Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion conjuring trick

Stage sets are sometimes moved into place in full view of theatergoers. On other occasions, such mechanics are meant to go unnoticed, but the audience can still hear scenery being dragged around in the darkness between acts.

Democratic stagehands are getting ready to show the national audience an imaginative drama depicting President Biden miraculously rescuing the economy. Their efforts are clunky in the extreme and won’t fool anyone who isn’t willfully disengaging his or her faculties.

One such toiler is Rahm Emanuel, the guy who counseled that no crisis should go to waste, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently that Biden is wrestling “with a pandemic, a stalling economy and the GOP’s recalcitrant leadership.” This fictional depiction of the political landscape is intended to suggest that Donald Trump left behind an economic wreck that only the superhuman efforts of Boss Biden can fix.

Here’s the reality: The pandemic began to wane before Biden took office; the economy is about to take off like a rocket anyway; and Republican leaders are not so much recalcitrant as they are reluctant to spend another $1.9 trillion needlessly, as we note in our lead editorial (P.1), to goose an economy already powering ahead.

Retail sales jumped 5.3% in January, manufacturing output rose, and employers are hiring again. The question is not whether a “stalling” economy can be revived but whether Biden’s spendthrift Democrats can splurge enough borrowed money fast enough to take credit for rapid growth, to which they will have contributed nothing.

This is reminiscent of the early months of President Bill Clinton’s first term, when he scrambled to pass a stimulus plan in the hope of bagging credit for economic growth that had resumed half a year before he was elected. Perhaps the Democratic conjuring trick will work again today, nearly three decades later. Keep your ears open for the moment when big borrower Biden starts claiming bragging rights.

That brag, saving the economy, is vital also to Biden’s precarious hopes of keeping the Democratic coalition together. Jay Cost, in his “Crack Up?” cover story this week, notes that the president arrived in office with a weak hold on Capitol Hill, at the head of a party that selected him faute de mieux, and is champing for radical policies that neither he nor the nation wants.

An old friend of mine coined a maxim about almost any problem being overcome “if you rub a little money into it.” That’s what Biden’s little $1.9 trillion is for. He talks of uniting the country, but his concern is at least as much about keeping the fractious donkey party from pulling apart.

Larry Arnn defends the nation’s 1776 founding against those trying to wrench it back to 1619; Charlotte Allen reviews a fine new biography of John C. Calhoun; Cory Gunkel makes the case that the Los Angeles Dodgers’ “evil empire” is a good thing; and Philip Terzian sums up the life, times, and influence of the late Rush Limbaugh.