What is Joe Biden’s economic policy?
AS the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden’s economic proposal prioritizes the pandemic, front-line workers’ health, and recession recovery.
Other planned reform includes education, climate change, immigration, and a new tax plan.
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Pandemic response
Joe Biden has repeatedly emphasized his plans to allow scientists to lead the federal coronavirus response and has championed mask-wearing.
He’s also promised to expand contact tracing and at-home testing in order to help stop the spread.
The former vice president wants to recruit at least 100,000 Americans for a “public health jobs corps” of contact tracers to help track and curb outbreaks.
He has even called for a “Pandemic Testing Board” that would bump up the supply coronavirus tests.
Biden also plans to restore the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, the pandemic response team he created with President Barack Obama in 2016.
The former vice president says he’ll establish at least 10 mobile testing sites and drive-through Covid testing facilities in each state to speed up testing and protect healthcare workers.
If elected president, Biden also plans to provide a daily White House report on how many Covid tests have been performed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state and local health authorities, and private labs.
He also promises to double the number of health workers in schools.
Recession recovery
Through his “Buy America” plan, Biden intends to create 5 million new jobs.
In this plan, the government would spend $400 billion to buy American products and services, while $300 billion would go towards research and development.
Half of the R&D money would be put towards clean energy, creating and securing jobs, and industry leadership. The Biden campaign claims that this package would be the largest of it’s kind since WWII.
Biden would also more than double the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Climate change
Biden’s climate change plan, called the “Clean Energy Revolution,” would invest $2 trillion into combating the planet’s greatest threat. According to The Balance, it would also:
- Declare climate change a national security priority
- End subsidies for fossil fuels
- Double offshore wind production by 2030
- Achieve net-zero emissions by 2050
- Ban offshore drilling in the Arctic and new oil and gas permits on public lands
- Spend $400 billion annually on clean energy research and innovation
- Eliminate carbon emissions in the power sector by 2035
- Add 500,000 public charging stations by 2030
- Restore the EV tax credit
Education proposal
Biden would increase federal funding throughout schools across the country. He plans to triple Title I funding for low-income families and raise teacher’s pay.
If elected president, Biden promises free pre-kindergarten for children, and supports putting early childhood development experts in community health centers.
Biden plans to make community colleges and public universities free for families who’s household income averages below $125,0000. He would spend $8 billion on community college facilities and $50 billion on workforce training.
A 1998 McKinsey studied showed that if low-income students had the same educational resources and support as their wealthy peers, in the next ten years, they could’ve potentially added up to $670 billion to the economy.
Immigration law
Biden’s immigration policies would effectively reverse most of Trump’s.
With Biden in power, the US would no longer separate families at the borders of the country. Biden would raise annual refugee admissions to 125,000 from its record low of 22,491 in 2018.
Biden would set out a roadmap for undocumented immigrants who are seeking US citizenship, provided that they pay taxes and pass a background check.
The Democratic candidate would address immigration issues at the US-Mexican border head-on and would provide a $4 billion aid package to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, whose regions are ridden with violence and trafficking.
As far as safety in the US goes, Biden wants to ban assault weapons, enforce more stringent background checks, and end the sale of firearms and ammunitions online.
Taxes
The Democratic nominee is calling for higher taxes on corporations and the rich while expanding tax credits for middle-class and lower-income Americans.
Several of the former vice president’s proposals are aimed at tax breaks for working-class Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond.
One of these initiatives is by temporarily expanding the child tax credit, which would be fully refundable so that the lowest-income families would receive the full amount of the tax credit.
The amount of the credit would be increased from $2,000 to $3,000, or $3,600 for children under six years old.
It also includes providing a tax credit for family caregivers and giving first-time homeowners a tax break.
Biden said he’d roll back Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for people earning more than $400,000, increasing the top individual income tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent.
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Under his plan, earnings above $400,000 would also be subject to Social Security payroll taxes.
The corporate tax rate would also spike from 21 per cent to 28 per cent – the same rate proposed by former President Barack Obama while he was in office.
Experts say that high earners in New York and California could face combined federal and state tax rates of 62 percent under Biden’s tax proposal, according to CNBC.