Biden secretly pushing for smaller stimulus deal?

As president-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office in January, one of the biggest things that Americans are looking forward to is another stimulus package.

This is because Biden is on record supporting one of the largest proposals for stimulus relief with a total value close to $3 trillion.

As many of you know, that is significantly larger than what most Republicans have entertained with their packages coming in around $500 billion and maxing out around $1 trillion.

While it is encouraging to have Biden on board with a large stimulus deal there is still the problem of passing the bill through what will most likely be a Republican controlled Senate come next year.

But now there are reports that Joe Biden is privately pushing Democrat leaders to compromise with the Senate on a smaller stimulus still.

Some people are saying that Biden is already playing politics since as soon as a couple of weeks ago he was being explicit about passing a huge stimulus still such as the Heroes Act.

“Right now, Congress should come together and pass the COVID relief package,” Biden said referring to something like the HEROES Act.

“There’s so much we can do, but the only way we do any of this is we work together.”

And while there may be some truth to him playing politics, the fact is that a compromise will almost certainly be necessary to get a relief package passed.

If Biden tries to come into office and “stick to his guns” on a $3 trillion package we likely will just see the back-and-forth talks that lead to no progress like we saw over the past few months.

So this private push for a compromise is in my opinion a necessity to getting relief passed in a timely minor.

A Biden spokesperson denied that this private push is occurring though and stated that the “President-elect fully supports the Speaker and Leader in their negotiations.”

Like most things, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

I can’t imagine a Biden administration actually thinking that they could come in and get a stimulus deal with an astronomical price tag passed, especially after Republicans lost the White House.

And considering that we still have to await the results of the Georgia runoff to see who will control the Senate, it would make sense that the Biden administration would want to keep these talks close to the chest.

So how much smaller would this compromise stimulus bill be?

A new Goldman Sachs report predicts Congress will pass a $700 billion package, so that might be what we are looking at.

Personally, I think it could be a little bit higher than that but I would be pretty shocked to see something in the range of $1.5 trillion or higher.

I do expect the package to contain more stimulus checks though but as we have seen that is still far from a guarantee.

H/T

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