Behind Biden’s Big Plans: Belief That Government Can Drive Growth

Some economists consider the latest spending plan an overkill response to the temporary, albeit severe, hit from the pandemic and lockdowns. They call recent stirrings in the bond market a warning that the vast increase in government spending and borrowing might prompt a return to the high- inflation/high-interest-rate stagnation of the late 1970s and early 1980s— conditions that fed the long-lasting backlash to expansive FDR-LBJ policies in the first place. “They’re creating too much demand when it’s not needed. When demand runs away from supply, you get inflation,” Multi trillion-dollar spending program would reverse Reagan-era tacit understanding that public sector is less efficient than the private in allocating resources

By and March 30, 2021 11:37 am ET

WASHINGTON—President Biden envisions long-term federal spending claiming its biggest share of the American economy in decades. He wants to pay for that program in part by charging the highest-earning Americans the biggest tax rates they’ve faced in years.

The Biden economic team’s ambitions go beyond size to scope. The centerpiece of their program—a multitrillion-dollar proposal to be rolled out starting Wednesday, less than a month after a $1.9 trillion stimulus—seeks to give Washington a new commercial role in matters ranging from charging stations for electric vehicles to child care, and more responsibility for underwriting education, incomes and higher-paying jobs.

The administration has also laid the groundwork for regulations aimed at empowering labor unions, restricting big businesses from dominating their markets and prodding banks to lend more to minorities and less for fossil- fuel projects. All while federal debt is currently at a level not seen since World War II.

It all marks a major turning point for economic policy. The gamble underlying the agenda is a belief that government can be a primary driver for growth. It’s an attempt to recalibrate assumptions that have shaped economic policy of both parties since the 1980s: that the public sector is inherently less efficient than the private, and bureaucrats should generally defer to markets.

The administration’s sweeping plans reflect a calculation that “the risk of doing too little outweighs the risk of doing too much,” said White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese. “We’re going to be unapologetic about that,” he said. “Government must be a powerful force for good in the lives of Americans.”

The pandemic and lockdown measures that followed have become a Rorschach test for the new economic debate. Former President Donald Trump argued that the booming economy of 2019 and early 2020 was proof his tax-cutting, deregulating agenda was the best for spurring broadly shared prosperity, and he portrayed the coronavirus and lockdowns as a temporary disruption. The Biden team sees the pandemic as exposing myriad flaws and fragilities that liberals had long identified in the economy, masked by prosperity.

Mr. Biden himself casts his program as a throwback to Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s Great Society and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal. “This is the first time we’ve been able to, since the Johnson administration and maybe even before that, to begin to change the paradigm,” he said at a White House event in mid-March. Mr. Biden recently spoke with a group of prominent American historians, and his aides have studied FDR’s presidency as they plan his economic agenda.

Mr. Biden’s big plans raise big questions, and big risks. He faces an uphill battle to win over a narrowly divided Congress, with solid Republican opposition plus hesitancy among Democratic moderates who blanch at higher taxes and more spending following nearly $5 trillion in coronavirus relief outlays over the past year.

Conservative-tilting courts, increasingly skeptical of executive authority, might block some of his initiatives. Already, a coalition of Republican state attorneys general has sued to challenge some provisions of the stimulus program and some of his executive orders.

Some economists consider the latest spending plan an overkill response to the temporary, albeit severe, hit from the pandemic and lockdowns. They call recent stirrings in the bond market a warning that the vast increase in government spending and borrowing might prompt a return to the high- inflation/high-interest-rate stagnation of the late 1970s and early 1980s— conditions that fed the long-lasting backlash to expansive FDR-LBJ policies in the first place.

“They’re creating too much demand when it’s not needed. When demand runs away from supply, you get inflation,” said Kevin Hassett, a former Trump chief economic adviser now at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “The laws of economics can’t be repealed,” he said.

The Biden agenda rests on the notion those laws have evolved. “There appear to have been a broad-based set of structural changes that have had a very significant effect on how the economy works,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said. “There are a lot of ways in which I think our understanding of the economy has shifted.”

Biden's Big Spending Vision

During the 2020 presidential campaign, President Joe Biden laid out an agenda that a push long-term federal spending as a share of the economy to the highest level in dec

Spending and revenue as percentage of GDP

 Source: Cornerstone Macro analysis of Biden campaign agenda, the American Rescue Management and Budget, Congressional Budget Office

She cited persistently low interest rates and low inflation, defying many conventional forecasts, as reasons to feel more relaxed than before about federal borrowing and low unemployment rates. Ms. Yellen says there’s little sign inflation is in danger of escalating, and is confident that if it does, the Federal Reserve has the tools to contain it.

The administration’s policies are rooted in economic research focused on perceived free-market flaws, much of it conducted and funded by young, left-leaning economists and activists now scattered throughout the administration. Much of the Biden economic agenda is built around the conclusion that climate change in particular is a private-sector breakdown requiring extensive government intervention.

Before joining the Biden Council of Economic Advisers, Heather Boushey ran the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank devoted to persuading economists and policy makers to take action reducing income inequality. To her and many of her colleagues, the pandemic validates their studies on market failures.

“We’ve talked about inequality—it seems like an abstract concept, but in 2020, this notion of the K-shaped economy became so real,” Ms. Boushey said. She was referring to a recovery where the fortunes of upper-income families—able to keep their jobs, work from home and enjoy gains in their stock portfolios—rose like the letter’s upward-sloping part, while lower- income families were unable to keep jobs in hard-hit service industries such as restaurants.

Plans for selling the administration proposals lean heavily on fears of losing out to China’s model of state-driven capitalism, a concern that resonates across the political spectrum. “China is out-investing us by a long shot, because their plan is to own that future,” Mr. Biden said recently in previewing his program.

  In a Wednesday speech in Pittsburgh, the president is preparing to unveil the first part of an economic proposal that would cost $3 trillion or more over 10 years and might be split into multiple pieces of legislation, with more coming in April. The first measure will focus on infrastructure, climate change, domestic manufacturing and research and development. Mr. Biden will find ways to pay for the full cost of the first measure, the White House has said. The second measure will center on child care, healthcare and education.

 ‘There are a lot of ways in which I think our understanding of the economy has shifted,’ said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

The multipart package would include higher taxes on corporations, upper- income households and investors. It will call for huge investments in infrastructure and climate programs and provide for universal prekindergarten and tuition-free community college, people familiar with the plan said.

Most Republicans are expected to oppose it, and the president’s advisers are already discussing options for continuing to move some of his proposals without GOP support, including through the process known as budget reconciliation.

Mike Donilon, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, acknowledged the challenges but argued the public supports action. “I don’t think the country is in much mood for relentless obstructionism,” he said.

Critics of big-government projects have long argued that bureaucrats are less skilled than market forces in allocating resources. “What they’re trying to do is re-establish government as a major positive force in the economy, and I believe government is a massive negative force” in it, said Stephen Moore, a former Trump economic adviser. “There really is a micromanagement of the economy from the left.”

Presidents of both parties, hesitant to micromanage, have long steered away from anything smacking of an industrial policy that attempts to bolster specific industries. Biden aides are more willing to target and support certain industries such as the health and high-tech sectors. “We are committed to using the levers of government to encourage more domestic production,” Mr. Deese said.

President Biden held notes on infrastructure while speaking during a news conference in the East Room of the White House on March 25.

The president’s budget and regulatory proposals could disrupt major industries, boosting renewable-energy companies over fossil-fuel firms and expanding markets for emerging technologies. Business groups and Republicans warn that new regulations could stifle growth.

Mr. Biden’s stimulus bill added to federal debt that had already hit peacetime records under Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden has said his full agenda will ultimately be aimed at curbing government borrowing, through tax increases and savings in medical spending.

That will be a challenge. Federal debt, which reached 100% of gross domestic product last fiscal year for the first time since 1946, is expected to rise to a record 107% of economic output by 2031, according to the Congressional Budget Office, fueling concerns that future generations will get stuck with the bill. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in March that the federal government can manage its debt at current levels, but policy makers should seek to slow its growth once the economy is stronger.

The long-dominant paradigm Mr. Biden and aides want to change is one widely branded neoliberalism, framed by Ronald Reagan, who declared in his 1981 inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He ushered in an era of tax cuts, deregulation and federal programs increasingly designed to work through market forces. That was followed by two of the longest expansions in American history, in the 1980s and the 1990s.

While Democrats controlled the White House for nearly half the time since then, their policies often were constrained by the core Reagan principles, in the view of many progressives. Bill Clinton tried to juggle liberal goals with a focus on balancing the budget, expanding free trade, and deregulating the financial sector. Barack Obama created a new government health program, but to the chagrin of the left, worked through private insurers. His 2009 program to fight the recession was constrained by fears of big deficits.

“For decades now, people have talked about economics as running against government, ignoring how much we need government to be able to build out opportunities,” said Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who, as an Obama adviser, often tangled with his aides over how aggressively to rein in Wall Street and support homeowners slammed by the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

A majority of Americans in 2020 told Gallup that government should do more to solve problems. Over the previous three decades, more people said government was doing too much.

pandemic hit, raised questions about how broadly prosperity gets shared absent government intervention. The swift loss of manufacturing jobs undermined support for free trade. China’s success and Wall Street’s collapse in the financial crisis further sowed doubts about free markets.

Republicans, too, have faced internal challenges to the party’s free-market orientation. Mr. Trump won the presidency in part by attacking

bipartisan support for globalization. In office, he launched a trade war with China, regularly criticized big business and intervened to force domestic investments and pressure companies to relocate manufacturing to the U.S. and cut prices of drugs.

“Some establishment Republicans are too willing to do nothing at all with government. They see an all-natural, organic market having its way,” said Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley. Mr. Hawley, a Trump supporter and possible presidential contender, has called for tougher antitrust laws to break up big tech companies and co-sponsored a bill last year with Mr. Sanders to give households $1,200 direct payments.

The first-term senator voted against the latest stimulus bill and opposes many of Mr. Biden’s policies, but he also says that “old-style conservatives have been too quick to wave away policies to strengthen American workers and promote competition rather than monopolies.”             

 Trends such as wealth disparities and wage stagnation animated the presidential candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, seen here speaking at a rally in Manchester, N.H., in August 2015.

While many of those urging an economic rethink are relatively new voices in the debate, some pillars of the establishment have evolved, including former senior economic aides in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Another Washington veteran whose positions have changed: Joe Biden.

Elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29, Mr. Biden ousted a Republican incumbent in part by casting himself as more attuned to the needs of the middle class, a theme that became a through-line of his career. He has long espoused the importance of unions, small businesses and a strong working class.

Mr. Biden juggled those causes with a belief in the need to curb government spending and cut taxes. He voted for Mr. Reagan’s historic 1981 tax cuts and backed spending ceilings for most agencies through the 1980s and a balanced-budget constitutional amendment in the 1990s. He regularly floated the idea of limiting Social Security and Medicare.

"For years, a lot of us subscribed to the notion that Milton Friedman warned us about,” that government would harm the economy if it didn’t take a light- touch approach to business, said former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, a longtime Biden friend, referring to the economist who helped define the small-government neoliberal philosophy.

As Mr. Obama’s vice president during the financial crisis, Mr. Biden walked a tightrope between pushing for spending, especially on infrastructure, and taking the lead in negotiating with Republicans to limit the extent of government expansion. Toward the end of his term, the persistently slow recovery prompted the vice president and his aides to launch a study of wage stagnation, income inequality and ways the government could steer business to do more for workers. That work planted the seeds for his current program.

Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate from Delaware in 1972 after a campaign in which he cast himself as attuned to the needs of the working class.

Mr. Biden started his 2019 presidential bid determined to lay out more of a big-government agenda than recent Democrats had espoused. But much of the primary field had moved even farther left. He emerged once again as the fiscal scold warning of excessive spending.

The arrival of the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd marked a turning point for Mr. Biden, according to his advisers, bringing into focus what his aides describe as his longstanding desire to “go big.”

Mr. Biden tapped his longtime friend and successor as Delaware senator, Ted Kaufman, to run the transition, and in helping assemble the economic team, Mr. Kaufman said his team focused on people steeped in new economic thinking and steered away from business executives.

“I looked at people who had internalized what Joe Biden’s policy was about, and Joe Biden’s policy was not about taking care of Wall Street or people making over $400,000 a year,” Mr. Kaufman said.

The middle ranks of the administration are filled with academics and activists who have spent the past few years honing a framework for progressive economic policy-making. In March 2019, many of them gathered at a Washington conference called “Bold v. Old.” A panel on toughening antitrust enforcement was led by Jennifer Harris, an official with the Hewlett Foundation—a philanthropy created by one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard Co. —overseeing a program funding researchers seeking to replace the neoliberal paradigm. She was joined by Lina Khan, a young law professor known for laying out the case for breaking up Amazon.com Inc., and Sabeel Rahman, president of Demos, a progressive think tank.

Ms. Harris has joined the Biden National Economic Council. Ms. Khan has been nominated to the Federal Trade Commission. Mr. Rahman works at the Office of Management and Budget.

Few of those new-generation policy makers supported Mr. Biden in the primaries. One of Mr. Deese’s deputies, Bharat Ramamurti, who was Ms. Warren’s chief campaign policy adviser, says the party is now largely unified on economic policy.

    A change in the Biden approach to economics is a re-evaluation of the costs of government action, which his team says have receded or always been exaggerated. And on the other side of the equation: an assertion that the cost of inaction is greater than previously estimated.

Progressive economists have generated rafts of research, often contested by conservatives, challenging the links between higher tax rates and lower economic activity. “The evidence suggests that the impact of marginal tax rates on labor supply is not as big as we may have once feared,” said Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

justify spending big and fast to try to return to full employment as soon as next year. Some critics, including former Clinton and Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers, have said that spending too aggressively to drive down unemployment could backfire, possibly prompting the Fed to raise interest rates and trigger a recession.

This more relaxed view of previous economic limits has freed the Biden team to plan on a grand scale. They designed a two-step strategy that began with the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which provided $1,400 direct payments to many Americans, extended a $300 weekly jobless-aid supplement, expanded the child tax credit to provide periodic payments and dropped requirements that recipients work.

That was a symbolically significant shift from the Clinton-era move to tie welfare to work and a nod to the burgeoning progressive demands for a no- strings-attached guaranteed government income floor, at least for families with children.

Biden aides are also preparing an aggressive plan of new regulations and enforcement that can be implemented without Congress.

“The president campaigned on concerns about big tech, about labor market competition, about making sure small businesses can compete with the bigger guys,” Mr. Ramamurti said. “The president has a clear agenda there.”

Write to Jacob M. Schlesinger at [email protected]