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Biden Falters in Push to Reframe Debt Debate, Thwarting Agenda

Biden Falters in Push to Reframe Debt Debate, Thwarting Agenda

The Biden administration’s attempt to reframe thinking around federal debt and win backing for a sweeping expansion of the American social safety net looks to have faltered, undone in large part by an inflationary surge that stiffened the resistance of a key Democratic senator.

The conflict between President Joe Biden and Joe Manchin over the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan came to a head Sunday, when the West Virginia senator invoked the size of the national debt in pulling his support.

Biden Falters in Push to Reframe Debt Debate, Thwarting Agenda

While the 10-year package was designed to pay for itself, it wouldn’t have done so in 2022, and would have run up bigger deficits if time-limited measures such as an expanded child tax credit were extended without revenue offsets. Manchin said the legislation camouflaged a run-up in borrowing that would “drastically” impair the U.S. from being able to respond to threats including from China and Russia.

It marked a major reversal for attempts to incorporate the long-term shift toward lower rates into fiscal debates. Biden and his team more broadly have tried to get Congress to assess what’s affordable by talking about the debt payments the government is actually making -- much as a homebuyer or private business might.

Biden Falters in Push to Reframe Debt Debate, Thwarting Agenda

“The world has changed,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the Senate in her confirmation hearing at the start of the year. “In a very low interest-rate environment like we’re in, what we’re seeing is that even though the amount of debt relative to the economy has gone up, the interest burden hasn’t.”

A steady decline in U.S. interest rates during the past four decades has challenged fiscal hawks and shown that the government has a greater capacity for borrowing than it did in the past.

Federal debt surged to more than the size of the economy last year, with the ratio of publicly held debt to gross domestic product climbing from 79% in 2019 to reach the highest since World War II.

Even so, the cost to service that debt declined, to just 1.6% of GDP from 1.8% in 2019, thanks to sliding borrowing costs; that ratio was more than 2% back in the late 1990s and 3% or above in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A separate metric shows that the outstanding stock of marketable Treasuries as of the end of last month was sold at a yield of 1.44%, down from 2.32% on the eve of the pandemic and 6.36% at the start of the century, according to Wrightson Icap.

‘Structurally Low’

“We are in an era of structurally low rates that seem likely to persist,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP. “This may very well change in time, but the bond market does not see that in the current environment.”

But Manchin isn’t buying the argument. In a statement explaining his reasons for rejecting legislation enacting Biden’s economic agenda, he highlighted the “staggering” debt the U.S. already has accumulated, along with concerns about inflation.

He has cited as an influence on his thinking comments made more than a decade ago by Admiral Mike Mullen, then the chair of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen, speaking at a time when the European debt crisis was raging, said that rising federal borrowing was the greatest threat to national security.

While Mullen back then speculated that interest payments might soon reach the level of Pentagon spending, last year the net interest bill was less than half the national defense budget.

Republican Criticism

This year’s surge in inflation, which the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve both initially dismissed as “transitory,” has gone a long way in undermining confidence in the White House’s economic stewardship, however.

Republican lawmakers, who didn’t express much concern over the deficit impact of former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts or the 2020 pandemic relief measures passed under the GOP president, have been sounding the alarm through, and blaming the escalating cost of living on the range of support to households extended by the current administration and congressional Democrats.

Biden Falters in Push to Reframe Debt Debate, Thwarting Agenda

Manchin is now expressing similar arguments, even though most economists attribute the surge in living costs primarily to supply-chain disruptions and a shift in consumer spending toward goods and away from services, thanks to the impact of the pandemic.

Even so, debt is “not a big problem” at the moment and taking on more to invest in the country is “as affordable as it’s been over the past few decades,” said Jason Furman, a former senior Obama administration economic adviser who had criticized Biden’s $1.9 trillion March pandemic-relief bill as being excessive and has favored -- along with former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers -- longer-term investments instead.

Furman estimates the Build Back Better package would only add 0.2 percentage point to inflation next year, with little impact afterward.

But such arguments for now aren’t carrying the day in Congress.

“Inflation and debt sustainability are two completely different issues,” said Furman, now a Harvard University professor. But, he says, “They’ve been conflated.”

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.