Historic benefits in stimulus bill may answer a big question for Democrats

The massive stimulus plan President Joe Biden signed last week sets up a critical real-world test of an argument that has divided political professionals for decades: Can Democrats win back White working-class voters drawn to conservative Republican messages on culture and race by offering them more tangible economic benefits?

Social policy experts say the $1.9 trillion bill will channel more direct government financial assistance to families on the middle and lower rungs of the income ladder than any single piece of legislation since at least President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society during the 1960s -- and possibly well before that. Irwin Garfinkel, one of the nation's leading social policy scholars and co-director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, says that in terms of putting a short-term infusion of cash into the pockets of families at or below the median income -- particularly through a historic expansion and reconfiguration of the child tax credit -- the bill's immediate impact compares favorably even to the crowning achievement of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.