Biden/Harris: Most Anti-Poverty & Pro-Worker Presidency In 100 Years

Biden has done more to reduce poverty than any president since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s.

The previous article on Biden’s Successes Fighting Big Money For The American Dream already listed many of these efforts.

Biden has also improved the lives of workers more than any president since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in the 1930s.

That’s why over 30 of the major labor unions (nearly all of them) have enthusiastically endorsed Biden, including the United Auto Workers, the AFL-CIO, which represents 60 unions, and the Service Employees International Union.

Fighting For Far Better Wages

Biden increased the minimum wage to $17.20 an hour for all federal contract workers.
Biden is the first president to ever visit a picket line to support a strike.
During the United Auto Workers strike, Biden supported their demand for a 40% wage increases.
Biden increased the salary cap to give 4.3 million more workers time and a half overtime pay, a raise of $1.5 billion total.
Biden made it harder for companies to avoid paying benefits by classifying workers as independent contractors.
Biden is forcing joint employers like Burger King, McDonalds, and Amazon to negotiate with unions for better working conditions and benefits for the workers of their franchisees and subcontractors.
Biden forced companies to recognize unions if the company illegally fights unions in any way.
He made it harder for companies to fire workers protesting bad working conditions.
Biden eliminated noncompete agreements for most workers that kept 1 in 5 American workers (30 million) from getting a job with better pay, likely costing them $300 billion per year.

Fighting Worker Abuses

Biden is classifying franchise workers of large companies like Burger King, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell as employees in order to hold them responsible when workers face:

wage theft
denied sick leave
harassment
unsafe or unhealthy practices

Biden increased funding for enforcing labor abuses.

Biden’s Labor Department forced corporations to rehire more illegally fired workers in just 2021 than Trump’s Labor Department did in all 4 years of Trump’s presidency.
Biden is targeting rampant wage theft at warehousing and logistics.
Biden collected more than $61 million in back pay for over 27,000 government service contract workers between January 2021 and March 2023 alone.

Fighting To Eliminate Child Poverty

Biden fought hunger and helped families put healthy food on the table by enacting the largest-ever permanent increase in SNAP food benefits for poor families.

This boost gave families with children an average of $542 per month instead of $420.
Our government estimated this change lifted 2.4 million Americans out of poverty.

Biden proposes restoring the expanded Child Tax Credit that cut child poverty in half. This would:

lift 3 million children out of poverty.
cut taxes by an average of $2,600 for 39 million low- & middle-income families with 66 million children.
This includes includes 2 million children living with a caregiver at least 60 years old.

Biden Stopped Republicans When They Tried To:

cut way more people off food stamps & family welfare
take food stamps & family welfare away from homeless people and veterans and cut their rental aid
cut nutritional assistance for mothers
cut way more money from IRS auditing of rich people

Fighting Price Gouging

Our government found corporate monopolies took advantage of the covid epidemic and supply chain issues to price gouge all of us ever since, resulting in record profits for them and terrible inflation for us.

Studies show rising corporate profits are the reason for over 50% of the inflation facing us now.
From 1979 to 2019, non-financial corporate profits averaged 11.4% of price growth.
Between April and September 2023, those corporate profits was 53% of price growth!
October to December 2023 was even worse, with corporate profits rising by $136.5 billion, from 90.8 billion the previous quarter!
The cost of groceries went up 50% from January 2020 to January 2024 while major supermarket profits increased up to 36%.
The major grocery chains have been operating with their highest profit margins of the last 20 years.
Biden is making it harder for massive corporations to merge and cheat us with price gouging, blocking some merger proposals like Kroger and Albertsons.
Biden is fighting anticompetitive pricing practices in agriculture, prescription medicines, health care, food, housing and financial services.
Biden has sued to block price fixing of chicken, pork, and turkey meats.

Affordable Housing, Record Home Construction

Biden has cut red tape so more builders can get federal financing, helping build a record 1.7 million housing units across the US.
Now more houses are being built than at any time in the last 50 years.
Biden’s new $20 billion in grants will produce hundreds of thousands of more affordable homes and rental housing to lower rents and housing costs.
Biden expanded Housing Choice Vouchers to help over 100,000 additional families.
Biden cut mortgage insurance costs for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages, saving 850,000 homebuyers and homeowners $800 each year.
Biden is cracking down to lower closing costs for home mortgages.
Biden lowered the costs of refinancing homes, saving many homeowners up to $1,500.
Biden’s new rules for energy efficiency in new homes backed by government loans will save Americans $2 billion on utility bills.
Biden proposed up to $25,000 for down payments to help people whose families have never owned a home to buy their first home.
This $25,000 home down payment proposal would help 400,000 families buy their first home.
Biden proposed $10,000 in tax credits to help 3.5 million first-time home buyers purchase their first home over the next two years.
He also proposes a $10,000 tax credit for families wanting to sell their first homes.
Biden urged Congress to expand Housing Choice Vouchers to over 500,000 more families, including first-time ever voucher guarantees to low-income veterans and youth aging out of foster care.
Biden proposed a new Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit, to help build or renovate over 400,000 affordable homes nationwide.
Biden proposed each Federal Home Loan Bank double its contribution to the Affordable Housing program to raise and additional $3.79 billion for affordable housing and help 380,000 households get, build, and renovate affordable homes and rentals.

Helping Renters

Biden is cracking down on big landlords who use unfair and illegal practices to fix prices and jack up rents, including non-rent fees.
Biden wants Congress to pass a law to build and renovate more than 2 million homes, to lower housing costs for renters and homeowners.
Biden is trying to expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit to build or preserve 1.2 million more affordable rental units.
These Low-Income Housing Tax Credits save renters hundreds of dollars in rent each month.
Biden proposed investing $86 billion in the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity to fight housing discrimination against the poor, the elderly, racial minorities, and LGBTQ people and help abused women escape their abusers and get housing.

Child Care & Long-Term Home Care

Biden has capped child care costs at 7% of income for Americans getting child care aid under the federal child care block grant.
Biden has devoted $20 billion to support child care businesses, including $7.2 billion to raise pay for existing workers and $1.9 billion for new workers.
Biden has devoted over $25 billion to support and hire more qualified home care workers like certified nursing assistants and home health aides.
Biden gave $250 billion to states and cities that they could use to pay government and private sector service workers better.

Quality Education & High Paying Jobs Even Without College

Biden is fighting for every American to have a high-quality education and great job prospects.

He wants all Americans to have access to high-quality preschool and tutoring to be successful in life.
Biden is working with unions, community organizations, high schools, colleges, and employers to expand vocational training for good paying jobs, including programs in broadband, construction, and electrification.
He is working to make college more affordable.
He wants to give all public-school teachers a raise.

Taxing The Superrich To Help Us

Some of the world’s richest billionaires pay no income taxes at all in some years, while us regular Americans pay an average of 25%.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid no income taxes in 2007 and 2011.
Tesla, SpaceX & X (Twitter) owner Elon Musk paid no income taxes in 2018.

Biden wants to increase taxes on the superrich, especially billionaires, to support the needs of regular Americans.

He has already forced companies with an income over $1 billion a year to pay a minimum tax of 15%.
Biden wants a 25% tax on anyone with more than $100 million.
This would raise $500 billion over 10 years to help pay for benefits like child care and parental leave for regular Americans.
Biden wants to make the Medicare tax far more fair by raising the cap and hiking the tax to 5% for those with incomes over $400,000.
Biden wants to increase the income cap on Social Security income, too, which could fund Social Security for decades.
As it is now, millionaires stop paying Social Security taxes each year in February!
Biden wants to end the tax loophole for “pass through businesses” and the “carried interest” loophole that lets hedge fund and private equity executives pay lower tax rates than low level workers and screw our economy.
He wants to increase the corporate tax rate to 28% instead of 21%.
He wants to increase the top capitals gains tax rate to 39.6% instead of 20%, to make this rich person’s tax for simply owning wealth the same rate as the top worker’s income tax.
Biden wants to make the minimum corporate tax rate for companies with over $1 billion in annual income 21% instead of 15%.
This alone could yield $137 billion over 10 years to use for the needs of regular Americans.
Biden is cracking down on millionaire and billionaire tax cheaters who haven’t filed taxes or who have shell companies, overseas bank accounts, partnership scams, corporate jet scams, etc.
One expert says superrich tax cheating could come close to $1 trillion each year!
Biden wants to eliminate a tax break for corporate jet purchases and establish a new tax on corporate jet travel.
Biden wants to quadruple a 1% surcharge on corporate stock buybacks.
Now only publicly-traded corporations can’t deduct the pay of CEOs, CFOs, and some other officers from their corporate taxes.
Biden wants to expand this prohibition to eliminate tax deductions for the pay of all corporate employees paid over $1 million a year.
This alone could raise $270 billion in tax revenue for our public needs.

Biden’s increased tax proposals for the rich would cut taxes by $750 billion for regular Americans, those making less than $400,000 a year!

Building Our Economy By Eliminating Student Debt

Canceling student debt helps our economy because it makes it easier for people to:

buy all kinds of things like cars and houses
invest in new businesses or start families
find better jobs

Biden tried to massively boost our economy by eliminating $430 billion in loan debt for about 43 million student borrowers.

Sadly, our Big Money Supreme Court stopped him.

But Biden kept on fighting.

Biden canceled $146 billion in student loan debt.
Many of them were teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters and other public servants who had trouble getting the debt relief they were entitled to under the law.
Biden gave 1.3 million people who suffered fraud by their schools, often involving worthless diplomas promised to be lucrative, $22.5 billion in debt relief.

Often, Biden was simply stopping the government from breaking its own promises to students. Many of the students became disabled or they:

saw their schools closed.
saw their schools lose certification or lose eligibility for loan programs.
signed up for programs promising debt relief for 10 years of government or nonprofit service.
signed up for programs promising debt relief after paying for 20 or 25 years.

Biden is now working to give 30 million Americans student debt relief, trying to:

cancel student debt for those experiencing financial hardship such as medical expenses or child care.
cancel all student loan debt for 4 million people.
cancel $20,000 on unpaid interest on student debts for everyone, regardless of income.
remove all extra balance owed after starting repayment for anyone with an income less than $120,000 or less or couples with incomes less than $240,000.
cancel debt for 2.5 million undergraduates who have been paying for 20 years and graduate students who have been paying for 25 years.
cancel student debt for those who went to poorly accredited colleges.
eliminate all interest on loans ballooning student debts for 23 million people.
give another 10 million borrowers at least $5,000 in relief.

Biden has already authorized these things but of course, Republicans are suing in courts to stop Biden from giving students relief that would help them buy cars, buy homes, and juice our economy.