Democrats already spent trillions they claimed was for fighting the pandemic — on other priorities.
Democrats already spent trillions they claimed was for fighting the pandemic — on other priorities.
W ith his approval ratings testing new lows and his domestic agenda going nowhere, President Biden is poised to ask Congress for more money to address the surge in Covid cases. According to House majority leader Steny Hoyer, the request will be “substantial.”
He should not get another dime.
More than enough money has already been allocated to address the pandemic, including under Biden. If Democrats have already blown through that money, they shouldn’t be granted more money to spend recklessly.
Roll Call writes that Hoyer told reporters that he “expects the White House will ask lawmakers to appropriate funding for testing, vaccines and ‘to make sure schools have resources to keep themselves safe.’” But wasn’t that supposed to be addressed in prior massive pieces of legislation?
Before Biden even took office, Congress had already enacted $4.1 trillion in spending increases to address the economic and public-health challenges created by the Covid pandemic itself and the lockdown-centric response. When Biden came into office, he signed another $1.9 trillion of spending into law, bringing the total to $6 trillion.
When sold to the American people, the $1.9 trillion plan was pitched as a way to support the strategy of mass vaccination, getting testing up to speed, and ensuring that schools had enough funding to open — all of the things that Hoyer now expects to be in the “substantial” White House request.
Yet in actuality, less than 1 percent of the bill was allocated toward vaccine-related programs, and 6 percent was left for other spending directly related to Covid (such as for testing).
On top of that, $130 billion was theoretically targeted toward funding to help schools safely reopen. In reality, the school money was just an open-ended handout to teachers’ unions. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget warned at the time, “This [schools] funding can be used for a variety of purposes, and likely much or most would be for purposes other than re-opening.”
Sure enough, with cases having skyrocketed in recent weeks, teachers’ unions are again making demands for more funding. But even MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has been left scratching his head. ”I feel like there’s a weird memory-holing of the fact last spring Congress distributed $123 billion dollars to K-12 schools for Covid preparedness,” he recently mused on Twitter. “That’s nearly $1 million *per school*. So big q is: what was that used for?”
Even if one were to add up all the spending tied to fighting Covid and lump it in with school funding, it would only account for 12 percent of the bill. Nearly 90 percent of it went instead to address pre-existing liberal priorities.
The plan expanded Obamacare, cut another round of $1,400 stimulus checks, provided monthly per-child payments to families, extended more-generous unemployment payouts, and sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states, which were already awash in cash.
When the plan was enacted, it was hailed by the New York Times as a “sweeping” effort, noting it represented an “extraordinary increase in safety net spending in the largest antipoverty effort in a generation.” It prompted columnist David Brooks to declare Biden a “transformational president.” Senator Bernie Sanders called it “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country.” It then prompted the drumbeat of comparisons of Biden to FDR and LBJ.
The important point here is that when Biden entered office and had an opportunity to spend trillions of dollars under the banner of “Covid relief,” he made the concerted decision to pass a sweeping, generational, social-welfare bill and reward political allies such as teachers’ unions. So his call for a new round of Covid spending should not be taken seriously. This is especially true given that the White House has been cagey about how much of the existing Covid-relief money remains.
It’s also impossible to remove this request from the context of Biden’s current political situation.
Senator Joe Manchin has made clear he has no interest in further negotiations to pass Biden’s signature Build Back Better bill. Democrats’ election bill is going nowhere, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema is not willing to kill the filibuster to pass it. He starts out 2022 with the expectation that his party will get slaughtered in the midterms, delivering at least the House to Republicans and destroying any chance he has to pass major legislation in his first term.
So, what this smacks of is a way for Biden to pivot, in hopes that he can get Manchin to vote for more spending as long as it’s being framed as part of the Covid emergency response. Let’s hope Manchin is not fooled by the latest desperate Biden gambit.