The Dictatorship
Democrats can maintain their lead over Republicans on the economy if they don’t make this disastrous mistake
Going into November’s midterm electionsDemocrats have put together a strong message that the prices of food, gas, healthcare, housing and utilities are too high and that Americans need to elect members of the party who take their financial struggles seriously. And that message has been working. Since President Donald Trump was elected in 2024 and embarked upon a term that has unsettled even those of us who were expecting the worst, Democrats have consistently overperformed in special and off-year elections.
Just ask Mikie Sherill and Abigail Spanbergerthe recently elected Democratic governors of New Jersey and Virginia, respectively. An April Fox News poll showed Democrats edging Republicans 52% to 48% on which party would better handle the economy. That was the first time Democrats have had an advantage on that question in 16 years.
Democrats may be walking blindly into a buzzsaw and risking giving away the advantage they have established over Republicans.
Given the party’s edge on this important metric, unless Democrats suffer a significant reversal in public opinion over the next five months, they should be considered likely to take control of the House after nearly four years in the minority. But preserving the party’s momentum rests on persuading voters that Democrats will take seriously the issue of affordability for everyday Americans. Our future success, including our hopes to reclaim the White House in 2028, will depend on us showing that we won’t just promise, but we will deliver.
But on one important issue, I fear Democrats may be walking blindly into a buzzsaw and risking giving away the advantage they have established over Republicans on who cares more about working Americans. The issue is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guarantees Americans that their bank accounts are insured up to $250,000. Some Democrats have bought into the idea that there needs to be a dramatic expansion of those federal banking insurance subsidies, and they are joining Republican supporters of the industry’s push. The legislation was introduced by Sens. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., and Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md.and currently it is being debated in the Senate Banking Committee. The bill, which would expand federally-backed deposit insurance guarantees for business transaction accounts from the $250,000 cap to as much as $5 million, is being sold as protection for “Main Street.”
But that’s far from the truth. More than 99% of Americans’ bank accounts are already fully covered by the FDIC’s $250,000 cap. It’s been quite some time since a good survey was done, but in 2016, JPMorgan Chase reported that the median small business held an average daily cash balance of just $12,100. There is little in the legislation, then, for most small business owners.
Indeed, the biggest beneficiaries of this legislation would be large corporations with treasury departments that are staffed to manage cash positions of this size. Those corporations already have plenty of options today to insure their accounts and to pay for those options themselves. Under this bill, they would instead get coverage backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
That is to say, those corporations would get coverage backed by you, by me and by every other American taxpayer. The legislation was also written to benefit all but a handful of the largest banks in the country, including more than a dozen with more than $100 billion in assets each.
We lose when the party is seen as too cozy with Wall Street and other wealthy supporters.
By guaranteeing deposits at such a scale, the federal government would be stripping banks and large depositors of any incentive to manage risk, thus recreating the “moral hazard” that helped drive the savings and loan crisis that cost taxpayers more than $120 billion. That crisis followed the 1980 deposit insurance coverage hike. This bill would subsidize wealthy depositors and banks by socializing the risk of the next bailout onto every American taxpayer.
The above is the economic argument against this bill. Now let me give you the political argument. Democrats win when we deliver our economic and affordability message. We lose when the party is seen as too cozy with Wall Street and other wealthy supporters. That perception of doing the bidding of the banks and not Americans struggling to make ends meet should make Democrats think twice about this legislation.
After all, voters never forget a bank bailout. The political damage of 2008 still reverberates today. The view that Democrats, who controlled Congress, were willing to rescue Wall Street while Main Street drowned was a generational wound. The Democrats’ perception as being most concerned about corporations helped fuel the tea party, the shellacking that was the 2010 midterms and a decade of lost ground on economic credibility.
We see from the elections Democrats have won since 2024 that middle-class Americans are trusting us to make their lives more affordable. Voting to put those same Americans on the hook for the next bank bailout would be a horrible way to repay that trust.
Democrats must not risk hurting their winning message on the economy by passing a giveaway for banking lobbyists and their wealthy clients.
Cedric Richmond is a former U.S. representative from Louisiana and a former senior advisor to President Joe Biden.