The American president seems decided to give a final push, before flying Thursday to Rome, where he will participate at the end of the week at the G20 summit, then Glasgow, for the great COP26 summit on the climate.
He goes to the state of New Jersey (northeast) on Monday to detail his plans for better care for young children – an area in which the United States lags behind other developed countries – and his ambitions to development of public transport. Social spending on the one hand, development of physical infrastructure on the other: these are the two pillars of the Democratic President’s major investment program. For the time being, it is still blocked in parliament, for lack of agreement within the democratic camp between the most progressive, who want to strike a blow in the face of rising inequalities, and the centrists, who call for budgetary and fiscal restraint. .
Remained a time away from parliamentary discussions, Joe Biden has launched into the fray in recent days, both to convince elected officials and to better explain his projects to the general public. The American president would like to arrive in Europe crowned with a major political victory, he who wants to make America a model of prosperity for all democracies in the world. He received Sunday for breakfast, in his stronghold of Wilmington (State of Delaware, northeast), the Democratic leader of the Senate Chuck Schumer, and Senator Joe Manchin, one of the elected refractory Democrats.
“We are almost there,” said Sunday on CNN channel Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives. To the point of voting during the week? “This is what is planned.”
To believe the freshest press reports, a compromise seems to be emerging on a less ambitious program, but financed, at least in part, by a rather new tax measure, and very popular with progressive economists: the taxation of over- so-called “latent” values. The White House would renounce in return its plan to increase the tax on the highest American incomes.
Clearly, it would be a question of taxing the gains dormant in the thick portfolios of stocks of the great American fortunes, after a particularly good period on the markets. If this project of taxation is very innovative, it cannot make us forget that Joe Biden, to pass his program “Build Back Better” (“Reconstruire in better”), had to accept many compromises. The component devoted to infrastructure, weighing more than 1,000 billion dollars, did not pose a major problem, and should even collect votes from the Republican opposition, a fact that has become extremely rare as the Trump presidency has widened partisan divisions.
But the 78-year-old Democrat has had to temper his ambitions in terms of environmental and social spending, in a country where health and education are widely viewed as private matters.
The American president initially wanted to vote for a program of 3.500 billion dollars over 10 years to improve the care of health, education and early childhood, but also to boost the energy transition.
