The economy is a top issue for many voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. In a lengthy interview ahead of the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, world-renowned progressive economist Robert Pollin offers a detailed and thorough assessment of the actual state of the U.S. economy and the effects of Biden’s economic policies. Pollin is a distinguished university professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His books include The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy; Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity; and Back to Full Employment. He has been a consultant to, among other organizations, National Nurses United, the American Postal Workers Union, the Washington State Labor Council, Labor Network for Sustainability and the BlueGreen Alliance.

C. J. Polychroniou: The economy will be one of the key issues in the 2024 U.S. election and may very well determine whether it will be Joe Biden who will be reelected as president or whether we will see Donald Trump return to the White House. As one would reasonably expect, of course, the two primary candidates for the 2024 presidential election have radically different takes on the state of the U.S. economy. Biden recently told NBC’s “TODAY” that “America has the best economy in the world,” while Trump claims that the economy is collapsing. Let’s start by talking about “Bidenomics,” the nickname for Biden’s economics policies and plans. Is Bidenomics a real economic philosophy? If so, what does it encompass?

Robert Pollin: Bidenomics does certainly encompass an overarching framework for dealing with many of the most basic economic problems under U.S. capitalism today, while still, obviously, operating well within the boundaries of the existing capitalist social order.

The starting point for Biden’s economic program is the aggressively pro-Big Business, pro-Wall Street and pro-rich neoliberal variant of capitalism that has dominated U.S. policy making for the past 45 years, under both Democratic as well as Republican administrations. Biden has been pushing out of this neoliberal straightjacket through initiatives that support working people, unions, a viable climate stabilization project and public sector-led economic development initiatives more generally. Of course, Biden himself has never been a leftist of any variety. He is a rather career politician and centrist Democrat. But he has allowed his administration to be moved leftward by the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren presidential campaigns and allied progressive labor unions and social movements throughout the country. These union and progressive groups deserve major credit for this accomplishment.

More specifically, what does it mean that Biden has been pushing out of the neoliberal straightjacket?

We can begin with Biden’s first major economic policy initiative. This was the March 2021 American Rescue Plan. Its purpose was to prevent the onset of a full-scale economic collapse on the order of the 1930s Great Depression in the face of the global COVID lockdown. The Biden rescue plan entailed a massive injection of government spending, at $1.9 trillion (or about 9 percent of overall U.S. economic activity, i.e. GDP) at that time. This boosted overall spending in the economy, which, in turn, counteracted the sharp rise in unemployment and spending cuts by both households and businesses that resulted from the COVID lockdown.

It is true that two previous stimulus measures to counteract the COVID lockdown were enacted while Trump was still in office, in March and again in December 2020. (The December 2020 measure was passed after Trump had lost the 2020 election.) In combination, these two initiatives under Trump were actually larger than the Biden stimulus. But the composition of government stimulus spending was much more egalitarian under Biden. Biden’s American Rescue Plan focused on direct stimulus checks to households, providing funds for state and local governments to sustain their public health, education and public safety programs, the expansion of unemployment benefits, the protection of workers’ pension plans, and expanding the tax credit program for low-income families with children. By contrast, the stimulus measures under Trump were heavily skewed to supporting businesses. Big corporations and Wall Street firms were at the front of Trump’s handout line.

The Biden rescue plan, in combination with the prior Trump measures, did indeed prevent a 1930s-level economic collapse in 2021. Unemployment in the U.S. could well have risen to perhaps 15-20 percent in 2021. Who knows how severely the global economy could have unraveled from there? But this achievement by the Biden administration has gone mostly uncredited, given that it succeeded in preventing a calamity that did not happen, as opposed to advancing a positive economic breakthrough of some sort.

In terms of positive initiatives, for starters, the Biden administration has been, overall, more supportive of U.S. workers and the union movement than any U.S. administration since the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt. This represents a 180-degree reversal from the Trump years. As one highly visible example, Biden himself was on the picket line in 2023 supporting the highly successful United Auto Workers (UAW) strike against Ford, GM and Chrysler/Stellantis. Biden has also vocally supported organizing efforts at, among other places, Starbucks, Tesla, Toyota and Amazon. More broadly, the U.S. Labor Department, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and even the Federal Trade Commission under Biden have also been strongly pro-worker on critical health and safety issues and employees’ rights at the workplace.

At the same time, Biden has not been fully consistent in supporting labor. Most notably, in 2022, he imposed a settlement to prevent a strike by U.S. railroad workers. This meant that the new union........

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