By Dr. Jack Rasmus
Trump’s proposals to radically transform much of US economic and social policy are being rapidly rolled out during the first week of his administration. How much he succeeds or fails in that transformation will depend on a number of factors. High on the list of such factors is the residue of conditions and policies leftover by the Biden administration—i.e. the legacies of the Biden years. Those legacies will play an important role influencing, and perhaps even determining, how Trump may fare in implementing his plans. So what are the legacy policies and conditions?
The most obvious economic legacy Biden leaves behind is the overhang of the worst inflation since 1980-81. Both a chronic high rate of inflation as well as a general price level that has risen at least 30%-40% over the four years of Biden’s term, when accurately estimated. Inflation has not been tamed and is now rising further—on a base level and rate already too high.
A second economic legacy—a consequence of the above—is that most US households’ real weekly earnings actually declined the past four years. Like the legacy of chronic inflation, that too promises to worsen in the very near future.
Biden’s third economic legacy is that despite a massive fiscal stimulus of $3.6 trillion during his first two years in office, in the second two years the US GDP economic growth rate has been a tepid average annual rise of 2%-2.5%. Thus a mountain of fiscal stimulus has produced a molehill of real economy recovery. More business-investor tax cuts by Trump will not change the tepid US economic growth of the Biden years—just as similar cuts in 2018 by Trump failed to do.
There was no molehill recovery, however, for financial asset wealth accumulation by wealthy investors and billionaires under Biden. In contrast to the anemic real economic growth legacy during his term, Biden’s $3.6 trillion fiscal stimulus of 2021-22 produced a record surge in 2023-24 in financial asset wealth accumulation and the creation of a record number of US billionaires. Income and wealth inequality in America accelerated. It will further under Trump, now on a base of an already record level.
A fifth economic legacy results from all the preceding four: during his four year term, no less than $7.65 trillion in cumulative US budget deficits also defines Biden’s economic legacy. As a consequence of the $7.65 trillion in budget deficits, the US national debt under Biden surged from $26.9 trillion in January 2021 to $36.2 trillion at year end 2024. That in turn resulted in annual interest payments to bondholders of $.95 trillion I 2024 alone.
A sixth economic legacy Biden leaves the US economy is a chronic and rising trade deficit of approximately $1 trillion annually.
These are all ‘legacies’, not just failed policies, since their effects will continue to be felt for years to come—by the US economy in general and especially by its middle and working class households.
But these economic legacies are not the entire story. There are more political legacies Biden leaves his successors. Here are another six political legacies worth noting as well:
In the realm of domestic politics there are at least three: first, during the Biden years, American democracy continued to atrophy and do so in a number of new ways; second, a national crisis in health care services affordability deepened; third, Biden leaves a strategically weakened Democrat Party and ineffective elections contender that will fail to recover for perhaps another decade.
It is in the sphere of geo-political action and US foreign policy, however, that Biden’s most enduring political legacies will leave an indelible imprint on the USA for years to come. These include the costly, lost US proxy war in Ukraine that has irreparably damaged US European allies’ economy; his unconditional support for genocide in Israel and GAZA that has undermined US influence throughout the middle east; and his policies of economic sanctions targeting Russia and China that have accelerated the expansion of the BRICS countries and their challenge to US global economic hegemony that has prevailed for nearly a half century.
Let’s examine each critical legacy in more detail.
1. Chronic Inflation Rate & High Price Level
As Biden leaves office it is clear that inflation has not been tamed and in fact has recently begun to rise again, leaving a base level and rate rise upon which inflation will almost certainly rise further in 2025 and beyond.
The inflation beast that arose in 2020-21 was tamed only in part and temporarily on his watch and has begun spreading its claws once more.
Inflation surged in 2021-22 to a 9% high as estimated by the US government’s official consumer price index (see BLS monthly CPI Reports, September 2021 thru December 2024 ). That rate of increase abated in 2023-24 as global energy costs and commodity prices slowed their rate of increase. However, in closing months of 2024 energy and goods prices in general have begun drifting upward once again. The inflation beast that arose in 2020-21 was tamed only in part and temporarily on his watch and has begun spreading its claws once more.
The official US estimate of the rise in the price level for consumers since 2020 is around 24% But that number obfuscates the far more severe impact on median and other working class households’ take home pay and disposable income. Prices for many basic food staples like bread, milk, eggs, chicken, etc. have risen 30%-40% since 2020. In 2024 a Wall St. Journal survey estimated the most often purchased grocery prices had risen 35% since 2020.
The true cost of shelter (home prices, rents) has risen even more. The prices for homes nation-wide are up 39% according to the Shiller home price index. But households’ mortgage costs—i.e. what households actually pay out of their monthly budgets— are up 113%! US official price indexes like the CPI do not include mortgage interest rates. Nor any interest rate hikes paid by households for that matter. Mortgage inflation due to rising interest costs have thus risen far faster and higher at 113% than the 39% for the price of buying a house.
The inflation for shelter (houses and rents & related costs) is even higher if home insurance costs, home repairs, and other fees that define ‘shelter’ in government statistics are included. Rents for roughly 50 million renting households typically follow home prices up and in 2023-24 rents have often made up half of the monthly rise in services price inflation in the CPI. Other services prices have also risen 30% and more—i.e. for auto, home and medical insurance; for auto repairs; and for other key and often purchased services like travel or entertainment.
Interest rates in the Biden years accelerated after March 2022 and have remained chronically high ever since, severely impacting households’ budgets: for example, interest rates on credit cards rose from 16% to 24%, bank auto loans roughly doubled to 9% on average for car purchases, while student loans surged to 6.8% and more.
When interest inflation is properly accounted for—along with increases in local government property and other taxes, fees, and other charges not considered by the government’s Consumer Price Index—the true inflation experienced by US households since January 2021 is easily 35%-40% and therefore much higher than the official CPI number of 24%.
This 35%-40% is the price level legacy left by the Biden administration—the level from which the rate of inflation for goods and services and interest rates across the board promise to rise further in 2025 under Trump as he implements tariffs and implements other policy changes that will raise prices further.
The consequence of this inflation legacy is another Biden legacy: still further declining real take home pay for tens of millions of middle class and below households.
2. US Households’ Declining Real Earnings
While the mainstream media and politicians like to cherry pick wage data to try to show wages have risen under Biden they typically cite ‘wages’ that include salaries, bonuses, and other pay to CEOs, managers and the self employed; report for only full time employed workers; ignore seasonality adjustments; or cite wages unadjusted for inflation.
According to the Federal Reserve bank’s ‘FRED’ database, Median Usual Weekly Earnings adjusted for inflation actually declined during the Biden years. After rising slightly under Obama and then from $351 per week to $378 per week during Trump’s first term, during the Biden years real median weekly earnings actually declined from $378 to $373 per week.
This combination of rising prices, chronically high interest rates, and declining real earnings during Biden’s term is further reflected in the balance sheets of US households the last four years: Household balance sheets (difference between assets and debt) serve as a kind of aggregate indicator on how well those working for wages and salaries have been doing. And per the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts of the US, at the close of 2020 US households’ assets totaled $859 billion, and rose to only $883 billion by the second quarter of 2024. In contrast, US households’ total liabilities (i.e. debt from excess use of credit) rose from $17.1 trillion to $20.7 trillion. The latter number reflects the surging load of debt households took on during the Biden years.
3. Weak GDP Growth Despite $3.6 Trillion Stimulus
Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the measure of how much the real economy grew—was not all that impressive, given the huge fiscal stimulus Biden introduced into the economy during his four year term. For example, his March 2021 ‘American Relief Plan’ designed to provide support to the general economy as it tried to reopen in 2021-22 from the 2020 shutdown amounted to $1.9 trillion in government spending and tax cuts.
However, that $1.9 trillion 2021 stimulus failed to quickly boost the US economy and GDP once the economy had fully reopened in 2022. The reopening in summer and late 2021 was followed by what’s called a technical recession in the first six months of 2022 when the US economy actually contracted for two consecutive quarters—or what some might legitimately call a double dip recession, despite the virtual blackout of the term at the time by the mainstream media and politicians.
As the recession unfolded in the first half of 2022, Biden’s response was to shift what remained of spending on households left over from the $1.9 trillion American Relief Plan of March 2021 (which by the way was intended to last only six months in 2021) and to transfer those funds to subsidize business investment instead of continuing households’ Covid relief.
To that unspent Covid funding was added additional funds by Congress as it passed Biden’s three business investment subsidy bills of 2022: the Infrastructure Act, the Chip & Modernization Act and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act that subsidized energy companies, alternative and fossil fuels. Those bills amounted to another $1.7 trillion in fiscal spending and tax cuts.
Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Relief Act plus the subsequent three business investment subsidy Acts amounted to a combined $3.6 trillion fiscal stimulus in 2021-22.
Biden thus leaves the legacy of a failure to correct this apparent crisis of US traditional fiscal-monetary policies’ failure to stimulate real economic growth—or conversely, one might add, to significantly curb inflation long term as well.
The $3.6 trillion mountain of fiscal stimulus produced a molehill of real GDP growth! GDP recovered in the second half of 2022 after its first half recession, but recorded a meager 1.9% growth rate for 2022. That was followed in 2023 and 2024 with still tepid GDP growth of 2.5% and 2.3% (the latter estimated by the CBO), respectively. The $3.6 trillion total stimulus, in other words, did not result in GDP growth in 2022-24 beyond the typical long run average GDP gain for the US economy or around 2-2.5%. Where did the stimulus go if it didn’t move the dial on the growth of the economy beyond its historical average?
The stimulus picture is even more unimpressive when one adds the 2020 additional fiscal stimulus of $3.1 trillion provided by the 2020 Cares Act in March 2020 and the Consolidated Act passed in December of 2020. That’s $6.7 trillion of combined fiscal stimulus… producing only annual GDP growth 2022-24 averaging barely 2.3% a year!
The historic low GDP growth of the economy under Biden was even weaker if one adds to the $3.6 trillion fiscal stimulus the Federal Reserve bank’s additional monetary stimulus of $4 trillion more in 2020-2022.
In short, a more than $10 trillion fiscal-monetary stimulus in 2020-2022 produced nothing more than the historically average GDP growth rate during the last three years of Biden’s administration during which the US economy had fully reopened!
This fact strongly suggests that US fiscal-monetary policies are barely working any more as instruments of economic stabilization. Biden thus leaves the legacy of a failure to correct this apparent crisis of US traditional fiscal-monetary policies’ failure to stimulate real economic growth—or conversely, one might add, to significantly curb inflation long term as well. It’s a legacy Trump inherits in turn.
4. Record Asset Wealth Accumulation & Billionaire Creation
The failure to stimulate the real US economy under Biden contrasts sharply, however, with the success of those same policies in stimulating financial asset markets in the US. After a contraction in 2020 due to the Covid shutdown and a weak recovery in 2021-22, US financial markets surged to record levels in 2023-24. US Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq markets recorded gains of 25-29% and more in each of the last two years. It’s not by accident the US economy created a record number of new billionaires under Biden, whose wealth is largely associated with rising financial asset prices from stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other. Record asset wealth surge is thus also a legacy of Biden’s regime.
The combination of record asset wealth amidst tepid real GDP growth, chronic inflation, and declining real earnings for a majority of Americans suggests the failure of the massive $10.7 trillion fiscal-monetary stimulus of 2020-22 might be due to the mis-allocation of that stimulus to financial markets at the expense of real growth. That’s for another analysis; however, at minimum, it’s a ‘smoking gun’.
5. US Budget Deficits & National Debt
The record $10+ trillion Biden era stimulus was diverted to asset markets nonetheless contributed in part to the record surge in the US budget deficits under Biden, and in turn to the accelerating US National Debt (which represents cumulative annual budget deficits).
Budget deficits are a function of both insufficient tax revenue collection, on the one hand, and accelerating government spending on the other. Insufficient tax revenues are due in turn to weak economic growth and/or tax cuts (or fraud); while spending excesses are associated mostly with discretionary spending on Defense, Wars, social programs, and rising interest payments on the national debt. For a quarter century at least, the US has been exacerbating all the above.
The US Congress and presidents have together cut taxes by at least $17 trillion since 2001. Slow economic growth in the wake of the 2008-09 crash and the Covid 2020-21 shutdown also negatively impact tax revenues, which historically account for 60% of budget shortfalls. The other 40% is due to excess spending which, in turn, is comprised of defense and supplemental war spending, interest payments on the debt, and social programs including the bailouts of the economy in 2008-10 and 2020-22. Defense & War spending since 2001 for US middle east and terrorist wars has amounted to, at minimum, another $8 trillion. Bailouts account for another roughly $5 trillion. That’s $30 trillion. Rising interest payments on the national debt, especially since March 2022, account for most of the rest of the current national debt.
Under Biden record annual budget deficits ranging from $2.7 trillion in 2021 to $1.8 trillion in 2024 for a total $7.65 trillion cumulative deficits over the past four years. From a level of $5.5 trillion in 2000, the National Debt in turn is now $36.2 trillion—having risen from$26.9 trillion at the end of 2020 just before Biden took office to the more than $36 trillion by today.
The interest payment in 2024 to bondholders who purchased US Treasuries to fund Biden’s budget deficits is now, per latest estimates, at $.95 trillion. Interest payments to bondholders thus now costs more than funding the Pentagon each year, approximately $885 billion per latest estimates. Moreover, the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimates that by 2034 the National Debt will rise, if continues at its current pace, to $56 trillion with annual interest payments of $1.7 trillion to bondholders by 2034.
With accumulated annual budget deficits over his four year term of $7.65 trillion during his term, Biden has had the highest budget deficits and has contributed more to the national debt than any prior president.
This legacy of deficits and debt means in 2025 the US Congress will almost certainly initiate a major austerity spending policy cutting social and public spending programs, foreign aid, offshore supplemental spending, layoff 100,000 federal workers, and lesser categories of spending cuts by $200 billion or more per year.
While the problem of rising budget deficits and national debt reaches back to at least 2000, the Biden legacy is its policies have severely exacerbated the longer term trend. It provided useful political ammunition for Trump and his corporate backers to slash public spending and social programs as never before.
6. Trade Deficit & Economic-Tech War with China
One of the economic hallmarks of the Biden administration has been to continue the trade and tech war with China that the prior Trump administration initiated in early 2018. Biden embraced and continued Trump’s tariffs as instrument of economic coercion. He then went several steps further beyond just a tariff strategy. Targeting primarily China, he launched legal actions against China companies, sought to drive them from US capital markets and prohibit their joint ventures in the US economy, pressured allies to raise tariffs and to embargo Chinese imports to their economies as well, and blocked the export of certain tech & business goods to China. Under Biden, Trump’s former tariff war with China morphed into a virtual US economic war against China.
This policy forced China to pursue access to other markets abroad and to accelerate its own internal tech development. Most notably China began penetrating markets and resource access in Africa and South America.
The record of US trade relations with most of the rest of the world was no less ineffective. The US trade deficit accelerated with rising imports into the US and slowing US exports to the rest of the world. According to the Trading Economics research site, the US trade deficit in goods alone is now running at -$1.2 trillion a year in 2024 and the overall deficit in goods and services nearly $1 trillion.
Biden leaves a legacy for the Trump administration that will make Trump’s return to raise tariffs even higher more difficult to succeed. The record trade deficit is likely an important motivator behind Trump’s policy to ‘drill baby drill’ to increase US oil and gas production in order to export to Europe to offset some of the trade deficit due to rising goods imports to the US. In other words, the Biden trade deficit legacy will be used by Trump to justify more oil and gas drilling and the further environmental issues in the US that will result.
7. Decline of Democracy in America
The Biden regime added new dimensions to the decline of American Democracy—a decline that has been occurring since at least the 1990s. These dimensions have now become embedded in the US electoral and political system. Among the changes on Biden’s watch:
The Democrat party’s adoption of a policy of systematic ballot denialism. This has included marginalizing of challengers to the Democrat party’s DNC leadership’s practice of pre-selecting its presidential candidates in lieu of an open, competitive primary system. The practice began in earnest in 2016, became even more evident with the South Carolina primary in 2020, and then deepened in the 2024 party primary cycle, as challengers such as RFkjr, Tulsi Gabbard, Maryann Williamson and others were systematically excluded from an already pre-determined primary outcome. Ballot denialism was also adopted as a policy by the DNC targeting outside third party challengers like the Greens and other 3rd parties.
Another contribution to the decline of intra-party and electoral democracy under Biden was a deepening of the influence of wealthy big donors within the party—reflected in part by those donors’ $2.9B contributions in just a few months in summer 2024; and likely more than $5B in the 2024 election cycle. The deepening of wealthy donors influence within the Democrat party extended to foreign entities as well. The Israeli political action committee, AIPAC, was allowed and encouraged by the DNC to interfere in the party’s primaries, as well as the general elections, by contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to select pro-Israel party candidates.
Further indicators of democracy decline on Biden’s watch was the cynical manipulation of the US legal system (i.e. lawfare) against challengers; a policy of enabling non-citizen immigrants to vote in elections; continuing support for the gerrymandering of seats in the US House of Representatives; and an extreme abuse of the powers of the presidential pardon system as was evident in Biden’s last actions as president—including the pre-emptive pardoning of family members and himself—that has punctured the popular myth that in America no one is above the law. All these changes are now embedded in the party system in general.
The decline of democracy in America has occurred not only within the electoral system and intra-political party practices and norms. The last quarter century has witnessed the decline of the US electoral democracy along multiple legal fronts, enabled by the US Supreme Court. From the Court’s Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 when it in effect selected the president, to its 2010 Citizens United decision which ruled spending money in elections was an act of ‘free speech’ for corporations and rich donors (including foreign), to decisions legitimizing the extreme gerrymandering that has resulted in no more than 40 seats in the US House of Representatives ever being competitive, to approving the spying, surveillance and denial of 1st amendment rights as result of the Patriot and subsequent National Defense Acts.
Among the Biden administration’s political legacies is how it presided over the atrophy of democracy within the Democrat party’s primary system, how it allowed rich donors deeper influence and control of its DNC, and how it introduced questionable anti-democracy practices like ballot denialism and non-citizen voting among its election practices
8. Increasingly Unaffordable US Health Care
The failure to stem and reverse the increasingly unaffordable healthcare system in the USA is another political legacy of the Biden years. Much is made by the party elite and its associated mainstream media how the Obama Affordable Care Act has succeeded in providing affordable health insurance. But facts reveal it has not.
The average cost of private health insurance for a typical family of four is now more than $25,000 per year, according to Kaiser Family research. And that’s just monthly premiums. It doesn’t count additional copays or deductibles now averaging $1 to $5k per year. Nor do those costs include dental, hearing or vision services. Hearing aids cost $4-$5k and the cost of a single tooth implant is $10,000 or more. Then there’s the ever-accelerating cost of prescription drugs, often hundreds of dollars per pill (costing less than $10 if purchased from the same company in Canada or abroad). A consequence has been millions of Americans are forced to forego use of health care services even if they are formally covered by bare bones insurance with unaffordable deductibles and copays.
The Biden legacy is to have allowed the crisis in affordability to continue and worsen, citing the Affordable Care Act which is financed in large party by $900 billion a year in government subsidies to Health Insurance companies. Biden introduced a few band-aid solutions, such as limiting the cost of insulin drug costs to $35/month (but just for Medicare enrollees). The vast majority of the population of millions of diabetes patients must still contend with health insurance insulin coverage denial. Another Biden token solution to escalating prescription drug prices was to limit the cost of just six of the most often purchased drugs—which will not to take effect until 2026, however.
Also left virtually unaddressed during the Biden years has been the triple Social-Healthcare crises: the escalating national suicide rate (now >48,000/yr), chronic gun deaths (averaging 45,000/yr since 2021), and accelerating drug-related deaths from opioids. At 70,000 in 2019 US drug related deaths surged to more than 100,000 in every year of the Biden administration.
The Biden legacy to allow the continuation of the Health Care affordability crisis in America. Like Medieval physician practices of centuries ago, the unaffordable health system is ‘bleeding’ American dry. And little to nothing has also been done to reduce the epidemic of deaths from suicides and addiction. The Biden legacy is to have looked away while the patient slowly succumbs leaving the health of the nation much worse off as he leaves office.
9. Crisis Within the Democratic Party
Biden leaves his own Democrat Party in political shambles, from which it is uncertain it may recover; or if it does, not soon. Insisting on running for re-election in 2024, Biden reversed a pledge made in 2020 he would not do so. His declining mental capacities revealed in the first presidential debate in the summer of 2024 for all to see, set in motion a disastrous chain of events where party elites—led by Obama and Pelosi—removed him as presidential candidate after just months earlier maneuvering to nominate him as such. The oligarchic nature of the party was thus revealed to all. That political oligarchy then selected an alternative weak candidate in VP Harris who publicly vowed to continue the policies of the Biden administration, thus ensuring her defeat in the general election. At the core of those policies was a strategy of Identity Politics which had increasingly defined the party since 2016. Fundamental economic issues for voters were largely ignored in the 2024 election. The Democrat party now drifts, essentially leadership and without a strategy and proposals that appeal to the voters. That drift promises to continue for years to come, during which its Republican opponent may well deepen its coalition and control of government for several election cycles to come. Biden thus leaves a Democrat party deeply and perhaps mortally wounded—thereby leaving Trump and the Republicans to run roughshod over the political system with their own anti-democracy plans in turn.
10. Costly Lost Proxy War in Ukraine
When Biden quickly ‘cleared the deck’ with a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 it was to focus on provoking a proxy war in Ukraine. That decision has proved the most disastrous US foreign policy decision since president Lyndon Johnson’s decision in 1965 to send 500,000 US troops to Vietnam.
Nearly all military analysts now admit the proxy war in Ukraine is lost. All that remains is how the US extricates itself. The political and economic fall out from Biden’s failed military adventure in Ukraine will be felt for years yet to come: Europe has been destabilized economically and politically as result; Russia has been permanently driven into a long term military alliances with China, No. Korea and Iran; US weapons inventories have been seriously depleted; Russia has war mobilized its economy and accelerated its advanced weapons development faster than the US; global trade has been restructured to the disadvantage of the USA; US ability to compete with China has been set back for years or perhaps longer; US budget deficits have been raised by at least $250 billion in US aid to Ukraine the past three years. And that’s just a short list. It’s also a Biden failed foreign policy legacy.
11. Sanctions, Rise of the BRICS & Decline of US Hegemony
History will likely show that Biden has done more to undermine US global economic hegemony and political influence than Russian and China presidents Putin and Xi together.
The Biden sanctions on both countries, especially Russia, have been counterproductive, impacting European allies negatively more than Russia or China. More important, Biden sanctions have likely accelerated the shift of the economies of the Global South toward the BRICS, the members of which have expanded significantly since 2022.
With the BRICS’ expansion has begun an inevitable shift in the global economy: from the central, dominant role of the US dollar as a global transaction and reserve currency to alternative currencies; a move by many economies away from the US bank-managed SWIFT International Payments system; and plans by the BRICS to create an institutional alternative to the IMF.
Biden thus leaves a most difficult legacy to Trump and presidents thereafter to address how to counter and compete with the BRICS and the emergence of an alternative global financial structure. History will therefore show Biden accelerated the decline of the US global empire by weaponizing the US dollar and escalating sanctions policies.
12. Support for Genocide in GAZA
Biden’s regime will likely mark a clear turning point in the history of US global dominance and the end to the US unipolar world that existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
A close second to Biden foreign policy debacles in the proxy war in Ukraine and mishandling of sanctions and the US dollar is the Biden policies supporting genocide by Israel in GAZA. The US has become inextricably associated in world opinion with allowing the genocide with its unlimited military funding support to Israel—currently amounting to around $50 billion since October 2023—and US unlimited shipments of US bombs and advanced weaponry to Israel. The result has been perhaps 500,000 Palestinians killed, maimed and homeless and the virtual loss of US political influence and soft power throughout most of the Arab and Muslim world.
The legacy of Biden policy in support of genocide will mean the continued diminishment of US political influence in the region, as well as US moral influence throughout the world.
Biden foreign policy legacies will haunt US attempts to re-establish US influence and authority in the world. Biden’s regime will likely mark a clear turning point in the history of US global dominance and the end to the US unipolar world that existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
Biden’s departure on January 20, 2025 also closes the book in the latest period in the history of Neoliberalism in the USA that has defined US policy and its evolution from the late 1970s to the present. Launched initially in the closing years of the Jimmy Carter presidency around 1978, Neoliberal economic and political policies expanded and deepened throughout the 1980s and 1990s, reaching a kind of apogee of effectiveness around 2005-07. Neoliberal policy then hit a wall with the financial crash and great recession of 2008-09. Thereafter such policies recovered only partially under Obama and Trump 2017-20 before hitting another wall with the Covid shutdown and recession of 2020-21.
Throughout Neoliberalism’s ‘weak restoration period’ of 2010-20, the internal contradictions within the Neoliberal policy mix have intensified. Those internal contradictions have deepened with the failed policies of the Biden regime.
Thus the beginning of the end of the Neoliberal restructuring of America that began in the late 1970s-early 1980s—and that has continued ever since—may well be recognized in years to come as the most notable historic legacy of the Biden years.
About the Author
Jack Rasmus is author of the recently published book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, 2020. He publishes at Predicting the Global Economic Crisis.
Dr. Dan Steinbock
