N°14-02/05/2021 After a recovery plan of nearly 2,000 billion dollars financed on public debt and whose objective is to revive consumption undermined by the crisis caused by Covid 19,
Joe Biden has just announced in Pittsburgh a plan of 2.250 billion dollars over eight years to finance the modernization of the country's infrastructure. Unlike the recovery plan, the latter should be financed by taxes, especially on corporations. It would go from 21 to 28%. Let us recall that under the Trump presidency this corporate tax had been considerably reduced from 35% to 21%. This funding announcement drew strong protests from the US Chamber of Commerce. This reaction, like those of elected Republicans and Democrats going on similar lines, is part of the search for negotiating margins in Congress and the Senate for a compromise on the financing and the participation of companies and in particular of the biggest monopolies.
What are the main lines of this plan? 1/3 of the planned funding concerns infrastructure: roads, bridges, railways, airports whose condition is generally deplorable due to the virtual abandonment of any modernization for decades. 1/3 is to be spent on industry, communications networks, transport and housing. Here too, the state of affairs is worrying for the world's leading power and this dilapidation is contributing to its loss of competitiveness. Finally, the last third would be devoted to the health status of the population marked by a decline in life expectancy since 1995, which indicates a significant weakening of the overall health status of the population.
This plan, which follows those already implemented under Trump's presidency and that of the start of Biden's presidency, is generally described as a break with the so-called "neoliberal" orientations practiced since the Reagan presidency. However on closer inspection, it is altogether different from a conversion to a statist conception, even socializing according to some and protective of employees. These stimulus plans which are, as the newspaper “Le Monde” describes them: “an immense Keynesian gamble” are in reality a massive intervention by the State to modernize, in all fields – including military – an American capitalism in loss of competitiveness and relative loss of speed vis-à-vis its main Asian competitor, China, whose significant efforts in all areas have made it a modern country. Indeed, in his Pittsburgh speech Joe Biden made it clear: he wants to outdo China. Thus, while Trump had based the strategy of confrontation with China by using the weapon of protectionism, Biden intends to do so by boosting through consumption and state investment a US economy in industrial decline – a decline that has been going on for decades but which has accelerated with the pandemic and the loss of 500,000 industrial jobs, against the backdrop of an explosion of inequalities and an impoverishment of some of the employees belonging to what Americans call the " middle class ".
While these stimulus packages are to have short- and medium-term effects, they present risks of inflation and rising interest rates that could precipitate a severe economic crisis both in the US and around the world. Biden who claims to "believe in capitalism"-- and we have no doubt about that!-- as a representative of the interests of the big capitalist monopolies would make not only American workers pay the bill, but many others too as the world economies are so interdependent. This would be the breeding ground for a further increase in tensions between imperialist powers due to the exacerbation of competition between capitalist monopolies. Everything shows that capitalism cannot be the answer to the immense challenges facing humanity: peace, health, the means to work, to live, to be educated… Its law of development of profit and the endless accumulation of capital are the obstacles that will have to be dumped.