A year has passed since it became evident that the coronavirus was for real. After an initial hit, financial markets rebounded and went on to new highs. As we know, although related, financial markets are not the real economy. Macroeconomic numbers — unemployment, GDP — took a hit. People got sick, lost jobs, struggled with teaching kids at home, and the nation experienced the spectacle of people waiting in long lines to get a box of food.

The pandemic exacerbated the long term weakness of this economy, increasing inequality of income and wealth, hitting middle and low income workers the hardest. Relatively low paid service workers were less able to work from home than white collar workers. Many faced risk of catching the disease vs. losing their income. Low income people had less access to online technology for students learning from home. Even white collar workers able to work from home struggled with balancing work with monitoring their children in the process of studying at home.

Small businesses were hard hit, many permanently gone.

With the arrival of three vaccines and rapid rate of vaccinations, we have increasing optimism that life can return to whatever the “new normal” will be. But even with increased optimism, we aren’t there yet, and the economy is far from full capacity.

As this is written, the current $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill is close to signature. There is no doubt that the previous relief bills, however imperfect, saved many people from financial ruin, and helped many businesses get through a serious financial jam. There is absolutely no doubt that the current bill is sorely needed as a major step toward better living and restoring the economy to full capacity.

The major difference between previous legislation and the current $1.9 trillion bill is the political machinations involved. While recognizing that earlier relief bills could be interpreted as a Trump victory, Congressional Democrats cooperated with the Trump Administration getting that legislation passed.  The nation desperately needed it.

In contrast, the current bill was passed without a single Republican House or Senate member approving it. Republicans complain that it is a “Democratic wish list,” not related to the pandemic. That’s eyewash. The bill contains money for vaccinations, money targeted specifically to restaurants, money to assist schools to open up, needed assistance to municipal governments, and much more. Direct payments to individuals are in stark contrast to Republican supply-side snake oil of giveaways to the wealthy and the vacant promise of “trickle down” which never happens. 

Senate Minority Leader McConnell and Ohio Senator Portman insist that the economy was set to come “roaring back” by this summer and, therefore, these expenditures are not needed and burden our children with debt.

Republicans don’t worry about increasing the public debt and “burdening our children” when giving away money to their wealthy donors.

Republican complaint that it should be “more targeted” was accommodated through reducing the income level to qualify for payments. As expected, that did not motivate a single Republican to vote for the bill, nor would anything short of modifications so severe as to render the bill ineffective.

President Biden had learned that lesson while serving as VP during the early years of the Obama Administration, and was not about to be stabbed in the back once again by Republican chicanery.

The morning after Obama’s election in 2008, Mitch McConnell and his Republicans vowed that their number one objective was to “make Obama a one-term president.” They would not give him any victory whatsoever, even to make affordable health care available to millions of citizens desperately needing it.

Obama proceeded on his promise to make affordable health care available for all. In a vain effort to gain Republican support, he built the Affordable Care Act on a model straight from the conservative Heritage Foundation, the model earlier instituted in Massachusetts by then-governor Mitt Romney. He abandoned a public option proposal in an attempt to placate Republicans. Republicans, with the aid of the media, blasted the ACA with slogans such as “death panels” and “socialized medicine,” and stoking fear that it would jeopardize Medicare. As time dragged on, President Obama called Senator Grassley, asking if there was anything he could do to get his support. Grassley nonchalantly replied, “Probably not.”

Lesson learned — there would be no bi-partisan support for Obama’s efforts to provide affordable health care to citizens who desperately needed it. McConnell did not achieve his goal of making Obama a one-term president. But the Republicans did succeed in using the then-unpopular ACA to take over the congress and many state legislatures during the 2010 elections. It was that debacle that gave us the Tea Party and the Senate’s most famously ignorant member, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson.

The lesson of Republican recalcitrance and disingenuousness was reinforced by Obama’s attempt to revive the economy from the Great Recession inherited from the Bush Administration. Democrats had to fight tooth and nail for the fiscal stimulus that was essential to prime the pump. Most economists insisted that as essential as that stimulus was, it was too small. The economy did grow over the next decade, but not robustly. As economists had warned, the stimulus was too small. Republicans hammered Obama for “the slowest recovery in history.”  

Biden would not once again fall for the Republican trick of hindering progress of a president, followed by hammering him for lack of progress. If he could get any Republican, cooperation, fine. He reached out to them. They offered a low-ball response that was a non-starter. Biden was not about to delay the bill, allowing the Republicans to whittle it down and render it ineffective.

While Democrats did not get all they wanted in the bill, it is still a necessary bill, supported by a majority of voters and including Republican local officials who need the money to keep their cities and counties running. 

Is the bill too big? Any such risk is dwarfed by the risk of a bill being too small, the economy remaining under capacity, and schools not reopening.

— John Waelti of Monroe, a retired professor of economics, can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Saturdays in the Monroe Times.