civil rights enforcement,
4:34
SPEAKER_01: and like trying to make people appreciate professional policing.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: which is like not what Trump did, not what leftist weirdos wanted, but has always been Biden's politics.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: And like he did it and it and it worked.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: The economy is a is a tough one because I mean, I think it looks to most people like Biden fix.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: You could say like Biden fixed inflation, but it's like Biden fixed inflation that happened under Biden.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: OK,
5:05
SPEAKER_00: so a few things we can we should bracket these things because they are different,
5:09
SPEAKER_00: even though I do think that like at some level,
5:13
SPEAKER_00: like the timeline question is really important on crime statistics.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Like.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Why did crime go up substantially in Donald Trump's last year in particular?
5:29
SPEAKER_00: And why did it go down after like the fact that those happen to line up with the
5:32
SPEAKER_00: turning of the administration is helpful for Biden.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: But I think also fits a pretty tidy theory of what was contributing to crime during
5:40
SPEAKER_00: Trump and what was contributing to the downtick in crime under Biden.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Whereas like with the economy, I think you can make an almost equally strong case, but because the.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: the data gets weird after the transition.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: In fact,
5:53
SPEAKER_00: well after the transition,
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Biden ends up having to do a lot of explaining,
5:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
5:58
SPEAKER_00: about why you shouldn't blame his policies for inflation,
6:05
SPEAKER_00: why things are better now than they were before the pandemic.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: And so it's just like politically a tougher matter.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: But I think like between the two of us,
6:13
SPEAKER_00: we're probably able to like construct pretty similar theories about why inflation
6:20
SPEAKER_00: like crime got worse under Trump,
6:23
SPEAKER_00: why the economy tanked so badly during the pandemic under Trump,
6:27
SPEAKER_00: and then why crime got better under Biden and why the economy also got better under Biden.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: I mean, so I mean, on the economy, what would you say?
6:33
SPEAKER_01: Right.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: I mean, so.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Well,
6:36
SPEAKER_00: the first thing I wanted to say is that I feel like we are jinxing this and there's
6:38
SPEAKER_00: going to be some horrible crime waves surrounding the Democratic Convention in
6:42
SPEAKER_00: Chicago now that we now that we've broached the topic.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: But OK,
6:46
SPEAKER_00: so so let's let's OK,
6:47
SPEAKER_00: let's start with inflation and then we can do crime in 20 minutes or whatever.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: But like, I mean, I I think that the the.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: My read of the economy under Trump was that he inherited Obama's economy,
7:01
SPEAKER_00: which he thought – which he always called crappy.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: Then the moment he took over, he called it really good.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: And if you look at – if you ignore – you can even ignore the fiscal policy changes
7:11
SPEAKER_00: that happened after he took office where Republicans cut taxes,
7:15
SPEAKER_00: increased spending,
7:16
SPEAKER_00: like –
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Just watch what the GDP line did.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: Watch what the employment line did.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: And you can't really tell where any major bill passed.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: It just looks like a continuation of the trend that began under Obama after the Great Recession.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: So you have three years.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Trump didn't fuck anything up.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: But even the things that he managed to wring out of Congress that should have been
7:39
SPEAKER_00: expansionary just didn't seem to cause like an acceleration in growth or anything
7:44
SPEAKER_00: like that.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: Then the pandemic happens.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: And like this is where I admit that like I would personally just encourage
7:52
SPEAKER_00: Democrats as politicians who don't need to be like hyper precise about things to
7:56
SPEAKER_00: say like,
7:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
8:00
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump cratered the economy and we brought it back.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: Inflation is part of the Trump legacy and we fixed it.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: the fact checkers then descend and say, well, the, the story is actually complicated.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: And like,
8:13
SPEAKER_00: I would concede that,
8:15
SPEAKER_00: especially in the United States where we kind of had to assemble a safety net from
8:19
SPEAKER_00: scratch when the pandemic hit,
8:20
SPEAKER_00: there was just going to be a lot of economic,
8:22
SPEAKER_00: a lot of people were going to lose jobs,
8:24
SPEAKER_00: both like as a real thing,
8:27
SPEAKER_00: like they stopped going to work in as a,
8:28
SPEAKER_00: just like a matter of,
8:30
SPEAKER_00: uh,
8:31
SPEAKER_00: like,
8:31
SPEAKER_00: um,
8:32
SPEAKER_00: paperwork.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: Right.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: Um,
8:34
SPEAKER_00: And no president,
8:37
SPEAKER_00: no matter how well they handled the lead up to the pandemic,
8:41
SPEAKER_00: if COVID escapes China,
8:44
SPEAKER_00: it's going to it's going to create huge economic disruption.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: So I think Trump really should, in some sense, get a pass on a lot of what happened in 2020.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: But he.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: Like.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: He definitely mismanaged the pandemic in ways that I think made the crash worse than it had to be.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: And I am pretty confident that if he had won reelection in 2020, the recovery would have been slower too.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: And Biden comes in, jolts the economy.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: There's a global spike in inflation as the economy reopens around the world, but it's
9:26
SPEAKER_00: matched here by increasing wages for much of it.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: And like, we got back to full employment within basically two years.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I think that that's actually a pretty successful story.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't reflect very well on Trump.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: And if you buy my version of events, it's a pretty good story for Joe Biden.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: I just acknowledge that that like, it took me five minutes or something to describe all that.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: And I like,
9:53
SPEAKER_00: Biden can't really do that.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: You need it to be intuitive to people, and it's kind of counterintuitive.
10:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
10:01
SPEAKER_01: I think a problem for Biden beyond the timeline,
10:06
SPEAKER_01: there's sort of three elements to it,
10:08
SPEAKER_01: but it's kind of like one thing,
10:10
SPEAKER_01: which is that when the American Rescue Plan was coming together,
10:16
SPEAKER_01: several prominent moderate Democrats said publicly,
10:23
SPEAKER_01: we think that this bill is too large and is going to generate an excessive level of inflation.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: Then second,
10:31
SPEAKER_01: when inflation started to rise,
10:35
SPEAKER_01: the Biden administration and the Fed took this very strong line that it was purely transitory,
10:41
SPEAKER_01: that it was just the kind of
10:44
SPEAKER_01: So the first summer of vaccines,
10:47
SPEAKER_01: the cost of hotel rooms skyrocketed because basically people were trying to take
10:53
SPEAKER_01: two and a half years worth of vacations all in one summer.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: And so you look at something like that and you're like,
10:59
SPEAKER_01: okay,
11:00
SPEAKER_01: this is annoying,
11:01
SPEAKER_01: but it's just going to go away.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: We don't need to do it.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: But in fact, some inflation got meaningfully embedded.
11:10
SPEAKER_01: Then the third part is that
11:13
SPEAKER_01: Biden never really did a kind of like hard pivot of the policy agenda to like,
11:22
SPEAKER_01: we're in inflation fighting mode now.
11:24
SPEAKER_01: You know,
11:25
SPEAKER_01: they took the view that like this was just kind of overblown and it would sort of
11:31
SPEAKER_01: fade away over time.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: And that was true.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: I mean, like I mean, in their defense, it was true, but it in a way makes it harder.
11:42
SPEAKER_01: Like having kind of like blown the call two times.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: it then makes it a little bit harder.
11:48
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's like a contrast actually with the crime situation where like part
11:55
SPEAKER_01: of what Biden did on crime was like actually say that the rising crime was bad.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: And like,
12:05
SPEAKER_01: to an extent,
12:05
SPEAKER_01: like,
12:06
SPEAKER_01: annoyed some leftists by,
12:08
SPEAKER_01: like,
12:08
SPEAKER_01: validating the concern that this rise in crime and disorder was a problem.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: But it now means,
12:14
SPEAKER_01: like,
12:14
SPEAKER_01: he can turn back and be like,
12:16
SPEAKER_01: when this was freaking you out,
12:18
SPEAKER_01: I was freaked out,
12:18
SPEAKER_01: too.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: I did a bunch of stuff, and now it's gotten better.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: Whereas on inflation... Matt, Matt, Matt.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: You... I mean, I love this about your Twitter presence, but...
12:30
SPEAKER_00: You enjoy posting the graph of inflation marked with when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, right?
12:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, sure.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: This did save the day with the inflation reduction act.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: If you want to do the crudest correlation causation fallacy,
12:45
SPEAKER_00: you can give Biden credit for crushing inflation by signing a very modest in size
12:52
SPEAKER_00: economic bill,
12:54
SPEAKER_00: but that has very little to do with inflation per se.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: but um uh but he called it the inflation reduction act and like what he did is i i think actually
13:03
SPEAKER_00: what you do optimally,
13:04
SPEAKER_00: if you realize that people are upset about inflation,
13:07
SPEAKER_00: but you think that it would be overkill to pass a genuinely disinflationary
13:13
SPEAKER_00: austerity bill,
13:14
SPEAKER_00: right?
13:14
SPEAKER_00: You want people to think that you're taking it seriously,
13:16
SPEAKER_00: so you call the bill the Inflation Reduction Act.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: But you think that if it's like this $4 trillion package of tax cuts or tax
13:23
SPEAKER_00: increases and spending cuts,
13:25
SPEAKER_00: that A,
13:25
SPEAKER_00: it'll be unpopular and B,
13:27
SPEAKER_00: you will take the recovery that you're generating with all the pent-up savings and
13:33
SPEAKER_00: all the spending that you did in the past year and a half and make the recovery
13:37
SPEAKER_00: slower than it needs to be.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: To me,
13:39
SPEAKER_00: there's actually something...
13:41
SPEAKER_00: I think they stumbled into it mostly,
13:42
SPEAKER_00: but you can characterize it as kind of like a wily and optimal about...
13:47
SPEAKER_01: I like that moment,
13:48
SPEAKER_01: but I think that there was not as much...
13:53
SPEAKER_01: follow through on the like promise of the slightly cutesy Inflation Reduction Act
13:58
SPEAKER_01: as there should have been.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
13:59
SPEAKER_01: I remember I was doing like briefing call before the 2024 SIG,
14:03
SPEAKER_01: the union,
14:04
SPEAKER_01: which wound up being a good speech,
14:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
14:06
SPEAKER_01: but it was like economic policy team.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: And they were like, you know, this is going to be all about our like focus on costs.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, in the spirit of like, help me help you.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: I was like,
14:15
SPEAKER_01: is there something we should look out for that you would say,
14:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
14:19
SPEAKER_01: a Democrat like wouldn't normally do?
14:23
SPEAKER_01: But that is a is a signpost of like how seriously you're taking inflation.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: And the answer was like, not really.
14:30
SPEAKER_01: And that I just think is like a little bit, you know, I don't know.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: I don't have any like wild takes on this.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: Like like his his inflation polling is terrible.
14:41
SPEAKER_01: The timeline, the timeline is bad.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: And like, I don't totally know what to do about it.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: So, well, OK, well, here's what I said about it.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: And it's what I actually think is true.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: Well,
14:53
SPEAKER_00: first things first,
14:54
SPEAKER_00: if you want to wreck the internet,
14:57
SPEAKER_00: you could say that Biden's big response to inflation was reducing the costs people
15:05
SPEAKER_00: bear with student loan debt.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: Costs went down.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: Not inflationary at all.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: Look, I honestly think that the main reason Biden found himself
15:18
SPEAKER_00: trapped um in a uh like by the facts like i became president in january 2021 i
15:27
SPEAKER_00: passed one point whatever it was seven five trillion dollars in the rescue plan
15:32
SPEAKER_00: Some people said it was too much.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: And here we are a year later, year and a half later, and we have significant inflation.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: And that looks bad.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: But I honestly think that the critical error was the sort of like...
15:51
SPEAKER_00: righteous,
15:53
SPEAKER_00: dignified new president coming in to take responsibility and set things right from
16:00
SPEAKER_00: his predecessor.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: Biden shows up and he's like, we're done talking about Donald Trump.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm here to fix things.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: And that put him on the hook for everything, whereas a slight tweak
16:12
SPEAKER_00: in his initial presentation as president,
16:16
SPEAKER_00: where he said,
16:17
SPEAKER_00: we've inherited a country in disaster shape,
16:20
SPEAKER_00: and it's going to take years to dig out,
16:23
SPEAKER_00: and some of it's going to be bumpy.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: But I want you there with me.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: I'll have you in mind.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: It means that when the inflation hits,
16:32
SPEAKER_00: then you get to say,
16:33
SPEAKER_00: it's because Trump left us a mess,
16:35
SPEAKER_00: and this is just part of the messy process of cleaning up what he left behind.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: But that wasn't available to him.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: If when the first report came out that suggested we might have an inflation issue
16:46
SPEAKER_00: creeping up,
16:47
SPEAKER_00: Biden was able to say,
16:48
SPEAKER_00: look,
16:49
SPEAKER_00: I told you at the outset,
16:51
SPEAKER_00: the global and domestic economic situation I inherited was really messy.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: And we needed money to pay for jobs.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: And we needed to reopen supply chains.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: And...
17:09
SPEAKER_00: both of those things coinciding is why we have inflation,
17:12
SPEAKER_00: but they're only necessary because the people who came before fucked things up so badly.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: Like that, I feel like implant that idea at the outset and it lingers.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: But if you go back now and say,
17:22
SPEAKER_00: what I really meant to say all along was that this was all Donald Trump's fault.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Everyone's going to be like, yeah, sure, dude, whatever.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: Like convenient that you found that scapegoat two years later.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, so looking back on it,
17:33
SPEAKER_01: What I think now is that,
17:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:37
SPEAKER_01: so I was reading,
17:39
SPEAKER_01: I was looking at the Twitter feed of some of the like COVID dead enders,
17:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:45
SPEAKER_01: people who are like complaining that like Democrats are leading a genocide of the disabled.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: And they showed me a polling memo that circulated among House Democrats in like,
17:58
SPEAKER_01: it was like spring of 2022.
18:01
SPEAKER_01: And the memo is basically begging Democrats to stop talking about their efforts to combat the virus.
18:10
SPEAKER_01: It's one of these things that's written in a pleading tone, just that the voters are done with this.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: They think vaccines have been available for a long time.
18:21
SPEAKER_01: They don't want to hear you talking about masks, talking about caution, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: And,
18:28
SPEAKER_01: you know,
18:29
SPEAKER_01: I think that what happened in practice once the Delta variant hit,
18:36
SPEAKER_01: right,
18:36
SPEAKER_01: in summer 2021,
18:39
SPEAKER_01: is that Democrats kind of moved into a like a version of your like long road back
18:48
SPEAKER_01: kind of messaging.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: But it was like long road back about the virus that wound up generating a
18:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, people forget it now because once it's done, it's all in the past.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: But there was a solid 18 months of just wrangling about a million things related to
19:07
SPEAKER_01: COVID and to non-pharmaceutical interventions.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: And you're right that in retrospect,
19:14
SPEAKER_01: what you would have wanted to do was spend that time emphasizing the depths of the
19:20
SPEAKER_01: economic hole.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Right.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: And like,
19:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
19:23
SPEAKER_01: blame Trump with some of your messages,
19:26
SPEAKER_01: be high minded with some of your messages,
19:28
SPEAKER_01: but like all the time be fixating on like,
19:32
SPEAKER_01: all these companies were just closed.
19:35
SPEAKER_01: And like, now they need to reopen because customers are coming back.
19:39
SPEAKER_01: And like, it is a bumpy road.
19:41
SPEAKER_01: The price of oil has gone up because all these companies went bankrupt during the thing.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: And like, we're getting it back up and running.
19:48
SPEAKER_01: And like, hail our heroic fracking troops, you know?
19:51
SPEAKER_01: And they did some of this, like, specifically with the ports.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: But it was like, everything was like that, you know?
19:57
SPEAKER_01: Like,
19:58
SPEAKER_01: That the economy is not a light switch that you can just kind of turn up and down.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: But I think a lot of that time was lost.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: Some of it was lost to high mindedness.
20:06
SPEAKER_01: Some of it was lost to complacency.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: Like you remember at the time, the conventional wisdom was that Biden had extremely lucky timing.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: Yes, because Trump, the economy, it was the opposite of the 2009 thing.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: And it was more like the Great Depression where the crash had occurred so long
20:22
SPEAKER_00: before the election that it was going to be clear to everyone for a long time who
20:26
SPEAKER_00: was responsible for it.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: Right.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: I kind of bought that.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: But I also knew from my experience watching the country confused in their own heads
20:35
SPEAKER_00: who was in charge during the election.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: during the financial crisis of 2008.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: And like, it's just like very easy to, um, like get the public to believe something that isn't true.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: It turns out like I knew in 2021 that like your decision to refer to him as the
20:54
SPEAKER_00: former guy and put him in the rear view and take ownership of the whole thing is a
20:58
SPEAKER_00: mistake as long as he's still kind of
21:01
SPEAKER_00: lurking out there, like an unvanquished... I agree.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: I do think that we all need to be honest about what was the CW about the economic situation.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: I thought, I think most people, I think that at that time, conservatives were worried, were angry.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, angry.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: But it was like, these vaccines...
21:23
SPEAKER_01: Vaccine distribution had started over the winter.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: It was like a big mess.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: And I think the focus of the Biden administration was like,
21:30
SPEAKER_01: we are going to clean up this vaccine distribution mess.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: But once we do that, it's going to be all downhill sailing.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: And they actually did do a lot of anti-Trump rhetoric about this.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: The last mile of the vaccine.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: Right.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: And then it was like, we got to fix this.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: And like, and they did fix it.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, to their credit.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: Right.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: And like, it went from a trickle of vaccinations to a flood.
21:54
SPEAKER_01: And there was the, you know, um,
21:57
SPEAKER_01: The hot vac summer.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: But then Delta came and inflation came,
22:04
SPEAKER_01: and it turned out that they were dealing with a different and more complex
22:09
SPEAKER_01: situation than I think they had accounted for.
22:12
SPEAKER_01: And it was just...
22:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, it wasn't handled optimally from like a substantive or a messaging standpoint.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: You know,
22:21
SPEAKER_01: everybody says that it's a terrible message to point out that like literally every
22:26
SPEAKER_01: other economy in the world is doing worse than America's.
22:30
SPEAKER_01: I guess that's true, that it's a bad message.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: No, you put it the other way around.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: America is the envy of the world.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: But yes, I mean, to me at least, like...
22:40
SPEAKER_01: For all my doubts and quibbles about Biden's approach to the recovery,
22:47
SPEAKER_01: I think it does actually speak volumes that the stock market is at record levels.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: There was this piece in Bloomberg about how investors all around the world have
23:00
SPEAKER_01: been flooding into US assets of various kinds because America is seeing...
23:08
SPEAKER_01: as the only really strong global economy,
23:11
SPEAKER_01: that inflation was bad in the United States,
23:14
SPEAKER_01: but it was just as bad in Europe.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: It toppled incumbents in New Zealand and Australia, all fucking every place.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: We've had the strongest real growth of any country.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: Immigration has obviously been something that we wrestle with.
23:30
SPEAKER_01: But the main reason so many people have been trying to sneak into America is that there's
23:35
SPEAKER_01: Plentiful jobs available here.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: And you can see it, too.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: The worst thing you can say is,
23:42
SPEAKER_01: okay,
23:43
SPEAKER_01: people are making bogus asylum claims because they want to get jobs doing Uber Eats.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: And that's what's happening.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: The American economy is not in,
23:55
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
23:58
SPEAKER_01: it's not like a utopia that has rained down from upon the world,
24:02
SPEAKER_01: but everybody has wrestled with
24:06
SPEAKER_01: the fallout of the war,
24:07
SPEAKER_01: the fallout of decoupling with China,
24:10
SPEAKER_01: the difficulty of reopening from the pandemic,
24:13
SPEAKER_01: the fact that,
24:13
SPEAKER_01: like,
24:14
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:15
SPEAKER_01: we just didn't have,
24:15
SPEAKER_01: like,
24:16
SPEAKER_01: good,
24:16
SPEAKER_01: like,
24:16
SPEAKER_01: macroeconomic models of what to do.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: And, like, it is the strongest economy in the world.
24:22
SPEAKER_01: And, like, that's got to count for something.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, look, like, I actually think that the fact that this economy kind of, like...
24:31
SPEAKER_00: phoenix from the ashes uh like it became so strong so quick in fact so strong so
24:37
SPEAKER_00: quick that they might have contributed to inflation um like that might be the thing
24:43
SPEAKER_00: that makes it genuinely hard like i don't know that there's been theorizing about
24:47
SPEAKER_00: this but i the theorizing that i know there has been is that like presidents who
24:52
SPEAKER_00: preside over the kind of growth that biden has presided over can generally count on
24:56
SPEAKER_00: smooth sailing politically right like that's uh-huh
25:00
SPEAKER_00: And that's why political scientists are prepared,
25:02
SPEAKER_00: I think,
25:03
SPEAKER_00: for a bit of a reckoning if Biden loses despite presiding over this kind of growth.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: But when there was full employment in the 90s, it was, in my recollection, a slower climb.
25:15
SPEAKER_00: Things got steadily better until they were really good.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of what happened starting in 2009 with Obama,
25:23
SPEAKER_00: and then Trump takes over,
25:24
SPEAKER_00: and then by 2019...
25:26
SPEAKER_00: much too long later,
25:27
SPEAKER_00: you're in a situation where the economy has gone from like the pits over a decade
25:31
SPEAKER_00: to being very strong.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: Whereas this situation is much, much, much different.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: And if like,
25:39
SPEAKER_00: like it came with so many disruptions that I think it might just be hard for people
25:43
SPEAKER_00: to process that,
25:45
SPEAKER_00: like,
25:46
SPEAKER_00: Just the other day I was pissed, but now we're here in the strongest economy of my lifetime.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: And like, that doesn't feel like it can compute.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know how you study that as like a,
25:55
SPEAKER_00: anything other than like a question of like individual psychology or group psychology,
25:59
SPEAKER_00: but it makes a certain amount of sense to me.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: It's unfortunately, I'd like a debunking of old medical ACS viewpoint.
26:06
SPEAKER_01: Because I mean,
26:07
SPEAKER_01: I remember sitting in the OEOB sometime in Obama's term,
26:11
SPEAKER_01: and I was like,
26:12
SPEAKER_01: you guys should have done this,
26:13
SPEAKER_01: you should have done this,
26:13
SPEAKER_01: you should have done this.
26:15
SPEAKER_01: And they were telling me,
26:15
SPEAKER_01: it's like,
26:16
SPEAKER_01: well,
26:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
26:16
SPEAKER_01: if we'd done all that,
26:17
SPEAKER_01: like,
26:17
SPEAKER_01: yes,
26:18
SPEAKER_01: unemployment would be lower,
26:19
SPEAKER_01: but there would have been all this inflation,
26:21
SPEAKER_01: right?
26:22
SPEAKER_01: And then I was like, sure, but wages would be higher to compensate for the higher inflation.
26:29
SPEAKER_01: And also unemployment would be lower.
26:31
SPEAKER_01: So why would that be worse?
26:34
SPEAKER_01: And these old guys were like, you weren't around in the 70s, young man.
26:38
SPEAKER_01: You don't know.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: People will be so mad.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, that's fucking stupid, guys.
26:43
SPEAKER_01: So Biden listened to me.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: And in retrospect, the old guys were onto something.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay,
26:49
SPEAKER_00: so I want to turn to crime,
26:51
SPEAKER_00: but just like,
26:52
SPEAKER_00: so I think that like you and I see the situation similarly enough and it's,
26:56
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:57
SPEAKER_00: I would concede certain things even to Donald Trump about how much blame he should
27:01
SPEAKER_00: get for things versus how much of it was just an act of God.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: But like for Democrats,
27:08
SPEAKER_00: like would it be,
27:11
SPEAKER_00: would it be wise and would it be viable for Joe Biden to just basically be like,
27:16
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump handed me a shithole country primed for inflation,
27:21
SPEAKER_00: and I brought the economy back,
27:22
SPEAKER_00: and I beat his inflation.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: I beat Trumpflation.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: Could that... I mean, like...
27:28
SPEAKER_00: I will say that I think that it's worth trying just to scramble the discourse a bit.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: And like if you get the fact checkers descending on Joe Biden for trying to like
27:43
SPEAKER_00: cast blame on Donald Trump for why people are unhappy about the economy.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: Like,
27:48
SPEAKER_00: they're probably going to say what he said was pretty tendentious,
27:51
SPEAKER_00: like three Pinocchios or something like that.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: But they will also end up rehashing a lot of,
27:56
SPEAKER_00: like,
27:56
SPEAKER_00: what happened,
27:57
SPEAKER_00: which I think would favor Biden naturally just insofar as it's like,
28:02
SPEAKER_00: well,
28:02
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump was president,
28:04
SPEAKER_00: like,
28:05
SPEAKER_00: lied about the pandemic,
28:06
SPEAKER_00: was completely unprepared for it.
28:07
SPEAKER_00: We had 20% unemployment or whatever it was.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: And...
28:14
SPEAKER_00: yeah and then biden took over like kind of in the middle of the bounce back and we
28:18
SPEAKER_00: got to full employment in record time like like they would have to concede enough
28:23
SPEAKER_00: of to to biden's um like version of events that i think like on net it would be
28:31
SPEAKER_00: good politics but um i don't know maybe just everyone would get so incensed because
28:38
SPEAKER_00: it's so baked in that this is all biden's fault that it would um
28:43
SPEAKER_01: blow up in his face I don't know I mean like it's a it's a tough one you know I
28:51
SPEAKER_01: just like I think that there were a lot of
28:58
SPEAKER_01: strands of Biden.
29:00
SPEAKER_01: What they have pivoted to is trying to point out that Donald Trump's fiscal
29:06
SPEAKER_01: policies are going to blow out the deficit and raise interest rates,
29:11
SPEAKER_01: that Donald Trump wants to raise the price of prescription drugs,
29:16
SPEAKER_01: and that Donald Trump's increasingly insane tariff proposals will just make
29:21
SPEAKER_01: everything more expensive.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: That all seems true to me.
29:25
SPEAKER_01: I never know how far you get with a comparison versus a whatever.
29:33
SPEAKER_01: We're looking forward to the debate.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: I think that this is...
29:37
SPEAKER_01: Obviously,
29:38
SPEAKER_01: everybody is like pregame of the debate is just like literally focused on like how
29:43
SPEAKER_01: old is Joe Biden.
29:45
SPEAKER_01: And I feel like conservatives are setting themselves up to like be owned when they
29:51
SPEAKER_01: have like lowered the bar.
29:52
SPEAKER_01: And when Biden,
29:53
SPEAKER_01: who like actually speaks in public,
29:57
SPEAKER_01: just like stands up and delivers lines and his like slightly quiet voice,
30:02
SPEAKER_01: people are like,
30:02
SPEAKER_01: oh,
30:02
SPEAKER_01: yeah,
30:03
SPEAKER_01: he's quiet.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: They're going to put him on all the cocaine.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, maybe he'll be amped up again.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: But like I'm interested in the text of the debate because it's like it is always
30:14
SPEAKER_01: hard to get a like a contrast argument going when you're on the defensive.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: But when the other guy is standing up there next to you.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: You have the open invitation to say to the moderator, I am also concerned about the high cost of living.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: And I'm particularly concerned that Donald here is going to tax our fertilizer.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: He's going to tax the crude oil that our refineries need.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: He's going to tax the clothing that we buy for our kids.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: And he's going to do that.
30:44
SPEAKER_01: While increasing the deficit with a tax cut for the rich, it's going to make your mortgages up.
30:48
SPEAKER_01: It's going to hurt housing supply.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Biden actually has,
30:51
SPEAKER_01: I think,
30:52
SPEAKER_01: much better attacks on Trump about inflation than he has defensive spin about what
30:59
SPEAKER_01: happened in 2022.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Biden talks a lot about how Donald Trump has the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: He has some arrows in this quiver.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: I just don't think that they're quite sharp enough.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: Right.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: But I mean, I think I think the forward looking inflation answers are like actually good.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: And we are.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: They're less tendentious for sure.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: But it's like Donald Trump will lie about where black unemployment ended in his presidency.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: Right.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, about all kinds of stuff related to the economy.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: And I just feel like like Donald Trump botched the pandemic so badly that I inherited an economy that.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: with high unemployment that was prime for inflation and i beat both challenges and
31:43
SPEAKER_00: he wants to take us right back there is a way to both absolve yourself of the of
31:49
SPEAKER_00: the um like
31:52
SPEAKER_00: economic problems that people blame you for and like look ahead trump because trump
31:59
SPEAKER_00: would represent a return to 2017 to 2020 policies like he will bring back the the
32:06
SPEAKER_00: same kind of economic misery that he already caused once um i think that that's
32:11
SPEAKER_00: like uh like you want to work i think ideally both
32:16
SPEAKER_00: both channels.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: I am confident that his advisors are telling him how to talk about Trump's fiscal
32:25
SPEAKER_00: plans and tariff proposals,
32:29
SPEAKER_00: but less so that they have
32:33
SPEAKER_00: decided that they want to take the fight about why the economy got bad in the first
32:37
SPEAKER_00: place directly to Trump.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: We'll see.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: We'll find out.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: This is going to be a special episode.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: Let's do a paywall.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah?
32:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's do a paywall.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: Then you'll find out who's being murdered.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: Only if you pay.
32:52
SPEAKER_00: All right.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about why Biden is a much easier and better case to make about
32:58
SPEAKER_00: beating the Trump crime wave on the other side of the paywall.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: If you want to listen to that, go to politics.fm and upgrade your subscription.