- Joe Biden revealed his opening offer for a stimulus bill Thursday in an ambitious, $1.9 trillion proposal that targets the three main planks of his recovery strategy: Covid-19 response aid, direct relief for families, and funding for communities and businesses. [Vox / Emily Stewart]
- The rescue plan, which Biden is pitching as half of a “rescue and recovery” program, is expected to be matched in price by its follow-up, which has yet to be announced. [Yahoo! News / Brittany Shepard]
- Noting the high cost, Biden said in his speech that “the health of the nation is at stake,” mandating a significant response. Both progressive organizations and the US Chamber of Commerce expressed initial support for the plan. [The New York Times / Jim Tankersly and Michael Crowley]
- Biden is asking for $20 billion to create a free national vaccination program, $50 billion for testing and the creation of a 100,000 worker-strong public health care force, focusing on overwhelmed areas including tribal lands, prisons, and nursing homes. [CNN / Tami Luhby and Katie Lobosco]
- For direct relief, he is proposing $1,400 direct stimulus payments to bring the total to $2,000 after the $600 payments authorized by Congress last month, fulfilling a Georgia campaign promise. [The Guardian / Maanvi Singh]
- The plan also include $400 weekly unemployment supplements, food and housing assistance, and some bones for progressives, including a $15 federal minimum wage, expanded child tax care credits, and emergency child care funds. [The New York Times / Jeanne Smialek]
- Biden wants $350 billion in funding for localities and states, as well as $50 billion in loans and grants to small businesses. [Vox]
- The final proposal will look different, but don’t expect Democrats to wait long for bipartisan approval. While they will give Republicans an opportunity to negotiate, Democrats want a quick deal and have slim majorities in both chambers to pass it without the GOP. [Politico / Alice Miranda Ollstein and Adam Cancryn]
- In 2008, President Obama kept his stimulus under $1 trillion to try and earn Republican votes and avoid cost criticism. Another recession and a pandemic later, Biden clearly has no such qualms, and faces pressure on his left to go even bigger. [The Washington Post / James Hohmann]
- The urgency around a new relief package is compounded by the worsening state of the pandemic. Thursday saw a new daily record for coronavirus deaths as well as the highest unemployment figures since August. [The Washington Post / Erica Werner and Jeff Stein]
- HEATHER COX RICHARDSO
Biden’s plan is far larger than a way to address our current crisis. It outlines a vision for America that reaches back to an older time, when both parties shared the idea that the government had a role to play in the economy, regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure. That vision was at the heart of the New Deal, ushered in by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt after the Great Crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed it illustrated that the American economy needed a referee to keep the wealthy playing by the rules. Government intervention proved so successful and so popular that the Republican Party, which had initially recoiled from what its leaders incorrectly insisted was communism, by 1952 had adopted the idea of an activist government. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower added the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the Cabinet on April 11, 1953, and in 1956 signed into law the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which began the construction of 41,000 miles of interstate highways. While this system was enormously popular, reactionary Republicans hated business regulation, the incursion of the federal government into lucrative infrastructure fields, and the taxes it took to pay for the new programs (the top marginal tax rate in the 1950s was 91%). They launched a movement to end what was popularly known as the “liberal consensus”: the idea that the government should take an active role in keeping the economic playing field level. The liberal consensus was widely popular, these “Movement Conservatives” turned to the issue of race to break it. After the Supreme Court unanimously declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, Movement Conservatives warned that an active government was not defending equality but redistributing the tax dollars of hardworking white men to grasping minorities through social programs. By 1980, Movement Conservatives were gaining power in the Republican Party by calling for tax cuts and smaller government, slashing regulations and domestic programs even as they poured money into the military and their tax cuts began moving money upward. By the 1990s, Movement Conservatives had gained the upper hand in the party and, determined to take the government back to the days before the New Deal, were systematically purging it of what they called “RINOs”—Republicans in Name Only. They would, they said, make the government small enough to drown it in a bathtub. As they dragged the country toward the right, Republicans pulled the Democrats from the New Deal toward reforms Democratic lawmakers hoped could attract the voters they had lost to the Republicans. “The era of big government is over,” President Bill Clinton famously said, although he continued to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid from Republican cuts. The Democratic defense of an active government was popular—people actually like government regulation, social welfare programs, and roads and bridges. But Republicans continued to be determined to get rid of the liberal consensus once and for all, insisting that true liberty would free individuals to organize a booming economy. Trump’s administration was the culmination of two generations of Republican attempts to dismantle the New Deal state. But now, the dangers of gutting our government and empowering private business to extremes have become only too clear. For four years, we have watched as a few privileged business leaders got rid of career government employees and handed their jobs to lackeys. The result has been a raging pandemic and a devastating economic collapse, as money has moved dramatically upward. Even before the pandemic, the Trump administration had added 50% to the national debt despite cuts to domestic programs. In the 2020 election, Trump offered more of the same. Americans rejected him and chose Biden. Biden’s speech tonight marked a resurrection of the idea of an activist government as a positive good. He is calling for the government to invest in ordinary Americans rather than in the people at the top of the economy, and is openly calling for higher taxes on the wealthy to fund such investment. “Asking everyone to pay their fair share at the top so we can make permanent investments to rescue and rebuild America is the right thing for our economy,” he said. Unlike the New Dealers and Eisenhower Republicans of the mid-20th century, though, Biden’s vision is not centered on ensuring that a white man can take care of his family. It is centered on guaranteeing a fair economy for all, focusing on an idea of community that highlights the needs of women and children. The idea of a government that supports ordinary Americans rather than the wealthy was first articulated by Abraham Lincoln in 1859 and was the system the Republicans first put in place during the Civil War. They paid for the programs with our first national taxes, including an income tax. After industrialists cut back that original system, Republican Theodore Roosevelt brought it back, and after it lapsed again in the 1920s, his Democratic cousin Franklin rebuilt it in such a profound way that it shaped modern America. With that system now on the verge of destruction yet again, Biden is making a bid to bring it back to life in a new form. |
