Bipartisan dysfunction is fueling reckless spending
After the Senate passed the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan,” President Joe Biden came out to take a bow. This measure came “not a moment too soon,” he said. “For over a year, the American people were told they were on their own.”
One of the hallmarks of hyper-partisanship is to live entirely in the moment. Precedents only matter as a way to show that the other side is hypocritical for violating them. The past itself is a foreign country with no binding power over the “fierce urgency of now,” as Barack Obama liked to say, borrowing from Martin Luther King Jr.
Because Donald Trump lived in the moment, with no historical memory and no foresight beyond the lifespan of a tweet, his administration was a constant demonstration of this dynamic. For example, he frequently insisted that the military had been run into the ground under his predecessor — “We had no ammunition!” — and that he completely rebuilt it. Neither was true.
Biden may have a longer memory and broader time horizon, but he’s acting like a player in the same game. When his administration took office, it immediately floated the claim that nothing had been done to combat the pandemic and that they would have to start “from scratch.” The simple fact that about a million people per day were already getting vaccinated when Biden was sworn in proves that was wrong.
Similarly, the idea that Americans have been told they were “on their own” is ahistorical claptrap.
The $1.9 trillion is just the latest installment in an unprecedented spending spree. This time last year, Congress passed the CARES Act, which spent more than $2 trillion on relief. In December, Congress extended the act to the tune of an additional $900 billion. That’s slightly more than the entire GDP of Turkey ($852 billion).
No one told Americans they were “on their own.”
It would take a hernia-inducing effort to connect some of the rescue plan’s provisions to the pandemic, such as $130 billion for K-12 education, even though $113 billion of education subsidies from earlier relief packages are still unspent.
There’s $30.5 billion for mass transit, including $1.7 billion for Biden’s beloved Amtrak.
The idea that this package comes “not a moment too soon” for an ailing economy is preposterous. Yes, there are millions of Americans suffering, but signs point to an economy about to skyrocket. Employment is surging, and U.S. households have $1.6 trillion in excess savings they are probably dying to dip into once they get the all-clear. Relief targeted where needed isn’t just defensible, it’s necessary. It would also cost vastly less than $1.9 trillion.
But the dilemma for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Republicans generally, is that this is the world they helped create. Under Trump, spending and debt exploded, even before the pandemic. And while McConnell has a point about the bipartisan nature of COVID-19 relief efforts, he would be hardpressed to show other examples of significant bipartisanship when he was majority leader under Trump.
The Biden administration likes to point out that while the relief bill passed along partisan lines in Congress, it enjoys bipartisan support with the public. And why shouldn’t it?
If you spend decades flip-flopping on debt and spending, depending on whether or not you’re in power, you shouldn’t be shocked if voters say, “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Send me my money.”