The New Deal is the foundation of Americans’ economic security today. It remains essential in ensuring that Americans are free. Free, if we work hard, to earn a decent living. Free, in time, to buy a home. Free to turn opportunity into success.
We speak as the grandson of the President who created the New Deal, and a Wisconsin expert on economic security, on how to adapt it to the 21st century.The genius of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was the two basic ways it protected Americans’ economic security, which endure today.
The New Deal began in Great Depression. It protects us today.
First, income security, by providing America’s workers with a minimum wage, collective bargaining rights, and earned benefits like Social Security. These popular programs ensure most Americans a decent income – whether they are current workers, temporarily unemployed, disabled or retired.Second, protection from harm, by safeguarding families and businesses against losing their savings or being cheated by financial institutions. New Deal programs ensure the safety of our bank deposits. They require we get the facts when buying stocks.
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Since the New Deal launched over 90 years ago, it has grown stronger in dozens of ways. Medicare, the Clean Air Act, and the Consumer Product Safety Act are just a few examples.
Vice President Kamala Harris wants to preserve the New Deal and the many ways it has improved Americans’ lives. Moreover, she wants to enlarge it.
Harris favors increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour. She proposes raising the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-to-moderate income workers. She favors paid family leave and child care support. She wants to make permanent the expanded Child Tax Credit that “led to a historic 46 percent decline in the U.S. child poverty rate.” And she has supported legislation to strengthen Social Security’s solvency and increase benefits, responsibly paid for by increasing contributions from America’s wealthiest.
And to protect Americans from harm, she wants to “crack down on the price-fixing, price gouging, and corporate mergers that drove high grocery prices in the wake of the pandemic.” She will be tough on big corporations that dump on the environment, workers, consumers, and investors.
Project 2025 and Trump want to dismantle New Deal protections
Donald Trump pretends to like a few of these things, but don’t be fooled. Over and over, Trump has made clear his wish to shred the New Deal’s twofold structure of economic security — adequate incomes and protection against market abuse.Trump at one point in 2016 called for “the elimination of the federal minimum wage.” He opposed raising it from its pathetic 15-year-old level of $7.25 per hour. When in office, unlike every president for the past half century, Trump failed to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit. His Child Tax Credit plan did nothing to help the lowest earners.
Trump is likewise opposed to protecting Americans from market abuse. He and his Project 2025 allies want to scrap policies that constrain the dangerous effects of climate change, which he calls a “hoax.” He will continue to gut regulations that protect the environment, workers, consumers, and investors. He wants to perpetuate — and expand —tax policies that dole out billions to super-rich Americans and big corporations.
James Causey: Project 2025 spells out second Trump term in alarming detail. That is no stretch.
The worst of Trump’s attacks on the New Deal is his contempt for America’s most popular domestic program: Social Security. His current protestations that he would protect it are not credible. He once called it a “Ponzi scheme” and proposed privatizing it, and has more recently suggested that a second Trump term would mean cuts to Social Security. His hugest unachieved social policy goal at the end of his presidency was the complete termination of Social Security’s principal funding source, the payroll tax. Just a few months ago, he said “there’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.”
And unlike Harris, he has never once proposed a revenue-based solution to the benefit cuts that will, without legislative action, inevitably result from the Social Security Trust Fund’s looming solvency crisis.
A lot is at stake when US voters pick their next President in November. Decency v. deceit. Democracy vs. autocracy. The rule of law vs. the law of rulers.
And take it from us, the fate of the entire New Deal will also be on the ballot.
James Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, is an attorney and former Associate Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. David Riemer has served in legal and policy positions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and US government, and is the author of the 2019 book “Putting Government In Its Place: The Case for a New Deal 3.0.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Opinion: The legacy of the New Deal is on 2024 presidential ballot