SINCE JOE BIDEN took office, Democrats have supported federal spending the likes of which the country hasn’t seen in decades—some of which they ’ve actually managed to pass into law. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are right that this agenda has been a far cry from the timid, moderate approach the president ’s recent predecessors took to economic policy.
There are many factors behind this shift, as Hacker and Pierson note. A notable one is that Democrats appear to have internalized a hard-won lesson from the Great Recession: aiming for policies that appear moderate but don’t live up to the scale of a disaster won’t buy them any political favor. All it does is extend mass miser y and put them at risk of taking the blame.
When, in late 2008, President-elect Barack Obama was deciding how much money he would ask Congress for to combat mass unemployment, foreclosures, and economic suffering, Christina Romer, the incoming chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, ran an analysis that found that the package should be at least $1.2 trillion. But in a meeting with Obama’s top economic advisors—Romer, Larry Summers, Jason Furman, Timothy Geithner, and Peter Orszag—chief of staff Rahm Emanuel worried that Congress would balk at that figure, deciding that Obama should ask for $775 million at most. Congress ultimately passed $787 billion.