By Daniel Henninger | Wall Street Journal
Joe Biden’s American Families Plan replaces individual
striving with middle class entitlements.
President Biden’s American Families Act makes one
political reality officially clear: The Democratic Party has given up on the
American dream.
The Biden proposals—coming as they do with the Democratic
progressives’ rise to power—present the American people with a
once-in-a-lifetime decision about what kind of country they want to live in for
the next half-century.
This isn’t about the culture wars or standard Keynesian
stimulus spending. The Biden plan is about public policies that will redesign
American society.
The American Families Plan and other recent Democratic
legislation implicitly pose several important questions. Is the traditional
American idea of upward mobility still important? If so, how should upward
mobility happen—through Washington or individual effort? Indeed, should the
habit of individual striving give way to a presumably more important goal of
nationalized paternalism?
It is no surprise that a liberalism that embraced the
“1619 Project’s” rewriting of the U.S.’s founding history would not stop there
and try now, despite its almost invisible congressional majority, to displace
the country’s originating idea of individual opportunity with a broad
birth-to-death entitlement state.
This transition began in March, when Democrats enacted a
federal unemployment-insurance bonus of $300. That bonus, pushing benefits past
market wage rates, indisputably is causing many to shun previously held jobs,
which surely will do long-term damage to the notion of working to get ahead.
Why bother? Instead, hold out for all this new
state-subsidized compensation that reduces the incentive or need to work—the
same skip-work choice public-school teachers across the country have made the
past year.
Mr. Biden’s American Families Plan proposes four
significant new federal entitlements: two years of free, universal
prekindergarten; virtually free child care for all; a paid family and medical
leave program; and two years of community college.
Nowhere will you find a Democrat calling these proposals
what they are—entitlements like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.
Rejecting that criticism at his news conference Wednesday, Mr. Biden said all
his spending will “create” jobs and growth.
His progressive colleagues don’t justify spending as
optimism about the American system or its private economy. For years, the word
favored by progressive analysts to describe the U.S. economy has been
“stagnation.”
Though this argument is disputable, they say private-sector wage growth in the U.S.
has been stagnant since the 1970s, isn’t likely to improve and that
middle-class survival isn’t possible without replacement income in the form of
federal social-welfare programs. Some conservatives agree but purport not to
want Mr. Biden’s entitlements.
At his news conference, Mr. Biden made the manifestly
false claim (also falsely citing the Heritage Foundation in support) that the
Trump administration’s policies produced minimal economic benefit. In fact,
before the onset of the pandemic last year, median household income in
2019 grew 6.8%, with higher increases among blacks,
Hispanics, Asians and women. Unemployment for these classes hit historic lows.
Possibly Mr. Biden was distracted with something else then and never heard
about these gains.
Americans need to understand the realities of what Mr.
Biden is offering them. Bernie Sanders wanted “Medicare for all,” but that
applied only to healthcare. Mr. Biden’s reach goes beyond even Bernie,
proposing what will become Medicaid for everything.
Medicaid is minimalist, bare-bones healthcare for the
poor. Because of its scale and cost, it is necessarily
lowest-common-denominator healthcare. When Joe Biden and the
progressive Democratic Party demand “equity” everywhere, they are proposing a
lowest-common-denominator society.
The reality of the new Biden entitlement is that costs
will be contained, even nominally, only by defaulting over time to
Medicaid-quality child care and universal pre-K.
But what if the progressive analysis is correct—that most
Americans are ready to accept new middle-class entitlements as a substitute for
centuries of individual striving?
Mr. Biden himself made this proposition clear in an interview Monday on the “Today” show when he said that
“after 400 years,” black Americans remain “far behind the eight ball in terms
of education, health, in terms of opportunity.”
If the American Families Plan passes, we’ll all be behind
the same federal dependency eight-ball.
Generations of similar welfare compensation eroded the
American dream for many black Americans by disincentivizing upward mobility.
Hundreds of thousand still live in public-housing units built for them in the
mid-1960s. The unions whose teachers refuse to return to inner-city schools
will run child care.
The Biden Democrats not only don’t apologize for this
malgovernance, they want to spread it to the nonpoor.
If Republicans let the Biden entitlements become law this
year, they will indeed become tax collectors for the permanent welfare state,
with payroll-tax increases or a national value-added tax becoming inevitable.
The current Biden entitlement pay-fors—higher taxes on corporations and the
1%—are obviously preposterous as long-term support.
And permanently unanswered will be whether American
parents ever actually concluded that traditional paths upward are out of reach
for them, their children and grandchildren.
Come to think of it, that turns out to be the true big
steal in the 2020 election: Joe Biden never asked voters if they wanted to
replace the American dream. He’s doing it anyway.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
