Biden's Economy Has the Best Growth Record Since Clinton
Then again, inflation under Biden is the worst since Carter, so there’s no cause for celebrating yet.
An economic report card.
Photographer: Oliver Contreras/BloombergWe’re more than a year-and-a-half into Joe Biden’s presidency, with full second-quarter economic growth numbers from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis now in hand. Which seems like as good a time as any for another installment in my occasional series comparing growth rates under US presidents — which somewhat to my surprise shows Biden on pace to compile by far the best growth record since Bill Clinton.
Yes, this is adjusted for inflation, albeit using the gross domestic product price index, which hasn’t been rising quite as fast as the better-known consumer price index (7.6% year-over-year in the second quarter versus 8.6% for the CPI). And yes, I measure growth here using not GDP alone but the average of GDP and another metric tracked by the BEA, gross domestic income. In theory GDP and GDI should be equal, but they are estimated from different sources and so far this year are showing very different economic trajectories for the US. GDP fell at a 1.6% annualized rate in the first quarter and 0.6% in the second, according to the latest BEA estimates, while GDI rose 1.8% and 1.4%.