Biden can’t unite America, but he can tackle COVID-19, jobs, and student debt | Solomon Jones

Joe Biden delivered his inaugural address to a country in deep crisis. Our divisions have been laid bare by Donald Trump — a president who spent four years feeding lies and conspiracy theories to millions of his followers, even as the country fell apart.

I don’t believe that it’s Biden’s job to reunite the country. After seeing how easily white supremacy was normalized, governmental safeguards were pulverized, and police abuses against Blacks occurred with alarming frequency, I am left to wonder if we were ever united in the first place. If, as I suspect, our unity was always an illusion, Biden’s job becomes virtually impossible.

Before we can heal at all, Biden will have to identify what got us to a point where Trump’s words could incite a mob to invade the U.S. Capitol.

But admissions don’t mean much now, when everyday Americans are standing in food lines. Only tangible help can change that.

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To deliver that help and secure America’s future, Biden must learn from America’s past. Then he must address three urgent needs:

Janet Yellen, Biden’s Treasury secretary nominee, said it best during her virtual confirmation hearing: “The smartest thing we can do is act big” on the next coronavirus relief package. She’s right.

The coronavirus crisis has decimated the financial outlook for many Americans. It has also peeled back the covers on America’s inequities. For example, Black Americans have been nearly three times more likely than whites to die from COVID-19. But even as America has shown signs of recovery, the rich have bounced back sharply, while others have experienced even more financial difficulties. “This is especially true of people of color,” Yellen told senators.

Biden has said his administration will distribute 100 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine in his first 100 days. To do so, he must not depend solely on nonprofit entities and private industry to distribute the vaccine, like the Eisenhower administration did, thus slowing down the rollout of the polio vaccine in 1955. Biden must also eschew Trump’s haphazard approach, which slowed the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine. Instead, Biden must plan and execute the distribution at a federal level. Only then can he eradicate this virus in every community, and get America back to business.

America has face economic crises before, most notably during the Great Depression of the 1930s. To solve the problem of joblessness, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created jobs through the federal government for both skilled and unskilled workers.

The program was called the Works Progress Administration, and it put 8.5 million Americans to work between its creation in 1935 and its dissolution in 1943. That gave steady income to American workers who otherwise would not have found real employment in a stagnant economy.

The program had racist elements, just like much of American life. The Civilian Conservation Corps, which put young unemployed men in camps and had them work to clear trees and build structures, was segregated. That can’t be the case now.

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I believe Joe Biden should use federal resources to create jobs in order to rebuild America’s infrastructure. In today’s economy, he could do that through a public-private partnership that would invite corporate investment in endeavors that would use jobs to create income and possibly put a dent in the growing violent crime rates that appear to be driven by the pandemic.

But Biden can’t do so by simply giving work to the building trades unions, since many of them remain largely white. If Biden is willing to make the work available to people beyond the union structure, Americans of all stripes will benefit.

Joe Biden, just like every president, will say much about jumpstarting the economy. Doing so will require putting money into circulation so that Americans can spend. There’s no better way to do that than to cancel student debt.

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According to the Center for American Progress, about 43 million adult Americans have federal student loans. Collectively, they owe $1.5 trillion in federal student loan debt. That doesn’t count the estimated $119 billion in student loans from private sources.

Biden, who has promised to eliminate some student loan debt, must make good on that promise. Doing so will jumpstart the economy by freeing up money that Americans can spend on other things.

Of course, none of this can create unity where none exists, but it can go a long way toward healing our wounds.