The Daily - Why Spending Too Little Could Backfire on Democrats

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

When Democrats first set out to expand the social safety net, they envisioned a piece of legislation as transformational as what the party has achieved in the 1960s. In the process, they hoped that they’d win back the working-class voters the party had since lost.But now that they’re on the brink of reaching a deal, the question is whether the enormous cuts and compromises they’ve made will make it impossible to fulfill either ambition.Guest: Jonathan Weisman, a congressional correspondent for The Times.Love listening to New York Times podcasts? Help us test a new audio product in beta and give us your thoughts to shape what it becomes. Visit nytimes.com/audio to join the beta.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: As Democrats ponder cutting a $3.5 trillion social safety net bill down to perhaps $2 trillion, a proposal to limit programs to the poor has rekindled a debate on the meaning of government itself.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. When Democrats first set out to expand the social safety net, they envisioned a piece of legislation as transformational as what the party had achieved in the 1960s and hoped that in the process, they'd win back the working-class voters the party had since lost.

But now that they're on the brink of reaching a deal, the question is whether the enormous cuts and compromises they've made will make it impossible to accomplish either. I spoke to my colleague, congressional reporter Jonathan Weissman. It's Tuesday, October 26th. Jonathan, as this bill was originally conceived, it was a $6 trillion act of social spending that would have been the most significant expansion of the country's social safety net

since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. And I know that you're a student of American history, so remind us of the context in which that monumental act of spending occurred and what it was all about. Well, some of the context actually might sound familiar. Then, as now, tax cuts had just been passed that largely accrued to the benefit of the rich. And the economy was growing really well writ large. In fact, when Lyndon Johnson took over the presidency, the U.S. economy had just grown by 10%.

That is a huge burst of growth. And right now, we're also seeing an economy in recovery. And then as now, what the president was seeing was a society growing more and more unequal. Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope. Johnson looks around and he sees some because of their poverty sees some because of their poverty

and some because of their color and all too many because of both. Entrenched poverty and real pain out there. Replace their despair. Senior citizens who have no health care whatsoever, who are dying in their homes. He sees people in Appalachia who are literally starving. He sees poverty amidst riches that would break anybody's heart. And this administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. And he says the government needs to step in. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. At a time of prosperity, at a moment where we can afford it, we need to step in and make sure there is a real safety net

for the bottom of the bottom of this country. And so... We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the great society. What Lyndon Johnson came up with was a series of programs that lumped together he called the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all.

It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we're totally committed in our time. And tell us how those programs worked. So for those old people who had no access to doctors and medicine, there was Medicare. To the poor who had no access to doctors and medicine, there was Medicaid. To those really struggling with food, to put food on the table, there was the creation of the food stamp program. There was the expansion of welfare. Now, there had been some welfare programs,

but they didn't go very far, and Johnson wanted a much more expansive welfare program to make sure that people weren't in abject poverty. And to poor children who had no access to decent schools, he created Head Start, which actually finally gave poor children a way in to preschool. And then the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, for the first time, began sending money to the poorest school districts from Washington to make

sure that there was at least a basic education for the poorest children. This is quite a list. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, Head Start, all of that is a result of the Great Society. That's right. The social safety net that we think of right now was created in the 1960s. And Jonathan, what do we understand the effectiveness of the Great Society to have been? What is its legacy? The Great Society, in some sense, really did work. It lifted a tremendous number of Americans out of abject poverty, and it created a floor under which, by and large, Americans don't slip. If you want help, if you need food, if you need education,

if you need a doctor and you're very poor, you should be able to get one thanks to the Great Society. And Jonathan, what were the political consequences of the Great Society? The Great Society actually proved to be very popular. The proof in the pudding is how long these programs have lasted. Food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid. Nobody is talking about doing away with these programs because they have become embedded in our society and accepted broadly by the American voter. And Americans accept that we need a floor under all of us to make sure

that we don't fall into abject poverty. But, you know, jump forward 50 years, and what we have seen is great new strains emerging in our society, in the working poor and the middle class, in our society, in the working poor and the middle class, which have struggled to keep up as the rich have bolted forward. And the Democrats looked at that, Joe Biden looked at that situation, and again said, it's time for government to do something, that this great stagnation among the working class has to be prodded forward, that we can't keep doing the same thing that we've been doing for 50 years and hope that those struggling will finally find their way to more affluence and to more stability. Right, and their solution was a new wave of social spending, but not one just focused on poverty, but instead building off the base of the Great Society and focusing, as you just said, on the working class and the middle class. And interestingly, many of these voters that the Democrats are seeking to extend these benefits to are the voters they have lost in the years since the Great Society.

That's right. The white working class has drifted to the Republicans. And the white working class, that discontented group that has stagnated over the last 30 years, that's the group that these programs are really aimed at. And what exactly was the Democratic plan to do that? So what the Democrats had in mind is a government program that would give the working class and the middle class access to the kind of benefits that white-collar workers and the affluent just take for granted. So for pregnant women and for new parents, there would

be a new family and medical leave component. For parents trying to get back into the workforce after a child, there would be rich new subsidies for childcare. Once that child reached two or three, there would be universal access to pre-kindergarten. And then once they've gotten through school, there would be universal community college. There would be job training throughout their lives. And then when they get older,

there would be help for people to help their parents get elder care. And then once they enrolled in Medicare, there would be an expansion of Medicare services to cover vision, hearing, and dental. So the Democrats envisioned a real reweaving of the social safety net, really at every stage of a person's life, cradle to grave. So if the Great Society was about this idea that there would be a floor that all Americans could stand on, would it be fair to say that this bill seeks to create a kind of staircase that would allow Americans to make it from, if you'll indulge this metaphor a bit more, the ground floor to maybe the second or third floor?

It's about the possibility of upward mobility and the belief that American society has become so stratified that government intervention is really the only way to make that possible because hard work alone is so rarely enough. This bill was about constructing a social safety net to make sure that all of those terrible mishaps that afflict us all, whether it's a sick child, a sick parent, whether it's a sick child, a sick parent, whether it's a difficult pregnancy, that they will not derail a person's hope to ever reach the real middle class and to reach stability.

Okay, so that was the grand intention of all this, to build on the great society and create this greater society with more social mobility. That was the intention. And then reality struck. A 50-50 Senate, a majority in the House, in which three dissenters could derail it. And suddenly, the Democrats came to the realization that their grand vision could not survive the politics of the United States Congress. We'll be right back. So Jonathan, let's talk about what happened once reality struck, once Democrats realized they had no margin for error, once they began fighting over the size of this all, and what the current state of the bill now is as a result. I know it has been stripped way down. So a vision that at one time

foresaw spending $6 trillion over 10 years was first cut down to $3.5 trillion, a level that was difficult for some Democrats to accept, but one that President Biden accepted. And now the deal that Democrats are about to announce will be somewhere around $1.5 trillion, a fraction of that original $6 trillion price tag. So when we think about that cradle-to-grave ambition of this bill, how is that being affected by these trillions of dollars in cuts? Does it mean that this bill is no longer capturing the full span of an American life, or is it reducing the spending at each stage, or what? Really, all of the above. For instance, remember I talked to you about universal access to community college. That's gone.

That's not even in the bill anymore. Or I talked about access to child care. Well, that child care access is now going to be limited probably to people with incomes up to $60,000. And for a working class person in, say, an affluent part of New Jersey, that $60,000 cutoff is really going to hurt. If you're earning $65,000, you're probably still struggling with child care. And there's also the issue of longevity. In the COVID relief bill that passed in March, there was a revolutionary new program. It was a $300 income support per child

that many, many families were getting. It was only for one year, but this bill envisioned making that virtually permanent. At least for six years, families with children would see this $300 showing up in their bank accounts every month. Well, because of these cuts, they're talking about extending that child credit

for only one more year. And that's going to have real impact because families can't count on a program like that to vault them into a more stable economic life if they think it's just going to evaporate in a year. Hmm. It sounds like you're saying that there are three distinct things going on here

as this bill gets stripped back. The first is that some things are just altogether gone. The second is that, like a great society, the bill would be more focused on the neediest, poorest Americans, and once again, wouldn't really address the working and middle class. And the third is that the timeframe for these programs, in many cases, would be very short and consolidated. That's right. And those timeframes issues are very big because instead of a new benefit that people can count on,

they're really looking at just kind of a temporary bonus to get them through the next 12 to 24 months. I'm interested in the implications of that because thinking back to what you said, Jonathan, about the Great Society as an example, or even more recently, the Affordable Care Act, we know that it took a lot of time for people to become accustomed to these programs. I mean, famously, many Americans who had stood to benefit most from the Affordable Care Act, they hated it when it was first announced as Obamacare. But as it became part of their lives

and they saw its benefits, it grew in popularity. And now it's seen as a big part of what flipped the House to Democrats in 2018. To put it simply, programs take time and they need time. And what you're now saying is that a lot of these programs are not going to have much time. Yeah, the Democrats, the optimistic ones, think that even if Republicans take control of the House next year, or maybe even the Senate, that somehow these programs will be so popular that even a Republican Congress would have to re-up them.

that even a Republican Congress would have to re-up them. But there is a really, really, really high probability that a program that lasts one or two years will just be allowed to expire at the end of that time limit. Because the fact is, a lot of Americans won't even have noticed that that program is helping them yet. They might not have any clue how to have accessed that child care money, how to get to that universal pre-K,

because it takes time for people to understand how to get a government benefit. It will not have really become enmeshed in their economic livelihoods. How many programs originally envisioned in this Democratic spending bill as plans that would last a really long time are now going to be funded for just a year or two and not be likely to achieve the longevity that you're talking about? Virtually all of them. They will all expire in the next two to three years, some in one year.

In which case, Democrats are not really going to have a chance to show Americans that these programs work, and they're not very likely to get that much credit for them. I mean, as you said, it took many, many years for the Affordable Care Act to really register as a base support for healthcare in this country. And in this case, this vision of a new social safety net to propel the struggling working class into a more affluent middle class, really won't have time to have really taken root before Republicans could just let that expire, before President Biden even gets to run for re-election.

Jonathan, as you're talking, it occurs to me that, counterintuitively, greater government spending, the original version of this bill, it might have been one of the most powerful ways for the Democrats to try to win back the voters that they have lost in recent years or are still at risk of losing. Because even though we think of more moderate and conservative voters as opposing government spending, the benefits of this bill, quite uniquely, could have so directly benefited those voters that it could have been like another version of Obamacare, but even more transformational to the lives of working and middle-class Americans. That's right. Democrats saw the original conception of this bill as a way for government to make a real difference in the lives of working and middle class Americans.

But perversely, by shrinking it down to ostensibly make it more palatable to conservative voters, Democrats might be making it less politically efficacious. Because if you know that the Democrats passed this big bill that's spending a lot of money, but you don't see it, you don't get a chance to really feel the impact, then you're really susceptible to the counter charge that will be coming from Republicans. And you can just imagine the ads. Democrats spent a trillion and a half dollars of your hard-earned money. And who got that money? Not you. That could be a line of attack that could really ring true to people who didn't really understand what the benefits were. And those benefits are already about to expire. Well, let me ask you a provocative question then. Is there a case to be made that $1.5 trillion is more wasteful than $3.5 or $6 trillion when we think about this policy? I think there's a case to be made that in its purest form, in its conception, this bill may well have been transformational,

society and the social safety network, but also politically, because it would be a true, tangible step that Democrats would make toward winning back the allegiance of the white, struggling, working class. But in its much smaller form, not only will it be less effective, it could actually come back to haunt the Democrats politically because it gives the Republicans a weapon. And so if and when those potential Republican ads that I mentioned before start to run and they say, Democrats spent a trillion and a half dollars of your hard-earned money, and on what? Now, that question to the white working class might come back with an answer. I didn't see any of it. Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the military in Sudan staged a coup, seizing power from the country's civilian leaders and detaining its prime minister. The actions

were a direct challenge to a two-year-old government in which Sudan's military and civilian leaders shared power, a system many, including the U.S., had hoped would lead to free elections and democracy. Instead, Sudanese military leaders appear to have abandoned the power-sharing system to protect their own power.

In response to the coup, thousands of protesters flooded into the streets of Sudan's capital, Khartoum. Soon after, the military turned off the country's internet, making it impossible to monitor the military's reaction to the protests. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan, Daniel Guimet, Rob Zipko, and Chelsea Daniel, with help from Rachel Quester. It was edited by Lisa Tobin and M.J. Davis-Lynn, engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music from Marian Lozano and Dan Powell.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilbaro. See you tomorrow.