Biden’s plan to cut child poverty is worth noting

Soon after Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, a visitor assessed the stakes of his New Deal proposal. “Mr President, if your programme succeeds, you’ll be the greatest president in American history,” the visitor told him. “If it fails, you will be the worst one.”

“If it fails,” Roosevelt responded, “I’ll be the last one.”

That story, from Jonathan Alter’s excellent book The Defining Moment, about Roosevelt’s first 100 days, underscores the desperation and uncertainty in the Great Depression as Roosevelt took office — a desperation that may seem familiar today. The Federal Reserve chairman, Eugene Meyer, was introduced at that time to the son of a White House staffer as “Governor Meyer”, so the boy asked him, “What state are you the governor of?” “The state of bankruptcy,” Meyer answered. This is not the Great Depression today, but we face the worst economic crisis since that time, plus about 4,000 Americans dying daily from the worst pandemic in a century, plus an insurrection incited by the lame-duck president, plus an undercurrent of national delusion that fuels division and violence.

In some ways, FDR had it easy. That’s the context of President-elect Joe Biden’s “America Rescue Plan”, a far-reaching effort to revive the American economy — and to do much more. Like Roosevelt, Mr Biden is employing a crisis to try to address long-neglected problems in our country. This is Big Policy. You might even call it Rooseveltian.

Of course, what was significant about Roosevelt was the scale not of what he proposed but of what he achieved, and even if Mr Biden’s initial proposal gets through Congress, it does not add up to anything close to the 12-year revolution that was the New Deal. But after years of hesitation and half-steps, it’s thrilling to see truly bold efforts to tackle some of America’s deepest underlying problems.

Coverage of Mr Biden’s $1.9 trillion (57.16 trillion baht) plan has understandably focused on the $1,400 payments to individuals, the increased unemployment benefits, the assistance to local governments, the support for accelerated vaccine rollout and the investments to get children back in schools. But there is so much more: food assistance, policies to keep families from becoming homeless, child care support, a $15 federal minimum wage and an expansion of the earned-income tax credit to fight poverty.

To me, the single most exciting element of the Biden proposal is one that has garnered little attention: a pathbreaking plan that would drastically cut child poverty. A Columbia University analysis found that it would reduce child poverty in the United States by 45%. For black children, it would reduce poverty by 52%, and for Native American children, 62%.

Americans too often accept poverty or race gaps as hopeless and inevitable. In fact, the evidence suggests they are neither. In Michigan, 41% of the early coronavirus deaths were among black patients, even though black residents make up only 14% of the state population. But Michigan then made a determined effort to address the inequity by bringing testing to black neighbourhoods and ensuring equal access to support programmes, and black residents are now underrepresented in Covid-19 fatalities, according to Dr Joneigh Khaldun, the state’s chief medical officer.

Perhaps another example is the New Deal itself. Results of Roosevelt’s boldness included Social Security, rural electrification, jobs programmes, networks of hiking trails, the GI Bill of Rights and a 35-year burst of inclusive growth that arguably made the United States the richest country in the history of the world.

Yet for the last half-century, we mostly retreated. We overinvested in prisons and tax breaks for billionaires while underinvesting in education, health and those left behind.

So we think of the United States as No 1, but America ranks No 28 worldwide in well-being of citizens, according to the Social Progress Index. And the United States is one of only three countries to have gone backward since the index began in 2011.

I would hope that if any of us came across a hungry child, we would pause and immediately offer help. But collectively we stroll by 12 million poor children without stopping. Yes, Mr Biden’s proposal would be costly, but a major study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that child poverty is even more expensive, costing America at least $800 billion a year in diminished productivity, higher crime and elevated medical costs.

Helping people is often harder than it looks. But it is difficult to overstate how much difference Mr Biden’s child poverty plan would make for Americans, for economic growth, for the country’s international competitiveness — and, let’s acknowledge it, for the moral framework of the United States. In the long run, this would do more to advance American equality and decency than almost anything else.