What would the first ten days of a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration look like? Hopefully, to my way of thinking, it would look something like this:
Day 1. Sign simple legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices
(immediately beginning to lower medicine prices for millions of Americans)
Day 2. Sign legislation raising the cap on income taxed for Social Security purposes
(extending the life of Social Security well past 2050...and submit legislation for Congress to extend the program into the next century by raising the cap further later on and reducing benefits to the highest income Social Security recipients)
Day 3. Increase the national minimum wage to $15 an hour
Day 4. Sign the John Lewis Voting Rights Act
Day 5. Sign the DREAM Act
Day 6. Begin undoing most of Trump’s executive orders
Day 7. Add a public option to Obamacare available to everyone
(and propose legislation to strengthen and sustain Obamacare further)
Day 8. Fully fund the Post Office
(and propose legislation to undo the Republican requirement that the Post Office (unlike every other institution or company in the country) must prepay its retirement benefits for 75 years in the future (imposed on it by Republicans to try to help kill it off).
Day 9. Propose legislation to provide student debt relief
Day 10. Begin implementing the Green New Deal (proposing the first of many Congressional actions on global warming).
Then….proceed with the rest of Biden’s agenda.
Why the above in that sequence?
Because….These are all very doable things in a short period of time. And seniors are suffering from skyrocketing prescription drug prices and need relief now. If Biden wins and Democrats win the House and Senate, Democrats should easily be able to start enacting basic, simple legislation that authorizes Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. (They can work on other ways to extend the life of Medicare later, raising the cap further later on (in a phased-in way and reducing benefits for higher-income retirees.)
As far as Social Security, it seems to me that it’s about time that Democrats inoculated the program from future Republican efforts for once and for all. The only rationale Republicans have had for trying to gut it with their “reforms” has been their bogus claim that it’s “going bankrupt.” They’ve been on a multi-decade campaign to convince people it won’t be there, to the point where sizable numbers of young folks have been completely convinced that the program won’t be there for them when they need it. It’s about time that Democrats did something unilaterally to protect the program from Republicans’ ongoing assaults. It would eliminate the excuse for so-called “cat food commissions” that Republicans and moderate Democrats seem to love (you know, whereby they always seem to come up with ways to “save” Social Security by...gutting it and leaving future recipients with little to no benefits or having to choose between buying human food or cat food).
All of the above are relatively incremental policies that can be achieved rather quickly. They can also help to solidify the coalition that would have brought Biden to power with tangible, specific actions that fulfill his promises.
These all happen to also be among the most important priorities that can be quickly addressed and will give impetus to more long-term legislation to start addressing all of the major challenges that have been ignored under Republican governance.
Of course, it’s unlikely that the first ten days of a Biden administration will go exactly as outlined above. But a person can dream, can’t they? This is my dream...of an ideal start to a new president’s administration.
(P.S. For those who say there wouldn’t be enough time for Congress to enact the Medicare, Social Security and other legislation noted above, there actually is. The new Congress takes office Jan. 3. the new president Jan. 20. And the pieces of legislation proposed above are designed to be very simple on purpose...to prevent them from getting bogged down in minutia, while kick-starting efforts to bolster those programs immediately. If, for whatever reason, Congress is unable to pass any legislation in time for the above timeline, President Biden would announce these initiatives on the above dates, to work with Congress to enact them within 100 days.)