The Daily - ‘We Have to Prove Democracy Still Works’

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Biden set out an expansive vision for the role of American government. He spent much of the address detailing his proposals for investing in the nation’s economic future — spending that would total $4 trillion. We analyze the president’s address and his plans for remaking the American economy. Guest: Jim Tankersley, a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: President Biden laid out an ambitious agenda on Wednesday night to rewrite the American social contract. Invoking the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Biden unveiled a $1.8 trillion social spending plan to accompany previous proposals.Read highlights from the president’s first address to Congress here. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. During his first address to Congress, President Biden makes the case for vastly expanding the role of government and taxing the country's wealthiest to pay for it. We watched with our colleague, White House reporter Jim Tankersley. It's Thursday, April 29th.

So Jim, I want to start this conversation by getting something very important out of the way immediately. start this conversation by getting something very important out of the way immediately. Was this technically a State of the Union address, or was this not a State of the Union address? And can we just call it the State of the Union, even if it's not? No, I believe we are prohibited by the Constitution from calling it a State of the Union. This was an address to a joint session of Congress, but not an official State of the Union, as is typically the case in a president's first year in office. So the first one, not State of the Union, instead just big important speech to Congress. Yeah. Joe Biden's been president for almost 100 days, but what he's doing here is less of a report to the country on how the country is doing and more of a report to the country on how things are going in that very young administration

of his. Got it. So let's talk about what this speech looked like and felt like in the room. I know neither of us were there, but it feels like these speeches are always defined by the moment in which they are delivered. And this one had the context of the pandemic. It feels like these speeches are always defined by the moment in which they are delivered. And this one had the context of the pandemic. This was the first joint address from the president to Congress since the pandemic really began to radically alter all of our lives in the U.S. So how present did that all feel?

It was kind of weird. Did that all feel? It was kind of weird. You know, the seats were not full. Because of COVID restrictions, there were only 200 people instead of the normal 1,600 for a speech like this. They were all spaced out at distance, and there weren't as many cabinet members, there weren't as many Supreme Court justices.

Madam Speaker, the President of the United States. justices. Madam Speaker, the President of the United States. A Congress that is normally sort of jockeying for position to, you know, greet the President as he walks down the aisle, you know, looked sparse, like, you know, the crowd at the NBA finals bubble last year when there really were very few people around. And it made for some weird moments, you know, Biden was walking down and he's sort of fist-bumping people, not shaking hands like politicians expect. Certainly like I would think that Joe Biden had not imagined in his mind all those years he's been envisioning himself president.

Right. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And then punctuating all that, there was certainly not a normal backdrop for him as he took the lectern, flanked for the first time ever by two women. Right, which he went out of his way to memorialize. He did.

Anyway, thank you all. Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President. He seemed really fired up by that particular line that kicked off the speech. No president has ever said those words from this podium. No president has ever said those words. And it's about time. Then he settles into the actual thing that presidents always do at the start of a speech to Congress, which is to tell them how things are going in the country, really. And usually that's very positive. Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation, America is on the move again. And in sort of quick and staccato phrases that will sort of mark this speech throughout the evening, he says, Crisis to opportunity, setbacks in the strength.

Crisis to opportunity, setbacks into strength. We all know life can knock us down. But in America, we never, ever, ever stay down. The president tried to do a delicate two-step, which is to both acknowledge the gravity of the moment that America is still in. I mean, there's still a deadly pandemic raging around us. There's still more work to do to beat this virus. We can't let our guard down.

While also trying to claim credit for putting the worst of that pandemic, hopefully, behind us. Our progress these past 100 days against one of the worst pandemics in history has been one of the greatest logistical achievements, logistical achievements this country's ever seen. And Jim, while the president touched on a variety of items in this speech, foreign and domestic, restrictions on guns that he would like to get passed, immigration reform he

would like to get done, his determination to stand up to authoritarian regimes overseas. It very much felt like the real focus of this address. And what I want to talk to you about was President Biden's vision for the role of American government. And it's a very expansive vision. And that's what he really seemed to be up to in this speech. Yes, absolutely. This was an economic policy speech, but more than a policy speech, it was selling America on the idea that, hey, the government is back. Big government spending initiatives are back. And bigger government, even than we have now,

is on the way. And it's going to be really great for you personally. And he does this sort of looking backwards and forwards. Throughout our history, if you think about it, public investment in infrastructure has literally transformed America. He ticks through the great achievements of the federal government in American history. The Transcontinental Railroad, the interstate highways, united two oceans, and brought a totally new age of progress to the United States of America. Whether it's World War II or railroads or, you know, the space race. These are investments we made together as one country, and investments that only the

government was in a position to make. Time and again, they propel us into the future. That's why I propose the American Jobs Plan, a once-in-a-generation investment in America itself. And then he goes on to spend the bulk of the speech, really, laying out his vision for America's economic future, which is really two proposals that total $4 trillion in the cost of taxpayers and form the Biden economic agenda. Right. And Jim, you have talked to us on the show about the first part of that plan, the American jobs plan, this very progressive version of what we might think of as traditional infrastructure, rebuilding bridges, roads, pipes,

railroads, housing, in a way that seeks, in Biden's words, to fight climate change and achieve racial justice. So how does he talk about this not-yet-past component of his agenda? I was really struck, actually, by his focus in talking about that part of the agenda and his just repeated use of the word jobs. This is the largest jobs plan since World War II. Jobs, jobs, jobs. Creates jobs to upgrade our transportation infrastructure. Jobs, modernizing our roads, bridges, highways, jobs building ports. He is talking about every single piece of that physical infrastructure agenda as a job creator, the biggest job creator since World War II. For too long, we've failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis. Jobs.

And not just any jobs. Blue-collar jobs. So many of you, so many of the folks I grew up with, feel left behind, forgotten, in an economy that's so rapidly changing. It's frightening. And he is really trying to speak to voters without college degrees who've been left behind by the economy, who he says he can create better paying good jobs for. The American jobs plan is a blue collar blueprint to build America. That's what it is. Right. Windmills should be built in Pittsburgh, not Beijing. There is simply no reason why the blades for wind turbines can't be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing. No reason. Right. You know, this is Biden trying to take that progressive vision of a low carbon future, but say it in sort of, you know, Joe from Scranton terms.

And all the investments in the American job plan will be guided by one principle, of the American job plan will be guided by one principle, by American, by American. Right. His message being, especially to Republicans, how could you not support a jobs plan? I mean, Republicans might look at this plan and say, actually, we think it's a climate plan and a social justice plan. But what Biden is saying is, no, I'm telling you that it's a jobs plan and asking how you could possibly not support it. Right. That's exactly what he's doing. And yes, Republicans are protesting that there are studies out there showing that it won't create many jobs or any at all. But Biden is just blowing right past all that criticism and saying millions of jobs, good paying jobs.

That's what this proposal is all about. And Congress needs to pass it now. And so what's the truth? Will this bill create jobs? good paying jobs. That's what this proposal is all about. And Congress needs to pass it now. And so what's the truth? Will this bill create jobs? It really depends on which study you look at. There are some studies that say it'll create millions of jobs. There's one pretty notable one that says it won't. And so the experts disagree. Got it. And then Biden turns to the second part of this grand infrastructure spending plan, which we had not really gotten much of a glimpse of until this speech. To win that competition for the future, in my view, we also need to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our families and our children. That's why I've introduced the American Families Plan tonight.

So this is what the White House calls the American Families Plan, which is a different sort of infrastructure. It's human infrastructure, infrastructure about people. And it breaks down into several categories. It's $1.8 trillion split between spending and tax incentives. First is access to good education. So there's an education component, which includes free universal preschool for three and four-year-olds across the country,

but also two years of free community college for anybody. American Families Plan will provide access to quality, affordable child care. It includes help for child care, so to reduce the cost of child care, particularly for low-income workers, but also paid family and medical leave so that workers who get sick or need to take care of a loved one who's sick can do so but not lose their jobs or their income, and that's paid by the government. In March, we expanded tax credit for every child in a family. credit for every child in a family. And then it extends a bunch of tax credits that are meant to fight poverty, including an expansion of the child tax credit that the White House estimates will cut the child poverty rate in half. We can afford it. And as he has often done in selling his physical infrastructure plan, Biden cast this family's plan in competitiveness terms. When this nation made 12 years of public education universal in the last century, it made us the best educated, best prepared nation in the world.

It's, I believe, the overwhelming reason that propelled us to where we got in the 21st, in the 20th century. But the world's caught up or catching up. They're not waiting. Basically saying, look, if we don't invest in our families, our children, our workers, just like we invest in our roads, bridges, pipes, charging stations, whatever,

we're not going to keep up with China and our other big competitors on a global scale right now to win the economic future of the world. I wonder if you can put the scale of all this, the education spending, the child care spending, the paid leave spending, the child tax credit spending into context for us. I think the best context to put it in is that it's unprecedented at this moment in the nation's economy for a president to do this. We do not have the same economy that we had when we did the space race or when we built the railroads or won World War II. We have an economy that depends to a much larger degree on women working, on workers of color, and in particular on service workers who need knowledge and skills to do their jobs better. This is a far bigger spending agenda than Barack Obama ever proposed, certainly much bigger than

the Democratic president beforehand, Bill Clinton, proposed. And so what you have is, for the first time, the meeting of the moment of what Democrats think is a renewed interest in big government with the heightened struggles of a 21st century economy. We'll be right back. So, how does President Biden in his speech talk about financing all of this? He does not shy from that either. How do we pay for my jobs and family plan? I made it clear we can do it without increasing the deficits. There's been a long time in America where this idea was you couldn't really talk about increasing taxes. It would be political suicide. But he goes right at it. I will not impose any tax increase on people making less

than $400,000. But it's time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans to just begin to pay their fair share. And basically says we're going to raise taxes on very high earners, people making more than $400,000 a year, which is just a small sliver at the top of Americans by income earning and corporations. And we're going to get $4 trillion out of those two places. A lot of companies also evade taxes through tax havens in Switzerland and Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. And they benefit from tax loopholes and deductions for offshoring jobs and shifting profits overseas. And then he ticked through a whole list of both tax increases and increased

enforcement from the IRS. And the IRS is going to crack down on millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes. It's estimated to be billions of dollars. To force people who had been cheating on their taxes to stop. I believe what I propose is fair, fiscally responsible. You know, Republicans are very much opposed to these tax increases and to the scope of the spending he wants to do. They're arguing that it's going to be wasteful, that it's not going to solve the problems that he says, that the government is not well positioned to tackle these issues, and that the tax increases are going to hurt the economy. But Biden goes right at that argument in the speech, basically saying, trickle down. Trickle down economics has never worked.

It's time to grow the economy from the bottom in the middle out. Hey, the dominant Republican philosophy for more than a generation now, trickle down economics, cutting taxes at the top and everybody will benefit, has not worked. The pandemic has only made things worse. 20 million Americans lost their job in the pandemic, working in middle class Americans. At the same time, roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion in the same exact period. What he is saying is we have huge, long-running problems in our economy. The pandemic showed us those problems.

They showed us the people who were hit unequally. You know, some people at the top amassed huge amounts of wealth while everybody else feared for job loss. And it's government's job now to start solving those problems or helping to solve those problems, not just in a short-term way, but in a long-term, durable way. And someone needs to pay for that, and that someone is the people who are the big successes in the economy can afford to supply the money to help everybody else have a shot at success too. Jim, it was interesting that Biden didn't really talk about inequality. He didn't use that word.

He didn't render that judgment, say that what's wrong in the United States is inequality. But the policies he's talking about are very clearly intended to fix inequality in the system. Yeah, he does more of a show don't tell on that. He talks about the 600 plus very wealthy people who amassed huge wealth during the crisis. And then he talks about the people who lost their jobs. He talks about all of these sort of like inequalities, you might say, without really saying the word. And it's a way to sort of try to connect with people where they are in their more personal terms as opposed to theoretical or even just broad macroeconomic terms. But I wonder if this is also a way to appeal to Republicans who have not been very supportive of Biden's spending plans. I don't think there's very much that the president did in the speech to try to appeal to Republicans in Congress, but I do think he's trying to appeal to Republicans across the country. He's trying to speak in the speech to try to appeal to Republicans in Congress. But I do think he's trying to appeal to

Republicans across the country. He's trying to speak in the language of blue collar, often conservative America, even if he doesn't expect that that's going to translate into any votes from Republicans in the Senate or in the House. But by trying to appeal to Republican voters, he's giving some cover to moderate Democratic senators to join him. If you're Joe Manchin, if you're Mark Kelly of Arizona or Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and you need some Republicans to reelect you, here's Joe Biden speaking to those voters for you and giving you some permission to go along with him. So in trying to appeal to Republican voters, he's actually just trying to keep the 50 Democrats in the Senate, the Democratic caucus, together and supporting both of these major infrastructure bills.

Yes. What Biden needs for any bill of this type to pass, including one that eventually might get bipartisan support, is for all Democrats to hang together. bipartisan support, is for all Democrats to hang together. And that, I think, was a big part of the mission of the speech here, was to hold his very, very narrow margins in the House and the Senate kind of in line while he seeks to push the agenda through. Jim, watching Biden outline these proposals and how to pay for them, I kept thinking back to the election and to this sense that in choosing Biden, the country chose what Biden himself advertised as the return to normalcy in the conduct and in the disposition of the president. And as a kind of safe ideological choice, Biden sold himself as a moderate Democrat with pretty middle-of-the-road views. But as we have seen at a few key junctures with Biden since the election, it feels like this speech marked the emergence of a distinctly progressive president, a president that is seeking to really expand the role of government as a leveler of the field, as an equalizer, as a fixer

of social wrongs. And that's not exactly who we necessarily thought we were going to be getting. Well, here's the sort of wild thing. Almost every policy proposal on the economy that Joe Biden laid out in the speech, he campaigned on. This is not new. Some of it dates back to 2019. Some of this stuff he was talking about when nobody really gave him much of a shot to be the Democratic nominee, it got kind of buried because so many of his rivals, almost all of them really, were much more progressive than he was. They were pushing even bigger tax increases, even bigger spending increases. In that field, Joe Biden really was moderate. In the context of American history, Joe Biden is pushing a very progressive agenda,

but it's all on brand for him because he's been talking about it all along. And the way he talks about it is different than the way that other politicians talk about it who are progressive. And so I think all that has come together. So both things are true. It is both true that this is seems to a lot of people and particularly to Republicans like, whoa, not the Joe Biden we thought we were getting. We thought he'd govern in a different way. But for anybody who was reading the details of his plans, he's very consistent. Are you telling me I wasn't reading the plans? I'm not telling you that. I would never say that. I'm sure you read deeply into all of the 800 different policy proposals that he had on the campaign, which is the actual number. In conclusion, as we gather here tonight, the image of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol, desecrating our democracy, remained vivid in all our minds. Lives were put at risk, many of your lives. Lives were lost. Extraordinary courage

was summoned. The insurrection was an existential crisis, a test of whether our democracy could survive, and it did. So Jim, at the end of this speech, the president tried to do something interesting. He touches on the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, something he did not do a lot in this speech, even though he's in the building where it happened, and he's speaking to several lawmakers who are being held responsible for stoking it. And he says...

They look at the images of the mob that assaulted the Capitol as proof that the sun is setting on American democracy. That you could see that event as a sign of the kind of decline of our democracy, the ultimate sign of its dysfunction. But then he seems to say... In our first 100 days together, we've acted to restore people's faith in democracy to deliver.

We're vaccinating the nation. We're creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. We're delivering real results to people. They can see it, feel it in their own lives. His first hundred days show otherwise, that they are a rebuke to the idea that the democracy is in trouble. What did you make of that?

Yeah, he's saying government is back, that it's survived the test of the January 6th attacks, that it has survived the test of a deadly pandemic, that it's showing up in the shot in your arm and the stimulus check in your bank account. And that if you just give it another bit of your faith, it can do all these other big things to solve all these other big problems in your life. And the evidence is sitting right there in the last year that you've witnessed of the government at work. at work. Well, Jim, thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite a nation. But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart. On Wednesday night, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina delivered the Republican rebuttal to Biden's speech, making the case for less government, and faulting Biden for pursuing what Scott called a divisive tax and spend agenda that would hurt the economy. Even more taxing, even more spending to put Washington even more in the middle of your life, from the cradle to college. We should be expanding opportunities and options for all families, not throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, federal agents executed search warrants at the home and office of Rudy Giuliani, former President Trump's personal lawyer, signaling a new phase of the criminal investigation into his conduct. That investigation is focused on whether in 2019, Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs who, at the time, were helping

Giuliani search for damaging information on Trump's political rivals, including President Biden. And the Biden administration is charging three white men with federal hate crimes in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old black man who was shot to death last year while jogging through a neighborhood in South Georgia. According to the indictments, the three men targeted Arbery, quote, because of Arbery's race and color. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Eric Krupke, Jessica Chung, and Leslie Davis. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Paige Cowan and engineered by Chris Wood. and engineered by Chris Wood.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.