The Senate’s reconciliation bill is quickly moving from being an infrastructure package to an across-the-board attempt at revitalizing the American economy, an omnibus proposal targeting areas including labor, the environment, immigration, and more.
Do it and be legends.
Or for some, be socialists.
the details of how much funding these programs will receive and their size are all still up for negotiation.
How about big enough and well enough funded to do the job. Learn a lesson from the GOP under funding Obama’s economic recovery plan.
So how many Scaramucci’s will it be before the GQP tries to take full credit for an epic plan, that once again, they’ll unanimously whine about and vote against?
This alone will do so much.
I am considering how many times over I have repaid the expense of my “socialist” education on military bases over the past few decades.
Dear Republicans, if you let people make a living, they can pay enough taxes that we won’t need to raise yours to post-WWII levels again. Just a thought.
If it makes it through, I fully expect GQP to tout the new dental, vision and hearing of Medicare (after voting against it).
I was just reading through the comments on a version of this article in my local conservative newspaper and every other commenter used the phrase radical left wing socialism. If they can do that all day long, I don’t see why we don’t just start calling them the Republican NAZI Party and be done with it.
Disappointed to see they are not trying to expand Medicare down to 60 or even 55 year olds.
No worries there, this still works and will help a great number of people all over the country, not to mention bringing much of our infrastructure into the 21st century.
A badge of honor in comparison
Needless to say this will be the most consequential legislation on domestic investment and investment in people since perhaps the New Deal. We’ve got all 50 Dems on board on the broad strokes here, and it addresses virtually every issue that we Dems have wanted to address in a big way for a few decades. We are that party that is dragging this country kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Yes–Ready, willin’, able, and big enough.
The size of this is amazing. Obama got 700 billion for stim, and another 700 in the tax deal with Boener. ACA was only 700 billion IIRC.
3.5 trillion, plus the bipartisan deal, plus the COVID relief bill will be life changing for millions.
Don’t forget what President Obama got in exchange for agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts after the Republicans took back the House in the disastrous 2010 midterm elections:
He broke Republican opposition to extensions in unemployment insurance and payroll tax cuts, clean energy grants, and $313 billion in new spending, as well as START II, emergency assistance for 9–11 first responders, and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” in exchange for nothing more than a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for upper-bracket income (Democrats had already agreed to extend them for the middle class, and those Bush tax cuts expired two years later in the Fiscal Cliff)— in effect, an $858 billion stimulus package.
Those extensions of the unemployment insurance and payroll tax cuts were only for one year, but when they came up for renewal a year later Republicans folded under political pressure, and I am hoping that things that the Biden administration got included in the Covid relief package— the Child Tax Credits and the enhanced subsidies for people buying medical insurance on the ACA marketplace — will also be extended and hopefully made permanent.
Yea, thats one everyone forgits. Obama worked that default/tax hike episode about as well as could be hoped. Like you say it came at a critical point and likely was a big factor in the improving economy during the year he ran for reelection, when unemployment stats were basically the only thing the media was covering.
I remember the late conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote a column in the Washington Post scorching Congressional Republicans for agreeing to the deal.
He argued that Republicans gave away way too much for what they got in return, that President Obama would get all the credit for the stimulus’s positive effect on the recovering economy, that he and the Democrats would gain momentum and win back independents and moderates so soon after the 2010 “shellacking,” and that Republicans would be saddled with the perception that they only cared about protecting tax cuts for the already rich.
He also said they would be called hypocrites for demanding that Democrats pay for their own funding priorities, while being nonchalant about borrowing for their own priorities and adding to the deficit.
He was prescient in that column, one of the few of his that I savored reading.