Konstantin Sonin: "Left march Biden"

"President Biden on the manner is very different from Bayden, who spent for thirty-five years a senator. He could not finish the answer, fitting at the allotted time, and allowed offensive blunders. President Biden lasted one of the most striking appeals to the American Congress in recent decades. Due to the fact that he did not turn to the room, as the hall, with all, with all, with all. Congressmen, judges and an ordinary public, and to a very small group of people - that is, almost entirely, to the TV, he used a dramatic whisper in American history to emphasize the simplicity, everyday life, routine of his priorities. The course of Roosevelt and the Great Society of Johnson, - writes professor at the University of Chicago on his Facebook page.

“When in January, before Bayden’s entry, I predicted his nearest agenda, it looked like this: a 2-trillion“ anti-crisis ”bag with large-scale direct help to everyone except the rich, then a 500-million-million-in“ infrastructure ”bag and then another, also 500 million.

The anti -crisis package was taken (and annual growth rates in the first quarter 2021 - 6.4%), and it is so popular among citizens that the next two packages are also 2 trillion! The infrastructure includes the entire conceivable "infrastructure", plus "green perestroika" (designated by the word Jobs), plus 400 billion for the restructuring of support for poor old age. And the next, two trillions, includes a free kindergarten financed from the federal budget, an increase in paid leave and free 2 years of undergraduate for everyone. And just transfers to working poor ones (the category is indicated by Tax Credits).

These mega-packets will be financed due to the increase in taxes on the rich (on those families in which the annual income is above 400 thousand dollars) and on the corporation (rates will be increased from 20% to 25%, that is, they will be lower than to Trump's decline). And this increase in taxes for rich and corporation is also popular among voters! The popularity of packages is very important, because at, in fact, 50 to 50 in both wards of Congress, Biden’s plans are very dependent on those democrats who “on the teeth” win their rather conservative districts. And it seems that both packages have high chances of becoming laws.

Republicans are not yet able to configure citizens against these plans of Biden. This is partly the result of the Trump Revolution in the Republican Party - Republicans are now not so against high taxes and the expansion of state programs. They are no longer a “big business party”, like the last forty years ... Today, the republican counter -offices - that is, what they already agree to - higher than what was expected from Biden's plans in January! But, it seems, the alignment is such that the democrats will sell both packages on the scale determined in the message.

It is interesting that Biden’s “left course” is close in their own way to the fact that the Libertarian-lands of economic freedom defended in the 1930s, criticizing Roosevelt and Keynes. Following both Locke and Smith, Henry Simons, one of the leaders of the “first Chicago school”, in his famous A Positive Program for Laissez Faire, greeted the equalizing redistribution of wealth. Hayek, who had not yet written the great “road to slavery”, supported this - in particular, supported the minimum guaranteed income.

What the supporters of economic freedom fought with - and what, of course, were right - this is with the intervention of state bodies in the production and work of the markets. Although the Biden program provides for a certain increase in regulation (this is the very “creation of green jobs”), these increase are not the central part of its economic program. This program is simultaneously a historical step towards increasing the role of the state in society and not corresponding to this, much smaller, step in the field of economics. ”