I enjoyed watching Tom Brady’s return to Boston Sunday night, especially the outcome. Plus, it was a pretty good game. But what got me most worked up was the new Subway ad that ran during the game featuring Brady swooning over a couple of loaves coming out of the oven. It’s shot in high-fashion black and white, Brady is decked out in a tux (Canali or Tom Ford, probably), his hair is perfectly gelled, and he treats the bread like it’s Giselle on date night — he can’t wait to get down to business.
Wait a minute — have you been to a Subway lately? It’s the kind of place where you think about leaving as soon as you enter. Employee uniforms look like they haven’t been washed since Trump was president and you remember that the tuna may not be real. And Tom Brady doesn’t even eat bread! This kind of disconnect between marketing and reality abounds in the fast food business — there’s that old joke about paying extra for a burger that looks like the one in the ads — but the same kind of disconnect is overflowing in Washington these days.
We’ve all been watching the drama in Washington over the past couple of months about $4.7 trillion in new spending — a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act, or, as wonks call it, the “reconciliation” bill. Everybody wants infrastructure, of course; if it came up for a vote today, it would pass handily. The Build Back Better Act is more contentious, for good reason. That’s a lot of money, even by Washington standards. But progressives are pushing it hard and their primary talking point is citing polls that show how popular it is.
That’s not a shocker. If you ask the average America whether they approve of free child care, free community college, or winning the war on climate change, of course you’re going to get a positive response. People love a good Christmas tree. “Poll after poll shows what we are doing is exactly what the American people want. It's not what the big money interest wants, not what the lobbyists want. It's what the American people want, and we got to do it,” said Bernie Sanders over the weekend (pardon his grammar). Just to gild the lily, Sanders said passing the reconciliation bill is a “test of whether or not American democracy can work.”
Here’s the disconnect: if you ask the average American whether or not they trust the government to efficiently and effectively spend $3.5 trillion on “human infrastructure” you might get a different answer. That’s because Americans simply don’t trust the basic competence of the government. In fact, Americans’ trust in government is at an historical low point. Look at this chart from Pew Research.
In the period from 1958 to 2021, public trust in government peaked in the early days of the LBJ administration, before the Vietnam War dragged him down. But it’s been on a steady decline since then, buoyed by occasional rises during the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. During Obama’s term, it ebbed to a low point and has kicked around there ever since.
Even if you ask Americans about their general attitudes toward government — whether they have a positive, neutral or negative attitude — the answer wouldn’t please Sen. Sanders. A major Gallup poll puts the federal government at the very bottom of this ranking, even below the fossil fuel industry, media, and advertising and public relations.
Americans simply don’t trust the government to get things done anymore. So, again, if you ask them if they trust giving the government the keys to a $3.5 trillion bank vault, the polls might not be so positive. The government has some ‘splaining to do.
Selling the Build Back Better Act on the strength of polls about whether people want “free” stuff isn’t much different than selling Subway sandwiches with the image of a tuxedo-clad Tom Brady sniffing bread like it’s a fine wine. It looks good, but if you peel it back a little, the reality looks much different. It’s one thing, for instance, to say that we’re going to end “forever wars,” but quite another to witness the U.S. exit from Afghanistan and its aftermath.
How about this? Let’s put aside the Build Back Better Act for a while. After all, we’re not facing a Great Depression, a world war, or a systemic financial collapse. Pass the infrastructure bill — $1.2 trillion, no chump change there — on a robust bipartisan vote. Then the members can fan out to their districts, put on hard hats, pick up a shovel and pose for pictures at public works projects ranging from new bridges and expanded airports to a modernized grid and EV charging stations from sea to shining sea. Get the job done. Fill potholes at an industrial scale. Modernize and fortify America. Then, when it’s clear the government knows how to get stuff done, stuff that Americans can see and use, turn to human infrastructure and give the Build Back Better Act another go. By that time, the infrastructure initiative may have supercharged the economy — if it’s done right — and $3.5 trillion might not be such a big pill to swallow.
With respect, Sen. Sanders, that’s a much better test of American democracy than passing a $3.5 trillion bill that nobody’s read by using a series of arcane legislative maneuvers, one-dimensional polling numbers and wealth-shaming. Prove yourself first. Show us you can actually get things done. Then let’s see where we go from there.