What's In The Infrastructure Bill? What's In Build Back Better? Which Is Which? Wonkette Gets Servicey!
IT'S GOOD ACTUALLY, QUIT BITCHING!
On the off chance you may have missed it, the House passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF) late Friday, with the second, much larger part of Joe Biden's first term agenda, the Build Back Better reconciliation bill, likely to be passed the week prior to Thanksgiving, as long as Joe Manchin doesn't decide it needs to include tax credits for diesel pickup trucks that "roll coal" on bicyclists and drivers of Prii.
in Monday's White House presser, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would sign the infrastructure bill into law sometime next week, when Congress returns to Washington after taking this week off so representatives and senators can meet constituents and get to the bottom of why Hunter Biden's laptop is teaching critical race theory. Also, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a congressional delegation were in Scotland this week for the big UN climate summit; Pelosi addressed the climate conference on the disproportionate impacts of the climate emergency on women and girls, particularly in developing countries.
Obviously, Biden wants to use the passage of the BIF as leverage to move Build Back Better to completion, which seems like a pretty sound strategy, and if your House or Senate critter is doing town halls this week, let 'em know you want Build Back Better to pass, yes, even if they're Republicans.
So now that the agenda is moving forward, let's take a moment to sort out what's in the two bills, in an easy bullet-point list that you can clip and save for later. (Please do not attempt to actually clip anything out of your monitor, it was a joke.) Because this is gonna be a big comprehensive listicle, we'll hit the BIF in this post, and then everything that's currently in Build Back Better in a second part. We've even linked 'em here, because we're goddamned professionals that way.
Part the First: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill
This would be the one passed Friday; its official title, the "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act," is so boring that we're just going to keep calling it BIF, because that's much funner to say than "IIJA," which I guess if you pronounced it as a word would sound like Buddy Hackett doing a 1968 sketch about karate.
This is the smaller of the two bills, and as we've explainered before, it's the result of Joe Manchin's insistence on carving out much of the physical infrastructure stuff from Biden's American Jobs Plan, so he could restore bipartisanship by writing a bill Republicans could agree to. In the process of making it work for Manchin and his Republican colleagues, the total amount of spending in the bill got slashed, from the proposed $2 trillion over 10 years, to roughly $1.2 trillion, of which $550 billion is actually new spending while the other $650 billion will go for a hodgepodge of "existing transportation and highway programs under previously planned appropriations." (Mind you, the original "Jobs Plan" did include a fair bit of "human infrastructure" stuff like home- and community-based care for disabled and elderly folks, which ended up going right into the Build Back Better reconciliation bill after the "physical infrastructure" stuff was carved out.) Let's look at what's in that $550 billion in new spending for BIF:
Planes, Trains, And Automobiles (Also Ports)
This is your go-to infrastructure infrastructure:
- $110 billion to repair and upgrade some 173,000 miles of roads and 45,000 bridges. (That's down from $159 billion in Biden's original request.)
- $66 billion for passenger and freight rail, including funds to finally close Amtrak's maintenance backlog, make trains safer, and upgrade commuter rail in the northeast corridor.
- $39 billion for public transit, to repair and modernize existing systems and to make transit accessible (just three short decades after the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990). Includes $7.5 billion to make bus and rail fleets cleaner, retiring dirty old diesels and introducing zero- or low-emissions buses, so you can checkmark this one under "climate" too.
- $25 billion for airports, upgrading air traffic control equipment and getting on a lot of backlogged airport maintenance and repairs nationwide. Flying will continue to suck.
- $17 billion for ports and waterways, with an emphasis on easing congestion and reducing pollution.
Climate And Environmental Justice
While the really big climate spending is in Build Back Better, there's a heck of a lot of good things in the BIF, which we'll get to in a moment. Unfortunately, as critics have pointed out, the BIF includes a number of provisions that could end up subsidizing fossil fuels as well. For example, those "low emission" buses may be cleaner, but they're not zero-emission machines. There's funding for "decarbonized" hydrogen fuels, but that's still generated from natural gas. Some environmental groups also object to funding for carbon capture technology, which they fear could be an excuse to prop up fossil fuels, like the failed "clean coal" boondoggle. That said, there's a case to be made for the still-developing technology to remove carbon directly from the atmosphere, as long as it's a supplement to rapid decarbonization of the economy, not a substitute for it. We plan to write more about this soon!
As for more unambiguously good things in BIF, the bill includes measures to
- Deliver thousands of American-made electric school buses to school bus fleets (part of the $7.5 billion for cleaner transit).
- Upgrade infrastructure around the nation to make it more resilient against climate change and cyberattack ($50 billion).
- Cleanup of Superfund sites and "brownfields," which are frequently in low-income communities and communities of color. This effort will also include funds to clean up decommissioned mines and wells, and for job creation in communities that have relied on fossil fuels ($21 billion).
- $7.5 billion for a network of EV charging stations (carved out of Biden's original proposal to spend $174 billion on EV development, supply chain infrastructure, and consumer incentives; a big chunk that was shifted into Build Back Better).
- $65 billion to upgrade the electrical grid. As we mentioned when BIF passed, this is HUGE, not just for making the grid more resilient, but for managing the addition of more wind and solar nationwide, as well as for connecting home-based solar systems to the grid. (Next bill, let's ban states and utilities from penalizing folks with rooftop solar!)
- $1 billion to reconnect communities. We'll go with Vox's short explanation: "In the past, roads, highways, and bridges have been built that divide communities of color from white communities, an issue this bill aims to address by removing existing barriers and building new infrastructure." Wingnut idiots mocked Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about this when he mentioned it Monday, and we are so GRR MAD that we're planning a standalone story on that, too.
- $55 billion for upgrades to water and wastewater systems. In Biden's original plan, the goal was to dig up and replace all the lead pipes in the USA, which would cost an estimated $45 to $60 billion. Instead, BIF has just $15 billion for lead pipe replacement, $10 billion in projects to remove contaminants, and another $20 billion for general water and wastewater projects. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted this week, there's more for lead pipe replacement in Build Back Better, so how about we finish the damn job?
Taxes For Your (Electric!) Taxis
Because Republicans balked at the original plan to fund much of the BIF via funding the IRS enough to collect unpaid taxes that are already owed, the funding will come from a bunch of smaller revenue streams, as summarized thusly by the Wall Street Journal, with its sentences copy-pasted into bullet points by us, for neatness' sake. (It's not plagiarism if we say how we done it!)
- More than $200 billion in repurposed funds originally intended for coronavirus relief but left unused
- About $50 billion will come from delaying a Trump-era rule on Medicare rebates
- $50 billion from certain states returning unused unemployment insurance supplemental funds
- About $30 billion will be generated from applying information-reporting requirements for cryptocurrency
- Nearly $60 billion will come from economic growth spurred by the spending
- $87 billion from past and future sales of wireless spectrum space.
Screw it, this thing's pretty much paid for and it's good. Also, the increased funding for the IRS got shifted to Build Back Better, which will be the subject of our next archive-quality listicle!
[Vox / CNN / WSJ / White House]
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Mitt Romney Warns That Taxing Billionaires Will Force Them To Buy More Ranches, Paintings, Unicorns
Poor job creators, how will they even live?
Democrats are looking for ways to fund President Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda now that Senator Kyrsten Sinema from Sinema-Land opposes rolling back the huge Trump tax cuts for the wealthy that she voted against four years ago. It's hard to find a spare trillion these days, but Democrats think they can shake down the marginalized billionaire class.
Billionaires could be taxed on unrealized capital gains on their liquid assets, Democratic officials said yesterday. It would affect people with $1 billion in assets or those who have reported at least $100 million in income for three consecutive years, according to news reports. That would ensnare perhaps 700 taxpayers — or the wealthiest 0.0002 percent — but Democrats hope it would generate at least $200 billion in revenue over a decade.
It's unclear why the Times used the verb “ensnare," like Democrats are setting up bear traps for these poor billionaires. This seems like a solid plan, but there are no longer any billionaires on Wonkette's staff so what do we know? Let's consult with almost-billionaire Mitt Romney, who's forced to work past retirement age to provide car elevators for his family. The senator from Utah explained on Fox News yesterday why taxing billionaires is a terrible idea.
Senator Romney expresses concern that taxing billionaires could cause them to invest in paintings or ranches rather… https://t.co/ENFb23nG25— Acyn (@Acyn) 1635199898.0
ROMNEY: It's not a good idea to tell billionaires don't come to America, don't start your business here.
This is a common rhetorical dodge for rich people who want to dodge taxes. Their patriotism is apparently so transactional, they won't stay in the country if taxed at a level they're unlikely to feel in any real sense. Meanwhile, no Democrat seriously suggests that working people will flee the country and settle somewhere that actually provides universal child care, paid family leave, and affordable health care.
Romney claimed that higher taxes for billionaires would convince the “Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates and people like that" to go somewhere else. Jobs and Gates both started as normal mortals who made their fortune in America, thanks to the contributions and hard work from their fellow Americans. It's not too much to ask that billionaires not abandon their countrymen because they don't like a capital gains tax. (A capital gainsplainer, if you will, is here.)
Then Romney reminded us of simpler times when Democrats didn't run against fake populists like Donald Trump but unabashed cartoon plutocrats like Romney himself. Every time Mittens opened his gold-plated mouth in 2012, Barack Obama's polls numbers improved in the Rust Belt.
ROMNEY: You're going to tax people not when they sell something but just when they own it and the value goes up. And what that means is ... these multi-billionaires are going to look and say, “I don't want to invest in the stock market, because if that goes up, I'm gonna get taxed!" So maybe instead I'll invest in a ranch or paintings or things that don't build jobs.
How does Romney think ranches even work if he claims that “investing" in them wouldn't create jobs? You can't just let the place go all Grey Gardens. You have cattle to rustle and horses to groom.
Paintings probably do require less maintenance and upkeep, but I'm imagining a rich asshole dropping a million on a painting from some artist who died broke in a rat-infested apartment and hanging it in a room of a house they visit once a year, all the while thinking, "I'm so clever for avoiding that extra tax that might've funded child care."
That's what this is all about. Senator Joe Manchin wants to put an income cap of $60,000 on the child tax credit, which is arbitrary and would penalize families making $61,000 instead of $59,500. (It would also raise taxes on families making between $60,000 and $150,000, the current cap.) That's real life and real money, while billionaires would play games with paintings and ranches rather than help less fortunate people. Of course, when you're among the wealthiest 0.0002 percent, almost everyone's less fortunate.
Romney's spiel does make another compelling argument in favor of Elizabeth Warren's straightforward soak-the-rich tax. Thanks, Senator.
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Oh Good, Now We Know What Joe Manchin Wants, Maybe. And It's AWFUL.
Dok is Mad About A Thing.
One of the recurring mysteries getting in the way of progress on the Build Back Better reconciliation bill is that nobody really knows what exactly the the two Democratic holdouts, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are holding out for. They've both been extremely coy about not saying in public what top-line amount of spending they could vote for, other than "Not $3.5 trillion over 10 years."
Now, last night, Manchin did release that screed about the "fiscal insanity" of spending lots of money on social programs while raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to pay for it, but even that wasn't terribly specific about changes he might want to make to the reconciliation package beyond insisting Congress should wait and see whether poor people stop being poor, and also we should means-test any new benefits to make sure the middle class won't support the bill since it's frozen out of getting any help.
As for Sinema, she's been even less clear. Asked whether the rest of the Democratic caucus knows where she is, she hilariously said "I'm clearly right in front of the elevator" because she's the second coming of goddamn John "turn left at Greenland" Lennon.
Today, however, Politico reports it has dredged up a copy of a July 28 document that it says Manchin has been handing to Senate colleagues who want to know what his own position on reconciliation might be, if he'd be so kind. It's a brief outline of some fairly radical changes he'd like to make to Biden's first-term agenda, like slashing most of it. Look at this shit, would you just LOOK AT IT:
We'll bullet point for you if you can't read that mess above:
Spending conditions:
Families and health
- Needs based with means testing guardrails/formulas on new spending
- Targeted spending caps on existing programs
- No additional handouts outs or transfer payments
- Inclusion of S. 1783 Budgeting for Opioid Addiction Treatment Act (LifeBOAT Act)
Climate
- Sole ENR jurisdiction on any clean energy standard
- Spending on innovation, not elimination. Fuel neutral
Energy and Vehicle Tax policies:
- That CCUS be included and ensure that CCUS on coal and natural gas can feasibly qualify
- If tax credits for solar and wind are included and extended, then fossil tax credits are not repealed (eg. intangible drilling costs and credits for enhanced oil recovery)
- Vehicle and fuel tax credits shall not be limited to electric vehicles — they must include hydrogen.
Offsets Conditions
- Any revenue exceeding $1.5 T shall be used for deficit reduction
- Corporate tax rate: 25%
- Corporate domestic minimum tax: 15%
- Raise the top rate on ordinary income: 39.6%
- Raise cap gains rate: 28% All in
- End carried interest
- Tax Gap, Rebate Rule, Dynamic Growth
Manchin — in late July at least — wanted the bill to be no larger than $1.5 trillion, just hacking out well over half of what the proposal called for after it had already been hacked down to Biden's agenda essentials. Worse, it appears to share the same complete misunderstanding of the Build Back Better agenda that we saw in his September Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which he called for a "pause" on the reconciliation bill until the economic effects of the American Rescue Plan became clear. Manchin really seems to think Build Back Better is another emergency stimulus package, not the thorough revamping of the social safety net and climate agenda that its proponents — including the president — see it as.
For instance, he called for debate on the package to not even start until October 1 (oh look, here we are), and insisted that none of the new spending for Build Back Better be disbursed "until all funding from COV1D legislation and [the American Rescue Plan] has been spent" and until the Federal Reserve has ended "quantitative easing" — another emergency measure to prop up the economy.
We sure hope someone has at least clarified to Manchin that this is Biden's legislative agenda for his first term, not a short-term plan to boost the economy. Has anyone told him? Senator? Have you heard?
Politico notes that the document's date, July 28, was "right before the Senate passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that Manchin helped write," and the Senate's passage of a basic framework for the reconciliation plan.
Among other demands, Manchin insisted on a top corporate tax rate of 25 percent (Build Back Better sets it at 26.6), a top capital gains tax rate of 28 percent (higher than BBB's 25 percent), and a top marginal income tax rate of 39.6 percent, which at last everyone agreed on. He also wanted any new revenue over $1.5 trillion to go to paying down the deficit, because OMG deficit.
Manchin's beloved means tests were in there, too, insisting that all benefits be "needs based," which would turn Biden's vision of educational and family benefits for working class Americans, a means of building the economy from the middle out and from the bottom up, into a set of safety-net benefits that the middle class would resent, because why are those people getting help and I'm not? Say goodbye to broad-based family and medical leave, free community college, universal pre-K, help for caregivers for the elderly, and childcare.
And on another key part of Build Back Better, Manchin appeared to completely reject the idea that the federal government should be working to transition the US to clean energy. Instead, he insisted that coal and natural gas qualify for government assistance if they adopt carbon capture technology (those CCUS's in his memo above are for "carbon capture, utilization, and storage"), and that if the government subsidizes clean energy, it may not cut any subsidies to fossil fuels. And while he was open to tax credits for electric vehicles, he insisted that similar credits be extended to hydrogen-powered vehicles, which is a problem since, as the New York Times reports, current technology for producing hydrogen is so energy intensive that it's really a misnomer to call hydrogen a "zero emissions" fuel.
The hostage note closes with the line "Senator Manchin does not guarantee that he will vote for the final reconciliation legislation if it exceeds the conditions outlined in this agreement." Politico notes that while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer signed the document and hand-wrote "will try to dissuade Joe on some of these," a spokesman for Schumer said today that Schumer
never agreed to any of the conditions Sen. Manchin laid out; he merely acknowledged where Sen. Manchin was on the subject at the time. [...] Sen. Manchin did not rule out voting for a reconciliation bill that exceeded the ideas he outlined, and Leader Schumer made clear that he would work to convince Sen. Manchin to support a final reconciliation bill — as he has doing been for weeks.
Again, that was where Manchin was in July, and Joe Manchin can be notoriously difficult to pin down. It's not terribly encouraging that Politico reports Manchin is still handing out copies of his list to colleagues, though, and it's difficult to imagine Democrats caving to all his demands from July, particularly the remaking of much of Build Back Better into means-tested programs that wouldn't help the middle class, or the insistence on propping up fossil fuels in the face of the climate crisis.
Since the document was published this morning, Manchin has very helpfully clarified to reporters that he is not now nor has he ever been a liberal, that he believes "in my heart" that the US can't possibly afford to spend more than $1.5 trillion (despite all of it being paid for), and that America shouldn't become "an entitlement-based society." Guess we shouldn't be too surprised: Since the 1980s, the very wealthy and huge corporations have been entitled to everything they ask for, so if progressives want to change that, he explained, they should "elect more liberals."
From your lips to the Cosmic Whatever's ear, Mr. Senator. We need to expand the Democratic majority in the midterms, that's for damn sure.
[Politico / Manchin memo / MSN/Business Insider / Photo by Ryan Stanton, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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Democrats Can Head Off Debt Ceiling Armageddon RIGHT NOW, So ... They Should Do That!
Trying to get 'Republican obstructionist' points is irrelevant when everyone blames Dems anyway.
Americans sometimes believe some weird things, like thinking the moon landings were faked, that a malaria drug can cure COVID-19, or even that you can sit in a bathtub as the water goes out and not be sucked down the drain, a pernicious myth that has led to countless tragedies. So it shouldn't be too surprising that a new Politico/Morning Consult poll shows that if the US were to default on its national debt, more Americans say they would blame Democrats than would blame Republicans.
The poll, taken between September 18 to 20, asked respondents, "If the United States were to default on the national debt, would you tend to blame the Democratic party more, the Republican party more, or both parties equally?" Thirty-three percent said they would blame Democrats, and only 16 percent would blame Republicans. Irritatingly, a whopping 42 percent said they'd blame both parties equally.
That's just kind of maddening to people who've been paying even the least bit of attention. Mitch McConnell, after four years of routinely suspending the debt ceiling to add some $8 trillion in debt for Donald Trump, has instructed Senate Republicans not to agree to any increase in the debt limit now that a Democrat is in office. It's a cynical political move that merely threatens to throw the US economy back into recession, probably taking the rest of the world with it. So this is absolutely not in any sense a "both sides" thing.
Happily, it's fairly safe to say that this polling shouldn't really be giving Republicans any ideas about riding this debt thing to victory in the 2022 midterms, for several reasons. For one thing, most people are not political junkies who watch Rachel Maddow and know that the debt limit is a stupid law passed because Congress was cheesed at getting involved in World War I just months after Woodrow Wilson campaigned on the slogan "He kept us out of war." The debt limit has never once prevented deficit spending or reduced that national debt, but nobody's paying attention but us geeks.
As a rough barometer of how much Americans pay attention to politics in a non-election year, we'd also note that in the same poll, nearly a quarter (23 percent) of respondents said they knew "nothing at all" about the recent California recall election.
But most Americans do know that Democrats have the presidency and slim majorities in Congress, so if they're asked about virtually anything involving government, of course they'll say "Democrats" or "both sides."
That's certainly the analysis put forward by Sen James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), who seemed fairly tickled Democrats might take the blame for his party's fuckery:
"The American people will say, 'I'm mad at everybody'," Senator James Lankford told Reuters. "But I don't know that it becomes the fault of the group that's in the minority in the House, in the minority in the Senate and not in the White House."
That said, there's not much chance Republicans will get the chance to blame Democrats for crashing the economy, because everyone in both parties knows, as we've discussed earlier, there's no way in hell Democrats are going to allow a default.
This week, House Democrats passed a bill suspending the debt ceiling through the end of December 2022 and also funding the government for three more months, to prevent a government shutdown and an eventual debt default. Now that bill goes to the Senate, where McConnell is likely to block it. But for all the talk of fiscal Armageddon if the US defaults on its debt, it's just not going to happen, because Democrats are the good responsible Student Council kids who actually care about governing.
If they really can't get 10 Republican votes next week to avoid a filibuster, Democrats will raise the debt limit via the budget resolution process. As the Source of All World Knowledge explains, that's perfectly cromulent under the weird Senate rules governing reconciliation, and wouldn't get in the way of Democrats' also using reconciliation to pass the Build Back Better bill this year as well.
So why haven't Dems just gone ahead and raised the damn thing, to take it out of the news? The reasoning we've seen is that Dems want to give Republicans a chance to be bipartisan first (and to have a talking point about Republican obstruction when R's filibuster). Also, a bipartisan bill would allow the debt limit to be suspended, while reconciliation would require the ceiling to be raised to a specific number, which Republicans could then wave around in campaign ads about those spendy spendy Dems next year. Maybe someone would care?
Frankly, we think it would probably be better for Dems to just pass the debt limit increase by reconciliation right now and get all the gloom and doom scenarios off the news sooner, because if that Politico/Morning Consult poll demonstrates anything, it's that voters aren't really paying attention to any of this crap anyway, so how about removing it from the conversation altogether. Whatever small political points might be gained by painting Republicans as obstructionists probably won't outweigh the effects of pundits fretting about default, and in a year, nobody is likely to remember any of it anyway.
But we are not political consultants, so we guess it may be another week or so until Democrats get there.
[Reuters / Politico/Morning Consult poll]
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