How Successful Was The Biden Administration In Managing The Economy This Year?

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Politics, Daily News, News

4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Biden administration laid out his main priorities as the president took office: tackling the pandemic, responding to the climate crisis, addressing racial inequality, and rejuvenating the economy. Over the next few weeks, the NPR Politics Podcast will check in on whether those goals being met.

President Biden's first legislative push was the American Rescue Plan, a roughly $2 trillion economic stimulus plan that expanded help for unemployed workers and issued direct cash payments to millions of people. The pandemic and supply chain issues, though, have proved tenacious. Many workers have seen their nominal wages rise, but persistent inflation has blunted the impact of the gains.

This episode: White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House.
0:09.0	And I'm Tamer Keith and I also cover the White House.
0:12.0	So we're doing some podcast to close out the year that are focused on what President Biden
0:18.0	said were the four pillars of his agenda as president. Those four pillars for those who might not have been studying this,
0:25.0	it's racial equity, fighting COVID, climate change and building the economy.
0:31.0	Today we're going to focus on the economy and to do that we brought in the economy master Scott Horsley.
0:39.0	Hi Scott. Great to be with you all.
0:41.0	Depending on the day your doctor doom or not so doom.
0:45.0	Exactly.
0:46.0	He covers the economy for NPR obviously and a very good friend of the podcast.
0:51.0	So Scott it's been a really weird year for the economy.
0:56.0	So start with employment which is you know one of the main things that people focus on when you talk about the economy.
1:02.0	Things have been just up and down with the pandemic and now it's undying unemployment rate.
1:12.0	Officially is low but for some reason people aren't out celebrating in the streets.
1:18.0	Like can you explain what's going on with that?
1:21.0	Well it's been a really mixed bag.
1:23.0	You know if you go back in the way back machine to this time last year the economy was actually hemorrhaging jobs.
1:29.0	We lost more than 300,000 jobs in December of 2020 and it you know we were in the midst of a winter COVID surge.
1:39.0	But it looked as if there was nowhere to go but up you know because vaccines were beginning to roll out.
1:45.0	It looked like the table was set for a huge improvement in the job market in 2021.
1:51.0	And by some measures we did get that and we had months of really strong job growth like March and June and July.
1:59.0	More than 6 million jobs all told in in 2021 with with December numbers still to come.
	...

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