Biden's last laugh
The outgoing president's policies may do more to jumpstart U.S. manufacturing than Trump's economic measures

Joe Biden leaves office Monday as a solitary, unpopular president, all but repudiated by many in his own party. And yet even a leading conservative thinker gives Biden credit for some policies adopted by Congress under his leadership.
Here’s CNN’s poll:
Americans broadly view Biden’s four years in office more as a failure than as a success, with his administration doing little to turn around persistent negativity about the state of the country generally or about its economy.
Overall, 36% of US adults say they approve of the way Biden handled the presidency, matching his previous low mark in CNN polling during his term, with even fewer rating his performance positively on immigration (31%), foreign affairs (32%) or the economy (33%). His strongest issues in terms of approval ratings still prompt net-negative results, with less than half saying they approve of the way he protected American democracy (46%), handled environmental policy (44%) or dealt with health care policies (43%).
In that poll, only 8% of Republicans approved of Biden’s handling of the presidency. Pundits on the right surely agree with that verdict.
Yet in a thought-provoking essay for Foreign Affairs, Oren Cass, chief economist for the conservative American Compass think tank, generally criticizes Biden’s leadership and makes the case that Trump has an opportunity to rebuild America’s industrial base, but only if he supports government policy changes to make it possible.
Cass writes:
Conservatives are always wary of granting government a substantial role in shaping and supporting private-sector investment. The many pratfalls of Biden’s spending policies have only heightened their suspicion. High-profile projects to deploy electric-vehicle chargers and broadband Internet access, for example, have gone nowhere.
He notes that a $100 billion Micron Technology semiconductor plant subsidized by the CHIPS Act, passed in 2022 with Biden’s support, is being held up by environmental review in upstate New York.
But then Cass makes a fairly stunning observation. Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts, which cost nearly $2 trillion, “failed to significantly affect business investment in their first two years, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Economic growth slowed.”
By contrast, the $50 billion which the CHIPS Act invested in the semiconductor industry in 2022 “has been a broad success. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the United States was ‘on track to add more construction for computer and electronics manufacturing in 2024 alone than it did during the 20 years before the CHIPS Act.’ The world’s five leading logic and memory manufacturers are all building in the United States. No other country hosts more than two. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has reported that initial yields from its new Arizona plant exceed those from its home country.”
“Trump should learn from this contrast, pursuing policies that look less like his first-term tax cuts and more like CHIPS,” Cass writes.
In other words, Biden proved to be a lot more effective in starting to re-industrialize America than first-term Donald Trump. (Overall, more manufacturing jobs were created in the U.S. during Biden’s term than during Trump’s, according to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques of Yale.)
And more benefits could be on the way. “Many of the projects funded by the hundreds of billions of dollars the Biden administration invested in domestic industry are slated to come online in the next four years,” Cass writes. “If he gets started right away, Trump’s policies could take effect just as those investments begin to pay dividends.”
Will Biden get any credit publicly for the positive results of these policies?
Don’t count on it. But he might have the last laugh.