WASHINGTON (AP) – When Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president, he became not only the first newly inaugurated U.S. executive in history, but also the oldest incumbent president in history. .
Biden was born on November 20, 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was 78, two months and one day old when he was invested on Wednesday. He is 78 days older than President Ronald Reagan when he left office in 1989.
A look at how the country Biden leads has now changed throughout his life and how his presidency might reflect that.
LITTLE BIGGER, MORE DIVERSE
The American population is close to 330 million people, exceeding 135 million since Biden’s birth and almost 60% more than when he was elected to the Senate in 1972. The world’s population of Biden’s life has gone from about 2.3 billion to 7.8 billion.
More striking is the diversity in Biden America. Biden, a descendant of Irish immigrants, was born during a period of stagnant relative immigration after U.S. restrictions on new entrants 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, the influx of Hispanic and non-white immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa has once again altered the crucible.
In 1950, the first census after Biden’s birth counted 89% whites in the country. By 2020, the country was 60% non-Hispanic whites and 76% white, including Hispanic whites.
It is therefore not surprising that a politician who joined an all-male, almost completely white, 30-year-old Senate used his inaugural speech 48 years later to promise a calculation of racial justice and later , that afternoon, signed several immigrants. -friendly executive orders.
BIDEN, HARRIS AND HISTORY
Biden took special note of Vice President Kamala Harris as the first woman elected to the national office and the first black 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 at Oakland Public Elementary School, still segregated, 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 is coming slowly. Harris was only the second black woman to serve in the Senate. When he resigned on Monday, the Senate had none left and only three black men out of every 100 seats. Black Americans make up about 13% of the population.
MONEY IS INTERESTING
The minimum wage in 1942 was 30 cents an hour. The median income for a male census in the 1940 census, the last before Biden was born, was $ 956, with women earning about $ 62 for every dollar a man earned. Today, the minimum wage is $ 7.25. The most recent weekly wage statistics from the federal government reflect an average annual income of about $ 51,100 for full-time workers. But the issue is purchasing power and that varies. The month Biden was born, a dozen eggs averaged about 60 cents in U.S. cities, two hours minimum wage. A loaf of bread was 9 cents, about 20 minutes of work. Today, eggs can cost about $ 1.50 (12 minutes of minimum wage work); a loaf of bread averages $ 2 (16 minutes).
College tuition is another story. Pre-war tuition at Harvard Business School was about $ 600 a year, about two-thirds of the average annual salary of American workers. Today, the current Harvard MBA class is charged an annual tuition of more than $ 73,000, or a year and almost five months of the average U.S. salary (and that’s before taxes).
Biden is proposing to raise the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour, an action that is already provoking opposition from Republicans. He has applied for tuition exemptions and two-year technical colleges without tuition for four-year (therefore not Harvard) public schools for home students with annual incomes of $ 125,000 or less.
DEBT
The national debt has risen over 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 aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, when debt was about $ 10 trillion. He now takes office amid another economic calamity: the coronavirus pandemic.
To some extent, this is a biography book for Biden. It was born when loans to finance the war effort generated budget deficits that, measured as a percentage of the global economy, were the largest in U.S. history until 2020, when emergency spending COVID, the 2017 tax cuts and the loss of revenue from a backward economy added trillions of debt in a single year.
Reflecting on how President Franklin Roosevelt dealt with the Great Depression and World War II, Biden claims, however, an additional $ 1.9 trillion in immediate deficit spending to prevent a long-term economic downturn.
AIRCRAFT, TRANSPORT AND CARS
As part of its proposed power grid overhaul, Biden wants to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030, a motion analysis project that could boost sales of 25 million electric vehicles . By context, federal statistics accounted for 33 million vehicles in the United States in 1948, when Biden began high school.
A FIRST FOR THE SILENT GENERATION
Biden is part of the Silent Generation, so named because he is among the “Greatest Generation” who endured depression and won World War II, and his children, the Baby Boomers, who left their mark through the devastating social and economic changes of the era of civil rights, Vietnam and the Cold War.
True to stereotypes, the Biden generation seemed for decades as if they never saw any of their own in the Oval Office. The older generation produced John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Reagan and George HW Bush. Then Boomers took over. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump were born over a period of 67 days in 1946, the first of the Boomer years. Barack Obama, born in 1961, reserved his generation as a young Boomer.
If his inaugural speech is an indication, Biden seems eager to embrace the characteristics of his generations on the sidelines. He marked the “cascading crises” – a pandemic and an economic downturn reminiscent of depression and subsequent war effort, a consideration of race that is an extension of the era of civil rights – and summoned the nation. ” to the tasks of our time. ”
A LOT OF FIRST HAND LEARNING
Biden lived 14 presidencies before starting his own, nearly a third of all presidents. No previous White House occupant had lived through so many administrations before taking office.