Advoken's Blog

No doubt about it, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not have an easy time of it when they finally take office. Partisan politics is a reality right now, with few Democrats or Republicans ready to stray from their respective party lines.

And the Congress is truly split right down the middle. Even if the Democrats somehow manage to win both Senate seats in Georgia, the Senate will be evenly divided at 50-50, with Vice President (to be) Harris needing to determine the vote. And the House Democratic margin has narrowed to about a six seat difference, leaving little room for Democratic defections.

This would seem to call for Biden to take a cautious, middle-of-the-road approach, seeking to build an agenda through compromise. If he were to follow that course, Biden’s Presidency will fail . . .the country along with him.

The country is facing no end of problems, to be sure. Ending the pandemic is, of course, most urgent, but Biden will need to still focus most directly on one principal goal: restoring the nation’s economy so that there will be jobs and sufficient income for all. No longer should we be looking at the Dow Jones averages to determine the health of the country; instead we must be looking statistics that tells us about employment levels, the poverty rate and average wages of workers.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, along with the Democratic leaders in Congress, must be bold! They must speak with one strong voice to develop programs that will make the U.S. economy work for all its citizens. For an example, they could look back to the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that helped rescue the nation from the crippling effects of the Great Depression. FDR was bold in offering policies that sometimes were challenged and thrown-out by the U.S. Supreme Court, but he persisted until he was able to pass policies that put money back into the wallets of working people, fueling an economic recovery built upon their increased purchasing power.

And if you look at history, you’ll see that FDR’s bold New Deal was a crowd-pleaser; even though he lost the support of most of the business community (and nearly all of the media), he won re-election over Republican Alf Landon in 1936 by the historic margin of 523 to 8 in the electoral college. FDR lost only two states, Maine and Vermont.

The New Deal included direct jobs programs like the WPA, PWA and CCC, plus affirming collective bargaining rights for labor unions in the passage of the Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act). To this day you’ll see bridges and buildings that were built as PWA and WPA projects. An addition to my own high school was built under a PWA project and my uncle, who lived with us, found employment through the WPA in a bridge-building project. My father-in-law found employment during the Depression as a CCC camp supervisor in northern Wisconsin.

If you’re puzzled by President Trump’s popularity among blue-collar workers in this country, consider that his campaign messages (and his many lying tweets) played on the economic needs of workers, usually blaming the wrong causes, such as immigrant workers and government regulations. Yet, his message found open ears among families struggling to make ends meet with low-paying jobs.

Indeed, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris must make lots of noise for an economic program that will help American families earn a living wage or to have a good safety net if they are unemployable. It’s not only good economics, but it’s winning politics!

As a beginning, Biden would do well to look to the “Jobs for Economic Recovery Act,” offered by Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin; Ron Wyden of Oregon, and others. The bill would create a federal subsidized jobs program, enabling unemployed workers to earn wages doing useful work for up to six months, with possible extensions. In addition, the program would pay for job-creating projects created by states, local governments or private groups with the federal government reimbursing wages from 58% to 100%, rising as the state’s unemployment rate might worsen. Most importantly, the bill would not permit replacing workers or undercutting prevailing or union-negotiated pay rates.

A companion bill has been offered in the House by Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL), Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) and others. Moore has said she will press to have the bill placed on the active agenda.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi would do well loud and clear in support such an economic program. It’s a winning strategy and will serve this nation well. – Ken Germanson, Dec. 31, 2020.