Joe Biden was a reform-minded senator in the 1970s. However, Biden did a 180-degree turn and became a Marxist, mirroring the Democratic Party’s and the White House’s leftward shift.
Rampant inflation dooms the incumbent, vindicate right-wing economic ideas, and set back the postwar liberal welfare project by a generation. Those are Joe Biden’s remarks, not those of a Wall Street Journal editorial, reported Free Beacon.
They came during an interview in 1987, when Biden was just starting his first presidential campaign. He bemoaned people’ dissatisfaction with government and large-scale expenditure programs linked with the New Deal and the Great Society at the time. According to Biden, the increasing inflation that characterized the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter generated a distrust of government.
“Government was making the wrong decisions,” Biden told the Atlantic. “As much as 5 or 6 percentage points on the inflation rate were due to oil. Another 5 percent was due to Vietnam. And so you have 10 or 11 percent on top of the inflation that had accumulated since 1932, as conservatives had predicted, and BAM—everything’s gone.”
That’s because those circumstances are all too familiar. Inflation is at an all-time high, thanks in part to the war in Ukraine, rising oil costs, and historic levels of federal spending, and it threatens to sink Biden’s presidency just as it did Carter’s.
The Biden of the 1970s and the Biden of 2022, on the other hand, could as well be two different persons, with the latter questioning economic orthodoxy and claiming that new entitlements and stimulus in the shape of Build Back Better will actually lower consumer costs. As a young, reform-minded senator in the 1970s, Biden presented proposals to cut tens of millions of dollars from ineffective and worthless federal agencies, claiming that big spending cuts were the only way out of America’s stagflation nightmare. His 180-degree turn mirrors the Democratic Party’s and the White House’s leftward shift, with ideologues (many of whom never lived through the 1970s) able to persuade a nearly 80-year-old president that everything he ever knew about how the economy worked was wrong.
“The taxpayers of this country have been charged $52 million to support 1,500 advisory committees, despite the fact that 397 of these committees have never even met and another 891 have never produced a single report,” Biden said in 1975.
U.S. News & World Report, a conservative journal at the time, praised Biden’s positions, writing that senators like him “are increasingly disillusioned with Great Society-type programs.”
In 1972, Biden concurred, saying, “We newer liberal Democrats are rejecting the theory of our more senior colleagues, which was that if you spend enough money, you can solve any problem.”
In 1974, Biden claimed that Democrats had lost sight of who their major constituency should be: the middle class. The decade’s relentless inflation convinced the average working guy earning “$12,000 a year” (about $70,000 now) that “he’s been had.” Biden claimed that Congress had paid much too much attention to poor Americans.
Biden was one of the few lawmakers who met with angry truckers in Washington, D.C., in 1973, as part of their statewide plan to shut down transit in protest of rising petrol costs. His attendance at the rally distinguished him from more liberal Democratic Party members—then-Senator George McGovern (S.D.), a past presidential contender and apparent labor supporter, was nowhere to be found—and helped Biden project an image of himself as a pragmatic.
Biden has been chastised for not doing enough to cut gas costs a year and a half into his first presidential term (as well as by an angry trucking industry with grievances that his White House refuses to acknowledge). Pipelines have been shut down, and oil licenses on federal lands have not been renewed, according to critics.
Following a review of then-President Gerald Ford’s budget, Biden criticized the White House for not doing enough to address high petrol prices and corporate tax rises, suggesting that there were better ways to reduce demand. Biden chided liberals for neglecting “the vast resources of the ocean and their importance to us… [which] range from lobsters to oil” during a Senate hearing in 1974.
Although Biden called for certain marginal tax increases, his strategy to combat inflation was mostly defined by budget cuts. During his Senate reelection campaign in 1978, Biden ran a full-page ad in the News Journal, one of Delaware’s largest newspapers, promoting his “sunset bill,” which would require “a thorough and complete review of federal spending programs every four years… [that] would automatically end a program that wasn’t proved useful or effective.”
“The spiraling costs of inflation are ripping into the fabric of American society,” the ad reads. “We must bring these problems under control and the first place to start is with the cost of government.”
Bills to decrease federal spending defined Biden’s early days in the Senate. One of the first laws he introduced was to curb federal employee pay rises and prevent automatic cost-of-living adjustments.
By 1978, Biden claimed to have acquired the title of “stingiest senator” in the country. His proposals targeted the budgets of the Department of Labor and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, as they were known at the time. He called the welfare system “wasteful” and claimed it was mostly used to “build political patronage.”
“I plan to keep chopping away—cutting wherever I can—so that eventually, we’re going to bring the monstrous federal budget under control,” Biden said during his first term in the Senate. “It’ll take time, but I know we can do it. We must.”
The federal budget deficit had risen to $40.7 billion by 1979. The federal budget deficit is expected to reach $1.4 trillion in 2022, up $500 billion from 2019. In 1978, the rate of inflation was 7.59 percent. It now stands at 8.5 percent.
In April 1978, a year and a half into Carter’s presidency, a Gallup poll indicated that only 39% of Americans approved of his job performance, with the firm determining that the economy was to blame for Carter’s 9-point dip in one month. Gallup indicated that 41% of respondents approved of Biden’s job as president in April 2022, with a majority of people worrying about the economy.
Carter delivered a televised message to the country on the state of the economy one month before the 1978 midterm elections. Carter praised the strengthening work situation while pointing to rising inflation rates around the world, a rhetorical tactic that Biden has often used.
“We know that government is not the only cause of inflation,” Carter said. “But it is one of the causes, and government does set an example. Therefore, it must take the lead in fiscal restraint.”
Those speeches, like many others given by Carter during his one-term presidency, did little to reassure the people. Democrats would lose three Senate seats and fifteen House seats.
Although the Democrats did not lose control of either chamber of Congress, numerous Republicans, like Newt Gingrich, who later led a conservative policy revolution, gained influence. Carter, who later attempted a pivot to the center, faced a primary challenge from the left in 1980 and lost to Ronald Reagan in the general election.
Faced with a comparable low popularity rating and a bleak midterm cycle, party insiders are already speculating about who might succeed Biden as the party’s presidential candidate in 2024. Biden’s former left-wing foe, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), has not ruled out a presidential candidacy, according to an adviser to Sanders.
Biden remarked on the Democratic Party’s political troubles in a National Journal interview held nearly a decade after the 1978 midterm elections.
“There is a consistent pattern that crept into the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and through the 1970s: We forgot who our people were,” Biden said. “The moral business of this country is not the way liberals think of it.”
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