A Barrage of Dodged Bullets

Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.

Dusting the text off now, you can feel that ambition. Across two bills — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — it sought to spend over $4 trillion across a decade.... an epochal expansion of government spending and ambition, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Little of this became law, of course. The bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021 included $250 billion in new transportation spending, less than half of the Jobs Plans’ number; even adding the $72 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicles doesn’t close the gap much. While the Jobs Plan included $1.6 trillion in climate spending, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures are estimated to cost less than half that much. The CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 appropriated all of $79 billion to support manufacturing, a far cry from Biden’s $590 billion bid, and largely didn’t appropriate money for science at all. And then there’s the American Families Plan, almost all of which fell by the wayside, not passed by Congress in any form.

Imagine the inflation associated with this titanic flood of Federal spending. What we got was bad enough. Your dollar wouldn't have been worth anything if all that planned print-money spending had been dropped into the market.

When I think of the 'Build Back Better' slogan, I always remember this video.

This wasn't an American agenda from an American president targeting an American Congress, it was a wildly international agenda. Its supporting actors were drawn from that crowd for whom American and Western decline was baked into the plan; building back 'better' was not meant to make any of our lives better, not farmers or machinists in American small towns or small-business owners in American suburbs. It was meant for them, another chance to extract wealth from the American people for service to these international elites. 

In the old days we wouldn't have noticed because each of their televised addressed would have been delivered to a carefully segmented market. Only now can we begin to see how networked the mechanisms of control really are.

And yet they failed, largely, in spite of the titanic efforts of 2020 and the certain knowledge that this could easily be the last chance. It's amazing to think.