Joe Biden government: the policies on the left that put the president in an unprecedented position in recent US history
Biden speaks at Congress to mark his first 100 days in office; proposals are bold - and expensive
A year ago, when Joe Biden was just emerging as the Democratic Party name to face Donald Trump in the November 2020 presidential election, his supporters did not disguise a certain lack of enthusiasm.
A professional politician with more than three decades in Congress, Biden was seen as a pragmatic, boring, protocol-style centrist, who would have to be towed to the left-most wings of the party to implement a progressive agenda in his administration.
This view seemed to corroborate both the history of Biden, who voted in favor of the Iraq War and used to maintain proximity to Republican parliamentarians repudiated by the Democratic base - such as Senator Mitch McConnell -, and his refusal to, even during the campaign, endorse proposals such as the creation of a universal public health system in the country, advocated by his rival in the primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders.
- In the party ranks and among the young and progressive US electorate, the almost octogenarian was taken as a possible buffer president, a moderate figure needed to pacify the country after the social turmoil of the Trump years, a kind of bridge to something more daring in terms of democratic public policy, which would not come in the four years of a Biden term. Biden has already put in place a $ 1.9 trillion covid-19 pandemic economic relief plan. This is an expense that, by itself, would already surpass the resource injection made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1933, the year in which the agent started his package of measures to recover the USA from the Great Depression, called the New Deal.
Part of these funds paid for the more than 160 million checks for up to $ 1,400 that the federal administration has already distributed among the country's population.
The projection is that, as a result of public money, the American economy will grow 7% this year, the highest result in almost four decades, after a contraction of 3.5% in 2020, as a result of the effects of the health crisis caused by the new coronavirus, which has already claimed the lives of 580,000 people in the country.
"This is the most significant legislation for workers that has been passed in the country in decades," celebrated the progressive Sanders, known for his critical left hand that he targets Democrats. Although the resumption of jobs in March seemed to confirm Sanders' enthusiasm, with nearly a million jobs created, the April figure disappointed and was only a quarter of that.
The package also ensured that Biden delivered nearly three times the vaccines he had promised in his first hundred days: there are 290 million doses available in the United States, 230 million of which have already been applied.
New York restaurant; Biden's plan put in place $ 1.9 trillion economic bailout
Last week, in another historic progressive movement, the White House changed its position in the World Trade Organization to stand in favor of the patent breakdown of immunizers against covid-19, proposed by India and South Africa.
The stance represents a blow to the interests of American pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer and Moderna, which own the intellectual property of some vaccines.
The American government justified that, as a major financier of the development and distribution of doses, it was also entitled to express an opinion on its reproduction around the world and that increasing access to immunizers at that time was strategic for national and international interest.
On another front, Biden combined his ambitious climate promises with a state-driven infrastructure development plan.
If approved by Congress, its $ 2 trillion investment package will earmark funds to build a clean energy matrix in the country and to encourage the replacement of much of the current US vehicle fleet with electric cars.
These efforts would be part of the way to meet the government's announced goal of halving US greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels, a bolder goal than that set by former Democratic President Barack Obama, of whom Biden was runner-up.
In addition to developing a green economy, the infrastructure plan would create millions of middle-income, well-paid employees to serve the mass of former American workers who saw their jobs migrate to Latin America or Asia during the process of globalizing production of American industry.
And if it promises to boost the high-tech green sector, the Biden government begins to dehydrate the country's mining and oil industry.
His government has suspended new leases for oil and gas exploration in federal lands and waters, which has been interpreted as the initial step in a permanent ban on these activities.
But Biden's plans are not just focused on improving the country's physical and environmental infrastructure. The government wants to invest in human capital.
Its proposals include the allocation of approximately US $ 1 trillion to daycare centers, universal public education for children between three and four years of age (today non-existent in most of the United States) and free two years of study at the so-called Community College, colleges places - cheaper and with much less prestige than the renowned American universities - that tend to serve students from the poorest strata of society.
White House changed its position in the World Trade Organization to favor the covid-19 vaccine patent break
And while the increase in the country's public debt will be inevitable, at least part of the plans must be funded by raising taxes on the wealthiest.
The White House proposes a review of the US tax system that affects all those with incomes in excess of $ 400,000 a year - whether families or businesses.
The proposal would almost double capital gains taxes (profit on investments) for people who earn more than $ 1 million annually. This would be the highest tax rate on investment gains since the tax modality was created in 1920.
In addition to these three large budget packages, the Biden administration tries to draw up bills in Congress that have a profound impact on cultural and social aspects of the country: the president sent Congress a plan that foresees a path for American citizenship to 11 million undocumented migrants, in addition to of a wide-ranging reform of the US migratory system, has advocated increasing restrictions on access to weapons and has recognized and attempted to combat structural racism, both through measures that expand access to voting among the black population and by proposing reform of the police in the United States. parents.
"Boring, but radical"
Biden's momentum seems to have taken both oppositionists and sympathetic to his management by surprise. On the one hand, Trump's Republican Senator Ted Cruz called the government "boring but radical".
On the other hand, Bloomberg economic news agency Dean Baker, the senior economist at the progressive economic and political research center, said Biden surprised: "Many of us feared that he would be overly cautious, but he set an aggressive agenda. and ambitious and defended it well. I underestimated him politically ".
The skepticism that Biden could frontally change the stances he defended in the not-so-distant past is understandable.
An anecdote illustrates this well. Between 2009 and 2011, when the Obama-Biden administration sought to resume US growth after the 2008 recession, Biden's assistant economist was the progressive Jared Bernstein. Bernstein left the government frustrated by the White House's focus on what was for him the "wrong economic issue": controlling the fiscal deficit.
The economist believed that it was necessary for the State to spend much more at first, to allow a robust return on the economy and the gradual withdrawal of public investments from the market. He lost his arm wrestling. Ten years later, Bernstein is back at the White House as one of the president's top economic advisers. And now, his view on the need for large spending by the state is no longer a minority in the government.
For political scientist Jonathan Hanson, those who expected to see in Biden a reissue of the Obama administration failed to notice not only a change in the political environment but to recognize the malleability inherent in professional politicians.
"I feel that the pandemic is ending the era that began with the Ronald Reagan government, when the government was considered the problem and should be reduced. For 40 years, both on the left and on the right, the mantra of cutting spending has been repeated and tax cuts. But right now, what people want is for the state to come forward to solve the problem, prevent the economy from collapsing in the face of the pandemic, "Hanson told BBC News Brasil.
The change in public perception of the State's performance in the economy is evident in opinion polls. At the end of April, a national survey by the Reuters agency and the Ipsos Institute showed that 65% of Americans approved the economic relief package for the impacts of covid-19, against 29% who disapproved.
Likewise, the infrastructure package also enjoys the sympathy of the majority. The Monmouth University Research Institute noted on April 26 that two out of three Americans support Biden's trillion dollar spending plan as well as the tax hike that will be required to pay for it.
According to Hanson, Biden showed the will to discover the popular will and malleability to follow it, as professional politicians usually do.
If approved by Congress, a $ 2 trillion investment package will allocate funds to build a clean energy matrix and to encourage the replacement of a large part of the current US vehicle fleet with electric cars.
"I think maybe people underestimated Joe Biden as a politician. He is very capable of reading the political situation both within his party and nationally. And, that means that he will change his position over time, yes. In the face of immense challenges in the United States and around the world, Biden came to recognize the need to make big decisions, necessary to face these crises ", says the professor at the University of Michigan.
The window of two years
Although audacious, much of Biden's agenda still depends on congressional approval, in which the situation is not exactly comfortable. Only the covid-19 relief package has already been approved.
Democrats hold a minimal majority in the legislature, sufficient only to pass legislation that has direct budgetary implications. Ordinary laws, however, demand a three-fifths majority in the Senate, which forces Democrats to convince part of the Republican bench to support their projects.
The construction of bipartisan legislation, however, has proved to be difficult. And while Biden founded his campaign on the motto of national unity and repeated on several occasions his appreciation for the multiparty composition, he has made it clear to Democrats that he will try to stick with the plans even if the Republicans do not embark.
This is because, in just two years, the Americans will return to the polls to renew - or not - the mandates of a portion of the parliamentarians, which threatens the already precarious majority of the president's party.
"In the last two Democratic governments, both Obama and Clinton started with a majority in Congress, sought consensus building with Republicans, ended up blocked and, in the mid-term elections, saw the end of their majorities - and the chance to pass good part of their proposals, thus losing the window of opportunity of the two years that, in practice, Democratic presidents have ", says Janson, in an institutional explanation for the fact that Biden presents a more progressive and bold agenda than his predecessors of the same broken in such a short time.
"Biden saw the mistake happen in the Clinton administration, when he was in Congress, he saw the mistake repeat itself in the Obama administration, when he was vice. And he now seems determined to end this cycle. He has already warned that he will use the legitimacy of the polls to push his agenda at the beginning, while there are conditions for that ", summarizes Hanson.
It is likely that, with minor or major changes, Biden will be able to approve his infrastructure and investment plans for people. The future of laws such as migration reform or policing remains to be seen. Historical flags of the Democrats' left-most wings, these same matters now depend on the approval of a part of the Republican bench to be approved. Ultimately, it will be up to the Republicans to decide whether or not they will make up the legacy of the Biden government.
No comments:
Post a Comment