The World This Week: Biden’s $2 Trillion ‘Paradigm Shift’

On Friday’s The World This Week, The Daily Beast’s Nico Hines and The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Dalton discussed President Joe Biden’s monumental infrastructure bill—describing the plan as a potential $2 trillion sign of a “paradigm shift” in the way Americans view government spending.

“During the financial crisis of 2008, America passed a 700-something billion dollar stimulus package and everyone thought that was huge,” said Dalton. “But this is 2 trillion dollars. It’s almost a paradigm shift in the way America thinks about macroeconomics.”

Dalton argued that the bill has the potential to shift America’s perception of the government’s inability to rectify economic inequity, and pointed to the U.S.’s long history of underinvesting in infrastructure.

“One of the main reasons for that is because of the philosophy that president Reagan embodied, which is ‘the government is the problem, not the solution’,” Dalton said. “Now people understand that maybe government can be the solution.”

Nico Hines remarked on the undeniable similarities between Biden’s new plan and the policies championed by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the form of the Green New Deal, which many on the right viewed viewed as radical.

“[Biden] put his big, friendly old, appeal-to-everybody… stamp on it,” said Hines, who described the bill as “effectively the same” as “what was being dismissed as a radical crazy progressive agenda.”

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