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United States Capitol building
Don’t believe everything you hear from the media about the war between the Democrats in Congress that could sink President Biden’s entire agenda to rebuild our national economy to serve the families of working Americans better than it ever has before.
The Washington media revels in hauling out all their clichés about “Democrats in Disarray” whenever an argument breaks out within the party. That happens fairly often since diverse Democrats, unlike Republicans, aren’t all interchangeable, indistinguishable artifacts from some bygone era that no longer exists in America.
The media did their best to describe last week as a major setback for Biden threatening to blow up his presidency as Republicans lobbed grenades from the sidelines. But when it was all over, Democrats simply gave themselves another month to pass two historic multitrillion-dollar legislative packages Biden wants to transform the lives of American workers the same way President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal did in the 1930s.
A bipartisan $1.2 trillion bill to spend billions in every state to create jobs rebuilding crumbling infrastructure including roads, bridges, toxic water systems and universal Internet connections already has passed the Senate. The tricky part is House progressives refuse to pass that bill until they’re assured more of Biden’s priorities will be passed in a bigger Senate budget bill under special rules with only Democratic votes.
Where’s the Split?
A scheduled House vote delayed last week was reported as a disastrous split between progressive and moderate Democrats in the House. It wasn’t. House progressives overwhelmingly support the bipartisan infrastructure bill just like moderates do. And most House moderates want to see as much of Biden’s agenda as possible included in the Senate budget bill.
So where’s this big split in the Democratic Party? Well, it’s not much of a split. Biden, every Democratic House and Senate leader and most elected Democrats are on one side. On the other side are West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.
That’s life in Congress these days when Biden’s party has razor-thin majorities allowing any single Democratic senator or any four Democratic House members to extort their president and party for special attention (and possible backroom deals) by threatening to sabotage their own president’s robust economic recovery program. Never mind Biden’s proposing exactly what our nation desperately needs as we’re just beginning to emerge from the economic wreckage left behind by his incompetent predecessor.
Good Economics for Everyone
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Neither Manchin nor Sinema has publicly identified any part of Biden’s economic agenda they oppose. They just don’t like the price tag of $3.5 trillion on Biden’s Senate bill because they think it sounds really big. Most ordinary human beings don’t toss around numbers in the trillions.
But ordinary human beings also have no idea whether $3.5 trillion is too much or too little to spend over the next 10 years to create a healthy national economy that serves the needs of all Americans instead of just the extravagant lifestyles of those at the very top as it has for decades.
Many economists say $3.5 trillion is actually a rather modest sum to spend compared to FDR’s New Deal recovery from the Great Depression, the most transformational economic program for working Americans in history. They don’t just adjust for inflation but also compare the size of the U.S. economy (Gross Domestic Product) in the 1930s to the economy today.
In the average year from 1934 to 1940, New Deal spending was equal to 2.8% of all goods and services sold in the U.S. Biden’s $3.5 trillion proposal comes in at around 1.1% every year through 2031. That’s why Biden argues negotiators should concentrate on what they want recovery to look like for average Americans instead of bemoaning $3.5 trillion as a big, scary number.
Besides, $3.5 trillion is just the cost side of the bill. Biden claims it can be fully paid for by raising taxes on multimillion-dollar corporations and the ultrarich who often pay no taxes at all. Not everyone believes Biden will succeed in passing all those taxes on the wealthy (primarily because of Manchin and Sinema’s opposition), but it’s strongly supported by most Americans.
So is the rest of Biden’s economic program — expanding pre-school and childcare to cut expenses for parents returning to work, permanently funding Biden’s landmark child tax credit program sending monthly checks to families raising children, continuing to reduce the cost of health care and rapidly expanding clean energy and other measures to join the global fight against the climate crisis to protect life on earth.
Here’s why progressives have already won the battle within the Democratic Party. Every single Democrat, including Manchin and Sinema, wants to be in the majority instead of the minority after the 2022 and 2024 elections. Causing their own president to fail to restore a booming national economy serving more Americans than ever before is not an option.
