The NPR Politics Podcast - What Does Biden Care About Most? Look At His Budget Proposal

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

President Biden wants to raise income taxes on households earning more than $400,000 a year to shore up the social safety net, make community college and childcare less expensive, and boost investment in strategic industries in order to counter China. But, like all presidents' budgets, it is more a statement of principles than a concrete plan to be taken up by Congress.And more people who have been convicted of felonies are getting their right to vote back — an expanding policy trend that defies typical partisan splits.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, and voting correspondent Ashley Lopez.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Giveaway: npr.org/politicsplusgiveaway Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Jesse, and I'm just eating some curried chickpeas after working all day at my desk job. This podcast was recorded at... That was great. It's 1129 Eastern on Friday, March 10th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. All right, let's start the show. Yeah. Got a little protein, got a little flavor, got a little crunch.

It's an inside joke, I don't know. It's just funny because it was just a week of like, I'm circumnavigating globe in a balloon calling into the NPR Politics Podcast, so I appreciate it. People are living their lives too. This was a timestamp for Scott Detrow. I appreciate the simplicity as well. Circumnavigating the globe in a balloon is a dangerous thing these days though.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Tetra. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. It's Friday. We're all kind of loopy. Let's talk budget. Yeah. It's the usual Friday loopiness.

Yeah, the loops. Yeah. Nothing brings you quite up like a budget, right, Tam? I'm all in on the budget this year because this is a budget that is setting the table for some really big fights that are coming and also for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign that we're all expecting. So we're going to talk about all of those interesting indicators in this budget. But first, let's talk about the budget itself and remind everybody that around this time each year, the White House puts out a spending plan. Congress usually goes, cool story, bro. That is the end of

that budget. Tam, what is in this document this year and what stood out to you? You know, not the broader political context, but simply the numbers and what Joe Biden says is his vision for running the federal government. Leading into the big budget release, the White House was building the hype, as happens. And they were talking a lot about how this budget was going to reduce the deficit over the next 10 years by $3 trillion, which is a really big number. And so when the budget came out yesterday, I was like, oh, this is not the austerity budget I was expecting. It includes a lot of priorities of President Biden, because as the president said, show me your budget, show me your values. So this includes affordable housing, universal preschool, paid family leave, college affordability, border security, support for Ukraine.

A budget is the entire federal government. And so it includes all of President Biden's priorities, all of the things that he campaigned on in 2020. I would argue, though, he does say that a lot. And I think it's true. But what also shows your values is the things that he discarded over the past two years because they didn't seem politically realistic in that moment, including several of these policies that he's now putting forward to try and get done this time. Absolutely. Because presidential budgets are a political document. They are a vision statement. They are, you know, a statement of your priorities. So why not include everything you could possibly ever want?

It also includes, to pay for it, a lot of taxes on the wealthy. President Biden guarantees no one earning less than $400,000 a year would see a tax increase. But everyone else, the wealthy, big corporations, tax loopholes, they're going away. The marginal tax rate for the wealthy is going up. All of that to help pay for this because there's a lot of spending in this budget that is also trying to cut the deficit. You know, it's not just a statement of priorities and values. It's also him looking toward the 2024 presidential election and his reelection campaign. And part of a broader context here of him moving to the middle, or at least focusing on the middle, starting with his State of the Union address, and some of the things that he'd outlined, as well as his moves on crime

and immigration that we've seen recently. And then the budget's the other piece of this. While he's also trying to box in Republicans, Kevin McCarthy has not released a budget. Biden has continued to say, show me your budget. If you want to negotiate on the debt ceiling, then you're going to have to show us that. What are your priorities? Specifically, what are you going to do about entitlements? And Biden is saying here in this budget that they can make Medicare solvent through the 2050s. And he's saying, okay, so show me what you can do. I mean, Domenico, I see that move to the middle on a lot of fronts. But what do you mean when it comes to this budget?

Because as Tam was saying, a lot of these are kind of the big government programs that Biden adopted in the first few years that are by and large viewed as progressive. I would call a lot of what they put in here, though, poll tested, poll approved. I mean, there's some very popular things in here. You know, being able to say, for example, oh, we're going to cut entitlements because we have to balance our budget over, you know, decades. That's not very popular with people, even though people say they want something like that. Doing things like capping the cost of prescription drugs. I mean, these are all things that are pretty popular, even if they are things that the government would actually do. debt ceiling, right? It's something that has to be renewed every once in a while to pay for things that the federal government has already committed to. House Republicans are saying we are going to put conditions on our vote to raise the debt ceiling, and those conditions are cutting the

deficit. Biden says, great, how would you do it? Here's my plan to do it. Tam, is it fair to say that there is no counter-Republican plan, there are no counter-Republican details, because that's something the White House is saying a lot right now. They don't have those details yet, that's for sure. There is sort of disagreement among House Republicans about how exactly to get the savings that they say they want. One big challenge here is Medicare and Social Security, these programs that Americans love and rely on, are a huge portion and a growing portion of federal spending because the population is aging. Republicans, as we all saw in the State of the Union address, Republicans made clear and in the days after, they're not going to touch Medicare and Social Security. That's what they're saying because it had been a criticism from President Biden that they were going to take away your Medicare and Social

Security. So now they're like, no, we're not touching that. They're not going to touch defense. And so that leaves a pretty narrow piece of the federal budget pie from which they would need to get all of their savings, which means if they actually put a budget on paper, the things that will get cut, some of them are unpopular, but most of them are things that actually affect people's lives, that people would recognize and understand as important functions of the government. So that's the challenge. And historically, it is fair to say that Joe Biden is a Democrat who does seem to actually legitimately care about lowering the deficit. But the way he wants to do it is by and large raising taxes on very wealthy people, which is not the worldview of the House Republican caucus. Their view is that he's a tax and spend Democrat.

So and again, though, what are they going to do, especially when it comes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security? And that is going to be a key point during this 2024 presidential reelection. And I think it's something Biden really wants to hang his hat on. Can I just say, though, we're talking a lot about deficit reduction and President Biden's budget, it pencils out, it's like $2.85 trillion over 10 years that the deficit would be reduced. But that doesn't mean that there won't be deficits every single year. And in fact, there will be massive deficits that will add on to each other,

add to the national debt. And later years of this presidential budget, you know, they forecast out a decade, the U.S. national debt would exceed the size of the U.S. economy. The debt to GDP ratio would be, you know, 110%. All right, Tam, I want to sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart for covering this numbers-heavy story for the White House team this week.

It was my pleasure. All right, we'll talk to you later. Bye. Domenico, stick around. We're going to take a break and come back with Ashley Lopez to talk about some interesting trends across the states when it comes to voting. We are back and Ashley Lopez is here and covers voting for us. Hey, Ashley. Hey there.

So you've been working on an interesting story this week. It looks at the fact that state lawmakers across the country are poised to expand voting rights to people who are convicted of a felony. It's an interesting trend. Before we get into what we've been seeing in state houses lately, just remind us how many Americans cannot vote right now because of felony convictions. So the latest data we have is actually about how many people were disenfranchised due to a past conviction during the past midterm election. And that was about 4.6 million Americans, about 2% of the voting age population in the United States, which is, you know, pretty significant.

I should caveat this, though, by saying that this was actually a lower rate than just a few years ago. In 2016, 6.1 million people with felony convictions were disenfranchised. So even though there's a lot of people, I mean, there's definitely been a trend of states expanding access to the ballot for people with a past conviction. And it's definitely bearing out in the numbers. What states have you been looking at? States like Minnesota and New Mexico have either passed in the case of Minnesota or are poised to pass soon or put into law soon.

Laws that expand access to people once they're out of jail. Minnesota and New Mexico required returning citizens to finish their parole or probation before they could get access to the ballot. But lawmakers have decided to open that up to, you know, as soon as they're out of jail or prison, they have their rights back. They don't have to wait to complete those like terms of their sentences. And then there are other states like left-leaning states in the country that already have some baseline access for people with past convictions that are considering opening up access to people while they're in prison. So in jail or prison, they'll be able to cast a ballot. So it really just depends what state you're looking at. But those states, I think, are pretty interesting. I was going to say, this sounds like we're also

seeing a sort of gap trying to be filled by states like with a lot of other kinds of legislation when the federal government really can't step in. You know, something like the Voting Rights Act used to be very popular until the Supreme Court sort of stepped in and gutted the Voting Rights Act. And Ashley, I wonder, it sounds like we're seeing something of a blue-red divide here, right? Yeah, well, that's broadly true of definitely most voting legislation out there. There's definitely a big divide where conservative states, for the most part, are restricting access and more purple and left-leaning states are looking to expand access to the ballot. This is one of those weird topics where actually the trend line is even in more purple or even red states towards in some way expanding access. So I think a good example of this is Florida in 2018. Voters there,

you know, voted for Ron DeSantis, a very conservative man. But those same voters, you know, at least a percentage of them also approved a ballot measure that opened ballot access to people once they finish their sentence. So, you know, it's like Florida voters would probably not have voted, let's say, for something that, you know, Oregon or Illinois is considering, but they do in some degree want to see people with past convictions or returning citizens have at least some access to the ballot at some point after their sentence, which I think is pretty interesting. Of course, how these are enforced or upheld is also a different story depending on who's in charge. I mean, we were talking about Florida, and you

remember Florida Governor Ron DeSantis kind of going in and trying to arrest people who may not have had the ability to vote but may have done so by mistake or by accident, looking for quote unquote, voter fraud, which has sort of become mixed in with voting rights in a time when, for example, these people have served time and then want to have the right to be able to vote after that. I mean, it's the difference again,, between like what voters want and I think what politicians see as part of their sort of stance on voting rights. Right. So what happened in Florida is just kind of messy and complicated. But basically, right before that ballot measure went into effect, the legislature, which is, you know, predominantly Republican, came in and said and added a bunch of caveats to the bill, which is like, you have to pay fines and finish paying any sort of financial aspects of your sentence, which wasn't included in that

ballot measure. And I think voting rights advocates have often said that when you require returning citizens to pay fines and blah, blah, blah, that tends to restrict access in some pretty significant way. It doesn't really remove all the barriers that, you know, these laws are intending to. And then the state of Florida didn't make any sort of serious effort to give people information about how much they owe and if they owe at all. So I think like Florida is an interesting case where voters wanted one thing, but, you know, the politics of voting rights got kind of like mixed into it. And now there's sort of a weird standstill that everyone's in. And, you know, the politics of voting rights got kind of like mixed into it. And now there's sort of a weird standstill that everyone's in. And, you know, formerly incarcerated people are paying

the price of that in those, especially in those cases of those arrests. Yeah. All right. We are going to take a quick break. We will come back and end the show like we do each Friday with Can't Let It Go. We are back and it is time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about things from the week that we cannot stop thinking about politics or otherwise. I'm going to go first, and, Domenico, this is actually about somebody we both know, Jonathan Salant, who we know as the commissioner of the D.C. Media Softball League, where NPR is a perennial division champion.

But, you know, this kind of starts out as a bummer, but I think gets to some broader things and has a nice ending. He has been for a long time a regional reporter covering Capitol Hill and focusing on the New Jersey delegation. He was unfortunately very recently laid off, and his company, New Jersey Advanced Media, they own the Star-Ledger and other papers, basically said in the memo, readers don't really want DC coverage. The paper can get this coverage from the Associated Press. And I think that made a lot of reporters here in

DC really upset because regional reporters have historically played such an important role in covering the politics of DC. They are there to cover congressional delegations. They are there to cover the federal government through the lens of what their listeners, what their region cares about. It's an important job, and it is becoming increasingly a dinosaur. More and more companies are just getting rid of these reporters. And here's where the story starts to take a turn. You know, he's been doing this for decades, been covering the New Jersey delegation, you know, and part of a reporter's job is sometimes to harass the politicians we cover. Basically, the entire New Jersey delegation sent a letter decrying this and saying, like,

sometimes we don't like his coverage, but he does a really important job for voters. And this is a really bad idea. So you had bipartisan, overwhelming support from New Jersey politicians saying, wait a second, this stinks. And the kicker to all of this is Jonathan is laid off. He keeps working for a little bit more. And he tweets this week, I've had three front page stories this week since I was laid off. The politicians said that, not to be cynical, but of course taking away somebody who is providing a bit of a megaphone to politics and wanting to be involved and understand how politics nationally could affect them locally. There's a lot of money that goes through these committees and laws that get passed that do affect how people live every day. And when you take away people who are covering that, it makes it that much harder for people to see, you know,

what the impact of politics is. Ashley, what about you? My can't let it go this week is the FDA proposed this week that basically we don't have to stop calling oat milk and soy milk, soy milk and oat milk. We can keep calling it that. There was like some contention over that in the dairy industry. We were all looking down the barrel of having to call it oat juice or something like that, which disgusts me highly as someone who is mostly vegetarian and vegan. So I am an oat milk girly, so I was really watching this closely. Things are changing.

We're not eating meat the same way we used to, and there's all of these alternatives. And I think it's really interesting to watch what the FDA thinks about all this. The only other thing that has been reported about this proposal so far, because there is going to be a comment period, is that it's recommended but not mandated that these soy milk and oat milk companies compare the sort of nutritional differences between milk and oat milk, like regular dairy milk and oat milk. And I think that's going to be interesting if anyone does it to be like, well, this is like from an oat versus an animal. I don't know. Can I say something really embarrassing about oat milk? Sure.

You like it? It took me a really long time to figure out how it was made. I was like, do they squeeze the oats? I don't understand. This makes no sense. I don't think many people know how it's made, Scott. It's just like soaked, right? You soak.

You boil it down. I make it. So I actually sometimes make my own oat milk, which I guess. You make your own? But you don't squeeze oats, right? So yeah, you don't. Like kind of. So how I have learned to do this is you get water and oat milk.

You can soak them for a little bit, but usually I just, like, blend it together and I add, like, some vanilla and, like, some other stuff in it. And then that, like, I strain that sort of, like, chalky mix of oats and water. And it comes out like milk. It's really easy. It just sounds like an oat smoothie. Kind of, but you're straining it. It's like, it's like an oat smoothie. It's like grinding up cereal. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's really easy. It just sounds like an oat smoothie. Kind of, but you're straining it. It's like an oat smoothie. It's like grinding up cereal.

Right. Yeah. I mean, that's not wrong. It's just gross the way that sounds. But it actually is kind of easy to make. Domenico, what can you not let go of this week? I'm sticking with food too. All right.

Nice. Maybe I'm hungry. Maybe I'm not. I don't know. I'm really hungry. But one of the stories that I read in the New York Times earlier this year actually, but it's been sort of circulating a bit, is about what expiration dates you need to pay attention to and not pay attention to. This is a hot debate in my household. So I'm excited to hear this.

Yeah. I mean debates can be settled by science. A bold claim. So one of the things that they said is that vinegars, honey, vanilla, or other extracts, sugar, salt, corn syrup, and molasses will last virtually forever with little change in quality. They said that regular steel cut or rolled oats, since we're talking about oats, will last for a year or so before they start to go rancid, the story says.

But par-cooked oats or instant oats can last nearly forever. Same with grits versus instant grits. So honey, you know, Scott, you and I were debating whether or not honey goes bad. And everybody has had the honey that sort of solidifies when you leave it for a while. But that doesn't honey goes bad. And everybody has had the honey that sort of solidifies when you leave it for a while. But that doesn't make it bad. Like it might not be useful at that point,

but all you have to do is heat it up and it'll last forever. My son is very into eating honey lately. And our honey took that turn to like solid. And I've been like, I've been, I guess, too lazy to just heat it up and solve my problems. But like scraping honey with a knife each morning and thinking, oh, this honey went bad. But you are proving me wrong. This has happened to me so many times that I just don't know why I haven't figured out how to prevent that.

If there's like even a way to do that. Because this is, I mean, I feel like I have discarded honey or just because like it's too difficult once it's a solid to even get out of that little bear bottle. You know what I mean? Yeah. I've done the same. Yeah. I throw it away. One of our producers said of that little bear bottle you know what i mean yeah yeah i've done the same yeah but throw it away one of our producers said just put that bottle in some hot water that's true yeah instead of instead of having to like scrape it open and put it in a pot yeah you just almost like the way you would defrost something in a you know a bowl of

warm water or something but you know what's interesting is that I was also reading somewhere else that honey, they were saying, has an endless shelf life. And that was proven by archaeologists who unsealed King Tut's tomb in 1923 and found containers of honey within it. Can you believe that? And anyway, there's science behind it because it's mostly sugar, very little water. So bacteria can't really get in. I wonder what their beekeeper garb looked like back then.

I think a lot of stings. Just painful. That's a wrap for this wonderful Friday. Our executive producer of this award-winning podcast is Mathani Mitteri. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Elena Moore. It is Elena's birthday. Happy birthday to Elena.

Happy birthday. Happy birthday. And also Casey Murrell. Casey, it's not your birthday birthday to Elena. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. And also Casey Morrell. Casey, it's not your birthday, but you're special too. Research and fact-checking by our intern, Devin Speak. Thanks to Christian F. Calamer and Lexi Shapiro. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. And real quick before we go, there is still time to enter our giveaway to win a free year of access to the NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Plus, of course, is our program where supporters get extra bonus episodes of the show, and they get regular episodes without sponsor messages. To enter for a free year of access, as well as an NPR swag bag and a chance to have your voice on the podcast, go to npr.org slash politics plus giveaway, and you spell out plus, P-L-U-S, not an addition sign.

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