US Elections 2020 – A look into Biden vs Trump policies

With the US Presidential elections just over 2 weeks away many voters have already ventured to the polls to take advantage of early voting. The 2020 elections may turn out to be one of the most important elections in history. As the country battles issues dealing with the economy, race relations and the COVID-19 pandemic, many voters are torn between their support of policies against their values.

President Donald Trump, like many fellow Republicans, holds out tax reductions and regulatory cuts as economic imperatives and frames himself as a conservative champion in the culture wars. The president has offered few details about how he would pull the levers of government in a second term. His most consistent argument focuses on stopping Democratic opponent Joe Biden and his party from pushing U.S. policy leftward.

Biden, for his part, is not the socialist caricature depicted by Trump. But he is every bit a center-left Democrat who frames the federal government as the force to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, rebuild the economy and address centuries of institutional racism and systemic inequalities. The former vice president and U.S. senator also offers his deal-making past as evidence he can do it again from the Oval Office.

We take a look at some of the pressing agenda policies from both candidates. Follow Spotlife Asia for the latest news and updates.

HEALTH CARE
As a candidate for the White House, Trump promised that he would “immediately” replace President Barack Obama’s health care law with a plan of his own that would provide “insurance for everybody.” Americans are still waiting for his plan.

Trump recently returned to health care amid disapproval of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and growing uncertainty about the future of the Affordable Care Act, which his administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn. He is reiterating his 4-year-old promises for quality health care at affordable prices, lower prescription drug costs, more consumer choice and greater transparency.

He also announced executive orders calling for an end to surprise medical bills and declaring it the policy of the U.S. government to protect people with preexisting conditions, even if Obamacare is struck down. However, protections for preexisting conditions are already the law, and Trump would have to go to Congress to cement a new policy through legislation. In the first presidential debate, Trump also held out the repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate to have health insurance as significant progress, while ignoring questions about his lack of a comprehensive plan.

Biden wants to expand Obama’s law to provide more generous coverage to a greater number of people and add a “Medicare-like public option” that would compete with private insurers and be available to working-age Americans. Biden estimates that would cost about $750 billion over 10 years. That positions Biden between Trump, who wants to scrap the 2010 law, and progressives, who want a single-payer system to replace private insurance altogether. Biden sees his approach as the next step toward universal coverage and one he could get through Congress.

Biden also has sought to turn the current Supreme Court vacancy into a health care matter, noting that the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a key vote in upholding the 2010 health care law, while Trump’s nominee, federal appellate Judge Amy Coney Barrett, has criticized the court’s reasoning in that decision.

ABORTION
As a candidate and as president, Trump has consistently expressed his opposition to the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide and said the issue should be decided by states.

He has expressed support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits Medicaid from being used to pay for abortions in most circumstances, and he’s sought to restrict access to two drugs that are used to induce abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancies.

Biden has declined to offer his own list of prospective Supreme Court nominees, but he’s said repeatedly that he supports Roe v. Wade’s finding that the Constitution establishes a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. He’s endorsed calls for Congress to codify that right, a move that would keep abortion legal statutorily even if the court struck down the constitutional protections.

CORONA VIRUS
The pandemic remains the biggest obstacle for Trump’s reelection hopes, and his bout with the virus just weeks before Election Day only brightened the spotlight on the issue.

Over the course of the summer, Trump went from acknowledging that the pandemic may “get worse before it gets better” to declaring that the U.S. is “rounding the corner” on the crisis. Then he tested positive for the virus himself.

Roughly 7 in 10 Americans think the nation is on the wrong track, and just 39% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the crisis that has killed more than 207,000 people in the U.S., according to a recent poll The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Congress approved about $3 trillion in coronavirus relief in March and April, and Democrats and the White House have been at loggerheads over another significant round of funding, with Trump sending mixed messages on what he wants.

Biden has committed to supplying “free public testing and rapid deployment of supplies, as well as economic measures such as emergency paid leave and the creation of a state and local emergency fund.” Any one of these would be better than what we currently have in place. 

Biden draws some of his sharpest contrasts with Trump on the pandemic, arguing that the presidency and federal government exist for such crises and that Trump has been an abject failure responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

RACE RELATIONS
President Trump he is “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,” but took out the civil rights offices at the Departments of Education and Justice and supports monuments of Confederate generals. He penned an executive order about making education “more patriotic,” by removing truths about how the country came to be.

Trump has rolled back rights for transgender people and banned travel from predominantly Muslim countries, and still refers to COVID-19 as “the Kung flu.” Trump has entirely ignored the cries of citizens to o something about systemic racism in policing and has declined to publicly denounce organizations known to support “White Supremacy”.

Biden has a plan in which he clearly acknowledges that systemic racism does in fact exist and needs to be rooted out. He has committed to prioritize the enactment of the Equality Act in his first 100 days as President. This would be in response to the Trump organizations ruling which reversed previously set forth protections under the ACA.

EDUCATION
Trump has pushed for schools to fully reopen for in-person learning and announced that the federal government will begin distributing millions of rapid coronavirus tests to states. He urged governors to use them to reopen schools for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Trump has also used his call for schools to fully reopen as an opportunity to spotlight his support for charter schools and school choice. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a longtime proponent of charter schools and school voucher programs, has suggested that families be allowed to take federal money allotted to school districts that don’t open and spend it on private schools that do open. For most of Trump’s first term, his administration sought major increases to federal charter school grant aid. Congress responded with relatively small increases.

With higher education, Trump has repeatedly complained that campuses are beset by “radical left indoctrination.” He has threatened to defund universities and said he would ask the Treasury Department to reexamine the tax-exempt status and federal funding of unspecified schools.

Biden wants schools to get more federal aid for pandemic-related costs through the same federal law used after national disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.

Beyond COVID, Biden wants the federal government to partner with states to make public higher education tuition-free for any student in a household earning up to $125,000 annually. The assistance would extend to everyone attending two-year schools, regardless of income. He also proposes sharply increasing aid for historically Black colleges. His overall education plans carry a 10-year price tag of about $850 billion.

He calls for universal access to prekindergarten programs for 3- and 4-year-olds; tripling Title I spending for schools with higher concentrations of students from low-income households; more support for non-classroom positions like on-campus social workers; federal infrastructure spending for public school buildings; and covering schools’ costs to comply with federal disability laws. Biden also opposes taxpayer money being routed to for-profit charter school businesses, and he’s pledged that his secretary of education will have classroom teaching experience.

THE ECONOMY and TRADE
Trump has predicted that the U.S. economy will rebound in the third and fourth quarters of this year and is set to take off like a “rocket ship” in 2021. He promises that a coronavirus vaccine or effective therapeutics will soon be available, allowing life to get back to normal. His push for a payroll tax cut over the summer was thwarted by stiff bipartisan opposition.

Low unemployment and a soaring stock market were Trump’s calling cards before the pandemic. While the stock market has clawed its way back after cratering in the early weeks of the crisis, unemployment stands at 7.9%, and the nearly 10 million jobs that remain lost since the pandemic began exceed the number that the nation shed during the entire 2008-2009 Great Recession.

Biden argues that the economy cannot fully recover until COVID-19 is contained. For the long-term recovery, he pitches sweeping federal action to avoid an extended recession and to address longstanding wealth inequality that disproportionately affects nonwhite Americans.

His biggest-ticket plans include a $2 trillion, four-year push to eliminate carbon pollution in the U.S. energy grid by 2035 and a new government health insurance plan open to all working-age Americans. He proposes new spending on education, infrastructure and small businesses, along with raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Trump views the signing of two major trade deals, an updated pact with Mexico and Canada and Phase 1 of a China agreement as signature achievements of his presidency. U.S. and China signed Phase 1 in January, less than two months before the pandemic put an enormous strain on U.S.-China relations

Phase 2 of the deal is expected to focus on some tougher issues between the countries, including Trump’s wish to get China to stop subsidizing its state-owned enterprises. But for Trump, who has come to frequently refer to the coronavirus as the “China virus,” it remains to be seen whether he will be able to effectively reengage Beijing on trade. Trump recently said he’s currently “not interested” in talking to China.

Biden has joined a growing bipartisan embrace of “fair trade” abroad — a twist on decades of “free trade” talk as Republican and Democratic administrations alike expanded international trade. Biden wants to juice U.S. manufacturing by directing $400 billion of federal government purchases to domestic firms (part of that for buying pandemic supplies) over a four-year term.

He wants $300 billion in new support for U.S. technology firms’ research and development. Biden says the new domestic spending must come before he enters into any new international trade deals. He pledges tough negotiations with China, the world’s other economic superpower, on trade and intellectual property matters. China, like the U.S., is not yet a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the multilateral trade agreement that Biden advocated for when he was vice president.