By presenting, on Wednesday March 31, a massive investment plan of 2,250 billion dollars (1,917 billion euros) financed in large part by increases in corporate taxes, Joe Biden has embarked on a gamble on which the outcome of his mandate will undoubtedly depend.
Even more than the lifeline launched to the $ 1.9 trillion economy adopted earlier this month in the context of the Covid-19 epidemic, it confirms a desire for a paradigm shift in Washington: the rehabilitation of the Federal state as actor, even strategist, after four decades of conservative revolution.
The latter was initiated when the newly elected Republican Ronald Reagan assured in January 1981 that the government was not ” the solution “, But ” the problem “. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I am from the government and I am here to help”, quipped the same president five years later. In 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton had recorded the ideological defeat of his camp by ensuring that “The era of “big government” ” was “Gone”.
With its distant successor, there is no longer any question of having as its sole objective its atrophy and the deprivation of the fiscal resources that make it work. The federal state is not “A foreign force installed in a distant capital, it is all about us”, had already assured Joe Biden on March 12, the coronavirus having highlighted, according to him, ” [sa] most important function: to protect the American people ”.
Republican support in the Senate unlikely
His ambition will come up against serious obstacles, first of all within the Democratic camp. His left wing, despite the sums at stake, will plead for even more massive investments, especially in the environment. In the Senate, on the contrary, where the majority of the president depends on only one vote, that of Vice-President Kamala Harris, also president of the Senate, Joe Biden will have to obtain the support of senators elected in Republican States, to start with that of Joe Manchin, in West Virginia, who wants above all that this vast project be carried by a bipartisan majority.
Republican support is however unlikely for now given the fierce opposition of the Grand Old Party (GOP) to the planned tax hikes. As for the rescue plan and lack of a democratic consensus for the elimination of the threshold of sixty votes essential to bypass parliamentary obstruction (filibuster), Joe Biden will have to rely on the special procedure which allows the upper assembly to adopt a text by simple majority when it includes budgetary provisions.
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