Larry Summers told Biden that passing the inflation reduction act aka the green supporters payoff bill, right after Covid would be extremely inflationary and Biden said, screw you, I’m doing it anyway.
Oops swing and a miss. Try again. I bolded some points that will support you and others that suggest you are full of shit. Please feel free to read it all and draw your own conclusions.
Manufacturing on the rise
Biden has made reviving American manufacturing a central part of his economic agenda. Biden signed into law legislation that incentivizes domestic manufacturing around clean energy, computer chips and other areas.
The White House has hailed a surge in private investment in American manufacturing under Biden’s watch.
“It used to be: find the cheapest market in the world, send the job overseas, and bring the product back. Not on my watch. Right here, we’re doing — we’re creating jobs in America, and we’re exporting American products,” Biden said during a
speech about “Bidenomics” in Philadelphia last month.
Booming manufacturing investment has helped boost the US economy, with Morgan Stanley economists citing that as a key reason for their brighter economic projections.
Summers said he agrees with a “large part of” what the administration has done, including the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act, which sought to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
“I believe those two signature items of Biden policies were appropriate steps,” Summers said.
Inflation concerns persist
However, the famed economist and former president emeritus of Harvard University, and former Secretary of the Treasury, is taking issue with the doctrine behind those policies.
“We do not have a problem of a shortfall of jobs,” Summers said, noting that the number of open jobs relative to people looking for work remains high. “We do have a problem of costs.”
High inflation has hurt workers by eating into their paychecks. Real wages, adjusted for inflation, have declined, making it harder for Americans to get by.
Summers argued that globalization and the reduction of trade barriers have helped consumers by lowering inflation and ushering in a period of low interest rates.
“That is why I am so concerned by the administration’s attitudes, or non-attitudes, toward trade,” he said.
On the antitrust front, last week the Biden administration
released new guidelines that signal officials plan to continue a tough approach when it comes to stopping harmful mergers.
“Unchecked consolidation threatens the free and fair markets upon which our economy is based,” Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement last week. “These updated merger guidelines respond to modern market realities and will enable the Justice Department to transparently and effectively protect the American people from the damage that anticompetitive mergers cause.”
Summers, however, argued that the new guidelines “discard” a long-standing focus on lowering consumer costs when it comes to antitrust actions.
“Yes, we should enforce the antitrust law more than we have over the last 30 years,” Summers said. “But we should do that in service of a doctrine of higher incomes through lower costs for consumers.”
