Joe Biden's narrow room for maneuver
Audio 03:57
Joe Biden wants to end the isolationism advocated by Donald Trump.
Here during his speech on November 7 in Wilmington.
AP Photo / Andrew Harnik
By: Mounia Daoudi Follow
8 min
Healing America is the commitment made on Saturday night a few hours after President-elect Joe Biden announced his victory.
And its first action will be to set up as of today a crisis unit on Covid-19.
But the new president will also have to quickly get down to healing the US economy.
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Joe Biden inherits a downed economy and the accelerating pandemic is not good news.
The economic situation today is almost as worrying as the health situation.
The timid recovery this summer, largely due to the massive support program voted in March by Congress –2.200 billion dollars + 500 billion extension in April is running out of steam.
The aid paid to households has certainly made it possible to avoid the recession, but entire sections of the economy, such as tourism, air transport, catering which employ millions of people, see their hope for a sustainable recovery in activity. fly away with the exponential increase in contaminations.
Joe Biden, who will not take office until January 20, will not confine the country as Donald Trump has often wrongly accused.
And if he wants to, he does not have the power since health policy is in the hands of each State.
But what the next tenant of the White House will seek to do is control the pandemic before the arrival of a vaccine and above all coordinate efforts to limit the impact on the economy as much as possible.
But Joe Biden inherits very degraded accounts while the American economy will need and very quickly a new support plan….
Negotiations in Congress between Democrats and Republicans will resume very quickly, without waiting for the taking of the oath on January 20 of the 46th American president.
We will have to bail out the failed states and local communities.
Urgently release additional aid to households.
Recall that the paralysis of the economy has destroyed more than 22 million jobs and if since half of these jobs were created, millions of Americans are today without activities and soon at the end of their right for unemployment benefits .
Support measures also for SMEs facing serious cash flow problems, otherwise we will witness cascading bankruptcies
Act quickly and strongly to avoid a worsening of the crisis.
However, this is not what is emerging.
Republicans by ideology will not sign a blank check to Joe Biden even if Donald Trump has succeeded in torpedoing the economic principles of his party and his sacrosanct budgetary orthodoxy ... The degradation of public accounts is unprecedented.
The US deficit will surpass the record level of $ 3 trillion this year.
It's historic!
By comparison, after the 2008 financial crisis, the deficit recorded by the Obama administration had not exceeded 1.6 trillion.
With a Senate for the moment with a Republican majority, Joe Biden's room for maneuver will therefore be narrow
His ambitious program - $ 7 trillion over 10 years - will face the harsh reality of partisan struggles in Congress.
To finance it Joe Biden has indeed planned to make the richest pay by increasing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% - it was 35% before the Trump reform, and by taxing the top 1%. well-off.
But if Republicans retain a majority in the Senate, most of this economic agenda, especially its tax hikes, will disappear.
The Biden administration will have to revise its ambitions downwards.
Because if the Republicans can give in on infrastructure development and renewable energy projects, they will not concede an increase in health and education spending, at the heart of Joe Biden's program ... Again by ideology.
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