A few right-thinking writers watched Wednesday night’s speech by Comrade Biden so you and I didn’t have to.

Jim Geraghty:

All of us in the political world are supposed to act as if last night’s joint address of Congress from President Biden was a big deal, but . . . it’s April 29. A week from now, on May 6, will anyone remember anything from Biden’s speech?

This is the sort of idea that sounds good when you hear it, but seems far less revolutionary and bold when you look at what NIH is already doing:

The NIH invests about $41.7 billion annually in medical research for the American people.

More than 80 percent of NIH’s funding is awarded for extramural research, largely through almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every state.

About 10 percent of the NIH’s budget supports projects conducted by nearly 6,000 scientists in its own laboratories, most of which are on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

I’m open to the argument that an ARPA for health at NIH would generate breakthroughs that couldn’t be reached at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions or the existing NIH campus, but I’d like to see proof that this isn’t just moving money around in hopes of generating new results.

Biden also echoed his predecessors by arguing that the national challenges of today are different from the challenges of the past: “Many of you, so many of the folks I grew up with, feel left behind, forgotten, in an economy that’s so rapidly changing — it’s frightening. . . . We’ll see more technological change — and some of you know more about this than I do — we’ll see more technological change in the next ten years than we saw in the last 50. That’s how rapidly artificial intelligence, and so much more, is changing. And we’re falling behind the competition with the rest of the world.”

And yet Biden’s response to these new changes is the same old agenda and proposals: Raise taxes. Spend more. Raise the minimum wage. Strengthen unions that have had declining membership for a generation, and who just happen to be Democratic Party allies. Other than the pandemic, there was little in last night’s address that couldn’t have been said by his Democratic predecessors in 2009 and 1993 and who knows, maybe even 1977.

Biden’s message in a nutshell is that China is making breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, which is why we need more unionized employees and a higher minimum wage. He’s the man from yesterday, trying to assure us that he and his team know how to prepare us for tomorrow.

If you found the Trump years sufficiently chaotic and erratic, maybe it’s better for the country that Biden is boring, lifeless, and predictable, and that listening to his speeches feels like eating reheated plain oatmeal that you suspect is significantly past the expiration date. But being boring is not necessarily better for Biden.

One of the things that jumps out if you follow politics enough is how much Biden is offering the same old stuff as previous Democratic presidents.

Biden called for “connecting every American with high-speed Internet” to “help our kids and businesses succeed in a 21st-century economy.” I can remember when Bill Clinton called for connecting every school to the Internet and “build a bridge into the 21st century.”

Obama passed his stimulus bill, Biden’s got his three American [Fill-In-the-Blank] Acts.

Biden lamented how high the health-insurance deductibles were for working families and how expensive prescription drugs were, but I seem to remember him talking about a “big blanking deal” eleven years ago that was supposed to fix that — a big blanking deal that was never fully repealed. And in the familiar pattern of our presidents, Phil Klein points out that Biden is promising way more than he could reasonably expect to deliver: “There is no basis on which to claim that Medicare could save hundreds of billions of dollars by negotiating drug prices.”

Biden just didn’t mention the situation at the border and hoped no one would notice.

Biden mentioned DARPA — arguably, dollar for dollar, the most effective and innovative section of the federal government, or at minimum the one that provides the most bang for the buck — and declared, “National Institutes of Health, the N.I.H, I believe, should create a similar advanced-research-projects agency for health.”

This is the sort of idea that sounds good when you hear it, but seems far less revolutionary and bold when you look at what NIH is already doing:

The NIH invests about $41.7 billion annually in medical research for the American people.

More than 80 percent of NIH’s funding is awarded for extramural research, largely through almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every state.

About 10 percent of the NIH’s budget supports projects conducted by nearly 6,000 scientists in its own laboratories, most of which are on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

I’m open to the argument that an ARPA for health at NIH would generate breakthroughs that couldn’t be reached at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions or the existing NIH campus, but I’d like to see proof that this isn’t just moving money around in hopes of generating new results.

Biden also echoed his predecessors by arguing that the national challenges of today are different from the challenges of the past: “Many of you, so many of the folks I grew up with, feel left behind, forgotten, in an economy that’s so rapidly changing — it’s frightening. . . . We’ll see more technological change — and some of you know more about this than I do — we’ll see more technological change in the next ten years than we saw in the last 50. That’s how rapidly artificial intelligence, and so much more, is changing. And we’re falling behind the competition with the rest of the world.”

And yet Biden’s response to these new changes is the same old agenda and proposals: Raise taxes. Spend more. Raise the minimum wage. Strengthen unions that have had declining membership for a generation, and who just happen to be Democratic Party allies. Other than the pandemic, there was little in last night’s address that couldn’t have been said by his Democratic predecessors in 2009 and 1993 and who knows, maybe even 1977.

Biden’s message in a nutshell is that China is making breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, which is why we need more unionized employees and a higher minimum wage. He’s the man from yesterday, trying to assure us that he and his team know how to prepare us for tomorrow.

James Freeman:

The propagandists who now dominate the establishment media have little interest in “fact-checking” Joe Biden as they did Donald Trump. But the Biden administration seems to be doing the job all by itself. The economic fairy tale told by the president on Wednesday night was debunked by his government’s data release on Thursday morning.

The Biden fairy tale is that the U.S. was in an economic crisis when he took office. He began telling this tall tale even before taking the job. Joining with former presidential campaign rival Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s most famous Marxist, Mr. Biden last year formed a legion of gloom to justify the historic government expansions to come.

But then as now, government data keeps exposing the Biden distortion. Today the Commerce Department reports that during the first quarter when the Biden administration began, the U.S. economy was soaring. “Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2021,” according to the advance estimate released by Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. This follows growth of more than 4% in the fourth quarter of last year and a rip-roaring 33.4% in the third.

The President continues telling his tale in an attempt to justify his LBJ-style lunge for bigger government. On Wednesday night the president claimed, according to the official White House transcript:

I stand here tonight, one day shy of the 100th day of my administration — 100 days since I took the oath of office and lifted my hand off our family Bible and inherited a nation — we all did — that was in crisis.
The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

A variant of this falsehood was road-tested by Mr. Sanders in December when he claimed, “The working class of this country today faces more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

Unemployment in the 1930s soared to roughly 25%. Since October of 2020 it’s been below 7%. By the time Mr. Biden was taking office in January it had fallen to 6.3%. The U.S. unemployment rate has been higher at some point in every decade since the 1930s, including for the entire first five years of the Obama-Biden administration.

Yet last night Mr. Biden kept on spinning:

Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation: America is on the move again… America is rising anew… After 100 days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for takeoff…
One hundred days ago, America’s house was on fire. We had to act.

A hundred days ago the raging fire was the aggressive effort by businesses to find workers for all the open positions available for people willing to work. Thanks to data releases by the Biden administration, we now know that the job market was just as robust as it seemed when he was taking office. In March the Labor Department reported:

The number of job openings changed little at 6.9 million on the last business day of January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

That’s a historically strong number, and thanks to an April release from the Biden administration, we know that the job market got even stronger during Mr. Biden’s first full month in office—before he had enacted anything of consequence. The Labor Department reported earlier this month that “the number of job openings edged up to 7.4 million on the last business day of February”.

The main threats to an economy that’s been rebounding since last summer—and is now just slightly smaller than it was before Covid—are Biden interventions which may discourage people from accepting those jobs on offer.

This column is gratified that Biden employees in the federal government have taken over the job of puncturing the president’s false economic claims from media folk who are no longer willing to do the work. In a similar way, employees at the federal Centers for Disease Control have published a range of data showing that Covid cases, hospital admissions and daily deaths were already decreasing when he took office, notwithstanding his Wednesday claims of leadership in distributing the vaccines developed and approved under the previous management.

But obviously it’s dangerous to rely on bureaucrats to do the job normally expected of a free press. Fortunately federal economic releases are not our only readings on economic vitality. This is quarterly earnings season for public companies, and they are also providing a stunning rebuttal of Mr. Biden’s portrait of the U.S. economy.

The Journal’s Karen Langley reports that “corporations have been trouncing analysts’ expectations. With about 40% of companies in the S&P 500 having reported results, profits are projected to have grown 42% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to FactSet.”

A vibrant recovery was well underway on Inauguration Day. The question is whether the legion of gloom’s massive interventions will disrupt it. As on the day he took office, the only person who can stop the “Biden boom” is Joe Biden.

Roger Kimball:

John Maynard Keynes is alleged to have said ‘When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?’ I am no fan of Keynes generally, but there is something to be said for that pithy ‘second-thoughts’ comment. It pains me to admit it, but the President’s address to the joint session of Congress put me in mind of Keynes’s observation. After all, was it not a rousing address? Even long-time critics acknowledged it. One described it as ‘a perfect blend of strength and empathy’. I have to agree. That same commentator wrote that ‘Tonight, I was moved and inspired. Tonight, I have hope and faith in America again.’

I think a lot of people felt that way. Many people agreed with him. Yes, it’s early days yet. But let’s face it. The President has already racked up significant victories. Think about his energy policy, his attack on illegal immigration, his efforts to dismantle or at least pare back the leviathan that is the administrative state, his proposals to reduce the tax burden for both businesses and individuals while also strengthening America’s military: in these and other initiatives has he not taken bold steps to fulfill his campaign promises to return power from Washington to the People and ‘make America great again’.

Oops: I was talking about the wrong speech! That was about Donald Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address, in which he called upon Americans to put aside the partisan passions that divide us in order to go forward as one people united in the goal of making a better America. It was his next State of the Union address, in 2020, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, sitting directly behind President Trump, capped the evening picking up a copy of the speech and tearing it in two.

She didn’t do that tonight. The speech was in the same chamber. But somehow it was not the same chamber. Watching Joe Biden tonight was like visiting a theater after hours. Lots of ghosts.

One ghost was St Anthony Fauci, who was responsible for Joe Biden’s doddering entrance to the depopulated room. No handshakes, just fist or elbow bumps to the bemasked denizens of that melodrama.

What Biden called ‘the worst pandemic in a century’ was at center stage. On taking office, he said, he promised 100 million vaccine shots in 100 days. To date, he said, 220 million shots have been delivered.

Who or what accomplished that? If you look at the Biden press pool — also known as CNN — the Biden administration is responsible for America’s robust response to this latest respiratory virus. But in fact, it was Donald Trump’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’ that produced several effective vaccines in record time — and it was Trump’s plan that provided the entire plan for distributing it.

Joe then went on to describe what he called, without cracking a smile, the ‘American Rescue Plan’. In essence, it is the same plan that was outlined, but in more modest terms, by a certain Italian politician in the 1920s. ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’

The word ‘jobs’ occurred nearly 50 times in tonight’s address. But here’s an embarrassing fact. Donald Trump’s economic policies led to the lowest general unemployment in decades. They led to the lowest minority unemployment in our history. They also led to a robust rise in wages at the lower end of the scale.

Joe did not mention any of that. Instead it was all Bernie Sanders-esque class warfare: raise taxes, eat the rich, take control of — well, everything.

But along the way there were some strange echoes. Biden said his mantra was ‘Buy American’. ‘American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs.’ Where have we heard that before?

MAGA? Nope. Biden is here to bring us MAPA: ‘Make America Poor Again.’

Here’s how we do it. First, spend more money than anyone thought possible. Promise free stuff for everyone (except Republicans). Second, destroy the engines of prosperity. Start with the energy industry. Tax it, regulate, mount a huge ‘green- new-deal PR campaign against cheap, abundant energy. It’s working! Hundreds of thousands are out of work and gas prices are up some nine percent in just 100 days! Good going, Joe!

I think my favorite part of this dog’s breakfast was the part where he asked, how are we going to pay for all this. ‘I’ve made clear that we can do it without increasing deficits.’

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Who knew that Joe Biden, like Hamlet, had an antic disposition.

The deficit is already skyrocketing. But Joe is going after the ‘millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes’. Did you know that the top one percent of earners already pay more than 40 percent of all income taxes? Think about that. The top 10 percent pay more than 71 percent, while the top 25 percent pay nearly 90 percent of all income taxes. So what is Joe talking about?

Of course, it would not have been a Democratic talk if there were not some invocation of the melée at the Capitol on January 6.

‘As we gather here tonight, the images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol — desecrating our democracy — remain vivid in our minds.

‘Lives were put at risk. Lives were lost. Extraordinary courage was summoned.

‘The insurrection was an existential crisis — a test of whether our democracy could survive.’

But it wasn’t an insurrection It wasn’t an ‘existential crisis’. And it wasn’t a test of ‘our democracy’ (i.e., not your democracy).

I thought it was a horrible speech — cliché-ridden, yes, but also deeply mendacious. The latest import from China is not ‘one of the worst pandemics ever’. We were not ‘staring into an abyss of insurrection and autocracy’ on January 6. There were a small number of bad hats and many who were exercising their constitutional right to dissent. This, of course, was in sharp contrast to the hundreds of thugs who rampaged through dozens of cities setting fires and destroying property over the summer — and even now. But forget all that. Here was the geriatric specimen blinking into the cameras:

‘We came together.

‘United.

‘With light and hope, we summoned new strength and new resolve.

‘To position us to win the competition for the 21st century.

‘On our way forward to a Union more perfect. More prosperous. More just.

‘As one people. One nation. One America.’

I thought at first that the few dozen people in the Capitol were wearing face masks. I didn’t consider the possibility that they were air-sickness bags.

One speaker did make sense: U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R–South Carolina), as reported by the Daily Wire:

Larry Kudlow:

I’m still suffering economic shock from Bad Earth Day. It was bad because Mr. Biden announced a 50% cut in carbon emissions in only a few years. That is going to throw a wet blanket over this booming economy.

Of course it will wreck the fossil fuel sector, which still accounts for 70% of our power.

Speaking of stupid, there’s a study coming out of the University of Michigan that says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal target, America has to stop eating meat, poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats.

OK? No burgers on the the Fourth. No steaks on the barby. I’m sure Middle America is going to love that. Can you grill Brussel sprouts? Get read. You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussel sprouts and wave your red, white, and green American flag.

I’m making fun of this because I intend to. This kind of thinking comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don’t care one whit about America’s well-being. Not one whit.

And just to round out Bad Earth Day, we’re going to take a more detailed look at President Biden’s doubling of the capital gains tax. That is part of the administration’s assault on investment and capital formation, including the corporate tax hikes, and please don’t forget that 70% of the corporate tax burden falls on blue-collar middle-class Americans or those with even lower incomes.

So this investment assault is a middle class assault. Reversing the Trump tax cuts has basically nothing to do with rich people. It has to do with inflicting enormous damage on the middle class in order to meet the opinion of some ideological zealots.

As professor Steve Koonin has told us, even the United States government’s own climate assessment showed that over the next 70 years, worst-worst case climate estimates would lose five one-hundredths of a percent of gross domestic product. That’s five one-hundredths of a percent in the word-worst case.

Lower taxes and regulatory rollback would more than overcome it and give us faster growth apart from the climate issue. As far as the Bad Earth Day global summit convened by Mr. Biden, rest assured China will never play ball.

Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, is jaw-boning American banks to stop investing in coal-fired power plants and other fossil fuel projects. He’d love to codify it in regulations or in legislation.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Americans might pay $20 a year to deal with climate change — although 32% of respondents said zero.

The Biden Green New Deal would cost $1,200 per household per year. I mean, this is nutty stuff. You couldn’t make it up. Except that we’re not making it up. It’s presidential policy.

The Tax Foundation has modeled the doubling of the capital gains tax, and it shows over ten years the government would lose $124 billion. The average capital gains tax in Europe is 19.3%. We would be at 43.4%.

Senator Bernie Sanders favorite country, Sweden, would be at 30% So we beat them all. Isn’t that great? Let’s celebrate by throwing back another plant-based beer regarding our assault on investment, which would damage the economy, generate lower wages, and decimate family incomes.

Bjorn Lomberg, president of the the Copenhagen Consensus, estimates that Mr. Biden’s new plans would reduce warming by the end of the century by 0.07 degrees fahrenheit.

Mr. Biden says it will make American more prosperous. Mr. Lomberg says that’s implausible. I’m with Mr. Lomberg. Besides wrecking burgers, steaks, beef, poultry, fish, and who knows what else, so that we can have lettuce for breakfast, it turns out that 80% of the population still prefers non-electric cars.

And, of course, China is not gong to play with these Paris climate, Biden-Kerry targets. Mr. Lomberg wants smart green innovation and private entrepreneurial, technological adbances to deal with the climate agenda.

And he’s right.

Jonathan V. Last:

Dan Pfeiffer has an interesting little exegesis on Joe Biden’s approval numbers over here. Mostly it’s about polarization and the persistent gap in R and D attitudes. Today that gap is so large that getting to 53.8 percent approval (where Biden is now) is hard.

Two nuggets from Pfeiffer for you:

(1) “As an example of how much things have changed, Bill Clinton’s approval rating among Republicans was 41 percent in a Gallup poll immediately after being impeached by a Republican Congress.”

Holy crap! I’d forgotten that. A truly amazing feat.

(2) This bit on Biden and negative partisanship is very smart:

[W]e live in an era of negative partisanship—where hatred for the other party is the biggest driving factor in political action. This is why Biden’s policies can poll in the seventies, and his approval rating can be in the low fifties. . . .

Therefore, as we think about 2022, we should focus a little more on Biden’s disapproval rating. In the aforementioned ABC/Washington Post poll, only 42 percent of respondents disapprove of Biden’s job performance. Based on recent history, this number is impressively low. At this point in his Presidency, Trump’s disapproval was 53 percent. Biden’s number is only three points higher than Bill Clinton’s at the 100-day mark in a radically less polarized era.

Biden hasn’t gotten Republican voters to like him, but he has prevented them from hating him — a truly remarkable achievement.

Yes. Keep an eye on Biden’s disapproval numbers as much as his approval numbers.

I want you to look at approval rating splits by party for the last 70 years: