Republicans are fighting to reduce the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan put forward by Joe Biden. I hope the Democrats do not agree. As I see it, there is nothing to lose by going big.
If they go big and the pandemic is curbed and the economy bounces back in a year or two, they will be praised for their actions. If the economy does not recover as much as expected, the stimulus cannot be blamed for being too big and instead it could be argued that it was not big enough. On the other hand, if the stimulus is trimmed back by a lot and the economy does not recover, Biden and tee Democrats will be blamed for going too small.
Republicans are saying that the large stimulus will add to the deficit and ‘overheat’ the economy and cause inflation. But we know that Republican concerns over the deficit are bogus and are always, always, just a way to oppose spending that does not benefit the wealthy. Furthermore both Fed chair Jerome Powell and treasury secretary Janet Yellen (who was Powell’s predecessor as Fed chair) have discounted the danger of inflation and said they have the tools to curb it if it does occur.
So Biden and the Democrats should go big and ignore the ‘sky is falling’ bad faith arguments of the Republicans.
You were in Ohio at the time, so you know how it went with Obama’s insufficient package.
State got insufficient moneys, so Ohio, under Dem. Gov Ted Strickland, had to cut a bunch of services AND dip in the State’s reserves. When it came time for re-election, the ads the Republicans put out were brutal, and Strickland (and a lot of other Dems) lost. And then the Republicans got to do re-districting. Which is where we are today.
To me, it’s (mostly) direct cause and effect
This is how democrats lose. They try to be like repubs, and then the REAL republicans lay into them. Let’s hope Biden doesn’t act like Clinton and Obama. It looks as though he has learned *some* of the lessons of past administrations.
Too late for that.
They already cut the amount they promised on the checks, which also haven’t come immediately as promised, and looks like they’ll be subject to even more means-testing which denies them to about 40 million people who got the previous ones (while Trump was in office). It was going to be a pitiful and totally insufficient amount to begin with, but they’ve been trying hard to make it worse.
I don’t even know what they think they’re doing with them anymore, other than maybe dangling a shiny object in front of the populace. We could’ve given everyone enough monthly, so they wouldn’t need to go to work, because the government was mandating that their workplaces needed to close for a while, in order to help stop the spread of the pandemic.
If they wanted something targeted at helping the poor (newsflash: they don’t), then they had better come up with something better anyway. But that’s not what this is about: rich assholes need to stay the fuck away from populated areas too, just like everyone else. It makes no fucking difference what their income was last year or the year before or at any other time. We still don’t want them spreading the virus.
All of this could have been much less painful, if this country wasn’t acting like it was written into the fucking constitution that everything needs to be run by sadistic clowns. But whatever… That ship has sailed, and a couple of small checks that go to a shrinking number of people, in order to provide “stimulus” and not actually to help with the pandemic response, is just a fucking joke.
Of course, the checks are also just one example…. None of this shit is what “going big” looks like. They just a have a number ($1.9T) which may sound sort of big, purely as a number and outside of any real context, but it isn’t big compared to what we need. It’s the least they could do, and if they thought they could get away with any less, that’s what it would’ve been.
I can assure you that it is far greater than the least they could do.