The public is in the mood for big social spending

And they want corporations to pay for it

The public opinion is unequivocal in its endorsement of Joe Biden’s massive economic stimulus and infrastructure bills. If people could vote solely for the Democratic plans as if they were candidates for office, they would be the most popular Democratic politicians in the country. The public mood is heavily in favor of social spending of nearly all stripes.

Last month’s covid-19 and economic relief plan cost the government $1.9 trillion — and was one of the most popular bills of the last twenty years. In my average of polls, for it was nearly 40-50 percentage points higher than the opposition, a margin matched only by the 2007 passage of the $5.85 federal minimum wage, the Brady Bill and the Clean Air Act. A clear majority of Independents and a near majority of Republicans supported the legislation.

Biden’s current push on infrastructure spending — defined loosely so far to include physical transportation infrastructure and funding for some social programs — is less popular, but still supported by a clear majority of Americans. 56% of adults register in favor of the bill, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, while 34% oppose it. That works out to a +22-point margin for the American Jobs Plan, placing it among the more popular legislation of the last 20 years.

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As is customary with most legislation, the Plan’s individual parts are more popular than the bill as a whole, which can often be dragged down by (a) out-partisan opposition to the legislation and (b) an increase in the share of people who don’t have an attitude on the whole bill, but still know how they feel about smaller proposals. Here is the breakdown according to a YouGov/Yahoo News poll:

This makes the Democrats’ infrastructure bill about as popular as Obama’s 2009 Stimulus bill, widely considered to be a political success (even if the economists conventional wisdom is that it did not spend enough money).

One interesting wrinkle in all of this is that the Democrats’ push for a more expansive definition of “infrastructure” might actually be decreasing public support for spending. A CNN analysis last week found that economic issues were a higher priority for the people. Another stimulus bill, then, might be even more popular.

But this is all a bit beside the point. The public is clearly in favor of a variety of infrastructure programs, fitting a broad scheme of definitions:

Another important wrinkle in the story is that public support for infrastructure spending (and presumably other forms of stimulus) increases when people are told it’s being funded by a higher tax on corporate profits:

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What would we do without the polls?

The defining feature of Joe Biden’s presidency so far has been his ability to get a supermajority of the public to support a massive expansion of government investment in the economy and our lives. Polling data are useful for revealing that; imagine what our conceptualization of the demand for social spending would look like if we were relying only on the results of the 2020 election instead. You might rationalize that, since Trump got 47% of the vote, only a bare majority of the country supported increased spending. But the polls say that the conservative position spending is only garnering support from 30 - 40% of the public.

As is often the case, polls have revealed the American people to be a lot more economically progressive than we would otherwise think or know. The fact that we know this will help them get what they want from their government. That is reason enough to keep paying attention to these data.