The president has tried to reset from the chaotic cruelty of the Trump era but the challenges in his inbox are daunting
Six months in, it looks like Joe Biden has a good chance of getting America back to where it was before the pandemic. Covid-19 is in retreat. So far, almost half of the adult population has been fully vaccinated. The economy is roaring back – still 7m jobs short of where it was in January 2020 but on track to return to the starting gate by the end of the year. Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” is a major success.
Related: The Guardian view on Biden, China and Europe: the US is back – for now | Editorial
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US.
Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party
Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor of Jacobin and a Guardian US columnist
Theodore R Johnson is the director of the fellows program at the Brennan Center for Justice and author of When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America
Valerie Rawlston Wilson is director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic