Biden embraces his inner Robin Hood

Source: Politico | April 28, 2021 | Natasha Korecki and Christopher Cadelago

The president didn’t shy away from redistributive governance. In fact, he leaned into it

President Joe Biden wants to soak the rich to give to the middle class and poor. And he ain’t afraid to say so.

In his first address before a joint session of Congress, the president embraced a tax-and-spend mantra to frame his next big legislative fight, walking right up to a third rail that has terrified Democrats for decades and forced his predecessors to triangulate and retreat to safer middle ground.

“I’m not out to punish anyone. But I will not add to the tax burden of the middle class of this country,” Biden said Wednesday, urging billionaires and millionaires to “pay their fair share.” “When you hear someone say that they don’t want to raise taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent and on corporate America, ask them: Whose taxes are you going to raise instead, and whose are you going to cut?”

Biden’s speech was, in its most direct form, an attempt to sell a host of agenda items, from massive spending on infrastructure and social welfare programs to calls for police reform, racial justice, gun control laws and, as he put it, ending “our exhausting war over immigration.” He took care to emphasize his own strides with implementing a mass vaccination program, declaring in chest-thumping fashion that the progress over his first 100 days was “one of the greatest logistical achievements our country has ever seen.” And he stressed, once more, that the tax hikes he’s pushing won’t impact anyone making less than $400,000.

“Trickle-down economics has never worked,” he added. “It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom [up] and middle-out.”

But at a more fundamental level, his remarks signaled a new, more unapologetic mode of big “D” Democratic thinking. Gone are the days where Bill Clinton was declaring the era of Big Government to be over. Forgotten are the moments when Barack Obama was touting his fiscal prudence. In its place was a president leaning into the very tax-and-spend charges that Republicans have thrown at him and his party for decades. Beside him was a massive swath of the Democratic coalition.

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