{"id":377713,"date":"2021-11-06T14:12:01","date_gmt":"2021-11-06T14:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/11\/biden-democrats-reconciliation-build-back-better-legislation-fdr-new-deal-comparison\/"},"modified":"2021-11-06T14:12:01","modified_gmt":"2021-11-06T14:12:01","slug":"no-the-democrats-reconciliation-bill-is-not-twice-as-big-as-the-new-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/11\/06\/no-the-democrats-reconciliation-bill-is-not-twice-as-big-as-the-new-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"No, the Democrats\u2019 Reconciliation Bill Is Not \u201cTwice as Big\u201d as the New Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Grasping for any available talking points to stave off progressive anger, Democrats are trying to depict Joe Biden\u2019s Build Back Better bill as some sort of New Deal 2.0. The comparison is absurd.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n President Joe Biden delivers a press conference today, November 6, following the passage of his infrastructure bill in the House of Representatives late last night. (Samuel Corum \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

While it\u2019s still unclear exactly what the Democratic Party\u2019s reconciliation package will look like in its final form, the bill originally pitched as a monster $6 trillion banquet of public investment now looks set to come in at less than a third of that number. Amid what is obviously a climbdown from the more far-reaching agenda the White House pitched earlier this earlier, however, some Democratic partisans have adopted a kind of glass-half-full rhetorical strategy: essentially arguing that the bill, whatever its faults and limitations, still represents the best of activist government on a large scale, akin in many ways to Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s Great Society.<\/p>\n

The most clearly articulated version of the argument, and quite probably the original source of what\u2019s become a common talking point, came from<\/a> White House chief of staff Ron Klain, who recently offered the following reply to a reporter tweeting about the lacerating cuts that continue to be made to the bill:<\/p>\n

It’s twice as big, in real dollars, as the New Deal was. This can be the Congress that goes from 12 years of universal education to 14 years; that makes the largest investment in fighting climate change ever; that cuts what families pay for child care in half.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Klain is, of course, doing his job, which in this case involves spinning a drastically pared-down piece of legislation as historic and transformative. Nonetheless, given how its central claim has been taken up by some liberal partisans, it\u2019s worth examining this spin a bit more closely. With this in mind, I put the question to historian Harvey Kaye, who has written extensively<\/a> on both the presidency of FDR and the New Deal.<\/p>\n

The first and most obvious issue with drawing dollar comparisons to the New Deal era in 2021 is that the country has changed pretty radically since the 1930s. \u201cThe United States population through the course of the Roosevelt administration,\u201d he points out, \u201cwas at its peak about 130 million. The population of the United States today is about<\/a> 330 million. So you can talk all you about the real dollars, but we should be talking about it in terms of something like per capita expenditures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, simply adjusting for inflation ignores the massive growth of real incomes since the 1930s. To be as effective as the original Works Progress Administration<\/a> (WPA), which in the 1930s hired unemployed workers to deliver services, a modern-day version could not simply take the original WPA wage and adjust it for 1935\u20132021 inflation; that would give today\u2019s beneficiaries a monthly wage of, on average, about $840, in exchange for full-time work \u2014\u00a0well below today\u2019s federal minimum.<\/p>\n

In addition, while the New Deal wasn\u2019t a single bill or piece of legislation but rather a suite of new programs and social expenditures that together forged a new economic and political consensus, we might \u2014 taking Klain\u2019s claim at face value\u00a0\u2014 consider how the current package measures up to the programs and spending of the New Deal era when you factor in the growth of US GDP.<\/p>\n

Last month, CNBC\u2019s Greg Iacurci offered up some useful numbers<\/a> vis-\u00e0-vis social spending during both the 1930s and the 1960s:<\/p>\n

By 1939, the share of federal social-welfare spending hit a New Deal-era peak of 3.6% of GDP, according to an analysis by Price Fishback, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies New Deal political economy. That\u2019s a 2.7-percentage-point increase relative to 1933. In 1963, social spending was 4.1% of GDP; by 1973, it had jumped to 7.4%, an increase of 3.3 points, Fishback said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By comparison, the $3.5-trillion-over-ten-years version of Joe Biden\u2019s plan would have represented a rise in spending roughly equivalent to 1.5 percent of the country\u2019s current GDP of $22.7 trillion<\/a> \u2014 smaller than the analogous increases during the Roosevelt and Johnson eras. With the proposed figure<\/a> for the current reconciliation package now coming in at less than $2 trillion, we\u2019re potentially talking about an even smaller increase.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem with trying to draw comparisons between the present moment and the 1930s, however, is that the scope of something like the New Deal can\u2019t actually be captured in purely quantitative terms. As Kaye explains:<\/p>\n

When Ron Klain makes that kind of remark, it\u2019s another example of liberals just utterly misunderstanding the significance of the New Deal. They grab hold of it as if the New Deal was just a matter of legislating some programs and spending a lot of money, when in fact it was a vast mobilization of labor and a vast empowerment of working people. FDR actually said, \u201cNew laws unto themselves do not bring the millennium.\u201d In other words, \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to fight now.\u201d So when they say things like \u201cwe\u2019re spending more than the New Deal spent,\u201d which is nonsense to begin with, they\u2019re just completely leaving out that it was a vast mobilization and class struggle was at the heart of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whatever its limitations may have been, then, the New Deal was premised on and enabled by a kind of political militancy that is nowhere to be found during the Biden era. It\u2019s true that FDR commanded much bigger congressional majorities than Biden (though he also openly sought confrontation with powerful interests and had to overcome considerable opposition). In any case, whatever its merits remain once the Democrats\u2019 reconciliation package finally goes to a vote on the floors of the House and Senate, there\u2019s virtually no chance it will represent anything as transformative or lasting as the New Deal \u2014 nor anything \u201ctwice as big.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While it\u2019s still unclear exactly what the Democratic Party\u2019s reconciliation package will look like in its final form, the bill originally pitched as a monster $6 trillion banquet of public investment now looks set to come in at less than a third of that number. Amid what is obviously a climbdown from the more far-reaching [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1840,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1840"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":377714,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377713\/revisions\/377714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}