After handily winning a primary packed with 20-odd people by refusing to embark on their race to the Left, Joe Biden is changing his tune. With the Democratic nominee’s most obvious selling point, personal decency and respect for decorum, imperiled by a credible sexual assault allegation, Biden now seems more desperate than ever to cater to the party’s far Left base.
Most noteworthy is the appointment of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as co-chairwoman of his climate change panel. During the primary, Biden’s initial climate proposal stood out from the rest precisely because it avoided the radical redistributionism of Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal.” Biden backed both an increase in nuclear research and production and using trade negotiations to cajole China, the world’s worst producer of greenhouse gases, into combating its own emissions.
Putting Ocasio-Cortez on his climate panel indicates that perhaps that wouldn’t be the plan we’d get in practice, however. Instead, Biden seems willing to incorporate aspects of the “Green New Deal,” the contents of which I summarized last year:
Furthermore, of the six total topics covered by the early proposal of the “Green New Deal” — which, might I remind you, its proponents say is intended to fight the single greatest threat to planet Earth — one is to “Uphold Indigenous Rights.” Under his statute, the “Green New Deal” forbids any “corporate schemes that places profits over community burdens and benefits,” including cap-and-trade and carbon capture and storage. So to paraphrase Ocasio-Cortez: We’re like: The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is that you are hung up on dams, nuclear power, and any scheme that makes carbon-free energy remotely viable?
Ocasio-Cortez’s Deal also promises to include a federal jobs guarantee and may include “additional measures such as basic income programs [or] universal health care programs.” This has nothing to do with green energy, although it could be viewed as an attempt to help the millions of people in multiple industries who stand to be thrown out of work if anything like this scheme is put into effect.
It might make sense to throw Ocasio-Cortez a bone, given her national ubiquity and relative popularity among the Left. But what makes less sense is Biden’s appointment of the crackpot economist Stephanie Kelton to his economy panel.
Kelton, most notable in political circles for advising Bernie Sanders, is the nation’s most vocal proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, which maintains that because the federal government issues its own currency, it could never run out of money as it could always print more to pay off debt and purchase whatever it wants. MMT fans assert that the bigger threat to the economy then, inflation, could be ameliorated with increased taxation — because that worked so well in the Weimar Republic.
Ocasio-Cortez is a household name, and giving her a pretty patronage is an easy way garner the trust of voters on the fence about turning out for Biden. Kelton is a fringe economist, one celebrated solely by the most extreme and high-information voters of the Left and pretty widely disliked by the few people outside of that circle who know about her.
Couple that with Biden’s recent assertions that he wishes to have an “FDR-sized presidency” and that he’s essentially a filler candidate until a more committed leftist can actually win national elections, and it’s pretty evident that Biden is running no mere continuation of the Obama legacy.
