Yet this early success for the new administration doesn't tell us very much about the viability of Biden's subsequent proposals. These include an infrastructure package that costs more than $2 trillion and actually covers lots of things (like elder care, an industrial policy, and investment in green technologies) that only a professional spinmeister for the Democrats (or a die-hard partisan on Twitter) could describe with a straight face as "infrastructure." Biden's also about to announce another large proposal (this one costing $1.8 trillion) that will include a modest tax hike on income at the upper levels and a more substantial increase on investment income (capital gains) along with substantial new spending on child care, pre-kindergarten, paid family leave, free community college, and extra money for the Affordable Care Act's health-care exchanges.
That's a lot.
Now, if Biden can get all of this, or even a substantial portion of it, through Congress over the next several months, then he will indeed have accomplished what I laid out in my earlier column, expanding leftward the bounds of the possible in Washington and moving definitively beyond the constraint that have limited progressive policymaking for the past four decades.
But this remains a very big if.
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