On Day 99, the Biden-Harris White House couldn’t stop saying the quiet part out loud.
White House Showcases Staff “Non-White”-Ness (Their Words).
In observance of Biden’s first 100 days in office, the White House released a fact sheet on the ethnicity and sexuality of 1,500 agency appointees, billed as “new data about the historic number and diversity of presidential appointees hired by Day 100.” The document included a long paragraph about the skin color and sexual proclivities of Cabinet secretaries.
As if the point of the exercise could possibly be made more explicit, the release finally said the quiet part out loud: We’ve been exemplary in hiring people who are not a certain skin color.
“Consistent with President Biden’s commitment to leveraging the talent, creativity, and expertise of the American people to build an Administration that looks like America, more than half of all Biden appointees are women, and half identify as non-white—numbers that set a new bar for future Administrations,” the fact sheet reads.
The American Families Plan, Brought To You By Wealthy American Families.
The Biden-Harris White House has begun promoting Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which aims to make the largest-ever investment in childcare, create a national paid family and medical leave program, give every student two free years of universal preschool and two free years of community college, and extend the tax cuts created in the American Rescue Plan.
The national leave program will include far more than traditional family and medical leave, funding up to three paid months off for a variety of circumstances. From a White House fact sheet:
The program will ensure workers receive partial wage replacement to take time to bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill loved one, deal with a loved one’s military deployment, find safety from sexual assault, stalking, or domestic violence, heal from their own serious illness, or take time to deal with the death of a loved one. It will guarantee twelve weeks of paid parental, family, and personal illness/safe leave by year 10 of the program, and also ensure workers get three days of bereavement leave per year starting in year one. The program will provide workers up to $4,000 a month, with a minimum of two-thirds of average weekly wages replaced, rising to 80 percent for the lowest wage workers. We estimate this program will cost $225 billion over a decade.
Wealthier Americans will foot the bill for this grand scheme to send children to school at age three, qualify more workers to take 25 percent of the year off work, and ensure those who only work 30 hours per week don’t fall into poverty.
“Alongside the American Families Plan, the President will be proposing a set of measures to make sure that the wealthiest Americans pay their share in taxes, while ensuring that no one making $400,000 per year or less will see their taxes go up,” the fact sheet explains. The American Families Plan would also abolish the evil of American families leaving too much wealth to their heirs: “The President would eliminate the loophole that allows the wealthiest Americans to entirely escape tax on their wealth by passing it down to heirs. Today, our tax laws allow these accumulated gains to be passed down across generations untaxed, exacerbating inequality.”
Among numerous education-related initiatives, the American Families Plan will help to solve the problem of too many white special education teachers, according to the White House.
“While only about half of the students receiving special education services are white, approximately 82 percent of special education teachers are white,” a fact sheet on the plan’s racial equity benefits describes.
It’s unclear who they intend to indict with this claim—white people for being too willing to be special education teachers, or minorities for being too reluctant to be special education teachers—but either way, the Biden-Harris White House is prepared to do something about it.
