President Joe Biden laid out his ambitious plan to remake the social contract between government and citizens during his first address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night.
Appealing to both patriotism and morality, he told Americans they should expect to get more out of their government and that those who are most successful should have to pay more in. His vision — for more government money to pay for child care, community college, health care, and infrastructure like roads and bridges and the power grid — would add up to trillions in new spending, but he argued we need to invest to prime ourselves for the battle of ideals — democracy vs. autocracy — with China and Russia. « Autocrats think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies because it takes too long to get consensus, » Biden said, speaking about China’s Xi Jinping. « To win that competition for the future, in my view, we also need to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our families and our children. » I went line-by-line through the speech and annotated it. Read it here. The scope of Biden’s plan — built on progressive goals for a more active and generous government — is in line with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which not only got the country rebuilt during the Great Depression but created Social Security so older Americans would not be in poverty. It’s no less ambitious than Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which gave older Americans guaranteed health care. And it builds on the legacy of Biden’s former boss Barack Obama, who tried to extend health benefits to the rest of the country through the Affordable Care Act. For an appraisal of similarities between Biden and Roosevelt, read this CNN Opinion by David Gergen, who advised four presidents from both parties. There are many differences between Biden and those other presidents, but there’s one key distinction that could stand in the way of any massive and meaningful permanent legislation, and it’s this: Biden’s trying to build a big time legacy with a small time majority. Each of those other Democratic presidents had a massive majority in the Senate — 60 or more — that helped them change the safety net with support in both parties. Social Security: 69 Senate Democrats,76 total « yes » votes, including 16 Republicans.
