The Patriot Post® · White House Help Wanted: No Business Experience Needed

The biggest question facing Americans today might just be this: Is Joe Biden screwing up the country because he doesn’t know what he’s doing or because he does know what he’s doing?

The answer is a little bit of both, of course. The Great Reset is, after all, a deliberate goal of dedicated radical leftists, for whom Biden is merely a cognitively disabled puppet. This cadre of Marxist-influenced “public servants” are committed to an ideology that places government power and control front and center over virtually every aspect of life.

Yet the White House is full of people who simply don’t have any clue what they’re doing because they have literally zero experience outside of government jobs or academia.

In a new report, economists Stephen Moore and Jon Decker lay out the problem in their title: “Not Ready for Prime Time Players: Majority of Biden Appointees Have Zero Years of Business Experience.” The executive summary then enumerates the key details of the “survey of the top 68 officials in the Biden administration, starting with the president himself”:

• 62% of Biden appointees who deal with economic policy, regulation, commerce, energy and finance have virtually no business experience.
  
• Only one in eight has extensive business experience.
  
• Average business experience of Biden appointees is only 2.4 years.
  
• Median years of business experience is zero.
  
• The vast majority of the Biden economic/commerce team members are professional politicians, lawyers, community organizers, lobbyists, or government employees.

There, in a nutshell, is the problem. In some ways, we’re not surprised. Leftists tend to gravitate toward government in the first place because it’s where they can go to control other people. They don’t want to put in the hard work of providing products and services that people voluntarily buy. They don’t want to create or build. They’d rather take over what you built.

At the same time, this utter lack of real-world experience is shocking for an administration committed to its American Rescue Plan and to the cockamamie scheme to Build Back Better. Shouldn’t these people at least have had a real job?

It wasn’t that long ago that a presidential administration turbocharged our economy thanks to the long and deep business experience of its members. Moore and Decker explain:

We also compared the Biden administration’s business experience to President Trump’s cabinet officials during his last year in office. We found that the average Trump cabinet member had 13 years of business experience, and the median years of experience was 8.

As the New York Post’s Miranda Devine summarizes:

Donald Trump had 45 years in business, his Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross 42 years, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette 14 years, Small Business Administration administrator Jovita Carranza 18 years, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin 25 years, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 14 years, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue 27 years, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos 23 years.

The result was a vibrant economy that lifted all boats. Sadly, the economic sunshine of the Trump years is a faded memory now that the wokesters are in charge.

The wokeness is a big part of the problem. As Moore and Decker understate it, “There is also a growing suspicion that the Biden officials are more interested in pursuing social policy objectives than expanding the economy and ensuring prosperity of our citizens.”

Rather than choosing qualified individuals for the job, Biden used skin color and gender confusion as his primary criteria, starting with Kamala Harris. He painted himself into a corner by promising to choose a woman of color as his running mate. Besides those two diversity boxes, Harris provides no reason to be a heartbeat away from the presidency — while serving under a president who, let’s face it, might be only a heartbeat away from the grave.

Cecilia Rouse, chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, has zero business experience. But she is a woman of color. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has four years of experience in business, but no background in transportation or logistics that might help during a supply chain crisis. But he is a gay man. Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young never had a real job. But she is another woman of color. Janet Yellen, secretary of the Treasury, is a lifetime academic and public servant with no business experience. But she is a woman. John Kerry has spent his entire life in The Swamp and has no background in anything to qualify him to be climate czar. But he did marry a ketchup heiress.

The list goes on and on.

Most of the business experience White House officials do have is venture capitalism. Which might explain why they treat your tax dollars as fodder for a venture capitalist government enterprise.

When Joe Biden took office, the nation’s economic recovery from the government’s pandemic malfeasance was not assured. In fact, aside from fighting off COVID itself, stewarding the economy was the most important job. Biden was not up to the task, and, though that was painfully obvious before his victory, 81 million* Americans didn’t care — they just wanted someone who didn’t mean-tweet.

So, here we are. Later this month, we may find that the U.S. has technically entered recession. We just learned this week that inflation continues to accelerate and Team Biden wants more of what caused it. “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way,” Biden said last July. “I don’t know anybody who’s worried about inflation.” If that was true, it was due to surrounding himself with economic novices.

The trouble is that Biden administration incompetence isn’t just fodder for news analysis. It exacerbates the economic weight crushing the American Dream for millions of people. And until our fellow Americans put two and two together and elect a different administration not only with some idea of what it’s doing but with the right ideas, this malaise will continue.