Are Progressives About to Get Rolled Again?

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It’s now clear that the Biden administration, House and Senate progressives, and the handful of conservative Democratic spoilers are vectoring in on a deal. Build Back Better will be boiled down to something in the $2 to $2.5 trillion range.

Progressives can comfort themselves that once the infighting is behind us, and we can get past the echo-chamber stories of a failed presidency, Biden can get on with the business of governing. His approval ratings can go back up, and we can come back for more money in the FY2023 budget reconciliation next fall.

But hold on, the devil is in the fine print.

More from Robert Kuttner

For starters, the original White House plan also included over a trillion dollars in refundable tax credits, notably an extension of the Child Tax Credit, as well as expanded credits for child care and a more generous EITC. If these tax expenditures are included in a $2 trillion total, then the entire spending part of the package is reduced to not much more than the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which has only about $600 billion in genuine new public investment.

And don’t forget, these are ten-year totals. Two hundred billion a year is pretty puny, given the kinds of transformations the economy needs. The $60 billion a year in the bipartisan bill is business as usual.

One ray of hope is in the dynamic economic gains produced by these outlays. The White House has argued, correctly in my view, that many if not most of these social and economic investments will enhance productivity and GDP, thus reducing their net budgetary impact. And that could produce a consensus on a larger bottom line. Joe Manchin has said he is sympathetic to this kind of budgeting.

Seemingly, Manchin is sympathetic to higher taxes on rich people, while his fellow spoiler, Kyrsten Sinema, is not. Here again, using public investments to increase economic output allows offsets to the total budgetary impact, and Sinema could be sympathetic to that. Recognizing these gains is as close as economics gets to the proverbial free lunch.

The package would be even worse without the insistence of House progressives that they will compromise only so much. The Child Tax Credit and the other tax subsidies for working families should not be counted as part of the spending. This is no time for further retreat.

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