Joe Biden’s ‘war economy’ policies are a radical break with the status quo

Linda J. Dodson

The Democratic platform thrashed out with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is not to my free market taste. It reads in places like a Soviet five-year plan, replete with top-down targets that second guess the direction of fast-moving technology.

There are pledges to install 500m solar panels and 60,000 wind turbines over four years, and 500,000 charging stations for electric cars by 2030. This is pinched directly from Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” speech, with his call for 60,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft guns to be built in a year.

But that is the point. Bidenomics is FDR’s war-economy model. In a sense it is the fiscal twin of helicopter money by central banks and the radical theories of MMT.

Personally, I think that such a plan cuts against the animal energy of American enterprise capitalism. It could degenerate over time into a bureaucratic tangle.

But I also think the greatest threat to western democracies in the 2020s is the feeling that elites are gaming the system and we are no longer in this together. A swing of the pendulum back to the bottom half is a healthy correction.

What we know is that Trumponomics failed. The premise of the corporate tax cuts in 2017 was it would lead to a surge in business investment and to self-sustaining expansion. It never happened. Companies spent the money on share buy-backs or hoarded the reserves in cash because there was not enough demand to justify expansion.

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