Joe Biden swerves to left on his way to US election

Joe Biden will go into this year’s US presidential election with the most left-wing Democratic agenda in a generation.

Democratic presidential candidate and former vice-president Joe Biden. Picture: AP

Joe Biden will go into this year’s US presidential election with the most left-wing Democratic agenda in a generation, as his platform is shaped by economic crisis and the need to enthuse younger voters.

A year ago the former vice-president told wealthy donors that he would not “demonise anybody who’s made money” and that “nothing would fundamentally change” for them if he ­became president.

Yet last week, determined to win over younger left-wingers who previously favoured Bernie Sanders, Mr Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said his goal was “not just to rebuild the economy but to transform it”.

If Mr Biden defeats Donald Trump in November that transformation would include trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus, vast investment in infrastructure and green projects, new laws protecting workers’ rights, and expanded healthcare and childcare.

The Democratic Party’s quadrennial convention is likely to thrash out the details in August but any stimulus proposed by a Biden presidency would far outstrip the $US800bn injected into the economy in 2009, which ­Barack Obama delegated Mr Biden to oversee.

Faiz Shakir, Senator Sanders’ former campaign manager, said Mr Biden had been “amenable and open” to bringing the left on board. “Because he hasn’t fleshed (policies) out as deeply as some other candidates over the course of the primary, that’s an opportunity,” he told Vox website.

It is far from only the left of the party urging structural change though. Mark Warner, a centrist senator from Virginia, said moderates had begun to think “exponentially bigger” about overhauling the economy. Mr Warner, a former venture capitalist whose estimated net worth of about $US90m makes him the richest Democrat in congress, told The New York Times: “There is a recognition that (the pandemic) is more transformative than 2008, more transformative than 9/11, more transformative than the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

Michael Bennet, a moderate senator from Colorado who ran a lacklustre presidential campaign, agreed the prospects for wealth redistribution were greater than after the 2008 financial crash. “I think there was not the same recognition 10 years ago that there is today that we’ve had 50 years of an economy that only works for people at the very top,” he said.

A clear direction of travel is shown by six policy taskforces that Mr Biden has unveiled. Originally conceived as a package of concessions to secure Senator Sanders’ support, the party’s progressive wing has been pleasantly surprised by the people enlisted to them.

Most notably, Alexandria ­Ocasio-Cortez, 30, a rising star left-winger from New York, will co-chair the climate change taskforce with former secretary of state John Kerry, 76. Ms Ocasio-­Cortez sponsored an attempt to pass a “green new deal” through the House of Representatives last year. It called for a move to solely renewable energy sources, government investment in electric cars and high-speed rail, and upgrading all buildings to be as energy-efficient as possible.

Even Biden allies appointed to the taskforces are encouraging for the Democratic left. For the economic taskforce Mr Biden selected Jared Bernstein, his economic adviser when he was vice-president. Mr Bernstein was seen as a progressive counterweight to the more Wall Street-friendly voices in the Obama White House. He has praised Britain’s furlough scheme.

The Times