Unfortunately his domestic achievements have been somewhat mediocre.
His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people.
I really do think his major failure was not pushing for a lasting achievement like implementing federal parental leave. He had the chance, but opted for a 1 year extension of child tax credits.
And of course the US has an illegal immigration problem. European right on the rise from 1/10th the number of illegal immigrants the US gets.
"His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people."
Look at the $300bn climate funding in the Inflation Reduction Act and the impact on bringing chip manufacturing onshore with the Chips Act. All this with a nearly divided congress.
Easily the most effective US president of my lifetime.
The CHIPS act has stagnated since its announcement, it comes with onerous DEI requirements on new chipmaker facilities which just compounds the shortage of skilled labor. There has been no progress on construction of announced facilities since the bill's passage.
The IRA has nothing to do with Joe Biden. It passed because Joe Manchin decided at the last minute that he hated what China is doing with trying to monopolize stuff like solar panels and batteries.
There's a reason people jokingly refer to him as President Manchin.
The US economy is extremely robust right now and the European countries that took a balanced budget austerity approach are in shambles. Look at England. Just carnage over there.
Deficit spending makes sense when the spending invests in the future. Every mortgage holder understands this implicitly. If these deficit levels concern you the obvious first place to start would be on the revenue side, by letting the Trump 2017 tax cuts expire.
Can't wait til Jan 2025. I'll be taking full advantage of the home energy rebates to rewire the electric, install modern insulation, and install energy efficient heating/cooling in my 1930's Craftsman. The rebates should cover up-to $14,000 of that cost which will be a great help.
1/10th the number of illegal immigrants? The US gets less illegal immigrants than Europe per capita. If you look at the charts from the last 10 years of the immigrants as percentage of population you recognize that the US is seeing slower growth while European countries see faster immigration. This is happening while the US has a high immigration rate of desirable skilled workers.
> And of course the US has an illegal immigration problem. European right on the rise from 1/10th the number of illegal immigrants the US gets.
Those are also the backbone of a lot of agriculture in the US, either a president tackles it and food inflation rises or you keep the status quo and prices steady.
There's no winning strategy, whomever tackles it will have it backfire someway, the US depends on exploiting cheap labour for its low margin industries.
Trump's strategy of making lots of noise about building walls to stop illegal immigrants while not actually building or stopping them seems to be working reasonably well.
Genuine question: is the European right actually on the rise? It seems somewhat localized to France, where Macron just unexpectedly outmaneuvered both Le Pen's party and the left coalition that formed to counter Le Pen, securing himself a surprise victory in the snap election everyone thought would be a disaster for him. In the EU as a whole, Ursula von der Leyen just won another 5 years as the President of the European Commission, which seems like a continuation of the status quo in the EU rather than a turn toward the right.
This is all from my naive perspective as an American.
Edit: I'd appreciate a reply instead of a downvote. As I said, I'm asking a genuine question.
Biggest party in the Netherlands is radical right (PVV). In France they barely got a parliamentary majority against Le Pen, in a country that's not particularly good at coalitions, so doesn't look like it will last. Hungary has been on the authoritorian track for quite some time. Poland just managed to get off it, but we'll have to see if it will stick. Italy got a neo-fascist.
Generally you see radical right gaining more votes in Europe, even if they don't outright win everywhere. You also see that other parties adopt ideas from the far right. This means that policy is changing in that direction and that the discourse is more around those topics. Meanwhile research shows that this doesn't actually make voters vote less for the radical right parties, so those other parties are not gaining anything from it.
I see, thanks for the info! Interesting that Poland managed to get off the authoritarian track as you said, when they're so geographically close to being embroiled in war again. I'd think that would lead people to lean toward that kind of "follow the strong leader to get us through war" thinking, but obviously I'm glad it doesn't.
Makes one wonder whether they just like his fascist leadership style or there are some rather direct incentives involved. Russian secret services like to stir the pot in other countries in order to weaken them.
A few German right-wing dudes seems to have more or less provably received money and favors from Russia.
The right-wing party in Poland (PiS) still won the latest election (as in - got the most votes), but didn't anyone willing to form the coalition with them that would secure enough votes to form government - other major parties campaigned on being explicitly anti-PiS. So, even though PiS won, they are the opposition now, and the wide anti-PiS coalition is in power.
Also to add, PIS was mired in the passports for sale scandal, which was a significant reason for them losing the election. People didn't vote against anti-immigration and far-right behavior, they voted against PIS hypocrisy.
Here in France, the media isn't so prompt as to call last election's results a "victory" for Macron's party.
Quite the contrary, his party now finds itself with (considerably) less parliament seats that it had, and when it could get a majority by appealing to the "moderate" right, he now has to compromise with the opposition. His party doesn't even hold a relative majority anymore.
Sadly my country hasn't been the only European one where fascism is creeping up again. The far rights came out on top in the last European Parliament election in Belgium, Italy, Austria, Hungary and France. In the other countries, its scores are steadily, dreadfully, increasing with each passing election.
Personally, I blame the increasing economic inequality and austerity politics lead in Europe since the 80s.
My personal opinion as a non-European who has voted in the UK elections as a Commonwealth citizen: the far-right tends to win broad support in European Parliament elections mostly as a reactionary bulwark against the EU's Open Borders policy (and rightly so). People tend to vote somewhat rationally for national elections.
Honestly, from my perspective, the rise of rampant immigration (and that too contributed by people of my community) is going to damage the entirety of Europe in the long run. Already I've seen firsthand the skewing of the demographic pyramid in the younger generation (0-18 yrs), a lack of worthwhile job prospects for second generation immigrants, and the rising tide of anti-national behaviors from members of migrant communities. As Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed rightly said, the next generation of terrorists will not come from Saudi Arabia or the Middle East, but from Europe. The kind of venom that mosques here in Europe spew is much worse than the extremely highly-monitored mosque sermons in the Middle East, from Egypt to Oman.
From my Muslim perspective, Europe will be a lost cause in a single generation, unless there is a MASSIVE cultural upheaval that stomps and quashes the current migratory trend. Austerity and inequality are just the sparks, but the bigger powder keg is the growing base of increasingly alienated migrants who have to face the austerity and inequality (see Leeds riots very recently). European society was never structured to take in so many incompatible migrants like American society is.
There ought to be a clear distinction between indigenous Muslims who migrated post WW2 all the way to the 80s and 90s, and the recent migration waves which outnumber the former. The former have been able to acclimatize to European culture while still maintaining their roots (not to mention that it was harder to migrate back then - you needed a job already for starters). The latter bring the same tribalistic beliefs of their homelands over here. And trust me, the former DESPISE the latter, and it's an understatement. Not because they want to pull the ladder up after them, but because the latter import the same foul culture that the former wanted to escape from.
As a Muslim, I don't want to see people praying on the roads and streets of Paris. I didn't want to see people chanting "From the river to the sea" for Gazans (who have a very strong reason for being despised by the rest of the Middle East). I don't want to see Muharram processions in Barcelona either.
Fun fact, the Middle East has one of the most relaxed migration policies across the world, yet a lot of European migrants are actually unable to migrate because they are criminals back home (the first condition to obtaining a residence visa is a police clearance).
Muharram processions are specific to the Shia community. Allowing one and not letting Sunnis or Sufis do some arcane street ritual/procession is recipe for disaster. Best to not allow anything. Let these rituals be relegated to the mosques and Imambaras, not on the streets where they hamper with the daily lives of non-Muslims.
Indigenous Muslims that you had mentioned are my absolute favorite kind of people, that I've eschewed the rest. The rest could actually learn a thing or two from them (but of course they won't).
I believe the immigration problem is mostly fear mongering by the far right. In France less than a thousandth of the population could be classified as "immigrants".
I am not saying we shouldn't have a sound immigration policy, but closing/controlling the EU's borders is highly unrealistic. Just look at Italy's far right government: they promised to stop all immigration to the country but since Giorgia Meloni's investiture, the numbers have never been higher.
The solution should reside in providing better integration and opportunities to migrants, who could very well be part of the solution to Europe's demographic crisis. The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.
Austerity and inequality are the direct results of deregulation, financialization and privatization of previously fine public services. Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.
> The solution should reside in providing better integration and opportunities to migrants, who could very well be part of the solution to Europe's demographic crisis.
The issue is that Europe has already taken in far too many migrants than it can possibly integrate. Right now, taking more migrants isn't a feasible situation if they're impossible to integrate.
The solution to Europe's (or any country's) demographic crisis isn't more migrants. It's making a conducive and affordable environment for families and childbearing. Cheaper healthcare, affordable childcare, cheaper education, etc. and that's just scratching the surface.
> Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.
So is that why Sweden, whose population is 10% non-Swedish now, has had to declare publicly that their crime rates have skyrocketed over the past decade? Why Poland, which took very few migrants pre-Ukraine, has had a very low crime rate? Call me right-wing, but while some of their claims might be horseshit, others are more than obvious truisms.
> The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.
The most diverse cities were already major production centers before migrants entered the picture. For a more accurate reference, compare the levels of non-residential investment into these cities pre and post the migrant crisis.
>In France less than a thousandth of the population could be classified as "immigrants".
France is obviously one of the few countries in Europe that could uniquely integrate its migrant population, but your numbers are wildly inaccurate too. Out of a population of 67 million, 8.7 million were foreign born. Sure foreign born could mean a lot of things, but that still isn't "less than a thousandth" of the population. And a significant number concentrate in the major cities, further ghettoizing them.
I don't believe you can convince your population to raise more children, sure you can make it easier for those that want to, but demographic decline is a worldwide phenomena. It's the endgame of the demographic transition.
What happens in Sweden is mostly due to a resurgence of organized crime. I don't think closing down the country's borders (which, again, isn't feasible by any realistic mean) woulf fix the problem. To find a culprit, you should look at poverty rates which is always much more strongly correlated to crime than ethnicity or whatever else. Here's an article from the Guardian that explores this, for what it's worth: https://theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-violence-...
When speaking of immigrants I always think of illegal immigrants from Africa, which is what the right talks about anyway. In that regard, I believe my figure of one one thousandth is more accurate.
And how again did organized crime become resurgent in Sweden? Was it not driven by scores of unemployed immigrant youth finding an outlet for their skills, coupled with a relaxed policing culture that was developed in good times?
We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in. The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.
As it stands now, it is tougher for me as an affluent non-European to migrate to Sweden, or any other European country (except Switzerland apparently, where I'm at now) for the long term, than it is for me to settle in the UAE or Singapore. It is tougher for my highly skilled friends in tech who want to move to Europe, so they've chosen to move to Singapore instead. On the other hand, both the UAE and Singapore are making it much harder for low-skilled migrants to get in, while they find it much easier to go and settle in Europe. And they are, in hordes.
> And how again did organized crime become resurgent in Sweden? Was it not driven by scores of unemployed immigrant youth finding an outlet for their skills, coupled with a relaxed policing culture that was developed in good times?
In short: no. Read the article whose link I posted above.
> We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in.
And how could we do that ? We can't put policemen along every 4m of the European border. We are already doing random border controls, I don't think we can do much better without bankrupting ourselves.
> The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.
I don't think comparing the EU with the UAE makes much sense here. The situations are very different. Also, the UAE depends on massive numbers of foreign low-skilled workers to run the country. There are usually only allowed to stay for the duration of their work, and are hidden away from the rest of the country. There are many reported cases of worker abuse and inhumane working conditions. Overall, I'd wager there to be much more violence in the UAE than in Europe. In any case, you were speaking of values earlier, I don't think Europe has much to learn from the UAE in that department.
As for Singapore, I don't know what to say. It's a city-state, obviously it functions very differently than a continent-sized loose economic union of several country. Not that their ways have nothing of interest to us...
I'll conclude on our exchange, feel free to disagree:
You seem to believe about everyone can get into Europe, which is far from being the case. Famously in France, Macron's government last immigration law was the last one in a series of about a hundred similar ones since WW2.
I am yet to hear of an immigration policy that isn't just "give them less rights, give more money to the police, etc.", which as we have seen is only effective if our goal is to worsen the situation.
The influx of young abled men and women should be a net positive for Europe, and France, where businesses are always complaining of not being able to find enough low-skilled workers. Instead, we are too busy pushing back and making their lives harder to the point of making integration almost impossible and ostracizing them from society, thereby creating the conditions for crime to flourish.
Ah, my mistake. The political commentary and analysis I'd been reading had been saying that, while Macron's party lost seats, his goal may have been to defang the far-right before they got any "real" power in 2027. I guess the commentary was implying that his goal may have been to let the French people see what the far-right would do with their political power, while not risking the presidency.
It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.
> It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.
The thing is with Macron, he managed to make the journalist class believe he's a genius (he's not dumb, but still miles away from being as brilliant as presented). So whenever he trips on a stone, you get an army of journalist explaining to you how he planned for it all along.
> securing himself a surprise victory in the snap election everyone thought would be a disaster for him.
This is totally incorrect. Macron's party arrived 3rd in number of seats when previously it had a relative majority. He lost over a hundred seats in parliament and many key roles. Additionally his coalition is weakened because his allies really didn't appreciate his move and are already openly questioning his leadership.
He is in a way worse position now than he was before the snap election, and while you can say nobody won, no one can seriously question the fact that Macron lost hard.
As for the rise of the far right, it's happening in more countries than just France: Germany, Netherland, Italy, etc.
> He is in a way worse position now than he was before the snap election, and while you can say nobody won, no one can seriously question the fact that Macron lost hard.
Good point. I replied to another comment below, I'd been reading political commentary/analysis saying that maybe his goal was to defang Le Pen's party by letting the French people see what they'd do with power before the election in 2027. But as far as I'm aware he never actually said that was his goal, it's just a guess, and from a hard numbers perspective he called a snap election and lost seats.
> maybe his goal was to defang Le Pen's party by letting the French people see what they'd do with power before the election in 2027
That's what he said in private at some point, but that wasn't his initial plan. We have another reported conversation that explain his plan was to benefit from the divided left to reconquer an absolute majority for himself.
It's only after the left managed to make a coalition that he started floating this idea of letting the far right ridicule itself.
But even if that's a stupid plan, he haven't achieved that either, the far right gained over 50 seats, and their electorate are now even more angry because they consider they got robbed of the election.
So no idea what commentary you were reading, but I'd recommend not to trust that source ever again on that topic at least.
He miscalculated super hard regarding LFI. I genuinely think he did not expect Glucksmann and Faure to basically sweep the antisemitism/antisionism under the rug that hard for the elections to get access to Melenchon's militants.
RN, through no skill of their own, is in ideal position right now. The coffers are going to be full, they have 3 years to clean up their candidates and get the messaging correct, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the coming EU budget restrictions. And R! is finally dead after having served their purpose of shifting the discourse.
The far-right parties are on the rise in most EU countries. But in most EU countries they have not managed to make it into government in enough numbers to be relevant, yet.
But the rhetoric of the centrists/moderates has been shifting towards the right as well, on the topic of immigration, and especially with regards to certain ethnic groups.
The UK may have just managed to get a majority, but that's a peculiarity of their electoral system. As a fraction of the votes, their far right gained a larger share than in previous years.
Similar effects can be observed in plenty of countries, among those Sweden, Germany to some extent, Italy, Hungary has been way left for a long time, etc.
To be honest, the UK elections might be parliamentary, but they have a very Presidential character to them, just as is the case in India and Canada. People still vote for the PM face. This time, they didn't want to vote in Rishi. Put Boris Johnson on the ticket, and I'm certain the results would have been extremely different.
Comparing the most recent election in the UK and the one before it the vote for the right (Reform) increased by 2% points (14% overall) versus the vote share for UKIP in 2019
The other right wing parties (Conservatives, DUP) got 25% between them
Where as the more progressive parties got over 50% of the vote - Greens got 6%, LibDems 12%, Labour 34% plus SNP and Plaid Cymru
To say the right did well in the UK election just isn’t true
There's no "EU as a whole". Europe is made of vastly different countries with their own politics and the people care much more about the national politics compared to EU level politics (at least based on what I have seen).
It doesn't help that the EU parliament (elected directly) does not have much power compared to the commission.
His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people.
I really do think his major failure was not pushing for a lasting achievement like implementing federal parental leave. He had the chance, but opted for a 1 year extension of child tax credits.
And of course the US has an illegal immigration problem. European right on the rise from 1/10th the number of illegal immigrants the US gets.