Today, Explained - Trillion-dollar Biden

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

You win some and you lose some. Just ask President Biden, who started last week with electoral setbacks and ended it with a big f***ing deal. Today’s show was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Finally, infrastructure week. You win some, you lose some. Just ask President Biden circa last week. Let's start with his L's.

A scary set of election results for the Democratic Party on Tuesday. A loss of the Virginia governor's race. Republican Glenn Youngkin, who made education a central issue, has won. And then the big win. The winning sum came at the end of the week when Congress, specifically the House of Representatives, finally got it together and sent the bipartisan infrastructure framework to President Biden's desk. We did something that's long overdue, that long has been talked about in Washington,

but never actually been done. And this is a big deal. And Biden can check this significant, important part of his agenda off his list, but there is still unfinished business relating to the rest of his build back better agenda, which is still tied up in both chambers of Congress. Andrew Prokop, Politics Vox, take us back to how this thing passed late Friday night. So the backstory here is that the Senate passed this bill all the way back in August. On this vote, the yeas are 69, the nays are 30. The bill as amended is passed. Passed with 19 Republican votes. Biden was pretty happy about it. And then it went over to the House of Representatives. The rule provides for consideration of the Senate amendment to H.R. 3684, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

But then there was a bit of a snag because progressives in the House of Representatives, backed by Speaker Pelosi, and it seemed backed by President Biden himself at times, wanted to sit on the bill. We have to hold on to that bargain. Because they were holding out for the Senate to pass the other big bill that President Biden wants to get done.

And that's called the reconciliation bill. If there is not a reconciliation bill in the House, and if the Senate does not pass the reconciliation bill, we will uphold our end of the bargain and not pass the bipartisan bill until we get all our end of the bargain and not pass the bipartisan bill until we get all of these investments in. That's big spending on all sorts of social programs that aren't traditional infrastructure and that Democrats badly want passed. The House Democrats and the progressives and Speaker Pelosi, they didn't trust the Senate to get this done. They specifically didn't trust the two moderate senators,

Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. You know, the read that we have is that they'll just dump the second one, leave the other one out to dry, and just never actually vote on it. So the idea was that Manchin and Sinema really loved this bipartisan infrastructure bill. So the House was going to essentially take it hostage. They were going to say, we're going to wait. We're not going to do anything on this until you guys agree to pass the social spending bill, the other big bill, through the reconciliation process in the Senate. So a few months have passed since then, and progress has been made on that second bill, but it has not passed the Senate. It has

not even passed the House. But I think eventually there was a bit of nervousness setting in that so much time had passed, a fear that this tactic wasn't really working and that there was a risk of ending up with nothing at all if too long passed. So President Biden and Speaker Pelosi finally put some pressure on the House progressives over the past couple weeks. You have the votes right now for the infrastructure bill. We can't wait too much later for the legislation. I do believe that there are a large number of members

of the Progressive Caucus who will vote for the bill. It wasn't enough to get it done before the Virginia governor's race, and they did try to do it, but it was finally enough to get it over the finish line a few days afterward late on Friday night.

What's in the thing? Are we all going to have free Wi-Fi pretty soon? I don't know if I can promise that specifically for you, but you can think of it as doing sort of three major things. One is there's a lot of money for what we might call traditional infrastructure spending. And usually in Congress, this tends to be spending for highways. But this bill was designed to be a lot more than that. There's a lot of money earmarked for transit and ports, airports, rail. It goes beyond what Congress traditionally does on this. And it's a huge pot of money. A lot of it is given to the transportation secretary to kind of use as he wishes. How much money is Secretary Pete getting? Do we know? About $100 billion. Not bad. And so

beyond that, there's also a sort of investment in the technology of the future. There's $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charges, for another $7.5 billion for electrifying buses and ferries. There's $55 billion on clean water infrastructure, which a lot of it is meant to tackle the problem of lead in pipes contaminating drinking water and other chemicals. And there's billions more for dealing with the effects of climate change and cleaning up pollution and environmental disasters. So, you know, there's environmental aspects to this bill, there's technology aspects to this bill, and there's just the traditional building stuff part of the bill that's all going together in a big pot of money and is going to become law. In sum, how much money is being spent on this traditional infrastructure bill that's now passed? Overall, it's over $1 trillion over 10 years. But it's important to distinguish that a lot of that money

would have been spent anyway. So the amount of new spending is about $550 billion over 10 years, which is a whole lot. And how is it being paid for? It's paid for essentially through spit and bailing wire, you know, tricks. These pay-fors were not viewed as the most credible necessarily. And it's an example that, you know, when the moderates in Congress really want to do something, the concerns about the deficit and paying for it, they're willing to look the other way on them. So, you know, the Congressional Budget Office found that this would add $256 billion over 10 years to the deficit. So that is a large chunk that's not paid for.

But, you know, there's some money that wasn't spent in the COVID relief package that they are going to use. And they want to oppose fraud in unemployment benefits. And they think that'll save some money. And they're delaying a certain rule of Medicare Part D. And they think that'll raise money. And so, yeah, it's a little questionable and generally less credible than a serious pay-fors would be. but everybody's feeling good about bipartisanship, so no one really cares. One of the last times President Biden helped pass a key piece of legislation was the ACA back, of course, when he was vice president, and he famously whispered into a live

mic that it was a big fucking deal into the ear of President Obama. How big a fucking deal is this infrastructure package? It's a big deal, for sure. This is the biggest infrastructure bill we've had in memory. It's also useful to think about the Biden legislative agenda as a package. He's already passed the big COVID relief bill, the American Rescue Plan, back in March. So this is his second big bill, and he is gunning for a third as well. But, you know, having two big bills passed at this point in time, it really puts him ahead of any recent president. Obama eventually did pass the Affordable Care Act through,

but that wasn't until March of his second year in office, getting this done by November and the potential for a third accomplishment. It's pretty impressive as far as presidential legislating goes. A word from our sponsor and then a word or two about that other thing Biden hasn't gotten done yet, his Build Back Better Act, a.k.a. Human Infrastructure.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Infrastructure, infrastructure week. Okay, Andrew, we talked about what Biden accomplished at the end of last week.

Let's talk about the thing that remains to be accomplished. That's the Build Back Better Act. What is in that thing again? So this is the massive mega bill that contains pretty much the rest of the Democratic agenda, at least everything that you can actually pass through the special budget reconciliation bill. So we're talking about spending stuff. We're talking about giving people money, putting a lot of more money in American families' pockets, especially the very poor, through the expanded child tax credit. Parents can receive up to $300 a month or $3,600 for the year for children up to age six.

We're talking about helping with child raising expenses by subsidizing child care, funding universal pre-K. Data shows that when kids are in preschool, more mothers can work and a family's overall household income increases. We're talking about expanding Medicare to cover hearing benefits. And we're talking about a whole lot of money on climate change, too. Over a billion metric tons of emission reductions, at least 10 times bigger on climate than any bill that has ever passed before, and enough to position us for a 50 to 52 percent emission reductions by the year 2030.

This is what progressives care most about and badly want passed into law. And it would be a pretty major accomplishment if it makes it through. Got it. So what's the status of this big boy? The main holdup is the Senate, and specifically Senator Joe Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Well, we've spoken about each of them on the show before, but let's speak specifically about what they want at this moment. What's the latest from Senator Sinema? Sinema's objections have been in the realm of the pay-fors for the bill, how it raises revenue that Democrats hope will finance the new social

spending laid out in this bill. And there were two aspects to this that she really objected to. One was the way they proposed to raise taxes and specifically tax rates on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. And the other was a new initiative to let Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. And she has negotiated changes to the drug part of the package already. Senator Sinema has told me she supports this agreement. So I think we're there. As far as the taxes part of it, it's not entirely clear where things stand on that. But the White House tried to meet Sinema's concerns by announcing various alternative tax measures that she seems to really have opposed raising rates.

Where she's not supportive is she says she will not raise a single penny in taxes on the corporate side and or on wealthy people, period. OK, so Sinema's concerns are about how this is all paid for. What about Senator Manchin's? So Manchin had a lot of objections. First off, he wanted to lower the overall spending level of the bill. It was $3.5 trillion over 10 years when that was kind of the Democrats' proposal from their budget committee. And he said he wanted it down to $1 1.5, so cut by more than half.

Democrats have now agreed to cut it to 1.75 over 10 years. And so they almost went all the way, but also not quite, because the way Democrats went about doing this was they still want to do almost everything they had originally proposed. They're just trying to do it for fewer years or scale it back. So for instance, instead of funding a new child care benefit that will help pay for people's child care, instead of funding that permanently, or instead of funding that for 10 years, they're going to fund it for six years, and only partially for three of those

years. And you see this again across various other programs in the bill, from the expanded child tax credit, which would help a lot of families, that's only being expanded for one year. You see universal pre-K programs, that funding would only be for a few years. And the thinking here among progressives is that if you do all this stuff, you get it into policy, people start getting these benefits, and then they'll like them. And then Congress won't want to let them expire. And so essentially, they will end up in practice lasting forever, even if the bill itself will only fund it for six years.

They think there's a good shot that it will be extended permanently by Congress. The problem is that Manchin understands this. In all of my years of public service, and I've been around for a long time, I've never seen anything like this. And he said in his press conference last week that he doesn't really buy it. As more of the real details outline the basic framework are released, what I see are shell games, budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the so-called $1.75 trillion bill estimated to be almost twice that amount if you extended it permanently. He doesn't think that's a good way to legislate. He wants to fund permanent programs, even if it means doing fewer of was indeed passed on Friday was a big deal. But this thing really feels like, you know, the signature part of the enchilada.

Well, Biden's approval rating now is very bad. It's about 43 percent in 538's tracker. And this legislative gridlock could be one potential contributing factor to that. But I tend to think from the polling data that I've seen that the American public is pretty disengaged from this whole legislative saga in general. There are other bigger things on their mind. The state of the economy. Even your morning cup of coffee costs more these days. Coffee prices up 5% since last November. The Delta variant and whether the pandemic will ever actually end.

The number of new coronavirus cases is falling in America, but in Europe it has jumped more than 50% in the past month alone. We saw the controversial withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that played out in chaotic fashion. We are coming on the air with breaking troops from Afghanistan that played out in chaotic fashion. We are coming on the air with breaking news from Afghanistan, an explosion at the Kabul airport where thousands of people are still in danger. All of this potentially plays a role. But I think the common thread to a lot of this is that in the first half of the year, voters generally thought Biden had things under control

and was doing a good job. But the common thread to a lot of his problems in the second half of the year is perhaps a perception of incompetence or floundering. If Democrats can pull this off, if they can get the infrastructure, infrastructure plus the human infrastructure, how we'll be looking back on this political moment, you know, years from now. Well, that still very much depends on what actually makes it into the final bill and into law, which is still very much in flux. But if Democrats do manage to get something reasonably close to Biden's initial proposal, this would really be remembered as a pretty sweeping moment in progressive policy change, liberal policy change. And so, you know, if these programs are enacted, if they are made permanent, I do think that we could be looking back on this year, many years from now, as a turning point in American public policy. But that's a big if. It is a big if. And other possibilities are that

nothing passes at all or that whatever does pass is compromised in such a way as to make it temporary, ineffective, or badly flawed. We don't know which will be the final outcome yet, and we won't until they hammer out those final details in Congress. And when that happens,

we'll have you back to talk about it. I'm looking forward to it. Andrew Prokop, he's following all the back and forth for you at Vox.com. Our episode today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi and Miles Bryan. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. It's Today Explained. The End you