President Biden has embarked upon the most ambitious use of federal economic power in several decades as he seeks to reshape major U.S. industries for long-term prosperity while pressing businesses to deliver immediate benefits for consumers by lowering prices today.
Biden’s twin-barreled economic offensive faces numerous hurdles but has sparked billions of dollars of private-sector investment and changed entrenched corporate practices.
Audi and Eli Lilly last week became the latest companies to respond to Washington’s carrot-and-stick approach, as the German carmaker said it “probably” would boost its U.S. output in response to the administration’s electric-vehicle subsidies and the pharmaceutical giant bent to the president’s calls to slash the price of insulin.
Eli Lilly to slash insulin prices by 70 percent
Biden is spending federal cash on several audacious goals, including reversing the erosion of high-technology manufacturing, accelerating the transition to a clean-energy economy and repairing the nation’s rotting infrastructure. At times, he has stretched the powers given to him by Congress in pursuit of unrelated social policies. And where he lacks legislative authority, the president has jawboned corporate executives to cut drug prices, airline fees and the cost of internet access.
Biden’s rejection of long-standing orthodoxy on the state’s proper economic role marks the end of an era in which Washington habitually bowed to the market — and is a gamble on an interventionist approach that in the past has delivered economic wins as well as government waste.
“This is a big moment,” said Harvard University professor Jeffry Frieden, the author of “Global Capitalism.” “This is a substantial shift in policy, and it’s going to be important to national economic growth for the foreseeable future.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2023/03/06/biden-industrial-policy-business-government/