“The Real Trouble With the Sprawling Reconciliation Bill”

Paul Starr in the American Prospect:

The individual elements in the reconciliation bill poll well, but you have to follow politics closely to know precisely what’s in it. There’s no single policy or idea at its center, no clear message about the Democratic project as a whole that is equivalent to the New Deal or Great Society. What most people are likely to have heard and remember about the bill is that it’s a “$3.5 trillion spending plan.”

I would be thrilled to see the whole package enacted, but I can imagine many people are confused or indifferent about it. That the legislation has come to be known and defined by its ten-year budgetary cost (without the caveat that the cost is offset by tax increases and budgetary savings) is itself a defeat. The number isn’t the problem; it’s the failure to define the legislation in other terms….

So what to do? As my Prospect colleague David Dayen has argued, the president and congressional leaders should concentrate on doing a few big things rather than spreading around the money to a large number of inadequately financed initiatives.

As I see it, two general criteria—one long-term, the other short-term—ought to govern those choices. The first is meeting the central challenge of our time: making the transition to a sustainable green economy. Nearly all Democrats acknowledge that climate change is an “existential” threat, but they don’t always act as if it is. The hour is already late, but now Congress has to do the right and necessary thing and treat the green transition as a top priority.

The second criterion has both a moral and political rationale: making substantial, visible, and immediate progress in alleviating the everyday economic insecurities Americans face. The voters who sent Democrats to Washington not only deserve help, they need to know that the party is delivering for them.

It would be great to do all the things the reconciliation package calls for, including financial support for child care and elder care, universal preschool, federally guaranteed paid family leave, free community college, permanently extending the improved health care subsidies and child tax credits temporarily introduced in the American Recovery Plan, and new Medicare coverage for dental, vision, and hearing costs. We could all pick our favorites on that list.

But in paring it down, I would give preference to policies that can be carried out quickly and will have a big impact, like the child tax credits, as opposed to policies like dental coverage for seniors, which would not go into effect until 2028, in part because of the planning it requires and in part because of an effort to keep down its cost within the ten-year budget window.

But the aim of doing a few big things with impact runs up against the imperative of keeping the different elements of the Democratic coalition satisfied. The Times’s Tankersley cites White House officials as saying that the various planks in the bill “serve as a sort of coalition glue—a something-for-everyone approach that makes it difficult to jettison pieces of the plan in negotiations, even if they prove contentious.” That’s undoubtedly true. But now’s the time it has to be done.

By all means, let’s have a national campaign for dental coverage (and explain to me why it should be for seniors only). Let’s build support for universal community college and some of the other ambitious goals in the bill. But let’s get the Democratic agenda focused in a way that puts existential interests first, delivers visible benefits, and shows voters what they have gained from putting Democrats into the majority and what further gains they can expect from them in the future.

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