“Once you start thinking about growth,” Robert Lucas, a Nobel prize-winning economist, once said, “it’s hard to think about anything else.” I’m not sure how much that happens in the White House of any president. Politicians certainly prefer to talk more in public about job numbers than GDP numbers. Of course, economic growth can drive job creation, and the lack of economic growth can doom a president.

JFK was one president who thought about GDP. In the 1980 book, The Worldly Economists, Robert Sobel, a professor of business history at Hofstra University, interviewed a number of economists who had advised presidents, including Walter Heller, chairman of Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers. Heller recalled Kennedy being acutely aware of — and unhappy with — how the German, Japanese, and even Soviet Russian economies had outgrown America’s during the 1950s. (It was really OK, though. They were all playing catchup after the devastation from World War II.) At one point, the president told Heller that he thought 4.5 percent growth was possible, a number Heller supported, which then made its way into a big speech.

How fast does Joe Biden think the economy can grow? When he was vice president, the 2013 Obama budget declared: “In the 21st Century, real GDP growth in the United States is likely to be permanently slower than it was in earlier eras because of a slowdown in labor force growth initially due to the retirement of the post-World War II baby boom generation, and later due to a decline in the growth of the working age population.”

If we want the US economy to grow anywhere near as fast in the future as in the past — 3 percent-ish rather than 2 percent-ish — that stubborn demographic reality means the heavy lifting for faster growth will need to be done via faster productivity growth. A more productive economy would, among other things, give a boost to wage growth. Historically weak productivity is a big reason why wage growth before the Great Pandemic was good but not spectacular given the low level of unemployment.

From what I can tease out of Biden’s economic agenda, Biden-omics posits a) higher demand would encourage companies to make more productivity investments, b) companies don’t do enough investing because they are trying to please shareholders today rather than stakeholders tomorrow. How about the impact of taxes and regulations? Or does the political climate in his party make a non-ideological discussion of those sorts of constraints off-limits for now? That Biden is proposing to raise the corporate tax rate to only 28 percent rather than back to the pre-Trump level of 35 percent is something, I guess.

This article first appeared at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Reuters.