By HOLLY OTTERBEIN and ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. | Scott Eisen/Getty Images
Joe Biden wants a more progressive approach to economic stimulus
legislation than Washington has taken so far, including much stricter
oversight of the Trump Administration, much tougher conditions on
business bailouts and long-term investments in infrastructure and
climate that have so far been largely absent from congressional debates.
In a fiery half-hour interview with POLITICO, the presumptive
Democratic nominee sounded a bit like his angrier and less moderate
primary rivals, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, though in
unexpurgated Biden style. The former vice president said that the next
round of coronavirus stimulus needs to be “a hell of a lot bigger” than
last month’s $2 trillion CARES Act, that it needs to include massive aid
to states and cities to prevent them from “laying off a hell of a lot
of teachers and cops and firefighters,” and that the administration is
already “wasting a hell of a lot of money.”
Biden has been running a low-profile campaign during the pandemic,
tweeting, filming videos and appearing on Sunday shows from his Delaware
home while President Donald Trump has briefed the nation daily from the
White House. Biden has let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speak for the Democratic Party during the
debates over economic relief, offering supportive public statements that
have faded into the background.
But
stimulus is a subject close to his heart, and he passionately contrasted
his own management of President Barack Obama’s $800 billion Recovery
Act in 2009 with President Donald Trump’s approach to the trillions of
dollars flowing out of Capitol Hill.
The
Obama stimulus was wildly controversial, but it won bipartisan praise
for its strict oversight and unusually low levels of fraud. In the
interview, Biden was at his most indignant when he recounted how he
recruited a gruff law enforcement veteran and government watchdog named
Earl Devaney to oversee the Recovery Act in 2009, and how President
Donald Trump fired the Pentagon inspector general who had been selected
to oversee the CARES Act almost immediately after he signed it.
“I wanted to bring in the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the country—I
really mean it, I’m not joking—because we wanted to make sure we did it
by the numbers with genuine oversight,” Biden said. “Right now, there’s
no oversight. [Trump] made it real clear he doesn’t have any damn
interest in being checked. The last thing he wants is anyone watching
that $500 billion going to corporate America, for God’s sake.”
The
Trump campaign said it would not comment on the firing of Pentagon
inspector general Michael Atkinson beyond the president’s public
comments on April 4, when he attacked Atkinson for giving Congress the
original whistleblower report about his call with the Ukrainian
president that eventually led to his impeachment. “I thought he did a
terrible job. Absolutely terrible,” the president said at the time. “He
took a fake report and brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay?
Not a big Trump fan—that, I can tell you.”
Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that
“this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the
Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit. He
railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the
American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot
at CARES Act aid intended for small businesses. Over the last month, 26
million Americans have lost their jobs, and Biden said many of those
jobs could be gone for good if mom-and-pop operations get left behind.
“We knew from the beginning that the big banks don’t like lending to
small businesses,” Biden said. “I’m telling you, though, if Main Street
businesses don’t get help, they’re gone.”
The CARES
Act and three smaller coronavirus relief bills have all passed Congress
with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Biden was careful to avoid
criticizing Pelosi and Schumer even as he criticized the results of the
compromises they negotiated. He said he’s “in constant conversation”
with both Democratic leaders, letting them know his priorities without
interfering with their negotiations; he credited them with securing
major increases in unemployment benefits and other improvements to
Republican proposals that were initially skewed even further towards big
business.
He was clearly
disappointed that Pelosi and Schumer failed to secure any new aid to
states in this week’s $484 billion package, but he suggested that could
work out politically, because in the next round they’ll be able to blame
Trump and other Republicans for looming state budget cuts and layoffs
of first responders.
“They got what they could get,” Biden said. “I’ve been in too many negotiations to second-guess anybody else’s.”
Still,
Biden suggested that after four rounds of legislation designed
primarily to stanch the economic bleeding, the next round should include
more forward-looking investments that could help the economy start to
recover and grow once the virus is contained. He suggested a
“trillion-dollar infrastructure program that can be implemented really
rapidly,” as well as “dealing with environmental things that create
good-paying jobs.”
Trump and Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have suggested that “green stimulus”
would be a non-starter with Republicans, but Biden said investments in
light rail, clean drinking water, and half a million electric vehicle
chargers on the nation’s highways could help retool the economy for the
future.
Biden also argued that
long-term growth initiatives are America’s only hope to rein in a budget
deficit that has suddenly ballooned to an unprecedented $4 trillion,
and is sure to continue to expand as Washington continues to spend. He
said that repealing the bulk of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut would help
limit the red ink—“It wasn’t worth the powder it will take to blow it to
hell”—but ultimately, restoring jobs and investing in the future is
“the only thing that grows the economy back so the deficit doesn’t eat
you alive.”
After this story
posted, Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh accused Biden of trying to
exploit the coronavirus crisis to push a Green New Deal, which Murtaugh
said would create "millions of job losses in the energy sector."
"Joe Biden
helped preside over the worst economic recovery since World War II, so
economic advice from him is not exactly a hot commodity," Murtaugh said.
Biden
has loved talking about stimulus ever since he ran the Recovery Act,
and he sounded comfortable returning to the topic from his Delaware
home, although there were a couple of typically hard-to-follow tangents,
and one brief coughing interruption that he attributed to swallowing a
peanut the wrong way.
His main
theme was the contrast between his legendary harassment of the Cabinet
secretaries, governors and mayors in charge of spending Recovery Act
dollars—he reminded me that he spoke with every governor except Alaska’s
Sarah Palin, most of them repeatedly—and “the malpractice of this
administration.”
“There’s no
coordination. There’s no accountability. Come on, the guy waits to hold
up money because he wants to make sure his name is on the checks!” Biden
said.
Biden has been firing off a
steady stream of tweets attacking Trump for failing to make sure America
has enough tests and protective equipment, for complaining about his
media coverage, and most recently for suggesting that drinking bleach
might help cure the virus. But while Biden clearly hopes to persuade
some 2016 Trump voters to back him in November, he also needs to make
sure that progressive Sanders and Warren supporters don’t stay home.
This
week, Biden has taken flak from the left for including the
corporate-friendly Democratic economist Lawrence Summers on internal
calls. But on Friday night, he denounced corporate America as “greedy as
hell,” echoing the structural critiques of the modern economy that
fueled the Sanders and Warren campaigns.
He called for stronger assurances that small-business loans will go
to small businesses, and that aid to larger corporations will come with
strings prohibiting stock buybacks, executive bonuses or worker layoffs.
But he also went beyond policy prescriptions, saying the pandemic might
convince Americans that grocery clerks “and all the other folks out
there saving our rear ends and risking their lives for eight bucks an
hour” deserve a better deal. He thinks there could be a backlash against
big corporations who have poured their profits into buybacks and
dividends rather than worker training and research and development. He
thinks the virus could deal a blow to short-term economic thinking and
anti-government political thinking.
“I think there’s going to be a willingness to fix some of the
institutional inequities that have existed for a long time,” Biden said.
“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
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