Joe Biden Just Wants to Make the U.S. a Normal Country That Isn’t Horrible for Parents

By the end of August 1935, Franklin Roosevelt was wrapping up a remarkable stretch of legislative victories, a follow-up chapter to his initial response to the Great Depression that historians would one day call the Second New Deal. Looking at the president’s achievements that summer, the progressive Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White judged that they were “long past due” and observed that they amounted to “a belated attempt to bring the American people up to the modern standards of English-speaking countries and in Europe in the matter of social responsibility” for the needy. White’s line came to mind this week while I was reading the details of President Joe Biden’s new, roughly $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, his new stab at modernizing the country’s shabby, outdated welfare state. It would also lengthen the life of two major but temporary pieces of Biden’s coronavirus relief bill: The expansion of Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies would be made permanent, while the supersized Child Tax Credit, which has the potential to cut youth poverty in half, would be extended until 2025. The United States used to have one of the highest rates of female employment among developed nations, but we began to fall behind in the late 1990s and early 2000s as other countries promoted policies like paid leave, child care, and flexible scheduling that made it easier for women to work, while our government stood mostly pat.