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What America would look like: Joe Biden

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Joe Biden
Illustration: Steve Marcus

To help local voters decide which candidate to support, Las Vegas Weekly and its sister publication the Las Vegas Sun invited the top candidates for interviews in recent weeks to explore their stances on key issues. We chose those candidates based on the same qualifications used to determine their eligibility to participate in the February 7 Democratic debate. Here’s our look at those candidates.

Joe Biden

Age: 77

Bio: Former vice president (2009-17) and seven-term U.S. senator from Delaware, making his third bid for the presidency

Joe Biden has put his years of experience within the Democratic Party’s establishment to good use in his campaign, as his policies demonstrate. He’s clearly assembled a seasoned team that understands the issues and offers one of the most thorough and coherent sets of plans in the field.

Each part of his platform builds on the other, with none operating in a vacuum. The complete package reflects an understanding of a core need of governance: Everything fits together and offers a vision for the future.

Immigration

Biden has been criticized over the high number of deportations carried out while he and President Barack Obama were in office, so it’s perhaps no surprise that immigration is a keystone of his platform and that his policies are by far the most carefully thought-out and appropriate of any candidate.

Among his far-ranging initiatives, he would:

• Provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million long-term undocumented immigrants.

• Reverse Trump’s policies on immigration, including family separations at the border and restrictions on access for asylum seekers.

• Provide aid to Central America’s Northern Triangle countries, but also address issues that are driving out-migration from Mexico—namely cartel violence and corruption—by establishing a State Department liaison to work exclusively with the Mexican government and by working one-on-one with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

• Adapt the visa program to benefit key industries based on input from companies about their employment needs.

• Create a new visa category for cities and counties to petition for higher levels of immigration to address workforce shortages.

• Reform the visa program for highly skilled workers to ensure it doesn’t undermine wages of domestic workers.

Climate Change

Biden calls for a $1.7 trillion investment over 10 years to address global warming and says the initiative would create 10 million new jobs. The investments heavily skew toward new industrial efforts and represent closely tying the Green New Deal to economic development through expansion of renewable energy technology, electric vehicles, support infrastructure, etc.

• His plan also connects to his infrastructure and transportation policies, in which he places a strong focus on passenger intercity rail and intracity light-rail systems to reduce the use of private vehicles and therefore cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

Infrastructure

Unlike other candidates’ plans on this subject, Biden’s $1.3 trillion infrastructure investment over 10 years represents a clear effort to reimagine and improve America, rather than just rebuilding old infrastructure. It includes funding for battery and energy storage technology, freight shipping on rail and waterways, energy research and more.

Health Care

Biden falls with other party moderates in not calling for an end to private insurance. His plan instead relies on key elements of the Affordable Care Act, such as expanded Medicare and government subsidies for coverage. Broadly speaking, he’s focusing on expanding the successful model of Obamacare and reversing Trump’s efforts to undermine U.S. health care.

Gun Safety

Biden touts himself as the only candidate who has “beaten the NRA twice nationally,” and cites his role in passing the Brady Bill and the Clinton-era assault weapons ban. His gun safety policy goes further than some of his colleagues’ in that he supports development of biometrics technology that prevents weapons from being fired by anyone other than the owner, and says he would work to overturn a federal law protecting gun manufacturers from liability over the use of their products.

“They’re the only [industry] in America exempt from being sued,” he said. “The only one. Imagine if that were the case with drug companies now. We’d still have 9 billion opioids being sold without warnings.”

In Conclusion

Biden has surrounded himself with smart, experienced and capable people from his party’s brain trust, which positions the country to benefit from solid leadership and a return to stability if he is elected president. In contrast to the Trump White House and its ever-changing cast of incompetent characters, Biden could be counted on to fill his Cabinet with people who know what they’re doing: Instead of wishing for more adults in the room, Americans would have a roomful of them.

Longer versions of these essays will run on lasvegassun.com in the coming week.

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