Abundance

by Ezra Klein

“Somewhere along the way, we stopped investing in ourselves,” Biden said in 2021. “We stopped investing in our people. And we’ve risked losing our edge as a nation. I don’t even think it was conscious, but that’s just what’s happened. And China and the rest of the world are moving to catch up and, in some cases, in certain areas, move ahead.”17 Under Trump, “infrastructure week” was a meme. Under Biden, it became an ethos. In his four years in office, Biden put his name to several laws that broke with the anti-build trend of modern politics. With the bipartisan infrastructure bill, he signed the largest authorization of infrastructure spending since the Interstate Highway program of the 1950s.18 With the CHIPS and Science Act, he announced America’s intention to invest billions of dollars in scientific discovery and invention—and tens of billions more to build advanced computer chips within our borders.19 With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US passed the largest clean energy bill in its history, with record investments in electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind manufacturing, and next-generation climate technology, such as carbon-removal plants.20 The core of this agenda—subsidies for computer chips and clean energy, historic investments in infrastructure—used the spur of China to get America building and manufacturing at home again. As in the 1930s, and again in the 1970s, external threats and internal crises are converging and making possible a new kind of politics.