Will Joe Biden turn out to the most transformational president since Ronald Reagan? In just a hundred days he has passed a stimulus predicted to cut child poverty in half, proposed an infrastructure plan designed to both fight climate change and create jobs, and proposed another plan that will increase government spending on child care, including universal pre kindergarten for all children over three. It also will raise taxes on the rich (and beef up spending on the IRS to go after tax cheats, who are usually rich) to help pay for them. It seems hard to believe that a long time moderate Democrat who's supported things like the war on drugs in the past is pushing for the largest expansion in government spending on the American people to reduce poverty since Lyndon Johnson in the nineteen sixties (or even Franklin Roosevelt in the nineteen thirties). Is it because the Democratic party has drifted leftward in the past few years? Or is it just that Biden sees the country's emergence from the pandemic as a chance to push through progressive changes while government spending is suddenly popular? Probably some of both. Certainly reporting of the fact that the salaries of that nation's top CEOs have continued to skyrocket during the pandemic has perhaps made the average American more acutely aware of the inequities of our society.
While the future of the infrastructure and childcare bills aren't set (once again, thank Senator Joe Manchin and his love of the filibuster), some version of them should pass in the near future. All economic indicators indicate that they will create a shift in wealth from the rich to the poor, that, in my opinion, has been a long time coming.
Really, this kind of spending goes to the core of what's wrong with the American brand of free market capitalism: the problem is that the pay you get for your work is not based on the quality or importance of it, but the pure raw dollar value you bring to an employer. While this works just fine in many jobs (if you're a trained lawyer than you can make a lot of money for a law firm, so they pay you a lot), its when it comes to jobs that are hard to assign a simple dollar value to that things get tricky. Take daycare workers for example; we all know that they have an important and essential job and perform a service that many parents rely on, and yet, because daycare centers can only charge the parents so much, they can only afford to pay their workers so much. Meaning that most daycare workers are paid little more than the minimum wage, causing many daycares to struggle to keep a consistent level of care because many of their workers leave for better paying jobs. Having a universal government pre k program that provides decent pay for the workers without charging the parents is really the only solution to this problem.
Quite a bit has been written about how the Biden spending plan will help to bridge the enormous economic racial gap that exists in American society (and already some Republicans have started griping about so called "reparations"), and while I think that's a good thing, it also should be pointed out just how this will benefit American women. Along with the most recent plan's call for universal childcare, the infrastructure plan calls for spending on better pay for eldercare workers; these two jobs are overwhelmingly held by women, and have been systematically devalued because of that. Paying women more for the important work they do is sure to have a positive effect on the country. And having daycare paid for by the government would be an economic windfall for working mothers. It would be a great benefit all around. A lot of positive attention has gone to the fact that, for the first time ever, the president gave a state of the union address flanked by a female vice president and speaker of the house; while symbols like that are nice, passing a bill that would improve the lives of millions of women in this country would be even better.
The nice thing about social spending is that once is starts, it becomes popular and people get used to it. In the nineteen thirties conservatives opposed Social Security, in the sixties they did the same for Medicare. Now those two programs are so popular that politicians often talk of expanding them. If both of Biden's tax and spending packages pass, I imagine the same thing will happen. Honestly, I'm surprised it has taken this long.
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