On April 25th, 2023, President Joe Biden officially launched his campaign for re-election. Back then, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis were locked in a still-somewhat-competitive battle for the Republican nomination. Kevin McCarthy was the sitting Speaker of the House, and he was in the middle of a months-long standoff with the White House over the debt ceiling that wouldn’t be resolved for another month. Overseas, Ukraine was preparing for its long-awaited counteroffensive, while a seemingly placid Middle East was ready for National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to call it “quieter than it had been in two decades.”
Amidst all of these events, it could have been easy to notice something peculiar: that, when Joe Biden’s campaign launched its official website, it contained nothing on policy. There was a store, as well as a place for you to put in your email so you could receive notifications about how Chuck Schumer is DEVASTATED and ACTUALLY GONNA DO IT THIS TIME every day for the rest of your life. There were also countless links for donations, complete with instructions for both online and mail-in contributions. But no matter where you looked, there was nothing as to what, exactly, Biden and Harris would do with four more years in power. A second-term agenda was completely missing. Still, this sort of thing wasn’t exactly uncommon for newly-launched campaigns—many of which deliberately choose to drop their agendas piecemeal to drive free media coverage—so it didn’t receive much notice at the time. Most assumed that they simply planned to lay out their agenda in the following months and left it at that.
Now, it is June 2024. A lot of things have changed over the 14 months. The primaries are over, with both winners having easily dispatched their competition. We have a new Speaker of the House, a new war overseas, and an entirely new political environment: one where Biden is trailing, not leading, Trump, and his approval rating is below, not above, where it was in 2022. The general election campaign is fully underway, with tens of millions of dollars already spent, both tickets nearly set, and a head-to-head debate only a week away. But one thing is still the same: Joe Biden dot com does not have a single policy listed on it. It still has all of the same donation links, of course, as well as an expanded merch page that seemingly has a rapid response team for everything Trump says. But there’s still nothing on policy. The closest thing they have to it on the entire page is an “accomplishments” page that goes over the bills they’ve passed over, complete with a link to a YouTube video from two years ago. But this section can’t be directly accessed on the front page: as of now, you can only get to it by finding the link on Google or manually typing in joebiden.com/accomplishments/ in your search bar.
What in the world is going on? I decided to find out. Going through Biden’s record, proposals, and public statements, I seek to answer a question his campaign should have answered a long time ago: what, exactly, does the President want to do with a second term?
Economic Policy
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