Tangle - The new Build Back Better framework.

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

On Thursday, the president announced a new framework for Democrats' reconciliation bill, also known as his Build Back Better plan, that he said would garner the support of moderates in the Senate and progressives in the House. The legislative text is still being negotiated, but the framework wasn't rejected out of hand by any members of the Democratic party — which is a sign of progress after many months of negotiations. Democrats need every member of their party to support the bill in the Senate, and can only lose three votes in the House. They are attempting to pass the bill in tandem with a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that has already been passed in the Senate but still needs to pass the House of Representatives.The plan's top line number is $1.75 trillion, down from the $3.5 trillion initially proposed by the Biden administration.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.You can support our podcast by clicking here.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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do the most? Holla don't. More festive, less frantic. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's show, we are going to be talking about the latest from President Biden's Build Back Better program, a little bit about the framework that he announced last week, what it means, what it looks like made the bill's final cut and what didn't. Before we jump in, as always, we're going to start with some quick hits. First up, President Biden is in Glasgow, Scotland for a United Nations conference on climate change today.

Number two, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, tested positive for COVID-19 over the weekend. Number three, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today in two cases over Texas' new abortion law. Number four, the FDA told Moderna that it needs additional time to examine the use of its vaccine in children aged 12 to 17. The FDA is hoping to evaluate the risk of myocarditis, a rare heart inflammation condition. Number five, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner described the U.S. interrogation program for the first time publicly last, which brings us to the main topic, Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan. On Thursday, the president announced a new framework for Democrats' reconciliation bill, also known as his Build Back Better plan, that he said would garner the support of moderates in the Senate and

progressives in the House. The legislative text is still being negotiated, but the framework wasn't rejected out of hand by any members of the Democratic Party, which is a sign of progress after many months of negotiations. Democrats need every member of their party to support the bill in the Senate and can only afford to support the bill in the Senate and can only afford to lose three votes in the House. They are attempting to pass the bill in tandem with a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that has already been passed in the Senate but still needs to pass the House of Representatives. The plan's top line number came out to $1.75 trillion, down from the $3.5 trillion initially proposed by the Biden administration.

According to Reuters and some of the texts that we've seen released about the framework, here is what we know or think it will include, what Biden is intending it to include. $555 billion in clean energy tax credits, climate resilience infrastructure, and renewable energy development. free preschool for three and four year olds for six years, expanded home care for the elderly and disabled, limiting the child care costs for families to no more than 7% of their income for families earning up to 250% of the state's median income, extending the child tax credit for one year, extending Affordable Care Act premium tax credits through 2025, potentially lowering the cost of health care premiums for about 9 million

Americans, $150 billion for affordable housing, and $100 billion to reduce immigration backlogs, and probably protect undocumented immigrants, some of whom have been here for many years at risk of deportation, although this part of the bill is likely to be rejected by the Senate parliamentarian because of some Senate rules. We'll talk about that in a little bit. The framework does not include paid family leave proposals, a proposal allowing the U.S. government to negotiate prescription drug prices, the billionaire tax that was proposed last week, which we covered, changes to the state and local tax deduction, also known as SALT, that Republicans limited in 2017 as a part of their new tax bill, free community college, and the clean electricity performance program. None of those things admitted

into the bill. Biden's proposal to pay for the plan includes instituting a new 15% corporate minimum tax, a 5% surtax on income over $10 million a year, a 1% tax on corporate stock buybacks, rolling back some of Trump's 2017 tax cuts, and increased funding for the IRS and its enforcement. On Sunday, Democrats said they were still discussing a way to include prescription drug price negotiations in the bill and had made some progress. Votes on the Build Back Better program and the infrastructure bill could happen as early as this week, but it could take many more weeks before legislative taxes finalize and these bills become law. Below, we'll take a look at some reactions to what's in, what's out, and where things go from here.

All right, we're going to start with what the right is saying about the framework. The right says the framework's true cost is much higher and Democrats failed to accomplish much of what they set out to do. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it a jerry-rigged plan with quarter-baked entitlement and programs that will retard work and $1.85 trillion in tax increases that will distort and limit investment. They use phony accounting to finance a few years of new spending with 10 years of tax increases, the board said. For example, the plan extends a $3,600 child tax credit for one year at a cost of $110 billion. But Democrats will inevitably extend the credit next year. If Republicans oppose this or try to scale the credit

back, they will be attacked for raising taxes on middle-class families. The true 10-year cost is about $1.1 trillion. The agreement drops the House's proposed Medicare vision and dental expansion, but it preserves a new hearing benefit, which the White House claims will cost a mere $34 billion and start in 2024. The annual cost of having the hearing benefit once fully phased in is some $16 billion. Congress will invariably make it permanent, making the true cost about $160 billion. Democrats also plan to extend Obamacare subsidies through 2025 for higher earners and broaden them to low-income folks in states that rejected Medicaid expansion. The White House says

this will cost $130 billion, but the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that providing coverage to these folks would cost north of $500 billion over a decade. These programs are merely illustrative of how Democrats are desperately trying to squeeze a menagerie of spending into their negotiated $1.75 trillion top-line costs, with the real costs likely to be closer to $4 trillion. In the National Review, Philip Klein said that Biden's social spending could be less resilient than Obamacare. To pare down the cost of President Biden's social spending bill, Democrats were forced to make a number of their new programs temporary. Their hope, and conservatives fear, is that once the programs are put in place and develop dependents, that even a future Republican Congress would feel compelled to extend them. The reason why Obamacare was different was that it was

a permanent piece of legislation. This meant that when Republicans got in control, they had to actively pass a bill to repeal it, which also put pressure on them to come up with some sort of replacement. Imagine, however, an alternate reality in which Obamacare would have expired at the end of 2017 had Republicans not passed legislation to extend or replace it. Suddenly, a Republican disagreement and dysfunction would have worked in favor of conservatives because if nothing passed, it would have effectively repealed the law, Klein said. If Republicans are in control in the future, it won't ultimately matter whether some Republicans or even leadership believes it would be better politics to extend child care and

universal pre-K subsidies. As long as a critical mass of Republicans won't vote for such extensions, they won't happen. In the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel said that the bill is the latest climate humiliation for the progressive left. President Biden promised progressives his budget bill would finally deliver them their long-sought climate stick. What they're getting instead is the same old carrot, corporate welfare, Strassel wrote, cuts. The original climate portion of the reconciliation package was built around the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would require utilities to buy or generate a certain additional amount of renewable energy every year. Companies would get federal payments if they hit the mark and face steep fines if they didn't. Some Democrats, including Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and several Texas representatives, said no to CEPP, and they meant it. The White House

claims that its souped-up subsidies will largely make up for the loss of enforcement mechanisms. They won't, though they stand to do real damage to energy reliability and the economy. All right, that's it for the right's take here. This is what the left is saying. The left is mixed on the framework, with some arguing its most crucial provisions were removed and others saying it should be celebrated. The Washington Post editorial board said the bill is getting worse and worse. Democrats might expand the child tax credit for perhaps only a single year. The expanded credit could halve child poverty. A long-term expansion should take precedence over a federal pre-kindergarten program or expanded housing aid. If temporary benefits expire, as written, the nation will derive little long-term good for its money.

Democrats might bet that future Congresses, even those run by Republicans, would not want to revoke popular benefits. If that is so, the Democrats' bill would effectively write a suite of expensive new programs into the law without long-term revenue streams to back them. Ms. Sinema compounded the funding problems by derailing Democrats' plan to roll back President Donald Trump's ruinous tax cuts, which were massive giveaways to the rich at a time of high wealth inequality and big budget deficits. massive giveaways to the rich at a time of high wealth inequality and big budget deficits. Meanwhile, Mr. Manchin appears to have forced Democrats to drop their central climate change policy, a standard that would have pushed utilities to steadily adopt clean energy,

leaving only a laundry list of expansive green subsidies in the bill. This would not and should not impress other nations that have adopted real carbon caps to guide their economies. In CNN, Kristen Rowe Finkbeiner said it was shameful that Democrats abandoned paid family leave. We are in the midst of a deadly pandemic and a jobs and care crisis as the only industrialized nation in the world without some form of national paid family or medical leave. We need it badly, she wrote. This life-saving and economy-boosting policy should not be delayed. Paid family medical leave is a policy that makes it possible for people to recover from childbirth to bond with a new child or to take care of themselves or a close loved one if a serious health crisis strikes. The situation is critical. Going into the pandemic, while a small percentage of people

had this policy through their work or due to state law, our nation guaranteed zero weeks of paid family and medical leave, while all other countries on average have 26 weeks of paid leave. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCelvax.ca. What does the devastation look like?

Millions of moms and caregivers have been disproportionately pushed out of the labor force, with black, brown, and indigenous moms experiencing compounded health and economic harms, and lives that could have been saved are being lost, in part due to our failure to guarantee paid family medical leave. That's not all. The cost of child care is now higher than public college, even as the most care workers are paid sub-living wages. And these child care costs are particularly hard to meet without paid leave as a bridge to going back to work after a new baby arrives. Businesses are faltering because our care infrastructure is nearly non-existent, pushing the

employees they need to keep their doors open out of the labor force. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dion Jr. said Democrats should celebrate victory, explain what they've achieved, and build on success to make more progress. Begin with the basics, he wrote. Trump spent four years promising investments in the nation's physical infrastructure. Biden got it done with bipartisan support. The bill's provisions to close the broadband gap will be especially helpful to the parts of the country that have seen little in return for their support of Trumpism. The Build Back Better bill includes a record investment to fight climate change, new programs for affordable housing, and increased assistance to make post-secondary education more affordable. For families earning up to $150,000 annually, it extends the child

tax credit of $300 a month for each child parents of kids under six and $250 a month for each child aged 6 to 17. It's a policy many conservatives have endorsed. The bill caps child care spending for most families at 7% of their income, and in what is really a big deal, it creates a universal pre-K program for all three and four-year-olds. At the other end of life, the bill expands home care services for the elderly and provides for a new hearing benefit under Medicare. It also brings health coverage to up to four million Americans, many of them locked out of the benefits's take, and this is my take.

So of all the things that had been floated to be included in Biden's Build Back Better plan, if I could have picked three to make it into the final bill, I think they probably would have been one, a paid family leave policy, two, new rules allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices, and three, a climate change provision that was not simply more corporate welfare. The first two are not in the bill, and the third is TBD, so I'm not exactly thrilled about the final product that came out of this. The paid family leave policy is, in my opinion, a no-brainer. Kristen Rowe Finkbeiner made the case very well in the newsletter above, as it's just a simple fact that we're woefully inadequate at taking care of our parents, kids, or sick employees, especially compared to other developed

nations. The social and the economic upsides are tough to overstate, and I think it should have been the Democrats' top priority. Now, it might happen anyway in future legislation because there's actually some strong bipartisan support for reform, but this is a huge opportunity missed, in my opinion, for people on both sides of the aisle. In my ideal world, Americans would be a lot less medicated and a lot less reliant on prescription drugs to live healthy lives. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in, and instead we have people going bankrupt to pay for life-saving medicine. Whether capping the cost of prescription drugs would hurt the development of future medicines is a very challenging question to answer, and a lot of experts disagree. But this was probably the most popular proposal in the whole bill, and an issue

every president in recent memory, including Trump, has tried to tackle, reducing the price of prescription drugs. Somehow, Big Pharma's billions of dollars in lobbying has appeared to leave it slipping through Democrats' hands once again. Finally, I have written about the reality of climate change in this newsletter and talked about it on this podcast. I am hopeful something useful will emerge in the final legislative text of this bill. Senator Joe Manchin is as compromised on this

issue as any politician could be. His state gets 90% of its electricity from coal, and he's received more money from the fossil fuel industry than just about any other sitting senator. His job is to serve his constituents, and it's understandable why he'd reject legislation that forces a much more abrupt shift to clean energy, one that would certainly disrupt West Virginia's economy. But it's also just unacceptable for him not to be leading on this issue given the stakes of what we're facing. The jury is still out on where we land, and we'll see what ends up in the final bill, but I am definitely not encouraged. the final bill, but I am definitely not encouraged. Now, my favorite part about the bill is the immigration overhaul. Around $100 billion, that includes funding to help U.S. citizenship and immigration services clear the backlog of migrants' paperwork and court cases. This is a solution I've been advocating for years. Clearing that backlog, adding judges on the southern border, processing

these cases more efficiently would reduce the number of undocumented migrants released into the U.S. without having their asylum claims evaluated and their immigration status solidified. It would create a more humane and orderly system in a year where we had a record number of undocumented immigrants apprehended at the southern border. Unfortunately, it's both unclear if this funding will even be allowed in the bill because of the Senate rules that dictate what can pass with a 50-vote reconciliation threshold. It's also not clear exactly what the $100 billion is going to do yet until we have the legislative text. I would love to see that money go towards judges and clearing this backlog and processing all this paperwork. It might be some of that. It might be none of that. It might be all of that. And regardless of everything there, it seems like we are expecting that the Senate parliamentarian will rule that no immigration reform can be included in this bill. So,

but also another thing that I'm hoping to see that doesn't look like it's going to end up in here. I'm also interested in learning more about the 1% tax on corporate buybacks. This seems like a compelling way to make revenue from corporations who use their massive profit windfalls to simply inflate their own share prices. Kudos to progressives also who have pledged not to vote on any bill until there is a legislative text. This is an obscenely low bar for legislators to meet, but it is not met with surprising regularity, and I'm just happy to see that they're not going to push through some 1,600-page bill without even seeing it. So what happens now? We'll see. Biden is in Europe for this UN climate change summit. The haggling in D.C. is underway. The bill isn't remotely close to what I'd hoped for, but the left's griping about its size seems a bit silly to me. It is

a historic piece of legislation. It could remake several facets of American life, and it's probably going to become law with just 50 votes in the Senate. Now, we have to see if those last two Democrats can finally agree on something with the other 48. Sinema and Manchin have to be on board for this to go down, but we are getting closer, so we'll see, and hopefully this week we'll have some hard legislative text. we'll see. And hopefully this week we'll have some hard legislative text. All right, that is it for today's main topic. We are skipping today's reader question because this is a pretty tricky topic we're covering in the main story, so it's taking up a lot of space. But as always, if you want to submit a question for the podcast, for the newsletter, just write to me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C, at readtangle.com, and you can submit a question that way. Today's story that matters is from NBC News, who conducted a 21-page poll that gives us an extensive look at how Americans are viewing the two major political parties today.

are viewing the two major political parties today. According to the poll, when asked which party would do a better job on specific issues, Democrats fared best on climate change with plus 24, coronavirus plus 12, education plus 10, and abortion plus 10. Meanwhile, Republicans did best on border security plus 27, inflation plus 24, crime plus 22, national security plus 21, and the economy plus 18. NBC News has a fascinating piece with all the poll results up on their website that you can check out. All right, that brings us to our numbers. And this is actually some more polling information that I found pretty interesting. 69% is the percentage of Americans

who said they know just some or little to nothing about what is in Biden's Build Back Better and infrastructure plans. 31% is the percentage of Americans who said they know a great deal or a good amount about what's in Biden's Build Back Better and infrastructure plans. 32% is the percentage of Americans who think the bills would hurt people like them if they became law. And 25% is the percentage of Americans who think the bills would help people like them if they became law. 50% is the percentage drop in abortions in Texas in September 2021 compared to September 2020. Now, COVID-19 pandemic probably played a role in that, but it's also an interesting comparison

given the abortion ban that was just passed there. 84% is the percentage of people seeking abortions in Texas who were more than six weeks pregnant before the new law that bans most abortions after six weeks was put into place. All right, so that's it for our numbers section. And finally, our have a nice day story. This one just kind of caught my eye. It's a crazy story. U.S. wildlife researchers have been stunned to discover that two California condors,

which are a critically endangered bird species, appear to be capable of virgin birth. The two birds gave birth without any male genetic DNA, something that other bird species as well as some lizards, snakes, sharks, and fish have been known to do. But this is especially important because there are only 500 California condors remaining in the southwest U.S. and Mexico. The birds were a surprising piece of hope for a species thought to be on its way out. In the 1980s, fewer than two dozen of the birds remained. Now their numbers are up to 500, and if these birds can give virgin birth, that might increase their odds of surviving extinction. What makes the case even more rare is that it is

the first time that any bird species has had a virgin birth when males were present for breathing, according to the BBC. They've got an awesome story about that up on their website if you want to check it out. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, please go to readtangle.com and subscribe to our newsletter or readtangle.com backslash membership to become a subscriber and support our work. There is also a link in our podcast description if you want to become a regular donor and just sort of keep us propped up until we get some advertisements on the podcast. Best thing you can do, give us a five-star rating, spread the word to your friends, and keep listening.

We'll see you guys tomorrow. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by edited by bailey saul sean brady ari weitzman and produced in conjunction with tangle's social media manager magdalena bakova who also helped create our logo the podcast is edited by trevor eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by diet 75 for more from tangle subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed.