Joe Biden has an activist agenda on tax, climate change and health
Americans are about to get their closest look at Joe Biden. Are they ready for a lurch to the left?
Americans will this week get their closest look at Joe Biden, the man who might be their president-elect in just a few months.
Biden’s nomination speech on Friday (AEDT) will be the most-watched moment of the election campaign so far and begins a much tougher phase for the former vice-president as he emerges squarely into the national spotlight for the first time.
The speech at the Democratic National Convention will officially launch Biden’s election campaign and comes at a time when he enjoys a solid but not unbeatable lead over Donald Trump in the polls as the US reels from the coronavirus pandemic, a collapsed economy and civil unrest.
Trump has already flagged his attack strategy against the 77-year-old Biden, portraying him as an over-the-hill, gaffe-prone puppet of the Democratic Party’s “radical left”.
“The most left-wing candidate in history,” says Trump. “Sleepy Joe Biden is just a Trojan horse for the radical left agenda. He will do whatever they want.”
So what sort of Democrat president does Biden promise to be? Is he, as Trump and Republicans claim, someone who has lurched to the left, giving lie to his claim to be a moderate? Or does Biden, as Democrats claim, offer the sort of mainstream centre-left policies espoused by other Democrat presidents such as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton?
Both claims have elements of truth. Although Biden remains a far cry from Trump’s portrayal of him as a radical socialist, his policy platform would still make him one of the most left-wing presidents to serve in the Oval Office.
“Whether it is healthcare, whether it’s the environment or climate change, whether it’s education, whether it’s in the economy, Joe Biden would be the most progressive president since FDR (Franklin D Roosevelt),” says self-professed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, a Biden rival for the Democrat nomination.
As Biden rolls out his policies ahead of the November 3 poll, he is trying to strike a precarious balance between appeasing the left and moderate wings of his party.
The Democrat left wing, with high-profile identities such as Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has backed Biden but in some cases without enthusiasm. Yet these identities, especially Sanders, have been central players in moving the party to the left since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016.
Collectively, they have proposed sweeping, uncosted policies such as Medicare for all, free college tuition and massive wealth taxes, which by the standards of American politics are revolutionary.
Ever since Biden won his party’s nomination, Sanders has led a largely successful push behind the scenes to persuade Biden to lean further left in his policy proposals although still far short of Sanders’s socialist dreams.
Biden’s dilemma here is palpable — if he doesn’t move to the left he risks not getting the vote of the “Bernie Bros” — the left-wing army of millennials who turned out in force to see Sanders, Warren and AOC during the Democrat primary race.
Yet if Biden turns too far to the left, he risks alienating mainstream Democrat and Republican voters and makes it easier for Trump to portray him as a prisoner of the Democrat left.
Activist president
Jason Miller, a senior adviser for the Trump campaign, argues that Biden has already moved too far to the left for mainstream voters.
“Biden has adopted the policies of the radical left, and that’s everything from taxes to the Green New Deal to killing millions of American energy jobs to open borders to being soft on crime,” Miller says. “I’ve never seen a Democratic nominee take a leftward lurch after they’ve secured the nomination, but I’m not going to talk him out of it.”
So what has Biden so far promised to deliver as president beyond his pledge to unite the country and “end the politics of division”?
In the big picture, Biden has moved away from the platform of incremental change, which he spoke of during the primary debates. Since the coronavirus pandemic and its related economic collapse, Biden now promises a more activist presidency, citing the need for bigger government and transformative change to tackle the country’s economic, racial and public health problems.
“We need some revolutionary institutional changes,” he has said, without detailing precisely what these changes would be.
He has laid out a Trump-like populist economic vision to reinvest in and revive local manufacturing with a “Buy American” campaign, not dissimilar to Trump’s “America First” domestic purchasing priorities.
Climate radical
But Biden would raise taxes and has so far proposed to offset his entire spending platform with nearly $US4 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, including the reversal of Trump’s 2017 corporate and personal tax cuts.
Biden’s agenda proposes tax and spending increases that amount to around 1.5 per cent of US GDP — more than double what Hillary Clinton called for in 2016, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Centre.
Biden casts himself as the president for the middle class. He has chided Trump for judging the economy’s performance on what Wall Street is doing, saying it is “way past time to put an end to shareholder capitalism”.
“Throughout this crisis, Donald Trump has almost single-handedly focused on the stockmarket, the Dow, the Nasdaq. Not you. Not your families,” he says.
Biden has also cast himself as a less business-friendly president than Trump, promising not only to raise corporate tax but also to restore the raft of environmental and other Obama-era regulations on corporate behaviour that Trump has progressively abolished.
Biden has refused to follow the left’s call for a nationwide ban on fracking, although he doesn’t support new fracking.
His economic proposals so far — he is still rolling them out — shows an old-fashioned tax-and-spend agenda aimed at reversing Trump’s legacy.
But it is on issues such as climate change, healthcare and education that Biden has moved further left than Obama ever did.
On climate change, Biden has not adopted the radical Green New Deal proposed by the party’s left but has embraced the most far-reaching climate change proposal yet put forward by a presidential nominee.
This includes a $US2 trillion plan over four years to put the US on an “irreversible path” to net zero emissions of carbon dioxide before 2050, including a carbon-free power sector by 2035. This includes plans to dramatically expand solar and wind energy. It is not surprising that these ambitious aims, which would trigger large job losses in fossil fuel industries, were drafted by Biden’s team in conjunction with Sanders.
“If I have the honour of being president we’re not just going to tinker around the edges,” says Biden. “When Donald Trump thinks about climate change the only words he can muster is ‘hoax’. When I think about climate change the only word I think of is ‘jobs’,” says Biden.
Trump describes Biden’s climate change plan as “the most extreme platform of any major nominee by far … I think it’s worse than actually Bernie’s platform”.
On the key election issue of healthcare, Biden has moved further left than Obama while still falling well short of the utopian Medicare-for-all schemes proposed during the primary campaign by Sanders and Warren.
Instead, Biden would expand the Obama administration’s signature Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, and would include an option to buy a public plan.
Trump, who ran in 2016 on a platform of abolishing Obamacare, says Biden’s plan is another step towards what he calls “socialised medicine” but in reality it is a medium-scale move to increase access to medical insurance and iron out the flaws of the original legislation.
On college education, Biden has also shifted ground and adopted a modified version of Sanders’s agenda by making public colleges tuition-free for students from low-income households, although this is similar to the plan proposed in 2016 by Clinton.
On race issues, Biden has promised “on day one” to address systematic racism but has given few details. Yet he has ignored calls from the extreme left of the party to “defund” the police in the wake of the George Floyd killing and is cautious about their calls for “reparation payments” to African-Americans to atone for slavery, agreeing only to study the issue.
On immigration, Biden says he will restore the Obama-era rights of the so-called “dreamers”, the children of undocumented immigrants, would end Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” and halt funding for the border wall. Biden claims he would “reform” the asylum system, but Trump says his immigration promises amount to an “open border policy”.
Yet Biden has also ignored calls from the left to restructure or abolish the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
On guns, Biden says he will seek to repeal liability protections for gun manufacturers and close background check loopholes, reforms Trump says will threaten the Second Amendment rights of Americans.
On the central issue of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden has promised to lift spending and exert greater federal control by appointing a testing tsar to oversee nationwide testing and supplies of PPE around the country.
On foreign policy issues, Biden promises a return to the Obama-era status quo rather than any fundamental shift in ideology.
He says he will end Trump’s isolationist policies and “restore American leadership on the world stage”. This includes the US rejoining a raft of multilateral agreements, including the Paris climate accord and possibly even the Iran nuclear deal. Biden promises a tougher position on China but hasn’t clarified what that means. He pledges to keep the US military fully engaged in the Indo-Pacific and says he will back NATO more strongly than Trump.
Misreading the mood?
All up, the evidence shows Biden on domestic policy has moved substantially — but not radically — to the left while still projecting the image of a moderate.
His supporters say this is merely a reflection of the leftward shift in the Democrat party and among Democrats and Democrat voters since Biden was vice-president in 2016.
About 47 per cent of Democrat voters currently describe themselves as liberal, compared with 51 per cent who say they are either moderate or conservative according to the Pew Research Centre.
This is similar to what it was in 2016 (45 per cent) but 10 points higher than when Obama was re-elected in 2012.
Biden has moved to the left to placate the Sanders wing of the Democrats but, in doing this, has he misread the mood of the electorate or is he reflecting what voters want? Trump and the Republicans will push this issue hard in the months ahead.
As president, Biden would hardly be a radical in the context of the times, but he would be much less of a moderate than he once was.
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.
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