Byron York’s Daily Memo: $3.5 trillion? Not gonna happen

$3.5 TRILLION? NOT GONNA HAPPEN. Many Democrats began the Biden administration hoping to pass close to $10 trillion in new spending on various progressive causes. That was a staggering number, and there was no way it was going to happen. But the fact is, Democrats have already gotten a lot.

First, there was the $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” bill, passed and signed into law in March, that provided for far more spending than was needed for COVID-19 relief. Then there was the $1.1 trillion infrastructure bill, passed on a bipartisan vote in the Senate in August. The House hasn’t voted on it yet — Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding it hostage to win still more spending — but having cleared the barrier of the Senate, it could be passed into law any day Democrats choose.

That’s $3 trillion in new, additional spending right there — more than total federal spending in any of the George W. Bush years. But, of course, Democrats want much, much more — some progressives demanded as much as $6 trillion more. But under pressure from some centrists, party leaders have pared that down to a $3.5 trillion proposal on what’s called “human infrastructure” — child care, education, free community college, old-fashioned welfare, elderly care, and more. The spending would be “the most significant expansion of the nation’s safety net since the war on poverty in the 1960s … that would touch virtually every American’s life, from conception to aged infirmity,” reports the New York Times.

Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!

The common thread uniting all three Democratic spending measures — $1.9 trillion plus $1.1 trillion plus $3.5 trillion, for $6.5 trillion in all — is that they contain vastly more spending than is necessary to address the nation’s needs. Spending that amount of money would be, in a word, crazy, and it could do enormous damage to the nation’s economic prospects in the long run. And now, finally, some Democrats seem to be getting the message that enacting the progressives’ proposals could end in disaster.

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat who has put the brakes on his party’s most progressive initiatives, has floated the possibility that he could support $1.5 trillion in new spending. Even that is more than is needed, given the $3 trillion in spending already passed, but it is far closer to reality than the current Democratic plan. In addition, Manchin proposed Congress take a “strategic pause” to think things over before passing vast new spending commitments.

Then Rep. James Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, said Wednesday that $3.5 trillion was a “ceiling” for spending and that the “floor” for spending could be far less than that. Noting the $2 trillion difference between Manchin’s $1.5 trillion figure and the party’s $3.5 trillion, Clyburn told CNN that there is a lot of room to negotiate.

Clyburn’s statement infuriated progressives. After his words got out, Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted a curt rebuttal: “$3.5T is the floor.”

Now comes a new poll that suggests the public is worried about the headlong rush toward new spending. The survey was commissioned by the nonpartisan group No Labels and asked this question:

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin has asked Congress to take a “strategic pause” on its plans to push through this month a $3.5 trillion budget-reconciliation bill supported by Democrats only in order to better debate and understand what spending of this scale will mean for the US economy, debt, taxes and inflation. Do you favor Joe Manchin’s “strategic pause” approach or do you believe that we need $3.5 trillion in social welfare spending now to help Americans in need and should not delay the budget reconciliation bill any further?

Sixty percent of those surveyed favored Manchin’s pause, versus 40% who did not. Fifty-two percent of independents favored the pause, along with 48% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans. Sixty-four percent of suburban voters favored the pause, along with majorities of all income levels and college and noncollege voters.

There is, in short, significant reluctance to support vast, far-reaching spending measures on top of the vast, far-reaching spending measures already passed.

Even so, President Joe Biden, fresh off his disastrous handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, will push Congress to pass the $3.5 trillion proposal. But Biden, whose job approval rating has slipped underwater, will face new pressure to slow down, to pause, to take a deep breath before acting. And when that happens, the $3.5 trillion “ceiling” will begin to fall.

For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.