WASHINGTON (AP) – When Joe Biden took the oath of office as the 46th president, he became not only the oldest newly inaugurated US president in history, but also the oldest sitting president ever.
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. That’s 78 days older than President Ronald Reagan was when he left office in 1989.
A look at how the country Biden now leads has changed in his lifetime and how his presidency might reflect that.
LARGER, MORE VARIOUS CAKE
The US population is approaching 330 million people, eclipsing the 135 million at Biden’s birth and nearly 60% more than when he was first elected to the Senate in 1972. The world’s population has grown from about 2 during Biden’s lifetime. , 3 billion to 7.8 billion.
More striking is the diversity in Biden’s America. A descendant of Irish immigrants, Biden was born during a period of relatively stagnant immigration after the US imposed restrictions on new entries 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 Spanish and non-white immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa has once again changed the melting pot.
In 1950, the first census after Biden’s birth counted the country as 89% white. On the way to 2020, the country was 60% non-Hispanic white and 76% white, including Hispanic whites.
So it’s no surprise that a politician who joined an all-male, almost-all-white senate as a 30-year-old used his inaugural speech 48 years later to promise a bill on racial justice and signed several immigrants later that afternoon. -friendly executive commands.
PRAY, HARRIS AND HISTORY
Biden took special note of Vice President Kamala Harris as the first woman elected to national office, and the first black and South Asian woman to reach vice presidency. “Don’t tell me things can’t change,” he said of Harris, who was a student in the still largely segregated Oakland public primary 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 speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. But change is slow. Harris was only the second black woman to ever serve in the Senate. When she resigned Monday, the Senate had none left – and only three black men for 100 seats. Black Americans make up about 13% of the population.
MONEY MATTERS
The minimum wage in 1942 was 30 cents an hour. The median income for men according to the 1940 census, the last before Biden’s birth, was $ 956, with women earning about 62 cents for every dollar a man earned. Today the minimum wage is $ 7.25. The most recent federal government weekly wage statistics reflect an average annual income of about $ 51,100 for full-time workers. But the question is purchasing power, and it varies. In the month Biden was born, in American cities, an average of a dozen eggs averaged about 60 cents – two hours minimum wage. A loaf of bread was 9 cents, about 20 minutes of work. Today, eggs can cost about $ 1.50 (12-minute minimum wage); a loaf is on average $ 2 (16 minutes).
Tuition is a different story. Pre-war education at Harvard Business School was about $ 600 per year – about two-thirds of the average annual wage of the American worker. Today, Harvard’s current MBA class is charged an annual tuition fee of over $ 73,000, or one year and nearly five months of the average U.S. salary (and that’s before tax).
Biden proposes raising the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour – a move already drawing opposition from Republicans. He has called for tuition-free two-year community and technical colleges and tuition waiver for four-year public schools (i.e. not Harvard) for students from households with $ 125,000 or less in annual income.
DEBT
National debt has skyrocketed 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 fallout from the 2008 financial crash, when debt was about $ 10 trillion. Now he’s taking office amid another economic disaster: the coronavirus pandemic.
To some extent this is a biographical bookend for Biden. He was born when borrowing to finance the war effort generated budget deficits that, when measured as a percentage of the total economy, were the largest in US history until 2020, when COVID emergency spending, 2017 tax cuts and the loss of revenues from a lagging economy added trillions of debt in one year.
Reflecting how President Franklin Roosevelt approached the Great Depression and World War II, Biden is nonetheless calling for an additional $ 1.9 trillion in direct deficit spending to avoid a long-term economic downturn.
AIRCRAFT, TEARS AND AUTOMOTICS
As part of his proposed energy grid overhaul, Biden aims to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging points by 2030, a project by motion analysts could boost sales of 25 million electric vehicles. For context, federal statistics totaled 33 million cars in the US in 1948, when Biden started high school.
A FIRST FOR THE SILENT GENERATION
Biden is part of the silent generation, so named because it falls between the ‘greatest generation’ to survive the depression and win World War II, and their children, the baby boomers, who have left their mark on the sweeping social and economic changes from the civil rights era, Vietnam and the Cold War.
True to the stereotypes, for decades Biden’s generation looked like they’d never see one in the Oval Office. The Greatest 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 in the span of 67 days in 1946, the first of the Boomer years. Born in 1961, Barack Obama recorded their generation as a young Boomer.
If his inaugural address is any indication, Biden seems eager to embrace the characteristics of his flanking generations. He tapped through the “cascading crises” – a pandemic and economic fallout reminiscent of the Depression and subsequent war effort, a race count that is an extension of the civil rights era – and called on the nation “for the duties of our time. “
LEARN LOTS FROM THE FIRST HAND
Biden passed 14 presidencies before starting his own president, nearly a third of all presidents. No White House resident had gone through so many administrations before taking office.