$1.9 Trillion Stimulus Bill Is Latest Example of ‘never Letting a Serious Crisis Go to Waste’

Rahm Emanuel, as chief of staff to President-elect Obama, famously said in late 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” Dubbed “Rahm’s rule,” that principle continues to inform policy responses to the coronavirus, including a significant part of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill advancing quickly in Congress.

The response to the coronavirus already includes longstanding Democratic legislative priorities like federal paid leave, expanded unemployment checks, and increased food stamp benefits. But at least those policies so far have been connected with the pandemic or elevated unemployment. Some of the latest stimulus plans are designed as permanent benefit expansions that have little to do with the pandemic in the first place.

Consider the proposal expected to be considered by the House this week to convert the current child tax credit into a larger “child allowance,” payable to all parents on a monthly basis “in 2021.” That plan has nothing to do with the pandemic, its benefits wouldn’t even start being paid until July (when stimulus advocates expect unemployment to be headed well below current levels), and it is based on policy proposals that were debated for years before the pandemic struck. Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, the plan “would only create the new benefit for one year, but congressional Democrats and White House officials have said they would push for the policy to be made permanent later in the year.” With a temporary cost approaching $110 billion, making this policy permanent would cost well over $1 trillion over 10 years. The legislation includes no offsets for that enormous cost.

That’s just one of the “unrelated policies,” as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts it, included in the stimulus bill that “have little to do with the current crisis and were long-standing priorities prior to the pandemic”:

Policymakers used to rely on automatic stabilizers like rising unemployment benefits and food stamp payments to stimulate the economy when need grew. Then, for decades, they legislated additional temporary stimulus during recessions, such as by extending the duration of unemployment checks. Now some are using current conditions to justify what they intend to be permanent benefit expansions that have “little to do with the current crisis,” as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget charitably puts it. It’s hard to imagine a more extreme application of “never letting a serious crisis go to waste.”