The president has been underestimated throughout his political career.

It is too early to write up the legacy of President Biden. He has six more months in office, and in these volatile times, much could happen. But it seems worth looking back at what we now know will be a one-term presidency and asking: What will define it in history?

To me, the signature aspect of Biden’s presidency has been his big break from decades of economic policy. For almost half a century, the federal government has refrained from any transformative long-term investments in the American economy. (Even the large pandemic relief payments were for consumption, not investment.)

In fact, the defining fiscal policies of our times have been tax cuts. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump all enacted large tax cuts that broadly benefited the rich. The result has been an America that can be characterized by private opulence and public decay — $100 million homes in a country where the roads are scarred by potholes and children die at higher rates than in any other country in the industrialized world. (These tax cuts, along with spending on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are responsible for much of America’s enormous federal debt.)

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Biden changed this narrative. He used the resources of the federal government to make large investments — in infrastructure, child care, manufacturing and energy. These investments won’t pay off anytime soon; many of them have just begun. But the United States is now undergoing the largest upgrade of its transportation infrastructure since the 1950s, with more than 56,000 projects already launched. It is seeing a boom in manufacturing investment and employment that reverses a decades-long trend. Green energy is booming, too. And for the year that it was in effect, Biden’s expanded child tax credit helped reduce child poverty in America by 46 percent — lifting a staggering 3.4 million children out of poverty in one year. (The credit expired after a year, and congressional Republicans refused to renew it.)

Biden’s measures helped trigger the strongest post-covid recovery of any major economy. The United States has produced more than 15 million jobs (the most ever for any president in one term), the unemployment rate stayed under 4 percent for over two years (the longest such run since the 1960s), and the Black labor force participation rate is now higher than that of Whites (for the first time ever on a sustained basis).

It’s........

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