Biden: Obama 2.0

On Thursday, with a speed well deserved by his, albeit fragile, Senate majority, President Joe Biden will sign a stimulus bill with a record total of U.S.$1.9 trillion for COVID relief, just in time for the national speech he will make in the Oval Office.* A speed, but also an ambition, that sharply contrasts with the pettiness of the Republicans when they still had the Senate majority, and represents a strong shift away from the massively pro-rich tax decreases voted for during the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency.

It is a promising plan in that it does not just provide relief for the immediate crisis. To a greater extent, it represents an economic policy with reformist measures that could be made sustainable, especially in the struggle against poverty and inequality. That is what makes it interesting. If humanity reaches an end to COVID-19, this plan is certainly not a cure-all, but it has the merit of duly noting challenges, modestly, in the limits of American political culture and its capitalist creed.

We can at least take for granted that, for the Democrats, it will be an electoral platform that they will defend as early as next year at the midterm elections in hopes of conserving their double majority in Congress. A complicated undertaking in the context of the disconnect at the heart of the Democratic Party between its centrists and the left-leaning, as well as the hyperpolarization between parties that is paralyzing American democracy. However, according to the polls, the majority of Americans approve of Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” — it is true that the opposite would be surprising, given the godsend he is sending down to Earth — while not one of the Republican elected officials voted in its favor, all of them tricked by Donald Trump and his populist hoax.

The plan will renew, by improvements, already existing measures from last spring: direct payments of $1,400, extensions of additional unemployment benefits, housing aid, help to small businesses and schools, support for local governments in fighting the virus. …

It is the most progressive plan in two respects. First, in so much as it is increasing, for at least two years, eligibility for Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), which decreases the astronomical costs of private medical insurance by the use of subsidies. Trump, in the end, never succeeded in demolishing Obamacare. Sweet revenge. Millions of people, having lost their jobs to the crisis, have caused the number of Americans without coverage to swell. Socially and electorally speaking, it makes even more sense that Biden is improving access to Obamacare. And again, the Republicans have been tricked: the anti-intervention discourse regarding health insurance that they have been hammering for 10 years is much less significant than it used to be.

The plan is progressive as well because it opens the door to the creation of a program for a universal family allowance of up to $300 per child per month. This isn’t too early at all: The same program has existed in Canada since … 1945. Federal child welfare service also exists in the U.S. as a tax credit, but it is not very useful to the most impoverished. It goes without saying that establishing some form of guaranteed family income is a significantly effective instrument against poverty, according to think tanks like the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Given that the U.S. is finally envisioning this, it is not far from a revolution.

This is all a shift to the left for Biden, who in the 1990s, as a senator, blindly approved shady cuts to social aid programs under Bill Clinton. What pie would he have his finger in if Trump hadn’t existed?

Here he is now launched into a Keynesian operation that the country has not seen since the 1960s, a clean break with the slow, applied approach of Barack Obama when faced with the Great Recession. Many are criticizing Biden. For spending money all over the place. For threatening the economy with overload and inflation, while the economy, they say, will soon resuscitate itself thanks to the vaccines. For whom and at what rate? One thing is for sure and it’s that the 10 million people who still haven’t found work, many of whom are women, certainly do not work in cutting-edge sectors. How many others are still working, but are enduring pain and misery? Is he risking economic collapse? Yes. But Biden did well in deciding that the risk was worth it.

Editor’s Note: The stimulus plan was signed Thursday, March 11, 2021.