President Joe Biden, members of his administration, and the Democratic Party in general have largely stopped using the term “Bidenomics,” while Republicans have been co-opting it for derisive purposes. In fact, Biden used it for the first time in over two months on Tuesday, according to reporters at Axios who have been tracking his public deployment of the phrase.
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The term was coined to refer to Biden’s flurry of economic programs designed to help grow the middle class with public spending.
Axios recently dared to ask members of the Biden administration why the president has dropped the term from his speeches, including his State of the Union address a few weeks ago.
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Soon after Axios asked, Biden happened to use the term at a Tuesday event in North Carolina. “Leading economists aren’t making much fun of ‘Bidenomics’ anymore,” he said. “They’re thinking maybe it works!”
Biden was initially hesitant about “Bidenomics” as a phrase, joking last June that he “doesn’t know what the hell that is.” Conservatives initially used the term to criticize inflation, gas prices, and other economic sore spots, but the Biden camp pushed him to embrace the term just as Obama embraced “Obamacare,” originally a Republican moniker. One of the first times he used the term was to explain how his economic platform is very different from the “trickle-down economics” doctrine that had informed American policy for four decades.
Speaking to a crowd of labor union members in Philadelphia in June, Biden said:
“Let me tell you what it’s about. It’s about building an economy — literally, not figuratively — from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. Because when the middle class does well, everybody does well. (Applause.) The poor have a way up, and the wealthy do — do — they just do just fine.
But like I said, I didn’t just come into office with a theory; I came with a plan. And it started with passing the American Rescue Plan — a plan to vaccinate the nation and get our economy going again.”
He began to use it with great frequency after his staffers convinced him that voters were going to associate the economy under his term with him regardless of whether it was good or bad or if he had a hand in its performance.
Despite his use of the term dwindling to nothing, Republicans in Congress have used it nearly 500 times in their public statements in March alone according to Quorum.
A poll released by Pew Research Center in late February shows that the economy—once again—ranks as the highest policy issue for Americans.
It outranks any other issue by a considerable margin. By comparison, in 2021 dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic ranked almost as high as a strong economy.
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics, economics, and culture for Valuetainment. Follow Shane on X (Twitter).
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