Joe Biden’s Radical Legacy

0:01 the bargain of the last half century or so was politicians saying to the American public we're going to let factory work go abroad don't worry about that be Bankers be software Engineers let China do the Dirty Jobs and we'll get a lot of cheap stuff in the meantime it was a very naive bargain there's been a consensus in this country for decades about how the economy should be run it's defined by neoliberalism the Washington consensus the neoliberal consensus let's call with that today you reached a new low I think by suggesting that Manufacturing in America doesn't matter it doesn't matter where the product is produced Congressman we have the highest standard of living in the world no we do not for

0:49 years that system looked Unstoppable it is the economic equivalent of a force of nature until it wasn't your husband sidea which was one of the worst things that ever happened to the manufacturing industry you go to New England you go to Ohio the consensus of the last 50 years is collapsing in its place something new is taking shape and The Man Behind it is not who you'd expect let me start off with two words made in America wait wait pause did you catch that made in America contained in those three words is actually a radical declaration a plan to transform the American economy so if you

1:35 look at what Biden has done it is a major major sea change in how government has worked in the US in the last 40 years Joe Biden's policies are an enormous break with a neoliberal consensus but to understand what Biden's plan actually is you have to dive deep into the ideology that has shaped our economy for the last 50 years for decades after World War II unionized manufacturing jobs at companies like GE and GM had built the middle class by 1970 middle class households were taking home 62% of all income so if you were to look in the 1970s at the fortunes of workers companies in the country it

2:21 would kind of move in tandem they they were linked in some way by the 1980s they started to diverge there's a lot of deregulation a lot of changes to tax policy that allow Finance to just take off and one of the great emblems of this is GE General Electric was one of the oldest corporations in America it's one of the original innovators but by the time the 80s and the 90s Ru around Jack Welch Neutron Jack Welch as he was called comes in and starts slashing and burning people he got rid of 100,000 GE employees you were criticized because you got rid of so many people y well and you didn't pull back no you went forward with it harder and this is another part

3:06 of financialization where human beings workers are sort of looked at like widgets costs on the balance sheet to be moved off so companies can become more efficient so that share prices can go up under the new paradigm maximizing share prices was What mattered and wealth began to shift away from workers Innovation and Manufacturing in into Financial assets like stocks loans and real estate you know in the ' 80s Global Capital was Unleashed well by the '90s global trade started to be Unleashed I was there at the beginning of the whole free trade thing I saw some of the job losses coming but I didn't see as many losses

3:55 as actually did result Robert R was the Secretary of lab under Bill Clinton when NAFTA was signed into law NAFTA eliminated trade barriers between the US Canada and Mexico The Advocates of free trade believed that American consumers would benefit from cheaper Goods coming from around the world I was told and repeatedly assured by The Advocates for NAFTA that American jobs would be protected by strict labor standards the fact of the matter is that as labor secretary every time I went to Mexico to try to enforce the labor standards nothing

4:41 happened all told the US lost around 700,000 jobs from NAFTA but an even bigger shock was about to hit the system soad to in 2000 Clinton normalized trade relations with China supporting the country's entry into the World Trade Organization the addition of the Chinese economy to the global Marketplace will result in a more efficient worldwide allocation of resources and will raise standards of living in China and its trading partners Chinese exports flooded America and really were responsible for a large percentage of the losses of manufacturing jobs in the United States

5:27 and when the jobs disappeared the shops the banks the people disappeared too between 1998 and 2021 the US lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs due to trade policies there's no future here with 75% of your refrigerators being built in Mexico they promis basically jobs for our kids if they wanted them that's not happening there was a real fan bargain that was made in the 1990s onward we outsourced our entire industrial Commons in exchange for cheap stuff we decided to stop making things and start consuming things one of the Beauties in some ways

6:13 of the neoliberal system at least for those that were buying into it is that it was simple as long as share prices were going up and consumer prices were going down there was no problem as long as companies were getting richer things were supposedly fine amidst all of that wealth creation America's middle class saw its share of national income decline that's the sort of Dirty Little Secret of neoliberalism which is that yeah the pie got bigger but fewer people got a slice of it all the things that make us middle class Education Health Care housing the price of these things didn't go down indeed the price of these things Rose

7:00 at the same time you get a lot of cheap consumer goods you also get a cost of living crisis so it's a very dangerous Paradox please welcome the next president of the United States Mr Donald J trump it took I think essentially the 2016 election where both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump critiqued that mainstream view for policy makers in Washington to really wake up to the reality of what they had wrought they say Trump is starting a trade War I say no the trade war ended a long time ago and the United States lost because our leaders didn't take care of our people and our companies the era of global

7:50 freeloading and taking advantage of the United States is over it's just over there was a kind of a coming to Jesus moment under Trump but the problem with the Trump Administration is it didn't have any policy prescription for the US itself it simply said China's bad we're going to slap tariffs on China but at the same time another more ambitious policy plan was being developed elsewhere a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton was shaken by the loss in 2016 he traveled to Ohio Colorado and Nebraska to talk to Americans from across the political Spectrum the result was a report foreign policy for the middle class co-authored by Jake Sullivan my National Security adviser I choose Jake Sullivan and it help steer

8:37 what I call a foreign policy for the middle class Biden comes in and says we need an entirely new philosophy of growth is based on a simple premise that will reward work not wealth in this country he's created what some people would call biomics what some people would call a postneoliberal world I don't buy for one second that the Vitality of American manufacturing is a thing of the past what this means is that he's decided to prioritize not just share prices and not just consumers but jobs incomes communities today we're getting to work to rebuild the backbone of America manufacturing unions the middle class over the past four years

9:22 the Biden Administration has quietly translated that worldview into a multi-trillion dollar set of policy you have to go back to the 50s when the statistics were created to find anything comparable to the level of manufacturing investment that we see right now that investment can be broken down into three pieces of legislation the bipartisan infrastructure law a massive infrastructure Bill the inflation reduction act helping to fuel a boom in clean energy all across the United States and the chips and science act boosting domestic semiconductor production we have not seen an infrastructure program this big since the Eisenhower era we haven't seen ambition that government could do this much I would argue since FDR under Biden investment in manufacturing construction has surged to

10:10 more than triple the average rate of the 2010s and those Investments are flowing disproportionately to counties where unemployment is highest it could be ultimately trillions of dollars that get invested in the economy targeted not at what Private Industry is focused on in recent decades like stock BuyBacks and other policies that redistribute income upwards instead we're seeing companies invest in real places with real workers for the first time in Generations how's it been how's it impacted your life man tremendously my life completely changed man I I got things now that I never thought I could have now we're in a position to where we have 19 20 year old people that are working and are thinking about their future the sit you up for the future medical dental vision pension

10:56 something to fall back on when it's all over with after Decades of stagnating wages these Investments are creating well-paid jobs with good benefits and that's by Design there's something called the investment tax credit that's a part of the inflation reduction act think of it like layers in a cake what it does is say that the public sector will help businesses cover 6% of their Capital cost if they are just investing in a clean energy technology that we find interesting but you can get five times that amount if also paying prevailing wages and running apprenticeship programs you can get an additional 20% of that if you're investing in a low-income Community 10% if you are investing in a community that's been

11:42 historically reliant on the fossil fuel industry and an additional 10% on top of that if you are using made in America Supply chains if you take all of the layers in the cake companies could see up to 70% of their Capital cost covered these types of policies are an attempt to shift companies away from the financial logic that has dominated corporate behavior for decades take an example like Cleveland Cliffs this is one of the Count's Premier steel manufacturers in recent decades they've engaged a lot in stock BuyBacks uh to reward their shareholders now they're working with the United Steel worker Union to build clean Steel in places across the country but in a global economy built by Decades of free trade what's to stop jobs like these from getting wiped out again

12:29 you're about to get a clear view of China's capacity to build this is a really big moment for the global economy the US has accused China of a practice called dumping flooding the market with a surplus of goods like electric vehicles or solar panels at artificially low prices we've seen this story before when the global market is flooded by artificially cheap Chinese products the viability of American firms is put into question China has Surplus in part thanks to years of careful planning and massive government subsidies but weak environmental and labor standards are also a factor the worry is that if we are just importing the lowest cost products that it will undermine labor

13:15 standards here at home and undermine the US economy Biden has kept Trump's China tariffs in place and recently announced new tariffs on Chinese Goods I thought Trump was right to put tariffs on China I I think Biden was right to continue them not for punitive reasons but because within the current system China is not playing by the rules of the game the Biden administration's tariffs on China are targeted in the same sectors where it's investing at home like steel semiconductors and clean energy the goal is to protect the jobs created in those sectors from being undercut by cheaper Imports you simply cannot say I'm going to Outsource the entire clean energy transition to one

14:00 country and not have any of those jobs in my own country and expect there to be a country left after that just like it took 40 years for neoliberalism to play out it's going to take many years and and even decades for the Post neoliberal era to play out you look at for example in Upstate New York what's happening with the building of a semiconductor industry from the ground up that's a 10-year process big sea changes like the one we're going through are complicated they're complicated to message it's hard to say we're moving from one political economy to another that's not something that you message on on Fox or MSNBC Biden's new economic worldview hasn't been at the center of most political coverage instead we get

14:46 coverage like this during his speech the president made a gap saying quote let me start off with two words made in America made in America but there is a coherent policy experiment Happening Here a response to Decades of neoliberal Economics whether voters choose to continue that experiment could dramatically shape the future of the American economy so I think after one term of trump and one term of Biden we have a decent sense of how they're going to govern Trump broke with the neoliberal era when it came to trade but he kept in place a lot of neoliberal policies like cutting taxes for the rich and deregulation we've tried neoliberalism

15:33 what happened during those 45 years was that wages stagnated Wall Street exploded big Banks got bailouts most Americans really came out on the short end and it pains me to say this because I was part of previous administrations I was in the Carter Administration I was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration I think that these administrations accomplished a lot of good things but looking back historically those administrations did not change the neoliberal consensus Joe Biden is changing it thank you so much for watching our video if you'd like to see more stories like this one be sure to like And

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