(Mar. 30) Watch live as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki answers reporters' questions during a news conference at the White House on Tuesday, March 30, 2021, in Washington, D.C. More than a half-century after Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, President Joe Biden is planning to take on the nation’s enduring challenge of inequality with a mass expansion of government spending and a revamp of the tax code. The effort, which Biden will start to detail in a speech Wednesday in Pittsburgh, is already proving just as divisive among economists as it is among lawmakers. While right-leaning economists warn about damage to overall growth from higher taxes on companies and the wealthiest Americans, liberals say the “trickle-down” approach of recent decades has failed and it’s time for a new strategy. The president’s remarks will lay out the infrastructure portion of an overall package expected to total more than $3 trillion. While social-spending programs will be outlined later in April, the administration’s drive to expand help for the poor will be visible even in infrastructure, through proposals such as the provision of safe drinking water. “It’s important to acknowledge that we’ve seen decades of this rising economic inequality,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said last week in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. “The ultimate measure of success of the economy is how well it’s working for people all across these United States.” For many, it’s not working well. The gaps between the richest Americans and the middle class, along with the lowest-income households, widened in the years before the pandemic struck -- even amid the longest U.S. expansion on record. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is among those agreeing that inequality holds the economy back, something that contributed to the overhaul in long-term monetary policy strategy he’s instituted. Halting or reversing the trend even with major changes in policy won’t come easily or quickly, economists widely agree. “You’re turning a supertanker, and it’s taken us a generation and half to get here,” said Brad Delong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “But, yes, you can start to turn the supertanker.” --- Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2TwO8Gm Bloomberg Quicktake brings you live global news and original shows spanning business, technology, politics and culture. Make sense of the stories changing your business and your world. To watch complete coverage on Bloomberg Quicktake 24/7, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/qt/live, or watch on Apple TV, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, Fire TV and Android TV on the Bloomberg app. Connect with us on… YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Bloomberg Breaking News on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BloombergQuickTakeNews Twitter: https://twitter.com/quicktake Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quicktake Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quicktake