These guys just won't quit with the revisionist history. Here's your "impartial" debate moderator from Fox Business Network opining that "Bidenomics" wasn't "buried" during the clown show of a debate last night.
KUDLOW: Yeah, there were a lot of little moments, no big moments. It's hard to get a big moment. Remember Reagan said to Carter, “There he goes again.”
Oh, god, for 40 years people have been using that line. So it's hard to get a big moment, I agree with Kellyanne.
I wanted somebody to say, as per Reagan, like I worked for Reagan a long time ago, I come into the Reagan library, we played all these Reagan clips on my show tonight, I wanted someone to say, as per Reagan, that government is the problem not the solution.
HANNITY: Yeah, I watched you play that clip of Reagan when he said it, the nine words, I believe, in the English language.
KUDLOW: Yeah, I'm here from the government and I'm here to help you. That's right.
I also wanted someone to say that we need to get 4 or 5 percent economic growth, not 1 percent so we should be slashing taxes across the board. We should be lowering marginal tax rates the way John F. Kennedy, did, the say Ronald Reagan did, the way Donald Trump did.
I wanted someone to say that, tough stuff to get the economy moving. There are a lot of good points on the economy. They acted more like Republicans this week than they did the last debate. Did they make the sale on the economy? I'm not entirely sure, but they punched away at it to some extent.
I still don't think Bidenomics was buried today on that stage. I just don't think so. I don't think they were direct hits and I was disappointed.
As Paul Krugman has written in recent months, "Basically, Bidenomics, widely reviled and ridiculed a year ago, looks a lot better in retrospect. It’s starting to look as if the administration got it mostly right, after all." And this is despite the constant flow of lies and disinformation flowing from the likes of Kudlow and his colleagues at Fox.
In Dean Baker's column last week, he discussed whether we're ever going to see prices fall back to pre-pandemic levels, and some of that Reagan mythology that Kudlow was pining for here:
I also doubt that many people other than economists and people who write on economics have a clear vision of the overall CPI or the price index of their choosing. For this reason, I’m not sure that many people really expect prices to come back down. Average hourly wages have risen by almost 20 percent since the start of the pandemic, do people really expect that they will pay the same for stuff as they did in 2019?
It is also worth noting that prices never came back down in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was singing about “Morning in America” in his 1984 re-election campaign when inflation was still over 4.0 percent.
My guess here is that the concern for prices coming back down is being fueled by the Fox News gang and their allied politicians. This is a theme they endlessly tout. I know this because Elon Musk has decided that I have to see the tweets of every right-wing politician and pundit in the country in my Twitter feed. (I have blocked most of them, but I still see plenty.)
As is often the case, Fox can have a huge impact on the national political agenda. We see this all the time, most obviously with the absurdity around Biden’s impeachment. Months of extensive investigation have produced absolutely nothing in terms of serious evidence and shot down most of the right-wing theories of President Biden’s corruption. Yet, the House is prepared to move forward, and close to half the country actually says they think there is a plausible basis for impeachment.
Anyhow, we know that Fox and its friends endlessly harp on out-of-control inflation. This may not correspond to reality, but that is not a big factor for many people. In short, I don’t think the issue is whether inflation will flip over to deflation, the question Rampell addresses, I think the issue is when, if ever, the right stops whining about inflation.
Pretty sure the answer to that is never. They're never going to admit Biden was right about anything. They're never going to stop harping about inflation as long as a Democrat is in office, and they're never going to stop pushing the trickle-down economics of the Reagan era and pretending they were a great success when they weren't.
