Biden adopts and reinforces Trump’s ‘America First’ with crisis at the door

The United States invented semiconductors, vital chips in contemporary industry, but “over the years, has let manufacturing go abroad,” US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday. “For our economy, jobs, costs and our national security, we have to manufacture these semiconductors in the United States again,” he said in a speech celebrating the passage of a law to encourage the sector.

A week earlier, on July 28, when pushing Congress to pass a package against the country’s rampant inflation, Biden said the proposal creates jobs “for those who build projects [com energia limpa] here in the United States.” This Thursday (2), he again praised the opening of posts within the American borders.

The weight that Biden has devoted to job creation — particularly in the manufacturing industry within American borders — has drawn the attention of observers and analysts. Not only in speeches but also in the proposals presented, “Bidenomics”, the nickname given to current US economic policy, has in certain respects taken on the tone of what his predecessor Donald Trump called “America first”, or “America first “.

In his 2017 inaugural address, for example, Trump said: “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries by manufacturing our products, robbing our companies and destroying our jobs.”

Of course, there is a level of patriotism in the policies of every president—especially the United States. For Edward Alden, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Affairs and a professor at Western Washington University, however, Biden distances himself as much as Trump from recent predecessors in insisting so much on revitalizing the manufacturing industry.

“They both believe that the United States has let a lot of its industry leave the country, especially to China. This is something that the other presidents just weren’t worried about, believing that jobs would be reallocated to other sectors of the economy and that trade global market would supply the demand”, he says.

In addition, both Trump and Biden focus on national security and the view that there are certain industries, such as semiconductors, that are critical and that must be within American borders.

This is the latest victory for the current administration’s “America First” policy, with Congress passing the semiconductor incentive bill last week. The legislation provides for the direct investment of US$ 52 billion in the production of chips on American soil, in addition to the granting of tax credits. The semiconductor industry — used in a wide range of cutting-edge technology products, from vehicles to smartphones — has gained even more importance since the shortage of the product from 2020 onwards, with the Covid-19 pandemic, sent prices soaring. a range of products to end consumers, most notably automobiles.

The Democrat’s speeches draw attention mainly because job creation hasn’t exactly been a problem in the United States, which has an unemployment rate at 3.5% according to data released this Friday (5) – the last time the country saw a unemployment rate lower than that was in 1968.

But there are other factors in the political calculus.

The most immediate is that Biden, with low popularity, will face midterm elections in November that should change the correlation of forces in Congress. The constant propaganda of the opening of new vacancies, mainly focused on states strongly affected by the deindustrialization of the last decades, as in the so-called rust belt, tends to help the candidates supported by the Democrat.

The second factor is the country’s peculiar economic situation. The contraction of the US GDP after two consecutive quarters could be enough to declare a recession in the US economy, which has not yet been done, mainly due to the heating up of the labor market, among other factors.

In addition to the job creation focus on the chip-incentive bill and the inflation-reduction package, a number of other measures since the beginning of the Biden administration have confirmed that “America first” still remains solid in the White House.

To date, the US government has not removed the tariff barriers imposed by former President Trump against steel imports, for example. Under the Republican, the US created a 25% surcharge on imported metal. Brazil, like some other countries, obtained a steel export quota free of this charge, but Itamaraty has been pressing ever since for this limit to be expanded, extinguished or for the country to pay a lower rate. On the 22nd, the US suspended tariffs on a specific type, cold-pressed rolled steel, but tariffs remain on the rest of the metal’s exports.

With oil prices soaring this year, the government also announced the opening of ten fields in the Gulf of Mexico and one in Alaska to reduce dependence on foreign fuel.

In addition, the Biden government even vetoed the export of vaccines against Covid-19 at the beginning of the production of the immunizer, even if the country already had enough doses for its entire population.

What primarily differentiates Biden’s “America First” from Trump’s, for Edward Alden, is the way the two dealt with allies. “Trump only talked about bringing the industry back to the US. He was angry with China, Europe, Japan and even Canada and Mexico, he saw everyone as competitors. Biden has a slightly more inclusive vision, with openness to allied countries”, he says.

Even so, the current government is not a cohesive bloc on the issue and there is internal debate — so far, however, the wing that defends concessions to allies has won. A concrete example was seen in the debates on the inflation reduction package. Previous version of the text determined tax reduction only for vehicles that were entirely produced in the USA from beginning to end. Criticized for the possibility that the measure violates the USMCA (new version of NAFTA that establishes free trade between the US, Mexico and Canada), the most current version of the package already talks about vehicles produced in North America.

The US First for Biden

Job creation in the industry Semiconductor Incentive Bill and Inflation Reduction Package Focus on Job Creation Within US Borders
Steel import surcharge Biden government has not yet lifted tariff barriers against Brazilian metal
Opening of new oil wells Faced with rising prices, the White House announced extraction points in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska to reduce foreign dependence
I veto the export of vaccines US stopped sending Covid-19 immunizations at the beginning of the manufacture of doses