The rescue bill: A new era of much bigger government
With his sprawling $1.9 trillion stimulus package, President Biden “is leading a quiet revolution,” said E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post. Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan “inaugurated a new ideological era” built on tax cuts, supply-side economics, and a “core conviction” Reagan summarized thusly: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” With the most progressive legislation since the 1960s, Biden is ushering in a new era built on “precisely the opposite view.” With the pandemic inflicting far deeper pain on working-class and poor Americans and turning income inequality into “a life-or-death proposition,” Democrats are embracing the belief that “only active and competent government can get us out of the mess we’re in now.” The mammoth rescue package spends tens of billions on health-care subsidies, rental assistance, child tax credits, and direct payments to hundreds of millions of Americans. Say goodbye to “trickle-down economics,” said Sarah Jones in NYMag.com. Instead of cutting taxes for the richest and corporations, as Republicans did in their $1.9 trillion tax cut in 2017, Biden is going all-in on the reverse bet: “Lift households out of poverty, and they’ll have more to spend.” His package’s benefits are heavily targeted toward the bottom 40 percent—such as a child tax credit that for most American parents will yield annual payments of $3,000 to $3,600 per child.
“For a party that cries ‘socialism’ at the drop of a hat,” said Matt Lewis in TheDailyBeast.com, the GOP had very little to say about this massive giveaway. The party used to be based on “a limitedgovernment worldview” and the belief that “earned success and hard work give us meaning and purpose.” But during the Trump presidency, many of my fellow conservatives threw their principles out the window, replacing them with a MAGA cult of personality and a nonstop culture war. So while Democrats and Biden were lurching toward socialism, Fox News and right-wing media were fixated on Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and “owning the libs.” Traditional conservative beliefs, meanwhile, are fading away with hardly any defense: “That deficits do matter. That there’s no such thing as a free lunch.’’
As a centrist Democrat, Biden used to espouse some of these views himself, said Joan Walsh in TheNation.com. When he first ran for president in 1988, he declared that “a government subsidy is not the ultimate answer to the problems of the poor,” and even cited Reagan’s “welfare queen’’ example. As a senator, Biden voted for President Clinton’s 1996 welfare-reform bill. But a “mismanaged plague” that has killed 530,000 of us in a single year and badly damaged the economy has accelerated a “leftward surge” among Democrats—Biden included. “The whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting,” said David Brooks in The New York Times, and not just because of the pandemic. For years, the up-by-your-bootstraps mentality touted by conservatives has rung hollow for Millennials and Gen Z, who are increasingly worse off than their parents. They no longer trust in education and hard work as a ticket to economic security. Income inequality and “economic precarity are the problems of our time.”
By addressing those problems, Biden’s bill gives Democrats a potent political weapon, said Jeff Greenfield in Politico.com.
They may have found a “tool to reconnect” with working- and middle-class voters “whose loyalty has been threatened for well over half a century”—and who turned to Trump in large numbers in 2016. The rescue bill is “an unapologetic assertion of the power of government” to help people, and because it benefits so many Americans—restaurant workers, small-business owners, the selfinsured, working parents—it’s not based on “identity politics.”
Still, the risks of so much spending “are enormous,” said Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal. Biden and the Democrats are revolutionizing government “with borrowed money, and no Republican support in Congress.” Democrats “will own the consequences.” What if the flood of federal money “begins to ramp up inflation and frighten financial markets also wary of tax hikes?” You know what comes next, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is already putting tax hikes on the table, including higher tax rates for corporations, capital gains, and dividend payments, as well as a “global minimum tax on corporations.” There will be debate about “which taxpayers to gore” to pay for all this spending, but one sure bet is that the result won’t be as popular as passing out money. “Paying the bill never is.”