Biden has finished his term, and now it's time to take a look back. I try to do this with all presidents: a look ahead, and a look back to see how close I got. As a reminder, here is my look-ahead for Biden from four years ago.
(Note: I'm counting my Predictions from last year as Trump's look-ahead.)
Let's see. On Biden ...
What did I get right?
Biden did live till the end of his term, though he certainly got tired near the end.
Biden undid a lot of Trump initiatives.
He passed a law that increased taxes on corporations -- a 15% minimum alternative tax.
I believe a watered-down version of Biden's initial environmental program was passed in the ill-named "Inflation Reduction" Act.
Democrats held on to the Senate.
Biden did end up being terrible in uniting people.
What did I get wrong?
Breaking his promise, Biden did run for a second term.
Biden did not get a law passed that would increase income taxes for individuals earning above $400k -- except for possibly some Trump tax cuts that might have expired.
He did not reinstitute the individual mandate penalty for Obamacare (kept it at $0).
Democrats did not hold on to the House at midterms.
Independents evidently did not like what Biden had accomplished.
We did not have a recession, technically.
Four years later, we have not yet been unified.
My biggest disappointments
Biden did have his share of big mistakes. He botched the Afghanistan withdrawal. He botched his attempts to unify when he attacked "MAGA Republicans." He failed to win over conservatives, and instead seemed to push more people away.
My biggest disappointment overall was: well -- we just hardly ever saw him. And when we did, he failed to reach people. I know a lot of this was due to his stuttering (something I totally understand, BTW -- when the brain moves faster than the mouth). But also, I think his staff was a little too much protective over his public appearances -- fearing that any goofiness would only give hilarious sound bites and clips out of context to further destroy his credibility. Ironically, not seeing him regularly only increased the image that he was unfit for office.
With Covid, I think Biden missed a golden opportunity -- as I mentioned before: giving Trump credit for the vaccines, and praising his contributions would have convinced a lot more conservatives to get the "Trump" vaccine, which could have helped save at least another 200,000 lives predominantly in red states, counties, and cities.
Biden almost never stood up for himself -- never took credit for some of the conservative policies he helped put into place -- he was just terrible at explaining why things were what they were.
He was way too lenient on immigration until the very last year when he clamped down hard.
I think he should have kept his promise NOT to run for a second term. Though, I think Trump would have won anyway.
My biggest satisfactions
By far, my main reason for voting Biden in 2020 was to get a four-year respite from Trump. (Though, I had thought it would have destroyed his political career, and he would have gone away, but that didn't happen.) Either way, Biden did give us those four years -- a time for healing and rest. It was actually nice to go a whole day without hearing anything or anyone talking about the president. It was like I could live out my life in peace. Well -- kind of -- Trump still wouldn't go away.
I know my conservative friends will disagree with me on this, but I'm a freakin' economist type. Biden did well NOT to disrupt our economic recovery from Covid more than he had to.
To demonstrate what I'm talking about, as early as February 2020, many of us math types had put together models predicting the effects of Covid to the economy and also the resulting recovery. We knew that it would be high inflation and short lived as everyone got back to work. And that's basically what happened.
The Covid recovery packages did seem to have a small and short adverse effect on US inflation, but on the most part, we tracked along with the rest of the richer countries. Ever since mid-2022, our inflation rate has been nearly equal to or less than Europe's. And our GDP overall has fared well in comparison. So while the whole world has been reeling from this recovery period, we've been coming out ahead of others by a small amount, and I believe Biden did help give us a noticeable edge. The alternative GOP narrative of Bidenflation is really a big obfuscation of reality by intentionally ignoring what's going on in other countries in an attempt to try and place all blame on Biden for all of our woes (a tactic that actually enjoyed large returns for the Party -- though what's going to happen when prices don't come down in a year?)
So, what did Biden do? He pretty much stayed out of the way. He didn't pressure the Federal Reserve to raise or lower interest rates, and basically let them do their job independently. He didn't do what Hungary's Orbán did, which was pressuring the federal bank, which then caused 30%+ inflation in his country. (The same thing Trump is trying to do right now.)
Biden also did -- I think -- increase the number of jobs substantially with some of his initiatives. I know he takes credit for 14 million or more new jobs. And yes -- it's very disingenuous, as we all know (liberals and conservatives alike) that the vast majority of those jobs were naturally coming back in the recovery after Covid19. But I will say in his defense: he didn't do anything to slow down that return of new jobs. In contrast, it took Obama nearly his full eight years to get jobs back to what they were after the 2007-8 financial disaster. And yes -- I believe Biden does deserve credit for some of the new jobs on top of the Covid19-returning jobs.
In the area of energy -- yeah -- get ready for this one -- you may be surprised that under Biden, we've actually INCREASED oil production ... breaking records in 2023, and possibly also in 2024. Also, you may not realize that in terms of Total Primary Energy, the US has produced MORE than they have used for the past five or so years -- mainly with the help of fracking/natural gas and an increase in green energy. As such, we've been a net exporter of energy for a few years. If you'd like to learn more, just Google "us total primary energy consumption vs production".
So, it may come as a surprise to me to hear about an "energy emergency" today, and I totally understand why Biden was trying not to laugh during that section of Trump's inaugural speech. You see -- if production increases too much, prices go down too much, and when producers aren't getting profits, they stop producing -- something we've seen in the past few years already. As a net exporter, we're likely already at a comfortable equilibrium point -- so it'll be interesting to see how this "drill, baby, drill" thing turns out when the producers refuse to "cooperate." But we'll see -- as you can see above, I've been wrong before.
Also -- I was surprised to hear this a couple of days ago, but it turns out that Biden had deported more immigrants than Trump had. Yeah -- part of this was because he said, "Come on in, everyone," but still surprising. You may also be surprised to learn that over 2024, the number of illegal entries and the flow of fentanyl had dropped drastically. Oh -- the GOP knows about this, but they weren't going to alert anyone right before the election. (And Biden/Harris were too dumb to take credit for this in their campaigns.)
And though the GOP wouldn't like to admit it, Biden actually accomplished a lot -- mainly in his first two years when Democrats led both the House and Senate. And during the last two years, which featured the least productive House in decades, Biden was still able to achieve a few more bipartisan surprises -- one that was so successful on immigration that Trump had to order Speaker Johnson to kill it, lest Biden start looking good and accidentally win the presidency again.
Closing Remarks
I suppose I could continue on with my satisfactions, which I feel outweigh my disappointments, but this is enough for now.
As I've said above, Biden more than satisfied my main reason for voting for him. He stood up to Trump and helped the US to regain some of its strength and confidence back from the rest of the world (who still mostly see our country as bipolar, unpredictable, and unreliable).
Do I feel better off today than I was four years ago? Most definitely, yes -- because in January 2021, I was still locked up at home. 2020 had been the worst year that America had seen in my entire lifetime, the culmination of Trump's incompetence, division, and hate. It was why he lost the election; and then he put us through a bigger hell the last two months of 2020, ending in a violent protest at the Capitol. And only then did he finally relent and allowed the transition to happen.
And finally, this past week has been very difficult for me. I had had some hope that Trump wouldn't turn out so bad, but so far he has only confirmed my worst fears. Just less than one week into this new presidency, I feel a LOT LESS safer than I had a week ago. If Trump's team allows background music glitches to happen (Underwood and Cyrus), what else are they going to allow? He's firing key cybersecurity personnel and replacing them with his own team (the same ones who allowed the 2024 campaign hack? Hopefully not.) He's taking actions that could likely launch us into a larger worldwide conflict. He's made it harder for the US to fight the bird flu breakout that's currently happening in Georgia and other states. He's getting ready to expel refugees who came into our country legally and who were invited. And he's threatening to end federal support of natural disasters while instituting plans that are likely to help increase both severity and frequencies of further disasters.
But it all really hit me as early as right after Trump's inaugural speech, which was very brutal and disheartening -- even going so far as to invoke MLK Jr's name to justify his efforts to do away with anti-discrimination measures, and "manifest destiny" to support ... expansion?
Shortly after the speech, Biden got into his helicopter -- Chopper 46 or whatever they were calling it, and flew away. And I just lost it. It was like seeing the end of an era that may or may not come back. That's when I first realized ...
I already miss Biden.
