Rashid A Mughal
JOE Biden who took over as 46th President of USA in a very simple and unique ceremony on 20 Jan 2021 is likely to face uphill task due to Trump’s follies who has left behind a America which is deeply racially divided, mismanaged Covid-19 which has killed almost half a million Americans, economy which is going down, relations with allies at the lowest ebb, unemployment rate spiraling up and number of jobless claims for monetary assistance multiplying every day, putting heavy pressure on government resources and exchequer.
Biden thus has a number of challenges which he has to tackle and show his skills and acumen as a seasoned, intelligent and experienced politician to come out of the mess left behind by Trump.
Both on domestic and international fronts, he has formidable challenges ahead but given his track record of decades in the political arena, it is hoped that he will come out successful.
There is little to suggest that Mr Biden’s views on foreign policy have shifted away from multilateralism and engagement on the world stage, in opposition to Trump’s unabashedly isolationist one.
He has also promised to repair relationships with US allies, particularly with the NATO Alliance, which Trump had repeatedly threatened to undermine with funding cuts.
Biden said China should be held accountable for unfair environment and trade practices, but instead of unilateral tariffs, he has proposed an international coalition with other democracies that China “can’t afford to ignore”, though he has been vague about what that means.
Joe Biden also wants to raise yearly refugee admissions to 125,000 in the coming fiscal year, a more than eight-fold increase after former President Trump slashed levels to historic lows.
Biden said he would approve an executive order to increase the capacity to accept refugees in the face of “unprecedented global need.”
Trump portrayed refugees as a security threat and a drain on resources. “It’s going to take time to rebuild what has been so badly damaged,” Biden said. “But that’s precisely what we’re going to do.”
Mr. Biden’s approach to tackle corona virus, the most immediate and obvious challenge facing the country, is to provide free testing for all and hire 100,000 people to set up a national contact-tracing programme.
He says he wants to establish at least 10 testing centres in every state and called upon federal agencies to deploy resources and give firmer national guidance through federal experts.
He says all governors should mandate wearing masks. Those suspicious of federal authority will see this as overreach but it lies very much in line with Mr. Biden’s and Democrats’ general view on the role government should play.
Mr Biden’s broader economic policies, dubbed his “Build Back Better” plan, aim to please two constituencies that traditionally support Democrats – young people and blue collar workers.
He supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour – a measure that is popular among young people and that has become something of a totem figure for the party in 2020, and a sign of its move to the left.
He also wants a $2tn investment in green energy, arguing that boosting green manufacturing helps working class union workers, who perform most of those jobs.
There is also a $400bn pledge to use federal dollars to buy American goods, alongside a wider commitment to enforce “Buy American” laws for new transport projects. Mr. Biden was previously criticised for backing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which critics say shipped jobs overseas. His 2021 plan calls for the federal government to invest $300bn in US-made materials, services, research and technology. In the wake of the race protests that gripped the US last year, he said he believes that racism exists in the US and must be dealt with through broad economic and social programmes to support minorities. A pillar of his “build back” programme is to create business support for minorities through a $30bn investment fund.
On criminal justice, he has moved far from his much-criticised “tough-on-crime” position of the 1990s. Mr Biden has now proposed policies to reduce incarceration, address race, gender and income-based disparities in the justice system, and rehabilitate released prisoners. He would now create a $20bn grant programme to incentivise states to invest in incarceration reduction efforts, eliminate mandatory minimum sentences, de-criminalize marijuana and expunge prior cannabis convictions and end the death penalty. However, he has rejected calls to defund police, saying resources should instead be tied to maintaining standards. He argues that some funding for police should be redirected to social services like mental health and calls for a $300m investment into a community policing programme.
Mr Biden has called climate change an existential threat, and says he will rally the rest of the world to act more quickly on curbing emissions by rejoining the Paris Climate Accord- the agreement, which Donald Trump withdrew from, committed the US to cutting greenhouse gases up to 28% by 2025, based on 2005 levels.
Though he does not embrace the Green New Deal – a climate and jobs package put forward by the left wing of his party – he is proposing a $1.7tn federal investment in green technologies research, some of which overlaps with the funding in his economic plan, to be spent over the next 10 years, and wants the US to reach net zero emissions by 2050 – a commitment that was made by more than 60 other countries in 2019.
China and India, the two other biggest carbon emitters, have yet to join the pledge. The investment dovetail with his economic plan to create jobs in manufacturing “green energy” products.
Mr Biden says he will expand the public health insurance scheme, passed when he was President Barack Obama’s Deputy and implement a plan to insure an estimated 97% of Americans.
Though he stops short of the universal health insurance proposal on the wish lists of the more left-wing members of his party, Mr Biden promises to give all Americans the option to enroll in a public health insurance option similar to Medicare, which provides medical benefits to the elderly and to lower the age of eligibility for Medicare itself from 65 to 60 years old.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan group, estimates that the total Biden plan would cost $2.25tn over 10 years.
In his first 100 days in office, Mr Biden fulfilled his promises to reverse Trump policies that separate parents from their children at the US-Mexican border, rescind limits on the number of applications for asylum and end the ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries.
He also fulfilled his promise to protect the “Dreamers” – people brought illegally to the US as children who were permitted to stay under an Obama-era policy – as well as ensure they are eligible for federal student aid.
In a notable shift to the left, he has endorsed several big pieces of education policy that have become popular within the party – student loan debt forgiveness, expansion of tuition-free colleges, and universal preschool access.
These would be paid using money gained back from withdrawing the Trump-era tax cuts to rich.
— The writer is former DG (Emigration) and consultant ILO, IOM.
