President Biden has a clear mandate
One big difference President Biden has from his predecessor, as he rushes to pick up after Donald Trump, is that he has the solid backing of a wide swath of the country. His approval rating last week is higher than what Trump ever managed to achieve in four years, and his job approval rating is even higher, with 97% of Democrats approving of his current performance – nearly the full backing of the party, along with 23% of Republicans. There’s a reason this is so important. If Biden’s $1.9 trillion recovery proposal passes, the country could recover from recession as early as the end of this year, according to a new analysis by Moody’s Analytics and Brookings Institute.
Moody’s proposed in 2020 that full Democratic control would be the surest way the country could recover quickly. If done properly, the plan could double economic growth, according to their calculations, adding as much as 7.5 million new jobs – a move that would consequently, mean Biden is responsible for more job creation than his predecessor, and the country would return to pre-pandemic levels of unemployment by mid-2022.
The Congressional Budget Office backs up these findings, suggesting that if no additional support is given, the economy could stagnate until 2024, with high unemployment plaguing the rest of Biden’s term. It would seem to suggest that the Republicans’ counteroffer of just $618 billion would just be a way to make the economy struggle for longer. If they were serious about handling the crisis, they would offer a more substantial package, not less. They just want to be able to propose a measure bound to fail if it were adopted, so they could argue that government intervention doesn’t fix anything and coast to re-election on that. It’s yet another reason why we need to take 2022 at least as seriously as we did 2018.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making