Back before the midterm elections in November 2018, the former Obama speechwriter and now political podcaster, Jon Favreau, released a 15-episode arc on the history and future of the Democratic party. In the ninth episode of the series, he presented “The Second Bill of Rights,” a “bold, progressive agenda” that he believes would be supported by any self-professed Democrat.
I wrote a blog post about the episode if you’re interested in some of the details, but Favreau’s Second Bill of Rights looks like this:
- The right to a job.
- The right to a fair and living wage.
- The right to exist regardless of one’s ability to work.
- The right to an education that supports the improvement of one’s lot, regardless of age or income.
- The right to the best possible healthcare.
- The right to form a union that advocates for the value of one’s labor.
- The right to participate in a fair and balanced economy.
With Vice-President Biden as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, I think it makes sense to compare his policy proposals against the “bold, progressive agenda” that Favreau discovered in his survey.
The Right to a Job
Democrats generally agree that every American who wants a job should be guaranteed one through a program inspired by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Managed locally, the program idealized by Democrats would create jobs in “the Care Economy: care for community, care for people, and care for planet.”
During the primary season, Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed a job guarantee, Senators Booker, Warren, and Gillibrand, and Harris co-sponsored a bill in the Senate to create a Job Guarantee pilot program, and Representative Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal resolution, which is supported by virtually all progressive Democrats and calls for “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”
Vice-President Biden, however, does not support a job guarantee. He told the Washington Post: “As automation continues to grow, it’s possible that down the line we may need to guarantee a job for every American, but we are not there.”
The Right to a Fair & Living Wage
In 2016, the official platform of the Democratic Party included the following:
We should raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour over time and index it, give all Americans the ability to join a union regardless of where they work, and create new ways for workers to have power in the economy so every worker can earn at least $15 an hour. … We also support creating one fair wage for all workers by ending the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers and people with disabilities.
While the platform will be revised during the 2020 convention (however it happens during “these uncertain times“), we can rest assured it will include some kind of call for a fair and living wage.
A researcher at M.I.T. put together a Living Wage Calculator that “estimates the cost of food, child care, health care (both insurance premiums and typical health care costs), housing, transportation and other necessities,” and breaks it down further by state and county, since a living wage in Rutland County, Vermont won’t be the same as a living wage in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York City.
Vice-President Biden agrees with virtually every other Democrat on this issue. His administration would work to “increase the federal minimum wage to $15 across the country,” but he goes further by supporting “indexing the minimum wage to the median hourly wage” rather than inflation. This would link “the minimum wage to overall conditions in the labor market rather than to the general level of prices” and help reduce America’s income-inequality gap.
The Right to Exist Regardless of One’s Ability to Work
Favreau’s survey found that most Democrats support subsidizing income to provide “a foundation of security under a vast majority of Americans,” first through expanding access to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and then through the creation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Interestingly, one of the first major politicians to support a guaranteed minimum income was a Republican, President Richard Nixon, who in 1972 proposed the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) as a way to replace the benefits of another federal program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was designed to help children whose families had low or no income. Despite passing the House, FAP didn’t make it through the Senate, thanks to an alliance between a group of conservative Democrats and Republicans.
In 1974, Congress passed the EITC, “a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income working individuals and couples, particularly those with children.” In tax year 2019, the EITC benefit maxed out at $6,557 for a family with three or more children, provided the family makes less than $55,952 (married, filing jointly).
The thing about the EITC, however, is that the beneficiary has to have at least $1 of earned income (pensions and unemployment don’t count); in other words, they have to work. With a Universal Basic Income policy, every citizen, regardless of their ability to work, is provided with a minimum income that allows them to, in the words of Andrew Yang, UBI’s most visible promoter this primary season, “pick their heads up and plan for the future.”
Vice-President Biden does not support a Universal Basic Income, telling the Post, “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity, your self-respect, and your place in the community. … We must build a future that puts work first.”
The Right to an Education, Regardless of Age or Income
In 2016, Senator Sanders changed the conversation around education in the country by proposing a “College for All” policy that would guarantee tuition and debt-free public colleges, universities, and trade schools to all. He took the policy further by calling for the canceling of all student-loan debt and expanding the federal government’s coverage of non-tuition costs (books, fees, etc.) by expanding Pell grants, tripling Work-Study programs, and more.
For the 2020 election, Senator Warren showed support for such a policy by offering a plan very similar to Bernie’s, canceling student-loan debt for 95% of Americans and making two- and four-year public colleges free for all Americans.
When Favreau conducted his survey in 2018, he learned that most Democrats support “providing every individual — if they have the ability — with a free college education, and erasing the economically-crippling burden of a generation’s worth of student-loan debt.”
Vice-President Biden holds a more conservative position on higher education than Senators Sanders and Warren, but he does take strides towards the Democratic consensus.
The Vice President’s proposal would provide “two years of community college or other high-quality training program without debt for any hard-working individual looking to learn and improve their skills to keep up with the changing nature of work.” In addition, he would “make public colleges and universities tuition-free for all families with incomes below $125,000.”
When it comes to the student-loan-debt crisis, he would expand the income-based repayment program to limit student loan payments to 5% of a person’s discretionary income, and those making less than $25,000/year would not have to make any payments on their balance or accrue interest on their loans. If a person made 20 years worth of on-time payments, their loan would be 100% forgiven. In addition, he promises to strengthen the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program to make it actually work.
The Right to the Best Possible Healthcare
Polls routinely demonstrate that healthcare is the most important issue for American voters. According to a Politico/Harvard School of Public Health survey taken a month before COVID-19 dominated the country’s attention, the two top issues for American voters of all parties were lowering the cost of health care and lowering prescription drug prices.
Democrats are divided on the best way to achieve these goals. Senators Sanders, Warren, and others support some version of “Medicare for All,” where the goal is to provide universal healthcare for all Americans. In fact, according to the Politico/Harvard survey linked above, 71% of Democrats and 53% of all Americans support “changing the health care system so that all Americans would get health insurance from Medicare.”
Contrary to the desires of more than two-thirds of all Democrats, Vice-President Biden does not support universal, single-payer healthcare.
Instead, he calls for giving Americans a choice between private insurance companies and a public health-insurance option similar to Medicare. His plan also calls for capping the amount of a family’s contribution to the costs of health insurance to 8.5% of their income and increasing the size of the tax credits to provide “more generous coverage, with lower deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.”
Unfortunately, all the public option does is “compete against private insurers in our current broken, market-based system, ultimately perpetuating the unequal coverage, underinsurance, and prohibitive out-of-pocket costs we see today.” It reinforces the notion that healthcare is not a human right, but a profit-generating enterprise that capitalists ought to have access to.
When it comes to lowering prescription drug costs, Vice-President Biden’s plan allows the government to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies, opens the border for individuals to purchase drugs from other countries, limits launch prices on drugs with no competitors, locks drug-price increases to the inflation rate, and improves the supply of generic drugs to the market.
Vice-President Biden’s plan supports women by expanding access to contraception, protecting the constitutional right to an abortion, restoring Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and rescinding the gag rule that prevents foreign aid from going to organizations that provide information on abortion services.
The Right to Form a Union that Advocates for the Value of One’s Labor
Favreau’s survey of the Democrats found that a majority of the party supports “making it easier for workers to form a union, penalizing employers who fire the workers who try to start a union, and revoking the ‘right to work’ laws that weaken unions in several of our united states.”
According to Tara Golshan, a political reporter at Vox, while Senators Warren, Sanders, and Harris focused their union messages on “an increasingly progressive working class that didn’t see a champion in either Trump or Clinton in 2016,” Vice-President Biden’s strategy involves winning back the white-union households that voted for President Trump in 2016.
The Vice President’s proposal, which his campaign titles “The Biden Plan for Strengthening Worker Organizing, Collective Bargaining, and Unions,” calls for holding executives personally accountable for interfering with organization efforts and violating labor laws, preventing federal dollars from flowing to corporations that engage in union busting, and penalizing companies that negotiate in bad faith.
The Vice President’s plan also seeks to make it easier for workers to unionize and provides a federal guarantee for public-sector employees to bargain for better pay, benefits, and working conditions, which several states actively forbid from them doing.
Finally, he promises to create a Cabinet-level working group that focuses solely on promoting union organizing and collective bargaining.
There’s more to the Vice President’s plan, and his campaign proposals are positive on the face of it, but the Vice President has also hosted fundraisers with anti-union lobbyists and supported NAFTA and other union-damaging trade deals. In addition, his paradigm of a union family better fits the unions of his youth (white, working class men) rather the unions of today; in 2017, the Economic Policy Institute found that “65.4 percent of workers age 18 to 64 and covered by a union contract are women and/or people of color.”
To its credit, the Vice President’s plan virtually mirrors Senator Sanders’ “Workplace Democracy” plan. Unfortunately, with his historic support of NAFTA and TPP, the Vice President’s reliability on worker protections is still up for debate.
The Right to Participate in a Fair and Balanced Economy
The Democratic party, according to Favreau’s survey, supports “reversing the consolidation of financial power by strengthening and aggressively enforcing federal anti-trust and consumer protection laws.” The party grew this sense of consciousness through the Occupy Wall Street campaign, which popularized the phrase, “We are the 99%.”
Senator Sanders picked up the mantle of this movement in 2016 (having carried it since entering politics in the 1970s), spreading its message far and wide and bringing to the modern consciousness such concepts as “the billionaire class”. In addition, Senator Sanders incredible ability to stay on message with this topic ensured that everyone who heard him speak between 2016 and 2020 now understood (and agreed) with the basic premise that the goal of America’s policies seems to be “a race to the bottom,” where the jobs that still exist in this country are lower paying with fewer benefits and fewer protections against environmental degradation and workplace dangers, all for the benefit of the capitalists.
The Vice President union-focused policy detailed above is the closest the presumptive nominee gets to discussing “a fair and balanced economy.”
The difference between Vice-President Biden and the progressive agenda is that the Vice President does not vilify the billionaire class, nor does he see Wall Street as working against the interests of Main Street.
He agrees that there are some bad actors, and his proposal calls for holding them personally accountable for acting in bad faith, but he neglects to connect the interests of the billionaire class with the government’s obstructions to progressive action. Put simply, the Vice President is not, in Bernie’s words, ready to “take on corporate America or Wall Street.”
Biden & The Second Bill of Rights
By comparing Vice-President Biden’s “Vision for America” with Favreau’s survey of what members of the Democratic party broadly support, we’ve discovered that the Vice President is exactly where many of us on the left suspected: ready to take incremental steps that, generally speaking, maintain the status quo while also trying to do some good.
His policies align with his message: a vote for Vice President Biden is a vote to return to President Obama’s America. Unfortunately, President Obama’s America does not align with my personal vision for what the country ought to be. Come November, I’ll hold my nose and “Vote Blue No Matter Who” because I agree with every other sensible American that President Trump has to be removed from office, but I wish more Americans recognized that we need to be making a lot more than incremental progress if we’re to survive the environmental, economic, and health-related cataclysms still to come.