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When Republican Ronald Reagan was inducted into the presidency in 1981, he summed up his plans in a sentence that would influence America's course for decades: "The state is not the solution to our problems, the state is the problem." A policy of deregulation and tax cuts that unleashed the dynamism of the American economy and permanently shaped American economic thinking. It also changed the Democratic Party, which made its peace with growth and a market economy under the centrist Clinton current at the beginning of the 1990s and was thus able to win elections again after Reagan.

Joe Biden was a 38-year-old senator when Reagan took office, and in the decades that followed, he earned a reputation for being a middle-class man of equilibrium.

This is how he sold himself in the most recent election campaign: as an alternative to the left-wing icons Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

As president, however, Biden has now made a clear turn to the left.

His speech to both houses of Congress did not have the memorable eloquence of Ronald Reagan.

But what he outlined in simple terms is nothing more than a departure from the idea of ​​the lean state.

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Massive spending programs, new social benefits, tough government regulation to achieve the climate agenda and intervention in economic life to strengthen key industries are the new line.

"It is an absolutely courageous, revolutionary and left-wing agenda," says Pramila Jayapal, who leads the union of left-wing democrats in the House of Representatives.

“The place where the candidate Biden started is different from the one where President Biden starts.” The left-wing icon Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who describes herself as a socialist, is also full of praise.

"The Biden government and President Biden have exceeded the expectations of the left wing," she says, "many of us expected a much more conservative government."

Does the patent protection for the Biontech vaccine now fall?

The line between Biontech boss Sahin and Chancellor Merkel is good, they spoke on the phone about the surprising announcement from Washington.

And even if the quick supply of vaccine to poorer countries was definitely an issue, there was a clear no to a softening of patent protection.

Source: WORLD

Now it is not surprising that in times of crisis governments set up expansive spending programs to save the economy.

The conservative George W. Bush did the same in the financial crisis as did the Democrat Barack Obama, and in the corona crisis Donald Trump focused on expansion, just like Joe Biden.

But behind the pretext of the Corona rescue package, a far greater ambition is now emerging: Biden wants to risk more state, not just to overcome the crisis.

He wants new and permanent social benefits and an expansion of state tasks.

For Biden, the executive is a welfare and mothering authority that takes citizens by the hand everywhere, in case of doubt with a lot of tax money.

Biden wants to get this money from the rich and the companies and also finance it through debt, because the planned tax increases will not be enough.

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That is a bet that can backfire, even in the mid-term elections in 2022. But Biden apparently believes that Americans today are ready to accept more government if it actually delivers more.

In a way, Donald Trump had already begun moving away from Reagan.

He has replaced the classic free trade policy of the Republicans with protectionism.

His arbitrarily set punitive tariffs against China and the EU, for example, not only increased import taxes on many products, but also represented a significant state intervention in the free market because Trump determined which industries would be winners and losers in his trade war.

His tariffs on steel imports, for example, helped domestic steel production, but harmed the metalworking industry, which had to pay higher prices.

And because soy exports collapsed as a result of Chinese retaliation, Trump suddenly turned America's conservative soy farmers into state transfer recipients.

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There was also no trace of spending discipline, a classic demand by the conservatives, from Trump. He increased America's debt by more than a third, a curve that pointed steeply upwards even before Corona, because a large part of his tax cuts were financed on credit. No wonder, then, that the Democrats no longer impose any inhibitions on themselves and their debt plans go far beyond what would be necessary to merely cushion the consequences of the corona. Biden's “Buy American” decree for government contracts is also essentially protectionist and anti-competitive.

Americans are generally much more distant from the state than Europeans and do not like it when the government interferes too much in their lives. But Biden is betting that this skepticism has been eroded by the corona epidemic. After all, that was the hour of the executive. Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs and have been in need of government unemployment benefits. The state provided masks, protective clothing, test kits, ventilators, and vaccines. Trump even activated the war management law from the 1950s in order to be able to compulsorily acquire required products.

The notion of what regulations the state can impose on citizens and what it is responsible for has shifted all over the world over the past year, including the United States.

And since many Americans have relied on the welfare state after these experiences and have changed their expectations of state action, Biden apparently thinks that he can use the opportunity to shift the coordinates of American politics in the direction of the welfare state.

And to intervene in economic activity much more vigorously, for example in the development of key industries and climate-neutral technology, than has previously been the case in the USA.

America has not seen such confidence that the state knows better than the economy since the era of stagnation and hyperinflation in the 1970s.

A look at the European experiences of the past decades should actually suffice to realize that too much welfare state, too much regulation and too much state intervention in the economy are not a good idea because they slow down the economies and result in less prosperity.

America has always been different from Europe in this regard.

Life is tougher in the US when you are an underprivileged or when life is playing badly on you.

On the other hand, the country also opens up more economic opportunities and a more innovative and faster-moving corporate culture.

Biden now wants to make America more European.

In doing so, however, he risks the country losing the dynamism that has always characterized it.