9 ideas Joe Biden should steal from his Democratic rivals

From coronavirus response to lead abatement to fighting child poverty, there’s a lot of good policies to choose from.

With Sen. Bernie Sanders out of the race, former Vice President Joe Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2020.

Biden has run a campaign focused more on personality and the lineage of the Obama administration than on long policy papers of the kind Sanders and Elizabeth Warren liked to release. But with the nomination for the taking, attention will turn to what a Biden administration will actually set out to accomplish.

He certainly has an issue platform, a mix of old Obama administration priorities like a public option for health care and new left-wing commitments like a $15-an-hour minimum wage. It’s a clear platform, if not a particularly creative one. That could be fine, though, as Biden seems to have triumphed against a 2020 Democratic field with a number of creative policy entrepreneurs. Some touted policies that were either new to a presidential race, or newly prominent because of the candidates backing them.

Biden would do well to crib liberally from his ex-rivals’ plans. He’s already started, by endorsing Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan and moving closer to Bernie Sanders by endorsing free public college for students from families making under $125,000. But there are a lot more good ideas out there for him to borrow.

Here are 9 of the best ideas from the field that he should be exploring.

1) Bernie Sanders’s coronavirus plan

It took weeks for Congress to conclude that the coronavirus crisis is a defining calamity of our era, one requiring trillions in spending to ward off. And while Congress did pass a $2.2 trillion stimulus package, it didn’t present a very coherent vision of what our recovery from the disease looks like. Big questions like, “How long should we expect the government to support people put out of work” or “How long can people rely on checks to pay for basic needs” or “How long are foreclosures halted” were left open-ended.

While it was too left-wing to ever make it through the current Senate, Sanders’s coronavirus plan is nonetheless worthy of Biden’s championing, because it presents a clear, comprehensive vision of how the government should be supporting people during this disaster.

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The plan introduces Medicare-for-all as an emergency measure on the grounds that especially in a crisis like this, health care should not be rationed based on ability to pay. Even normal Medicare-for-all skeptics like Biden should be able to embrace that idea at a time when bond markets are all but begging the US to increase deficit spending. But Sanders also calls for investments in expanding health care supply, not just funding, by mobilizing medical residents, expanding community health centers, and using the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of medical equipment like masks and ventilators.

The safety net part of the plan is even better. Businesses would be eligible to have the federal government directly fund their payroll costs, as Denmark is doing in an attempt to “freeze” the economy. All Americans, adult or child, would get $2,000 per month in cash for the length of the crisis. Sanders would suspend mortgage payments, foreclosures, and evictions, and waive student loan payments during the crisis, so households’ expenses fall substantially. Unemployment insurance would be vastly increased to cover 100 percent of wages up to $75,000 and apply to part-time and self-employed workers. Food stamps would be made more generous and all Americans would get paid family and medical leave.

It’s not a perfect plan (direct government payment of rent/mortgages seems preferable to freezing evictions only for people to be forced to pay back-rent once the crisis is over). But it’s one that’s appropriately scaled to the crisis at hand, and that makes it unique out of proposals coming out of Congress now. Biden would do well to embrace it, his skepticism about single-payer notwithstanding.

2) Michael Bennet’s plan to cut child poverty nearly in half

Long before cash became a key part of America’s coronavirus response, Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) were pushing a bill called the American Family Act. The proposal would adopt a policy that’s common in other rich countries: a child allowance.

The intuition behind a child allowance is that raising a child is work, just as much as any other job. Moreover, it’s work that benefits society as a whole by preparing a new generation of workers, parents, and volunteers. When that work is uncompensated, fewer people will do it than want to, and children will be forced to grow up in poverty. So many countries, from Sweden to Japan to Germany to France, have embraced cash transfers to parents as a way to support their work of raising children.

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Poverty experts in the US have embraced the idea recently as a cost-effective way of reducing child poverty, which is unusually high here compared to peer countries. An allowance the size of Bennet-Brown — $250 a month for kids 6 and older and $300 to young kids, excluding the richest families — could cut poverty among children from 14.8 percent to 9.5 percent, according to a 2019 study by a Columbia University research team. That means 4 million kids would escape poverty.

Before Bennet and Brown, the idea was barely in the conversation on Capitol Hill. By 2019, thanks to them and to Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA), 38 out of 47 Senate Democrats were on board, as are 186 out of 232 House Democrats. A slightly more modest proposal designed to appeal to moderates, the Working Families Tax Relief Act, has support from all but one Senate Democrat (Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona); even Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, is on board.

Bennet and Brown did a lot to promote this idea in the Senate; Bennet’s presidential run also offered him a chance to popularize the child poverty reduction plan with the public at large, although it did not seem to make waves in media coverage. Still, it was the policy centerpiece of Bennet’s campaign, and one that should meet with more success than Bennet’s candidacy did. Biden has not explicitly signaled his support for Bennet-Brown. But he should, and he should be preparing for it to be one of the first bills Congress passes should Democrats retake the Senate and the White House.

3) Jay Inslee’s climate plan

No candidate in the 2020 Democratic field has entirely ignored climate change as an issue, but it’s safe to say that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee gave it the most concentrated attention of any candidate. In the process he laid out what an aggressive climate plan should look like, scaled to reduce emissions rapidly in both the US and abroad.

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Inslee’s plan includes a carbon tax (he preferred to call it a “climate pollution fee”), a ban on fossil fuel production in all federal lands and offshore waters, rescinding permits for pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure, a carbon duty on imported goods to reflect their climate cost, a clean energy standard that would require 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030, and an increase in clean energy research funding by five-fold. The investments in his plans totaled $9 trillion.

This is what an extremely aggressive plan to decarbonize the US looks like. No, not all of it is likely to make it past moderate Democrats in the Senate. But it provides such a rich menu of options that even if half of them are picked up by the next Congress, it will have made substantial progress. Biden would do well to crib liberally from the Inslee plan in building his climate agenda going forward. There’s a lot of good material in Biden’s plan, like a price on carbon and $1.7 trillion in climate investments, but Inslee has a fuller, more fleshed-out vision.

4) Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg’s “Unions for all” plan

This is an issue where Biden has made gestures toward the policy adopted by his rivals Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, but hasn’t gone all the way.

“Unions for all” is the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) term of art for what’s known in other countries as “sectoral bargaining.” Under this approach, instead of organizing each workplace one at a time, unions could bargain for raises that apply to everyone in a certain industry, not just union members.

This is the approach to union bargaining taken in most European countries. In Sweden, for example, bargaining takes place at three levels: nationally for all industries, between the national union confederations and an association representing all employers; nationally, for specific industries, between the relevant unions and employers; and locally among individual companies. For the vast majority of workers, wages are set at a combination of the three levels, with only very few having deals set primarily at the company level. That prevents the dynamic that prevails in the US, where unionized firms pay higher wages due to bargaining and thus hire fewer people in the future, driving down the unionization rate in the long-run.

Biden has said that he wants to have a cabinet-level working group “explore the expansion of sectoral bargaining.” But other candidates went further.

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Sanders has proposed establishing a nationwide sectoral bargaining system to “set wages, benefits and hours across entire industries, not just employer-by-employer.” Buttigieg made “multi-employer bargaining” a focus of his union plan, under which “workers at three unionized fast-food restaurants will be able to decide collectively to bring their three employers to a single bargaining table and negotiate a single pay package for all three restaurants.” Warren promised to “amend federal labor law to promote sectoral bargaining so that workers across industries can band together and bargain alongside labor organizations to improve wages, hours, and working conditions on an industry-wide basis.”

There’s an emerging evidence base in economics, noticed even by decidedly non-radical figures like Larry Summers, for the idea that declining worker power relative to employers has led to stagnant wages and lower growth. Strengthening unions through sectoral bargaining would be one way for Biden to reverse that trend.

5) Michael Bennet’s Federal Reserve that works for workers

The Federal Reserve is extremely powerful (its recent announcement that it will buy literally unlimited quantities of government and mortgage-backed bonds until the economy stabilizes may have tipped you off). For years it has tended toward caution, raising rates even when inflation wasn’t imminent, at the expense of workers who need lower unemployment and faster wage growth.

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That’s changed somewhat under Fed Chair Jay Powell. And under Michael Bennet’s plan, more Powells would populate the Fed. He was the only candidate that I’m aware of to put forward a comprehensive “recession plan” to respond to the next downturn complete with better automatic stabilizers (like enhanced unemployment insurance and cash relief that kicks in when unemployment spikes).

But his plan also had a central role for the Fed. He committed to only appoint Federal Reserve board members who will support “a monetary policy that prioritizes the typical American worker.” As Matt Yglesias explains in his piece on the Bennet plan, “A refreshing thing about this Bennet proposal is that appointing Federal Reserve Board members is an actual power the president has … A White House that is committed to finding well-qualified full employment hawks will in fact be able to put some on the board, but one that doesn’t care about this won’t.”

Bennet will not be making those appointments. But Biden will, and he should commit, like Bennet, to only appointing doves who will push for lower interest rates (like Minneapolis Fed chair Neel Kashkari) rather than more hawkish economists, like Peter Diamond and Jeremy Stein, whom the Obama administration sometimes nominated for the Fed.

6) Bernie Sanders’s electric school buses

This might seem like a small-bore issue, but it’s more important than it sounds.

Bernie Sanders’s version of the Green New Deal included a provision offering $407 billion to states so that school districts, and public transit, can replace all their gasoline and diesel school buses with electric ones. That’s a change well worth the cost, as Kelsey Piper explained for Vox.

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“Meta-analyses of hundreds of studies have found strong associations between even low levels of air pollution and deadly cardiorespiratory diseases,” Piper notes. “One recent study looked at the effects of diesel cars that were supposed to meet emissions guidelines — but in fact did not — and suggested that even the slight increase in air pollution from one cheating car meant more kids hospitalized and more babies born prematurely. … Another found that dust pollution in Africa drives a 22 percent increase in child mortality.”

That’s all relevant because pollutant levels on diesel buses, which make up 95 percent of school buses in the US, are five to 10 times higher than pollution levels in the air normally. Switching to electric school buses, even apart from the climate benefits, would mean an end to a longstanding policy of poisoning schoolchildren with dirty air, and would probably increase lifespans, boost school performance, and improve various health outcomes.

7) Elizabeth Warren’s plan to prosecute executive branch staffers who break the law

One of the biggest meta-problems in American life is elites’ feeling that they can act with impunity: They can flout the rule of law when in power, be it in businesses or in the government, and reliably expect to get away with it.

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Both the Russia and Ukraine scandal illustrated how deeply this mentality has infested the Trump administration, but it didn’t start there. Only one Wall Street executive ever served jail time for the financial crisis. Rampant foreclosure fraud during the crisis, in which mortgage companies illegally forced millions of families from their homes on the basis of false evidence, went largely unpunished. The Obama administration did not bring any charges against John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who put together memos authorizing systematic torture of detainees, nor against CIA officials who tortured detainees in accordance with the torture memos, nor against the CIA’s Jose Rodriguez, who authorized the destruction of 92 tapes showing the CIA torturing detainees.

And even before the George W. Bush administration, there was Iran-Contra, in which high-ranking policy officials who likely committed numerous crimes in service of an arms deal with Central American death squads were pardoned by George H.W. Bush before they could face real repercussions.

Elizabeth Warren, more than any other candidate, laid out an agenda to change this. She pledged to prosecute and imprison CEOs of companies committing white-collar crimes, and she pledged to create a task force to prosecute ex-Trump administration officials for crimes committed while in office.

Biden should resist the temptation to seem magnanimous and post-partisan by promising to not investigate, say, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner for potentially using his policy influence in the White House to enrich himself through real estate. Such a probe may seem like score-settling, but it’s not; it’s required as a deterrent for such behavior in the future. Elite impunity will never end without a commitment to ending it, and Warren laid out what such a commitment really looks like.

8) Julián Castro’s nationwide lead cleanup plan

Much like air pollution (see electric school buses above), lead poisoning is a persistent harm being inflicted on America’s children that could be easily eliminated by a real federal investment. Luckily, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro used his presidential bid to lay out what such an investment would look like.

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As Matt Yglesias explains in Vox’s piece on the plan, Castro wanted to commit $5 billion per year, for 10 years, on eliminating lead from paint and soil, and replacing lead pipes where they’re still in use. He additionally wanted more investment in lead poisoning detection for children in schools and greater coverage of treatment in Medicaid. We have strong evidence that exposure to lead increases crime, decreases learning in school, reduces IQ, and increases the rate of ADHD. Cleaning up this pollution could easily pay for itself in health benefits alone, and Castro deserves to be commended for raising the issue.

9) Cory Booker’s plan to ban factory farms

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is the only vegan in the US Senate and, with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), one of two vegan candidates who ran in the 2020 Democratic primaries. So it’s perhaps not surprising that he came out with an ambitious plan that would impose an immediate moratorium on the biggest factory farms in the US and phase them out entirely by 2040.

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Booker’s Farm System Reform Act of 2019 would, among other important provisions, put a pause on new construction of large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), a term the Environmental Protection Agency uses to refer to animal factory farms that produce meat and poultry. Existing operations above a certain size would be banned from expanding. It would also halt their growth by establishing a $100 billion fund over 10 years to buy out existing CAFOs and promote the transition to “agriculture activities such as raising pasture-based livestock, growing specialty crops, or organic commodity production.”

Large factory farms as a model have major, mostly negative ramifications for the welfare of animals that these facilities house. They often use battery cages, for instance; a cage can contain about five to 10 birds each, with as little as 67 square inches per bird — roughly the size of an iPad. CAFOs also frequently use gestation crates, which involve confining mother pigs to fenced-in areas barely larger than their bodies, where they also lack the room to turn around. Ian Duncan, an eminent scholar of animal welfare at the University of Guelph, has described it as “one of the cruelest forms of confinement devised by humankind.”

But Booker did not promote his bill through reference to the animal welfare costs of factory farms. His press release announcing the bill instead emphasizes the negative ramifications of factory farming on humans: the environmental damage it causes through toxic waste pollution, the ways it exacerbates climate change, and the harm it causes to workers and independent farm contractors. Indeed, the American Public Health Association publicly called for a moratorium on new and expanded CAFOs, citing health risks, as well as the potential of antibiotic resistance emerging in such concentrated facilities.

Factory farming has to end soon, and ending it is popular. As Tom Philpott at Mother Jones noted, some 63 percent of Iowans — that is, residents of a farm state with lots of factory farms — supported a moratorium on CAFOs in a recent survey. Biden should take up the cause.

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