538: Five Things The COVID-19 Bill Revealed About How Washington Will Work In The Biden Era [View all]

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

President Biden will soon sign into law a $1.9 trillion bill intended to boost the economy and help the U.S. deal with the effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic. It’s only the second bill Biden has signed into law and likely to be one of the most significant. So let’s look at what we learned from the process of enacting this legislation:

The Biden-led Democratic Party is more liberal and populist than the Obama or Clinton versions.

In 2009, Barack Obama was in the White House and Democrats controlled both the U.S. House and Senate. The Great Recession was still in full force, and one of the first things the party did was propose a stimulus bill. But many Democrats, particularly more moderate members of Congress, were wary of being cast as supporting too much spending. So Democrats made sure the bill cost less than $1 trillion, eventually landing at a figure of $787 billion.

Twelve years later, Democrats passed a bill with about double the spending of the 2009 bill.1 The economic challenges caused by COVID-19 are much different than those caused by the banking and housing-bubble crash of 2008, so it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison and say whether the 2009 stimulus or this one is closer to the optimal range of spending to boost the economy. But in my view, the higher spending in the 2021 stimulus bill compared to 2009 isn’t just about the underlying economic conditions. Today’s Democratic Party is further to the left than its 2009 version — in particular, it is more open to spending and much less worried about being cast as big-government liberals. So while this bill is about boosting the economy in the short term because of COVID-19, it also includes a number of liberal policies that Democrats probably would have tried to adopt even if there was no coronavirus-induced shutdown, such as increasing the child tax credit to $3,000 per school-aged child and increasing subsidies for people buying health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Indeed, the party’s left wing is delighted with this legislation.

-more-

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/five-things-the-covid-19-bill-revealed-about-how-washington-will-work-in-the-biden-era/