No wonder prominent Democrats have been unwilling to criticize the looting that has plagued so many large U.S. cities. They were planning to do some looting themselves—of taxpayers.
We’re glad that President Trump and his coronavirus relief package negotiators, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, were willing and able to walk away from the hold up.
As Trump said after his failed discussions with North Korea last year, “Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times.”
This latest round of coronavirus relief negotiations was another one of those times.
Democrats thought they were holding all of the cards and could extract a $3 trillion raid on the taxpayer. Republicans thought a $1 trillion raid was enough.
To be clear: The reason Democrats are so willing to spend an extra $3 trillion, on top of the roughly $3 trillion Congress has already authorized in four separate bills, is they believe they will have a stronger case for raising taxes under President Joe Biden, who has laid out a plan for nearly $4 trillion in new taxes.
In short: A vote for higher coronavirus spending is a vote for higher taxes.
We are disappointed, however, that nixing the negotiations for now means there is no pandemic-related liability reform, which was one of the most helpful proposals.
As the recent jobs report documented, companies are hiring again. And companies might be hiring even more if they were convinced that trial lawyers didn’t see their efforts to open safely as cash cow to be milked.
Whether Trump should have jumped into executive-order overdrive is another question.
If his four executive orders were essentially an effort to force Democrats, concerned they might not get any credit for helping struggling Americans right before an election, back to the table, then it might be a reasonable tactic.
But IPI strongly opposed President “Pen and a Phone” Obama’s foray into pushing out questionable, if not unconstitutional, executive orders when he couldn’t get a Republican Congress to do his bidding. We warned at the time that it would open the door for future presidents to double down. And here we are.
For our part, if the Democrats are not willing to cut their demands dramatically, then no deal is better than an outrageously expensive one. Another $3 trillion in spending is bad; $4 trillion in new taxes is worse.
August 11, 2020