The Dems’ Self-Defeating Self-Negotiation

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Few things have been more frustrating than watching the Dems negotiate their two big infrastructure bills among themselves. They’ve let themselves be sucker-punched by Republicans and Joe Manchin.

Not only do they seem to have no idea why or how. They don’t even seem to feel the pain.

Two facts are not just relevant but crucial. First, the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill enjoys such overwhelming popularity among all voters that it was reportedly able to garner 69 votes in the Senate, even in the current dysfunctional, hyper-partisan climate. Second, although less well known, the “Build Back Better” bill—the so-called “partisan,” “soft” or “social” infrastructure bill—also enjoys wide popularity.

So if Dems want to expand their majorities in Congress and make sure that the Demagogue never holds the White House again, the very best thing they can do is turn popular support for both infrastructure bills into laws that magnify Joe Biden’s presidency. They can do that by emphasizing what the bills will do, in real life, both for Dems and former Dems who went Republican because the Demagogue promised them so-far-elusive magic.

Yet what have the Dems done so far? They’ve let the GOP and Joe Manchin limit the debate to the price tags.

That approach beggars both effective strategy and common sense. Every seller of goods knows that you discuss price last. So does everyone who’s ever negotiated with a spouse or parent over a desirable but costly purchase. You first establish how desirable the purchase or investment is and all the good it can do. Then you get to the price.

But even that’s only half the story. In this case, discussing price first is catastrophically dumb because it falls right into the GOP’s routine propaganda game plan. It lends itself to GOP-incited fears of deficits and inflation.

Millions of workers left the Dems to vote Republican because they bought a stale bouquet of vapid abstractions and forgot their own real interests. For a decade or more, the has GOP sold nothing real for workers—not improved health care, not a bigger minimum wage, not better collective bargaining, not getting 60,000 factories back from China, not a clampdown on discrimination against police misconduct, harassment and discrimination against women and minorities, and definitely not keeping tech monopolies from throwing their weight around and abusing workers and small businesses like medieval empires. Instead, the GOP has sold workers “smaller government” (smaller than what?), “lower taxes” (lower for whom?), “less regulation” (less than what?) and “liberty” (which can mean anything from freedom to practice your religion to the right to kill yourself with Covid by refusing vaccines).

Price tags aren’t real to the average Republican voter, let alone a Dem. At least they aren’t when they’re in the trillions. The average voter has as good a grasp of what a trillion dollars means as how far a light-year is. All those price tags do is scare people, which is precisely what Republicans want.

What voters need to know is what the infrastructure bills will do for them. Not how many trillions they will cost, but whether they’ll give the average family $150 more per week for child care, or their newborns free birth-to-kindergarten education, to match the free public K-through-12 education that once put the US among the world’s most advanced societies. Voters want to know that their Congress reads the news and understands that science now considers early-childhood education one of the most powerful predictors of children’s success in life.

Our nation is not (yet) like a poor family, which can afford only so much and has to budget everything. There is enough flexibility in our financing to consider what we want and how we can get it before we start talking price. If the Dems discuss price at all at this stage, they should do so privately, without a word about the bottom line leaking to the public. They should be discussing all that they should invest to fill at least part of the void of multi-decade disinvestment in physical infrastructure and our people.

When a deal emerges, Dems should avoid mentioning the ten-year “top line” as scrupulously as GOP leaders reiterate the nonsense phrase “job-killing taxes.” [See Endnote below.] Why? Because the top line applies over an entire decade—a point most voters don’t understand. I don’t know any household that budgets for ten years at a time. Does yours?

If the top line comes out as $2.5 trillion over ten years, Dems should report it as “$250 billion per year, as compared to $778 billion for the military in 2020, and $1.059 trillion for Social Security payments and administration in 2019.” Then, without stopping for breath, they should cite how much of this relief will be paid for by tax increases. Last, and most important, they should enumerate what the money will be used for, in the order of importance to working voters, especially right-leaning ones.

Dems should repeat relentlessly and incessantly what voters will get. This, of course, will require the disputatious Dems, uncharacteristically, to show a bit of discipline and zip their lips for the time being. They must work this out first in lengthy negotiations. In the meantime, they can enumerate the things they think the GOP base will want most, as long as they are sure there will be some money in the final bills for each of those things.

Dems, especially moderates, should work hard to figure out what swing voters want most. Here’s my estimate of their priorities, not my own: (1) guaranteed family leave; (2) continuing child support (perhaps based on need); (3) universal free community college; (4) free early-childhood education (universal pre-K) and subsidized child care; (5) disaster relief, including strengthening infrastructure against wildfires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes; (6) climate-change mitigation; and (7) climate change deceleration, including things like electric-car chargers. (Note that climate change deceleration is the last priority, although not so in my own list.)

Finally, the Dems need to borrow a page from the GOP persuaders’ book. It’s not duplicitous to emphasize different things to different audiences, as long as everything ends up in the bill with greater-than-token funding and the eventual bottom line (seldom mentioned) is right. The Dems can and should make different persuasive efforts, with different lists of priorities (not in order of funding), to: (1) the GOP base; (2) moderate Dems, (3) progressive Dems, and (4) the constituents of the Senate holdouts, including Sens. Manchin and Sinema.

Now, however, is a time to think and bargain in private. The time for posturing, play-acting and nonsense propaganda will come once the Build Back Better bill takes shape. Premature release of a bill this important makes its survival as difficult as premature birth does a baby’s.

The part of the electorate that has swallowed GOP propaganda for years may be unreachable. But not entirely. For a substantial part of the GOP base, polls show a growing cognitive dissonance between routine GOP nonsense and what voters want to see in their own lives.

Most voters—especially non-college-educated voters in the new GOP base of lower-paid working people—are poor judges of abstract arguments, nonsense or otherwise. They are not poor judges of their own needs.

Therefore the Dems need to come up with an accurate list of benefits to be included in both bills, but especially the Build Back Better Act. Numbers are secondary.

Tell voters, as soon as possible, what you are going to do. Then itemize it, not in terms of government expense, but in terms of benefits to the typical or average voter. If government expenses must be dislosed, state them as yearly expenses, not ten-year totals. Voters will thank congressional leaders for making things simple and more like their own households’ finances.

At the end of the day, the ten-year total is only a phantom. Many voters will be dead before, if ever, the final bill comes due. And the actual final bill is as uncertain as the future. It will depend on such unknowable things as future interest rates, future presidential and congressional action, disasters and pandemics, financial panics, international tension, supply-line diversification and rationalization, future innovations and industrial disruptions, future climate-spawned disasters, and maybe even new wars.

So tell the voters what they’ll be getting and what the cost will be next year and the year after, in the order they want to hear. Then leave the crystal ball—including the eventual total bill—with prophets and the CBO.

Endnote: “Job-Killing Taxes.” No matter how often Republicans repeat it, this phrase is pernicious nonsense. Taxes that support government programs pay for jobs in government, doing all the policing, soldiering, testing, regulating, teaching and scientific research that have produced, and/or continue to produce, the following government achievements: (1) helping fight and beat the Nazis and Imperial Japan; (2) inventing, perfecting and maintaining the nuclear weapons that have deterred wars between major powers fighting on their own territory for 76 years and counting; (3) resolving major financial panics and recessions with fiscal and monetary policy after private industry failed miserably in preventing them (including, among others, the Great Depression, the recent Great Recession and the receding pandemic-caused recession); (4) developing and/or supporting private development of (a) high-altitude flight, (b) space travel, and (c) the Internet; (5) providing support and supervision for the development of, and ensuring the safety and efficacy of, drugs, medical devices and vaccines, including those for smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, seasonal flu, cervical cancer, and Covid-19, (6) keeping our workplaces safe and healthy (OSHA), our food free of contaminants and nutritious (USDA and FDA), and our soil, air and water cleansed of the worst known pollutants (EPA); (7) providing a floor of protection against fraudulent, coercive and otherwise illegal conduct by private businesses (DOJ, FDA, CFPB); (8) keeping tabs on our major storms, hurricanes and tornadoes (NOAA), plus earthquakes and volcano eruptions (Geological Survey), and warning us of them when possible; (9) and maintaining basic rules against discrimination among and harassment of workers in private businesses and in state and federal government (DOJ and EEOC).

If taxes go to toward our “safety nets,” to rescue desperate people in difficult circumstances (as in the recent pandemic with the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021), or simply for the aged (as in Social Security and Medicare), they go right back into the economy as spending on necessities. Why? Most of the people who receive this help live hand to mouth and spend most or all of what they receive.

In contrast, money that corporations and the rich save by evading taxes, whether legally or not, often goes into passive investment and savings, where it can languish outside the general economy for years. This money does little but inflate the prices of securities, making the rich richer and doing little or nothing for the poor.

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