Voters Shouldn’t Forget the ‘Era-Defining Impact’ of Joe Biden’s Presidency

Eric Fitts has been an educator in the US public schools system his whole working life. A single dad of two teenage boys, the 50-year-old worked his way from teacher to award-winning principal, to his current role as senior executive school leadership coach at Wake County public schools district, a 160,000 pupil catchment area in North Carolina.

However, like millions of Americans, despite his decades of career success, Fitts was saddled for years with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. That is, until the Biden administration’s efforts to forgive student loan debt resulted in his payments burden ceasing as of October 2023.

“I was worried about what I could do for my kids because I had $1,000 [monthly] payments,” Fitts explains of how they took a huge chunk out of his paycheck. “That is so limiting.” The debt forgiveness was a “complete game changer,” he says. Without debt cancellation, Fitts estimates he would be paying the sum off for another 20 years.

“It’s a level of security to build and establish,” he says of his change of circumstances. “I’m saving. I’m investing. It’s about the future. Student loan debt is about the past.”

At last the family has a chance to buy a house and he can put money aside for his kids’ to go to college instead of cash being sucked up by loan repayments.

Cancelling and relieving student debt for low and middle income borrowers along with public sector workers has been a keystone of the Biden-Harris administration.

With the federal student loan debt reaching $1.6 trillion in 2024 and 46 million Americans estimated to be impacted, the administration’s bids to erase debt have proven popular with the public.

Nevertheless setbacks, including the right wing dominated Supreme Court in June 2023 blocking early attempts to roll out the initiative as well as Republican rebuffs from congress, have come thick and fast.

With the final days of the 2024 election campaign mired in multiple attention-grabbing stunts such as Trump’s fascist rally in Madison Square Garden, as well as spectacle and misinformation distracting from policy, moves on student debt relief that could provide a potential vote-getting lever for Kamala Harris in her pitch for the presidency have instead been overshadowed.

The Biden administration’s latest steps via the Department of Education to alleviate the strain of student debt by targeting around eight million people dealing with financial hardship from other sources such as health care bills announced on 25 October, barely registered as a blip in the news cycle.

Student debt relief could be a metaphor for the broader Biden legacy. Despite billions being poured into Democratic Party campaigning and messaging, the American public still don’t appear to be fully aware of a crucial thing: the significant and ongoing impact of the Biden administration’s era-defining domestic and economic policies.

Regardless of unprecedented economic achievements, not least the strongest pandemic recovery of the G7 countries as measured by GDP, somehow the positive narrative has been drowned out in the vortex of political cognitive dissonance, including voters rating Trump higher on the economy. Ingrained negative public opinion about Biden’s performance since taking office in January 2021 hasn’t helped and, even with record jobs growth, voters are focused more on inflation.

With unemployment rates historically low and wages growing faster than inflation since the pandemic began, the disconnect with public opinion on the economy is all the more stark.

As a recent report from The Center for American Progress (CAP) put it: “The economy in 2024 is stronger than experts had predicted it would be in 2024 before COVID-19 even happened. And it is stronger now than it was projected to be by 2024 at the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration.”

Bobby Kogan, a former Biden White House adviser and currently senior director for federal budget policy at CAP and a co-author of the report, says the federal government’s “proactive approach” post-pandemic helped deliver the US’s outperformance of other G7 countries on growth, adding that when it comes to earnings, the bottom 10% of workers experienced the highest “real wages gains”.

Millions more people still need help but the current administration has nevertheless been “the most ambitious in my lifetime,” he adds.

In fact, Biden has overseen the introduction of more domestic legislative programmes than any Democratic president since Lyndon B Johnson. During Biden’s tenure, the federal government spearheaded programmes to drive clean energy and it pumped billions in to infrastructure projects around the country.

Some of the agenda was stymied not only by Republicans in congress but by members of his own party, for example the $2 trillion flagship, Build Back Better climate and social spending framework scuppered in 2022 by senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.

That aside, in some quarters Biden’s achievements have been likened to Franklin Roosevelt, whose sweeping New Deal extricated the country from the throes of the Great Depression and who Biden invoked during his presidential nomination acceptance speech in 2020. Indeed he quoted Roosevelt when signing the massive $1.7 trillion stimulus package into law in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The administration has also proven successful in reinvigorating industry (something Trump promised and failed to do) by generating new manufacturing jobs and strengthening unions.

The number of workers filing for union representation has, according to latest government figures, doubled in four years. The CHIPS and Science Act in 2002 allocated $52 billion for factory building and boosting domestic computer chip production.

Federal dollars were also assigned to programmes that directly address racial equity and support economically marginalised communities.

In Flint, Michigan, Tony Johnson – a single parent to three young children – and who was one of thousands of workers who suffered when car manufacturers (and “well-paying jobs”) left the area over a number of decades, attributes finding his feet again to one of the new federal programmes.

Johnson is in training again as part of the Flint Environmental Career Worker Apprentice Readiness Training Program, funded by the federal Justice40 initiative. The programme connects jobseekers to training and job opportunities.

Johnson settled on carpentry out of a number of possible trades to train in and says he is now on the path to a skilled union job. “There was no real safety net,” he says of the time he has spent seeking welfare assistance and looking for better paying work to put a roof over his family’s head. “Jobs weren’t paying enough.” Being part of the apprentice programme has given him a “road map” to a steadier, “more secure” life.

While people like Johnson and Fitts testify to the qualitative effect of federally-funded initiatives under Biden, Karen Dolan, a senior fellow or project director of the criminalisation of race and poverty project at the Institute for Policy Studies says it is still the case that “people don’t know” about many of the administration’s signature achievements.

Dolan points to how the American Rescue Plan (ARP) introduced to tackle the immense economic fallout from the pandemic has, in just a few years, faded into the public’s political rear view mirror.

Not only did it “stave off” a worse economic crisis, she says, it showed what policy could do to alleviate longstanding problems.

“I think the American Rescue Plan was just phenomenal in terms of cutting child poverty in half and drastically reducing overall poverty. We were facing an extreme economic crisis in addition to the public health crisis.”

While programmes introduced by the ARP weren’t extended by congress thereby ensuring that the gains weren’t sustained, (for example, child poverty “spiked”) Dolan points out that when operational the approach “showed what we can do when we have the political will”.

Whatever way Biden is remembered in the future, it would be difficult to argue that he was lacking in political will when it was most needed (albeit with an early push from the left of the party). Describing his legacy in a recent New Yorker article Biden remarked: “No one thought we could get done, including some of my own people, what we got done. One of the problems is, we knew all the things we did were going to take a little time to work their way through. So now people are realising, ‘Oh, that highway. Oh, that . . . .The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying ‘Joe Did It’.” 

With a new president coming, Fitts has no doubt in his mind that Biden ‘did it’ for his family with student debt forgiveness. “It’s about quality of life. It’s a new lease of life. You can dream again.”