To the Editor:
Rep. Daniel Webster is critical of the $1.9 trillion disaster relief package soon to become law. The unemployed need help now, when they have lost jobs through no fault of theirs. The States need help now when their tax revenues are down and their own solutions of either raising taxes on people still working or laying off are not palatable.
I want to share a quote from Nobel Prize winning Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton University: “President Biden’s COVID-19 relief proposal remains incredibly popular; if anything, it’s getting more popular as it barrels through Congress. Multiple polls show that something like 70 percent of Americans approve of the $1.9 trillion plan. It’s almost twice as popular as the Republican tax cut of 2017; it’s more popular than the Obama stimulus of 2009; it’s hard to believe now, but the Biden plan is more popular than Medicare was in the months before it passed in 1965.”
Big business has also come on board: More than 150 senior executives at major companies have written congressional leaders urging enactment of Biden’s plan.
It’s not too hard to see why Democrats and independents like the plan. What I’m trying to understand is something that seems like a political paradox. Namely, how is it possible that so many Republicans approve of the plan?
Why is Republican support for Biden’s economic plans a puzzle? Because most of the Republican rank and file believe (based on nothing but lies) that the election was stolen. So we’re in a peculiar position where a substantial number of voters don’t believe Biden has the right to be running the country, but effectively approve of the way he’s running it, at least in terms of economic policy.
Ash Marwah
Village of Belvedere
