Bidenomics is one of those things that means different things to different people. I will attempt what I see as the practical mainstream face-value focused explanation.

Bidenomics is the use of government incentives, mostly economic, to achieve structural and policy goals to direct national objectives. Those goals may include energy, industry, social economic engineering, and environmentally related objectives. The general gist of it is, using government to incentivize the private sector to get it to respond in a desired manner. Examples are everywhere … carbon credits for carbon dioxide pipelines, tax incentives to restore the solar industry, tariffs on Chinese goods, subsidies to computer chip makers, rebates for electric vehicles, and even forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans, just to name a few.

President Biden will tell us that his objective is to build the economy from the bottom up and expand the middle class out. He and Congress set the agenda and the government implements handing out the carrots. Some folk’s hate Bidenomics and others buy in completely, differing on the basis of ideology. Of interest to me is that business Republicans are the dominant investors in the developing carbon economy. They are putting their money in even if their mouth is saying something else.

Bidenomics sees the government as being for, and by, the people. The opposition sees the government as the enemy of the people. Bidenomics sees institutions as the just means to a positive end, and the opposition sees them as a state threat to their liberty. The void between the two views has gapped open.

I suppose that you have to pick sides, and I am on the same side as Theodore Roosevelt. My grandson is named Theodore.

Theodore Roosevelt practiced “TRomics,” which in many ways looks a lot like Bidenomics from the standpoint that Roosevelt strongly believed that the government was the people and that he believed in using the government as the mechanism to drive policy that he believed was in the interest of the people. He carried a big stick and favored what some would call “big government” versus laissez-faire government. He went after monopolies supporting the middle class. He favored irrigation to build the West even if it crossed private property. He equated government to being the people and was very much an institutionalist. He was a reformer who worked all his life in many official capacities to make the government serve the people.

That is the way that he would be approaching it today. He would not have supported shutting it all down.

Back to Bidenomics … I think Geopoliticist Peter Zeihan put it best, saying, “We are in the midst of the greatest reindustrialization process in United States history. We are building out industrial infrastructure and factories and refineries and pipelines and roads and all that faster than we did during WW II.”

As a general statement, the people — the country — does not get this. This is one of the foundations of Bidenomics. For years they lamented the offshoring of American industry to China and elsewhere and Bidenomics is what it looks like when it is coming back. It also looks like the surprise 336,000 jobs created last month and low unemployment. Biden was the first president to man a picket line. It also looks like uncomfortable inflation as it takes resources to build stuff, the infrastructure to build the stuff and then to build the stuff when operational so demand supports prices.

Did you think that we could do that without elevated inflation?

This massive investment being made by the incentive in Bidenomics requires capital, which is a reason, other than the Fed, that interest rates have risen. The people are getting exactly what they said that they wanted — reshoring and reindustrialization, and this is what it looks and feels like while under construction. The people do not appear to be very clued into the plan coming from the old man.

There is some pain, but this is necessary for the gain. This re-industrialization should help rebuild the middle class. I do not think that it will harm the 1%. It should strengthen our economy long term as well as enhance our national security. Our strategic industry needs to be ours, located here rather than “over there.”

Note that Mexico is becoming our best buyer of grain and meat. Bidenomics should make North America an economic supply-chain juggernaut.

There is a dark side to Bidenomics in how it is being financed. It continues to add to the debt as the government financial incentives that are driving Bidenomics are being borrowed. That is not how Biden planned it. He was going to pay for it by raising taxes. He was going to tax corporations, the wealthy and the dead, empowering and inflating the army of federal tax collectors, but was blocked from doing so by the U.S. House. It is the death tax which would be the greatest threat to legacy farm operations.

I was frankly viewing GOP control of the House as a good thing as this blocked the tax portion of Bidenomics from being implemented. What I see now in the chaos created by the MAGA crazies is that we are at risk of losing this buffer, currently limiting the tax risk from Bidenomics, as it may be lost. My view is that the GOP is teetering on the edge of total self-destruction, putting the stepped-up basis at risk.

So, in summary, I think that in general, Bidenomics is in the interest of the American people as long as my kids do not have to sell a farm to pay the capital gains tax on my estate.