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Most Democrats I know are positively dizzy about Joe Biden’s presidency. This man is like a political Yoda, who harnesses the power of the government to turn around the worst economic crisis since the depression within 100 days. Seva Employment Plan, Covida crisis management and moves to change the country towards a rewarding system not working wealth they involve changes that many had hoped to see for decades. The agenda includes higher labor standards and a fairer tax system. investments in health, child care and education, and more resistant supply chains. Even Republicans are on board with things like better roads and broadband.
Some of what Biden proposes, such as use union labor in federal contracts and defend U.S. commercial interests, it can be done with a feather blow from the White House. But multimillion-dollar stimulus programs will have to do it go through Congress. That depends on keeping the meager majority of Democrats in the House (the Senate is split between 50 and 50). Even if plans go through, implementation will be complex.
The practical details of many of the programs – how they would be developed, which agencies (state or federal) would be at the helm, and how they would be funded – are still scarce. But as more concrete plans emerge, they are likely to involve offsets between countless interest groups. That’s when the hard work really begins.
First, there are the usual considerations that need to be made between politics and politics, which are particularly important before the midterm elections, where Democrats risk losing their margin of support in the House.
Survey sample that both Republicans and Democrats want infrastructure investments in new bridges and broadband. The question is where the money flows first. A large percentage of construction unionists voted for Donald Trump in the last election. These voters, many of whom are in tipping states, want to spend quickly on shovel-ready projects that put a large number of workers to work quickly, which the president acknowledged. in his speech last week in Congress, calling his work plan a “blue plan” for “rebuilding better.”
Reconstruction of bridges and roads is certainly necessary and provides opportunities for cutting ribbons. But reinforcing broadband certainly in underserved communities, some of which are rural, but many of them in large urban areas, is even more important. However, these efforts are less visible. Initial investments would go to equipment rather than people, and the process of laying cables and fibers is moving slowly. The same goes for things like boosting the supply of semiconductors. Building a foundry takes years, not months.
This underscores the tension between short- and long-term priorities. U.S. capital markets, and venture capitalists in particular, want quick results and big outflows. But rebuilding the industrial base and moving to a green economy is a proposal of several decades. It may require a completely new long-term financing system, such as a public infrastructure bank, not to mention a commitment to industrial policy.
It will also require the support of allies. Reducing the distance between what will be sold at home and what is sold abroad can be the president’s biggest challenge. In his speech to Congress, Biden said he had held talks with world leaders who believe the United States “has returned” but want to know “for how long?” It is understandable that Europeans want to be able to count on American political stability before committing to liberal democratic alliances around trade, taxes, and technology, especially because of the importance of China-EU trade ties.
Europe and America need each other and should work together to develop a digital alliance that provides a liberal-democratic alternative to Beijing-style state-based surveillance capitalism, or to the unrestricted monopolies of the big technologies represented by Silicon Valley groups. But even if Europe realizes that its long-term interests are better protected by strengthening ties with Washington rather than Beijing, Europeans and Americans have different business stakeholders pushing for priority and protection.
Witness, for example, Apple and Google fighting Bayer, Siemens and BASF over patent rules and who gets what part of the value of the 21st century digital economy. Or European concerns about US data regulation. Germany will be the zero point in all of this, as the US pushes the country to choose between various 5G systems and chips. In this battle, German exporters, who sell to both the United States and China, have a lot to lose. As a lawyer who represented powerful American labor interests recently told me, “Germany is trying to have it both ways with China, and they can’t.”
Nor can Biden be a pro-Labor president and one who seems easy on Big Tech. Silicon Valley is a huge lobby presence in Washington, with politicians on both sides in its pocket. He Uberization of more types of work, the failure of union activists get organized into tech companies like Amazon and argue that platform monopolies shouldn’t be broken because they need to stay big to defend the national economic interests of the United States they all threaten Biden’s view of “working not wealth”. The battle of this political Yoda has just begun.
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