Sean Hannity and the other Fox News hosts can no longer deny it: Joe Biden is the greatest president in recent American history. Under Biden's leadership, the U.S. economy grew by a massive 5.7% in the last 12 months, and by 6.9% in the last quarter, marking the strongest surge of economic activity since the days of St. Ronald Wilson Reagan Himself. Even in the midst of a devastating pandemic, the Biden recovery is now approaching the economic output that would have happened had the pandemic not happened at all.
But Biden accomplished this feat despite being saddled with both a pandemic and a Donald Trump economy that had crashed, cratered, nosedived, gone corpse-like, and joined the choir eternal. Under Donald Trump, the economy crashed; under Biden, the economy is soaring. Obviously, that makes Biden one of the greatest presidents to ever inhabit the office, and Fox News can no longer deny it. This sort of thing is their wheelhouse: Numbers That Prove Things are the fortified coffee that gets their hosts up in the morning. We eagerly await the analysis from Hannity himself as he contemplates how his treason-loving crooked leader failed so utterly that the U.S. economy was brought to its knees, but the completely boring, "barely" campaigning Democratic new guy was able to fix it all in just his first year of office.
If anything, Biden is being too successful! Each of the new problems being fretted over on the Fox shows are due to Biden fixing the economy just too darn much. The nation's ports are now so clogged with products being shipped in to sate the needs of cash-flush Americans that ships can no longer dock. Inflation hawks worry that the economy is so strong that it may count as overheated, and warn that we need to start kneecapping too-smug American workers lest they get ahead of themselves. Worldwide, pandemic factory closures have caused shortages of critical parts—but the American economy has, pandemic or not, spiked demand for those very same products.
Is this, then, the problem with Democratic government? That our leaders are so very competent at what they do that the rest of the world's factories and workers and banking systems simply cannot keep up? Is this why Republicans insist on electing incompetent, blustering nincompoops to office between Democratic presidencies, just to give the rest of the world a sporting chance to keep up? Finally, it all makes sense. Hannity supported Donald Trump so that Asian export economies would have a chance to catch their breath in the same way that Tucker Carlson is now promoting neo-Nazi conspiracy theories in order to give an aspiring Hungarian autocracy a helpful nudge despite the forces arrayed against it.
We had it all wrong. Hannity didn't support the guy who cratered the economy and killed half a million people out of boastful Republican pride. He did it to prove once and for all that Democratic presidents can handle things cleanly even if Republicans put into the Oval Office the most incompetent, delusional, lying, crooked, self-regarding, morally bankrupt bungler that the party can scrounge up.
Now that we've given some poor Hannity intern a stroke—sorry buddy, but you knew what you were in for when you joined Team Sedition—let's put this a bit more properly into perspective. Yes, it's true that the economic recovery has been absolutely blistering, and the year-to-year jump in 2021 was the largest since 1984. But that was possible only because the economy, under Trump's pandemic incompetence, absolutely cratered.
What we have been seeing ever since is rapid growth caused by economic demand that had been sharply suppressed in the early pandemic, but never went away. And it's always extremely dodgy to credit massive economic shifts to the actions of single administrations, because that is not how the world works. Biden has little control over how much Americans want to buy or when they want to buy it, and even less control over which low-wage workers will tell their bosses to go to hell and which won't as a new deadly disease makes low-wage work even less attractive and more dangerous than it was beforehand.
The rapid development of a vaccine—one now in widespread use except among certain constituencies—is likely a major reason that the economy was able to reconstruct itself so quickly after initial shutdowns. The economic recovery checks sent to American families so as to prevent widespread food insecurity, rules barring pandemic evictions, and even small bureaucratic touches like threatening shippers with steep fines if they leave their containers parked dockside for any longer than is necessary all played roles in stabilizing families and companies, making sure things did not get even worse.
But perhaps the largest lesson of the pandemic so far is that competent government can indeed tinker with economies around the edges, but incompetent government can send things absolutely to hell very quickly indeed. None of the economic gains of the last year have offset the damage done when an incompetent administration chose to partisanize pandemic safety precautions—a choice that continues to kill large numbers of unvaccinated Americans and that will continue to kill large numbers of unvaccinated Americans for the foreseeable future.
Had that single choice not been made, and had "wear a mask" and "get a vaccine" been promoted as the obvious and patriotic choice by both parties rather than just one, the economy would be coming back even stronger than it currently is. Hospitals would not currently be overwhelmed and utilizing crisis-care standards to prioritize patients. Retail, food, and entertainment businesses would likely be booming because consumers would feel more secure about their safety when dining out or shopping in venues with known, uniform safety rules in place.
The lesson of the Biden recovery, then, is not that a Democratic presidency solves all that ails the country. It is that the last administration's pandemic response was so incredibly catastrophic that the country is still reeling from its effects. The Republican Party's adoption of anti-safety pandemic policies continues to kill Americans; the deaths of those Americans and continued widespread sickness among the unvaccinated continue to weigh down recovery efforts.
If all Americans were now vaccinated, the omicron surge would still have been bad. But it wouldn't still be bringing hospitals to their knees.
Even as the pandemic continues, the economy continues to creep back to pre-pandemic normal. That's great news in that Americans are largely recovering from the damage inflicted on them by a once-in-a-century world crisis—but much of the current "damage" didn't have to happen in the first place.
A competent government can have great impacts on a nation's economy, but an incompetent government can do so much damage so quickly as to erase it all and then some. That should be the lesson we take from all of this, and it’s the lesson Hannity should be contemplating as he wonders how his support for a plainly corrupt and buffoonish narcissist ended with a catastrophe the likes of which the nation had not seen in a century. Perhaps his interns can pick his brain about that; if we could only get an agreement from the Fox News crowd to not prop up delusional, seditionist jackasses in their quest for party power, we could probably muster the sort of economic boom that would remake the whole country into something better.
Though I suppose we're asking for too much in just asking them to ditch their support for violent insurrection. "Don't elect incompetent liars" is advice that would probably bring the whole network down.
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