Thread mentions July 4th completion, at best. Honestly, I thought this would be floated next year since we haven't even digested last month's stimmy. Tells you how fragile markets are even as companies are doing buybacks on a frontloaded recovery. It's also been noted that budget reconcilliation is a once a year thing. They already did it a few months ago...
Hopefully Biden is loading this up knowing it will get shaved down but the end result will be real sustainable infrastructure jobs. This country desperately needs it to recreate the blue collar middle class.
When Biden Channels His Inner FDR https://www.allsides.com/blog/when-biden-channels-his-inner-fdr When Joe Biden ran for president last year, there were times when it sounded like he was campaigning for Barack Obama’s third term in office. But at this early stage of his own presidency, Biden has decided that he would prefer to serve Franklin Roosevelt’s fifth term instead. There is nothing in Biden’s past – current or distant – that would have predicted this outcome. He secured the Democratic nomination last spring by being the safe alternative who would be best positioned to run against Donald Trump in the general election. Party activists complained that his centrist establishment tendencies were uninspiring, and that candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would pursue much more ambitious agendas in office. But Biden stayed on safer ground, avoiding calls for a Green New Deal, single payer health care and free college tuition in favor of a more measured and more cautious platform. Biden got those progressives to turn out for him in November, mostly by simply not being Trump. But throughout the fall, he was still careful not to give Republicans too juicy a target. Their efforts to paint him as a dangerous leftist largely fell flat, and Biden’s low key profile during Trump’s post-election tantrums further solidified a conventional wisdom that a Biden presidency would sacrifice grand ideological goals in favor of pragmatic bipartisanship. But sometime between Election Day and Inauguration Day, Biden suddenly discovered that a previously undetected radical progressive lurked within him. He believed that the coronavirus pandemic had unleashed a thirst for government activism amongst the American people reminiscent of similar realignments during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. After one perfunctory meeting with Senate Republicans shortly after taking office, Biden ignored GOP leaders and passed his coronavirus relief bill by mostly party-line votes. The high levels of support that both the legislation and Biden currently enjoy have convinced White House staff that the nation’s voters are ready for their government to play a larger role in the economy and society as a whole than has been the case in several decades. Ever since Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 on the position that government was more an obstacle than a solution, the country’s political debate has been framed by a center-right orthodoxy that the federal government should be more efficient, less obtrusive and more deferential to private sector and community interests. Even the two Democrats to win the presidency over those years – Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – accepted that broader thesis even while pushing for some expanded role for government in certain areas. Biden appeared to be an ideological heir to those two men, perhaps looking for opportunities to move forward on specific progressive policy goals while leaving Reagan’s central premise unchallenged. But the combination of a pandemic, a recession, a resurgent social justice movement, and a Trump backlash seems to have created an environment in which Democrats feel more emboldened than they have in more than half a century. Biden’s new infrastructure proposal will represent the largest expansion of government since the Great Society, and the new president has taken to frequently citing FDR in his public comments. Like Roosevelt’s election at the depths of a debilitating economic depression and Lyndon Johnson’s ascension at a time of national tragedy and unrest, the tumultuous events of the past year have forced Americans to look to their government for assistance in an unaccustomed way. Biden sees an opportunity to push forward at a similar scale to Roosevelt and Johnson and is moving aggressively to take advantage of that opportunity. Biden could very well end up overreaching, and the possibilities for failure are much greater in the current hyper-polarized times in which we live. Issues such as immigration could also derail him, just as the legacy of Vietnam ultimately overshadowed Johnson’s domestic accomplishments. But Biden is rapidly approaching a point of no return, and whether he is ultimately successful in achieving his newly-grand ambitions or falls disastrously short, this long-time conventional thinker is going big in a way that no president of either party has attempted in many, many years. History moves in cycles, and just as an era of expansive government that began with Roosevelt ultimately concluded with Reagan’s election forty-plus years later, at some point Reagan’s vision of smaller government will conclude as well. Biden thinks that time has arrived, and he's betting his presidency on it. Dan Schnur is a Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, Pepperdine University, and the University of Southern California, where he teaches courses in politics, communications and leadership. Dan is a No Party Preference voter, but previously worked on four presidential and three gubernatorial campaigns, serving as the national Director of Communications for the 2000 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator John McCain and the chief media spokesman for California Governor Pete Wilson. He has a Center bias.
Yes, MAGA I think in this first inning, we are witnessing a Biden admin with a sense of urgency matched with a sense of 'i'm not going to wait around for the other side to said no' all day long. Definitely not a repeat of Obama mistakes, one of the fears that he would from many progressive and Dem.
"Biden's Billions for Higher Ed": https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/01/what’s-2-trillion-infrastructure-plan-higher-ed Biden's Billions for Higher Ed The president unveiled his new infrastructure plan Wednesday, with billions of dollars for community colleges, research and minority-serving institutions. By Lilah Burke April 1, 2021 President Biden unveiled his new infrastructure legislation plan Wednesday, proposing billions of dollars for higher education over eight years. The plan -- which is about $2 trillion in total -- would give $12 billion to updating infrastructure in community colleges and $50 million to the National Science Foundation. Historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions would also be in for more funding under the proposal. The plan calls for a $10 billion investment in research and development and $15 billion to create 200 research incubators at those institutions, with the framing that those investments could eliminate racial and gender inequities in R&D and STEM. Of the $40 billion dedicated to improving research infrastructure and laboratories, half would be set aside specifically for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions. While there are some additions they say could be made, many in higher education are applauding the plan and its proposed investment. “One thing that strikes you when you look at the summary the Biden folks put out is just the number of ways higher education serves in the recovery,” said Jon Fansmith, director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “It’s a pretty impressive commitment to higher education but I think it also demonstrates how inextricably linked colleges and universities are to the health of our economy.” Fansmith said that he would have liked to see doubling of the value of federal Pell Grants in the proposal, as well as a bit more investment in four-year colleges and universities. “While no one argues about the needs that exist at community colleges in the infrastructure space, there are lots of four-year institutions that similarly were impacted by the pandemic, similarly are underresourced and could really use the support,” he said. LaToya Owens, of the UNCF, a philanthropic organization for Black students and HBCUs, said the investment in historically Black colleges is sorely needed. HBCUs have trailed far behind top predominantly white institutions in private, state and federal funding, she said, and while there has recently been some more interest in things like student scholarships for HBCUs, the institutions themselves also need to be supported. Giving specific support to STEM infrastructure at HBCUs also is the right idea to help Black students in STEM, she said, since HBCUs tend to overproduce those students. While they are only 3 percent of higher ed institutions, they educate 10 percent of Black students and graduate 24 percent of Black students in STEM. However, beyond research, development and STEM, the federal government could invest more in general institutional infrastructure if it wants to help Black college students, Owens said. “I absolutely think specific investments in the institutions are needed. If you say you want to serve underserved students and communities, not only do these students need to go to schools that understand how to best educate them, the institutions need to be supported, because they provide a number of resources,” she said. “We have decades of underfunding to make up for.” Janette Martinez, senior policy and research analyst at Excelencia in Education, said the investments could help Hispanic-serving institutions upgrade their facilities to provide research opportunities to their students. Also helpful, she said, is the proposed funding for community colleges. “Over 40 percent of Hispanic-serving institutions are community colleges,” she said. “This could really go a long way in supporting those institutions that are enrolling Latino students.” David Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, said the bill addresses issues that have been important with the organization’s members. Money for infrastructure, he said, is sorely needed. “We hear constantly about the ongoing deferred maintenance needs of the colleges, because modernized facilities help them provide state-of-the-art education,” Baime said via email. “Community colleges routinely aspire to upgrade their facilities and undertake new building. This is hindered only by lack of adequate funding, which is what makes the proposal so positive.” Baime also called attention to other features of the bill that would impact community colleges and their students. The proposal calls for investments in job training and career pathways, which community colleges are closely involved in, and the nationwide expansion of broadband. Many community college students are still learning remotely through the pandemic, and some have been limited in their studies by lack of internet access. more at the link
There's not a whole lot of room for this to be shaved down, this is the bare minimum when addressing national infrastructure (not saying I'm not happy that we are getting that, I am). I believe Joe Manchin called for 4 trillion in infrastructure spending so I'm not sure who is going to be demanding that it gets shaved down if it's going through reconciliation.
If it lets them buy bigger boats and take bigger vacations, then yes! boomers’s kids will score bigly by Trickle Down Economic Benefits
That's a weird way to view it lol The elderly is the highest poverty group in America at 23% (a fierce race between them and children who are 21%). I guess it depends on how these benefits are distributed, but most rich people probably aren't going to stay in gov assisted care homes, I'd assume?
The West is horrible at taking care of their parent. For profit nursing home didn't do such a good job at protecting them from Covid. We should be shifting more toward at-home care, giving tax breaks to family caretaker and providing higher pay for home care workers. Pro-family policies. We will all benefits - the elders would love to stay at home more than at nursing home and the family unit stay more intact. With medical advances, more and more of us are bound to live longer and will need more enhanced home care.
I wasn't trying to project an anti-infrastructure spending bill although most of it really has little to do with infrastructure. We (and by we, I mean most developed countries) are coming to an end of a long term debt cycle. This is just the beginning of massive spending bills. There was a time I was against wasteful spending (translate that to inefficient spending) but now I really dont care. The amount of money out there is insane. Government wants to give me $4000 a year in stimulus, sign me up. I dont need it, but I'll happily put it in Bitcoin and real estate. The current state of affairs is rapidly wiping out the middle class. Those who understand this know we have passed the point of no return. Those who invest in appreciating assets will do very very well. Those who throw their money in depreciating assets have a long road ahead of them. Good luck to Gen Z. I have the utmost confidence their childrens generation will clean up the mess. Gen X (99er's) have failed us.
2 a year not three but Schumer asked the parliamentarian for another bill by some loophole.. it's mind blowing that he's only spending less then 1% of gdp a year and people are complaining about spending. This needs to be a 5-6 trillion dollar bill but the biden administration knows that's too high of a number to sell right away. I'm sure they'll pass a part two after midterm if they keep the house.
"High-Speed Rail Advocates Should Pay Attention to California's Costly Disaster": https://reason.com/video/2021/04/02...pay-attention-to-californias-costly-disaster/
I looked into this in more detail. wrt spending, they can pass another one this year for "next year's" fiscal year. Could possibly stretch the provision to do more spending reconciliations, but it's ultimately sketchy and would likely face more resistance. It also mentions the Schumer hack of rewriting reconciliations through Section 304. Sounds inherently greasy. In theory, you gotta pay off the deficit caused by reconciliation within 10 years (or the length of the bill), unless congress passes some waiver like they did with Trump's tax cuts... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/02/05/what-is-reconciliation-in-congress/ HOW MANY RECONCILIATION BILLS CAN CONGRESS CONSIDER IN CALENDAR YEAR 2021? Under usual practice, two: one for fiscal year 2021 (which ends September 30, 2021) and another for fiscal year 2022 (which ends September 30, 2022). Congress doesn’t pass a budget resolution every year, and it didn’t pass one for fiscal year 2021 in the last Congress, largely because there was little chance that the Republican majority in the Senate could come to agreement with the Democratic majority in the House. With Democrats in control of both the House and Senate, both houses moved quickly in early February to pass a budget resolution for fiscal year 2021. (Vice President Harris broke a tie in the Senate.) The resolution cleared the path for a reconciliation bill that enacted President Biden’s $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan. It extended pandemic-related unemployment benefits, sent $1,400 per person checks to most households, beefed up the public health system, sent aid to state and local governments, and expanded the Child Tax Credit. The bill passed the Senate 50-49 (with one Republican not voting). Democrats may craft a second budget resolution (technically for fiscal year 2022) and a second reconciliation bill later this year, one that would include longer-run elements of Biden’s “Build Back Better” program, including investments in infrastructure and perhaps tax increases. There are interpretations of the Congressional Budget Act that say the Senate could consider more than one reconciliation bill for fiscal year 2022, though that would be a break from past practice. According to Richard Kogan, a budget expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “The Senate can consider the three basic subjects of reconciliation — spending, revenues, and the debt limit — in a single bill or multiple bills, but a budget resolution can generate no more than one bill addressing each of those subjects. In practice, however, a tax bill is likely to affect not only revenues but also outlays to some extent (for example, via refundable tax credits). Thus as a practical matter a single budget resolution can probably generate only two reconciliation bills: a tax-and-spending bill or a spending-only bill and, if desired, a separate debt limit bill.” CAN A RECONCILIATION BILL INCREASE THE BUDGET DEFICIT? Yes. Although the reconciliation process originally was viewed as a way to reduce budget deficits by cutting projected spending and raising revenues, it has been used to expedite passage of tax cuts that increase budget deficits. If reconciliation is used this year to enact some version of President Biden’s COVID relief bill, it will increase budget deficits. (Here’s a bit of history, provided by budget mavens David Reich and Richard Kogan at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: In 2007, when Democrats took control of the House and Senate, both chambers adopted rules designed to prohibit use of reconciliation for measures that increase deficits. When Republicans took the House in 2011, they replaced the House rule with one that placed no restrictions on tax cuts that increase deficits but prohibited reconciliation bills that would produce a net increase in spending on Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, farm programs, or other entitlements, often called “mandatory” spending because they don’t involve annual congressional appropriations. That rule was repealed at the beginning of the new Congress in 2021. The Senate rule against deficit-increasing reconciliation bills was repealed in 2015.) Although a reconciliation bill can increase near-term budget deficits, there are a couple of wrinkles. A Senate rule says that a reconciliation bill cannot, under congressional scoring, increase the deficit beyond the period specified in the resolution, usually ten years. That’s why the reconciliation bills that enacted the Bush and Trump tax cuts said that some of the tax cuts expire before the tenth year. A separate law, the Statutory PAYGO Act of 2010, establishes a scorecard to keep track of the cost of any new mandatory spending or tax changes. A reconciliation bill, such as the one Congress may consider for Biden’s COVID relief package, would create costs on the PAYGO scorecard for the next five years. Under the law, 15 days after a session ends—say, January 15, 2022—the law requires an across-the-board budget cut to all mandatory programs (except those specifically exempt, which include Social Security, veterans’ benefits, Medicaid, and other major means-tested entitlements) to offset one year’s worth of costs on the scorecard for fiscal year 2022. So if a bill costs $2 trillion over five years, the average annual impact—$400 billion, in this example—would show up on the FY2022 scorecard to be squeezed out of Medicare, farm benefits, etc. Congress cannot waive the provisions of the PAYGO Act in a reconciliation bill, but it usually does waive them in some subsequent piece of legislation, one which could require a 60-vote majority in the Senate. In addition, press reports suggest that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is considering invoking an obscure provision of the Congressional Budget Act that would essentially re-use the fiscal year 2021 budget resolution to allow for a majority in the Senate to approve Biden’s big infrastructure package. Never used before, Section 304 says Congress “may adopt a concurrent resolution on the budget which revises or reaffirms the concurrent resolution on the budget for such fiscal year most recently agreed to.” WHAT ARE THE MAJOR LIMITS ON THE USE OF RECONCILIATION? One feature of the reconciliation process is the Byrd Rule in the Senate, named for its chief proponent, the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). Designed to prevent “extraneous” provisions from benefitting from the expedited reconciliation process, the Byrd Rule gives senators the right to object to any provision that doesn’t change the level of spending or revenues, or one for which the change in spending or revenues is “merely incidental.” Initial interpretations of the Byrd Rule are made by the Senate parliamentarian, a non-partisan position. The Byrd Rule binds only if a senator raises what’s known as a “point of order.” If one does, it takes the consent of 60 senators to overturn a point of order. Items that are stripped from a reconciliation bill because of this rule are known as “Byrd droppings”—and often are dropped before a bill comes to the floor. The process of deleting those provisions is known as a “Byrd bath.” Among other things, the Byrd Rule also says that changes to Social Security benefits or Social Security payroll taxes cannot be considered as part of a reconciliation bill. Many substantive provisions have become Byrd droppings over the years, but sometimes the rule becomes more of a way for the minority to annoy the majority. During consideration of the 2017 tax cut bill under reconciliation, for instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) objected that a section that gave the law the name “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” was “extraneous” under the Byrd Rule. As a result, that name had to be dropped, and the statute has no plain English title. What is and isn’t allowed under the Byrd Rule is not always black and white. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was created in a reconciliation bill in 1996 because the rule allows provisions that are not budgetary if they are “terms and conditions” of provisions that are budgetary. The winning argument was that the provision created block grants to states—clearly budgetary—and all the rest constituted “terms and conditions.” The Senate Parliamentarian ruled in late February that the Byrd Rule precludes including in a reconciliation bill an increase in the minimum wage, disappointing those Democrats who had hoped to include a provision increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour so it would need only 50 votes to pass the Senate.
more on economists "How Larry Summers went from Obama’s top economic adviser to one of Biden’s loudest critics": https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/03/29/summers-biden-economy-inflation/ excerpt: Summers, 66, who drafted economic blueprints for the past two Democratic presidents and was a top candidate to lead the Federal Reserve Board under President Barack Obama, has emerged in recent weeks as the loudest critic of President Biden’s approach to reviving the pandemic-era U.S. economy. The Harvard University professor — who advised Biden for a time last summer — warns that the president’s stimulus plan may trigger the highest inflation in more than half a century and could cost Democrats the chance to make lasting investments in the economy. Summers’s Cassandra-like critique has ignited a firestorm among some of the most liberal members of his party, who blame him for financial industry deregulation in the 1990s that contributed to the financial crisis and for the anemic recovery that followed. But his arguments also have been swatted aside by his erstwhile allies in the White House, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, who argue that the economy is in desperate need of help. “This might not have struck as much a nerve if it didn’t reflect concerns that were widely felt,” Summers said in a 45-minute telephone interview last week. The extraordinary clash between a globally recognized Democratic economist and a Democratic president hoping to enact the most transformative liberal agenda since the Great Society involves both the central issues of the day and the lessons of history. If he at times uses dramatic language, Summers nonetheless has given voice to an unpopular opinion that many in the Democratic camp say deserves consideration. Few other Democratic economists have aired such concerns; some say doing so might harm Biden’s ability to translate his fragile congressional majority into decisive action. Summers’s complaint about an oversized stimulus “was what a lot of people were saying privately, what was being whispered by people without his voice or without his platform who were nervous about going public,” said Jason Furman, who was Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers chair and disagrees with Summers’s inflation assessment. more at the link
