Bidenomics Works

From Philipp Plein's Billionaire clothing line, via Yahoo Sports. 

Heather Cox Richardson puts together a couple of things I really should have put together myself: Bidenomics, seen as a definitive turn from Reagan-era neoliberalism, and the amazing character of the US economy at the moment, as reflected in the current numbers on growth, unemployment, and consumer spending:

with the election of Republican president Ronald Reagan, lawmakers claimed that concentrating wealth on the “supply side” of the economy would enable wealthy investors and businessmen to manage the economy more efficiently than was possible when the government meddled, and the resulting economic growth would make the entire country more prosperous. 

The problem was that this system never produced the economic boom it promised. Instead, it moved money dramatically upward and hollowed out the American middle class while leaving poorer Americans significantly worse off. 

Manchin Making Moves

 

Reverend Barber, left, and some West Virginians outside the Hart Building, 14 December, demanding Manchin's cooperation on the Biden agenda, Build Back Better and voting rights. Photo by Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images, via The Nation, whose headline was "West Virginians Give Manchin a Lump of Coal for Christmas".

Got any New Year optimism? 

I'm pretty cheered by this Axios report

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is open to reengaging on the climate and child care provisions in President Biden's Build Back Better agenda if the White House removes the enhanced child tax credit from the $1.75 trillion package — or dramatically lowers the income caps for eligible families, people familiar with the matter tell Axios

assuming it's Manchin himself, directly or indirectly, who engineered the story, anxious to get his name back in the mouths of the panditry as soon as possible, which would mean it's probably true.

The bargaining chip he seems to be pushing back onto the table is the one I've been recommending on and off as the best way to buy him off: cutting some of the wealthier recipients off from receiving the enhanced child tax credit, which in its current form is getting fully paid to households with an income of up to $150,000 (approximately the bottom 90%), but only half that for single-parent households, which is nuts. 

Because I'm kind of receptive to one of the points Manchin might be making on this: advocates love telling us that the expanded CTC reduces childhood poverty by something like 50%, an unarguably worthy goal (a lot less than 100%, of course, but infinitely more than zero), but it does that by giving an awful lot of cash to people who are far from poor. I dislike this, as you know, because I think it maintains and even increases economic inequality (while the poor are using the money to stay where they are, treading water, the well-off can invest the money, rising higher). At best, it's just really inefficient, and at worst, it's a bad political error.

Pettiness on Display

 

Image via preen.ph.

And it's back to no, according to yesterday's interview with West Virginia MetroNews Radio. Jennifer Psaki was just too mean.

Manchin said he would not say "the real reason" talks failed.

But when asked what that was, he said: "The bottom line is ... it's staff. It's staff purely. ... It's not the president. It's staff. And they drove some things and put some things out that were absolutely inexcusable."

That's more important than the United Mine Workers, probably among the most important factors in electing him as a Democrat in one of the most Republican states in the union. It was the UMW that convinced me he'd end up voting for the bill back in April, when union president Cecil Roberts showed up with him to endorse the BBB climate change provisions. Nah, he threw those guys under the bus:  

The labor union noted that the bill includes an extension of a fund that provides benefits to coal miners suffering from black lung disease, which expires at the end of the year. The UMWA also touted tax incentives that encourage manufacturers to build facilities in coalfields that would employ thousands of miners who lost their jobs. 

“For those and other reasons, we are disappointed that the bill will not pass,” Cecil Roberts, the union’s president, said in a statement. “We urge Senator Manchin to revisit his opposition to this legislation and work with his colleagues to pass something that will help keep coal miners working, and have a meaningful impact on our members, their families, and their communities.”

He didn't think much of the mothers of West Virginia either:

Literary Corner: Wit's End

 

Drawing by Dick Wright/Daily World.

Sonnet: The Living Crap

by Senator Joseph Manchin III

I’m not blaming anybody. I knew
where they were, and I knew what they
could and could not do. They just
never realized it, because they
figured surely, dear God, we can move
one person, surely we can badger and
beat one person up, surely we can get
enough protesters to make that person

uncomfortable enough they’ll just say,
“I’ll go for anything. Just quit.”
Well guess what, I’m from West Virginia.
I’m not where they’re from and they can
just beat the living crap out of people
and think they’ll be submissive.

You'll never beat the living crap out of Senator Joseph Manchin III of West Virginia, because there's just too much of it.

Something is happening and I don't know what it is

So many signals and so much noise I don't even know who to quote on these developments. Maybe Uncle Dick—

I would hope—expect—they are moving to voting rights because there’s a plan to strike now. They’ve given themselves two weeks, which is a needless marker to fail by if there’s no plan. And yet.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) December 15, 2021

—but I'm getting the impression that the whole strategy in Congress and in the White House has turned upside down, with the BBB mess entirely postponed until the new year and some kind of voting rights bill replacing it as the administration's before-Christmas target, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Are there commitments from Manchin and Sinema to skip the filibuster on voting rights legislation? Manchin yesterday seemed to be saying no, nothing's changed as far as he's concerned:

“A rules change should be done to where we all have input . . . because we’re all going to live with it,” he told reporters Wednesday. “Because we’ll be in the minority sometime.”

And Sinema as well. Even though they both seemed perfectly cheerful about ignoring the filibuster rule to raise the debt ceiling, as Senator Warnock noted:

Good News!

Good cruise ship turning takes time—usually. Via.

1. You know how Bill de Blasio ran for the New York City mayoralty on a promise to do something about the "inequality crisis" as he called it in the 2013 campaign:

“Right now, as we’re gathered this morning, one New Yorker is rushing past an attended desk in the lobby of a majestic skyscraper,” de Blasio began. “A few miles away, a single mother is also rushing, holding her two young children by the hands as they hurry down the steps of the subway entrance…” The first New Yorker is thinking about how to profit from the bull market in stocks; the second is trying to figure out how to pay her grocery bill. 

And in the intervening years since he's been mayor every once in a while somebody pipes up to announce that he failed to do anything: from the not-at-all biased Manhattan Institute in 2017 to the not-at-all biased Manhattan Institute in late 2020. Well, I guess it wasn't that widespread. Still, de Blasio himself admitted just last month that he hadn't solved inequality in New York yet, in spite of having had eight whole years to do it.

On Wednesday, with his time in City Hall approaching its end, de Blasio sounded far less idealistic and admitted that his lofty promise to fix New York’s economic disparities remains unfulfilled.

“I don’t think anybody — literally, I don’t know a single person — who thought we were going to solve all the inequalities of society in four years or eight years,” he said in his daily morning briefing.

What a quitter, right? Not one single person? What about all his supporters at, you know, the Manhattan Institute, who were totally expecting him to fix inequality and so disappointed at his failure?

Anyway, guess what?

Sociological Bent

So two weeks ago was Bad David Brooks, and last week we had Self-Help David Brooks ("The Awesome Importance of Imagination", which read like a compilation of BrainyQuotes, though it actually wasn't), so naturally today Woke David Brooks is doing a shift ("Joe Biden Is Succeeding"), which among other things praises the Biden agenda to the skies. And then explains why he's qualified to disagree with the economist Lawrence Summers on the subject of whether last spring's American Rescue Plan might overstimulate the economy and lead to inflation

Larry is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known and someone I really admire. If I were an economist, I might have agreed with him. But I’m a journalist with a sociological bent. For over a decade I have been covering a country that was economically, socially and morally coming apart. I figured one way to reverse that was to turbocharge the economy and create white-hot labor markets that would lift wages at the bottom. If inflation was a byproduct, so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.

and then agrees with him anyway

The Art of the Impossible

Illustration by William Pène du Bois for his 1947 juvenile novel The Twenty-One Balloons,  via Swann Galleries.

Robert Kuttner, at The American Prospect:

In 1948, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Harry Truman’s approval rating was in the 30s. He was universally expected to lose. So Truman sent Congress a Roosevelt-scale program that he knew Republicans would vote down, and he went on the road to remind voters of the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

In 1964, Democrats were in solid control of both houses, but Lyndon Johnson, campaigning for the presidency against a lot of suspicion in his own party, in mourning for our handsome young murdered president from Massachusetts and not sure how we felt about the unelected Texan, did something rather similar. In May he gave a commencement address at the University of Michigan calling for the United States to become a "Great Society"—

Joe Did What? The Return of Team Optimist

Can't believe I'm still doing this, but it's really not over, and there are some reasons to be pleased with today's program from Biden, assuming he's put it out because he really thinks he has a deal, and supposing he might be right—

“After months of productive, good-faith negotiations with President Biden and the White House, we have made significant progress on the proposed budget reconciliation package,” Sinema said in a statement. “I look forward to getting this done, expanding economic opportunities and helping everyday families get ahead.”

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), the other centrist holdout, would say only, “In the hands of the House” when asked about the new framework in the Capitol on Thursday.

If I understand that correctly, it means Manchin is saying his own work is done, until Pelosi sends the bill over for him to vote on—that is, he's not planning to undermine it any farther than he's already done. 

The worst cuts seem to be those of the paid leave provisions, which were supposed to cost somewhere between $494 billion and $547 billion over the ten-year period, the prescription drug pricing negotiation initiative, which would have saved the government between $460 billion and $530 billion over the same period, and the free community college. Sanders has had to let go his plan to include vision and dental care in the Medicare menu, but hearing remains. The immigration approach is not chopped liver ($100 billion to improve efficiency and humanity in green card process, asylum process, border, etc.) but isn't at all the promised reform (which I think probably couldn't fit in the reconciliation).

What's in the bill remains pretty good, if limited in time for some items:

The Ends Justify the Means Test

 

Trigger warning: I'm going to do a little agreeing with Joe Manchin here, on the question of what they call means testing, or income- and wealth-based restrictions on who gets government assistance:

Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia has a ready retort to fellow Democrats who say shrinking the party’s social safety net bill will mean depriving vulnerable populations of critical resources: Limit access to every program in the ambitious measure to only those Americans who need it most.

Or maybe not so much Manchin as Tim Kaine of Virginia, 

“In the same way that we have higher tax rate on people who make more, I think some programs should phase out on people who make more,” he said.

Still, lawmakers need to be mindful of complexity, Mr. Kaine cautioned, and some programs are more conducive to such limits than others. For example, the push for universal prekindergarten and community college access should be treated as an extension of the public school system, which is open to all comers, Mr. Kaine said.

This is an issue I used to be very hot and heavy on a year or two ago, with the advent of Yangism and the Universal Basic Income that was not actually going to be an income for anybody, and would in my view operate to increase economic inequality: the poorer you were, the more of your lousy $1000 a month you would have to spend on bare necessities, while the rich could invest all of it, for instance putting it in the kids' college fund (poor parents don't have college funds), and directly widening the wealth gap.