Democrats tout polls showing public support for their $3.5 trillion social spending and tax hike bill, which critics (in horror) and supporters (gleefully) say will transform the American way of life.
Qinnipiac in late July found 62% supported and 32% opposed what its survey described as a “spending bill on social programs such as childcare, education, family breaks, and expanding Medicare for seniors.” A Monmouth poll painted the bill in equally rosy colors and discovered 63% support, 35% opposed. To which one can only smile ironically and wonder if the pollsters thought of mentioning mom and apple pie.
What if, instead, they’d asked an equally accurate question such as, “Do you support or oppose the $3.5 trillion bill expanding government spending and raising taxes for new social programs?” One suspects that the two-thirds-one-third split would have gone the other way.
Democrats seem to know this. It shows in the way they’ve dug in their heels over raising the federal debt ceiling. They refuse to include an adjustment of the ceiling in the $3.5 trillion legislation even though it’s obviously an appropriate budgetary matter and the parliamentarian, who adjudicates these things, has already ruled that it can properly be part of the bill.
The party of the Left is fine and breezy when it comes to ramming a bill laden with goodies through Congress without Republican support using reconciliation, which allows passage with a bare 51-50 majority. But the same party reels back like a startled horse that’s seen a rattle snake when Republicans say that if they’re going to heap more debt on to our children’s heads, they can do it by themselves.
Instead, they demand GOP support and bipartisanship, and President Joe Biden has the gall to call refusal “dangerous and disgraceful,” even though he did precisely the same thing during debt limit fights in 2003, 2004, and 2006 when George W Bush was president.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declines to play ball, retorting that since the Democrats won’t negotiate with him on the $3.5 trillion bill — they’re haggling only among themselves to find trickier accounting gimmicks to make the total spend look lower without really being so — then, when it comes to their debt-limit request for bipartisanship, they can pound sand.
Here’s the thing: It’s easy to get public support for benefits when you say they won’t cost anything. How hard can it be to get people to approve of rainbows and ponies? Benefits on which the price tag is zero — the White House is continuing to peddle this blatant and debunked falsehood — are what a British looter once described simply and enthusiastically as “free stuff.” Who doesn’t like it?
But when you attach a plausible price tag, suddenly the benefits become a lot less enticing; that’s why looters loot rather than going into the store and buying its wares legitimately.
The Democratic Party has become the party of free stuff. That’s what their Modern Monetary Theory is, positing the daydream that the U.S. can buy whatever it wants by the simple expedient of printing as many dollars as required. And that’s also the core truth about the $3.5 trillion (which is actually $5.5 trillion, as I’ve discussed in this space before); it’s the promise of goodies while hiding the price.
Democrats are the legislative version of the rioters who ransacked stores for free stuff in the summer of 2020. They’re looting the piggy banks of the next generation and the generation after that.
They are trying to strong-arm their own centrists into backing the mega splurge by refusing to hold a vote on the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill until the Senate approves the $3.5 trillion. There’s no necessary connection between the two, but the radicals want to leverage the popularity of the smaller bill to get the bigger bill to Biden’s desk for signature. If it were actually popular, they could easily do it later.
That is key. It isn’t really popular. Not popular on Capitol Hill, where it doesn’t have the votes to pass. And not popular in the country, where voters are turning away from the Democrats on economic management. The party knows it’s likely to lose control of the Senate and House in the 2022 midterm congressional elections.
So, the next time you hear Biden, or Nancy Pelosi, or Majority Leader Chuck Schumer say their unprecedented expansion of government is popular, pause to wonder why, if that’s true, Democrats are scrambling to rewrite the statute book before voters take away their power to do so.
