IT’S TIME TO TREAT PRESIDENT BIDEN AS WE DID FDR, DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

 

      …FDR as the U.S. President, succeeding Republican President, Herbert Hoover

 

The new American Rescue Plan is today’s version of FDR and the New Deal

 

The signed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act is incredibly popular.  Polling shows that 7 out 0f 10 Americans support it.  A majority of American men and women say they are in favor of it. People of all ages, races, and income brackets give it a thumbs up in large numbers.  In many ways, it is a new president that is acting somewhat like president FDR did in dealing with the Great Depression and WWII and bringing the nation together for increasing the size and influence of the middle class in America.

This is extraordinary, in a nation where people who need to rely on welfare to get by are routinely referred to as “takers.”  Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have properly sold the nation on the largest expansion of the social safety net since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930’s.  Also, the Great Society initiatives of the 1960s under another Democratic president Johnson, and this time, they did it in less than two months.

Republicans have literally been left in the dust.  They have been reduced to whining about how the plan is not “prudent,” to quote Rep. Charlie Dent (Pa.), when they aren’t falsely attempting to take credit for parts of it, as Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker has done.

Here’s the secret: By ignoring decades of so-called Washington wisdom about the need for narrowly targeted aid and small steps forward, this legislation allows us to sidestep our societal negatives around race, poverty and who we think is deserving of a government assist.

The American Rescue Plan assumes that almost everyone can use a helping hand.  According to the institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, roughly 85% of adults and children will receive a stimulus payment, meaning, as Biden said in his Thursday night speech, that “a typical family of four earning about $110,0000 will get checks for $5,000.”  The yearlong expansion of the earned-income tax credit will significantly reduce child poverty, and the additional child tax credit will impact more than 90% of households with children under the age of 17. And for those who receive their health insurance through a federal exchange, not only are subsidies upped for two years but premium payments also are capped at 8.5% of household income. There’s $39 billion in aid for child-care centers, and $29 billion in help for restaurants.

My question is, ”Why has it taken so long for this country to be aware of the need to do something, and what does it take to get people off their asses to do something?  Have they not seen the increasing number of homeless people in our neighborhoods, and why hasn’t someone rang and answered the bells of need?

In her recent book “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” Heather McGhee points out that in the 1950s, almost two-thirds of White Americans said they believed it was the role of government to offer a job to anyone who needs one, and provide a minimum standard of living to all.  A decade later, support for the same position had virtually collapsed.  She points to the civil rights movement as the reason, and it’s hard to disagree with her reasoning.

The pushback to Great Society expansions of the social safety net was often just thinly veiled (if that) of racism: Remember that Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” was a Black woman. The same phenomenon occurred during the initial fight over the Affordable Care Act, as expected, Rush Limbaugh claimed, “This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations, whatever you want to call it.” Even in 2021, the Center for American Progress found that support for changes to the social safety net that make it more generous garner significantly more support when described as helping “those living in poverty," but it falls off when described as helping “Black Americans and Hispanics.”

Perhaps the current Proud Boys and the other private militia groups are just an example of those white supremacists that want to take us back to the 1860’s of segregation against anything that isn’t White.

The simplest way out of this toxic dilemma is to make benefits so generous that they are near universal. This is why Social Security is all but untouchable and why Medicare, once controversial, is now so popular that the slogan for people who want to see universal coverage, government guaranteed health-care coverage is called: “Medicare for All.”

The idea that we should help only the utterly destitute, no matter how well meant, just leads to less support for helping almost anyone, not just Blacks and Latinos. When you offer government safety-net assistance only to the most badly off, those just slightly above them on the income scale tend to get angry. “It seems to me that people who earn nothing and contribute nothing get everything for free,” as a woman not eligible for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act told the New York Times in 2018.

Of course, Biden doesn’t deserve sole credit for this new strategy. Long-time progressive agitation for these exact changes played a role, and they put pressure on the new administration to act. But it’s also true that Biden, with a longtime record as a fiscal moderate, made it clear this was more than just a simple left-wing wish list.

Now our new president has raised the bar, and then some, for what kind of help Americans can expect from our government in future economic downturns. Yes, many of the benefits for individuals and families are temporary, but, it’s almost certain that the expansion will create a large constituency for making them permanent. This bill is a remarkable and amazing achievement.

It is important that we Americans support what the Democrats are trying to do in acting like our parents did during the WWII issues and afterwards under Harry Truman in making the American middle class the strongest in the world.

Copyright G. Ater 2021