On Monday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jared Bernstein stated that President Joe Biden’s numbers on the economy are poor because “you’re getting a lot of partisanship” in the President’s approval ratings.
Co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin asked, “I imagine you’ve seen the polls, you’ve seen the former President, President Trump’s numbers go up, not down, this after being indicted. How do you explain that and can you explain how the American public is looking and thinking about this economy under this President and why, if the numbers are as positive as you think they are, you think either that message is not getting out or being understood or resonating, what is happening?”
Bernstein responded, “I think part of it depends on what kind of indicators you’re looking at. … When you ask people about the components of Bidenomics, you get very favorable responses, you get numbers in the 70%, in the 75% range. People are very excited about infrastructure. People are extremely content with their job security right now. We recently hit an all-time, historical high in terms of how people are feeling about the quality of their job and their job security. That’s immensely important to this President.”
Sorkin then asked why Biden’s poll numbers don’t reflect that.
Bernstein answered, “I do think that when you ask the question from 30 or 40,000 feet, you’re getting a lot of partisanship and you know that we’re in an extremely partisan time. What I think is much more important, especially when we’re talking about economic policy and we’re talking about markets and the kind of work that you do there at CNBC that I much admire, I think we have to get down to cases. I think we have to ask people specifically about what this administration is doing, how do you feel about finally reversing decades of disinvestment, about fixing that bridge, by the way — and this is federal, state, and local, so I want to make sure the credit goes around — fixing that bridge on I-95 in Philly in two weeks. That is Bidenomics in action at a very granular level. Broadband — high-speed access to broadband for all in rural areas where it hasn’t gone, fixing our ports, fixing our bridges, our roads. All of that crowds in private investment. That’s the exact opposite of the prior view of the kind of top-down cut public investment and cross your fingers and hope it gets you somewhere.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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