President Biden has yet to make one of the most important appointments of his presidency, the position of assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division. The lawyer tapped for this post will play a major role in shaping Biden’s antitrust policy at a critical moment: Monopolies are concentrating power in nearly every industry, large and small, but the government is still strong enough to take them on. How long until they’re simply too big to stop is anybody’s guess, but they’re growing bigger every day.
It’s widely understood that the choice comes down to Jonathan Kanter, whose life work has been about taking on the concentrated power of Big Tech, and Jonathan Sallet, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson, who was a high-level official in the antitrust department during the Obama years. The question for Biden is whether he wants to take a real swing at antitrust, or wants to take a more comfortable approach, and risk missing the moment.
But another key question remains unanswered: Has Sallet represented Big Tech in the recent past? His disclosure forms, not yet public, would require him to disclose income since 2018, but not the years prior. He left the Obama administration in 2017 and Steptoe represents both Apple and Facebook. Steptoe prepped Mark Zuckerberg for his high-profile congressional testimony.
For the last two weeks, I’ve been asking the White House to comment on whether he worked for either of those clients, and while they’ve been responsive, they’ve so far been unable to provide an answer. That seems like an awfully important question to answer before making this appointment. If I get one, I’ll report back.
Next week, Biden will address a joint session of Congress for the first time, and he’s expected to focus largely on his economic agenda. Because he’s Biden, the speech will probably sound moderate, but look closely, and he’s going to be outlining an agenda that would fundamentally transform -- in a good way -- what it means to be a working person in this country.
To back up: As I started to become politically aware in the 1990s, it was fairly easy to see what the obstacles were in front of people trying to climb their way out of poverty. Wages were too low, schools were bad, child care was too expensive and often poor quality, and health insurance was hard to come by without a good job, leading to soaring medical bankruptcies. The cost of college began exploding around that time, adding student debt to the list. In most other developed nations, those obstacles simply didn’t exist: wages were higher, insurance coverage was guaranteed, child care was subsidized, schools were better, and university was free. That, to me, is the baseline for a decent society, though by no means all the way there.
As you watch Biden’s speech, look for whether he’s using this unique moment to deal with the structural obstacles in front of people today. According to the reporting that’s out there so far, and confirmed by conversations with White House officials, his American Family Plan will address several of those hurdles. Expanding the child tax credit through 2025 will raise incomes across the board for those who need it most. Additional subsidies for child care will try to increase the quality and the supply of child care, while finally making it actually affordable. He’ll also extend the new Obamacare subsidies, so that everyone is able to buy into a silver plan at no more than 8.5% of their income annually. That’s a far cry from Medicare for All, and it needlessly props up the rapacious health insurance industry, but it is a vast improvement over the barbaric system that existed until recently. Biden so far has resisted calls to cancel up to $50,000 of student debt, and is more likely to offer some meager subsidies for community college, which is fine, but by no means transformative.
I guest-hosted the show Rising on Thursday, and among the segments we did was one on the potentially transformative role of Biden’s child care reform. We also did a segment on the failed soccer Super League, and what it says about regional inequality and populism.
"He’ll also extend the new Obamacare subsidies, so that everyone is able to buy into a silver plan at no more than 8.5% of their income annually." is a disingenuous way to put it. The issue is not often that the premiums are too high, it's the extremely high deductibles. Its the deductibles that cause medical bankruptcy even for those who have insurance. If you don't mention the outrageous deductibles you are doing your readers a disservice.