https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-25-2023
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American (Please read the entire letter. It is that important - my words)
'Democrats are...staying out of the way and letting Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans make a spectacle of themselves...Senate Republicans seem to be keeping their heads down while the House Republicans perform for their base...they intend to slash Social Security and Medicare...Since the 1980s antitrust laws, the government had stopped enforcing laws to prevent giant corporations from concentrating their power. The result had been less growth, weakened investment, fewer small businesses, less bargaining power for workers, and higher prices for consumers...“[T]he experiment failed,” ...Biden..change(d) the direction of the government’s role.... it has claimed the ability to review previous mergers that it now deems in violation of antitrust laws, citing the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil.
...the Democratic Congress—along with some Republicans—passed a number of laws that have shifted the economic policy of the nation...The country added 223,000 jobs in December, and the unemployment rate went down slightly to 3.5 percent. The last two years of job growth are the strongest on record...10.7 million jobs were created and a record 10.5 million small businesses’ applications were filed in the past two years...median weekly earnings rose 7.4% last year, slightly faster than inflation. For Black Americans... the median rise was 11.3% over 2021. A median Hispanic or Latino worker’s income saw a 4.8% raise, to $837 a week... The Inflation Reduction Act gave Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and capped the cost of insulin for those on Medicare at $35 a month (Republicans blocked an attempt to make that cap available for those not on Medicare). It made hearing aids available over the counter, making them dramatically cheaper, and it also expanded subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Today the Department of Health and Human Services announced that a record number of Americans enrolled in the ACA in the last open enrollment period: 16.3 million people.
For 40 years the Republican Party offered a vision of America as a land of hyperindividualism, in which any government intervention in the economy was seen hampering the accumulation of wealth and thus as an attack on individual liberty. The government stopped working for ordinary Americans, and perhaps not surprisingly, many of them have stopped supporting it. Biden refused to engage with the Republicans on the terms of their cultural wars and has instead reclaimed the idea that government can actually work for the good of all by keeping the economic playing field level for everyone....Biden and members of his administration are taking to the road to tout their successes to the country, especially to those places most skeptical of the government. If they can bring the Republican base around to support their economic policies, they will have realigned the nation as profoundly as did FDR and Theodore Roosevelt before them.
