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WASHINGTON (AP) – When Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president, he became not only the longest-serving newly-inaugurated US chief executive in history, but also the longest-serving president in history.
Biden was born on November 20, 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was 78 years, two months and one day old when he was sworn in on Wednesday. He was 78 days older than President Ronald Reagan when he left office in 1989.
A look at how the country Biden now leads has changed over the course of his life and how his presidency might reflect that.
BIGGER AND MORE VARIOUS PIE
The U.S. population is approaching 330 million, eclipsing 135 million when Biden was born and nearly 60% more than when he was first elected to the Senate in 1972. The world population during Biden’s lifetime has grown from about 2 , 3 billion to 7.8 billion.
More striking is the diversity of Biden’s America. A descendant of Irish immigrants, Biden was born during a period of relatively stagnant immigration after US restrictions on new entry in the 1920s, followed by a global 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 again changed the melting pot.
In 1950, the first census after Biden’s birth counted the country as 89% white. As 2020 approached, the country was made up of 60% non-Hispanic white and 76% white, including Hispanic white.
So it’s no surprise that a politician who joined an all-male and almost all-white Senate at the age of 30 used his inaugural address 48 years later to promise a judgment on racial justice and, later in the afternoon, signed several immigrants. – user-friendly executive orders.
BIDEN, HARRIS AND HISTORY
Biden took special note of Vice President Kamala Harris as the first woman elected to national office and the first black woman and South Asian woman to reach the vice presidency. “Don’t tell me things can’t change,” he said of Harris, who was a student in the still largely isolated Oakland Public Elementary School when Biden became a senator.
The first time Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, there will be two women behind a president, another first: Harris and President Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. But change comes slowly. Harris was only the second black woman to sit in the Senate. When she resigned on Monday, there were none left in the Senate – and only three black men out of 100 seats. Black Americans make up about 13% of the population.
MONEY ISSUES
The minimum wage in 1942 was 30 cents an hour. The median income for men according to the 1940 census, the last before Biden was born, was $ 956, with women earning about 62 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Today, the minimum wage is $ 7.25. The most recent weekly wage statistics from the federal government reflect a median annual income of about $ 51,100 for full-time workers. But the issue is purchasing power, and it varies. In the month of Biden’s birth, a dozen eggs cost an average of around 60 cents in American cities – two hours of minimum wage work. A loaf of bread cost 9 cents, about 20 minutes of work. Today, eggs can cost around $ 1.50 (12 minutes of minimum wage work); an average loaf of bread costs $ 2 (16 minutes).
University tuition fees are another story. Pre-war Harvard Business School tuition fees were around $ 600 a year, or about two-thirds of the median annual salary of American workers. Today, Harvard’s current MBA class is billed an annual tuition fee of over $ 73,000, or one year and almost five months of the median US salary (and that’s before taxes).
Biden is proposing to raise the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour – a move that is already attracting opposition from Republicans. He called for a two-year tuition waiver in community and technical colleges and tuition waivers for four-year public schools (hence, not at Harvard) for students from households with an annual income. of $ 125,000 or less.
DEBT
National debt skyrocketed during Biden’s lifetime, from $ 72 billion to $ 27 trillion. But it is a recent phenomenon. Biden finished 36 years in the Senate and became vice president amid the fallout from the 2008 financial crash, when debt was around $ 10 trillion. Now he takes office amid yet another economic calamity: the coronavirus pandemic.
To some extent, this is a biographical bookend for Biden. It arose when borrowing to finance the war effort generated budget deficits which, measured as a percentage of the overall economy, were the largest in U.S. history until 2020, when spending on The COVID emergency, the 2017 tax cuts and the loss of income from a lagging economy added billions in debt in just one year.
Reflecting the way President Franklin Roosevelt approached the Great Depression and World War II, Biden nonetheless calls for an additional $ 1.9 trillion in immediate deficit spending to avoid a long-term economic collapse.
AIRPLANES, TRANES AND AUTOMOBILES
As part of its proposal to overhaul the energy grid, Biden wants to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030, a move analysts project could boost the sale of 25 million electric vehicles. For context, federal statistics counted 33 million cars in the United States total in 1948, when Biden started high school.
A FIRST FOR THE SILENT GENERATION
Biden is part of the Silent Generation, so named because she sits between the “greatest generation” that endured depression and won World War II, and their children, the Baby Boomers, who made their mark. through the radical social and economic changes of the civil rights era, Vietnam and the Cold War.
True to stereotypes, Biden’s generation has searched for decades as if they would never see one of their own in the Oval Office. The larger generation produced John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Reagan and George HW Bush. Then the baby boomers took over. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump were born in 67 days in 1946, the first of the Boomer years. Barack Obama, born in 1961, reserved their generation as the Young Boomer.
If his inaugural speech is any indication, Biden seems eager to embrace the characteristics of his flanking generations. He hovered over “cascading crises” – a pandemic and economic fallout reminiscent of the Depression and the war effort that followed, a race consideration that is an extension of the civil rights era – and summoned the nation “to the tasks of our time. “
A LOT OF FIRST-HAND LEARNING
Biden lived through 14 presidencies before creating his own, or nearly a third of all presidents. No former occupant of the White House had experienced so many administrations before taking office.
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