I've made this point before, but I want to say it again to bang it into people's heads: BBB was wildly unprecedented. Nothing like it has ever been done in American history.
There were three things that made it so. First, depending on how you count, it created seven or eight big new programs in a single bill. Child care. Pre-K. Climate. Obamacare. Paid leave. Long-term care. Expanded, work-free child tax credit. Hearing and vision in Medicare.
In the past, any one of these would have been a major victory for liberals. The prospect of getting half a dozen of them in one go was breathtaking.
Second, it was expensive. The initial version of the bill probably would have cost more than $500 billion per year, though that number depends a lot on what assumptions you make. Even the cut-down final bill, using realistic assumptions instead of smoke and mirrors, probably would have come to $300 billion or so.
This amounts to 1-2% of GDP compared to less than 1% of GDP annually for FDR's New Deal during its first decade. So the plan was to pass a bill that was astonishing in scope and cost more than the New Deal.
Third, this was to be done in a Senate with precisely 50 Democrats, not FDR's 60 in 1933 (soon to be 70 in 1935).
This was crazy! What on earth convinced liberals that they could pass something like this? And why did so many of them consider it a vast betrayal as it eventually got cut down to "only" three or four big programs? Even that would have represented the biggest boost to the liberal program in decades. It would have been cause for celebration no matter which programs eventually made the cut.
So why did it go down the way it did? This isn't really about taking sides in the endless and tedious portioning of blame between centrists and lefties. After all, the vast majority of both supported the full bill. In the end, just as political science and common sense suggests, it was brought down by the two or three most conservative Democrats in the Senate.
As Mario Cuomo told us, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Bernie Sanders understands this. After campaigning on the promise of a progressive revolution, he's been Mr. Pragmatic during the tortuous journey of BBB. He knew from the start that Joe Manchin would be the eventual bottleneck, and despite the occasional outburst it's obvious that he accepted this.
Long story short, we should all stop feeling like the world has collapsed around us—and drop all the circular firing squad crap while we're at it. Manchin says he's open to further talks in January, and I wouldn't be surprised if they finally produce a compromise of three or four fully funded programs along with enough offsetting tax hikes to make the bill more-or-less revenue neutral.
And if this happens? "Only" three or four programs? Then pop the champagne. No other president in recent memory has done anything like this. And by any reasonable standard, it would make Joe Manchin quite a liberal senator.
It's hard to believe Rattner used this chart, and equally hard to believe that the Times let it through. Rattner is showing nominal wage growth even though wages should always be adjusted for inflation. If your pay goes up 2% but inflation goes up 10%, you're not going to be bragging about how much more money you're making.
As you can see, real wages have gone steadily down all year. It's true that workers at the bottom did better than anyone else, but that only means their wages didn't decline as much.
