Mark Warner Says Democrats’ COVID Rescue Package Was Too Big

Democrats overdid it on their signature pandemic relief bill last year, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said this week.

“Was there too much in the American Rescue Plan on a relative basis? Absolutely,” Warner said Tuesday on Bloomberg Television when asked about economic policy regrets.

It’s unusual for a lawmaker to second-guess a bill they voted for in such a way. Still, Warner said he would not have done anything differently since lawmakers at the time worried the economy wouldn’t recover strongly from severe disruptions related to COVID-19.

“Had to do it over again? I would do it because the potential of unraveling of the economy due to COVID,” Warner said. “We just didn’t know where we were headed.”

Warner noted that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021, did not constitute the majority of the more than $5 trillion lawmakers authorized since the start of the pandemic in 2020, most of it on a bipartisan basis. Congress approved extra unemployment benefits and stimulus checks as parts of relief packages in 2020 and again in 2021.

Republicans bailed on pandemic relief after Joe Biden became president, which prompted them to return to their role as fiscal scolds. They have since blamed the Rescue Plan for causing the high inflation plaguing the economy for the past year.

Most experts agree Congress contributed to inflation, but, at the same time, the relief bills prevented the economy from flopping. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, for instance, said fiscal support ― including both the Rescue Plan and earlier bipartisan bills ― contributed 3 percentage points to inflation at the end of 2021.

“However, without these spending measures,” the economists wrote, “the economy might have tipped into outright deflation and slower economic growth, the consequences of which would have been harder to manage.”

Democrats wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 2007-2009 recession when a weak fiscal response left the economy with super-low inflation and super-weak job growth for years.

Warner said some of today’s Rescue Plan critics were clamoring for assistance at the time of the bill’s passing.

He explained: “It’s ironic to me that some small business friends who are announcing today that you guys spent too much were exactly the same people who were saying, ’You guys need to do another round of PPP, small business funding or you need to send out more additional checks to all Americans.’”