Wonks Progress Administration
On the night of March 10, Joe Biden’s campaign staff gathered in the foyer of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center to celebrate the three primary victories that had all but confirmed their boss would be the Democratic presidential nominee. As they danced awkwardly to the Whitney Houston remix that blared through the speakers, down the street at Biden HQ, a quartet of television screens was broadcasting grim news about the staggering rate of COVID-19 infections and coming death toll. The next day, the World Health Organization would declare the coronavirus a pandemic. Until that point, Biden’s campaign message had focused on big-picture themes: electability, experience, and his pledge to restore America’s “soul.” But it was now clear that the nation’s soul might not be the first thing that needed saving in a Biden presidency.
The day he takes office, President Biden will inherit an economy that’s been battered by a public health crisis and further damaged by his predecessor’s fecklessness. To turn things around, he’s proposed the Build Back Better plan, a four-pillar federal stimulus measure. With a combination of public spending and tax credits, it is in many ways a redo of the 2009 recovery package he and President Barack Obama rolled out when they took office in the midst of another historic recession. But Biden’s $7.3 trillion plan has far more ambitious goals than Obama’s $787 billion bill: It includes $2 trillion to boost clean energy and infrastructure, $300 billion to spur research and development on technologies such as electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, $400 billion aimed at resuscitating American manufacturing, and a $775 billion proposal to provide affordable care to children, people with disabilities, and the elderly. It also aims to address the racial inequities that the coronavirus crisis laid bare by boosting existing programs that aid Black, Latino, and Indigenous Americans.
Every Biden aide I spoke with before the election went out of their way to stress that the ideas in Build Back Better are all his, the product of a half-century in headline summed it up: “Biden’s Brain Trust on the Economy: Liberal and Sworn to Silence.”
