The result is an opposition emboldened to obstruct. His indictment of America’s failed trade strategy and his own $2 trillion pandemic recovery plan set the stage for Biden, just as Jimmy Carter’s embrace of deregulation, privatization, military spending, and fiscal austerity presaged the Reagan era. Trump also helped by exposing the bankruptcy of the conservative establishment. It helps that the agenda of the Democratic left-Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, curbing Wall Street, strengthening labor unions, ending police brutality- is broadly popular, as are Biden’s early initiatives. Progressive policy institutes provided ammunition for the debate and alternative ideas, and progressive legislators in Congress have growing clout. Sanders won the battle of ideas, if not the nomination. With labor unions weakened, progressive movements-Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the Poor People’s Campaign, 350.org, the Dreamers-pointed the way. The calamitous failure of the conservative era also left an opening. The crises forced his hand-just as the Great Depression forced FDR’s. As a career politician with a history of tacking to conservative winds, Biden is a most unlikely captain to chart this course.
If enacted and strengthened-a big if-Biden’s agenda would represent a profound break with the conservative era of the past 40 years. At about 9 percent of current GDP, it dwarfs FDR’s and Obama’s stimulus packages and will supercharge the recovery.
It also creates a universal basic income for poor and middle-class families with children, which would cut child poverty in half. Hailed by Bernie Sanders as the “most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country,” the package provides $1,400 in direct payments, as well as extended unemployment benefits, support for rapid vaccination, resources to help open schools, aid for state and local governments, and a dramatic expansion of health insurance subsidies. He also moved aggressively to take on the pandemic and to address the climate crisis, naming John Kerry as special envoy for climate with a seat on the National Security Council and announcing an April climate summit.īiden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan was passed by Congress under the arcane reconciliation process with no Republican votes. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, joins Brian to discuss the known knowns, known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns of COVID-and whether ongoing research can provide the answers we need.Biden began with a barrage of executive orders reversing some of Trump’s follies-ending the Muslim travel ban, rejoining the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord, pulling the plug on the border wall. Is this a level of disruption we’re just going to have to tolerate indefinitely? Would anyone really be satisfied with the existing level of COVID risk continuing in perpetuity? And is our healthcare equipped to deal with the ongoing and compounding effects of long COVID? Dr. We do know that the virus is substantially less deadly now that we’ve built up a big wall of immunity, but it still manages to infect most people, sometimes even multiple times a year. We don’t know if next-generation vaccines will be as effective against current variants as the original shots were against COVID Classic. We do know vaccine effectiveness wanes, and that vaccines need to be updated to keep pace with an evolving virus. More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, there are still many questions that we sort of think we know the answers to, and many others we don’t.
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