As President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan speeds toward final passage this week, Democrats are hailing the bill as one of the most sweeping pieces of progressive legislation in decades – one that they say will lift millions of Americans, particularly children, out of poverty, and could herald a deeper and more long-term shift in public attitudes toward government assistance.

The bill allocates $92 billion – or about 5% of the overall price tag – toward public health initiatives, including testing, tracing, and vaccination, as the Monitor detailed last week. Nearly half of the bill’s cost goes toward the third and largest round of stimulus payments to date, as well as expanding many existing government benefits – including the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit, Medicaid coverage, and other subsidized health insurance. For an average family of four making less than $150,000 annually, that could amount to more than $10,000 in tax-free benefits, some of which will be paid out monthly. Lower-income families could receive double that.

“It’s one of the most important and transformational bills to come out of the Congress in the last quarter century,” says Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus. He says he looks forward to supporting the bill, which “meets the moment that we’re in right now.”

Some are characterizing the legislation as the largest expansion of government welfare benefits since Lyndon B. Johnson or even Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Although its key steps would need to be renewed in order to endure, the bill arguably moves the country closer to a form of universal basic income. That’s a concept that gained attention in the 2020 primaries, when Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang promoted it as the most effective way to help struggling Americans, circumventing government inefficiency by allowing individuals to solve their needs in the best way they see fit, which in turn would funnel money back into the economy.

“It is unequivocally a landmark legislation in the sense of putting the biggest dent in U.S. poverty rates and child poverty in particular, really probably since the Great Society and maybe even since the New Deal era,” says Samuel Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. In particular, he highlights the expanded child tax credit. “It’s really hard to overstate the anti-poverty impact of just that one piece in particular.”