Now All Biden Has to Do Is Build It

Now All Biden Has to Do Is Build It

In the past few months, Joe Biden’s agenda has gone from a failed promise to real legislation.

Taken together, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) have the potential to put America on a path to decarbonization, develop some of the most advanced and crucial supply chains in the world, and build all kinds of next-generation technologies. It’s hard to overstate just how transformative these plans could be if they are carried out in the right way.

But that’s a big “if.” Because Biden’s legacy will not be written just in tax code and regulatory law. All of this legislation is about building things in the real world — from wind farms to semiconductor manufacturing plants to electric vehicle charging stations and so much more. Which means the hard work isn’t over. It’s just beginning.

Felicia Wong is the president and chief executive of the Roosevelt Institute and someone who has had an unusually clear read of the Biden administration from the beginning. Wong has been arguing that Biden wants to fundamentally reshape the productive capacity of the economy. And now he’s gotten approval of bills that have the potential to do just that. But Wong is also realistic about the obstacles in the way of realizing that project. And so the question at the center of this conversation is: What will it take to turn the Biden agenda from written legislation into lived reality?

We also discuss the death of the “care infrastructure” for helping families that was at the heart of the Build Back Better proposal, the challenges of building up the American semiconductor industry, why some progressives view these bills as “corporate welfare,” the conservative argument that government shouldn’t be “picking winners and losers,” how these bills could respond to America’s deep regional inequalities, how to address the problem of NIMBYism, what participatory budgeting and worker cooperatives can teach us about better ways to represent community voices, why we should want the government to take bigger risks even if that means more government failure, and much more

Mentioned:

All Biden Has to Do Now Is Change the Way We Live” by Ezra Klein

Book recommendations:

The Middle Out by Michael Tomasky (accompanied by new podcast, "How to Save a Country")

Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Chords of Change (forthcoming 2023) by Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

​​ “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Episoder(490)

An Unusually Optimistic Conversation With Bernie Sanders

An Unusually Optimistic Conversation With Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders didn’t win the 2020 election. But he may have won its aftermath.If you look back at Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’s careers, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan,...

23 Mar 202128min

Andrew Cuomo and the Performance of Power

Andrew Cuomo and the Performance of Power

Six months ago, Andrew Cuomo was on top of the world. He was touted as the anti-Donald Trump — the calm, fact-driven coronavirus leader the country needed. Now, amid allegations of hiding the true num...

19 Mar 20211h 5min

Mark Bittman Cooked Everything. Now He Wants to Change Everything.

Mark Bittman Cooked Everything. Now He Wants to Change Everything.

Mark Bittman taught me to cook. I read his New York Times cooking column, “The Minimalist,” religiously. I bought “How to Cook Everything,” that red brick of a cookbook, and then, when I gave up meat,...

16 Mar 202148min

How America’s Covid-19 Nightmare Ends

How America’s Covid-19 Nightmare Ends

On Jan. 28, I published a column that began like this: “I hope, in the end, that this article reads as alarmism. I hope that a year from now it’s a piece people point to as an overreaction.”Today, tha...

12 Mar 20211h 1min

What Does Toxic Stress Do to Children?

What Does Toxic Stress Do to Children?

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s pioneering work on how childhood trauma shapes adult outcomes led to her being named the first surgeon general of California. That was in 2019. And then, of course, the novel...

9 Mar 20211h 6min

Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.

Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.

We were promised, with the internet, a productivity revolution. We were told that we’d get more done, in less time, with less stress. Instead, we got always-on communication, the dissolution of the bo...

5 Mar 202154min

What a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look Like

What a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look Like

If you watched this past weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, you heard a lot of debunked election conspiracies, dire warnings about “cancel culture” and unwavering fealty to Donald Tru...

2 Mar 202158min

How the Texas Crisis Could Become Everyone's Crisis

How the Texas Crisis Could Become Everyone's Crisis

Last week, freezing temperatures overwhelmed the Texas power grid, setting off rolling blackouts that left millions without power during an intense winter storm. But this story is a lot bigger than Te...

26 Feb 20211h 20min

Populært innen Politikk og nyheter

giver-og-gjengen-vg
aftenpodden
forklart
lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
aftenpodden-usa
popradet
i-retten
stopp-verden
det-store-bildet
fotballpodden-2
rss-gukild-johaug
dine-penger-pengeradet
rss-ness
hanna-de-heldige
nokon-ma-ga
aftenbla-bla
bt-dokumentar-2
e24-podden
frokostshowet-pa-p5
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk