Biden's Plan for Seniors Is Not Just a Plan for Seniors.
The incoming administration aims to tackle child care, elder care, preschool and more in one ambitious aid program.
'President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has no shortage of ideas about how to transform caregiving. One striking feature of his teams plan: It does not address elder care separately from child care, or divide plans to support family caregivers from those for paid caregivers. Rather, it takes on Medicaid benefits for older and disabled adults, preschool for toddlers and better jobs for home care workers, all in one ambitious, $775 billion-over-a-decade package.
It approaches the care economy in a holistic way, across the age spectrum, said Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has long pushed many of those measures. Its a big breakthrough.
The same families who need child care in order to stay employed are often responsible for aging relatives, she pointed out, and many work as paid caregivers themselves.
Elements of the Biden plan, announced last summer, will sound familiar. The campaign for paid family leave, whether for childbirth or for care of older parents, goes back decades. So does the ongoing effort to rebalance Medicaid, making it more able to cover caregiving at home, where most older adults hope to stay, rather than in the nursing homes they dread.
But the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis have spotlighted the halting, fragmented way the United States approaches these issues, compared with other industrialized democracies.
Advocates see this emergency as both ruinous for families and workers, and as an opportunity to tackle long-deferred needs. Policies like converting the anemic federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandates only unpaid leave, into 12 weeks of paid leave, as Mr. Biden has proposed, could help propel the nations labor force back to work. . .
The Biden team asserts that the nation can pay the tab for this vast undertaking over 10 years, by rolling back tax breaks for real estate investors with incomes over $400,000 and increasing tax compliance for other high earners.
It also argues that the plan will create three million new caregiving and education jobs, and increase employment by five million by allowing unpaid caregivers (most of them women, again) to re-enter the work force.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/health/biden-senior-citizens.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
AZ8theist
(5,338 posts)They always want to go back to the "good old days", right?
The marginal rate in the 50s was 91% for households above $200,000. ($2M in todays dollars)
ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING OLIGARCHY ALREADY.
SammyWinstonJack
(44,129 posts)RicROC
(1,202 posts)JudyM
(29,122 posts)bucolic_frolic
(42,663 posts)Castrating the tax code to 2 or 3 rates while piling on deductions helped who?
The tax code is written to benefit builders, developers, and resource extraction to create jobs. Without tax writeoffs rental housing would never get built or repaired.
But they could go the other way. Home ownership, renovation, wages that support low income workers, and tax incentives/loans to help them grow their communities. Instead we have allowed city neighborhoods to decay, and moved on to McMansions on virgin farm land for people who can't afford them either. Somebody's making a lot of money.
AZ8theist
(5,338 posts)CTyankee
(63,769 posts)gonna be bad, bad...