In real estate, a buyer who offers one third of the seller’s asking price is likely to get the door slammed in his face. President Joe Biden has not rejected Senate Republicans’ COVID-19 relief proposal with quite so dramatic a flourish, but he nevertheless seems to have discerned a similar message. When Republicans offered $618 billion, they showed they were not serious. And the new president rightly determined to forge ahead without the GOP.
Cognizant that President Biden enjoys significant popularity at this point, 10 Republicans, including North Carolina weathervane Thom Tillis, extended an offer of compromise to the new administration. They used guarded rhetoric. Unwilling to commit fully to a good-faith negotiation, they peppered their statements with caveats. Finally, they made Biden an offer he couldn’t not refuse, and the sham collapsed.
Progressives may have been nervous that Biden would draw out his negotiations in an effort to score bipartisan support. After all, in 2009 President Obama allowed Republicans like Olympia Snow to string the administration along on healthcare until the Affordable Care Act had suffered significant blows to its image. Given Biden’s strong promises of compromise, it was understandable that the left wing of the party would feel a sense of dread when the Republican “Gang of 10” signaled their disingenousness.
Biden avoided the trap. As he definitively put it, “I’m not going to start my administration by breaking a promise to the American people.” This resolve indicates that Biden has a focused and determined plan to keep his promises, and that although he genuinely believes in bipartisanship, that commitment has not blinded him to the need to serve the people first. He is less naive about the Republicans than some progressives feared.
Difficulties remain in putting together and passing a large COVID relief bill. Moderates like Joe Manchin are insisting on targeted checks rather than universal relief, a bad idea that Biden finds distasteful, but that disagreement can be worked out. With or without the Republicans, Biden will do the right thing. And yet again Thom Tillis will be proven less clever than he so desperately wants to think.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
The use of 2019 income is a concern, but it doesn’t go away no matter what the threshold is. The case is being made largely on the basis of people not having enough to eat. $74,000 or $75,000 ought to be plenty to address that an more besides. But $300,000 for a family of 4 as it now stands as I understand it is really rather outrageous in my view. We could spend that money much more usefully on infrastructure.
Why is “targeted checks rather than universal relief” a bad idea? I’m fortunate enough that I don’t need a check. I thought progressives wanted to help those most in need. And per Larry Summers and other economists, money to the relatively well off doesn’t help the economy that much.
The biggest reason is that the “targeting” is based on your AGI from 2019. In case that’s not self-explanatory, a lot of people were in the excluded bracket in 2019 that aren’t in that bracket now, most of them because of the impact of Covid-19 on their livelihoods.
And Larry Summers? Please.
$74,000 as a amount someone could earn and get the support seems like a lot, but if you live in some parts of this country , it is pretty good — as long as nothing goes wrong, like a medical problem or a short furlough without pay due to the virus. Even co-pays and deductibles can quickly run into thousands of dollars for medical care. That assumes you have health care insurance that covers you and your dependents. Lots of jobs do not. And furloughs for several weeks, which happened, as did cuts in working hours, can make life very difficult.
I think there is an expectation that this money should go only to people who going hungry or about to be homeless. That is neither desirable nor economically sufficiently helpful.
As for the notion that “savings” do not have any economic benefit, it depends on how long one saves.
Ultimately, it is hard to do this and the more limitations put on it, the more inadvertent ways in which needy people get left out.