[While Republicans threaten to bring the government to a halt,
Democrats are caving in to the austerity measures they demand.]
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AMERICANS HAVE ALREADY LIVED THROUGH A SHUTDOWN  
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September 29, 2023
Chris Lehmann
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_ While Republicans threaten to bring the government to a halt,
Democrats are caving in to the austerity measures they demand. _

President Joe Biden talks with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy
(R-Calif.), as he departs the Capitol following the annual St.
Patrick’s Day gathering, in Washington, March 17, 2023., J. Scott
Applewhite, File / AP Photo

 

This fall, as Washington geared up for the recurring spectacle of
another prospective shutdown of the federal government, many Americans
were experiencing a different shutdown—one already in its final
stages. With the retirement of the $52 billion childcare stabilization
program at the end of September, the last vestiges of the Covid-era
welfare state have been expunged. Earlier casualties of America’s
reversion to the old, austerian normal included the wildly popular and
effective child tax credit, which netted more than $160 billion in
annual tax savings for working families during the pandemic, as well
as expanded Medicaid and SNAP benefits that helped to ensure that
ordinary Americans could reliably access food, shelter, and healthcare
during the economic perils of the lockdown. Meanwhile, during the
debt-ceiling negotiations this past spring, the Biden administration
agreed to suspend the Covid pause on student loan payments, plunging
some 44 million Americans into renewed economic insecurity.

The impact of these myopic policy decisions has been immediate and
devastating. The child tax credit, in particular, helped spark a
record reduction in child poverty, and its cessation at the end of
2021 caused that grim social metric to more than double—from 5.2
percent that year to 12.4 percent in 2022, according to recent census
data. Look for that trend to worsen with this year’s withdrawal of
federal childcare support.

This baleful reversion to a Dickensian neoliberal consensus on the
provision of basic income supports is a pressing material disaster for
millions upon millions of working Americans. It’s also close to the
textbook definition of an unforced political error for the Biden
administration and the Democratic Party’s policy elite. Even as
broad macroeconomic indicators such as employment and wage growth
continue to support a robust overall economic picture, Biden’s poll
numbers remain mired in the low 40s—a clear sign that most Americans
don’t believe they’re living in a prosperous middle-class social
order. Indeed, a recent Quinnipiac University poll even had a majority
of respondents agreeing that Donald Trump would be a better leader in
a national emergency than Biden—by a jarring 10 percent margin.
“We’re seeing a withdrawal of pandemic support while inflation is
still high—and when we certainly haven’t had deflation, people’s
incomes haven’t kept up with that,” says Marshall Steinbaum, an
economist at the University of Utah. “So this whole alleged mystery
of why Biden’s poll numbers are bad—that’s laughable. A lot of
people drank the Kool-Aid as to the transformativeness of this
administration’s economic policies, and now they’re kind of left
saying, ‘Wait, no one agrees with this grand vision I’ve conjured
out of nothing?’”

This ideological tunnel vision is also unlikely to produce economic or
political gains from a confrontation with the Republican House
majority in a government shutdown—especially given the precedent of
this administration’s capitulation on the student loan pause in the
debt ceiling negotiations. “Given what the Republicans got on
childcare and student debt, what they will do is keep targeting
Democratic constituencies who will be betrayed by a Democratic
administration,” Steinbaum says. “They’re carefully picking off
all Democratic constituencies. And what’s galling about the politics
of it is that the Democrats just expect people to be thankful for it
not being worse. So Republicans are thinking, ‘We got a big betrayal
of the Democratic constituency in May, and now we can do that in
October’—all laying the groundwork for Trump’s reelection.”

In order to forestall this death by a thousand budget cuts, the Biden
administration would have to effectively call the bluff of House
Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the anti-government ghouls who pull his
strings. Bill Clinton supplied an object lesson in this kind of
brinkmanship during the 1995–96 federal shutdown, which stretched
into the holiday season. When vacationing Americans found that they
could no longer visit national parks, the GOP-run Congress knew that
its hard-line posture was politically unsustainable and caved soon
thereafter.

Any comparable outcome seems unlikely this time around, in view of how
extensively Biden and his supporters in Congress have already disarmed
themselves on Covid outlays before the battle was truly joined. “The
Democratic political consensus is that we have to be the party of
order—for the people who believe the system is working,” Steinbaum
says. “So using the political system to punish your enemies is
totally antithetical to that. You see that in Democratic messaging
about the Supreme Court: Any time you propose directly challenging the
unlawful power of the court, the response is ‘Well, we can’t do
that—that’s what the autocrats do.’”

Part of the reason that working families are so vulnerable in a
shutdown fight is that Biden’s signature economic
programs—codified in the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS
Act—didn’t take up the challenge of extending or expanding the
Covid welfare state. “The American Rescue Act, the IRA, and
CHIPS—25 percent of all three bills is going to road repair, road
construction, and bridges,” says Robert Pollin, who codirects the
Political Economy Research Institute at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. “There are good climate provisions there, but
there’s nothing for sustaining the family investments in the
American Rescue Act, and that could have been integrated into this.”
Instead, feckless conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and
Kyrsten Sinema (now an independent) killed off an extension of the
child tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act.

These are painful failures and omissions for a White House keen to
depict itself as a direct successor to the social democratic
policymaking of the New Deal. “The New Dealers were consciously
thumbing their nose at a political establishment that was hostile and
punishing it for its hostility,” Steinbaum says. “Today, for all
the time Democrats have spent patting themselves on the back for
pandemic-era policies and how great they were, there was no thought of
mobilizing a constituency behind that.”

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_CHRIS LEHMANN is the D.C. Bureau chief for The Nation and a
contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor
of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most
recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the
Unmaking of the American Dream
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2016)._

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American journalism._

* federal government
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* Shutdown
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* childcare
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* Medicaid
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* SNAP
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* student loans
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* Child Poverty
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* Democrats
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* House Republicans
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