WASHINGTON (AP) – When Joe Biden took the oath of office as the 46th president, he became not only the oldest newly appointed chief executive in history, but also the oldest incumbent president of all time.
Biden was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was 78, two months and one day old when he took an oath on Wednesday. That’s 78 days older than President Ronald Reagan when he left office in 1989.
An analysis of how the country Biden now leads has changed over the course of his life and how his presidency might reflect that.
LARGER AND MISCELLANEOUS PIE
The US population is approaching 330 million people, exceeding 135 million at Biden’s birth and almost 60% larger than when he was first elected to the Senate in 1972. The world population during Biden’s lifetime has grown from 2.3 billion to 7.8 billion.
More impressive is the diversity in Biden’s America. A descendant of Irish immigrants, Biden was born during a period of relative immigration stagnation following the US’s limitations on new entry in the 1920s, followed by a worldwide depression in the 1930s. But a wave of European immigration followed World War II. , when Biden was young, and more recently an influx of Hispanic and non-white immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa has altered the melting pot again.
In 1950, the first census after Biden’s birth counted the country as 89% white. In 2020, the country had 60% non-Hispanic whites and 76% whites, including Hispanic whites.
It is therefore not surprising that a politician who entered a Senate composed only of men, almost all white at 30, used his inaugural speech 48 years later to promise a reckoning on racial justice and, in the late afternoon, signed several immigrant contracts – friendly executive orders.
BIDEN, HARRIS AND HISTORY
Biden especially noted Vice President Kamala Harris as the first woman elected to a national office and the first black woman and woman in South Asia to reach the vice presidency. “Don’t tell me things can’t change,” he said of Harris, who was a student at Oakland’s still-segregated public elementary school when Biden became a senator.
The first time Biden speaks at a joint congressional session, there will be two women behind a president, another unpublished: Harris and spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. But the change comes slowly. Harris was only the second black woman to serve in the Senate. When she resigned on Monday, the Senate was left with none – and only three black men in 100 seats. Black Americans represent about 13% of the population.
MONEY MATTERS
The minimum wage in 1942 was 30 cents an hour. The average men’s income according to the 1940 census, the last before Biden’s birth, was $ 956, with women earning about 62 cents for every dollar a man earned. Today, the minimum wage is R $ 7.25. The most recent weekly wage statistics from the federal government reflect an average annual income of around $ 51,100 for full-time workers. But the question is purchasing power, and it varies. In the month Biden was born, a dozen eggs cost an average of 60 cents in American cities – two hours of work on a minimum wage. A loaf of bread cost 9 cents, about 20 minutes of work. Today, eggs can go for about $ 1.50 (12 minutes of work on a minimum wage); an average bread costs US $ 2 (16 minutes).
College tuition is another story. The pre-war tuition at Harvard Business School was about $ 600 a year – about two-thirds of the average annual salary for the American worker. Today, the current Harvard MBA class pays an annual tuition of more than $ 73,000, or one year and almost five months of the average salary in the United States (and this before taxes).
Biden proposes raising the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour – a move that has already drawn opposition from Republicans. He asked for a two-year tuition waiver for community and technical college and a four-year public school tuition waiver (therefore not at Harvard) for students from families with an annual income of $ 125,000 or less.
DEBT
The national debt soared during Biden’s lifetime, from $ 72 billion to $ 27 trillion. But it is a recent phenomenon. Biden ended 36 years in the Senate and became vice president amid the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when the debt was about $ 10 trillion. Now he takes office in the midst of another economic calamity: the coronavirus pandemic.
To some extent, this is a support for Biden’s biographical book. It was born when the loan to finance the war effort generated budget deficits that, when measured as a percentage of the overall economy, were the largest in US history until 2020, when COVID’s emergency spending, 2017 tax cuts and loss of revenue from a backward economy added trillions of debt in a single year.
Reflecting how President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Great Depression and World War II, Biden, however, is asking for an additional $ 1.9 trillion in deficit spending to avoid a long-term economic downturn.
PLANS, TRANS AND AUTOMOBILES
As part of his proposal to reform the power grid, Biden wants to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030, a project by motion analysts that could spur the sale of 25 million electric vehicles. For contextual purposes, federal statistics counted 33 million cars in the United States in 1948, when Biden started primary school.
A FIRST FOR THE SILENT GENERATION
Biden is part of the Silent Generation, so called because he is among the “Greatest Generation” who endured the Depression and won World War II and his children, the Baby Boomers, who left their mark through the radical social and economic changes of the era of the civil rights, Vietnam and the Cold War.
True to stereotypes, Biden’s generation looked for decades as if they would never see one in the Oval Office. The Greatest Generation produced John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Reagan and George HW Bush. So the Boomers took over. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump were born in a 67-day period in 1946, the first of the Boomer years. Barack Obama, born in 1961, marked his generation as a young Boomer.
If his inaugural speech is any indication, Biden seems eager to embrace the characteristics of his flank generations. He went through “cascading crises” – a pandemic and economic consequences that resemble the Depression and the subsequent war effort, a racial calculation that is an extension of the civil rights era – and called the nation “to the tasks of our time. “
LOTS OF FIRST HAND LEARNING
Biden lived 14 presidencies before starting his own, almost a third of all presidents. No previous White House occupant had gone through so many administrations before taking office.