In a big speech today, President Biden once again compared himself to FDR and asserted that America’s economy is by far the fastest growing in the world today. Well, in those terms, the U.S. in the last five quarters has grown at about 1 percent at an annual rate. That’s for 15 months. Canada is growing at more than 3 percent, or three times as fast. Oops.  

Now, most of Europe is growing at about the same stagnant 1 percent, but India is growing at more than 6 percent and China is at roughly 4.5 percent. So I don’t know which world Mr. Biden is looking at.  

As far as FDR is concerned, that’s a longer discussion, but I’m going to say Mr. Biden is far more socialist than FDR ever was. However, FDR’s massive taxing and regulating policies stifled private investment. He declared total war against business. He failed to solve the Great Depression until World War II mobilization occurred.  

Roughly 10 years after the onset of the depression, the U.S. unemployment rate was more than 19 percent — that was in 1938. In fact, 1937-38 was a recession inside the depression. Now, true enough, it was Republican Herbert Hoover who signed insane tax and tariff increases, and a mistake-prone Federal Reserve policy that brought on the depression in the first place. But FDR’s class warfare against business and entrepreneurs failed to solve the depressionary slump, and undoubtedly made it worse.  

Then Mr. Biden goes through the usual nonsense about telling us how bad the economy was when he first took office. This is part of his Bottomless Pinocchio. He inherited a 6.5 percent growth rate with 1.4 percent inflation from President Trump. Today, economic growth is hovering at a stagnant 1 percent. 

And while the year-to-year changes of inflation have cooled from over 9 percent to roughly 5 percent, what matters to middle-class working people is the change in the level of prices, which is not going down, and has damaged affordability for everyday items and contributed to a big decline in real wages — what Ronald Reagan called take-home pay.  

Under Mr. Biden, this level of consumer prices has increased 15.6 percent, with groceries up 19.7 percent, gasoline up 41.7 percent, new cars up 20 percent, and on and on. So, when Mr. Biden tells us how his policies have built the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, instead of the top down, this is another Bottomless Pinocchio.  

E.J. Antoni of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity has shown, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, that real wages in the bottom quartile fell 2.3 percent, and dropped 3.9 percent in the second quartile. For the entire worker spectrum, Bidenomics has produced a 2.1 percent decline in wages measured after inflation.  

This is killing everybody. Lower, middle, even upper. It has always been the soft underbelly of the Biden economy. Mr. Biden may brag about all of his new spending for high-speed internet, but the reality is it was the Trump administration that developed and fleshed out a true national 5G policy. It included well more than $100 billion of spectrum auctions to the private sector, who will then be more efficiently developing high-speed internet.  

But $65 billion of internet-related government spending is an outrageous sum. Both wireless operators and local officials will have no idea nor any capability of how to spend those gigantic sums. It will wind up being pure election-year pork — another Biden grift. By the way, just for the record, the vast amount of investment in this country, even despite Mr. Biden’s efforts, comes from the private sector, not the government.  

Finally, as Mr. Biden brags about bringing electricity to American homes and to farms, the reality is his war against fossil fuels is killing electricity. Some estimates show that his turning off of the fossil spigot would damage 65 percent or more of the electric grid, which, contrary to the beliefs of Mr. Biden’s radical climate followers, still depends overwhelmingly on oil, gas, and coal. So there you have another Bottomless Pinocchio.  

Mr. Biden can’t get his story straight and can’t get his facts straight, but, most importantly, hasn’t gotten his economy straight. He has brought us inflation and stagnation. Big-government socialism hasn’t worked — and never will.  

Save America. Bring back free market capitalism.

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.