Last Thursday, 39 million American parents began receiving a monthly child allowance ($300 per child under 6, and $250 per child from 6 through 17). It’s the biggest helping hand to American families in more than 85 years.

They need it. Even before the pandemic, child poverty had reached post-war records. Even non-poor families were in trouble, burdened with deepening debt and missed payments. Most were living paycheck to paycheck – so if they lost a job, they and their kids could be plunged into poverty. It’s estimated that the new monthly child allowance will cut child poverty by more than half.

But every single Republican in both the House and Senate voted against the measure.

After I posted a tweet reminding people of this indisputable fact, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah responded Friday with a perfectly bizarre tweet: “If you’re one of the 39 million households receiving their first Child Tax Credit payment today, don’t forget that every single Democrat voted against making it larger.”

Hello? Did we just go through the funhouse mirror?

In point of fact, when the American Rescue Plan was being debated last February, Lee and Senator Marco Rubio did propose slightly larger payments. But here’s the rub: They wanted to restrict them only to “working parents.” Children of the unemployed would be out of luck. Yet those kids are the poorest of the poor. They’re most at risk of being hungry without a roof over their heads.

In a joint press release at the time, Lee and Rubio said they refused to support what they termed “welfare assistance” to jobless parents, warning against undercutting “the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.” Then Lee, Rubio, and every other Republican voted against the whole shebang – help for working and non-working parents. And now Lee wants to take credit for wanting to make the payments larger to begin with? Talk about both sides of the mouth.

As we move toward the gravitational pull of the midterm elections – and polls show how popular the monthly child payments are – I expect other Republicans to make the same whopper of a claim.

But underneath this hypocritical Republican rubbish lie two important questions. The first: will a payment of up to $300 per child every month – totaling up to $3,600 per child per year – invite parents to become couch potatoes?

That seems doubtful. Even a family with three kids under six would receive no more than $10,800 a year. That’s way below what’s needed to pay even subsistence expenses, and still far below what a full-time job at the federal minimum wage would pull in.

But even if the payment caused some parents to work a bit less, it’s far from clear their children are worse off as a result. Maybe they benefit from additional parenting time. 

Which only raises a second question: should children be penalized because their parents aren’t working, or are working less than they would without the child payment?

This question has been debated in America for many years – ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt first provided “Aid for Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC) in the Social Security Act of 1935.

It can’t be decided based on facts; it comes down to values. We know, for example, that child poverty soared after Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans ended AFDC in 1996 and substituted a work requirement. Many people – myself included – look back on that decision as a horrible mistake.

But many of its proponents call it a success because it resulted in additional numbers of poor adults getting jobs and thereby setting good examples for their children of personal responsibility. In the view of these proponents, a country where more parents take responsibility to provide for their children is worth the collateral damage of a greater number of impoverished children.

Since the 1990s, the Republican view that public assistance should be limited to families with breadwinners has taken firm hold in America. Only now, with the American Rescue Plan – put into effect during the worst public health crisis in more than a century and one of the fiercest periods of unemployment since World War II – has that view been rejected in favor of a universal family benefit.

It’s too early to know whether this about-face is permanent. The Act’s payments will end a year from now unless Congress passes Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion addition. Almost every Senate Democrat has signaled a willingness to go along. But here again, not a single Senate Republican has signed on.

Let’s be clear. Mike Lee’s Republican Party – the putative party of “family values” – doesn’t support needy families. It supports a pinched and, in these perilous times, unrealistic view of personal responsibility – children be damned.

What can be done to deter pharmaceutical companies from jacking up prices of critical drugs? To prevent Wall Street banks from excessive gambling? To nudge CEOs into taking a longer-term view? To restrain runaway CEO pay?

Answer to all four: Fulfill Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign pledge.

When he ran for president, Bill Clinton said he’d bar companies from deducting executive pay above $1 million. Once elected, he asked his economic advisors (among them, yours truly) to put the measure into his first budget.

My colleagues weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the new president’s campaign promise. “Maybe there’s some way we can do this without actually limiting executive pay,” one said.

“Look, we’re not limiting executive pay,” I argued. “Companies could still pay their executives whatever they wanted to pay them. We’re just saying society shouldn’t subsidize through the tax code any pay over a million bucks.”

They weren’t convinced.

“Why not require that pay over a million dollars be linked to company performance?” said another. “Executives have to receive it in shares of stock or stock options, that sort of thing. If no linkage, no deduction.”

“Good idea,” a third chimed in. “It’s consistent with what the President promised, and it won’t create flak in the business community.”

“But,” I objected, “we’re not just talking about shareholders. The pay gap is widening in this country, and it affects everybody.”

“Look, Bob,” said the first one. “We shouldn’t do social engineering through the tax code And there’s no reason to declare class warfare. I think we’ve arrived at a good compromise. I propose that we recommend it to the President.”

The vote was four to one. The measure became section 162(m) of the IRS tax code. It was supposed to cap executive pay. But it just shifted executive pay from salaries to stock options.

After that, not surprisingly, stock options soared – becoming by far the largest portion of CEO pay.

When Bill Clinton first proposed his plan, compensation for CEOs at America’s 350 largest corporations averaged $4.9 million. By the end of the Clinton administration, it had ballooned to $20.3 million. Since then, it’s gone into the stratosphere.

And because corporations can deduct all this from their corporate income taxes, you and I and other taxpayers have been subsidizing this growing bonanza.

Hillary Clinton understands this. “When you see that you’ve got CEO’s making 300 times what the average worker’s making you know the deck is stacked in favor of those at the top,” she’s said in her presidential campaign.

And she’s taken direct aim at executive stock options.

“Many stock-heavy pay packages have created a perverse incentive for executives to seek the big payouts that could come from a temporary rise in share price,” she said in July. “And we ended up encouraging some of the same short-term thinking we meant to discourage.”

Yes, we did. Specifically, her husband and his economic team did.

Case in point: In 2014, pharmaceutical company Mylan put in place a one-time stock grant worth as much as $82 million to the company’s top five executives if Mylan’s earnings and stock price met certain goals by the end of 2018.

But the executives would get nothing if the company – whose star product is the EpiPen allergy treatment – failed to meet the target. Almost immediately, Mylan began stepping up the pace of EpiPen price increases. The price of an EpiPen two-back doubled to $600 – a move Hillary Clinton has rightfully called “outrageous.”

Stock options doled out to Wall Street executives in the early 2000s didn’t exactly encourage good behavior, either. They contributed to the near meltdown of the Street and a taxpayer-funded bailout.

Now that Wall Street is no longer restrained by the terms of the bailout, it’s back issuing stock options with a vengeance.

According to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the top 20 banks paid their executives over $2 billion in performance bonuses between 2012 and 2015. That translates into a taxpayer subsidy of $1.7 million per executive per year.

Hillary Clinton has proposed penalizing pharmaceutical companies like Mylan that suddenly jack up the prices of crucial drugs. And she’s promised to go after big banks that make excessively risky bets.

These are useful steps. But she should also consider a more basic measure, which would better align executive incentives with what’s good for the public.

It’s doing what her husband pledged to do in 1992, if elected president – but which his economic advisors then sabotaged: Bar corporations from deducting all executive pay in excess of $1 million. Period.

Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats?

The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party.

Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action).

The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”  

All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class.

Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.

But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.

I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it.

Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners drown.

Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated.

Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics.

What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform?

You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class.  

Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations.

In part, it’s because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes.

Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.

“Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years.

Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big corporations and the Street.

Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top.

This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America.  

But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.

Will they? That’s one of the biggest political unknowns in 2016 and beyond.

What’s the reason for the tempest in the teapot of Hillary and Bill Clinton’s personal finances?

It can’t be about how much money they have. Wealth has never disqualified someone from high office. Several of the nation’s greatest presidents, who came to office with vast fortunes – JFK, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his fifth cousin, Teddy – notably improved the lives of ordinary Americans.  

The tempest can’t be about Hillary Clinton’s veracity. It may have been a stretch for her to say she and her husband were “dead broke” when they left the White House, as she told ABC’s Diane Sawyer. But they did have large legal bills to pay off.

And it’s probably true that, unlike many of the “truly well off,” as she termed them in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, the Clintons pay their full income taxes and work hard.

Nor can the tempest be about how they earned their money. Most has come from public speaking and book royalties, the same sources as for most ex-presidents and former First Ladies.

Then what’s it about?  

The story behind story is that America is in an era of sharply rising inequality, with a few at the top doing fabulously well but most Americans on a downward economic escalator.

That’s why Diane Sawyer asked Hillary about the huge speaking fees, and why the Guardian asked whether she could be credible on the issue of inequality.

And it’s why Hillary’s answers – that the couple needed money when they left the White House, and have paid their taxes and worked hard for it – seemed oddly beside the point. 

The questions had nothing to do with whether the former first couple deserved the money. They were really about whether all that income from big corporations and Wall Street put them on the side of the privileged and powerful, rather than on the side of ordinary Americans.

These days, voters want to know which side candidates are on because they believe the game is rigged against them.

According to new Pew survey, 62 percent of Americans now think economic system unfairly favors the powerful, and 78 percent think too much power is concentrated in too few companies. Even 69 percent of young conservative-leaning voters agree the system favors the powerful.

Other potential presidential candidates are using every opportunity to tell voters they’re on their side. Speaking at last week’s White House summit on financial hardships facing working families, Vice President Joe Biden revealed he has “no savings account” and “doesn’t own a single stock or bond.”

The same concern haunts the Republican Party and is fueling the Tea Party rebellion. In his stunning campaign upset, David Brat charged that Eric Cantor “does not represent the citizens of the 7^th district, but rather large corporations seeking insider deals, crony bailouts, and constant supply of low-wage workers.”

But the Republican establishment doesn’t think it has to choose sides. It assumes it can continue to represent the interests of big business and Wall Street, yet still lure much of the white working class though thinly-veiled racism, anti-immigrant posturing, and steadfast opposition to abortion and gay marriage.

The Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton, doesn’t have that option.

Which means that, as the ranks of the anxious middle class grow, the winning formula used by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama may no longer be able to deliver.

That formula was not just to court minorities and women but also to appeal to upscale Republican-leaning suburbs, professionals, moderates on Wall Street, and centrist business interests.

Accordingly, both Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s economic plans called for deficit reduction as part of a “responsible” fiscal policy, trade expansion, and “investments” in infrastructure and education to promote economic growth. 

But in a world of downward mobility for the majority, Democrats need to acknowledge the widening divide and propose specific ways to reverse it.

These might include, for example, raising taxes on the wealthy and closing their favorite tax loopholes in order to pay for world-class schools for everyone else; enacting a living wage and minimum guaranteed income; making it easier to unionize; and changing corporate and tax laws to limit CEO pay, and promote gain-sharing, profit-sharing, and employee ownership.

In this scenario, Democrats would seek to forge a new political coalition of all the nation’s downwardly mobile – poor, working class, and middle class; white and black and brown.

It’s a gamble. It would make big business and Wall Street nervous, while ignoring Republican-leaning suburbs and upper-middle class professionals. The GOP would move in to fill the void.

But as the middle class shrinks and distrust of the establishment grows, a new Democratic strategy for the downwardly mobile may be both necessary and inevitable. If she runs, Hillary may have to take the gamble.

And if America is to have half a chance of saving the middle class and preserving equal opportunity, it’s a gamble worth taking. 

Bill Clinton’s speech tonight at the Democratic National Convention was very long but it was masterful – not only in laying out the case for Barack Obama and against Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, but in giving the American public what they most want and need in this election season: details, facts, and logic. 

Republicans have eschewed all detail, all fact, all logic. Theirs has been a campaign of ideological bromides mixed with outright bald-faced lies. 

Therein lies the importance of what Bill Clinton accomplished tonight. But, just as importantly, it wasn’t a wonky talk. He packaged the facts in a way people could hear. This is the highest calling of a public educator.

The question is not how many undecided voters saw the speech (I doubt many did) but whether it galvanizes Democrats – giving them the clarity of conviction and argument they need over the next nine weeks to explain why Obama must be re-elected, and why a Romney-Ryan administration would be a disaster for this country.