By Stephen Moore
President Joe Biden's time in the White House is mercifully coming to an end. He's now officially a lame duck with six months to go.
Biden was a victim here of a corrupt Democratic machine (with a complicit media) that thought it could pull off a grand election-year deceit despite Biden's failing cognitive abilities.
The establishment and a compliant media convinced millions of primary voters that he was of sound mind and ready to serve four more years. This lust for power put America in danger. How could they be so unpatriotic?
So where will Biden stand in the history books? He wasn't a failed president because of his declining cognitive abilities. It was his policies that wrecked America.
From his first days in the Oval Office, he governed from the far left on everything from climate change to radical income redistribution to massive government expansionism to racial politics to a "blame America first" foreign policy to his dangerous weaponization of every agency of government, from the IRS to the State Department to the FBI to the Justice Department and perhaps even the Secret Service. He made Richard Nixon look like an amateur.
It's hard to point to a single policy that he got right. On the economy he was catastrophically bad. The trillions of dollars of debt he rang up bought nothing. He sent inflation to the highest levels in almost 40 years. The average family lost $2,000 of income after inflation during his reign. Test scores fell. More people died of COVID-19 during his presidency than in former President Donald Trump's — despite the availability of the vaccine.
Interest rates rose. Home ownership became a pipe dream for young people. Homeowners faced mortgage payments that doubled. Biden declared war on American energy. He put America back into the corrupt Paris Climate Accords. The rest of the world went on using more fossil fuels than ever. By impeding U.S. oil and gas production and pipelines, he played into the hands of our enemies — China and Iran.
Gas prices rose. Small business confidence sagged. Two-thirds of Americans consistently told pollsters that the economy was "fair" or "poor." Poverty rates rose.
Even the one statistic that Biden boasts about — job creation — is a mirage. Most of the jobs were government or health care jobs. With the government borrowing $2 trillion a year, there is no reason the government should be hiring more workers.
Then there was the sheer incompetence. The bungled Afghanistan withdrawal was a national security disaster. The border became a broken dam, with some 10 million illegals flowing into the country. The government spent $7 billion to build electric vehicles, and only a handful got built.
Biden gave away hundreds of billions of dollars for an illegal and immoral student loan forgiveness program. He put regulators of key agencies in charge even though — or because — they hate business. Less than 10% of his appointees had any business experience. It showed.
He tried to pass mandates that would force Americans to give up their gas cars, gas stoves and other appliances.
When he departs the White House in January, he will leave the nation poorer, weaker, more divided, more in debt, more vulnerable and less respected than when he entered office.
This was a man who pledged to unite the country and did just the opposite. He deserves to go down in history as one of the five worst presidents of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Here is my list, starting with the worst:
1. Woodrow Wilson
2. Herbert Hoover
3. Jimmy Carter
4. Joe Biden
5. Barack Obama
Now the Democrats want to run Vice President Kamala Harris, who was on board with every Biden policy and oversaw the worst border catastrophe in modern history.
Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior economic advisor to Donald Trump. His latest book is: "Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy."
Free Press International
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