Americans are losing benefits. That could hurt Biden in 2024.
Expiring Covid benefits and new limits on safety net programs threaten to hit Americans’ pocketbooks — especially among core parts of the Democratic electorate.
By Garrett Downs, Olivia Olander, Michael Stratford and Marcia Brown
11/23/2023 07:00 AM EST
President Joe Biden has just under a year to convince skeptical U.S. voters they’re better off financially thanks to him. Widening holes in the country’s social safety net could make his task even harder.
A string of popular pandemic-era support programs have expired this fall, creating so-called benefit cliffs affecting millions of Americans. That coincides with policy changes to traditional welfare programs that are now kicking in, creating potential new hurdles for hundreds of thousands of participants.
The Biden administration and Democratic allies in Congress are fighting to restore some of the lapsed benefits when lawmakers take up the 2024 spending bills early next year. But at best it will be a partial reprieve — the student loan payment moratorium, for example, is gone for good.
The collective impact: a cascading set of new financial burdens that are disproportionately affecting women, young people and people of color — a core part of the Democratic electorate. Coming on top of stubbornly high inflation, they risk further undermining the president’s pitch that he’s rebuilding the economy “from the middle up and the bottom out,” particularly among voters he needs to turn out in November.
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https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/23/biden-social-safety-net-2024-00128488
