I will say that Biden’s Child Tax Credit program has been remarkably effective at reducing poverty. So that’s a bright spot that I didn’t predict.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/09/24/the-new-child-tax-credit-does-more-than-just-cut-poverty/amp/
With a razor-thin majority, Democrats pretty much only have control over spending money. So overall, my predictions held. No major expansions of civil rights, immigrant rights, or voting rights. SCOTUS is in fact rolling rights *back* and allowing states, businesses, and individuals to discriminate *more*, which is a major shift in direction that hasn’t occurred since before the 1960s. So I wasn’t gloomy *enough* on that front.
I also wasn’t gloomy enough about the Covid pandemic. My comment only glances upon it — but I assumed, like most liberals, that widespread vaccination would help bring it to an end this year. In fact, a hardcore group of 25% or so of Americans refused to ever get vaccinated, and meanwhile the Covid variants have been multiplying, some of them causing more severe infections or partially evading the vaccine.
Covid pandemic will never “end” but will be with us in perpetuity, it seems — and in a constant tug-of-war between vaccines, “natural immunity,” and social distancing/masking/mitigation measures on the one hand, and new Covid variants on the other.
