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This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“You know, within the first two months of office, I signed the American Rescue Plan—the most significant economic recovery package in our history—and I also learned something from Donald Trump. He signed checks for people for 7,400 bucks because we passed the plan. And I didn’t—stupid.” —President Joe Biden, in a Tuesday speech about his economic legacy
The above quote from Joe Biden’s speech at the Brookings Institution this week was met with laughter. As the chuckles subsided, Biden segued back to his prepared remarks by saying, “All kidding aside.” Jared Bernstein, an economic adviser to the president, would later say too that Biden had been “kidding” with the remark.
It’s nice that everyone is having a good time kidding around ahead of the holidays. We continue to wonder, though, why this description of their own political malpractice is a laugh line among Democrats.
What is Biden saying here? Disentangling his words is a process that has not gotten easier with time, but disentangle we must. In short, Biden is referring to Trump’s name appearing on COVID-era stimulus checks—aka “stimmies”—that were sent to Americans across the country, while Biden’s did not. This is true.
There were three rounds of COVID stimulus checks during 2020 and 2021. The first round of payments, as part of the March 2020 CARES Act, were worth up to $1,200 per tax filer and $500 per dependent; the second round, at the end of 2020, offered $600 and $600; the final round, as part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan, offered $1,400 and $1,400. (In the official White House transcript, Biden’s 7,400 figure was corrected to 1,400.) Trump presided over the first two, and Biden over the last one.
The Trump administration made sure during that first round that those who received paper checks would read the words “Economic Impact Payment/President Donald J. Trump” on it, alongside a letter from Trump. (There were several rounds of mock-ups for these checks within the Treasury Department.) Democrats howled at the time that Trump was risking a delay in delivery of the checks for purely political reasons. Mostly, though, they howled because this was an obviously shrewd move from the Trump administration in an election year, taking credit for what had been a top Democratic priority when the CARES Act was moving through Congress.
Even though Trump had set a precedent—Biden could have put his own name on the big, bad $1,400 checks his administration was preparing to issue—the Biden administration declined to follow it. Democrats’ dreaded instinct of wanting to appear above politics had won the day.
“We are doing everything in our power to expedite the payments and not delay them,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in March 2021, “which is why the president’s name will not appear on the memo line of this round of stimulus checks.”
Democrats in Congress groused about this at the time. (Privately, of course. It would not be the last time they complained futilely, in private, about important decisions made by Biden.) As they should have!
Because what did this decision to appear like selfless adults, or to avoid looking like hypocrites after trashing Trump for the practice a year earlier, or to ensure that checks didn’t come a week late, earn Democrats in the long run? Well, to the extent it earned anyone anything, it was to secure Trump, in the collective memory of many in the electorate, as the guy who issued stimmies. It led some people to think, despite there being no indication of it whatsoever, that he might do so again once reelected.
What’s more remarkable is that this Democratic anti-politics of giving people money and hiding behind a lampshade to ensure that no one gives them credit has become something of a presidential habit.
The 2009 stimulus package that President Barack Obama signed shortly after coming into office contained a tax cut of $400 per worker and $800 for married couples. But no one really knew about it, and the administration didn’t get any credit for it. The administration—and I still think about this all the time—argued that that had been by design.
“Faced with evidence that people were more likely to save than spend the tax rebate checks they received during the Bush administration, the Obama administration decided to take a different tack: it arranged for less tax money to be withheld from people’s paychecks,” the New York Times reported in 2010. “They reasoned that people would be more likely to spend a small, recurring extra bit of money that they might not even notice, and that the quicker the money was spent, the faster it would cycle through the economy.” How clever. But what about sending people checks so they knew you’d given them checks? What about writing PRESIDENT “CHECKS” OBAMA in the memo?
Obama gave an interview in 2010 suggesting that he’d learned his lesson on that. But on the campaign trail for Vice President Kamala Harris this year, there was Obama, once again, celebrating how he and Biden didn’t participate in the crass politics of Trump. He was saying this, of course, because he had to correct voters’ belief that Trump was the only president who gave people checks.
The next Democratic administration’s goal will be very simple. When it opens its legislative agenda with a stimulus bill to counter whatever calamity it has inherited, it should send people their checks with the stupid president’s name on it. Fifteen years of lousy check politics is quite enough.
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