〇Last weekend, the U.S. Democrats overcame a months-long political struggle to pass an inflation-cutting bill in the Senate, marking a major win for President Joe Biden and “Bidenomics” ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
The bill will put $369 billion into climate change and clean energy, making it the largest climate-related investment in US history. This is expected to allow the US to meet her two-thirds of its Paris Agreement commitments while reducing energy costs. This will reduce healthcare costs for millions of Americans. It seeks to combat inflation by directly cutting individual costs and reducing the deficit through closing tax loopholes and increasing taxes on businesses and the wealthy.
The act is far from perfect. It was the waning offspring of the failed Build Back Better Act, a $2 trillion package that radically extended childcare, made community colleges free, and subsidized health insurance, but ultimately failed to secure the support of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. an evenly divided Senate). Gaining political support for the law required the abandonment of climate change ambitions and broader plans to cut costs for families. Enables further drilling for fossil fuels. A carve-out to protect private equity interests from the corporate tax elements of the law. For this reason, the act has come, and has already, come under heavy criticism from activists and climate change groups.
But in the face of fierce political opposition, this is a major or breakthrough achievement. It’s also a win for the activists and economists who have continued to feed ideas to the Biden administration to pursue alternative approaches to the economy and the environment. social investment; incentives for workers’ power and employers to provide adequate wages, apprenticeships and profit-sharing with communities; Higher taxes on the wealthy will keep inflation in check and cut costs, including a new tax on share buybacks that only boosts income for investors. These ideas are no longer stuck on the bench.
Historically, the United States and Britain have played a common leading role in the intellectual development and political implementation of new ideas and policy paradigms. and Blair’s Third Way politics, the two countries tended to move in step. But now our policy paths diverge amid the US Inflation Reduction Act and the UK Conservative Party leadership battle.
The US needs to get ahead of the UK when it comes to reducing climate change emissions and building economic justice. US emissions are significantly higher than the UK (on an absolute and her per capita basis), and the US is also the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. Similarly, inequality in the United States is greater than in the United Kingdom, and poverty is greater. Simply put, land of opportunity is not offered to too many American citizens.
But Democratic leaders are pushing a bold agenda to break deep political polarization and reshape and reshape America’s economic success. Comparing this to the UK, it is ironic that the conditions for action commensurate with the scale of the climate and natural crises, for economic strategies that prioritize everyday people and places over wealth and profits, and for expanding collective supply are: is much more favorable. The goods and services we all rely on. We have a head start in terms of the basics of social democracy. In contrast to the US, there is more consensus among political parties on the need for government action on climate and natural crises. The actions taken now are far less likely to be wiped out by an opposition victory than the fragile progressive interests of the United States.
The Conservative Party, which has been in power for more than a decade, has dabbled in several of those ideas in recent years, from May’s mission-oriented industrial strategy to Johnson’s net zero and leveling up of pledges. . At the moment, however, the Conservative Party is plummeting in the opposite direction to its U.S. counterpart, troubling policies for Tories like grammar schools and Conservatives amid a sharp rise in inflation and a cost-of-living emergency. are discussing. Rather than look around the world and turn to evidence on how to address pressing problems of our time, Mr. Truss, widely seen as a front-runner, relied on outdated financial backing and paid for itself. It says virtually nothing about how to achieve net zero, either for the sake of the economy or as a response to the cost of living crisis. As those who could privatize rather than suffer on the waiting list, there are no substantive proposals to address the creeping real privatization of the NHS.
It is wrong to point to the United States and claim that the house is in order or that the lessons can be read in simplistic terms. However, Biden and the activists and researchers around him are trying to rapidly decarbonize, relieve pressure on family wallets through collective supply, fund this, and invest in wealth and profits to quell inflationary pressures. We are ambitiously building a new kind of economic policymaking, aimed at taxing.