Leading Up to the Build Back Better Act Vote
“Letters From An American,” November 18, 2021; Professor Heather Cox – Richardson
Today began with Republican leadership doubling down on its support for Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), whom the House censured yesterday for tweeting a cartoon video of himself killing a Democratic colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and attacking the president, Joe Biden. Only two Republicans voted with the Democrats in favor of the censure.
Former president Donald Trump issued a statement praising Gosar and saying the congressman “has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” In addition to the censure, the House stripped Gosar of his committee assignments, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said today that if the Republicans take the majority and he is elected Speaker, he will likely throw Democrats off committees and give Gosar and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who was stripped of her committee assignments in February after violent threats against Democratic colleagues, better committee assignments.
This morning, on the podcast of Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows went after McCarthy, suggesting that Trump should replace him. Then, on Trump loyalist Steve Bannon’s podcast, Meadows suggested that if the Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in next year’s elections, Trump should become Speaker of the House, which would drive Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.” Bannon suggested he could hold the position for 100 days and “sort things out” before running for president in 2024.
While the Trump loyalists were putting the screws to McCarthy, the economic news continued to be good. A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on Thursday showed that the United States is the only G7 country to surpass its pre-pandemic economic growth. That growth has been so strong it has buoyed other countries.
Meanwhile, the administration’s work with ports and supply chains to handle the increase in demand for goods appears to be having an effect. Imports through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are up 16% from 2018, and in the first two weeks of November, those two ports cleared about a third of the containers sitting on their docks.
Then the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its score for the Democrats’ $1.85 trillion Build Back Better Act. The CBO is a nonpartisan agency within the legislative branch that provides budget and economic information to Congress. The CBO’s estimate of the costs of the Build Back Better Act will affect who will vote for it.
The CBO’s projection was good news for the Democrats; it was in line with what the Democrats had said the bill would cost. The CBO estimates that the bill will increase the deficit by $367 billion over ten years. But the CBO also estimates that the government will raise about $207 billion over those same ten years by enforcing tax rules on those currently cheating on them. These numbers were good in themselves—in comparison, the CBO said the 2017 Republican tax cuts would cost $1.4 trillion over ten years—but they might get even better. Many economists, including Larry Summers, who has been critical of the Biden administration, think that the CBO estimates badly underplay the benefits of the bill.
The CBO score also predicted that the savings from prescription drug reforms in the bill would come in $50 billion higher than the House had predicted.
As soon as the score was released, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would vote on the bill tonight, suggesting that she had the votes to pass the bill.
And then something interesting happened. Kevin McCarthy took to the House floor to slow down the passage of the Build Back Better Act, throwing the vote into the middle of the night. The minority leader put on a Trump-esque show of non-sequiturs, previewing the kind of speech he would make to rally Republicans behind him if the Republicans retake the House in 2022. The speech was angry, full of shouting, and made for right-wing media: it was full of all the buzz-words that play there. McCarthy spoke for more than three hours—as I write this, he is still speaking.
But the blows he was trying to deliver didn’t land. The Democrats made fun of him, catcalled, and eventually just walked out, while the Republicans lined up behind McCarthy looked increasingly bored, checked their phones, and appeared to doze off. When Axios reporter Andrew Solender asked a Republican aide for some analysis of the speech, the aide answered: “I’m watching the Great British Baking Show.”
As he spoke, Pelosi’s office fact-checked him, noting that while he is attacking the elements of the bill, saying no one wants them, the opposite is true. According to CBS News, Pelosi’s staff wrote, “88 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s measures to cut prescription drug prices,” “73 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s funding for paid family leave,” and “67 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s funding for universal pre-K.” In addition, according to Navigator Research, “84 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s provisions to lower health insurance premiums,” and “72 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s creation of clean energy jobs to combat climate change.”
Grace Segers, a politics reporter for The New Republic, described the mood in the House as “hostile.” She noted that Democrats are furious that McCarthy has made no effort to rein in the most extreme Republicans and, after yesterday’s defense of Gosar, have had enough. In his speech, McCarthy was indeed courting that extreme right, posturing not for voters, but rather for his conference, trying to reassure them that he is a strong enough pro-Trump leader to be House Speaker if the Republicans retake the House.
But it felt tonight as if the dynamic in the House has changed. The Republicans are now openly embracing Trump and his one-man rule. But their support for Gosar yesterday appears to have created a breach. Democrats are no longer trying to reason with the Republicans and are instead treating them with derision. That is, psychologically at least, a much more dominant position than they held recently.
Rather than vote in the middle of the night, the Democrats have delayed the vote on the bill until tomorrow, when the American people can watch. In the past, Republicans have criticized Democrats for passing legislation “in the dead of night.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said of this important bill that dramatically expands the nation’s social safety net: “We are going to do it in the day.”
important bill that dramatically expands the nation’s social safety net: “We are going to”
I would like to be the first to point out that, if Congress wants to pass legislation with redeeming social value, they should not pass a spending bill. Instead they should pass a taxation bill that would raise the tax on those who can most easily afford to pay taxes.
(supply/price/demand)
More taxation should shrink money supply, shrink demand, shrink prices that the poor are paying for their subsistence.
Spending money our country doesn’t have means inflation which hits the poor hardest. Inflation? We’re getting
tard of
it
!
Justin
not sure “we” are getting tard of it. the bought and paid for press is getting hysterical about it.
but I absolutely agree that if inflation, or the deficit. is a problem, the answer is higher taxes on those who have extra money. i have been calling for a 10% patriotic deficit emergency surtax on incomes over the SS cap for years now.
note, this is not “raising the cap” but “instead of raising the cap” for those looking for cosmic justice and “making the rich pay.”
cosmic justice and “making the rich pay.”
“
being born Americans, each of us has a subconscious hope that we will be equal to the average American, not equal to the median American. This unconscious dream is the problem.
Subconsciously we hesitate to set the wealthy up as a target for taxes. Add to this the setting up of a subset of the populace involves a modicum of privacy invasion. I don’t think we should be taxing persons or corporation’s I think we should be taxing what our country by eminent domain already owns, our real property. Who also owns 99% of it? The excessively wealthy including your landlord.
Do you see how this works? you simply send out a taxation bill to the entity who is listed as owner of the property. If taxes are paid, ownership is unchanged. If not, ownership automatically reverts to the State who pays the IRS either the tax received of the proceeds of the auction.
Such a system would drop the market value of land thus encouraging companies to build factories on shore, not offshore. Lower land prices would rev up home construction, give more Americans a chance at the
American
Dream
!
Justin
a significan subset of the population talks as if “make the rich pay…” is an important goal to them, i call this seeking cosmic justice because in a sense it is easy to believe riches among poverty is “not fair” and the rich should share their wealth weather they want to or not.
i don’t believe in this myself. too much experience with “the poor” who for one reason or another don’t contribute much to the general welfare themselves, as well as experience with “the honest rich” who do contribute “fairly” to the general welfare and deserve what that brings them in the way of “nice things.” on the other hand there is certainly “the criminal rich” who got their wealth by sharp dealing if not genteel assault and battery,,, most congressmen appear to be in this class…not it’s most creative members but clever enough liars to be useful to them.
i make peace with this as it seems to be the world always has been and attempts to change it seem to result in worse things: war and terror. i don’t like a wealth tax (the property tax is a wealth tax) because it is the power to destroy. i do like an income tax because the parties to a transaction can take the tax into consideration when they are considering what they are willing to pay or charge for whatever is being exchanged.
Beyond that, I don’t think you would find many people who would agree with your economic theory,
An argument could be made for taxing vast estates which withdraw huge amounts of the best land from use by a people in need of land. On the other hand the owners of those vast estates generally take better care of it than small owners or renters or “commons.” I know I have a very different view of “trespassing” when I am the landowner, than when I was a landless prole just wanting a place to go for a walk.