The pitch of Bidenomics was that it could solve several problems at once. Laws like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act would help rebuild America’s industrial heartland by reinvesting in American manufacturing, a sector whose workers are 78 percent white and 70 percent male. Reindustrialization could win back voters (working class white men, in particular) who had grown disillusioned with Democrats and drifted toward Trump. Perhaps most importantly, investing in key twenty-first century growth industries—i.e., chips and clean energy—would allow the U.S. to “win the future” against China, breaking its dominance in those increasingly important markets. The way to do that would be to offer massive subsidies to companies to invest in those technologies stateside, and then to insulate those companies from foreign (i.e. Chinese) competition using tariffs and other protectionist measures. Reducing emissions has been a mostly a tertiary goal of Bidenomics, although the administration has frequently touted the Inflation Reduction Act’s modest $37 billion-a-year in spending on wind, solar and a host of other green technologies as “the largest ever climate investment.” That this is true, at least domestically, seems like cause for despair rather than celebration: much, much more is needed.
Bidenomics has succeeded on some of its own narrowly defined terms of success: in the two years since the Inflation Reduction........