Joe Biden’s spending bill isn’t extreme, no matter what moderate Democrats say. EricLevitz writes
Photo: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock For weeks, the Democratic Party’s progressive and right-wing flanks have been locked in a staring contest over spending. The latter contingent is eager to pass the bipartisan infrastructure legislation that passed the Senate in August. The former cares less about that souped-up highway-funding bill than it does about the president’s broader agenda for green investment and welfare-state expansion. And the vehicle for enacting that agenda is the $3.
Still, Biden’s disloyal Democratic opposition may hold one genuine trump card. The notion that Sinema & Co. will oppose any reconciliation bill unless the bipartisan one passes next week is silly. But the idea that they would rather see the latter legislation die than support a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is more plausible. As Politico reports:
The reasons for this aren’t hard to discern. If passed in its current form, the reconciliation package would be the largest expansion of the American welfare state in half a century. Progressives are responsible for that fact and are therefore eager to advertise it. Moderates, for their part, have an incentive to describe the bill in similarly grandiose fashion for the sake of establishing its putative extremity.
By any reasonable measure, the reconciliation bill poses less inflationary risk than the relief bills that Joe Manchin and his fellow “moderates” already voted for, even if one ignores the fact that the reconciliation bill offsets its outlays with tax increases. Spending hundreds of billions on direct relief payments in a single year will rapidly boost demand; gradually increasing federal spending by 5 percent over a decade will not.
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