Like Roosevelt, Biden Wants To Invest In American People

With the nomination of the pandemic, the recession, and the growing economic inequality in the United States, the Biden administration faces a crisis this nation has not seen since the Great Depression.

President Roosevelt brought this nation out of that previous crisis situation by spending big to invest in this country and especially its people. And he did it in spite of Republican opposition to his programs.

Now the Biden administration is taking that same course to guide this country to a recovery that is fair to all Americans -- and he will have to do it without any support from congressional Republicans. It will be harder this time, because Biden doesn't have the Democratic majority that Roosevelt had, but it must be done. Just returning to normal is not enough. He must make the country and its economy fairer to all its citizens.

Here is how New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof sees it:

The best argument for President Biden’s three-part proposal to invest heavily in America and its people is an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s explanation for the New Deal.

“In 1932 there was an awfully sick patient called the United States of America,” Roosevelt said in 1943. “He was suffering from a grave internal disorder … and they sent for a doctor.”

Paging Dr. Joe Biden.

We should be cleareyed about both the enormous strengths of the United States — its technologies, its universities, its entrepreneurial spirit — and its central weakness: For half a century, compared with other countries, we have underinvested in our people.

In 1970, the United States was a world leader in high school and college attendance, enjoyed high life expectancy and had a solid middle class. This was achieved in part because of Roosevelt.

The New Deal was imperfect and left out too many African-Americans and Native Americans, but it was still transformative. . . .

In short, the New Deal invested in the potential and productivity of  much of the nation. The returns were extraordinary.

These kinds of investments in physical infrastructure (interstate highways) and human capital (state universities and community colleges) continued under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. They made America a stronger nation and a better one.

Yet beginning in the 1970s, America took a wrong turn. We slowed new investments in health and education and embraced a harsh narrative that people just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. We gutted labor unions, embraced inequality and shrugged as working-class America disintegrated. Average weekly wages for America’s production workers were actually lower in December 2020 ($860) than they had been, after adjusting for inflation, in December 1972 ($902 in today’s money). . . .

Biden proposes something more humane and effective — investing in children, families and infrastructure in ways that echo Roosevelt’s initiatives.

The most important thread of Biden’s program is his plan to use child allowances to cut America’s child poverty in half. Biden’s main misstep is that he would end the program in 2025 instead of making it permanent; Congress should fix that.

The highest return on investment in America today isn’t in private equity but in early childhood initiatives for disadvantaged kids of all races. That includes home visitations, lead reduction, pre-K and child care.

Roosevelt started a day care program during World War II to make it easier for parents to participate in the war economy. It was a huge success, looking after perhaps half a million children, but it was allowed to lapse after the war ended.

Biden’s proposal for day care would be a lifeline for young children who might be neglected. Aside from the wartime model, we have another in the U.S.: The military operates a high-quality on-base day care system, because that supports service members in performing their jobs.

Then there are Biden’s proposed investments in broadband; that’s today’s version of rural electrification. Likewise, free community college would enable young people to gain technical skills and earn more money, strengthening working-class families.

Some Americans worry about the cost of Biden’s program. That’s a fair concern. Yet this is not an expense but an investment: Our ability to compete with China will depend less on our military budget, our spy satellites or our intellectual property protections than on our high school and college graduation rates. A country cannot succeed when so many of its people are failing.

As many Americans have criminal records as college degrees. A baby born in Washington, D.C., has a shorter life expectancy (78 years) than a baby born in Beijing (82 years). Newborns in 10 counties in Mississippi have a shorter life expectancy than newborns in Bangladesh. Rather than continue with Herbert Hoover-style complacency, let’s acknowledge our “grave internal disorder” and summon a doctor.

The question today, as in the 1930s, is not whether we can afford to make ambitious investments in our people. It’s whether we can afford not to.

Can Biden Transform The Country Like Roosevelt Did?

Franklin Roosevelt became president when the country was in trouble, and he was able to pass huge reforms that made the country better and fairer for all its citizens.

Joe Biden also became president in a time of trouble for the country. The nation needs bold leadership and action to conquer the coronavirus and rescue the economy.

Biden got a massive rescue/stimulus bill through Congress, and is now working on a massive infrastructure bill. That infrastructure bill would bring the type of change and reform the country hasn't seen in decades.

The truth is that no president since the end of World War II has been in a position of being able to make huge (and badly needed) changes to the country and its economy. Biden is in such a position.

The following is part of a thought-provoking op-ed by Jonathan Alter in The New York Times. He compares the experiences and opportunities that Roosevelt and Biden share.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes,” Mark Twain (supposedly) said. If so, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. could be a couplet. With a few breaks and the skillful execution of what seems to be a smart legislative strategy, President Biden is poised to match F.D.R.’s stunning debut in office. 

That doesn’t require Mr. Biden to transform the country before May 1, the end of his first 100 days, the handy if arbitrary marker that Mr. Roosevelt (to the irritation of his successors) laid down in 1933. But for America to “own the future,” as the president promised last month, he needs to do amid the pandemic what Mr. Roosevelt did amid the Depression: restore faith that the long-distrusted federal government can deliver rapid, tangible achievements.

With one of the biggest and fastest vaccination campaigns in the world and the signing of a $1.9 trillion dollar Covid relief package, the president has made a good start at that. His larger aim is to change the country by changing the terms of the debate.

Just as Mr. Roosevelt understood that the laissez-faire philosophy of the 1920s wasn’t working anymore to build the nation, Mr. Biden sees that Reagan-era market capitalism cannot alone rebuild it. . . .

Mr. Roosevelt had it easier on Capitol Hill, with big Democratic majorities in both houses. But it’s a myth that Congress, even in Mr. Roosevelt’s first 100 days, gave him a rubber stamp. Southern Democrats were the Mitch McConnells of their day, forcing Mr. Roosevelt to take half a loaf or less on many bills. . . .

A few days after taking office, Mr. Roosevelt attended retired Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 92nd birthday party. After the new president left, Mr. Holmes remarked: “Second-class intellect, first-class temperament.”

The same can be said of Mr. Biden. At 78 (Mr. Roosevelt was 51 when he took office), his persona more snugly resembles grandfatherly Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan, whose minor verbal slips were also indulged. He is less devious and manipulative than Mr. Roosevelt, and hardly to the manner born. Otherwise they share many traits.

Both men were ennobled by suffering (Mr. Roosevelt’s polio forced him into a wheelchair; Mr. Biden lost his first wife and, over time, two children), which deepened their empathy and connection to people. Before the presidency, both were repeatedly derided as long-winded lightweights destined to sell out liberal principles for votes. Both were seen as too infirm to be nominated by the Democrats, and won in large part because of disgust with their Republican predecessors — Herbert Hoover and Donald Trump, respectively — who mismanaged the crisis of the day.

Both came to office when democracy was at grave risk (many Americans wanted a dictator in 1933) and saw themselves as called to bolster it. As canny politicians with good relationships on Capitol Hill, both learned to surround themselves with smarter people dedicated to making them look good. Up close, both proved hard to dislike. Meeting Mr. Roosevelt was like, as Winston Churchill said, “opening your first bottle of champagne”; meeting Mr. Biden is like one’s first encounter with a tail-wagging therapy dog.

Mr. Roosevelt essentially invented intimacy in mass communications. When he described those listening on the radio as “my friends” and adopted a conversational (as opposed to the usual stentorian) tone, he did for public speaking what Bing Crosby and other crooners did for singing. . . .

Mr. Biden is no great communicator, but his national bedside manner resembles that of “Old Doc Roosevelt.” In his first prime-time address on March 11, he leaned forward as if comforting a patient, shattering any ice of indifference. . . .

Whatever the future holds, Mr. Biden and Mr. Roosevelt are now fused in history by the size and breadth of their progressive ambitions. Jimmy Carter took office when liberalism was fatigued; Bill Clinton said “the era of Big Government is over”; Barack Obama was forced to conform to the mantra of deficit hawks. Mr. Biden was lucky enough to have been elected when what the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called “the cycles of American history” are spinning left. He is the first president since Lyndon Johnson who can rightly be called F.D.R.’s heir. Soon we’ll know if he squanders that legacy — or builds on it.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt Was NOT A Socialist

The top photo shows President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the bill that created Social Security on August 14, 1935. The bottom graphic shows the Economic Bill of Rights proposed by President Roosevelt on January 11, 1944.

There are some of my brothers and sisters on the left that claim these two things show that Roosevelt was a socialist. They would have you believe that anyone who believes in those things must be a socialist, and say it proves Roosevelt was socialist. He was NOT. This is nothing more than an effort to make socialism palatable to the general public. That's a worthy goal in my opinion, but claiming something that is not true is not the way to do that.

Did Roosevelt (who I consider to have been a very good president) have some socialist elements in some things he proposed? Yes. He also had capitalist elements. The fact is that a person can believe in economic fairness with being a socialist -- and many Americans today like the idea of our economy being fair, without embracing all the tenets of socialism. They don't see economic policy as an either/or thing (capitalism or socialism). They view some elements of each as being good -- and so did President Roosevelt (who rejected both unregulated capitalism and socialism as being unworkable). He believed a vibrant and fair economy lay somewhere in the middle.

The following is part of an excellent op-ed in The New York Times by Jonathan Alter on Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, American politics took place largely on Roosevelt’s liberal terrain. Since then, even Democratic presidents have often been forced to play on Ronald Reagan’s conservative side of the field.

Suddenly, though, Roosevelt is alive again in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign: His ideas for using government to improve lives echo through stump speeches across Iowa and New Hampshire. . . .

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to revive Roosevelt. Before we allow anyone to assume his mantle, let’s separate candidates merely seeking inspiration for big ideas from those misappropriating his legacy.

Bernie Sanders, the most explicit of the Roosevelt wannabes, is in the latter category. He has repurposed the “Second Bill of Rights” address on his website to report that Roosevelt was constantly attacked as a socialist, so he must have actually been one — just like the independent senator from Vermont. He’s betting that a younger post-Cold War generation won’t conflate his brand of democratic socialism with communism, as many of their elders wrongly do.

But Roosevelt was an improvisational pragmatist — a “juggler,” he called himself — not a socialist. While his idea for Social Security contained socialistic elements (as did George W. Bush’s 2008 bank bailout), he understood that in a nation of strivers, the concept is a political loser. When asked his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.”. . .

Even after Roosevelt took office at the depths of the Depression, he had no unified plan, just a vague commitment to “action and action now.” But he quickly made good on that pledge with a dizzying series of inventive programs and structural changes that have inspired “100 Days plans” from Ms. Klobuchar and others.

Not all were embraced on the left. Like President Barack Obama in 2009, Roosevelt in 1933 rejected calls to nationalize failing banks after they reopened. His larger aim was to reform capitalism so it worked better for ordinary people, which sounds a lot like Elizabeth Warren’s agenda.

Senator Warren’s challenge is that today’s economic anxieties might not be powerful enough to drive real change. Roosevelt capitalized on the Great Depression: It helped him offer government jobs, regulate Wall Street, raise taxes sharply on the wealthy, launch huge infrastructure projects and secure a minimum wage — all ideas reprised by today’s Democrats, but in a much stronger economy.

Running for re-election in 1936, Roosevelt said of his big-money critics: “They are unanimous in their hate of me and I welcome their hatred.”

But when Mr. Sanders quotes that line in his stump speech, he doesn’t mention that Roosevelt soon tacked to the center. He rebuffed calls for national health insurance as impractical, backed a balanced budget, insisted that most welfare be connected to work and supported free trade. As World War II approached, he abandoned the New Deal entirely and invited the corporate titans who loathed him to help him win it. With the end of the war in sight, he renewed his liberal domestic agenda with the landmark G.I. Bill, which inspired today’s Democratic focus on affordable education. . . .

Roosevelt was far from perfect, and various candidates have noted his slowness on civil rights, the folly of his “court-packing” scheme and the horrible wartime detention camps for Japanese-Americans that Mr. Trump is now using for migrant children.

But his larger message remains powerful: Despite our divisions, the country can confront big problems like global warming. We don’t know yet if “Happy Days Are Here Again” — Roosevelt’s campaign theme song — but the cycles of history may finally be turning in a progressive direction. With any luck, the next election will bring a new epoch of problem-solving — a fresh commitment to what Roosevelt called “bold, persistent experimentation.” It’s about time.

Presidential Grades After 100 Days In Office

I just thought this was interesting. The Economist / YouGov Poll (done between April 29th and May 2nd of a random national sample of 1,500 adults, with a 3.1 point margin of error) asked Americans to grade Donald Trump on his first 100 days in office -- and then compared his grades to those of past presidents after 100 days.

Trump didn't fare so well. He led the pack in poor grades (D's and F's) -- far behind Obama, Reagan, and Roosevelt (the leaders in good grades (A's and B's).