Joe Biden has always made it clear that he wanted to grow the economy for the benefit of working people, not the wealthy. His choice of means evolved over time and was tied to the prevailing conditions. Initially, he responded to the pandemic by supporting a substantial expansion of the welfare state. This proved to be only temporary, due to inflation, the end of the pandemic, and the lack of votes for the program in the Senate. The second phase–the current one–focuses on infrastructure improvements and massive subsidies for green manufacturing. The idea behind it, other than mitigating climate change, is to create new, high-paying manufacturing jobs, largely in areas that have been left behind over the past 20 years. Will it work, and will Biden get the credit for it?
The subsidies were the only climate change program available to Biden, and they should help with the environmental problem, but it is questionable whether they will make a dramatic difference to workers in the much larger context of the American economy. Manufacturing simply isn’t as big a part of the economy as it was 50 years ago, and finding enough qualified people to do the new jobs has been a problem. As for the credit part, it clearly isn’t working. Biden just hasn’t shown the ability to sell his programs to the American people, probably at least in part because he has been determined not to dominate the public consciousness the way Trump did.