Now officially announced. This package is what the administration wants to do first before they try to move another "recovery" package focused on job creation and infrastructure.
By itself this package is quite ambitious and, well, huge. It includes $1 trillion in direct relief for families, $400 billion for vaccination rollout and testing and $440 billion for business support and state and local governments. The scale is impressive. As Matt Yglesias notes:
"The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [2009] was $787 billion which is like $950 billion in today’s dollars. The bipartisan Covid relief bill that passed in December was about that big and the CARES Act was much larger. But despite that, Biden is talking about doing a bill that’s about double the ARRA in inflation-adjusted terms and he’s saying that’s just going to be the first of two bills."
Can the Democrats get it through? Biden says he'll seek bipartisan support. It's smart to at least try but also to not waste much time doing it. A critical paragraph from the Post article on the package:
"Biden...wants to try for a bipartisan majority on his first bill — although his team appears to have conducted little outreach to congressional Republicans on the plan. Democratic aides say that if Republicans do not appear willing to cooperate, they can shift gears quickly and move to “budget reconciliation,” the procedure that would allow them to pass legislation without GOP votes. That’s how Republicans passed their big tax-cut bill after Trump took office, and how President Barack Obama passed the Affordable Care Act."
Yup. Sounds like how it's going to go down. And that's just fine.
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