Bessent’s View of Bidenomics

I thought you might be interested in the views of Bidenomics that the chap whom President-Elect Trump nominated as his new Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, expressed in a piece at City Journal not long ago. Here’s a snippet:

Over its eight years, the Reagan administration successfully rolled back excessive government interventions of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter administrations, unleashing the productive capacity of the U.S. economy. This consensus mostly held through the George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. But the Obama administration featured a return to heavy government intervention in the private sector, particularly through its turbocharged expansion of the regulatory state, delivering an economic constipation similar to the one that plagued the U.S. before the Reagan revolution. The Trump administration’s pursuit of tax reform, deregulation, and fair trade produced noninflationary growth that generated the fastest increases in real wages in a generation.

Yet the Biden administration actively chose to disregard the roadmap for economic dynamism that Presidents Reagan and Trump left behind. Instead, it reached back for the Carter model. “Bidenomics,” or to use Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s framing, “modern supply side economics,” is neither modern nor supply side nor economical. At its core, Bidenomics represents a return to the discredited economic philosophy of central planning.

Other than the imputing of motives, I didn’t find much controversial in what he had to say—he’s largely just echoing what Larry Summers said early in Joe Biden’s term, things that any Keynesian or neo-Keynesian economist would have said.