I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source with Mark Blythe, the celebrated Scots-accented

People's Economist.

Celebrated above all, Mark, when you come home to the locals in your own old pub in Dundee

and settle all the arguments there are around money and power.

Populism on the way to plutocracy in the comeback reign

of Donald Trump. Welcome back. People ask for you, Mark. You have a following in our listenership.

Before we get to Trump, too, just speak of, for me, the lingering Biden paradox. The economy

was said to be the saving grace of Joe Biden's short term,

specifically the drive to rebuild the industrial base at home. But the same economy was the

undoing of his would-be successor, Kamala Harris, specifically inflation, a largely hidden cost of living crisis in food and energy

that hurt real people, poor people, most of all. What is your final score on Bidenomics, Mark?

Well, first of all, hi, Chris. It's nice to see you again and hello everyone and it's nice to know

that one wants one back on the show, so that's good.

They do. So let's separate out a few things here, right? Bidenomics, right? If we mean by that, the IRA,

not the Irish Republican Army, we know, right? So, you know, the core of Bidenomics was the

inflation reduction act. And a good comparison to this is, and I got this from Paul Pearson,

the political scientist, I thought was a good way of putting it, is Obamacare. When Obamacare came in,

it was fragile. Nobody liked it. Nobody understood it. Nobody knew what it was for. But then you

wait five, six, seven years and 20 million people are getting health care they didn't have before,

and you can't touch that.

And what happened was, if Biden's successor had managed to actually win, you would have got IRA 2, and it would have embedded it, and it would expanded it, and it would have done more on

labor and mobility and skills. And then if they'd won again on the back of that, you would have

...