Biden’s Green Plans Put the Best Ideas of His Rivals to Work

It’s clear that the U.S. economy needs an enormous overhaul, similar in scale to the New Deal. America's health-care system is famously dysfunctional, rent is unaffordable for too many people, infrastructure is falling apart, inequality is at staggering levels and the nation is unprepared for the threat of climate change. Some believed that Bernie Sanders was the candidate best positioned to be the new FDR; others thought it was Elizabeth Warren. But by a strange twist of fate, it looks like it just might be Joe Biden -- a man many had pegged as a centrist defender of the status quo.

Since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, Biden has been rolling out a series of startlingly ambitious plans for reshaping the U.S. economy. His tax plan would make the U.S. tax system significantly more progressive, reversing the trend of the past few decades. His industrial policy plan was a sharp departure from the traditional free-trade consensus, and includes a variety of measures to restore U.S. technological supremacy, train workers and bring back vulnerable supply chains to guard against disasters. And his housing plan would expand and strengthen the Section 8 voucher program, giving low-income people the chance to move to better neighborhoods.