Joe Biden labeled himself as a center-left candidate at a time that much of America was greatly politically polarized. He has enacted widely supported bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act, free Covid tests and other aggressive measures to encourage public health, and has also made some interesting predictions…
Covid
Back in 2020, Biden correctly predicted vaccines would be widely available by 2021. In televised statements he encouraged all Americans that were able to to get vaccinated for COVID-19 to prevent excess deaths. In fact, after the reopening and after the mass vaccination programs in 2021, COVID-19 deaths dropped dramatically in 2022 and in 2023.
Afghanistan
Biden had predicted a withdrawal from Afghanistan would be safe and not result in a toppling of the government. However, as NPR reported in detail, “Chaos ensued“.
As Politico noted, rating this as one of the worse predictions of 2021, Biden had said “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy … of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable” (to Saigon, which Biden had witnessed decades earlier). In fact, Kabul did later have helicopter evacuations from the embassy.
Inflation Reduction Act
The inflation reduction act was a bipartisan act to reduce greenhouse gases, bolster US manufacturing and renewable energy. The president stated the act would be
“the largest investment ever in combatting the existential crisis of climate change. It addresses the climate crisis and strengthens our energy security, creating jobs manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles in America with American workers. It lowers families’ energy costs by hundreds of dollars each year.
Signed in 2022, it indeed has already had positive effect according to a recent Dept of Energy report:
“OP-NEMS results suggest that
IRA and BIL will enable the deployment of roughly up to 250GW of new wind, up to 475GW of
new solar, and the manufacture of up to 14 million new light-duty electric vehicles between
2022-2030. These results are despite not being able to model additional provisions that will
further bolster domestic clean energy supply chains. For example, manufacturing tax credits in
IRA, including the 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit and the 48C Qualified
Advanced Energy Credit, are already driving investment in domestic supply chains
Not only did it drive local manufacturing, but projections for energy costs of citizens were indeed projected lower in the most recent DOE report.