Tag: middle class
Biden’s Ambitious Agenda Is More Truman Than FDR

Biden’s Ambitious Agenda Is More Truman Than FDR

Joe Biden's multitrillion-dollar plans to revive the economy, fix America's infrastructure and ease poverty have spawned comparisons between him and Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the 100-day mark of the Biden presidency, David Gergen, who has advised presidents of both parties, wrote, "Biden is off to an excellent start — arguably, one of the best since Roosevelt."

And Biden hasn't discouraged such talk. He now has a giant portrait of FDR in the Oval Office, right across from the Resolute Desk.

But while there may be likenesses between those two presidents' agendas, the less glamorous Harry Truman also deserves inspirational face time. Truman and Biden both came from modest small-town origins. Unlike the aristocratic Roosevelt, they knew firsthand about middle-class striving.

It's not surprising, then, that the Biden agenda seeks to recreate the Golden Age for the American middle class — the postwar years of 1947 through 1973, when productivity doubled but so did the median compensation of full-time workers. Truman was instrumental in launching it.

Truman understood that the well-being of workers depended on factors beyond the magic of the market. Widespread prosperity needed a third player in addition to business and labor. That player was a government willing to impose social norms through tax policy, the minimum wage, and protection for organized labor.

As World War II was ending, impatient workers launched destabilizing strikes. And so, in November 1945, Truman held a conference to create a new labor policy through which postwar abundance would be broadly shared. The participants came from business, the labor movement and — at Truman's insistence — government.

The business community came eagerly on board. As Eric Johnston, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the conference: "Labor unions are woven into our economic pattern of American life, and collective bargaining is a part of the democratic process. I say recognize this fact not only with our lips but with our hearts."

Truman proposed a national health care plan, which didn't happen, and higher taxes on the top incomes, which did. Biden's agenda both strengthens the Affordable Care Act and seeks to raise taxes on the top incomes.

Unlike Roosevelt's New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal took a strong stance on civil rights. New Deal programs broadly discriminated against Blacks. The National Recovery Administration, for example, gave preferences to white job seekers and allowed lower pay scales for Blacks.

Roosevelt appointed a few Blacks to token jobs. Truman put nonwhites in positions of real power, notably William Henry Hastie, the first African American federal appellate judge.

Biden just announced a racially diverse slate of judicial nominees. It includes sending Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered a springboard for the Supreme Court.

Biden is pursuing racial equity in some controversial ways. The COVID-19 relief bill includes a $5 billion fund for minority farmers only. And the infrastructure package says that 40 percent of the benefits of clean energy must go to "disadvantaged communities." How that would work is unclear.

The offshoring of American jobs and technological change of course accelerated workers' loss of economic security — and helped end the Golden Age. But the ditching of norms that only government could enforce also played a part.

Ronald Reagan cut taxes on the rich. Then George W. Bush did, and then Donald Trump. The federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 an hour. In 1973, it was equivalent to $9.81 in today's dollars.

Biden seems to be summoning his inner Harry Truman and bringing back the third player. In assuring a stable and happy middle class, the market has a job to do, but so does government.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Mitt Romney

The Conservative Virtues Of Romney’s Liberal Child Allowance

The United States has a vast array of government programs that are meant to alleviate poverty, from food stamps to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Yet these efforts don't actually solve the problem they address. In terms of poverty, the United States ranks at or near the worst among developed countries.

One reason for that failure is that we keep avoiding the obvious solution: If people are poor, give them money. But Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, is not avoiding that solution any longer.

He has unveiled a major proposal to provide $350 per month ($4,200 per year) to every child in America up to the age of 6, as well as $250 per month ($3,000 per year) to every child age 6 to 17. Each family would be limited to a maximum of $1,250 per month ($15,000 per year). The program would be a model of simplicity, with the Social Security Administration mailing out checks every month. That's a big difference from the Earned Income Tax Credit, which typically provides cash only in one lump sum after the tax year ends.

"This plan," Romney says, "would immediately lift nearly three million children out of poverty, while providing a bridge to the middle class." There is also an unexpected bonus: Because it would trim other programs and repeal the federal deduction for state and local taxes, it would have a net budgetary cost of zero.

To hardline conservatives, this proposal may sound like a left-wing dream, vastly expanding dependence on federal handouts. But to anyone who thinks we have a collective responsibility to prevent serious hardship among innocent people, particularly those too young to fend for themselves, it represents a giant step toward a more humane social welfare system that also advances sound conservative principles.

The idea of fighting poverty with direct cash has an intellectual pedigree that notably includes Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, who advised Republican presidents and was revered on the right. He proposed payments through a "negative income tax," which he argued was a more effective, efficient remedy for poverty than a hodgepodge of programs that somehow spent far more money than the supposed beneficiaries ever got.

Romney's plan has the same virtue. It mirrors a proposal by Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado and Sherrod Brown of Ohio thiat enjoys broad support among congressional Democrats. A report from the centrist Niskanen Center in Washington, "The Conservative Case for a Child Allowance," concluded that Romney's plan would reduce child poverty by one-third. Ernie Tedeschi, a Treasury economist in the Obama administration, told The Washington Post it would be "among the most pro-family, anti-poverty policies in a generation."

How would it help families? It would avoid the penalty for marriage that some programs impose. The child allowance would give parents more freedom to decide whether to pay for child care or keep one parent at home. It would replace the current Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, which does little or nothing for parents with low incomes but a lot for those with high incomes.

Direct payments also get around another problem with welfare programs — that beneficiaries lose benefits when they get jobs, paying a penalty for working. A child allowance that goes to everyone would remove that disincentive.

By helping parents afford whatever child care arrangements they prefer, it would ease a painful trade-off that falls disproportionately on mothers. It would make it easier for both parents to work outside the home if they want — or for either parent to do the unpaid work of childrearing full time. When Canada established a similar program, the Niskanen report notes, "single and married moms alike worked more."

Unlike many social welfare programs, this one does not require the employment of hordes of public employees or force low-income citizens to grapple with bureaucratic obstacles that flummox many who should qualify. It doesn't involve the sort of social engineering that conservatives abhor. By eliminating other programs, it streamlines government.

It furnishes a regular income without strings attached, on the belief that parents are fully able to decide how best to use it for their families. It enables parents; it doesn't compel them. In that way, it expands freedom.

Conservatives may bridle at the idea of establishing a big new anti-poverty program, but they know all too well the failures of our current policies. They might take a page from Mae West, who said, "Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before."

Steve Chapman blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman. Follow him on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Danziger: “A Miracle For The Middle Class”

Danziger: “A Miracle For The Middle Class”

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel.

Can Liberals Learn To Love The Trump Voter?

Can Liberals Learn To Love The Trump Voter?

Reprinted with permission fromThe Washington Spectator.

For leftists beginning the work of opposing and resisting a Trump presidency, one of the most pressing questions is how to understand and address those who supported him. Even ignoring the predictably bad takes from the centrists who pass as progressive—like Jonathan Weisman implying the Democratic National Committee shouldn’t have a “black Muslim” like Keith Ellison at its head, as it might alienate (presumably white) rust belt voters, and Mark Lilla blaming Hillary Clinton’s loss on an “identity politics” too focused on diversity—the question has become a fault line.

On one side, there are left-liberals like Jamelle Bouie, who declared “there is no such thing as a good Trump voter.” Rejecting calls to empathize with them, Bouie argued that we must focus instead on the marginalized groups who will be hurt most by Trumpism. “If any group demands our support and sympathy,” he wrote, “it’s these people, not the Americans who backed Trump and his threat of state-sanctioned violence against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans. All the solicitude, outrage, and moral telepathy being deployed in defense of Trump supporters—who voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes—is perverse, bordering on abhorrent.”

On the other side are socialists who argue that we must embrace a political strategy that will appeal to many of the groups that Trump won, undermining his sham populism by advancing an authentic left populism. As five members of the Jacobin editorial board argued:

Blaming the American public for Trump’s victory only deepens the elitism that rallied his voters in the first place. It’s unquestionable that racism and sexism played a crucial role in Trump’s rise. And it’s horrifying to contemplate the ways that his triumph will serve to strengthen the cruelest and most bigoted forces in American society.

Still, a response to Trump that begins and ends with horror is not a political response—it is a form of paralysis, a politics of hiding under the bed. And a response to American bigotry that begins and ends with moral denunciation is not a politics at all—it is the opposite of politics. It is surrender.

In truth, the distance between Bouie and Jacobin (on this issue, anyway) isn’t so great. It is possible—and necessary—to loudly and unequivocally condemn the racism essential to Trump’s rise, the racism his voters articulated and countenanced, while simultaneously building a broad political movement that targets if not those very voters, then ones very much like them who stayed home on election day. However, doing so requires abandoning the most comforting liberal narratives about the right and its supporters.

Too often, the tropes liberals use to describe right-wing voters collapse the distinction between the problems those voters face and the policies and politicians they support. In condemning the latter, liberals deny that the former exist at all. Not only does that create the conditions Trumpism thrives in and the political blindness that made Hillary Clinton seem unbeatable, it obscures insights that are fundamental to a progressive political program and posits a false choice between moral condemnation and political power.

The This American Life episode “Seriously,” which aired in late October, provides a telling example. The title alone summarizes the bewilderment and exhausted disdain with which the show treats Trumpism. And while that disdain is earned—it’s only natural to want to throw up your hands when Ira Glass rolls tape of Trump claiming that Clinton started birtherism and he finished it, that she was on drugs during one of the debates, that she “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty”—it’s a mistake to assume that every one of these absurd tales is totally baseless.

Of course many of Trump’s narratives are outlandish, brazen lies, and probably will continue to be throughout his presidency. And some of them truly are completely detached from reality. But the question we should ask ourselves is how those lies could ever seem true to his supporters, and to do that we must be willing to admit that some of the lies grow out of a grain of truth, no matter how disgusting their final form. Clinton is not plotting the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, but she most certainly is part of an elite with immense wealth and power that uses its influence to shape the global economy to its liking. So were her Republican corollaries who served as Trump’s earliest victims—let us not forget the fate of JEB!, after all.

But instead of taking into consideration what 62 million Trump voters might experience in their everyday lives that could make them believe his inane theories, Glass merely laments the growing “distrust [of] the fact-based media and fact-based journalists.” Instead of questioning what ignored truths might motivate Trump’s claims of a secret banker cabal—something plenty on the left are likely to believe as well—Glass merely contrasts the “post-truth politics” of Trumpism with the fair, objective understanding of the world offered by more respectable (and ostensibly liberal) commentators.

But what Glass and his guest, Planet Money’s Jacob Goldstein, offer in response is not objectivity. It’s technocratic elitism. While discussing why Trump (as well as Clinton and Bernie Sanders) oppose trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Goldstein explains that “one of the reasons trade is so unpopular is, the pain is really concentrated and visible. And the benefits are really diffuse.” He cites a survey showing that zero economists—those consistent arbiters of truth—said NAFTA made Americans worse off. “The big picture with these trade deals,” Glass summarizes, “is, like, a small number of workers get bonked on the head, and then the rest of us get a bigger economy.” The problem with Trump voters, they seem to say, is they just don’t understand the data. If they did, they would realize that things are actually going pretty well for everyone, minus a forgettable few.

Of course, as anyone committed to a progressive politics should know, that brand of “fact-based journalism” fails to consider the role of growing inequality, and that even if GDP rises—as Goldstein explains it has—that increase in wealth is increasingly flowing into the pockets of a select few. In fact, according to research by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, the bottom 50 percent of the country hasn’t seen a real increase in income since the 1970s. Glass and Goldstein also ignore how corporations suppress union activity, one of the biggest deterrents to inequality, with threats of outsourcing, which these trade deals make viable, as well as the broader way in which the deals disclose the power the wealthy have over the global economy—you know, the power that allows them to bankrupt the world’s economy and erase millions of people’s retirement savings with impunity.

Trumpism obviously represents a dangerous politics based on bald lies, but that doesn’t mean anything opposed to it is true. Looking back on the election, we can see now just how mistaken it was to deny the kinds of economic issues Glass and Goldstein ignored. A Brookings Institute report by Mark Muro and Sifan Liu showed Trump won 2,584 counties compared to Clinton’s 471, yet the counties he won accounted for only 36 percent of the country’s GDP, a historically low number for a winning candidate. Telling those people, as Glass and Goldstein seem to do, that things are actually already good seems especially daft. It’s the same losing tactic Clinton adopted when she claimed “America never stopped being great”—something that was clearly false for many rust belt voters.

In a rush to deny Trump’s vile politics, these politicians and journalists deny the life experiences that lead people to Trump. They prove their ignorance of Trump voters’ lives while implying they are the only ones with facts and reason and truth. And that means Trump’s deplorable racist stereotypes and conspiracy theories carry much more weight—because they are the only narratives that explain the basic experiences of certain voters, even when they take the form of ridiculous conspiracy theories and easily proven lies.

A Trump voter, focusing on the cultural rather than the economic, seemed to explain that on another pre-election podcast, WYNC and The Nation’s The United States of Anxiety. In the show’s fourth episode, this woman was brought to tears during Trump’s convention speech. She, like many other Trump supporters, has a troubling obsession with political correctness and offers an admittedly baffling history tying it to Bill Clinton’s “it depends on what the definition of is is.” But when host Arun Venugopal pushes her to explain why she finds Trump’s comments on political correctness so moving, she, clearly emotional, says: “To hear someone say the things we’ve been saying for decades and not feeling we were heard. Nobody to speak up for us. It’s pretty amazing.”

“As you can hear,” Venugopal concludes in a voiceover, “this disgust for the Clintons is very deep.”

It seems undeniable that the woman’s motivations stem from feeling locked out of government, held powerless by Washington power brokers. The Clintons seem more synecdoche than villain. But in one sweeping statement, Venugopal dismisses all those concerns, writing them off as nothing more than a ridiculous grudge. Perhaps his response was understandable, given the pressing need to confront Trump’s exploitation of political correctness. But denying the reality of ordinary Americans shut out of government because they blame that fact on immigrants and racial minorities is completely unhelpful. As the show’s other host, Kai Wright, rightfully said, “Whatever you think of Donald Trump’s message, it’s not like it came out of thin air. Whatever he has tapped into, it has been with us and it will be with us until we confront it.”

The it here is neither the biased descriptions Trump supporters give of their problems nor the prescriptions Trump offers. It is the motivations behind all of that, the conditions people are living in. That’s what we must address and explain. And that’s exactly what these podcasts repeatedly deny in their rush to condemn Trumpism. The rest of the State of Anxiety episode, for instance, was devoted to a laundry list of harrowing clips from right-wing media: Rush Limbaugh commissioning racist songs and mocking the genocide of Native Americans, Donald Trump Jr. referencing gas chambers, Limbaugh and Glenn Beck claiming Obama planned on inciting race riots.

We should take the time to combat those vile arguments—but we should also note the intent of playing them all back to back to back on one segment, which seems to be delegitimizing everything else Trump supporters say. And while we should militantly condemn their support for racism, we must be clear that the things those voters use racism to explain—lack of good jobs, lack of political power, the decline of public institutions, even extended work hours and the simple emptiness of life under late capitalism—are very real. Rather than affirming our moral superiority, we must offer better narratives explaining the root cause of those issues.

That need is all the more pressing because Hillary Clinton’s approach, which built on the comforting liberal narratives on display in these episodes of This American Life and The United States of Anxiety, failed in much of the country. And it failed not just because she couldn’t attract the moderate Republicans she targeted, but because she couldn’t bring Democratic voters out to the polls in battleground states, as Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr explained in Slate. Her narrative not only failed to offer an alternative to Trump, but it failed to motivate her base, including people of color.

That’s because the problems Trump is offering a solution to, however hate-filled and false that solution is, bear strong similarities to the problems that working-class Democrats endure. Look at the practical issues in all working-class voters’ lives: health care and education costs are rising, people feel disconnected from their government, shut out of economic growth, public services are out of reach or inadequate. We should always be clear that people of color, LGBTQ individuals, immigrants, and other groups suffer immense additional injustices based on their identities and that there are real and important differences in how poverty and its symptoms appear in the lives of these different groups. But we should also be clear that there are overlapping experiences that can be used as a starting point for a new political movement. In doing so, we can bring together the groups Trump depended on for his improbable win and those targeted by his policies.

That’s the kind of class politics Jacobin rightly encourages. But that approach will also focus on addressing racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and other forms of oppression, as Bouie rightly argues is necessary. While many liberal commentators claim those policies would scare away Trump supporters, that’s the exact approach the Moral Mondays movement used in North Carolina to oust Republican governor Pat McCrory, one of the few Democratic victories of 2016.

Moral Mondays has targeted a wide array of regressive policies that have an outsized effect on black voters, especially voter suppression. But it has done so while agitating for progressive, universal, and class-based reforms, like more funding for public education and an increased minimum wage. In an interview with the American Prospect, Moral Mondays’ leader, the Rev. Dr. William Barber, described the diverse supporters the movement has attracted as its strength. “In the South, for the NAACP to be leading a moral movement and you see crowds that are 40 percent white and 30 percent young?” he said. “That’s what’s really concerning them, and why they’re calling us names.”

Yet McCrory barely lost and Trump won the state. Moral Mondays’ victory must be expanded, and to do that we need, to use Jane McAlevey’s terms, a politics focused not on “mobilizing,” bringing out those who already agree with you, but “organizing,” bringing out those who do not yet see themselves in your camp, including those who may have voted Trump. And to do that we must abandon longstanding liberal narratives that dismiss Trump’s base as ignorant, unredeemable fools. Doing so does not mean denying, as Nathan J. Robinson argued in Current Affairs, “that maybe it is racism that fueled their Trump votes,” but merely admitting “that racism is something that can be exacerbated by demagoguery.” And that means it’s something that can be suppressed by solidarity. Only on those lines will it be possible to put forward an explicitly antiracist, antisexist, egalitarian politics that can defeat Trumpism—as well as run-of-the-mill Republicans and corporate Democrats

Matt Hartman is a writer living in Durham, North Carolina.

IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during his “Make America Great Again” rally at Orlando Melbourne International Airport in Melbourne, Florida, U.S. February 18, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque