Stan Veuger: What is Bidenomics?

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2021

⏱️ 83 minutes

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Summary

How should we analyze the economic policies advanced by the Biden Administration? What are the possible effects of the trillions of dollars in government spending and the various programs proposed by the administration? What is America’s overall economic outlook coming out of the pandemic—and how might things play out under various scenarios? Joining us to consider these questions is American Enterprise Institute scholar Stan Veuger. Analyzing Biden’s economic agenda, Veuger and Kristol address the paradox that it is both extraordinarily large in scale but doesn’t create large structural changes to the economy, as would the institution of single-payer healthcare, for example. Veuger reflects on the degree to which the territory we face in fiscal policy is uncharted: the extent of domestic spending, outside of a crisis, without sufficient tax revenue to pay for it. Veuger also addresses topics ranging from the threat of inflation to where things stand in our politics relative to immigration and trade.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today by my friend Stan
0:20.2	Boyger, the resident scholar and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. I also
0:25.9	teaches at Harvard University in Tilburg University in the Netherlands. We've done two conversations. One,
0:33.6	I think, stands up quite well, what early middle of the pandemic, where you, I think,
0:37.9	got a good forecast of what might be happening. But now we have a new administration, a new economic
0:44.1	theory, allegedly, and we should talk about what it is and what it means and what might happen.
0:50.9	So welcome, Stan. Thank you, Bill. Good to be back. Thank you for having me. I look forward to this.
0:56.9	Yeah, me too. So, Bidenomics, everyone's talking about it. I don't know. It's funny. You know what,
1:01.3	expected there to be a Bidenomics, even when he was elected, right? It was going to be, oh,
1:05.4	custodial presidency, you know, chose how much things can, you know, transitional, now it's
1:10.9	transformational, chose how much things can change quickly due to various events, I guess,
1:16.3	winning two Georgia Senate seats among others. But what is it? I mean, is it, as he's laid out
1:22.7	his plans here, how should we think about it? What's the magnitude? Is it, you know, a massive thing?
1:28.0	Is it more of the same? Is it incremental? Would just give us some sense of the quantities and
1:32.4	then the different aspects we can go through of what Bidenomics looks like it wants to be?
1:38.7	Well, so I would say it is incremental in the following sense, that a lot of what
1:44.6	the administration has proposed really does build on existing elements of the federal government
1:51.4	and the activities it carries out. On the other hand, it is quite radical, I think, in the size of
1:58.8	some of those increases of existing activity, right? So a good example is the child text credit,
2:06.0	which has existed for a while, but the administration would like to expand quite dramatically,
2:12.7	that is, it is true for the involvement of the federal government in family policy,
2:19.2	more broadly, in education policy, it's all, you know, things where the federal government has
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