In a memo released Tuesday, the National Economic Council — key White House advisers — insisted that emerging data indicates the sprawling relief package adopted in the spring is boosting wages and fueling economic growth, an effort to recapture the narrative and dispel the economic anxiety deepening among wide segments of the public.

While the memo concedes that labor shortages — which it attributes to pandemic-induced dislocations — have given rise to a degree of consumer hardship, it reframes this as a “positive development” promising to yield considerable pay hikes for working people. The memo stresses the need to continue to juice the economy with renewed injections of social spending, fueled by higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Striking a similar chord, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen delivered a speech at the Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday in which she informed the corporate elite they must contribute more in taxes to fund Biden’s ambitious domestic spending program and decried the escalating economic inequality resulting from labor’s erosion in bargaining power.

Taken together, the White House memo and Yellen’s speech demonstrate the remarkable extent to which the Biden administration’s economic vision — resting on redistributing wealth, revitalizing labor, and recalibrating the balance of power — has upended the neoliberal orthodoxy that defined economic policymaking in both parties for decades.

Lastly, thousands of McDonald’s workers launched a national strike in more than a dozen cities across the U.S. today, designed to coincide with the company’s annual shareholder meeting tomorrow. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are slated to join the strikers on the picket line as they demand higher wages. “The time is now to end starvation wages in the richest country in the world,” Sanders said in a press release trumpeting the action.