Joe Biden aims to blunt Trump’s edge with an economic plan of his own
• The US’s Democratic presidential challenger is all set to start unveiling his policies intended to foster manufacturing and encourage innovation
Joe Biden will begin rolling out his plan on Thursday to repair the US economy as he seeks to improve his standing with voters on one of the few issues on which he lags President Donald Trump.
Biden will frame the economic argument for the remainder of his campaign with a speech near his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, a place that’s been synonymous with the blue-collar workers who helped Trump win the state in 2016. He will unveil policies to foster manufacturing and encourage innovation, adopting ideas from his progressive primary rivals but avoiding bigticket proposals such as the Green New Deal.
The former vice-president’s plan is divided into four areas, the first of which he’ll address in more detail on Thursday: a push to buy American and create manufacturing jobs, costing at least $700bn.
The others are building infrastructure and clean energy; advancing racial equity; and modernising the “caring” economy such as childcare and eldercare workers and domestic aides.
His campaign said he would follow Thursday’s speech with detailed policy proposals before the Democratic National Convention, which begins on August 17.
On Thursday, he’ll unveil plans for $400bn in additional federal government purchases of products made by American workers over his first term — based on a proposal that senator Elizabeth Warren, a former opponent, offered during the primaries — as well as $300bn for federally funded research & development (R&D).
In all, the Biden campaign estimates its proposals on manufacturing and buying American will create 5-million jobs. It did not offer a plan for how to pay for those measures.
With Americans enduring a recession because of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden is homing in on the economy, the policy area where a slim majority favour Trump’s approach. In a recent New York Times-Siena College poll of registered voters in six critical electoral states, 55% of voters preferred Trump on the economy and 39% preferred Biden.
Now Democratic nominee Biden has shifted to a general election footing. To win in November he needs to attract independents and Republicans weary of the Trump administration.
“I think there is going to be a broad-based view not just among Democrats but among independents and even Republicans that this plan and its substance [are] matched to the moment,” said Jake Sullivan, a top Biden policy aide.
“It is focused on trying to drive job creation fast so that we don’t have scarring, so that we don’t have people unemployed long term, so that we don’t have businesses dying.”
Aware that any positions Biden takes are parsed for outreach to the left, advisers argued he gets to truly progressive results, just at his own pace.
“Biden wants to get to the same place that many to his left want to get to but he firmly believes that it will take an incremental path to get there and that you can’t leapfrog the political reality that he has come to know in many decades in politics,” said Jared Bernstein, who is advising the campaign after serving as Biden’s chief economic adviser in the vicepresident’s office. “So his destination on many key issues, particularly on the economy and health care, is very similar to the further left but his path to get there is going to be more incremental,” Bernstein said.
The plan for the US government to buy Americanmade products would cost $100bn a year over four years and would purchase things such as clean vehicles and clean energy; materials to prepare for future public health crises such as ventilators and masks; materials for infrastructure projects such as steel, concrete and equipment; and telecommunications.
Warren had proposed $150bn a year for a decade to be spent on procurement of clean energy. Biden would also work with other countries to renegotiate the Government Procurement Agreement at the World Trade Organization to ensure the US and its allies can spend taxpayer dollars on growing investment in their own countries.
On trade, a senior Biden adviser, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said the candidate would also study existing tariffs as well as potential trade agreements he wants to negotiate. His advisers declined to comment directly on what would happen to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump abandoned in 2017, or existing tariffs under a Biden administration.
Trump has made buyAmerican policies and protecting the US steel and aluminium industry a centrepiece of his administration, but domestic manufacturers have complained his actions didn’t go far enough.
The $300bn R&D plan would encompass all 50 states and would increase direct federal programmes such as the National Institutes of Health, the department of energy and Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a health innovation entity that Biden had previously proposed. He would also direct money to support innovative small businesses and workforce development programmes.
Each idea may seem small but “the beauty of these plans is in the totality” of everything that Biden will be proposing on the economy in the coming weeks, Bernstein said. Biden’s advisers said the plan, once fully revealed, would be ambitious.
“This will be the largest mobilisation of public investments in procurement, infrastructure and R&D since World War 2 — and that’s just a part of the plan,” Sullivan said.
The senior Biden aide said the campaign was not ready to detail where money for these programmes would come from.
Recurring programmes would be financed with additional tax proposals but measures might need to be treated as stimulus to help the economy recover and would be dependent on economic conditions when Biden takes office, the official said.
Most of the more progressive ideas, such as the Green New Deal and other large jobs programmes that hearken back to Franklin Roosevelt’s policies in the Great Depression, would likely be left behind at the beginning in favour of a more step-by-step approach, says the Biden campaign. Steph Sterling, advocacy and policy vicepresident at the Roosevelt Institute, and others on the left say they would like to see Biden contemplate a jobs guarantee or other measures that would be more in the vein of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
A Biden adviser said such policies were not being considered seriously, though the candidate had proposed creating a US public health jobs corps employing about 100,000 people. Biden offered parameters in April, saying: “Look at the institutional changes we can make without us becoming a socialist country or any of that malarkey that we can make to provide the opportunities to change the institutional drawbacks.”
If Biden wins the presidency, he will be walking into an economy unlike the one he would have faced before the pandemic. “If Biden is president he will be up against this incredibly, incredibly weak economy,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, and a chief economist at the US labour department in the Obama administration.
“Regardless of what’s going on with Covid, whether there’ sa vaccine or widespread maskwearing or not, it will be a hugely depressed economy.”
Even with improvement in jobs and consumer spending that’s been better than analysts expected, the US economy remains in a deep hole, and most forecasters expect a gradual recovery.
Unemployment at 11.1% in June is higher than any time in the 80 years before the pandemic. Black and Latino unemployment rates are even higher. Since mid-June, economic gains slowed as virus cases accelerated in a variety of states, leading local officials to pause or reverse reopenings.
If legislators let extra unemployment benefits and small business aid expire in coming weeks, jobs and consumption could take another hit.
BIDEN FIRMLY BELIEVES YOU CAN’T LEAPFROG THE POLITICAL REALITY THAT HE HAS COME TO KNOW IN MANY DECADES IN POLITICS
IF JOE BIDEN IS PRESIDENT HE WILL BE UP AGAINST THIS INCREDIBLY, INCREDIBLY WEAK ECONOMY