In Reply to: Imagine that. posted by BluBlood on December 08, 2025 at 11:56:34
That’s a bit overstated.
The Inflation Reduction Act was essentially a major clean-energy and industrial policy bill. The name was changed largely for political reasons, to give cover to key Senate votes. Aside from capping the price of a limited set of prescription drugs, there wasn’t much in the bill that directly addressed inflation.
A lot of the clean-energy investment and rural broadband expansion—projects that could have produced substantial blue-collar employment, especially in red states—ended up bogged down in red tape and slow implementation.
The truth is that presidents usually have limited control over the economy.
They can damage it through policy mistakes—like deregulating financial markets too aggressively, imposing broad tariffs, or mixing tax cuts with wartime spending—but they don’t typically have the power to micromanage economic performance. Their biggest influence comes in crisis moments: FDR during the Depression, Reagan during the inflation shock, Obama during the Great Recession.
Biden’s economic environment was largely shaped by the enormous amount of money pumped into the economy during and after the pandemic. That surge of demand is what drove inflation. Combine that with an emerging AI industry. In my view, nothing uniquely “Biden” produced the hot economy or the strong stock market.