In the interest of unity, the willfully misunderstood buzzword of the moment, President Biden is right to hear out the Republican senators offering a counter-proposal to his pandemic relief plan. But let’s not get carried away.
If Biden can draw GOP support by tinkering with the composition and scope of his stimulus package, wonderful. But dramatically diminishing aid that people, cities, states and the economy desperately need is not worth the minor symbolic victory of a few Republican votes. And the proposal put forward by the 10 senators who met with Biden on Monday suggests that they are asking for too much — or, in terms of the relief Americans will get, asking for too little.
The group led by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, proposes about $600 billion in aid, or two-thirds less than the president’s $1.9 trillion plan. The Republican package would spend about half as much on direct payments to households by cutting the maximum value of the one-time checks from $1,400 to $1,000 and setting stricter income limits for eligibility. It would also shrink Biden’s proposed spending on supplemental unemployment benefits by over 60%, dropping the added benefit from $400 to $300 a week and ending the payments in June instead of September.
THE GOP proposal also would skip most of Biden’s proposed $170 billion in aid to schools and colleges, most of it rightly targeted to facilitate reopening classrooms for in-person instruction, providing just $20 billion for the purpose. And it drops the president’s attempt to raise the federal minimum wage, which has lost 17% of its value since it was set at $7.25 in 2009.
The most irresponsible omission of the Republican counteroffer concerns aid to state and local governments, which were forced to fill a federal leadership vacuum with reduced revenues and limited assistance from Washington. While Biden’s plan would spend $350 billion on shoring up those governments, the GOP would stiff them again, further hobbling the pandemic response and precipitating more public employee layoffs.
The president is right on that score, too. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the first major pandemic relief bill found that aid to state and local governments was most efficient in promoting economic recovery. The least efficient spending in the legislation was aid to businesses, one of the areas in which the Republican proposal matches Biden’s.
While a new CBO report projects that gross domestic product will recover to its pre-pandemic level by the middle of the year, it also expects the economy to under-perform until 2025 and employment to remain short of previous levels until 2024. Additional government spending can accelerate the recovery and avoid the prolonged pain that followed the Great Recession thanks partly to successful Republican pressure to limit that era’s economic stimulus.
Biden, who was vice president then, seems to have learned the right lesson from the experience. His press secretary told reporters Monday that Biden sees spending too little on relief as a greater risk than spending too much.
Getting all 10 of the Republican senators behind the counter-proposal would allow a relief bill to pass with a filibuster-proof majority. Alternatively, Senate Democrats can use a process known as budget reconciliation to pass the spending — though possibly not the minimum-wage increase — without Republican votes.
Such a partisan vote for robust relief would be far less troubling than another inadequate package with nominal GOP backing. Americans will rightly judge the new president and the Democratic Congress not by which arcane parliamentary procedures they employ, but by whether they give them the help they need.
— San Francisco Chronicle
