Today, Explained - This is the future Joe Biden wants

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Trillions spent on the environment, caregiving, manufacturing, and the racial wealth gap: Vox’s Dylan Matthews explains how Biden wants to “Build Back Better.” Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Vox Media is conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Find it here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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conversation with our colleague Ellen Nilsen on the question of what Joe Biden would do with majorities in the House and the Senate. She said he's got a New Deal-style agenda for these United States. Today, we're going to break down that agenda with another colleague, the host of Vox's Future Perfect podcast, Dylan Matthews. We started with the name of this Biden New Deal. It's heavy on the alliteration. He has a big policy agenda that they're calling Build Back Better. In order to meet the challenge of the day, we can't just build back the way things were before. We have to build back better. That is four prpronged, but it's basically investing a whole lot of money in a whole lot of things.

Let's dive right into it. What are the four prongs? So the four prongs are number one, clean energy. Number two, caregiving. Number three, made in America and made in all of America, they like to emphasize. And prong number four is racial equity and closing the racial wealth gap. Okay, so wildly ambitious. Let's break them down one by one, starting with plank one, clean energy. And we spoke to our colleague David Roberts a bit about this, but this is essentially he wants to invest $2 trillion in a green economy? Yes, he wants to invest two trillion dollars and to do it

fast over just a few years, not over a whole decade. And this is a big shift from how Democrats usually talked about clean energy, say, a decade ago. So in 2010, the big Democratic item was a cap-and-trade bill, and the centerpiece of that was charging polluters for everything they polluted. And that was really hard because it was easy to paint it as a tax and easy to whip up opposition against. And so how Biden's approaching it now, which I think reflects the way a lot of people in the climate world are approaching it, is instead of offering a stick, you offer a carrot. We can't rebuild our economy and meet this climate crisis unless we create opportunities for people to build their own communities. This is about jobs. It's also about dignity. It's about pride. I'm confident we can do this. So you offer $2 trillion in funding to research and develop and then actually deploy

things like electric cars and buses and trucks, distributed solar, a better grid with more battery storage so that when things like solar and wind are out because the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time, you have some storage to make up for that. So just spending lots of money to get the stuff that you have some storage to make up for that. So just spending lots of money to get the stuff that you want to get done rather than penalizing people for doing stuff you don't want to have done. And this $2 trillion plan on its own would be all a presidential candidate from the past would really need to say, here's my policy agenda. but he's got these three prongs left. What does he want to do on caregiving? The basic thing here is investing more in especially child care, but also care for elderly people.

This is about easing the squeeze on working families who are raising their kids and caring for aged loved ones at the same time. As I think a lot of people have noticed during the pandemic, it is really, really expensive to get someone to take care of your kid, especially young children, for parents who are trying to go back into the workforce. And so Biden has proposed this system, first off, of universal pre-K, so every three- and four-year-old would have access to free pre-kindergarten schooling. And below that age, and for people sort of before and after school, a really large system of tax credits to subsidize access to child care. The hope is that for the vast majority of Americans, you would cap child care expenses at 7% of your

income. So for the average American making an average salary, it would go from being tens of thousands of dollars a year to maybe a couple thousand. Okay, so a few trillion in spending so far on a green economy and caregiving. What about made in all of America? What's the deal there? Like another few trillion? I just want to keep a tab here. This is merely hundreds of billions rather than shillings. This is a $700 billion plan. So Joe Biden, while he was sort of painted as a moderate in the primary, and he was compared to someone like Bernie Sanders, has always been like a bit of an economic populist. You know, they call me middle class Joe. And this plan is very much like that side of Joe Biden. So they want to counter the move of manufacturing, but also service jobs into other countries. And they also want to address concerns that have come up, I think, especially since the 2016 election about sort of underinvestment in certain areas of whether places like Appalachia or the Rust Belt are getting left behind while a handful of really rich cities like San Francisco and New York do really well.

And so the made in all of America part is we're not only going to spend $700 billion funding research and investment, and also $400 billion of that is going to be spent just buying these products. When we spend taxpayers' money, when the federal government spends taxpayers' money, we should use it to buy American products

and support American jobs. My plan would tighten the rules to make this a reality. And it goes further. During my first term alone, we'll invest $400 billion in purchasing products and materials our country needs to modernize our infrastructure, replenish our critical stockpiles, enhance national security. That's how much the federal government will spend on buying products, the federal government. And the final prong that he's going to address the racial wealth gap, billions, hundreds of billions, trillions? There is less of

a hard number on this. It's more something that's threaded throughout all of his other proposals. So, he has a big proposal that doesn't get its own prong, but for affordable college and free college below a certain income threshold. Part of that is spending billions of dollars subsidizing historically Black colleges and universities. Part of his economic recovery agenda has been asking the Federal Reserve for the first time to take the racial wealth gap into consideration when they're making monetary policy decisions. Removing the barriers for Black and Brown entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses is only one of many things we have to do to close the racial wealth gap in this nation.

Why has Biden picked these four policy areas or issues to focus on? The environment, caregiving, American manufacturing, and the racial wealth gap? So I think American manufacturing speaks to something about him personally and is something that has motivated him a lot of his career. The iron workers have been with me my entire career. When I heard the first operation to ever endorse me in 1972, I wasn't even old enough to be elected senator and you guys endorsed me. And I was able to turn 30 by the time I got sworn in. I think in general, you're looking at a list of things that the Democratic coalition cares about. And Joe Biden is like a capital D Democrat and will do what it takes to lead a coalition of Democrats. That there have been past presidents who are really strong personalities in their own right.

I think Obama was like this. Bill Clinton was like this to some degree. Where they were individuals who had very strong views on certain things that were not necessarily the views of their party. Joe Biden is a party man. He sees that the party cares about climate change. He sees that the party cares about caregiving and child care. He sees that there's a lot of energy moving to address the racial wealth gap. And he sees those things and he responds to it.

And he builds an agenda that's responsive to the coalition that he's trying to represent. And I think that's an unusual approach in recent decades, but is also more traditionally what party leaders have been supposed to do throughout American history. And I think it's something that FDR notably saw as his role. That FDR as an individual, when he ran in 1932, was not seen as this wild-eyed revolutionary, but he saw where the labor side of his party was going. He saw rising support for communists and socialists amidst the Great Depression, and he put together an agenda that he thought could represent the coalition that elected him. And I think Joe Biden is trying to do something similar. And speaking of FDR, how does Joe Biden's agenda to build back better with

trillions upon trillions of spending compare to the platforms of previous presidents, Democratic or Republican? So it's just a massive agenda in terms of dollar amounts. I think his green energy plan alone is about twice the size of Obamacare in terms of 10-year spending, which is remarkable. Obamacare was a major achievement, and he's proposing several plans that dwarf it in size. I haven't done the exact math with the New Deal, but I suspect you would come up with something similar. The New Deal in dollar terms is not as large as you would think. It's the regulatory structures and new agencies that they set up that we remember it for. I think what's different about Biden is, especially in a comparison to FDR, part of why people admire FDR and we remember him the way we do is that he tried everything, that he saw this sort of world historic crisis and said, I'm not just going to set up one

government agency that hires people to do public works. I'm going to set up like five of them and have five people I trust run them and see who wins. He called it bold, persistent experimentation. And I don't see that as much with Joe Biden. He has sort of a handful of things that he wants to do. There's less of a throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach. But it is similar in the kind of grandiosity of the plans and the scale of spending that he's imagining. More with Dylan in a minute. Thank you. from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos.

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What if he doesn't get the Senate? What if he loses the House? So if he doesn't get the Senate, and I would amend this to say also if he gets the Senate, but there isn't significant filibuster reform, because even if you get the Senate but you don't have 60 people, it can be very difficult to pass this stuff. Some of it you can pass through something called budget reconciliation, but it gets a lot harder if you don't have a filibuster-proof majority. I think a good example of this is a fight that Biden was very much a part of in 2009,

overpassing the stimulus. So Democrats had the House. They had, I think at that point, 59 members of the Senate, and they needed 60 to get something passed. And so they proposed stimulus legislation, but it couldn't get passed until they cleaved off at least one Republican voter. And so Biden and Obama spent months in rooms with a handful of moderate Republicans trying to craft a stimulus bill they could agree to. And they eventually did. The yeas are 60. The nays are 38.

And it was a lot smaller and arguably hurt the recovery by being a lot smaller. And to make matters worse for Biden, the three Republicans they got to support that. Senator Snow from Maine. Senator Collins from Maine, Senator Specter from Pennsylvania. But for them, we would not be where we are. Two of them are out of the Senate, and one of them is Susan Collins. And if Democrats retake the Senate, she's probably not going to be there. She'll be replaced with a Democrat. So you have a much more conservative Senate Republican caucus that you have to win over members from

in order to get things done. And if you don't have any control of the Senate, and Mitch McConnell is majority leader, he gets to decide what they vote on. So even if you do have the votes, there's no mechanism, the way there is in the House even, to get something that has majority support and put it on the Senate floor if Mitch McConnell doesn't want it to be voted on. And if Mitch McConnell's still in power, there's less of a chance the filibuster is going anywhere. Right. He will understand that he has a chance of losing his majority and he's not going to mess with the best tool he has if he's eventually in the minority. How has Joe Biden's political past set him up to deal with this particular scenario,

with the Mitch McConnell scenario? So one thing Joe Biden's advisors will tell you and insist upon quite strongly is, this is a guy who entered the Senate in 1972, or early 1973, I suppose, and was there for 36 years before he became vice president. He knows a lot of Republican senators, and Republican senators like him a lot personally. He was not like a bomb thrower in the Senate. He was someone who worked very hard to get along with people on both sides of the aisle. And they'll tell you lots of stories about this. For instance, they'll tell you stories from the Obama years. So Biden was very intimately involved in 2011 in negotiations between Mitch

McConnell and Obama and John Boehner about a debt ceiling spending deal. And people who were part of those negotiations will tell you that McConnell and Boehner liked Biden a lot more than they liked Obama. I get in trouble. I read in the New York Times today that one of my problems is if I were to run for president, I like Republicans. Okay, well, bless me, Father, if I have sinned. I think I draw a very sharp distinction between what happens if he has the Senate in house versus if he doesn't. I don't know if Biden draws that same distinction. I think there's part of him that really believes he can sit down and talk to Republicans and get them to believe that his agenda is what's best for the country and move forward with it. And I think my concern is that that's an overly naive assessment of where the Republican Party is now compared to

where it was when he started in the Senate and even for the majority of his time there. Is there a chance that in this scenario where a President Joe Biden has to deal with a Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, that he just sort of quickly backtracks to being moderate Joe, you know, a guy Republicans can talk to, not this guy who's proposing a platform agenda left of any previous Democratic candidate in history? I mean, I think it's certainly possible. I mean, Barack Obama ran on expanding spending on a lot of stuff in 2008, and he did expand spending on a lot of stuff in 2009 and 2010. And then Republicans retook the House, and you cut a deal in 2011 where $1.2 trillion of domestic spending was cut automatically in exchange for not defaulting on the U.S. debt.

And that was a deal that Ted Kaufman, who is an almost lifelong aide to Joe Biden, served as his chief of staff for many years and took his Senate seat when Biden became vice president, told me was like a model for how they think that Biden should govern. He pointed to that debt ceiling deal that cut trillions in spending and said, you know, this think that Biden should govern. He pointed to that debt ceiling deal that cut trillions in spending and said, you know, this is Joe at his best. He can sit down with someone like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and come to a deal. And I think that is appealing to some more moderate Joe Biden supporters, but I think it's a point of concern for progressives who are wondering how sincere he is about these multi-trillion dollar plans, that if when push comes to shove,

he has to deal with Republican opposition and agrees to large-scale cuts instead of sort of holding his ground, that might be a source of disillusionment for people who were already kind of skeptical of him in the primaries. Is there also a chance that he has to sort of expend all of his political capital just to dig the nation out of the economic and health crisis it'll be in because of COVID-19 by

potentially January of next year? That he'll expend so much political capital just trying to get the nation out of crisis that he won't have the votes or the wherewithal to pass all of this other ambitious stuff on the economy and the environment and caregiving and the racial wealth gap. I think that's a big risk. And there's a way in which he can use the effort to pass something to take the country out of the hole to get at his other priorities. So this is something Obama did in the stimulus bill where you had a bunch of mechanisms to send out money immediately, and then you also had a bunch of money for sort of green jobs, changing education policies in states. They snuck in a lot of other things that they wanted to do in that package. So one path for Biden is to try to do that. But I think the other thing for him to keep in mind is that his political fate is tied up in how well he handles this crisis. In 2009, there was a member of his and Obama's team named Christy Romer, who's an economist at Berkeley.

And she ran the numbers and found that you would need something like $1.2, $1.3 trillion in stimulus to pull the country out of the hole. But if you were to ask me what was sort of the main mistake that both the Fed and the administration made, it was to not be even bolder in our policy response. But the response from other advisors was, Larry Summers said, it's non-planetary. That like, we take that to the Senate, everyone will laugh at us and we won't get anything done. And I think there's, he had a point, but also because the recovery was so weak,

they lost a ton of seats in 2010 and they suffered in a lot of other ways politically. At the end of the day, voters want you to dig them out of the hole. And that can require doing things that seem really extreme in the moment, but that are necessary to get you back to something like a normal state of things when you're in a situation with double-digit unemployment and a massive pandemic. And is it the double-digit unemployment and the massive pandemic that created this sort of transformation in Joe Biden that took him from being just that dependable, moderate Joe that you know real well because he's been around since the dawn of time to this guy with FDR-style ideas? Yeah, I think Biden's pitch before coronavirus and before the coronavirus economic

collapse was, I'll make things normal again. You won't have the president tweeting at 3 a.m. because he's watching Fox News and has some new theories about ballot harvesting. You'll have a normal president who makes the news when he's doing things to help people. And I think Kaufman told me that the theory was addition by subtraction, that a lot of things get fixed just when you get Trump out of the White House. And to some degree, that might have been true in February 2020. It's definitely not true now. Just getting Trump out of the White House does not end the pandemic. It does not end the economic collapse. You need to do a lot of affirmative things to dig the country out of those holes. And so I do think that has forced Biden's hand to a degree and has pushed him to

be a lot more ambitious than he otherwise would be. Dylan Matthews is the host of Vox's Future Perfect podcast. A fresh season is on its way. You can and should give it a listen. You can find Dylan's and Ella's articles on Biden and the Senate races over at Vox.com. And one last thing. Last year, we came to you and asked you to fill out a listener survey, one that would help us understand why you listen, what you're looking for, who you are, all of it. Well, a lot has changed since last year for you, for us, for the country, for the world. So we're doing another survey. It's short, it's easy,

and it'll help us out if you can make the time. You can find it at voxmedia.com slash pod survey. Again, that's voxmedia.com slash pod survey. You can even find a link in today's episode description. Thanks for making the time.