What Pollsters Should Be Asking about the COVID-Stimulus Bill By David Harsanyi *****
“In this environment, a party with a slim and fleeting majority can ram through multi-trillion-dollar bills with massive inherent costs dumped on an entire country without any genuine debate. It is tragic — and certainly not something to celebrate — that we have an ignorant citizenry cheering on passage of bills that come with generational consequences.”
For starters: ‘Do you support a bill that sends only 7 percent of its funds to help alleviate the effect of COVID?’
T here is overwhelming bipartisan support for the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.” No doubt about it. Every poll says so. The latest Morning Consult poll, for instance, informs us that Americans support the bill by a wide 75–18 percent margin. Among Democrats, it’s 90–5. Among the GOP, it’s 59–35. Among independents, it’s 71–20.
As the Washington Post’s lead “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler put it recently on Twitter, presidents dream “of getting numbers like this for a major piece of legislation — especially if no one from the opposition party votes for it.”
Indeed, they do. But the dream can be made reality only if the media abdicate their responsibility of critically reporting and properly highlighting the partisan boondoggles in trillion-dollar legislation. How popular would the “American Rescue Plan” be if pollsters asked voters grown-up questions rather than push-polling for Democrats?
How about:
- Do you support a “stimulus” bill that bails out cities like San Francisco, whose $650 million-budget shortfall predated the pandemic?
- Do you support the Democrats’ plan to give $570 million in taxpayer dollars to teachers’ unions for “emergency leave” pay, even though most teachers were paid to work from home throughout the pandemic and now stand in the way of reopening schools in your community?
- Do you support the relief bill’s $86 million taxpayer bailout of 185 union pension plans?
- Do you believe a rescue bill should set up a new $570 million family-leave account exclusively for federal workers to pay federal employees who have kids out of school up to $21,000 in emergency leave pay, even though these workers have not lost their jobs or benefits?
- Do you support an emergency-rescue bill that spends a third of proposed funding, around $700 billion, in 2022 or later, rather than right now?
- Do you support a bill that allocates $852 million to “civic volunteer” groups that do not create any jobs and do not provide any relief for coronavirus-related issue?
- Do you support giving $50 million in taxpayer funding for abortion?
- According to the Wall Street Journal, only around 7 percent of the American Rescue Plan’s $1.9 trillion is directed to programs that directly help alleviate the pandemic — which includes testing, contact tracing, and vaccine distribution. Do you believe such a bill even qualifies as “COVID relief?”
- Do you believe that an emergency-relief bill should allocate over $30 billion for grants to the Federal Transit Administration to fund projects that have absolutely nothing to do with COVID-19 or your community?
- Do you believe that the American Rescue Plan should include additional bailouts and subsidies for Obamacare exchanges simply because they are having difficult time attracting customers?
- Do you believe that Congress should find a bipartisan consensus before passing one of the most expensive bills in the history of the United States?
Now, perhaps voters would back the Democrats’ efforts anyway, but one doubts whether even a sliver of those polled by Morning Consult have even a rudimentary comprehension of the 100,000-word bill. It’s the citizens’ responsibility to find out, of course. And Republican messaging has been terrible, as always. It is also true that the public’s ignorance is in large part a result of the death of responsible political journalism. Even when reporting on these billion-dollar tidbits, journalists almost always frame them in Democrats’ terms: “rescue,” “stimulus,” “relief,” and so on.
Take the recent example of a Washington Post piece headlined, “The difference between the Trump tax cuts and the Biden relief bill, in one chart.” The point of the article is to illustrate that Joe Biden’s stimulus bill benefits average Americans far more than Trump’s tax cuts have.
Now, I’ve seen some commentators note that comparing the two efforts is like comparing apples and oranges, which would be true only if apples and oranges were created to do completely different things. Logic dictates that across-the-board federal income-tax cuts passed in times of economic growth will mostly benefit those who pay most of our federal income taxes. At the same time, it is also true that if government sends checks to Americans whose lives have been disrupted and upturned by government decree, they are going to benefit in crude terms.
Comparing a bill that lets people keep what they’ve earned to one that sends them checks is silly. This would be obvious to even a mildly inquisitive middle-schooler. Yet, Philip Bump, a “correspondent” at the Post, relies on a bunch of juvenile charts lifted from the left-wing Tax Policy Center to put a scientific veneer on this absurd argument. Though he needs only one chart to explain it all.
This is what passes for serious journalism these days. Not a hint of skepticism, much less an honest representation of the opposition’s argument, just vacuous gotcha-ism. There is not a single correspondent at the Washington Post who is offering a dissenting opinion. In this environment, a party with a slim and fleeting majority can ram through multi-trillion-dollar bills with massive inherent costs dumped on an entire country without any genuine debate. It is tragic — and certainly not something to celebrate — that we have an ignorant citizenry cheering on passage of bills that come with generational consequences.
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