Tim Geithner, the former US Treasury secretary, famously said “plan beats no plan” during the 2008 financial crisis. It is a lesson that Republicans appear to have forgotten. If Donald Trump loses in November, his aversion to striking an economic stimulus deal with Democrats amid a raging pandemic will be one of the main reasons. You cannot beat something with nothing.
The irony is that Joe Biden’s own plan contains key elements of what Mr Trump promised in 2016: to modernise US infrastructure and protect the “forgotten American”. The logic of Bidenomics is simple. The cost of borrowing is free. The US is in the midst of a national crisis. Its infrastructure is no longer first world, and unemployment is at a generational high. It seems like a good moment to enter the 21st century with the “largest mobilisation of public investments” since the second world war, as the Biden campaign puts it.
The debates about whether Mr Biden’s proposals are too centrist, as Democratic progressives complain, or are radically socialist, as Mr Trump says, have an air of unreality. His policies are squarely in the American tradition. What Mr Biden proposes is pragmatic — an America-coined word and philosophy that means “whatever it takes”. A better term may be pandemonomics. Neither the left nor the right should underestimate its appeal.