(Washington) The factory against Wall Street: as the countdown to the 2024 election, but also before a possible American default, is well underway, Joe Biden wants to once again present himself as the defender of workers on Wednesday .
The 80-year-old Democrat, who intends to run again, must speak from a union training center, to create a contrast with Kevin McCarthy, boss of the elected conservatives in the House of Representatives.
The latter had chosen Monday to speak on Wall Street to denounce the spending “madness” of the Democratic camp and promise to cut spending.
Joe Biden will go to Maryland, a neighboring state of Washington, to meet apprentices destined to work in the construction of highways, mining and other public works.
His argument, already well established, is as follows: we must increase the tax burden on the rich and the multinationals, in order to finance major programs of reindustrialization, energy transition and social protection.
Taxes
The Democrat intends to set an example: he published his tax return for 2022 on Tuesday – which Donald Trump, breaking with custom, refused to do. Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden, a still-working college professor, earned $579,514 last year and paid a total of $169,820 in taxes.
The American president intends, according to an official of the White House, to recall that “the trickle-down theory does not work”, clearly that supporting large fortunes and large companies, in particular by reducing their taxes, does not have the effect automatically benefit low-income households.
The rhetoric is not new to Joe Biden: on a trip to Ireland last week, he once heavily emphasized his family’s humble origins and his promise to give working people back their “dignity”.
But this time, the battle is getting tough, because of the risk of a default on payment by the United States. This disaster scenario will only be avoided if Joe Biden’s Democrats and Kevin McCarthy’s Republicans find a compromise on public finances.
The US Congress must regularly vote to raise the authorized debt ceiling, a long-routine procedure, and unique among rich countries, but which the conservatives have made a political battleground.
This famous “ceiling” of 31,400 billion dollars was reached in mid-January, and the United States has so far escaped default by means of temporary measures.
Financial peril
In the absence of a compromise in Congress, the world’s leading economic power could find itself truly unable to meet its deadlines this summer, an unprecedented situation that carries dangers for the entire world economy.
On Tuesday, Joe Biden had already replied to Kevin McCarthy.
“He didn’t tell the rich or the powerful on Wall Street that it was time to pay their fair amount of taxes,” Trump said.
The Democrat also recalled Ronald Reagan, one of the favorite former presidents of Republican voters, who according to him had “warned in a very direct way against the temptation to play with the debt”, and who had himself presided over numerous increases in this ceiling.
“The United States has a special responsibility, to itself and to the world, to fulfill its obligations,” Ronald Reagan, for example, said in 1987, who was, however, also a staunch supporter of budgetary discipline.
The Republican Party of today “is not that of our parents. It’s quite another thing, ”said Joe Biden again.
The Democratic president regularly criticizes the conservatives for being subject to the influence of his predecessor Donald Trump, whom he could face again at the polls in 2024.