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    Biden Accuses Republicans of Undercutting Working-Class Americans

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    President Biden trained his criticism on House Republicans who are threatening to shut down the federal government if their budget cuts are not enacted.President Biden challenged his Republican opponents on Thursday in their area of political strength, arguing that he has done a better job of managing the economy than former President Donald J. Trump did and accusing his predecessor’s congressional allies of undercutting working-class Americans.While Mr. Trump has long made his stewardship of the economy his most salient bragging point, Mr. Biden declared that his “Bidenomics” program had done more to help everyday Americans make a living than what he termed “MAGAnomics” ever did. He framed the argument in terms of the fall’s coming budget battles, but it also represented a preview of next year’s campaign.“They have a very different vision for America,” Mr. Biden said in a speech at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Md., just outside the nation’s capital, where he held up a copy of budget plans by House Republicans. “Their plan, MAGAnomics, is more extreme than anything America has ever seen before.”Mr. Biden trained his criticism on Republicans who are threatening to shut down the federal government if their plans are not enacted. The president accused the Republicans of caring more about the wealthy than the working class, pointing to proposals to cut taxes for high-income households and corporations; wring savings from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; and reverse initiatives to lower the cost of insulin and other prescription medicine.The intensified criticism of Republicans follows months of speeches and other messaging by the president and his team promoting the benefits of Bidenomics, a phrase used by critics that they have chosen to embrace. But the credit-taking has not budged Mr. Biden’s poll numbers, and so White House officials now plan to spend the next few weeks or longer emphasizing the contrast with his opponents.“House Republicans have understandably been reluctant to tout the MAGAnomics Budget — but the White House is going to spend much of this fall doing it for them,” Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the president, wrote in a memo released to reporters.Mr. Biden faces strong political headwinds on the economy. A new poll released on Thursday by USA Today and Suffolk University found that only 22 percent of Americans think the economy is improving while 70 percent think it is getting worse. Asked to volunteer a single word to describe the economy, a majority came up with terms like “horrible,” “terrible,” “crashing,” “shambles,” “chaotic” and “expensive.”Just 34 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy and, when asked to choose, more expressed faith in his predecessor to improve the country’s economic health than they did in the incumbent, 47 percent to 36 percent.Mr. Trump sought to rebut Mr. Biden even before the speech. “The public has not been fooled,” his campaign said in a statement. “They see Bidenomics for what it is: inflation, taxation, submission and failure.”“With polls confirming that Americans overwhelmingly reject Biden’s effort to whitewash his abysmal economic record,” the statement added, “he will now attempt to reverse his message 180 degrees, ludicrously trying to blame President Trump for the destruction and misery that Joe Biden himself has wrought.”Mr. Trump has always used superlatives to exaggerate the strength of the economy while he was in office. While he presided over a strong and generally healthy economy, it was not the best in history, as he has often stated, and before the pandemic it was roughly comparable in many ways to the economy of the last few years of his predecessor, President Barack Obama.During Mr. Trump’s first two years in office, the economy grew an average of 2.5 percent per quarter on an annualized basis, while it grew an average of 3.1 percent per quarter in Mr. Biden’s first two years coming out of the pandemic, according to a comparison by Barron’s. The stock market soared by 21 percent during the early part of Mr. Trump’s tenure compared with 8.5 percent during a comparable period under Mr. Biden.Unemployment has been roughly similar during the two administrations, at 3.8 percent near a record low, but job growth under Mr. Biden has far surpassed that under Mr. Trump as the economy rebounds from Covid-19 lockdowns. By last spring, monthly job growth had averaged 470,000 since Mr. Biden took office, compared with 180,000 in the start of Mr. Trump’s administration, Barron’s calculated.Where Mr. Biden has struggled most economically is with inflation, which averaged around 2 percent under Mr. Trump but peaked at 9 percent last year under Mr. Biden before falling to about 3.7 percent now. Inflation has increased the cost of groceries, clothes, household goods and housing, while eating away at rising wages. The federal deficit is also rising sharply, as have interest rates.Still, the recession many feared has yet to materialize, and many experts now are more optimistic about what they call a soft landing. Mr. Biden argues that his expansive legislative program has positioned the country for the future better than Mr. Trump ever did through new or repaired airports, roads, bridges and other infrastructure; vast investment in the semiconductor industry; ambitious clean energy programs to combat climate change; and initiatives to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.“America has the strongest economy in the world of all major economics,” Mr. Biden said. “But all they do is attack it. But you notice something? For all the time they spend attacking me and my plan, here’s what they never do — they never talk about what they want to do.” He added: “It’s like they want to keep it a secret. I don’t blame them.” More

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    UAW Standoff Poses Risk for Biden’s Electric Vehicle Commitment

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    A looming auto industry strike could test the president’s commitment to making electric vehicles a source of well-paying union jobs.President Biden has been highly attuned to the politics of electric vehicles, helping to enact billions in subsidies to create new manufacturing jobs and going out of his way to court the United Automobile Workers union.But as the union and the big U.S. automakers — General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler, Jeep and Ram — hurtle toward a strike deadline set for Thursday night, the political challenge posed by the industry’s transition to electric cars may be only beginning.The union, under its new president, Shawn Fain, wants workers who make electric vehicle components like batteries to benefit from the better pay and labor standards that the roughly 150,000 U.A.W. members enjoy at the three automakers. Most battery plants are not unionized.The Detroit automakers counter that these workers are typically employed in joint ventures with foreign manufacturers that the U.S. automakers don’t wholly control. The companies say that even if they could raise wages for battery workers to the rate set under their national U.A.W. contract, doing so could make them uncompetitive with nonunion rivals, like Tesla.And then there is former President Donald J. Trump, who is running to unseat Mr. Biden and has said the president’s clean energy policies are costing American jobs and raising prices for consumers.White House officials say Mr. Biden will still be able to deliver on his promise of high-quality jobs and a strong domestic electric vehicle industry.The head of the United Automobile Workers, Shawn Fain, center, wants his union’s wages and labor standards to apply to nonunion workers who make electric vehicle components.Brittany Greeson for The New York Times“The president’s policies have always been geared toward ensuring not only that our electric vehicle future was made in America with American jobs,” said Gene Sperling, Mr. Biden’s liaison to the U.A.W. and the auto industry, “but that it would promote good union jobs and a just transition” for current autoworkers whose jobs are threatened.But in public at least, the president has so far spoken only in vague terms about wages. Last month, he said that the transition to electric vehicles should enable workers to “make good wages and benefits to support their families” and that when union jobs were replaced with new jobs, they should go to union members and pay a “commensurate” wage. He is encouraging the companies and the union to keep bargaining and reach an agreement, one of Mr. Biden’s economic advisers, Jared Bernstein, told reporters on Wednesday.A strike could force Mr. Biden to be more explicit and choose between his commitment to workers and the need to broker a compromise that averts a costly long-term shutdown.“Battery workers need to be paid the same amount as U.A.W. workers at the current Big Three,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California who has promoted government investments in new technologies.Mr. Khanna added, “It’s how we contrast with Trump: We’re for creating good-paying manufacturing jobs across the Midwest.”At the heart of the debate is whether the shift to electric vehicles, which have fewer parts and generally require less labor to assemble than gas-powered cars, will accelerate the decline of unionized work in the industry.Foreign and domestic automakers have announced tens of thousands of new U.S.-based electric vehicle and battery jobs in response to the subsidies that Mr. Biden helped enact. But most of those jobs are not unionized, and many are in the South or West, where the U.A.W. has struggled to win over autoworkers. The union has tried and failed to organize workers at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif., and Southern plants owned by Volkswagen and Nissan.A Ford Lightning plant in Dearborn, Mich. The U.A.W. worries that letting battery makers pay lower wages will allow G.M., Ford and Stellantis to replace much of their current U.S. work force with cheaper labor.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesAs a result, the union has focused its efforts on battery workers employed directly or indirectly by G.M., Ford and Stellantis. The going wage for this work tends to be far below the roughly $32 an hour that veteran U.A.W. members make under their existing contracts with three companies.Legally, employees of the three manufacturers can’t strike over the pay of battery workers employed by joint ventures. But many U.A.W. members worry that letting battery manufacturers pay far lower wages will allow G.M., Ford and Stellantis to replace much of their current U.S. work force with cheaper labor, so they are seeking a large wage increase for those workers.“What we want is for the E.V. jobs to be U.A.W. jobs under our master agreements,” said Scott Houldieson, chairperson of Unite All Workers for Democracy, a group within the union that helped propel Mr. Fain to the presidency.The union’s officials have pressed the auto companies to address their concerns about battery workers before its members vote on a new contract. They say the companies can afford to pay more because they collectively earned about $250 billion in North America over the past decade, according to union estimates.But the auto companies, while acknowledging that they have been profitable in recent years, point out that the transition to electric vehicles is very expensive. Industry executives have suggested that it is hard to know how quickly consumers will embrace electric vehicles and that companies needed flexibility to adjust.Even if labor costs were not an issue, said Corey Cantor, an electric vehicle analyst at the energy research firm BloombergNEF, it could take the Big Three several years to catch up to Tesla, which makes about 60 percent of fully electric vehicles sold in the United States.A strike could force Mr. Biden to choose between his commitment to workers and the need to avert a costly shutdown of the U.S. auto industry.Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesData from BloombergNEF show that G.M., Ford and Stellantis together sold fewer than 100,000 battery electric vehicles in the United States last year; in 2017, Tesla alone sold 50,000. It took Tesla another five years to top half a million U.S. sales. (The Big Three also sold nearly 80,000 plug-in hybrids last year.)The three established automakers had hoped to use the transition to electric cars to bring their costs more in line with their competitors, said Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, a research firm. If they can’t, he added, they will have to look for savings elsewhere.In a statement, Stellantis said its battery joint venture “intends to offer very competitive wages and benefits while making the health and safety of its work force a top priority.”Estimates shared by Ford put hourly labor costs, including benefits, for the three automakers in the mid-$60s, versus the mid-$50s for foreign automakers in the United States and the mid-$40s for Tesla.Ford’s chief executive, Jim Farley, said in a statement last month that the company’s offer to raise pay in the next contract was “significantly better” than what Tesla and foreign automakers paid U.S. workers. He added that Ford “will not make a deal that endangers our ability to invest, grow and share profits with our employees.”Mr. Biden and Democratic lawmakers had sought to offset this labor-cost disadvantage by providing an additional $4,500 subsidy for each electric vehicle assembled at a unionized U.S. plant, above other incentives available to electric cars. But the Senate removed that provision from the Inflation Reduction Act.Such setbacks have frustrated the U.A.W., an early backer of Mr. Biden’s clean energy plans. In May, the union, which normally supports Democratic presidential candidates, withheld its endorsement of Mr. Biden’s re-election.“The E.V. transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” Mr. Fain said in an internal memo. “We want to see national leadership have our back on this before we make any commitments.”The next month, Mr. Fain chided the Biden administration for awarding Ford a $9.2 billion loan to build three battery factories in Tennessee and Kentucky with no inducement for the jobs to be unionized.A BMW battery plant in South Carolina. The U.A.W. has struggled to unionize autoworkers in the South.Juan Diego Reyes for The New York TimesMr. Biden tapped Mr. Sperling, a Michigan native, to serve as the White House point person on issues related to the union and the auto industry around the same time. By late August, the Energy Department announced that it was making $12 billion in grants and loans available for investments in electric vehicles, with a priority on automakers that create or maintain good jobs in areas with a union presence.Mr. Sperling speaks regularly with both sides in the labor dispute, seeking to defuse misunderstandings before they escalate, and said the recent Energy Department funding reflected Mr. Biden’s commitment to jump-start the industry while creating good jobs.Complicating the picture for Mr. Biden is the growing chorus of Democratic politicians and liberal groups that have backed the autoworkers’ demands, even as they hail the president’s success in improving pay and labor standards in other green industries, like wind and solar.Nearly 30 Democratic senators signed a letter to auto executives this summer urging them to bring battery workers into the union’s national contract. Dozens of labor and environmental groups have signed a letter echoing the demand.The groups argue that the change would have only a modest impact on automakers’ profits because labor accounts for a relatively small portion of overall costs, a claim that some independent experts back.Yen Chen, principal economist of the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit group in Ann Arbor, Mich., said labor accounted for only about 5 percent of the cost of final assembly for a midsize domestic sedan based on an analysis the group ran 10 years ago. Mr. Chen said that figure was likely to be lower today, and lower still for battery assembly, which is highly automated.Beyond the economic case, however, Mr. Biden’s allies say allowing electric vehicles to drive down auto wages would be a catastrophic political mistake. Workers at the three companies are concentrated in Midwestern states that could decide the next presidential election — and, as a result, the fate of the transition to clean energy, said Jason Walsh, the executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental groups.“The economic effects of doing that are enormously harmful,” he said. “The political consequences would be disastrous.” More

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    Wally Adeyemo, the Deputy Treasury Secretary, to Visit Nigeria

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    Wally Adeyemo, the highest-ranking member of the African diaspora in the Biden administration, emigrated from Nigeria to the United States as a child.The Biden administration is dispatching Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, to Nigeria next week as it seeks to deepen economic ties with Africa and counter China’s influence on the continent.The visit comes as Nigeria’s new president, Bola Tinubu, is embarking on reforms to revive his country’s sluggish economy and months after President Biden pledged to deepen the United States’ involvement with Africa with an investment of more than $50 billion over the next three years. The United States has been trying to make up lost ground in the geopolitical contest with China and Russia to cultivate relations in Africa.Nigeria, which is Africa’s largest economy, is key to those efforts. The Biden administration believes Nigeria, a democracy that is rich with natural resources, has the potential to be an economic anchor for the United States on the continent.Several Biden administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, have visited Nigeria during Mr. Biden’s first term. However, Mr. Adeyemo is a unique emissary: He was born in Ibadan, one of Nigeria’s largest cities, and emigrated with his family to California when he was 2 years old.The trip will be Mr. Adeyemo’s first time going back to Nigeria in decades, he said, and he will be returning as the highest-ranking member of the African diaspora in the Biden administration. His ascension to the top ranks of the U.S. government has been watched with joy in Nigeria in recent years.“It’s one of those opportunities to go to a place that means a lot to me personally, but also to go to a place that means a lot to me professionally, just given that Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy with a huge demographic boom,” Mr. Adeyemo said in an interview with The New York Times. “It’s just a great chance for me to talk about how we can deepen the economic relationship and the strategic relationship at a moment when Nigeria has a government that’s already taken really important steps in terms of economic reform.”While in Lagos, Mr. Adeyemo plans to meet with government officials and executives from the technology, entertainment and finance sectors. He also plans to meet with American companies that operate in Nigeria and visit a local project that has received financing from the U.S. government.The Biden administration views Nigeria as an opportunity because of its large population of young workers. Nigeria’s government has tried to make the country more attractive to foreign investors by easing currency controls and removing fuel subsidies, which have for years strained its public finances.Mr. Adeyemo said that his message in Nigeria will be that “the United States wants to be your partner, not only to provide development assistance, but to think about how we deepen our investment and trade relationship.”While he is there, Mr. Adeyemo plans to talk to Nigerian officials about tackling corruption and protecting the financial system from illicit finance risks. He will also encourage Nigerian officials to continue to pursue ways of diversifying the economy away from its reliance on petroleum and embracing renewable energy.The outreach from the United States comes as Nigeria is grappling with the highest levels of inflation in nearly two decades and, like many African nations, a heavy debt burden.According to government statistics, Nigeria owes more than $20 billion to international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It also owes $4.7 billion to China, which is Nigeria’s largest bilateral creditor.The Biden administration has been pressuring China to offer debt relief to African countries. However, Nigeria has yet to seek debt relief through the “common framework” initiative that was established by the Group of 20 nations.Biden administration officials have been careful to avoid explicitly characterizing U.S. interests in Africa in the context of competition with China. During a trip to South Africa last year, Mr. Blinken said the administration’s Africa strategy was not centered on rivalry with China and Russia. But a White House document on Mr. Biden’s strategy in sub-Saharan Africa released the same day said the effort to strengthen “open societies” was partly intended to “counter harmful activities” by China, Russia and “other foreign actors.”Asked about China’s influence in Nigeria, Mr. Adeyemo underscored what the country shares with the United States and noted that both are large, multiethnic democracies with similar values. He pointed out that African countries are increasingly aware of China’s reluctance to restructure debt and that the United States is taking a different approach to its economic relationship with Nigeria.“We’re talking about investment and foreign direct investment in Nigerian companies, in Nigerian infrastructure, in a way that allows Nigerians to be able to build a thriving economy that isn’t overly reliant on external debt,” Mr. Adeyemo said. More

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    Bharat Ramamurti, a Senior Biden Aide Who Helped Shape Economic Agenda, Is Leaving

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    Bharat Ramamurti supported the president’s competition agenda and pushed the administration to do more for student borrowers and salaried workersBharat Ramamurti, the last original senior member of President Biden’s National Economic Council, will leave the White House at the end of the month. His departure closes a chapter in Mr. Biden’s tenure that included a flurry of economic legislation directing large sums of federal money toward infrastructure, manufacturing, clean energy and other initiatives.Mr. Ramamurti, an N.E.C. deputy, has been a key player in Mr. Biden’s efforts to boost the economy through both legislation and executive action. That included Mr. Biden’s attempts to increase corporate competition — an initiative outlined in an executive order in 2021 — and his plan to forgive a wide swath of student loans, which the Supreme Court struck down.Mr. Ramamurti was a candidate to lead the N.E.C. when its first director under Mr. Biden, Brian Deese, stepped down in February. The position instead went to a former top Federal Reserve official, Lael Brainard.In an interview, Ms. Brainard praised Mr. Ramamurti for “outstanding judgment, collegiality, strategic sense, policy chops and communications.”Before joining Mr. Biden’s transition team after the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Ramamurti was a policy aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and the first member of the Congressional Oversight Commission charged with tracking some of the $2 trillion of economic stimulus approved by President Donald J. Trump amid the Covid-19 pandemic.Many observers expected Mr. Ramamurti to help link Mr. Biden’s economic team with Ms. Warren and other progressive Democrats in Congress on issues like student debt relief, where Mr. Biden’s plans called for less expansive action than the more liberal wing of his party had urged.Mr. Deese recalled that Mr. Ramamurti, in developing the ill-fated student debt proposal, was influential and pragmatic in expanding on Mr. Biden’s original promise of $10,000 in loan relief for lower-income and middle-class borrowers.Mr. Ramamurti was among those pushing for more expanded relief that could help Black students and other students of color with particularly large debt levels. He suggested several different ways to expand forgiveness in a targeted manner, at the request of Mr. Deese and Susan Rice, who was then the head of Mr. Biden’s Domestic Policy Council. The team eventually settled on a plan that offered an additional $10,000 in relief for students who had been eligible for federal Pell Grants, which benefit lower-income families.“In all of our work on college affordability, he was very conscious of racial equity and distributional impacts,” said Jared Bernstein, the chairman of Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. In the student debt debate, he said, Mr. Ramamurti “brought a level of both policy expertise and emotion — which is a nice way of saying ‘pissed off’ — to those meetings.”Some of Mr. Ramamurti’s influence on policy was more durable — if less visible. Mr. Bernstein said he had successfully pushed other administration officials to be more aggressive in setting a Labor Department rule that expands the number of salaried workers who automatically qualify for time-and-a-half overtime pay after working 40 hours in a week.He coordinated the administration’s efforts to broker an agreement in early 2022 between the nation’s telecom giants and leading airlines over the deployment of 5G wireless towers near airports, which could have caused crippling disruptions in air travel.He also helped lead much of Mr. Biden’s competition agenda, including his efforts to crack down on so-called junk fees charged by banks, airlines and online ticketing agencies. That effort spanned cabinet agencies and several parts of the West Wing, and colleagues repeatedly praised Mr. Ramamurti’s coordination skills.It was a “major undertaking that could not have happened without Bharat’s ability to run good process and communicate so clearly and distill things down for people, including at all levels of the White House,” said Hannah Garden-Monheit, who now leads Mr. Biden’s competition council.Mr. Biden has seen significant turnover from his original economic team. Along with Mr. Deese and Ms. Rice, he lost his first C.E.A. chair, Cecilia Rouse, and several senior deputies across the White House. His first labor secretary, Marty Walsh, stepped down to become the head of the National Hockey League players’ union. More

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    Huawei Phone Is Latest Shot Fired in the U.S.-China Tech War

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    The release of a homegrown Chinese smartphone during a visit by the Biden official in charge of regulating such technology shows the U.S.-China tech conflict is alive and well.In the midst of the U.S. commerce secretary’s good will tour to China last week, Huawei, the telecom giant that faces stiff U.S. trade restrictions, unveiled a smartphone that illustrated just how hard it has been for the United States to clamp down on China’s tech prowess.The new phone is powered by a chip that appears to be the most advanced version of China’s homegrown technology to date — a kind of achievement that the United States has been trying to prevent China from reaching.The timing of its release may not have been a coincidence. The Commerce Department has been leading U.S. efforts to curb Beijing’s ability to gain access to advanced chips, and the commerce secretary, Gina M. Raimondo, spent much of her trip defending the U.S. crackdown to Chinese officials, who pressed her to water down some of the rules.Ms. Raimondo’s powerful role — as well as China’s antipathy toward the U.S. curbs — was reflected online, where more than a dozen vendors cropped up on Chinese e-commerce sites to sell phone cases for the new model with Ms. Raimondo’s face imprinted on the back. Doctored images showed Ms. Raimondo holding the new phone, next to phrases like “I am Raimondo, this time I endorse Huawei” and “Huawei mobile phone ambassador Raimondo.”Chinese media have referred to the phone as a sign of the country’s technological independence, but U.S. analysts said the achievement still most likely hinged on the use of American technology and machinery, which would have been in violation of U.S. trade restrictions.Beginning in the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the United States has steadily ramped up its restrictions on selling advanced chips and the machinery needed to make them to China, and to Huawei in particular, in an attempt to shut down China’s mastery of technologies that could aid its military.For the past several years, those restrictions have curtailed Huawei’s ability to produce 5G phones. But Huawei appears to have found a way around those restrictions to make an advanced phone, at least in limited quantities. Though detailed information about the phone is limited, Huawei’s jade-green Mate 60 Pro appears to have many of the same basic capabilities as other smartphones on the market.An examination of the phone by TechInsights, a Canadian firm that analyzes the semiconductor industry, concluded that the advanced chip inside was manufactured by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation of China and was operating beyond the technology limits that the United States has been trying to enforce. Douglas Fuller, an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, said SMIC appeared to have used equipment stockpiled before restrictions went into effect, equipment licensed to it for the purpose of producing chips for companies other than Huawei, and spare parts acquired through third-party vendors to cobble together its production.“The official line in China of a heroic breaking of the technology blockade of the American imperialists is incorrect,” Mr. Fuller said. “Instead, the U.S. has allowed SMIC continued significant access to American technology.”Huawei and SMIC did not respond to a request for comment. The Commerce Department also did not respond to a request for comment.Chinese social media commentators and news sites celebrated the smartphone’s release as evidence that U.S. restrictions could not hold China back from developing its own technology.“Regardless of Huawei’s intentions, the launch of the Mate 60 Pro has been imbued by many Chinese netizens with a deeper meaning of ‘rising up under US pressure,’” the state-run Global Times said in an editorial.The phone was released during a week when both American and Chinese officials had issued numerous statements about renewed cooperation and communication. Chinese officials had asked for the United States to roll back its restrictions on chip exports. But Ms. Raimondo — whose email, along with other U.S. officials, was targeted this year by Chinese hackers — told reporters that she had taken a hard line on the technology controls in her meetings, saying the United States was not willing to remove restrictions or compromise on issues of national security.During the trip, Ms. Raimondo and her advisers set up a dialogue to share information about how the United States was enforcing its technology controls. She said the step would lead to better Chinese compliance but was not an invitation to the Chinese to try to water down export controls.Ms. Raimondo also met directly with the Chinese premier, Li Qiang, during her visit. The week before, Mr. Li had visited Huawei during a visit to southern China, according to the official Xinhua News Agency, and met with the company founder Ren Zhengfei.Phone cases in China displaying doctored photos of the U.S. commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo.MengyanThe release of the Huawei phone raises questions about whether Ms. Raimondo’s department will continue trying to build good will with Chinese officials — or potentially take a more aggressive stance toward cracking down on China’s access to American technology.The Biden administration is preparing to issue a final version of the technology restrictions it first put out last October, and the revised rules could come within weeks.Huawei’s development of the phone does not necessarily demonstrate a huge leap forward for Chinese technological prowess — or the total failure of U.S. export controls, analysts said.Because Chinese firms no longer have access to the most cutting-edge machines for making semiconductors, they have developed novel workarounds that use older machinery to create more powerful chips. But these methods are both relatively time-consuming for manufacturers, and produce a higher proportion of faulty chips, limiting the scale of production.“This does not mean China can manufacture advanced semiconductors at scale,” said Paul Triolo, an associate partner for China and technology policy at Albright Stonebridge Group, a consultancy. “But it shows what incentives U.S. controls have created for Chinese firms to collaborate and attempt new ways to innovate with their existing capabilities.”“It is the first major salvo in what will be a decade or more struggle for China’s semiconductor industry to essentially reinvent parts of the global semiconductor supply chain without U.S. technology included,” he added.Nazak Nikakhtar, a partner at Wiley Rein and a former Commerce Department official, said Huawei’s progress was “a result of longstanding U.S. policy” — specifically U.S. licenses that allow companies to continue selling advanced technologies to firms that the Commerce Department placed on a so-called entity list, like Huawei and SMIC.From Jan. 3 to March 31, 2022, the Commerce Department approved licenses for the sale of $23 billion of tech products to companies on the entity list, according to information released in February by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.“Where gaps exist in licensing policies, exports will get funneled through the gaps,” Ms. Nikakhtar said. “The U.S. government needs to close the gaps if its intention is to limit exports of critical technologies to China.”In a statement on Wednesday, Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who heads a congressional committee on China, called for ending all U.S. technology exports to both Huawei and SMIC. U.S. chip makers such as Qualcomm and Intel have received exporting licenses.Claire Fu More

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    Wrestling With Inequality, Some Conservatives Redraw Economic Blueprint

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    A growing number of Republican politicians and theorists are challenging party orthodoxy on pocketbook issues, corporate power and government’s role.More Republicans are coming to the view that economic inequality, or a lack of social mobility, is a problem in the United States — and that more can be done to enable families to attain or regain a middle-class life.Though discussions about inequality tend to be most visible among liberals, about four in 10 Republican or Republican-leaning adults think there is too much economic inequality in the country, according to a Pew Research survey. And among Republicans making less than about $40,000 a year who see too much economic inequality, 63 percent agree that the economic system “requires major changes” to address it.But a growing debate among conservative thinkers, politicians and the party base — online, in books and in public forums — reveals a group divided about how, in practice, to address pocketbook issues and the extent to which the government should be involved.“I don’t think just having a bigger government is a solution to a lot of these problems,” said Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and a fellow with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank widely credited with giving Trumpism an intellectual framework. “But I do think that we could stand to think a little bit more on the right about how to make that 1950s middle-class life possible for people.”These yearnings and ideological stirrings have picked up as both whites without college degrees and the broader working class have grown as a share of Republican voters. (Hillary Clinton won college-educated white voters by 17 percentage points in her 2016 race against Donald J. Trump; four years earlier, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, carried that group.)A notable swipe against longtime Republican economic thinking has come from Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative who served as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and the opinion editor of The New York Post. The metamorphosis of his worldview is laid out in a recently published book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.”“I was writing editorials preaching the gospel of low taxes, free trade, et cetera,” Mr. Ahmari said in an interview. But Mr. Trump’s election inspired him to research how “American life in general for the lower rungs of the labor market is unbelievably precarious,” he said, and his politics changed.Mr. Ahmari recently endorsed a second term for Mr. Trump, but he has written that “while ferociously conservative on cultural issues,” he is also “increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the left — figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.”In their own ways, Republican presidential primary candidates are jostling for ways to validate the populist energy and financial unease that Mr. Trump tapped into with a mix of pronouncements and policy promises. Some have set out economic goals that, according to many experts, are hard to square with their promises to reduce public debt and taxes and make deep cuts to government programs — especially now that many Republicans have backed away from calls to cut entitlement benefits.In a campaign speech in New Hampshire this summer called “A Declaration of Economic Independence,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican presidential contender, sharply critiqued China, diversity programming, “excessive regulation and excessive taxes” — a familiar set of modern conservative concerns. Yet he also echoed complaints and economic goals often heard from the left.“We want to be a country where you can raise a family on one sole income,” he told the crowd.“We cannot have policy that kowtows to the largest corporations and Wall Street at the expense of small businesses and average Americans,” he added. “There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism.”Critics on the left and the right argue that Mr. DeSantis has failed to clearly define how he would achieve those goals. The DeSantis campaign declined to comment for this article, but he has cited pathways to broader prosperity that include bringing industrial jobs back from abroad, increasing work force education and technical training, removing “red tape” faced by small businesses and aiming for annual U.S. economic growth of at least 3 percent.Though the fissures on the right over economic issues were evident when Mr. Trump upended the political scene eight years ago, the realignments are maturing and deepening, causing fresh tensions as factions disagree on the extent to which inequality, globalization and growing corporate power should be seen as problems.Some conservatives remain more concerned with the trajectory of federal spending and unlocking greater overall prosperity, rather than its distribution.Last year, Phil Gramm, a Republican who steered the passage of major tax cuts and deregulation during his time representing Texas in Congress from the 1970s to the early 2000s, published a book with his fellow economists Robert Ekelund and John Early called “The Myth of American Inequality.” The book — filled with alternative tabulations of impoverishment and living standards — argues that inequality is not high and rising as “the mainstream” suggests.It argues that when including welfare transfers, income inequality has been more stable than government figures suggest, and that the share of Americans living in poverty fell from 15 percent in 1967 to only 1.1 percent in 2017.“The point of the book is to get the facts straight,” Mr. Gramm said in an interview, adding that “we’re having these debates” with numbers that are “verifiably false.” (Some scholars have vehemently disagreed with the authors’ analysis.)Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that he largely agreed with Mr. Gramm’s thesis and that Americans were mostly wrestling with “keeping up with the Joneses,” not a loss of economic traction.“In general, folks at the bottom, up to the median, are doing better,” Mr. Lincicome concluded. “They’re not winning the game, but they’re doing better than the same group was 30-plus years ago.”He added: “You know, economists can debate all day long whether we’re better off, worse off overall or whatever. But when you factor in all the factors, I personally think things are fine.”To the extent that these debates have popular reach, the most public face of the revisionist camp may be Oren Cass, an adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 campaign, who has become immersed in a collective project among some right-leaning thinkers to “rebuild capitalism.”Mr. Cass and his allies want to use government spending and power to promote economic mobility with traditionalist goals in mind — like reducing the cost of living for the heads of married, two-parent households.Mr. Cass praised Mr. Ahmari’s book as one that “bravely goes where few conservatives dare tread, to the ideologically fraught realm in which the market appears inherently coercive and capitalism appears in tension with economic freedom.” (Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, is talking at a book event with Mr. Ahmari this month at the National Press Club in Washington.)Many economists and political scientists contend that the ideological realignment on the right is overblown, confused with a broader, hard-to-quantify loyalty to Mr. Trump rather than an explicit ideology giving life to Trumpism.“In a way,” Mr. Ahmari said, his critics — “the people who say, ‘Yeah, sure, you’re just a couple of guys: you, Oren, and a few others at magazines and think tanks’” — are “not wrong institutionally,” as there is little donor support for their efforts.“But they are wrong in terms of voters,” he added.Ms. Stepman of the Claremont Institute says she is personally “more traditional right” than thinkers like Mr. Ahmari but agrees they are tapping into something real. “There is a very underserved part of the political spectrum that is genuinely left of center on economic issues, right of center on cultural issues,” she said, pointing to issues including immigration, gun laws, education, gender norms and more.Gabe Guidarini is one of them.Growing up in Lake Bluff, Ill., in a working-class household where MSNBC often played in the background at night, Mr. Guidarini felt his view that “the status quo in this country is corrupt” was validated by the “anti-establishment” voices of both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump. But he came to the view that “you can’t get away with” social views that stray from progressive orthodoxy and still be accepted by Democrats. Now, at 19, he is the president of the University of Dayton College Republicans.In 2022, he worked as a campaign intern for J.D. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” who aligned himself with Trumpism after his 2016 book was credited for providing a “reference guide” for Mr. Trump’s electoral success. Mr. Vance, an Ohio Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate.In line with Tucker Carlson and some other conservatives, Mr. Guidarini thinks the party “should be taking policy samples from Viktor Orban in Hungary, and what he’s doing with family policies that aim to increase family creation, increase childbirth and make it easier to live a decent life as a working or middle-class taxpayer,” he said. “That’s what’s going to return the American dream for so many people, because to young people — and I feel like a lot of other people in America today — the American dream feels dead.”Mr. Guidarini, like many on the right, is wary of achieving those goals by increasing taxes on the wealthy. But according to Pew Research, more Republican or Republican-leaning adults support raising tax rates for those with incomes over $400,000 (46 percent) than say those rates should go unchanged (29 percent) or be lowered (24 percent). And more than half of low-income Republicans support higher taxes on the highest earners.For now, though, all economic debates are “tangential,” said Saagar Enjeti, a conservative millennial who is a co-host of two podcasts that often feature competing voices across the right.“‘What are we going to do when the Trump tax cuts expire?’ These are not the fights that are happening,” Mr. Enjeti said. “I wish they were, but they’re not. They’re just not.”With consensus on policy solutions elusive and “the culture wars” in the campaign forefront, Mr. Enjeti said, Republicans will mostly rally around what he believes will be Mr. Trump’s simple economic message: “Make America 2019 Again” — a time when unemployment, inflation and mortgage rates were low and, for all of life’s challenges, at least cultural conservatives were in the White House. More

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    U.S. and China Agree to Broaden Talks in Bid to Ease Tensions

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    During a visit to Beijing, Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said the two sides would meet to discuss export restrictions and intellectual property, among other issues.The United States and China agreed on Monday to hold regular conversations about commercial issues and restrictions on access to advanced technology, the latest step this summer toward reducing tensions between the world’s two largest economies.The announcement came during a visit to Beijing by Gina Raimondo, the U.S. commerce secretary, who is meeting with senior Chinese officials in Beijing and Shanghai this week.The agreement to hold regular discussions is the latest move toward rebuilding frayed links between the two countries, a process that had already begun during three trips in the past 10 weeks by senior American officials: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and John Kerry, the president’s climate envoy.“I think it’s a very good sign that we agreed to concrete dialogue, and I would say, more than just kind of nebulous commitments to continue to talk, this is an official channel,” Ms. Raimondo said in an interview after four hours of negotiations with China’s commerce minister, Wang Wentao.Ms. Raimondo said on Monday night in Beijing that she’d had an “open” and “pragmatic” discussion with Mr. Wang and had raised the American business community’s concerns about China’s recent actions against Intel and Micron Technology, two semiconductor companies in the United States. The Chinese government has scuttled a large acquisition planned by Intel and has blocked some sales in China by Micron this year.She said two separate dialogues would be established. One would be a working group that included business representatives and would focus on commercial issues. The other would be a governmental information exchange on export control issues.Bilateral talks about trade, technology and other economic issues were once the norm between the United States and China, but those discussions have atrophied in recent years. China halted eight bilateral discussion groups a year ago in retaliation for a visit to Taiwan by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was House speaker at the time.The flight of a Chinese spy balloon that traveled across the United States last winter and was then shot down over the Atlantic Ocean only deepened divisions between China and the United States, and resulted in Mr. Blinken’s initially canceling a trip to Beijing.But relations have begun to thaw as both nations, whose economies are tied to each other, have opened the door to resuming diplomatic ties.In a readout after the meeting, the Chinese ministry of commerce said Mr. Wang had expressed serious concerns about U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports, as well as the Biden administration’s efforts to bolster the U.S. semiconductor industry by providing government subsidies. Mr. Wang criticized those new subsidy programs, which are designed to lure manufacturing to the United States, as “discriminatory,” and he expressed concerns about U.S. sanctions on Chinese companies.China is willing to work with the United States to create a sound policy environment for business cooperation between the countries, he told the U.S. side, according to the readout.Even before Ms. Raimondo traveled to China, Republican lawmakers criticized her for planning a “working group” of U.S. and Chinese officials to discuss American export controls. Four senior Republicans contended in a letter last week that it was “deeply inappropriate for our foremost adversary to have any influence over controls on sensitive U.S. national security technologies that the American people charged her to protect.”Ms. Raimondo announced the new dialogue not as a working group but as an “information exchange.” She said that it had been set up to share more information about U.S. export restrictions on advanced technology, but that the group’s creation did not mean the United States would be compromising on issues of national security. The first meeting of the export control group was scheduled to take place in Beijing on Tuesday.Ms. Raimondo also said she and the Chinese commerce minister had agreed to meet with each other at least annually.He Weiwen, a former Chinese commerce ministry official who is now a trade specialist at the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing research group, said the bilateral agreement to have more discussions showed a mutual commitment to pragmatism.“It means that both sides share the approach to solve practical issues,” he said.But in a sign of how politically fraught relations with China remain, plans for a formal dialogue structure between the two countries drew criticism from some China hawks in the United States.Matt Turpin, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and former China director of the National Security Council, described the move as a “real head scratcher.” He pointed to China’s unwillingness to take action to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States, its alliance with Russia and its hacking of Ms. Raimondo’s email account before the trip as reasons China did not deserve such outreach.“It seems that Raimondo gave a significant concession to Beijing and got nothing in return,” Mr. Turpin said.A senior Commerce Department official said the Chinese had raised concerns during the meetings Monday about a trend toward declining trade and investment between the two countries, as well as issues around government subsidies.U.S. officials conveyed the concerns of American businesses and investors, including unfair requirements faced by foreign businesses and a declining transparency in China’s economic statistics. China suspended the release of youth unemployment data this month after the figure reached a record high this summer.Ms. Raimondo said that she had spoken to nearly 150 business leaders in preparation for her trip and that they had given her a common message: We need more channels of communication.“A growing Chinese economy that plays by the rules is in all of our interests,” she said.As the Chinese economy has faltered this summer, Chinese officials have begun softening their stance on some issues. In the latest measure, the foreign ministry announced on Monday that starting on Wednesday, travelers to China would no longer need to test themselves first for Covid.Michael Hart, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said there had been a change in direction from Chinese officials this summer, with an increased willingness to hold discussions.“It used to be at every meeting I went to, the first five minutes were ‘Everything is America’s fault,’” Mr. Hart said. “It’s definitely toned down now. Government officials understand the importance of U.S.-China trade.” More

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    Biden Incentives for Foreign Investment Are Benefiting Factories

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    Early data suggest laws to increase semiconductor production and renewable energy technology have shifted the makeup of foreign direct investment — but not increased it.Lucrative new tax breaks and other incentives for advanced manufacturing that President Biden signed into law appear to be reshaping direct foreign investment in the American economy, according to a White House analysis, with a much greater share of spending on new and expanded businesses shifting toward the factory sector.Data that include the first months after the enactment of two pieces of that agenda show that a key measure of foreign investment fell slightly from 2021 to 2022, adjusted for inflation.The numbers suggest that, in the early months after the bills were signed, the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that Mr. Biden is directing toward manufacturing have not increased the overall amount of foreign direct investment in the economy. Instead, the laws appear to have shifted where foreign investment is being directed.A new analysis by the White House Council of Economic Advisers shows the composition of what’s known as capacity-enhancing spending on new structures or expansions of existing ones shifted rapidly toward factories, in line with one of Mr. Biden’s top economic goals.The analysis shows that two-thirds of foreign direct investment, excluding corporate acquisitions, was in manufacturing in 2022. That was more than double the average share from 2014 to 2021.The surge is small in the context of the overall economy. But administration officials call it an encouraging sign that multinational companies are being enticed to America by Mr. Biden’s industrial policy agenda. In the last year, the analysis notes, construction spending on new manufacturing facilities in the United States has increased significantly faster than in England, continental Europe or other wealthy Group of 7 nations.Administration officials say a Commerce Department survey of new foreign investment suggests investors pouring money into America’s factories are largely concentrated in Britain and continental Europe, along with Canada, Japan and South Korea. Half of 1 percent of the investment appears to be associated with China.That foreign investment is flowing largely to computer and electronics manufacturing, particularly of semiconductors, which were the centerpiece of a bipartisan industrial policy bill that Mr. Biden signed into law last summer. He also signed a climate, health and tax bill later that summer that included large new subsidies for renewable energy technology manufacturing.Since those laws were signed, companies have announced a flurry of planned investments in the United States. The administration tallies them at more than $500 billion. They include semiconductor plants in Arizona, advanced battery facilities in Georgia and much more. Many of the announced projects are from foreign companies, like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.Administration officials say shifting investment toward factories — even if the overall level of investment does not change — can produce positive spillovers for the economy. The White House analysis cites higher wages in manufacturing jobs and potential increases to productivity from foreign firms sharing knowledge with existing domestic manufacturers.“Foreign direct investment in manufacturing doesn’t just help us build up this critical sector in key focal areas of Bidenomics, such as semiconductors and clean energy,” said Jared Bernstein, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. “It also allows us to learn valuable production lessons from international companies in these and other areas.” More