Amid Economic Turmoil, Biden Stays Focused on Longer Term

WASHINGTON — President Biden and his economic team on Thursday made their most detailed case yet for trillions of dollars in new federal spending to rebuild public investment in workers, research and physical infrastructure, focusing on long-term ingredients of economic growth and equality as the current recovery from recession showed signs of distress.

The president’s aides published what amounted to a deeper economic backbone for the argument that Mr. Biden is making publicly and privately to sell his plans to lawmakers, including the message he conveyed to a group of Republican senators he invited to the White House on Thursday to discuss an infrastructure package centered on roads, bridges, transit and broadband.

That meeting ended with encouraging words from both sides. Republicans said Mr. Biden invited the senators, who had previously offered a nearly $570 billion, narrowly focused package, to return with an updated offer, including how to pay for new spending.

Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who is leading the Republicans’ negotiations, said lawmakers would prepare an updated offer for the president to review by early next week, including a more detailed list of the kinds of projects they would be willing to fund and a set of proposals to cover the costs. The senators said they expected Mr. Biden would then respond with a counteroffer.

“I made it clear that this was not a stagnant offer from us,” Ms. Capito said. “He made it clear that he is serious in wanting to pursue this.”

She said Republican senators were open to raising the overall top-line price tag of their offer, which is a fraction of the new spending the president proposed. She also suggested that Republicans would be willing to cut a deal with Mr. Biden even if he decided to pursue a more progressive package, including priorities beyond traditional infrastructure, with only Democratic votes. Other senators predicted the sides would know by Memorial Day whether they could reach a deal.

“It’s in nobody’s interest to draw this out beyond the time when you think it’s workable,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri. “But I certainly left there thinking there’s a workable agreement to be had if we want to stretch a little both ways.”

Shortly before the meeting, the White House Council of Economic Advisers posted a document to its website that cast Mr. Biden’s $4 trillion economic agenda as a way to correct decades of tax-cutting policies that had failed to bolster the middle class. In its place, the administration is pushing a rebuilding of public investment, like infrastructure, research and education, as the best way to fuel economic growth and improve families’ lives.

The so-called issue brief reflects the administration’s longer-term thinking on economic policy when conservatives have ramped up criticism of the president over slowing job growth and accelerating inflation.

Administration officials express confidence that recent price surges in used cars, airfare and other sectors of the economy will prove temporary, and that job growth will speed up again as more working-aged Americans are vaccinated against Covid-19 and regain access to child care during work hours. They say Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid package, which he signed in March, will lift job growth in the coming months, noting that new claims for unemployment fell to a pandemic-era low on Thursday.

The officials also said it was appropriate for the president to look past the current crisis and push efforts to strengthen the economy long term.

The two halves of Mr. Biden’s $4 trillion agenda, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, are premised on the economy returning to a low unemployment rate where essentially every American who wants to work is able to find a job, Cecilia Rouse, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview.

“The American Rescue Plan was rescue,” Dr. Rouse said. “It was meant as stimulus as we work through this hopefully once-in-a-century, if not longer, pandemic. The American Jobs Plan, American Families Plan are saying, look, that’s behind us, but we knew going into the pandemic that there were structural problems in our country and in our economy.”

Mr. Biden’s plans would raise taxes on high earners and corporations to fund new federal spending on physical infrastructure, care for children and older Americans, expanded access to education, an accelerated transition to low-carbon energy and more.

Those efforts “reflect the empirical evidence that a strong economy depends on a solid foundation of public investment, and that investments in workers, families and communities can pay off for decades to come,” Mr. Biden’s advisers wrote. “These plans are not emergency legislation; they address longstanding challenges.”

The five-page brief focuses on arguments about what drives productivity, wage growth, innovation and equity in the economy. The issues predate the coronavirus recession and recovery, and Democrats in particular have pledged for years to address them.

The brief begins by attacking the “old orthodoxy” of tax-cutting policies by presidents and Congress, including the 2017 tax cut passed by Republicans under President Donald J. Trump. A driving rationale behind that law was an effort to encourage more investment by private companies, bolstering what economists call the nation’s capital stock. The brief faults those policies for not producing the rapid gains in economic growth that champions of those policies promised, and it says that raising taxes on high earners “will help ensure that the gains from economic growth are more broadly shared.”

Republicans continue to insist that tax cuts, particularly for businesses, are the key to economic competitiveness and middle-class prosperity. They have refused to negotiate any changes to their party’s signature 2017 tax law as part of an infrastructure agreement, even as they concede some need for a limited version of the new public investments Mr. Biden is calling for.

Republicans used the meeting on Thursday to reiterate that they would be unwilling to raise corporate or personal taxes lowered by their 2017 law. Instead, they pitched the president on the use of zero-interest loans and public-private partnerships, in addition to existing gasoline taxes and other government savings.

Mr. Biden would raise taxes to reverse what his economic team calls the federal government’s underinvestment in policies that help educate children and adults, facilitate the development of new technologies and industries and support parents so they are able to work and earn more. His team cites the wave of quickly developed coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which grew out of publicly funded research, as an example of public investments yielding private-sector innovation.

“Those started with ideas that were funded by the public sector decades ago,” Dr. Rouse said. “And then the private sector built on top of that, so it’s really, the private sector needs to work with the public sector. We are all very grateful that the public sector was willing to take that risk, and it didn’t pay off right away.”

“In many ways, the federal government should be patient,” she said. “We are a kind of entity, we should be patient. So I’m not saying we have to wait a million years for something to pay off, but we don’t need to have the kind of immediate payoff that a private company might need to see.”

That argument is in many ways a departure from how administrations typically pitch economic policies during a crisis. There is no focus in the brief on immediate job creation or a quick bump in economic growth.

Weeks after Mr. Biden detailed both halves of his plan, the administration has offered no projections about the effects of his policies on jobs or growth. Instead, Dr. Rouse and other administration officials cited forecasts by the Moody’s Analytics economist Mark Zandi, which are among the more favorable outside analyses of the president’s agenda.

Administration officials say there is no need for their economic team to produce such forecasts. Congressional Republicans have repeatedly called for the White House to produce an estimate of how many jobs would be created by Mr. Biden’s plans.