News from the States - Awaiting Biden’s farewell address, Democrats tout administration’s record

Jan 15, 2025 | 10:10 am ET
By Erik Gunn

Ahead of President Joe Biden’s planned farewell address Wednesday evening, the Democratic Party is calling attention to the impact his policies have had during his four-year term.

“With an unemployment rate under 3% and infrastructure investments of over $20 billion into Wisconsin, including fixing the Blatnik Bridge, President Biden and Vice President [Kamala] Harris have delivered for Wisconsinites,” outgoing Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said Tuesday. “The investment and commitment the Biden Administration made into Wisconsin will benefit the state for decades to come.”

The DNC is crediting Biden with a list of accomplishments, economic and otherwise, and has customized them for the Badger State.

• Unemployment in the state was 4.7% in January, 2021, when Biden took the oath of office and has since fallen to 2.9% in November, the St. Louis Federal Reserve reports.
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 186,800 jobs added in the last four years. The state lost 83,500 jobs in Donald Trump’s first term as president, reflecting the job crash that came starting in early 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The White House takes credit for an estimated $8 billion investment that private companies have announced for clean energy and manufacturing in Wisconsin. The U.S. Department of Energy is projecting that the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is responsible for $4 billion in new, large-scale clean power projects in the state by 2030.
• The administration has pegged the value of federal infrastructure investments in Wisconsin at $9.2 billion, with $1 billion of that going to upgrade and repair the Blatnik Bridge connecting Superior, Wisconsin, with its twin city of Duluth, Minnesota.
• Federal investment in health care navigator services and the Inflation Reduction Act’s extension of enhanced subsidies for health insurance premiums purchased through the health care marketplace Healthcare.gov under the Affordable Care Act have contributed to a record enrollment of 306,000 people to date — an increase of more than one-third from the 2020 enrollment of 195,000.
• According to the Department of Health and Human Services, capping insulin prices at $35 a month for Medicare recipients, a new $2,000 cap on yearly out-of-pocket Medicare prescription costs and Medicare’s new ability to negotiate the prices for certain high-priced prescription drugs will benefit more than 1 million Wisconsin seniors. For some 300,000 Wisconsin Medicare recipients, prescription drug cost savings will average $475 a year, HHS projects. All of those provisions were included in the Inflation Reduction Act.
• The American Rescue Plan, enacted in the first three months of Biden’s term has most recently enabled Wisconsin to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage to 12 months from two months previously, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy news and analysis organization.
• As a result of the administration’s student debt relief efforts, the federal Department of Education has projected that 62,000 Wisconsinites have had over $2.4 billion in student debt canceled.

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