Biden’s COVID Relief Bill Is the Biggest Anti-Poverty Program in…Months by Seth Ackerman, Jacobin, March 19 https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/03/joe-biden-relief-bill-child-benefit-anti-poverty
The Biden administration is selling its COVID relief bill as a historic milestone in the war on poverty. In reality, it's a temporary measure whose anti-poverty impact is roughly the same as last year's CARES Act signed by Trump. For Biden to claim an anti-poverty legacy, he needs to make the child benefit permanent. . . . In other words, Biden’s COVID relief plan is what you would have expected a President Joe Biden to pass in an emergency. Like the 2020 vintage, it’s a collection of temporary expedients to dampen hardship during a crisis. What it’s not — by itself, anyway — is any kind of paradigm shift. Nor does it transform anything in particular, at least not past 2021. . . . Will Biden manage to do as he promised and create a permanent family allowance? The choices are stark. If doesn’t, he will have finally invoked cloture on the Great Debate about the current state of the Democratic Party. All his poetry about transformational-this and paradigm-shifting-that will be disposed of in the proper bin for sorting. If he succeeds, on the other hand, not only will he be able to take credit for boosting the economy and engineering a major reduction in America’s shameful child poverty rate. He will have struck a powerful blow on behalf of this country’s all-too-fragile democracy by shepherding the Democratic Party through its slow and painful transformation into something this country has long been so badly in need of: a responsible, democratic-minded party of the center-right. ### -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#7593): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7593 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81691761/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
