But when you skip the line-by-line details and look at the overall numbers, something striking becomes evident. The administration’s proposal, when combined with the $900 billion in pandemic aid agreed to in December, would amount to a bigger surge of spending, both in absolute terms and relative to the depth of the nation’s economic hole, than has been attempted in modern American history.
Mr. Biden’s proposal — or even more limited versions of it that appear to have a better shot of winning congressional approval — would pump enough money into the economy to, in effect, intentionally overheat it. Or at minimum it would push the limits of how fast the American economy can rev.
Supporters of aggressive stimulus aid view that as a positive thing, a means to finally correct the mistakes of the last recession and achieve a boom-time economy quickly, rather than muddle along with millions out of work for years.
Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, whose work on the impact of fiscal stimulus President Biden has frequently cited, estimates that the United States currently has an “output gap” — a gap between actual activity and economic potential — of 4 percent to 5 percent of G.D.P., and that the Biden proposal would amount to 8 percent to 9 percent of this year’s G.D.P.
Even if scaled back somewhat to gain moderates’ support, the Biden plan implies enough fuel to get the economy burning hot.
“It’s better to err on the side of too much rather than too little,” Mr. Zandi said. “Interest rates are at zero, inflation is low, unemployment is high. You don’t need a textbook to know this is when you push on the fiscal accelerator. Let’s go.”
To skeptics, it would be a risky use of the power of the Treasury, with far-reaching implications for inflation, financial bubbles and the sustainability of the national debt.
“We’re already in uncharted territory,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who has advised Republicans. He noted that fourth-quarter G.D.P. was only about $119 billion below its level of a year earlier: “Do we need another $1.9 trillion to deal with that problem? I have an arithmetic problem with where we are.”
Traditional fiscal policy to address a recession goes something like this. First make your best projection of how the economy will perform in the months ahead. Then make your best guess at how much smaller that is compared with the economy’s potential if healthy — for example, the value of G.D.P. if everyone who wanted a job was working and factories were running at full capacity.
At that point, try to analyze the “fiscal multipliers” of policies under consideration: how much economic activity each dollar of spending is likely to trigger. Then size your fiscal stimulus package accordingly, essentially using federal dollars to replace the economic activity that has evaporated because of the recession.
In practice, of course, it’s never that simple. It includes a lot of estimates and projections, and congressional politics will ultimately determine the size and content of stimulus legislation. Constrained by Congress, President Barack Obama’s signature fiscal stimulus program, enacted in early 2009, was a poor match for the economic crisis at hand. It pumped an average of $240 billion into the economy each of its first three years, at a time the “output gap” approached $1 trillion per year.
The approach of both parties in fighting the pandemic-induced downturn has focused less on the big picture. It has been more about assembling provisions to help individuals and businesses weather the crisis, whatever the price tag. Under that approach, large bipartisan majorities enacted the $2 trillion CARES Act in the spring and several smaller provisions, including the $900 billion package a month ago.
These efforts are less fiscal stimulus in the traditional sense — using government money to replace missing demand in the economy — and more an effort to directly alleviate the problems the pandemic has caused.
“This package is sized not simply to fill the hole,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. “It’s trying to do somewhat different things. A lot of people and businesses are desperately hurting right now, so this money is relief aimed at those people, and in order to be really confident you’re reaching them all, you need to send a lot of money.”
But that doesn’t change the fact that the aggregate money the government is pumping out adds up to more than the missing economic activity, which could have meaningful consequences for the years ahead. And that is before accounting for other expected proposals from the Biden administration, such as large-scale funding of new infrastructure.
“There are pros and cons,” she said. “Running the economy hot might be a good thing, but there also might be a painful adjustment with a period of slow growth on the other side of the mountain.”
In an economy running hot, employers face shortages of workers and must bid up their wages to attract staff. This, along with potential shortages of various commodities, can, in theory, fuel a vicious cycle of rising prices.
For the last 13 years, arguably longer, the United States has had the opposite problem. Large numbers of Americans of prime working age — 25 to 54 — have been either unemployed or outside the labor force altogether. Wage growth has been weak most of that time, and inflation persistently below the levels the Federal Reserve aims for.
Some argue that estimates of potential output by the C.B.O. and private economists are too pessimistic — that Americans should dare to dream bigger. “We don’t really know what the G.D.P. output gap truly is,” said Mark Paul, an economist at New College of Florida. “Economists for decades have erred and been too cautious, thinking that full production is significantly lower than it actually is. We’ve been consistently running a cold economy, creating massive problems for social cohesion.”
In a paper published in December, he said a pandemic aid package of more than $3 trillion would be justified based on the scale of job losses that have been endured. The output gap looks worse based on employment than it does when you look at G.D.P., in part because job losses have disproportionately occurred in sectors that generate relatively low economic output per worker, such as restaurants.
Still, the scale of the pandemic aid already in train helps explain why Mr. Biden faces a tricky road toward finding a Senate majority for the next bill, even among Republicans who are not dead set against stimulus spending conceptually.
“It’s hard for me to see, when we just passed $900 billion of assistance, why we would have a package that big,” Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, said recently. “Maybe a couple of months from now, the needs will be evident and we will need to do something significant, but I’m not seeing it now.”
A key case for going large revolves around risk management. With the economy mired in a cycle of weak labor markets and low inflation, a little overheating might be welcome. If, for example, the Federal Reserve needed to raise interest rates down the road to keep inflation from taking off, it could be a positive thing for creating a more balanced economy less reliant on monetary policy and booming asset prices.
Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, has said that ensuring the long-term productive capacity of the economy is a more urgent priority than tamping down inflation.
“I’m much more worried about falling short of a complete recovery, and losing people’s careers and lives that they built, because they don’t get back to work in time,” Mr. Powell said in a news conference Wednesday. “I’m more concerned about that than about the possibility which exists of higher inflation. Frankly, we welcome slightly higher inflation.”
Put differently: It’s hard to worry too much about getting burned after a decade-long winter out in the cold.
Taking $15 an hour as that bottom peg for argument’s sake, that would meant almost 40% of American workers are earning less than the weakest union contract would yield them.
(http://fortune.com/2015/04/13/who-makes-15-per-hour/ — 2015)
Never mind any bottom of the barrel pact — 2012’s federal minimum wage is a dollar an hour short of the 1950 federal minimum (!) – and five dollars short of the 1968 (!) — been something like tripled per capita income since 1950 – doubled since 1968.
“We’re 85% effective at preventing severe disease, which we define as disease that makes you feel particularly sick at home, or may go to the hospital, or worse,” Dr. Mathai Mammen, global head of research and development at Johnson & Johnson, told CNN.
“And we are right now completely protective, it would appear 100% protective, against disease that actually does make you go to the hospital, we’re 100% protective against death.”
Economic insight from Holtz-Eakin and Susan Collins. Yeah, I’ll pass on that. Not to even mention that this is first and foremost a relief package, not a stimulus package.
With Yellen as the Treasurer, it would be difficult for me to listen to others about over extending in terms of relief or national stimulation. The economy contracted by 2.5% which is not a good sign when you consider there are new variants of the virus coming into play. Robert Waldman’s recent post on low interest rates during this period of time of large deficits certainly is supportive of the narrative of a larger package. If they need a balance to this, than cut back on the 2017 tax breaks which skewed large tax breaks to people in the upper 1% of Households taxpayers. That in itself was a major part of the $1 trillion annual(?) deficit.
I do not believe we should dally in the same manner Obama did with the ACA waiting for racist Republicans to get on the bandwagon and provide for constituents with healthcare. That period of time was wasteful as we lost Kennedy, a chance to have Long Term Care also and which he sponsored, and a public option which the senator from Aetna Liberman (he is also largely responsible for DeVos as he was a paid shill for the family) owns.
Pre-election, we saw republicans come out of the woodwork in defiance of trump. Now most have fallen back into place as good little sycophants. Can’t depend on Collins and Murkowski as they are playing the “Lucy” football game. Go forward without them. Would Manchin vote against it? Maybe. We can cut back on it in areas where families making more than %250,000 annually.
As far as Republican constituency? Where is the Lincoln project now? Scurried back into there holes now that trump can turn on them? Where are the Repub Senators and Reps who were cowering in fear of their constituent attackers who turned against them? Bold and tough now, the cowards. Should have shoved Matt Gaetz out the door to reason with the incorrigibles. Where are the constituents who should have learned from trump’s inspired attack on Congress? Angry it did not succeed, angry at Democrats, and still hell bent on voting against themselves. And they are just as angry and as ignorant as before the election.
$1200 trillion. That’s what the economy will produce over the next 40 years — while you grandchildren are growing up to be tax payers — and pay off the “burden” we left them. 50% population growth over the next 40 years; 50% increase in per capita output, income or what have you.
Today’s $20 trillion X 1.5 = $30 trillion X 1.5 = $45 trillion. Median is $32.5 trillion X 40 years = $1200+ trillion. Makes today’s emergency deficits look quite manageable. (Hey; we are under invasion!)
(GOP:”Y’know, if we’d have known this big virus was gonna
hit, maybe we wouldn’t have given so much to the mega-
wealthy. Maybe. Now, unfortunately, the tank is empty.”)
PK: So 10 Republican senators are proposing an economic package that is supposed to be an alternative to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The proposal would reportedly be only a fraction of the size of Biden’s plan and would in important ways cut the heart out of economic relief.
Republicans, however, want Biden to give in to their wishes in the name of bipartisanship. Should he?
No, no, 1.9 trillion times no.
It’s not just that what we know about the G.O.P. proposal indicates that it’s grotesquely inadequate for a nation still ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond that, by their behavior — not just over the past few months but going back a dozen years — Republicans have forfeited any right to play the bipartisanship card, or even to be afforded any presumption of good faith.
Let’s start with the substance.
By any measure, January was the worst pandemic month so far. More than 95,000 Americans died of Covid-19; hospitalizations remain far higher than they were at previous peaks.
True, the end of the nightmare is finally in sight. If all goes well, at some point this year enough people will have been vaccinated that we’ll reach herd immunity, the pandemic will fade away, and normal life can resume. But that’s unlikely to happen before late summer or early fall.
And in the meantime we’re going to have to remain on partial lockdown. It would, for example, be folly to reopen full-scale indoor dining. And the continuing lockdown will impose a lot of financial hardship. Unemployment will remain very high; millions of businesses will struggle to stay afloat; state and local governments, which aren’t allowed to run deficits, will be in dire fiscal straits.
What we need, then, is disaster relief to get afflicted Americans through the harsh months ahead. And that’s what the Biden plan would do.
Republicans, however, want to rip the guts out of this plan. They are seeking to reduce extra aid to the unemployed and, more important, cut that aid off in June — long before we can possibly get back to full employment. They want to eliminate hundreds of billions in aid to state and local governments. They want to eliminate aid for children. And so on.
This isn’t an offer of compromise; it’s a demand for near-total surrender. And the consequences would be devastating if Democrats were to give in. …
Complaints that it would be “divisive” for Democrats to pass a relief bill on a party-line vote, using reconciliation to bypass the filibuster, are also pretty rich coming from a party that did exactly that in 2017, when it enacted a large tax cut — legislation that, unlike pandemic relief, wasn’t a response to any obvious crisis, but was simply part of a conservative wish list.
Oh, and that tax cut was rammed through in the face of broad public opposition: Only 29 percent of Americans approved of the bill, while 56 percent disapproved. By contrast, the main provisions of the Biden plan are very popular: 79 percent of the public approve of new stimulus checks, and 69 percent approve of both expanded unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments.
So when one party is trying to pursue policies with overwhelming public support while the other offers lock-step opposition, who, exactly, is being divisive?
Wait, there’s more.
Everyone knew that Republicans, who abruptly stopped caring about deficits when Donald Trump took office, would suddenly rediscover the horror of debt under Joe Biden. What even I didn’t expect was to see them complain that Biden’s plan gives too much help to relatively affluent families.
Again, consider the 2017 tax cut. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, that bill gave 79 percent of its benefits to people making more than $100,000 a year. It gave more to Americans with million-dollar-plus incomes, just 0.4 percent of taxpayers, than the total tax break for those living on less than $75,000 a year, that is, a majority of the population. And now Republicans claim to care about equity? …
(GOP:”Y’know, if we’d have known this big virus was gonna
hit, maybe we wouldn’t have given so much to the mega-
wealthy. Maybe. Now, unfortunately, the tank is empty.”)
No, they would have done it exactly the same way.
Because they believe the wealthy are entitled,
and the non-wealthy are free-loaders.
That tax program was passed under reconciliation. They could always end it for the 1-percenters. You would gain much of the money back. This will sunset 2027.
Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty runs down several recent stories about shipments of COVID-19 vaccine that have gone astray or been allowed to spoil:
‘When a pharmacist discovered that 57 vials….Nearly 2,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine….More than 1,100 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine….165 Moderna COVID-19 vaccine doses….the majority of the 11,900 doses in the shipments.’
When all of these anecdotes are laid out, it feels like a small miracle that anyone ever gets vaccinated. This adds up to about 15,000 doses out of 49 million that have been distributed so far. That’s 0.03 percent.
Geraghty asks, “Is this the most rage-inducing Corner post I have ever written?” I’d say it’s not only not rage inducing, it’s positively miraculous. If the number were ten times higher, it would still be pretty good. This is yet another example of what I (clumsily) call the “America is a big country” syndrome. It’s easy to find examples of almost anything, and it’s just as easy to come up with large-sounding numbers. But that’s only because our country has a population of 330 million. There’s always somebody doing something stupid. And even a hundredth of a percent is still 33,000 people. So: good job, vaccine distributors! Now if we can just figure out what happened to the 20 million doses the Trump administration apparently failed to account for.”
Biden Wants the Biggest Stimulus in Modern History. Is It Too Big?
NY Times – Neil Irwin – January 29
President Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion pandemic rescue package includes money for many goals: expediting the rollout of coronavirus vaccines; reopening schools; expanding unemployment benefits; sending more cash payments to most Americans.
But when you skip the line-by-line details and look at the overall numbers, something striking becomes evident. The administration’s proposal, when combined with the $900 billion in pandemic aid agreed to in December, would amount to a bigger surge of spending, both in absolute terms and relative to the depth of the nation’s economic hole, than has been attempted in modern American history.
Mr. Biden’s proposal — or even more limited versions of it that appear to have a better shot of winning congressional approval — would pump enough money into the economy to, in effect, intentionally overheat it. Or at minimum it would push the limits of how fast the American economy can rev.
Supporters of aggressive stimulus aid view that as a positive thing, a means to finally correct the mistakes of the last recession and achieve a boom-time economy quickly, rather than muddle along with millions out of work for years.
Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, whose work on the impact of fiscal stimulus President Biden has frequently cited, estimates that the United States currently has an “output gap” — a gap between actual activity and economic potential — of 4 percent to 5 percent of G.D.P., and that the Biden proposal would amount to 8 percent to 9 percent of this year’s G.D.P.
Even if scaled back somewhat to gain moderates’ support, the Biden plan implies enough fuel to get the economy burning hot.
“It’s better to err on the side of too much rather than too little,” Mr. Zandi said. “Interest rates are at zero, inflation is low, unemployment is high. You don’t need a textbook to know this is when you push on the fiscal accelerator. Let’s go.”
To skeptics, it would be a risky use of the power of the Treasury, with far-reaching implications for inflation, financial bubbles and the sustainability of the national debt.
“We’re already in uncharted territory,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who has advised Republicans. He noted that fourth-quarter G.D.P. was only about $119 billion below its level of a year earlier: “Do we need another $1.9 trillion to deal with that problem? I have an arithmetic problem with where we are.”
Traditional fiscal policy to address a recession goes something like this. First make your best projection of how the economy will perform in the months ahead. Then make your best guess at how much smaller that is compared with the economy’s potential if healthy — for example, the value of G.D.P. if everyone who wanted a job was working and factories were running at full capacity.
At that point, try to analyze the “fiscal multipliers” of policies under consideration: how much economic activity each dollar of spending is likely to trigger. Then size your fiscal stimulus package accordingly, essentially using federal dollars to replace the economic activity that has evaporated because of the recession.
In practice, of course, it’s never that simple. It includes a lot of estimates and projections, and congressional politics will ultimately determine the size and content of stimulus legislation. Constrained by Congress, President Barack Obama’s signature fiscal stimulus program, enacted in early 2009, was a poor match for the economic crisis at hand. It pumped an average of $240 billion into the economy each of its first three years, at a time the “output gap” approached $1 trillion per year.
The approach of both parties in fighting the pandemic-induced downturn has focused less on the big picture. It has been more about assembling provisions to help individuals and businesses weather the crisis, whatever the price tag. Under that approach, large bipartisan majorities enacted the $2 trillion CARES Act in the spring and several smaller provisions, including the $900 billion package a month ago.
These efforts are less fiscal stimulus in the traditional sense — using government money to replace missing demand in the economy — and more an effort to directly alleviate the problems the pandemic has caused.
“This package is sized not simply to fill the hole,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. “It’s trying to do somewhat different things. A lot of people and businesses are desperately hurting right now, so this money is relief aimed at those people, and in order to be really confident you’re reaching them all, you need to send a lot of money.”
But that doesn’t change the fact that the aggregate money the government is pumping out adds up to more than the missing economic activity, which could have meaningful consequences for the years ahead. And that is before accounting for other expected proposals from the Biden administration, such as large-scale funding of new infrastructure.
“There are pros and cons,” she said. “Running the economy hot might be a good thing, but there also might be a painful adjustment with a period of slow growth on the other side of the mountain.”
In an economy running hot, employers face shortages of workers and must bid up their wages to attract staff. This, along with potential shortages of various commodities, can, in theory, fuel a vicious cycle of rising prices.
For the last 13 years, arguably longer, the United States has had the opposite problem. Large numbers of Americans of prime working age — 25 to 54 — have been either unemployed or outside the labor force altogether. Wage growth has been weak most of that time, and inflation persistently below the levels the Federal Reserve aims for.
Some argue that estimates of potential output by the C.B.O. and private economists are too pessimistic — that Americans should dare to dream bigger. “We don’t really know what the G.D.P. output gap truly is,” said Mark Paul, an economist at New College of Florida. “Economists for decades have erred and been too cautious, thinking that full production is significantly lower than it actually is. We’ve been consistently running a cold economy, creating massive problems for social cohesion.”
In a paper published in December, he said a pandemic aid package of more than $3 trillion would be justified based on the scale of job losses that have been endured. The output gap looks worse based on employment than it does when you look at G.D.P., in part because job losses have disproportionately occurred in sectors that generate relatively low economic output per worker, such as restaurants.
Still, the scale of the pandemic aid already in train helps explain why Mr. Biden faces a tricky road toward finding a Senate majority for the next bill, even among Republicans who are not dead set against stimulus spending conceptually.
“It’s hard for me to see, when we just passed $900 billion of assistance, why we would have a package that big,” Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, said recently. “Maybe a couple of months from now, the needs will be evident and we will need to do something significant, but I’m not seeing it now.”
A key case for going large revolves around risk management. With the economy mired in a cycle of weak labor markets and low inflation, a little overheating might be welcome. If, for example, the Federal Reserve needed to raise interest rates down the road to keep inflation from taking off, it could be a positive thing for creating a more balanced economy less reliant on monetary policy and booming asset prices.
Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, has said that ensuring the long-term productive capacity of the economy is a more urgent priority than tamping down inflation.
“I’m much more worried about falling short of a complete recovery, and losing people’s careers and lives that they built, because they don’t get back to work in time,” Mr. Powell said in a news conference Wednesday. “I’m more concerned about that than about the possibility which exists of higher inflation. Frankly, we welcome slightly higher inflation.”
Put differently: It’s hard to worry too much about getting burned after a decade-long winter out in the cold.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/upshot/biden-economic-stimulus.html?smid=tw-share
Biden Wants the Biggest Stimulus in Modern History. Is It Too Big?
Supporters of a ‘hot’ economy see a chance to correct the mistakes of the last recession. Others see danger. …
Biden Wants the Biggest Stimulus in Modern History
(Feel free to clean this up, if I ever get it right.)
Taking $15 an hour as that bottom peg for argument’s sake, that would meant almost 40% of American workers are earning less than the weakest union contract would yield them.
(http://fortune.com/2015/04/13/who-makes-15-per-hour/ — 2015)
Check these out:
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=0.75&year1=195001&year2=202012 .75 8.31
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.60&year1=196802&year2=202012 1.60 12.19
Never mind any bottom of the barrel pact — 2012’s federal minimum wage is a dollar an hour short of the 1950 federal minimum (!) – and five dollars short of the 1968 (!) — been something like tripled per capita income since 1950 – doubled since 1968.
So far, so good:
“We’re 85% effective at preventing severe disease, which we define as disease that makes you feel particularly sick at home, or may go to the hospital, or worse,” Dr. Mathai Mammen, global head of research and development at Johnson & Johnson, told CNN.
“And we are right now completely protective, it would appear 100% protective, against disease that actually does make you go to the hospital, we’re 100% protective against death.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/johnson-johnson-covid-19-vaccine-130453442.html
Economic insight from Holtz-Eakin and Susan Collins. Yeah, I’ll pass on that. Not to even mention that this is first and foremost a relief package, not a stimulus package.
EM
With Yellen as the Treasurer, it would be difficult for me to listen to others about over extending in terms of relief or national stimulation. The economy contracted by 2.5% which is not a good sign when you consider there are new variants of the virus coming into play. Robert Waldman’s recent post on low interest rates during this period of time of large deficits certainly is supportive of the narrative of a larger package. If they need a balance to this, than cut back on the 2017 tax breaks which skewed large tax breaks to people in the upper 1% of Households taxpayers. That in itself was a major part of the $1 trillion annual(?) deficit.
I do not believe we should dally in the same manner Obama did with the ACA waiting for racist Republicans to get on the bandwagon and provide for constituents with healthcare. That period of time was wasteful as we lost Kennedy, a chance to have Long Term Care also and which he sponsored, and a public option which the senator from Aetna Liberman (he is also largely responsible for DeVos as he was a paid shill for the family) owns.
Pre-election, we saw republicans come out of the woodwork in defiance of trump. Now most have fallen back into place as good little sycophants. Can’t depend on Collins and Murkowski as they are playing the “Lucy” football game. Go forward without them. Would Manchin vote against it? Maybe. We can cut back on it in areas where families making more than %250,000 annually.
As far as Republican constituency? Where is the Lincoln project now? Scurried back into there holes now that trump can turn on them? Where are the Repub Senators and Reps who were cowering in fear of their constituent attackers who turned against them? Bold and tough now, the cowards. Should have shoved Matt Gaetz out the door to reason with the incorrigibles. Where are the constituents who should have learned from trump’s inspired attack on Congress? Angry it did not succeed, angry at Democrats, and still hell bent on voting against themselves. And they are just as angry and as ignorant as before the election.
$1200 trillion. That’s what the economy will produce over the next 40 years — while you grandchildren are growing up to be tax payers — and pay off the “burden” we left them. 50% population growth over the next 40 years; 50% increase in per capita output, income or what have you.
Today’s $20 trillion X 1.5 = $30 trillion X 1.5 = $45 trillion. Median is $32.5 trillion X 40 years = $1200+ trillion. Makes today’s emergency deficits look quite manageable. (Hey; we are under invasion!)
Tim Cook May Have Just Ended Facebook
https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/tim-cook-may-have-just-ended-facebook.html
—Too many are still asking the question, ‘How much can we get away with?’ When they need to be asking, ‘What are the consequences?’
What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of the high rates of engagement?
What are the consequences of not just tolerating but rewarding content that undermines public trust in life-saving vaccinations?
What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users joining extremist groups and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?
It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn’t come with a cause. A polarization of lost trust, and yes, of violence.
A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe.”
Ten Republicans Outline Smaller Stimulus Before Biden Meeting
The Republican senators’ proposal is about a third of the
size of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill.
Their plan would extend enhanced unemployment benefits
and include scaled back direct payments of up to $1,000.
A group of centrist Republicans outlines their own relief package ahead of a meeting with Biden
(GOP:”Y’know, if we’d have known this big virus was gonna
hit, maybe we wouldn’t have given so much to the mega-
wealthy. Maybe. Now, unfortunately, the tank is empty.”)
Why? What is their purpose?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/opinion/coronavirus-relief-biden-republicans.html?smid=tw-share
NY Times – Paul Krugman – February 2
The Republican Economic Plan Is an Insult
It’s bad faith in the name of bipartisanship. …
PK: So 10 Republican senators are proposing an economic package that is supposed to be an alternative to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The proposal would reportedly be only a fraction of the size of Biden’s plan and would in important ways cut the heart out of economic relief.
Republicans, however, want Biden to give in to their wishes in the name of bipartisanship. Should he?
No, no, 1.9 trillion times no.
It’s not just that what we know about the G.O.P. proposal indicates that it’s grotesquely inadequate for a nation still ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond that, by their behavior — not just over the past few months but going back a dozen years — Republicans have forfeited any right to play the bipartisanship card, or even to be afforded any presumption of good faith.
Let’s start with the substance.
By any measure, January was the worst pandemic month so far. More than 95,000 Americans died of Covid-19; hospitalizations remain far higher than they were at previous peaks.
True, the end of the nightmare is finally in sight. If all goes well, at some point this year enough people will have been vaccinated that we’ll reach herd immunity, the pandemic will fade away, and normal life can resume. But that’s unlikely to happen before late summer or early fall.
And in the meantime we’re going to have to remain on partial lockdown. It would, for example, be folly to reopen full-scale indoor dining. And the continuing lockdown will impose a lot of financial hardship. Unemployment will remain very high; millions of businesses will struggle to stay afloat; state and local governments, which aren’t allowed to run deficits, will be in dire fiscal straits.
What we need, then, is disaster relief to get afflicted Americans through the harsh months ahead. And that’s what the Biden plan would do.
Republicans, however, want to rip the guts out of this plan. They are seeking to reduce extra aid to the unemployed and, more important, cut that aid off in June — long before we can possibly get back to full employment. They want to eliminate hundreds of billions in aid to state and local governments. They want to eliminate aid for children. And so on.
This isn’t an offer of compromise; it’s a demand for near-total surrender. And the consequences would be devastating if Democrats were to give in. …
Complaints that it would be “divisive” for Democrats to pass a relief bill on a party-line vote, using reconciliation to bypass the filibuster, are also pretty rich coming from a party that did exactly that in 2017, when it enacted a large tax cut — legislation that, unlike pandemic relief, wasn’t a response to any obvious crisis, but was simply part of a conservative wish list.
Oh, and that tax cut was rammed through in the face of broad public opposition: Only 29 percent of Americans approved of the bill, while 56 percent disapproved. By contrast, the main provisions of the Biden plan are very popular: 79 percent of the public approve of new stimulus checks, and 69 percent approve of both expanded unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments.
So when one party is trying to pursue policies with overwhelming public support while the other offers lock-step opposition, who, exactly, is being divisive?
Wait, there’s more.
Everyone knew that Republicans, who abruptly stopped caring about deficits when Donald Trump took office, would suddenly rediscover the horror of debt under Joe Biden. What even I didn’t expect was to see them complain that Biden’s plan gives too much help to relatively affluent families.
Again, consider the 2017 tax cut. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, that bill gave 79 percent of its benefits to people making more than $100,000 a year. It gave more to Americans with million-dollar-plus incomes, just 0.4 percent of taxpayers, than the total tax break for those living on less than $75,000 a year, that is, a majority of the population. And now Republicans claim to care about equity? …
(GOP:”Y’know, if we’d have known this big virus was gonna
hit, maybe we wouldn’t have given so much to the mega-
wealthy. Maybe. Now, unfortunately, the tank is empty.”)
No, they would have done it exactly the same way.
Because they believe the wealthy are entitled,
and the non-wealthy are free-loaders.
Or they just need to work harder.
Fred:
That tax program was passed under reconciliation. They could always end it for the 1-percenters. You would gain much of the money back. This will sunset 2027.
Surprising. And nice to hear.
” Vaccine Distributors Are Doing a Great Job
Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty runs down several recent stories about shipments of COVID-19 vaccine that have gone astray or been allowed to spoil:
‘When a pharmacist discovered that 57 vials….Nearly 2,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine….More than 1,100 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine….165 Moderna COVID-19 vaccine doses….the majority of the 11,900 doses in the shipments.’
When all of these anecdotes are laid out, it feels like a small miracle that anyone ever gets vaccinated. This adds up to about 15,000 doses out of 49 million that have been distributed so far. That’s 0.03 percent.
Geraghty asks, “Is this the most rage-inducing Corner post I have ever written?” I’d say it’s not only not rage inducing, it’s positively miraculous. If the number were ten times higher, it would still be pretty good. This is yet another example of what I (clumsily) call the “America is a big country” syndrome. It’s easy to find examples of almost anything, and it’s just as easy to come up with large-sounding numbers. But that’s only because our country has a population of 330 million. There’s always somebody doing something stupid. And even a hundredth of a percent is still 33,000 people. So: good job, vaccine distributors! Now if we can just figure out what happened to the 20 million doses the Trump administration apparently failed to account for.”
https://jabberwocking.com/