President Joe Biden’s financial support packages are almost unparalleled in US history. There is a new New Deal on the stairs, and it is the Big Deal, writes Morten Strand.
WHERE JUMPS: The Easter bunny? Yes, to the left. Here with the presidential couple, Jill and Joe Biden. Photo: AFP / NTB view more
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Published
Thursday 08 April 2021 – 16:04
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Donald who? Well, he’s taken the madhouse from the White House to Florida, and is only in the news when news of new defeats in lawsuits about economic crime, and a little about the storming of Congress. Otherwise, Donald Trump is wiping away from the actual political processes in the United States. President Joe Biden even makes an elegant rhetorical point of it, consistently referring to Trump only as “the other guy”. There are no vicious, distorted characteristics like “Sleepy Joe” or “Crooked Hillary”. Just a slightly indifferent shrug, like a little dust on the lapel, “the other guy.” Donald who?
EASTER SPEECH: US President Joe Biden gave an Easter speech on April 5, 2021, and a certain Easter bunny would also be on stage. Video: AP. view more
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Because it’s Joe Biden who is boss now. Absolutely boss, at least much more than most had imagined. He runs an administration that has put the vaccine work in order, and 100 million Americans were vaccinated after just two months as president. Biden promised to vaccinate 100 million after 100 days as president, so the vaccination is almost twice as fast as he promised. Three out of four Americans are happy with how Biden copes with the pandemic. These are compelling figures in a country that is still deeply divided after the ravages of President Trump.
Vaccination hangs closely with the economy, and in March alone, nearly one million Americans returned to work. Unemployment is now at six percent, while it peaked at more than 14 percent during the pandemic, when Trump’s – the other guy’s lies and indifference caused the pandemic to explode.
TO READ: Joe Biden held his first official press conference as President of the United States. Video: AP. view more
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Central in Bidens Economic recovery plan is the state, or federal government. He has received through a financial aid package of 1.9 trillion dollars, which goes to most people, so that the economy does not collapse, and consumers help to keep the economy going. It is a different device than the one President Barack Obama chose when the meltdown of the economy hit the United States and much of the rest of the world in 2008. Obama saved the banks and big companies from bankruptcy, and that was important enough, while most people mostly sailed its own sea.
Different now, for Biden’s plan is not just about the help package for most people. It is about what is more and more like a Keynesian approach to stimulating the economy, namely that the state pumps money into an economy in crisis, as it did during the Great Depression in the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched its New Deal policy.
For the other Biden’s crisis package is about pumping another two billion dollars into the economy to modernize an often dilapidated infrastructure. The once impressive Brooklyn Bridge in New York still has bridge parties reminiscent of the scenes in Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story from 1957. But not only the Brooklyn Bridge needs modernization, also an upgraded internet and not least the transition to a greener economy. must be financed with this package. Finally, a final billiard will be used for children and health in a society where the pandemic has contributed to galloping poverty in a socially already shaky society.
It looks like whether it is the cautious American Democrat Joe Biden who will breathe life into a modern political project for the political left. The pandemic seems to be created for left-wing politics. And who would have imagined Biden (78) as an army commander for a global, modern left?
And thus we are – yes, a little premature – already in the debate about what kind of president Joe Biden will be. What will he be remembered as? He is almost unthinkable without “the other guy”. Both as a contrast to Trump, and because he can largely thank Trump’s failure in the face of the pandemic for his election.
But Biden is similar neither on his great role model John F. Kennedy, nor Barack Obama, whom he served as vice president for eight years. As presidents, they were the youngest and most eloquent and mobilizing of their generation. And they share the fate that they talked more than they acted. Biden’s card, however, makes him more of a man of action.
That’s what Biden looks like more on Kennedy’s Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, a moderate Navy Democrat who took over when the president was fired, and who carried out many of Kennedy’s dreams and plans. Like Biden, he now had tens of years behind him in Congress, and therefore an ability to implement like few others. Progressive social policy and progressive civil rights legislation were Johnson’s major victories in the 1960s. And a new – progressive – New Deal is set to be what Biden will be remembered for. It will all be financed by higher corporation tax and more tax for the very richest. We’re miles from “the other guy.”
