Photo credit: U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley, Public Domain
President Trump tossed a bomb on his way out of office to try to blow up congressional agreement on desperately needed economic assistance for tens of millions of Americans, but it turned out to be a dud. Trump’s complaint about Republican stinginess in the size of new stimulus checks wasn’t really even the worst part of the emergency legislation the president finally signed late Sunday night.
After four years, Trump is still clueless about how a bill becomes a law. Fox News never ran that episode of “Schoolhouse Rock.” But the worst part of the relief legislation was everything Republicans intentionally left out of the economic package to try to sabotage Joe Biden’s presidency.
If that sounds familiar, it is. That’s exactly the same tactic Sen. Mitch McConnell and Republicans used to try to prevent President Barack Obama’s successful economic recovery from the Great Recession under Republican President George W. Bush. Until Trump, Bush’s recession was the worst U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression. Now that Trump’s disastrous mishandling of a deadly pandemic has devastated the economy again while simultaneously killing more than 330,000 Americans, Bush’s recession seems like a harmless blip.
But once again the top priority of McConnell and Republicans is trying to prevent a successful economic recovery by a popularly elected Democratic president. It’s unbelievably cruel for any political party to block economic recovery when American families are struggling to survive. But Republican economic policies always primarily benefit those at the very top instead of the overwhelming majority of working Americans.
GOP Cuts State, Local Assistance
The most glaring omission from the current economic package was McConnell’s elimination of $160 billion in federal assistance for state and local governments. Republicans attack it as a “blue bailout” even though every state in the country, Republican and Democrat, has been devastated financially by the loss of income and sales taxes. A recent analysis by Moody’s Analytics said unless state and local governments receive federal assistance, they’ll “be forced to raise taxes or cut spending by between $171 billion and $301 billion over the next year and a half.” That’s exactly the timeline when the Biden administration will be doing everything possible to restore a successful U.S economy for all Americans.
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The irony is many Republicans did better than they expected in Senate and House elections during Trump’s decisive defeat by falsely accusing Biden and Democrats of plotting to “defund the police.” That’s exactly what congressional Republicans are now doing by withholding funding from local governments. Budgets for policing and public safety are the largest expenditures of municipalities.
The problem is Trump’s failure to control the raging pandemic already forced state and local governments to drastically cut payrolls with hundreds of thousands of businesses closing and reducing revenue from income and sales taxes. Since the start of the pandemic, according to Moody’s, about 1.3 million public employees have been laid off leading to the smallest state and local government workforce since 2001. There’s nobody left to cut but police officers, firefighters, teachers and health-care workers.
And wouldn’t you know it? Republican Senators just remembered how worried they’ve been about those soaring federal deficits former House Speaker Paul Ryan always warned them would destroy America. Never mind that one of Ryan’s last official acts was passing the largest increase in the federal deficit in history. That was to pay for something Republicans considered essential — Trump’s massive $2-trillion tax cut in 2017 going overwhelmingly to billionaires, millionaires and multimillion-dollar corporations over the next decade. Now Republicans are suddenly demanding Biden and Democrats learn a little fiscal discipline to rebuild the economy Trump demolished.
Last Minute Disruption
Trump ended his last-minute attempt to further disrupt the economy Sunday night by signing the $900 billion emergency relief bill. If the bill didn’t become law by Tuesday, the government would have shut down and hundreds of thousands of federal employees would have been sent home without any pay. But the panic Trump stirred with his hollow threats wasn’t entirely without some useful political purpose. It emphasized the adamant Republican refusal to provide adequate funding to put the nation on the path to a healthy economy Democrats have sought for months.
When Trump signed the bill, he released an odd statement promising “much more money is coming,” but it’s not coming from Trump or the current Republican Senate. President-Elect Biden has made it clear the meager Republican relief is just a down payment on the stimulus funding that will be needed in the coming year to repair Trump’s shattered economy. Trump was also helpful in calling attention to how little Georgia’s incumbent Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler have done for their state.
That’s important because unless McConnell has a radiant vision on the commute from Damascus, restoring the American economy could depend on Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff winning Georgia’s Senate runoff elections next Tuesday.
