‘INVEST’ IN KIDS
Jill joins Joe in touting education spending plan
First Lady Jill Biden — a college professor by trade — tagged along with her presidential husband for a trip to a couple of schools in Virginia on Monday to plug his wide-ranging $1.8 trillion “American Families Plan.”
The rare joint trip was meant to highlight the education provisions of President Biden’s plan, including the $109 billion earmarked for providing all Americans with two years of tuition-free community college, $80 billion for expanded Pell Grants and billions of more dollars for improving affordability in higher education, especially for lower- and middle-class families.
“We need to invest in children, they’re our future,” Biden said at Tidewater Community College in Portsmouth, Va., their second stop for the day.
Earlier in his remarks, Biden cracked a tongue-in-cheek joke to signal that his wife’s lifetime career in education has proven a large influence on him politically.
“If I didn’t have these positions, I would be sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom,” he mused.
Jill Biden, who’s the only first lady in American history to hold on to her day job — teaching English at a community college in northern Virginia — echoed her husband and admitted to frequently giving her husband political advice.
“We must provide support and resources so that our students can make it across the finish line. Joe knows that. He saw it in his classes when he taught law school, and he’s heard it from me every single day when I finish teaching my classes,” she said.
The first lady has emerged as a key asset for Biden as he seeks to make transformational changes in the lives of millions of families, from free community college and pre-school to making permanent a pandemic-era child tax credit for parents.
With Jill Biden by his side, the man who refers to himself as “Dr. Biden’s husband” pitched his child tax credit and
deductions for child care as an engine for economic growth.
“Millions of women are at home because they can’t afford the cost of child care,” the president said.
Earlier in the day, the Bidens visited an elementary school in nearby Yorktown, where students were showing off projects and chatting with the high-profile visitors.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” the president asked.
“A hairdresser,” one student responded, prompting Biden to quip: “I could use some, some hair, I mean.”
During his remarks at the community college later, Biden defended his proposal to pay for the “American Families Plan” and a second $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan by hiking taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
“It’s about balancing the system,” Biden said, while reiterating his promise to not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. “It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up .... to build an economy that rewards work over wealth.”
“Folks, for too long we’ve seen that trickle-down economics does not work,” he added.
Republican leaders slam Biden’s plans as a budget-busting giveaway to liberal special interests and vow to oppose them in lockstep.
Having already pushed his COVID recovery plan through Congress without any Republican support, Biden is relying on the backing of Republican and independents voters to again convince Democrats to stay united behind his massive government spending blueprints.
Still, it won’t be easy to push either the infrastructure or the education and family aid packages through a virtually evenly divided Congress.
With the GOP unified against them, Biden needs to keep all Democrats in line, a tricky task when moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) object to new taxes to fund the plans. Swing-district lawmakers in the House, meantime, may be hesitant to offer their support because of concerns about the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.