Joe Biden will call for a moderate approach toward reviving the U.S. economy if elected president that includes spurring manufacturing and encouraging innovation, shelving for now the more ambitious proposals pushed by progressive Democrats, people familiar with his plans said.
The Democratic nominee plans to deliver an economic speech on Thursday near his childhood hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, framing his argument for the rest of the campaign.
The outline of the plan covers four areas: A push to buy American and incentivize American jobs, clean energy and the “caring” economy such as child-care and elder-care workers and domestic workers, and racial equity, two people familiar with the plan said.
He will follow Thursday’s speech with detailed policy proposals leading up to the Democratic National Convention, which begins Aug. 17. Other Democrats were being briefed Wednesday on Biden’s plans.
Biden’s advisors said the plan, once fully revealed, would be ambitious.
“This will be the largest mobilization of public investments in procurement, infrastructure and R&D since World War II -- and that’s just a part of the plan,” said Jake Sullivan, a top policy advisor.
“Biden wants to get to the same place that many to his left want to get to but he firmly believes that it will take an incremental path to get there and that you can’t leapfrog the political reality that he has come to know in many decades in politics,” said Jared Bernstein, who is advising the campaign after serving as Biden’s chief economic advisor in the vice president’s office.
Biden’s proposals will hit some of the areas that are often discussed by both the right and left, including efforts to spur manufacturing and to encourage innovation.
“So his destination on many key issues, particularly on the economy and health care, is very similar to the further left but his path to get there is going to be more incremental,” Bernstein said.
Plan Draws From Primary Opponents
Each individual idea may seem small but “the beauty of these plans is in the totality” of everything that Biden will be proposing on the economy in the coming weeks, Bernstein said.