Biden Taking a Page out of Nixon, Trump Playbooks
Biden Bucks could be hitting your inbox soon via an expanded child tax credit
If you paid attention in high school history–and if you read what I write, the odds are you probably did–you’ll remember President Richard Nixon’s famous plan to stuff Social Security check envelopes with campaign-like literature just in time for the 1972 election. Now, President Joe Biden, who joined the United States Senate just months later, is looking for a similar win.
While the 20% increase in Social Security benefits was passed by Congress, Nixon obviously wanted some credit. The increase, which would kick in just weeks before the election, “fulfilled a request which I have been making since the first months of my administration,” he said.
But talk is cheap, and checks are expensive. Nixon wanted Americans to know just how supportive he was of the checks, by having them sent along with a message from him. “As conceived by White House counsel Chuck Colson, the stuffers would be colored red, white and blue, carry quotations from Nixon’s speeches, and be marked with Nixon’s signature,” Michael Hiltzik noted.
Nixon’s plan was foiled by a career Social Security staffer who threatened to resign if his plan was implemented. Fast forward to the coronavirus pandemic, and then-President Donald Trump wanted to do something similar with his “stimmy” checks–although Trump succeeded where Nixon failed; around 35 million Americans received Trump Bucks in the mail with the president’s name on them. Although Trump got his name on the checks and Nixon didn’t, Trump lost while Nixon won reelection (thanks to some…different forms of chicanery). So how is Biden playing into this playbook?
As it turns out, Biden may be in a position to do something similar with an expansion of the child tax credit. The IRS’s commissioner, Danny Werfel, told Congress that child tax credit checks could potentially be mailed out in a manner of weeks from now–and some Democrats, like California Representative Jimmy Gomez, want monthly installments instead of lump sums. “We may be able to start implementation as early as six to 12 weeks after passage,” Werfel told Congress–adding that the IRS could potentially act “closer to the six-week end of that range.”
Biden Bucks would definitely be a boon for the president, who’s seen consistently horrible polls on his handling of the economy. Some Republicans are concerned about giving him a short-term win while compromising the ability to extend the signature Trump-era tax cuts.
“I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good mailing out checks before the election, means he could be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley said. Grassley was first elected to Congress in 1974, so he got to see the Nixon era firsthand. His Democratic counterparts who are facing tough reelection battles are, conversely, celebrating the possible outcome. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown called the bipartisan child tax bill a “big, big, deal.”
Biden’s memory is failing him, as we see on a daily basis. But maybe he’s got enough going on upstairs to remember what Nixon almost got done.
I can think of an amendment to the bill that would prevent such chicanery: "No funds shall be expended (or, it is a prohibited) for any communication or transmission of funds from the Treasury directly or indirectly to any person or entity or their financial accounts with the names, photographs, or signatures of any elected official or officer of the United States.