Prize-winning economists speak up for President Biden’s economic policies—the same policies they predicted would ease inflation and spur growth.
Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists have signed a public letter in advance of Thursday’s presidential debate endorsing President Biden’s economic policies and criticizing Donald Trump’s. They write:
The economists support Biden’s reelection campaign and warn that Trump’s tax-cutting proposals will reignite inflation and destabilize the nation’s economic standing in the world. The message was drafted and circulated by Joseph Stiglitz and signed by other luminaries, including Edmund Phelps (Columbia University), Robert Shiller (Yale), Paul Romer (Boston College), Angus Deaton (Princeton), Oliver Hart (Harvard), and others. All are known as liberal or left-leaning economists with attachments to the Democratic Party.
In 2021, 15 of these same economists, including Stiglitz, Phelps, Shiller, Hart, Romer, and Deaton, signed a similar public letter endorsing Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which contained spending proposals for climate initiatives, health-care subsidies, schools, housing, and other causes. That bill eventually passed Congress with a $1.9 trillion price tag. Several pieces of a pared-back plan were eventually incorporated into the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, with an estimated cost of around $800 billion. The prize-winning economists had this to say about Biden’s economic proposals: “Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”
The economists also claimed that Biden’s agenda includes “a broader conception of infrastructure” that went beyond spending on roads, bridges, and the like to include investments in human capital, research, public education, and health care.
