The COVID-19 Relief Bill Is ‘A Big Effin’ Deal’ (As Joe Biden Might Say) (Updated)

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The “lamestream media” coverage of passage of the COVID-19 Relief bill tended to focus on the fact that it was not “bipartisan,” i.e., that not one Republican in Congress voted for the most popular bill since raising the minimum wage in 2007, supported by 76% of Americans and even 60% of Republicans. That is almost unheard of bipartisan support for a bill, media villagers.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent adds, “If this new poll from Pew Research is right, the public is broadly rejecting the official definition of ‘bipartisanship’ that has seeped into so much mainstream news coverage of this debate.” Are Biden and Democrats in the process of redefining bipartisanship?

The media villagers really need to expand their vocabulary to include “asymmetric polarization” to explain that America has only one political party committed to governing, the Democratic Party, and the other is a right-wing propaganda machine only interested in performative politics, i.e., fear mongering and faux outrage over culture war issues. See Ryan Cooper, The Republican grievance perpetual motion machine.

While Democrats were delivering funding for COVID vaccines and economic relief for long suffering Americans one year into this pandemic and the resulting recession, Republicans proposed to do nothing for Americans.

Republicans instead sought to distract by clutching their pearls and feigning outrage over Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss books. No, seriously. Enough with the media whining about “bipartisanship” when one political party has checked out from reality and is not a serious partner in governing.

Progressives were justifiably upset with Prima Donna Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema keeping the $15 minimum wage increase out of the COVID-19 Relief bill, trimming Joe Biden’s $400/week unemployment boost down to $300, and tightening the eligibility requirements for the $1,400 direct stimulus checks because they felt certain people didn’t deserve it.

But the reality is, for all their drama, these Prima Donnas got very little and did not alter the fundamentals of President Biden’s COVID-19 Relief Bill. As Joe Biden once famously said, this bill “is a big effin’ deal.”

Jonathan Cohn explains, Progressives Should Be Celebrating The Senate’s COVID-19 Relief Bill:

The concessions to secure final votes were dispiriting and, at times, infuriating.

The “vote-a-rama” that kept senators in the chamber overnight, repeatedly voting down Republican messaging amendments, was just dumb.

Even so, something big and important just happened in Washington.

A bare Democratic majority of 50 senators held together to pass a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. The legislation, which House leadership hopes to pass quickly [this] week, would go a long way toward helping America get through and past the pandemic.

It could also make it easier to pass more progressive legislation in the future, even if the familiar structural problems of American politics will make that difficult.

The Bill Helps Families And Could Cut Child Poverty In Half

The legislation contains a multitude of significant, much-needed efforts to support Americans struggling with the pandemic’s economic impact. Among the best-known of these is a new set of direct payments, worth $1,400 for individuals making up to $75,000 (and joint filers making up to $150,000). With those income thresholds, most of the U.S. population will be getting checks.

The bill also increases the child tax credit and extends unemployment insurance through the summer.

A separate set of provisions funds COVID-19 testing and vaccination, which couldn’t be more timely. A third COVID-19 shot (by Johnson & Johnson) was approved at the end of last month, and there is an expected surge in supply from manufacturers that President Joe Biden has said will mean enough vaccines to cover the country’s entire adult population by the end of May.

Local and state governments will also get a boost, and there’s $130 billion in funding to help schools reopen safely.

Those features alone would make the legislation historic in nature. By one estimate, the relief bill could cut child poverty in half.

It’s A Down Payment On More Affordable Child Care And Health Care

But there’s more, including two critical provisions that have gotten a lot less attention but could have widespread effects.

One is direct funding for child care — to the tune of $39 billion — that states can use to assist families, to boost provider pay, or to help centers with the costs of operating during a pandemic. Another provision is a substantial boost in financial assistance for people who buy health insurance through the state and federal exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.

Each of those two has a clear tie to COVID-19. The pandemic has put extra strain on child care providers, and has made affordable health care more important than ever.

But those provisions also represent down payments on items on the long-term progressive agenda ― namely, having the government take a more active role in financing child care, which was unaffordable for many families even before COVID-19, and bolstering the Affordable Care Act, which is something Democrats have wanted to do since it first became law in 2010. [See, Pandemic Relief Bill Fulfills Biden’s Promise to Expand Obamacare, for Two Years; In the Stimulus Bill, a Policy Revolution in Aid for Children.]

The Bill Could Be Better — Or A Lot Worse

The term “down payment” is important because all of the relief’s provisions, including the direct payments and child tax credits, are temporary. Biden and Democratic leaders have indicated they want to make these provisions or versions of them permanent, but that will require new legislation ― and most likely a bigger fight.

Biden and the leaders also had to make a series of concessions to secure a Senate majority. They removed a proposed minimum wage increase, reduced supplemental unemployment benefits from $400 to $300 a week, and tightened eligibility for the direct payments in a way that’s likely to exclude roughly 16 million Americans [i.e., voters. I think of Sen. Joe Manchin as Wile E. Coyote, Genius.]

The underlying reason for all of these concessions was reticence from more conservative Democratic senators, especially Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin’s insistence on a change to the unemployment proposal held up progress for hours on Friday, as party leaders negotiated with him.

But Manchin really does have political constraints, because he’s from a state that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election by a 2-to-1 margin. Whatever the wisdom (or lack thereof) of his positions, it’s not hard to see why he wants to make a show of disagreeing with Democratic leaders.

And he could have insisted upon a great deal more ― including a less expensive overall package. That is what conservative Democrats kept demanding in 2009 and 2010, when the Obama administration was trying to pass its own economic stimulus package and, later, health care bill.

Instead, the total outlays are still $1.9 trillion, which is precisely what Biden first proposed.

The Filibuster And Senate Still Work Against Democrats

In an ideal world, Democrats wouldn’t depend on Manchin to pass legislation. And keeping the caucus together is sure to be a lot harder as attention turns to other items on the Democratic agenda, like infrastructure, climate change and immigration reform.

But that’s a byproduct of the Senate, whose small-state bias skews power toward more conservative-leaning states. And Democrats can do something about that ― like getting rid of the filibuster, which makes passing legislation with even 50 senators much more difficult, and adding the District of Columbia (and Puerto Rico, if Puerto Ricans agree) as a state.

On the filibuster, at least, there’s some hope for action. Support for ending the filibuster seems to be increasing, with more and more Democrats coming out for it. At this point, the biggest holdouts in the caucus appear to be Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, who also is among the most conservative members.

But it’s possible they’ll change their minds, or at least consider modifications to the filibuster, especially after seeing the COVID-19 relief bill pass without a single Republican vote, even after Democratic leaders made concessions. [Just like they did to President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama.]

If that doesn’t change their minds, political self-interest might, at least for Sinema. Democratic legislation on voting rights is sure to draw a GOP filibuster, one that party leaders won’t be able to evade by using the budget reconciliation process they did for this bill. A main goal of the voting rights bill is to stop the kind of GOP voter suppression efforts that could easily swing a Senate election in tightly contested Arizona.

The Bill Strengthens The Case For Government Action

In the meantime, the COVID-19 bill could help the prospects for progressive legislation in another way: by demonstrating that government works. [Joe Biden is the anti-Reagan.]

One of the biggest, most underappreciated impediments to much of the Democratic Party’s agenda these days is a lack of faith in the public sector. In the mid-1960s, more than three-fourths of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time, according to polling from Pew Research. Today, around 1 in 5 do.

There’s no simple or single explanation for why faith plummeted as much as it did, just as there is no quick, surefire way to revive it. But if the COVID-19 bill does what it’s supposed to do, it will provide critical financial relief, shore up child care services, make health insurance more affordable, and underwrite a vaccination effort that could reach most of the country by the summer.

Those things can only help remind people of government’s ability to improve people’s lives. And if that happens, Democrats could have a chance to do much more.

This COVID-19 Relief bill also reverses the previous GQP Covid Relief bills under Donald Trump that showered money on corporations and the wealthy, The Rich Got Richer During COVID-19, while average working class Americans suffered. This bill begins to address inequality and poverty.

Axios reports Study: Poorest Americans would get 20% income boost from Biden relief package:

President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package will give the poorest 20% of Americans a 20% boost in income, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Why it matters: Biden and Democrats have touted the “American Rescue Plan” as one of the most impactful anti-poverty bills of this era. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) dubbed it “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country.” [Hyperbole.]

Details: The legislation would lower federal taxes in 2021 by an average of $3,000, while raising net incomes by some 3.8%, per the analysis.

      • Families with children would see their taxes cut by an average of more than $6,000.
      • On a national scale, the relief package would cut taxes by some $467 billion in 2021, and about $590 billion over 10 years.

The big picture: “Simply in terms of whose taxes are cut, the bill is in stark contrast to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” writes Urban Tax Policy Center fellow Howard Gleckman.

      • People making $91,000 or less would get nearly 70% of the tax benefits from the package, Gleckman writes. The Republicans’ 2017 bill signed by former President Trump saw nearly half of its tax cuts go toward people in the top 5% of income earners.

Politicususa similarly reports, Bombshell Analysis Reveals The Top 1% Get NOTHING In The Biden Stimulus:

The bottom 20% of Americans will see their income go up by 20%, while the top 1% will get nothing from the Biden stimulus.

According to an analysis from the Tax Policy Center:

Here is the analysis:

How does the Trump’s tax cuts compare with the coronavirus relief bill? The change in after-tax incomes (including all provisions of the 2017 law) looks like this.

Republicans claim that they are the party of working people, but the reality is that they all voted against the Biden stimulus bill because it doesn’t boost the incomes of the top one percent.

Republicans in Congress don’t care about poor and working-class people. They spent their time when they had the majority in the House and Senate passing tax cuts for the rich, and then trying to pay for them by cutting programs to the poor and working poor.

The Biden stimulus doesn’t just talk the talk. It walks the walk. For the first time in decades, Republicans didn’t have the power to demand that rich people get something out of a stimulus plan. The American Rescue Plan will deliver money to those who need it the most, which will help businesses all across the country.

The COVID-19 Relief bill also helps economically disadvantaged minorities, which has the white nationalists in the GQP clutching their pearls. Relief bill is most significant legislation for Black farmers since Civil Rights Act, experts say; ‘That’s reparations!’: Graham reacts to aid to Black farmers.

Democrats Just Approved The Biggest Investment In Native Programs In U.S. History.

As Jennifer Rubin writes, “Raise economic inequality with Republicans and they will likely bristle, insisting you are engaging in ‘class warfare’ or want to ‘soak the rich.’ (“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” ― Warren Buffett). What happens when the government attacks inequality:

President Biden’s covid-19 rescue plan is the first challenge to that mischaracterization and a test as to whether a shift in economic policy can narrow income inequality.

* * *

In short, policy matters. Growing income is vital to reducing poverty and providing upward mobility, but if we continue using income tax cuts to “generate growth” (which the 2020 tax cuts, in the long run, did not do), the vast majority of the savings will benefit the top end, and income inequality will increase.

If we want to boost the lower- and middle-income earners, we will need to look to the spending side — e.g., expansion of the earned-income tax credit, child tax credits, education, job training, broadband expansion. Republicans’ hypocritical concern about the cost of spending but not the cost of tax cuts conveys a willingness to increase federal debt for the sake of those already well off. Democrats will need to consider just how much debt we can incur, but their preference for doing so on behalf of those who need assistance the most is morally sound and politically smart.

The challenge will come as we move beyond covid-19. In his next major legislative proposal, Biden will attempt to move forward on his “Build Back Better” plan. It will be telling if he continues to keep his thumb on the scale in favor of lower- and middle-income Americans. That — not stirring the pot on silly cultural memes — will determine which party champions populist economics and is on the side of working-class Americans.

Of course, the Republican grievance perpetual motion machine is spewing disinformation and lies attacking the COVID-19 Relief bill, gaslighting Americans into thinking that they really don’t want what the overwhelming majority of Americans wanted. The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, breaks down their disinformation and lies. Murderers, undocumented immigrants: Hyped-up claims about who’s getting stimulus checks.





2 thoughts on “The COVID-19 Relief Bill Is ‘A Big Effin’ Deal’ (As Joe Biden Might Say) (Updated)”

    • I’m not so sure it’s a mistake. After castigating the former occupant for doing the same thing. Perhaps using your line in ads in all forms of media and Democrats of all stripes hammering it in every media appearance may be a more effective way to go?

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