In a major campaign speech, Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden laid out a $700 billion economic recovery plan focused on increasing federal spending on U.S.-made products and technology. He dubbed the plan “Buy American.” The proposal has been compared to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign call to invest $1.5 trillion in federal spending on U.S.-made clean energy products. Biden spoke in Pennsylvania.
Joe Biden: “Donald Trump may believe that pitting Americans against Americans will benefit him. I don’t. We have a health crisis, an economic crisis, a racial justice crisis, a climate crisis. We need to come together to solve these crises, to solve them as Americans. This is our moment to imagine and to build a new American economy for our families and for our communities.”
Meanwhile, a task force made up of allies of Joe Biden and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has released policy recommendations that will be used to draft the Democratic Party’s new platform. The task force endorsed free pre-K, tuition-free public college for most families, student loan forgiveness, carbon-free power by 2035, the end of private prisons and the end of cash bail. The report didn’t endorse two key planks of Sanders’s campaign: Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.