President Joe Biden has signed the American Rescue Plan into law. Some context from Heather Cox Richardson:
Rather than focusing on dismantling the federal government and turning individuals loose to act as they wish, Congress has returned to the principles of the nation before 1981, using the federal government to support ordinary Americans. With its expansion of the child tax credit, the bill is projected to reach about 27 million children and to cut child poverty in half.It’s a good day.
The bill, which President Biden is expected to sign Friday, is a landmark piece of legislation, reversing the trend of American government since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Rather than funneling money upward in the belief that those at the top will invest in the economy and thus create jobs for poorer Americans, the Democrats are returning to the idea that using the government to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans will rebuild the economy from the bottom up. This was the argument for the very first expansion of the American government—during Abraham Lincoln’s administration — and it was the belief on which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal.
Unlike the previous implementations of this theory, though, Biden’s version, embodied in the American Rescue Plan, does not privilege white men (who in Lincoln and Roosevelt’s day were presumed to be family breadwinners). It moves money to low-wage earners generally, especially to women and to people of color. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) called the child tax credit “a new lifeline to the middle class.” “Franklin Roosevelt lifted seniors out of poverty, 90 percent of them with Social Security, and with the stroke of a pen,” she said. “President Biden is going to lift millions and millions of children out of poverty in this country.”
comments: 2
I am surprised that nobody has noted that the 40 years since Reaganomics...
(middle aged people have never known a USA without ongoing tax cuts and sole valuing in business of stockholders)
... is balanced by the 40 years between WWII and Reagan. Actually Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer has noticed. He says, in Growing Pains, that the only theory that came true was that the rich would get richer. I wish more people than just Dyer would take the time to compare and contrast.
That’s something I like about Heather Cox Richardson’s digests. She’ll pull back from the events of the day to give a much broader picture of the history of voting rights and voter suppression, Social Security, and so on. Much more helpful than hours of “the news.”
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