Joseph R. Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States January 20. In a speech following the oath, he said he would be a president for all Americans and work to heal a divisive political landscape.
Biden, a Democrat, takes office with a Democratic-majority House of Representatives and an incredibly thin Senate majority (a fifty-fifty split, with a Democratic Vice President, Kamala Harris, as a tiebreaker). He previously served in the Executive Branch as President Obama's Vice-President.
On the campaign trail, President Biden’s manufacturing plan called for stiff tax penalties on companies that offshore operations and an advanceable tax credit for companies to modernize facilities or create jobs in the United States.
Domestically, Biden favors higher taxes on corporations compared to Trump, and his Senate majority—slim as it is—may allow him to effectively reverse Trump’s laissez-faire policies. Where Trump has generally touted the efforts of private companies to train their own employees, including in his “Pledge to America’s Workers” campaign, Biden has called for more federal investment in trade schools and community colleges.
Biden’s trade policies are different in several notable ways from those of his predecessor, Donald Trump. Like Trump, Biden sees China as a trade adversary to the United States, but favors an approach that focuses less on direct confrontation with China via tariffs (an approach that Trump used to sign a trade deal with China) and more on trade pacts that would involve coalitions of nations similar to the TPP, which Biden was a key architect of but which he disavowed on the trail.
