Democratic presidential candidate Biden proposes ‘Buy American’ campaign
The former vice-president has called for 700 million dollars to be spent on bolstering US manufacturing and technology firms.
Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden has proposed sweeping new uses of the state’s regulatory and spending power to bolster US manufacturing and technology firms.
The former vice-president to Barack Obama has called for a 400 billion-dollar (£316 billion), four-year increase in Government purchasing of US-based goods and services plus 300 billion dollars (£237 billion) in new research and development in American technology concerns.
Among other policies expected to be announced in an economic pitch on Thursday, he proposes tightening current “Buy American” laws that are intended to benefit US firms but can be easily circumvented by Government agencies.
The former vice-president will discuss the proposals on Thursday at a factory in Pennsylvania.
It is the first of a series of addresses Biden plans as he shifts his line of attack against incumbent president Donald Trump to the economy.
Mr Biden will continue in coming weeks with an energy plan to combat the climate crisis and a third package on what the campaign has dubbed the “caring economy”, with a focus on making child care and elder care more affordable and less of an impediment to working-age Americans.
“What’s going on here, we need to build back, not just to where we were but build back better than we’ve ever been,” Mr Biden told the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on Wednesday.
“We’re going to take a monumental step forward for the prosperity, power, safety and dignity of all American workers.”
They cast Mr Trump’s imposition of tariffs and uneven trade negotiations with other nations as a slapdash isolationism compromised further by tax policies that enrich multinational corporations.
Mr Biden’s campaign also pointed to a rise in foreign procurement and continued outsourcing of jobs by US-based corporations during Mr Trump’s presidency.
Republicans nonetheless have made clear they will attack Mr Biden on trade and the economy, framing the Democratic establishment figure as a tool of the far left on taxes and a willing participant in decades of trade policy that gutted American workers.
Mr Trump has also lampooned Biden as “weak on China”.
