The recovery legislation includes very substantial, but temporary, increases in the size of the welfare state. Biden is gambling that the GOP won’t have the nerve to let them expire in two years. Will it work?
The obvious precedent is the Bush tax cuts. The Democrats used the upper end tax cuts as leverage for other priorities. Look for the GOP to link the expiration of the upper end Trump tax cuts to the Biden safety net expenditures in the same way.
That’s the way it works in America today: the two parties are only capable of reaching agreements that further blow up the deficit.