President Joe Biden argued in an interview published Friday he was not a socialist despite his massive $6 trillion plan to redistribute wealth in America.
“The progressives don’t like me because I’m not prepared to take on what I would say and they would say is a socialist agenda,” Biden said in an interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks.
But Biden’s policies have won the support of Democrat socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
Biden’s agenda would dramatically raise taxes on corporations and Americans making more than $400,000 and use it to fund welfare programs — free childcare, free pre-school, free community college, and expanding food stamps.
His plans also expands the role of the state by expanding Obamacare health insurance premiums, a $400 billion program for home elder care, and hundreds of billions on the left’s Green New Deal priorities.
In his interview with Brooks, Biden returned to one of his common complaints that corporate leaders were making more money than their workers.
“The CEOs back as late as the 70s were making 35, 40 times as much as the average employee. Now it’s 320 times,” he said to Brooks. “What are they promoting? What are they doing? As my mother used to say, ‘Who died and made you boss?’”
Biden frequently uses that statistic to defend his planned corporate tax hikes to help pay for his spending programs.
The president argued in the interview he was only spending on big programs to help America compete with rising world powers such as China at the dawn of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
“The risk is not trying to go big,” Biden said. “If we stay small, I don’t know how we change our international status and competitive capacity.”