President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan is no joke.
The massive, more than $ 2 trillion proposal he will unveil on Wednesday covers an expansive and vital political area, which became a Washington joke in the Trump administration and resulted in painful dashed hopes for past presidents.
For Biden, infrastructure is about much more than fixing America’s creaky, crumbling roads and bridges, airports and railroads, which are often unfavorably compared to gleaming 21st-century projects in developing countries like China. The show is the latest massively ambitious sign that he feels that fate, political circumstances, and shifts in public opinion offer him a sudden, but fleeting opening to achieve his long-term political goal of improving the lives of American workers.
While Biden’s $ 1.9 trillion covid-19 relief plan, the infrastructure effort and an upcoming jobs bill seemingly address specific policy areas, they have a broader common purpose. It forms the basis of the president’s effort to engineer a generational shakeup of the American economy. The covid bailout plan, for example, which Congress passed this month was hailed by progressives like Vermont’s independent senator Bernie Sanders and independent analysts as the most significant effort to lift millions of Americans out of poverty in decades.
USA: analyze another employment and infrastructure package 0:52Biden’s vision now is not just for new roads, broadband, and ports. It sees unions revived, equally shared GDP growth, easier access to healthcare, equal pay for women, clean energy, and better childcare for workers.
“My economic plan has to do with employment, dignity, respect and community. Together we can, and will, rebuild our economy, ”Biden said in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, where he explained his core philosophy.
Biden’s infrastructure plan
The ambition of the infrastructure and employment plans leaves no room for doubt about their desire to transform into an economy that has further enriched the wealthiest in the past 40 years, but left the working class trampled.
The first includes investments in manufacturing, research and development, climate, and transportation infrastructure. The second is aimed at childcare, paid family leave, health care and education – crucial considerations for American workers, a senior White House official told Citizen Free Press.
Even the place of Biden’s speech Thursday, Pittsburgh, sends a message. Steel CityThe place where Biden launched his 2020 White House bid is exactly the kind of blue-collar union fiefdom where the president feels right at home. But it is also an example of a city that is already on the way to achieving what the infrastructure plan seeks to do for the rest of the United States. It has evolved from a post-industrial apocalypse to a hub of modern industries, medical technology companies, world-leading educational institutions, and innovation that is now a showcase for economic regeneration.
The president also has a sentimental attachment to the city.
“He’s home,” the Pennsylvania native told a reporter after running through the city’s Labor Day parade in 2015, in one of his first public appearances after the death of his beloved son Beau from cancer.
I’m hot. I’m angry, I’m angry, ”Biden told a crowd and vowed to fight for workers who are denied a share of the gains made from increased productivity.
Something is wrong, friends […] a level playing field doesn’t exist, ”he roared in what seemed like the launch of a presidential campaign that never materialized, only for Biden to end up in the White House five years later.
Maximum employment and inflation of 2%, Fed targets 0:49
Shifting political trends give Biden hope
In a mainstream political environment, Biden’s infrastructure plan would likely be dead by the time it reached Congress. While he will seek Republican participation in the push, his desire to fund some of it through increased corporate taxes and its scale will almost certainly drive away Republicans who have not accepted his leadership’s strategy of denying the new president big money. triumphs.
But in the wake of the pandemic, and thanks to shifting political arenas before it hit, Biden’s plan may have a chance, though it will face the limitations of a 50-50 Senate and could test Democratic unity to the point of a break as the president calls for approval of the bill this summer.
Biden clearly established his authority in Washington and bolstered approval with his Covid-19 bailout package, which included hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits for workers and the least well-off Americans.
No Republicans voted in favor, but the bailout bill was widely popular, including among some Republican voters, showing that in the worst internal crisis since World War II there is a growing desire for the government to address the country’s problems. .
How Trump Helped Biden
Many Democrats might have preferred that Biden chose other issues for his next big political tactic, such as gun control, climate change, abolishing Senate filibuster, or joining the battle for a radical electoral reform plan to face the suppression of Republican ballots.
But the infrastructure bill was exactly the kind of measure with the potential to be widely popular that the president seemed to be referring to when he spoke about the importance of political synchronization last week.
“Successful presidents better than me have been successful in large part because they know how to time what they are doing,” Biden told a White House news conference.
If Biden had waited until later for an effort to pass the “People’s Bill” until after other priority liberal issues, likely to spark an irreversible political schism on Capitol Hill, infrastructure reform would have had no chance.
The president’s push for his $ 2.25 trillion plan may also benefit from indirect help from an unlikely source: former President Donald Trump.
Stimulus package payments come to households 1:36It not only benefits compared to the incompetence of the former president that left the federal government disastrously incapable of dealing with the waves of coronavirus that swept across the country and wrecked the economy. The former president changed the Republican Party itself in ways that Biden could exploit.
Trump’s forays into white working-class Americans and success in fracturing the conservative creed of low deficits helped silence the classic Republican line of attack on high-spending Democrats and win him the support of more outspoken conservative voters. the Government solve your problems.
The United States may have reached an unusual moment, experienced under President Franklin Roosevelt, in the 1930s, and Lyndon Johnson, in the 1960s, when there is a brief political window for overwhelming government intervention to help the poorest Americans. At no time since the 1980s has the unleashed capitalism represented by President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher seemed so threatened.
The “era of big government is over” centrist policy of former President Bill Clinton, which was designed to polish the soft edges of Reaganism, also seems outdated. And Biden’s advisers are now openly talking about how the Obama administration in which he served as vice president was not big enough after the Great Recession and was initially wrong to pander to Republicans, who really wanted to hamper the presidency in a quest for months of bipartisan purchase.
And like Trump, Biden can speak the language of Americans who believe that the riches of the American economy have been unfairly hijacked by wealthy Wall Street barons, who sent their jobs to low-wage economies abroad.
The president’s anthems to the working class, reverence for his Scranton, Pennsylvania birthplace, and tales of his working-class struggles may sound corny. But they are authentic because he has been at it his entire political life.
Biden, like Trump, has tapped into the anti-globalization and “fair trade” sentiment popular among the former president’s main supporters.
Even its foreign policy is geared towards promoting the interests of the American working class in the first place. While Biden rejects Trump’s disdain for allies and appeasement of tyrants, his core tenet of downsizing and strength-building at home bears conceptual similarities to Trump.
“Biden is not doing a ‘America First’ policy but his policy is. That makes a lot of sense. That’s why he was elected, ”said Nicholas Dungan, non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
In the Trump White House, officials had to repeatedly reschedule “Infrastructure Week,” a scripted series of events designed to show that a disruptive and rowdy president could behave normally and get things done. His plans always clashed with Trump’s volcanic temper and torrent of scandals.
Yet Biden demonstrated in his press conference that he has a strong theory for why he was chosen: to fix the problems that hold back working and middle-class Americans.
While huge political obstacles stand in his way, the centrality of the plan he unveils Wednesday to his personal and political philosophy will ensure that his commitment to the issue lasts longer than Trump’s.