A the day before Donald Trump, Elon Musk and tech bosses rallied to Trumpism came to power, Joe Biden launched, during his farewell speech, a vigorous warning against the emergence of a news “techno-industrial oligarchy” threatening the American democratic ideal. For the outgoing president, the extreme concentration of wealth and power risks calling into question “our basic rights, our freedoms, and the possibility for everyone to have a fair chance to survive”.
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Biden is not wrong. The problem is that he has done little to oppose the oligarchic drift underway in his country and on a global scale. In the 1930s, his predecessor Roosevelt, also very worried about such excesses, was not content with making speeches. Under his leadership, the Democrats embarked on a vigorous policy of reducing social inequalities (with tax rates applied to the highest incomes being around 70%-80% for half a century) and investment in public infrastructure. , health and education.
In the 1980s, Republican Ronald Reagan, skillfully playing on nationalism and the feeling of catching up, set out to put an end to the Rooseveltian New Deal. The problem is that the Democrats, far from defending this heritage, have actually contributed to legitimizing and perpetuating the Reaganite turn, particularly under the Clinton (1993-2001) and Obama (2009-2017) presidencies.
-Inflation, a major subject
Biden has often been described as more economically interventionist than his predecessors. This is not totally false, except for two important caveats. Biden is one of the Democrats who voted for the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the founding law of Reaganism, the one which demolished Rooseveltian tax progressivity by lowering the top tax rate to 28%. Everyone can be wrong, but the problem is that he never found it useful to explain that he had made a mistake or that he had changed his mind. However, if we do not finance our spending, we inevitably fuel inflation, another major subject on which Biden's contrition is still awaited.
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