Krugman: The Republican Economic Plan Is An Insult – Don’t Negotiate, Get it Done

President Joe Biden met with a group of 10 Republicans at the White House on Monday to discuss COVID relief legislation, but he quickly made it clear following the meeting that he won’t settle for a watered-down GOP proposal.

The full statement:

The President and the Vice President had a substantive and productive discussion with Republican senators this evening at the White House. The group shared a desire to get help to the American people, who are suffering through the worst health and economic crisis in a generation.

While there were areas of agreement, the President also reiterated his view that Congress must respond boldly and urgently, and noted many areas which the Republican senators’ proposal does not address. He reiterated that while he is hopeful that the Rescue Plan can pass with bipartisan support, a reconciliation package is a path to achieve that end. The President also made clear that the American Rescue Plan was carefully designed to meet the stakes of this moment, and any changes in it cannot leave the nation short of its pressing needs.

The President expressed his hope that the group could continue to discuss ways to strengthen the American Rescue Plan as it moves forward, and find areas of common ground — including work on small business support and nutrition programs. He reiterated, however, that he will not slow down work on this urgent crisis response, and will not settle for a package that fails to meet the moment.

The Republican proposal does not strengthen the American Rescue Plan, but rather seeks to gut its provisions. It is only one-third the size of Biden’s proposal, and not calibrated to address the size and scope of the economic crisis we are in. It is not a serious offer.

Paul Krugman explains, The Republican Economic Plan Is an Insult:

So 10 Republican senators are proposing an economic package that is supposed to be an alternative to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The proposal is only a third of the size of Biden’s plan and would in important ways cut the heart out of economic relief.

Republicans, however, want Biden to give in to their wishes in the name of bipartisanship. Should he?

No, no, 1.9 trillion times, no.

It’s not just that the G.O.P. proposal is grotesquely inadequate for a nation still ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond that, by their behavior — not just over the past few months but going back a dozen years — Republicans have forfeited any right to play the bipartisanship card, or even to be afforded any presumption of good faith.

Let’s start with the substance.

By any measure, January was the worst pandemic month so far. More than 95,000 Americans died of Covid-19; hospitalizations remain far higher than they were at previous peaks.

True, the end of the nightmare is finally in sight. If all goes well, at some point this year enough people will have been vaccinated that we’ll reach herd immunity, the pandemic will fade away and normal life can resume. But that’s unlikely to happen before late summer or early fall.

And in the meantime we’re going to have to remain on partial lockdown. It would, for example, be folly to reopen full-scale indoor dining. And the continuing lockdown will impose a lot of financial hardship. Unemployment will remain very high; millions of businesses will struggle to stay afloat; state and local governments, which aren’t allowed to run deficits, will be in dire fiscal straits.

What we need, then, is disaster relief to get afflicted Americans through the harsh months ahead. And that’s what the Biden plan would do.

Republicans, however, want to rip the guts out of this plan. They are seeking to reduce extra aid to the unemployed and, more important, cut that aid off in June — long before we can possibly get back to full employment. They want to eliminate hundreds of billions in aid to state and local governments. They want to eliminate aid for children. And so on.

This isn’t an offer of compromise; it’s a demand for near-total surrender. And the consequences would be devastating if Democrats were to give in.

But what about bipartisanship? As Biden might say, “C’mon, man.”

First of all, a party doesn’t get to demand bipartisanship when many of its representatives still won’t acknowledge that Biden won legitimately, and even those who eventually acknowledged the Biden victory spent weeks humoring baseless claims of a stolen election.

Complaints that it would be “divisive” for Democrats to pass a relief bill on a party-line vote, using reconciliation to bypass the filibuster, are also pretty rich coming from a party that did exactly that in 2017, when it enacted a large tax cut — legislation that, unlike pandemic relief, wasn’t a response to any obvious crisis, but was simply part of a conservative wish list.

Oh, and that tax cut was rammed through in the face of broad public opposition: Only 29 percent of Americans approved of the bill, while 56 percent disapproved. By contrast, the main provisions of the Biden plan are very popular: 79 percent of the public approve of new stimulus checks, and 69 percent approve of both expanded unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments.

So when one party is trying to pursue policies with overwhelming public support while the other offers lock-step opposition, who, exactly, is being divisive?

Wait, there’s more.

Everyone knew that Republicans, who abruptly stopped caring about deficits when Donald Trump took office, would suddenly rediscover the horror of debt under Joe Biden. What even I didn’t expect was to see them complain that Biden’s plan gives too much help to relatively affluent families.

Again, consider the 2017 tax cut. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, that law gave 79 percent of its benefits to people making more than $100,000 a year. It gave more to Americans with million-dollar-plus incomes, just 0.4 percent of taxpayers, than the total tax break for those living on less than $75,000 a year, that is, a majority of the population. And now Republicans claim to care about equity?

In short, everything about this Republican counteroffer reeks of bad faith — the same kind of bad faith the G.O.P. displayed in 2009 when it tried to block President Barack Obama’s efforts to rescue the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.

Obama, unfortunately, failed to grasp the nature of his opposition, and he watered down his policies in a vain attempt to win support across the aisle. This time, it seems as if Democrats understand what Lucy will do with that football and won’t be fooled again.

So it’s OK for Biden to talk with Republicans and hear them out. But should he make any substantive concessions in an attempt to win them over? Should he let negotiations with Republicans delay the passage of his rescue plan? Absolutely not. Just get it done.

Professor Krugman’s analysis is a perfect smackdown response to the asinine and utterly ridiculous editorial opinion in the The Arizona Republic fka The Arizona Republican today, Joe Biden can pass COVID relief and still unify the nation in which the editors try to set a “unity trap” for capitulation to bad faith Republican demands:

Biden agreed to meet with the Republicans on Monday night, but it wasn’t clear if he was simply going through the motions. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would hear the Republicans out but wouldn’t negotiate with them.

Democrats might be able to blow up the old rules to ram home their proposal, but the price will be high in this moment of national crisis. As Biden stressed at his inaugural, he is here to return the nation back to a place of calm.

Thus, he owes it to the country to try to reach a compromise with Republicans.

This asinine opinion next argues that it is the Democrats, the only functioning political party in this country, which must fix the dysfunctional Republican Party by acceding to its bad faith demands (?):

One of our major parties, the GOP, is leaderless and listing under the weight of its own dysfunction. The Republicans can probably be pushed aside, but the Democratic Party, as the only functioning major party, needs to understand it shoulders historic responsibility to not just pass an agenda, but to help the country work through its trauma.

* * *

In normal times Biden could argue it’s time to change the rules to make rapid progress, but these are far from normal times. The nation craves a more even-tempered politic and dreads another battle royale.

Passions have been inflamed. Our exhaustion is palpable. The two parties have already proved they could work together and pass some $4 trillion in pandemic funding last year.

They can do it again.

* * *

There’s time to do the next round in a way that helps Americans weather the coronavirus while starting to diffuse the hatred around us.

At the moment, that’s Joe Biden’s most important job.

He devoted the greater part of his inaugural telling us so. Now he needs to prove he has the qualities to bring a free people together.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck off editors of the Arizona Republic. It is not “Biden’s most important job” to capitulate to bad faith Republican demands as part of some bullshit “unity” trap in which he must agree to Republican demands for some “kumbaya” moment with Republicans, who are at this very moment plotting his demise. It is not the Democrats’ job to fix what is wrong with a dysfunctional Republican Party. That is the job for craven coward Republicans who have allowed the far-right fringe parasites in their party to hollow out the dead carcass of the GOP.

As Michell Goldberg says today, It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Party Now. And Michael Gerson says today, Trumpism is American fascism. So The Republic thinks “Biden’s most important job” is to placate QAnon kooks and fascsists who engaged in a seditious insurrection on January 6 in a failed coup attempt to overthrow American democracy and install an authoritarian GOP dictatorship? What The Republic is doing is what Jennifer Rubin says is the The latest attempt to normalize the Republican Party:

Democrats would be wise to tell the sane stragglers in the GOP that their dream of a restored GOP is fanciful. It is time to embrace the sad reality that there is only one ideologically diverse party that operates in the real world and defends democracy. The party of Lincoln is now the party of Putin propaganda, sedition and “might makes right.” There is no viable center-right party. There is crazy, and there is the Democratic Party.

We too often mouth the incomplete platitude that we need a two-party democracy. In fact, there is no magic to the number two … Voters need a good-faith debate between democratic (small “d”) competitors about policy. They need choice. They do not need an illiberal, racist cult that operates in a political fantasyland. They do not need the Republican Party.

So I repeat myself, fuck off editors of the Arizona Republic.

By the way, the U.S. economy is projected to grow at a robust 4.6% annual rate this year, although employment isn’t expected to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024, the Congressional Budget Office says. CBO projects 4.6% growth in Biden’s first year, jobs lag.

Here’s the annual U.S. GDP growth under Donald Trump, who falsely claimed to have “the  best economy ever”:

• 2017: +2.3%
• 2018: +3%
• 2019: +2.2%
• 2020: -3.5%

As I have explained many times over the years, The Economy Does Much Better Under Democrats. (excerpts):

A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”

Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans, according to a Times analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch.

The six presidents who have presided over the fastest job growth have all been Democrats. The four presidents who have presided over the slowest growth have all been Republicans.

[T]he pattern is so strong and long-lasting that coincidence alone is unlikely to be the only explanation. Statistical noise, as Mr. Blinder and Mr. Watson wrote in their paper exploring the pattern, does not seem to be the answer.

That leaves one broad possibility with a good amount of supporting evidence: Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts [faith based supply-side “trickle down” economics] and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.

But if the causes are not fully clear, the pattern is. The American economy has performed much better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones, over both the last few decades and the last century. And as Ms. Wanamaker said, “Administrations do certainly have the ability to affect economic outcomes.”

There is no reason to listen to Republicans who don’t know squat about economics and can’t do math. They have consistently failed us, with often disastrous consequences.