An October 16 New York Times article (“Democrats Spent $2 Trillion to Save the Economy. They Don’t Want to Talk About It.”) reviews how lawmakers who supported large federal stimulus checks dispersed in 2021 now barely mention those payments. The article notes:
Democratic candidates in competitive Senate races this fall have spent little time on the trail or the airwaves touting the centerpiece provisions of their party’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue package, which party leaders had hoped would help stave off losses in the House and Senate in midterm elections. In part, that is because the rescue plan has become fodder for Republicans to attack Democrats over rapidly rising prices, accusing them of overstimulating the economy with too much cash.
The “rescue plan” refers to the March 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, which passed without a single Republican vote. Republicans, however, were not alone in voicing their opposition to that legislation, which senior Democrats also criticized as it was being drafted for potentially overheating the economy. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers warned the legislation was too large and could “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Former Obama “car czar” Steven Rattner seconded its “risk of igniting high inflation” and called for scaling back its stimulus checks, relief funds for states, and other giveaways whose costs were entirely added to the deficit.
As AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis has pointed out, concerns about the scope of the plan even came from within the Biden administration. An advance biography of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen released in June 2022 suggested that
Yellen, worried by the specter of inflation, initially urged Biden administration officials to scale back the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan by a third….“Privately, Yellen agreed with Summers that too much government money was flowing into the economy too quickly…”
Yellen subsequently denied the claim she wanted to scale back the rescue plan, and the biographer later said he was reporting only that Yellen “had concerns that the cost was on the high side and would have preferred something closer to $1.3 trillion, according to colleagues.”
The “centerpiece provisions” of that March 2021 spending plan included two separate types of federal checks. The first were $1,400 per adult and child stimulus checks paid to an estimated 85 percent of all US households (upper-income households didn’t qualify). Those payments followed two prior rounds of stimulus checks authorized in 2020. All told, a typical family of four collected $11,400 in such checks during the pandemic, at a staggering cost of $869 billion—or more than the US annual defense budget.
As the Times reminds readers, the promise of that third round of stimulus checks was central to the January 2021 runoff elections in Georgia that handed Senate control to Democrats:
In the midst of a critical runoff campaign that would determine control of the Senate, the Rev. Raphael Warnock promised Georgia voters that, if elected, he would help President-elect Biden send checks to people digging out of the pandemic recession.
Mr. Warnock won. Democrats delivered payments of up to $1,400 per person.
But with inflation now raging at 40-year highs, the Times reports that “as Mr. Warnock is locked in a tight re-election campaign, he barely talks about those checks.”
The same relative silence applies to a second set of checks—the expanded child tax credit payments issued between July and December 2021 for the first time on a monthly basis, including to parents who don’t work. Those welfare-like checks worth up to $300 per child per month were paid to an estimated 39 million households including 88 percent of children in the US (again, children in upper-income households didn’t qualify). Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), who is seeking reelection and the Times describes as the architect of that temporary policy, has run no TV ads about it and refers to the expanded payments in the past tense: “It certainly came up when it was here, and it certainly came up when it went away,” he said. “But it’s been some months since that was true.”
Why the silence? The Times quotes “many campaign strategists” who
say voters are not responding to messages about pandemic aid. Some Democrats worry that voters have been swayed by the persistent Republican argument that the aid was the driving factor behind rapidly rising prices of food, rent and other daily staples.
In the end, the “centerpiece provisions” of a partisan $2 trillion law that even some Democrats warned could trigger high inflation “have not turned into political selling points.”
Imagine that.
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