Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP
J.P. Mejia of Miami high-fives Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) after she spoke to young Americans at a sit-in at the U.S. Capitol hosted by Our Revolution, September 27, 2021.
This week, Democrats face some excruciating choices. They have to find a consensus across almost their entire caucus to pass the most comprehensive and long-overdue provision of socially and economically necessary public programs since the New Deal. Senators like Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have balked at the topline spending number of $3.5 trillion, though progressives have called this the bare minimum needed for their constituents on health care, climate, education, child poverty, affordable housing, and a host of other priorities that have been delayed for far too long.
It’s a choice that my colleague David Dayen has labeled a “Sophie’s Choice”: In order to reduce a $3.5 trillion package to, say, $2 trillion (or whatever the negotiations between the party and its center-right outliers yield), should Democrats preserve every program at a half-funded level, or fully fund some programs while dumping the others? The former option leaves open the possibility that they could more adequately fund all those programs, once established, in future Congresses, though the public benefits of those half-fundees may be so scattershot that they don’t gain much public support. The latter option will produce some programs that do indeed satisfy public needs, while putting the rest on indefinite, perhaps decades-long, hold.
Infrastructure Endless banner
But at least in theory, there’s a third option: Fully funding every program in the $3.5 trillion package—not for the next decade, as the package proposes, but just for the next four years, at a considerable reduction in price.
The advantages that accrue to this course are social, economic, and, most pointedly, political. It would make the 2024 election a referendum on whether the public wishes to continue those programs by further funding them, or prefers to end them. Democrats would run on preserving the programs and re-upping their funding. That would compel Republicans to run against what should be widely popular policies, whether or not they nominate Donald Trump for president (but especially if they did, as Trump, even more than his GOP underlings, opposes everything Joe Biden supports).
The point here is that, once the public receives steady and reliable services to meet their individual needs—affordable child care, universal pre-K, Medicare coverage of vision and hearing and dental care, paid sick leave, child tax credits, tuition-free community college, significant climate mitigation—it won’t want to have them terminated.
Indeed, that was the argument forcefully and effectively made by then-neoconservative Bill Kristol in 1993, in a memo he addressed to “Republican Leaders” on behalf of the Project for a Republican Future. His advice was they should not seek simply to water down then-President Clinton’s proposal for universal health coverage, because once enacted, the public wouldn’t cotton to having it taken away. Rather, they had to kill it before it could become law.
“Any Republican urge to negotiate a ‘least bad’ compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president ‘do something’ about health care, should also be resisted,” Kristol wrote. “Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent [italics added] an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy—and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security … It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”
Republicans ended up heeding Kristol’s counsel, killing Clintoncare while still in utero.
Today, 28 years later, Kristol’s argument is a pretty fair statement not only of the political effects of the reconciliation bill should it be enacted, but also of the difficulty of dumping the programs contained therein even if they’re only enacted for several years.
We have an example of this of very recent vintage. The Affordable Care Act wasn’t a particularly popular program when enacted. But seven years later, when Republicans tried to repeal it, the public rallied against their effort to take away its improvements. In the end, Republicans couldn’t repeal the ACA, despite full control of the government. That fear of losing something already granted to the public transformed the perception of the ACA, and aided the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections.
Once the public receives steady and reliable services to meet their individual needs, it won’t want to have them terminated.
In my “Prospects” column in the forthcoming September/October issue of our print magazine, I raised the metric of timeliness in judging the merits of government programs. In it, I related how Franklin Roosevelt took some funds appropriated for his massive public-works program, which encompassed such long-term projects as building dams, aircraft carriers, and the Triborough Bridge, and gave them to less capital-intensive and quicker-to-start-up programs like paving roads and building post offices—projects able to give work to millions of unemployed Americans in a matter of weeks. Roosevelt’s keen sense of the ticking clock was no small part of his political brilliance, of the Democrats’ ability to win vast public support for his New Deal.
Democrats are already trying to save money on the public-spending package by delaying the start date of some programs; the dental benefit in Medicare wouldn’t start until 2028 under the Democratic proposal, for example. This gets things completely backwards. The way to obtain maximum policy and political benefit comes from making programs tangible in people’s lives as soon as possible.
There is certainly risk in sunsetting these extremely vital programs in 2025. What if Democrats lose, and Republicans get to shrink the welfare state, end efforts to fix the climate crisis, and make the lives of the poor and the middle class more precarious without having to pass anything or even lift a finger? But, as with their attempts to repeal the ACA, Republicans would be taking a huge risk if they pursued that option. As for the Democrats, they find themselves in a bind just now, as the few holdouts whose votes are needed for passage apparently won’t let them make everything permanent.
Therefore, in dealing with this most transformative package of bills since the New Deal, the second-best option is for Democrats to front-load all its elements. Get child care and sick leave and the Medicare expansions up and running within the next year or two. To afford those and the other elements in the bill, fund them for just four years. That may not halve the dollar total that the Manchin-Sinema-Gottheimer gang objects to, but it moves in that direction, and gives the Democrats some very tangible achievements that will enhance most Americans’ lives, on which the Dems can run and quite possibly win in 2022 and 2024.
Do I hear a second?
