Key economic expert changes sides, comes out in support of President Biden’s Build Back Better
You’ve probably never heard of Lawrence Summers – the former treasury secretary who Republicans have regularly touted as an expert on inflation when they’re trying to fire up their base by demanding the president do something, even though they’re clearly against the solutions that President Biden and his party are proposing and successfully getting passed.
He initially wrote a column opposing the infrastructure legislation but now he’s supporting it in full – pointing out that spending over the next ten years under this plan would actually be less than what was paid in federal stimulus in just this year alone. This is after the plan was endorsed by 17 different economists who said that Build Back Better and before it received a solid score from the Congressional Budget Office.
While the Republicans are determined to make sure President Biden and the Democrats inherit all of the blame for rising inflation, their adamant refusal to vote on Build Back Better still – despite even their own expert now encouraging Congress to vote on it means that they’ll soon be the proper ones to blame for inflation being a problem – and once it passes, this is exactly the talking point that Democrats will be able to carry with them for the midterms.
Should any Republican take the bait and try to explain, they’ll only be doing themselves in. Yet again, while Democrats saved the economy, Republicans not only did nothing – they lied about the best possible way they could have helped the economy to recover.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making