The Next Step for Democrats: Curb Their Ambitions

The Joe Biden administration has finally accepted that it needs to scale back its ambitious economic agenda. This provides an opportunity for a much-needed overhaul, say Bloomberg Opinion columnists Karl Smith and Michael R. Strain. Here are their recommendations, even if it remains to be seen whether Democrats are willing to listen.

Karl Smith: From a political perspective, the core problem all along has been the lack of clear vision. The reconciliation bill the House assembled was a hodge-podge of interest-group demands without a core guiding principle. From a policy perspective, however, the bill’s deeper problem is that those demands reflect the concerns of a pre-Covid economy, when working-class jobs were scarce and raw materials were cheap.