Or maybe the Humpty-Dumpty Congress. I’m thinking of Humpty-Dumpty’s apothegm in Through the Looking Glass:
When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is spurring a considerable amount of comment. In it he says in no uncertain terms:
I, for one, won’t support a $3.5 trillion bill, or anywhere near that level of additional spending, without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs. This is even more important now as the Social Security and Medicare Trustees have sounded the alarm that these life-saving programs will be insolvent and benefits could start to be reduced as soon as 2026 for Medicare and 2033, a year earlier than previously projected, for Social Security.
Establishing an artificial $3.5 trillion spending number and then reverse-engineering the partisan social priorities that should be funded isn’t how you make good policy. Undoubtedly some will argue that bold social-policy action must be taken now. While I share the belief that we should help those who need it the most, we must also be honest about the present economic reality.
which must be giving the Congressional leadership some heartburn. Kevin Drum responds:
The spending bill amounts to only $350 billion per year and is mostly paid for, which means that its effect on inflation will be negligible.
Part of the problem here is that everyone, including me, keeps referring to this legislation as a “$3.5 trillion bill,” as if its size were the main thing that defines it. But it’s not meant as a stimulus bill or a recovery bill or anything like that. It’s just a bill that funds a bunch of progressive programs. This means the questions we should be asking about it are less about its raw size and more about which of these programs you support.
The CBO says the bill is only “mostly paid for” if you accept certain rather unlikely assumptions which are even now failing.
He continues by throwing down the gauntlet and challenging people to declare their relative support or opposition to seven spending components in the House’s “infrastructure” bill. I’m pretty sure my answers would not make Mr. Drum happy. I think that
- The federal government should be chary of subsidizing consumption except, possibly, at the outset of a recession when there is a steep shortfall in consumer spending.
- Even then any plan of the sort should be strictly means-tested.
- Paying for two years of community college for all comers is an utter waste of money whose main effect will be to increase the cost of higher education.
- Our problem is a shortfall in aggregate product which will not be addressed by anything in the proposed spending bill at least not in the near term and probably not at all.
