When Congress authorized December’s $868 billion COVID aid package without including relief for struggling state and local governments, we feared for places like New York, which saw the bottom fall out of sales tax and other revenues vital to balancing our budget after the pandemic arrived. So it was a great relief when, as part of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March, state and local governments got $350 billion in virtually unrestricted cash, to help fill in COVID-caused revenue gaps.
The Era of Big Government is Here
Biden’s agenda is a reflection of how little regard both parties have for conservatism.
(Photograph by Melina Mara/Getty Images.)
The best way to gauge the success of American political movements is not by the depth to which they shape their native party, but the breadth to which they extend into the opposing side.
By that standard, the American conservative movement hit its lowest ebb in generations last week. Its success was so towering 25 years ago that Democratic President Bill Clinton embraced smaller government, free trade, welfare reform and fiscal discipline. Conservatism’s failure now is so abject that not only has a new Democratic president repudiated those concepts in his first address to Congress, but the Republican Party that for decades made itself synonymous with the conservative movement also increasingly rejects its core tenets. The tidal shift toward big, activist, progressive government that began even before the financial
US President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress in the House chamber of the US Capitol April 28, 2021. In the speech, he highlighted the need for increased investment in research and design and cast China as a key geopolitical adversary.
Melina Mara/Getty Images
In his address to the joint session of Congress on April 28, President Joe Biden made the case for reinvigorating the government’s role in technological investment, laying out a vision for what you could call “progressive tech optimism”: the idea that government investment in tech is the path forward to solving Democratic priorities like the climate crisis and developing treatments for illnesses like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer.
EA on BBC and Radio FM4: Why Biden Is Making History
Posted by Scott Lucas | Apr 29, 2021 |
President Joe Biden addresses the US Congress, April 28, 2021 (Melina Mara/Getty)
I joined BBC TV and radio outlets and Austria’s Radio FM4 on Thursday to analyze President Joe Biden’s speech to Congress and to explain why his Administration is making US history with the most ambitious economic and social programs since the 1930s New Deal.
The adults are back in the room. After the years of spectacle and chaos, culminating in the attack on the US Capitol in January, you have people discussing how to make things better not to go on Twitter, not to hold rallies to whip up an audience in a frenzy against supposed enemies.