The Biden administration is in mortal peril. Hemmed in by
circumstances, the Democrats bet nearly their entire domestic agenda on the
passage of two gigantic bills, the trillion-dollar infrastructure package and
the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.
اضافة اعلان
Both are now in serious trouble because Democratic moderates
and progressives aren’t close to agreeing on what should be in the bills, how
much they should cost or even when they should be voted on. If these bills
crumble, the Democrats will fail as a governing majority, and it will be far
more likely that Donald Trump will win the presidency in 2024.
We don’t want that, so the question is, how can moderate and
progressive Democrats create a package they both can live with? The best way to
do that is to build on each side’s best insights.
The best progressive insight is that we need a really big
package right now.
Joe Manchin, a leading moderate, argues that the $3.5
trillion package is too big. The economy is already growing. Inflation is
already rising. The national debt is already gigantic. We don’t need another
flood of deficit-bulging spending. We should pause to think this through.
The American people largely agree with Manchin. A No Labels
poll revealed that 64 percent of Americans living in suburbs support a
strategic pause while only 36 percent oppose one (in urban areas, 53 percent
support large-scale welfare spending now while 47 percent support a pause).
But Manchin and those people supporting his position are
missing the big picture. We’re a nation in decline. We’re in decline because we
have become a wildly unequal, class-rived society in which tens of millions of
people feel alienated, disillusioned, distrustful, and left out.
The progressives have a strategy to reverse American
decline: Redistribute money to people without a college degree. Make health
care more affordable so people have a stable foundation upon which to build
their lives. Offer child tax credits so parents have more options. Expand free
public education by four years so the coming generations are better equipped.
That’s a plausible strategy and the time to enact it is now.
There are rare critical junctures in history. COVID has exposed the tears in
the American social fabric and made Americans more enthusiastic about
government spending. If we can add, say, $4 trillion to the roughly $5.3
trillion in COVID-relief spending that already passed, we’ll at least have made
a giant effort to heal the ruptures bedeviling American society.
The key moderate insight is that we’re the US, not Europe.
We are mostly an immigrant-fueled, frontier nation. We place a lot of value on
individual striving, hard work and mobility. We are hostile to centralized
power. These values have made America more unequal and crueler than Europe but
also much richer, more innovative and more productive.
The moderates are right to point out that a newly expanded
welfare state should flow along the grain of American values and not against
it.
We should not be doling out huge benefits to people without
asking anything from them in return, like work and education requirements. A
recent YouGov/American Compass poll found that only 28 percent of voters said
they supported a permanent child tax credit that went to people regardless of
whether they work. The history of welfare reform over the past few decades
shows that there are better outcomes for kids when governments help parents
join the labor force.
We should not be centralizing power in Washington, pouring
more money into federal programs that badly need reform or rigging personal
choices to fit the preferences of the professional class. There is a lot of
evidence to suggest that high-quality pre-K education for kids three to five
years old can produce long-term gains. But Head Start has been ailing for
decades and needs to be transformed, not reinforced. Even we champions of early
childhood education have to admit that there’s some evidence that when done
badly it can have negative or no effects. Government should give parents more
resources to make decisions based on what’s best for their own children.
We should not be under the illusion that we’re going to
create a European-style welfare state on this side of the Atlantic. The Danes
were apparently happy to devote 46 percent of their GDP to taxes in 2019, to
contribute to their welfare provisions. In America the 50-year average federal
tax revenue-to-GDP ratio was 17 percent, and as James Pethokoukis points out in
his column in The Week, even if the Democratic bills passed, it would go up to
only 19 percent in the coming decade. Americans prefer to control their own
resources, and so we’re never going to have the kind of cradle-to-grave system
Europeans are content with.
The upshot is that we need a big jolt to heal the nation,
but every plank should be about building a society in which if you work hard
you will get ahead. We should ditch provisions like Medicare expansion and
double down on pre-K, community colleges, infrastructure, green energy jobs and
the child tax credit.
The theme should not be cradle-to-grave security. It should
be giving people an open field and fair chance to be better capitalists,
pioneers of their own destinies. America will reverse decline with a measure
that is progressive in its scope and moderate in its values.
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