Investment in American Infrastructure

[andydp]

May 11, 2021 18:42:34 GMT LFC said:

May 11, 2021 18:28:21 GMT pnwguy said:

I beg to differ.  Republicans don't need a record to run on.  By virtue of the (R) behind their name, their base gives them absolution.  They could all be co-sponsors of the National Kitten Execution Act, and their base would just shrug ("damn shame about those cute kittens").

The old Edwin Edwards line about "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy." doesn't apply to MAGA voters.  Matt Gaetz isn't having any trouble about his legislative record.  Dumpster could still be re-elected from a jail cell, which I hope he sees the inside of in the next year or two.

Of course you're discussing the MAGAt base and are totally correct about them but I wrote them off for all serious consideration long ago. I'm discussing the impacts of getting Democrats turned out and getting a bigger chunk of that small slice that still would be willing to vote for either party. That's who the Democrats have to play to if they're going to win elections. If they can figure out a way to get the MAGAts dispirited then that's a bonus but there's definitely no political play to the MAGAts that involve a positive pitch about Dems.

Sadly. you're both right.  But the MAGAs don't have to vote because there's an "R".  All the candidate has to say is "My opponent is for (Abortion, Planned Parenthood, Icky gay sex, defunding Police) and they get an instant vote even though they're going to cut their Social Security after re election.

[Traveler]

May 11, 2021 18:48:05 GMT pnwguy said:

May 11, 2021 18:42:34 GMT LFC said:

That's assuming those persuadable voters are allowed to vote or aren't buried in safe GOP districts or states.  That's the plan now.  Look what could happen to PA, if your cretins get their way.  

What is going on in PA, besides the usual?  Gonna have to live with REAL ID.  Which is a total chore for many.  But that is what Dem GOTV is for.  Spend the effort to get the cards for your shut ins etc. Will enhance actual voting.  Great thread going on in BB on this topic.  

[LFC]

May 11, 2021 18:48:05 GMT pnwguy said:

That's assuming those persuadable voters are allowed to vote or aren't buried in safe GOP districts or states.  That's the plan now.  Look what could happen to PA, if your cretins get their way.  

It also assumes they're able to vote. It also assumes the elections aren't outright stolen. Basically we can caveat the f*** out of things all day long but it still comes down to should the Democrats do to maximize their chances. Separate infrastructure bills and the virtually guaranteed Republican obstruction is their best move.

[goldenvalley]

May 11, 2021 18:28:21 GMT pnwguy said:

May 11, 2021 15:51:31 GMT LFC said:

Separate bills certainly make for good politics. The Republicans get a choice; support at least some of Biden's agenda or make pathetic excuses why they couldn't vote for a bill that gave them 95% of what they said they wanted. I can't imagine any more than one or two backing anything from the Democrats. That gives the Dems a fig leaf of "bipartisan" while being able to bash on the majority of Republicans running for reelection.

I beg to differ.  Republicans don't need a record to run on.  By virtue of the (R) behind their name, their base gives them absolution.  They could all be co-sponsors of the National Kitten Execution Act, and their base would just shrug ("damn shame about those cute kittens").

The old Edwin Edwards line about "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy." doesn't apply to MAGA voters.  Matt Gaetz isn't having any trouble about his legislative record.  Dumpster could still be re-elected from a jail cell, which I hope he sees the inside of in the next year or two.

I think the point is to give Democrats a Rep record to run against.  And it will work maybe with enough people who can be swayed into voting for a Democrat.  Those wins in Congress in 2018 were mostly by narrow margins...that's what is needed again (plus decent non politically gerrymandered Congressional districts).

[jackd]

I don't think we can avoid politically gerrymandered Congressional districts. I agree with your basic point: we have to get out our vote to beat them and that's especially difficult in midterm elections.

[LFC]

May 11, 2021 21:18:01 GMT jackd said:

I don't think we can avoid politically gerrymandered Congressional districts. I agree with your basic point: we have get out our vote to beat them and that's especially difficult in midterm elections.

The only other option is to sit around and mope.

[pg]

Apr 12, 2021 21:19:09 GMT LFC said:

"The GOP is taking Frank Luntz's advice to heart " Already did it, decades ago. 

[goldenvalley]

May 11, 2021 22:17:49 GMT LFC said:

May 11, 2021 21:18:01 GMT jackd said:

I don't think we can avoid politically gerrymandered Congressional districts. I agree with your basic point: we have get out our vote to beat them and that's especially difficult in midterm elections.

The only other option is to sit around and mope.

Well I guess we could form mobs to attack the state houses and governors' offices in the states that are gerrymandering.  That seemed like a good idea to some folks a while back and we'd have a good legit reason not a BS one done in service of a wanna be strongman.

[LFC]

A TPM reader says that Moscow Mitch just handed Biden the perfect excuse for ignoring them.

I agree with TPM Reader JL about McConnell’s “red line” …

So McConnell says that GOP won’t revisit the 2017 corporate tax cuts. It seems to me that would be a perfect exit ramp for the negotiations. Biden can say he tried to negotiate with Republicans but they won’t revisit an unpopular tax cut that only benefit corporations and the rich and didn’t deliver the promised boom in capital expenditures.

Of course, Manchin still holds a lot of the cards so it’s more complicated than that. But still …

As I told JL, McConnell’s position is hardly surprising on various fronts. No party wants to immediately undo what they see as the signature accomplishment of their immediate, past administration. To the extent the GOP still cares about policy at all, tax rates is the central priority. So again, not surprising. But packaging it this way seems like a bit of a gift to Biden.

As JL notes, the 2017 tax cut bill has never been popular. It was rightly seen as a big giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. At some point Biden has to say no and this gives him a favorable footing to do so.

[Deleted]

Infrastructure effort is starting to resemble the same meandering path as the ACA legislation. The momentum has slowed, or to be precise, nearly halted. Then it was the senators from the northern great plains. Now the senator from the coal hole is traipsing in to the Republican bog. Without big successes like vaccine rollout, paradigm shifts in infrastructure fostering long term American competitiveness, we are headed right back to the Republican era: know nothing, do nothing, destroy everything.

[LFC]

May 20, 2021 14:56:29 GMT @probabilistic3 said:

Without big successes like vaccine rollout, paradigm shifts in infrastructure fostering long term American competitiveness, we are headed right back to the Republican era: know nothing, do nothing, destroy everything.

"Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events." --Abraham Lincoln

Some things never change. Actually maybe they do. If they rule they will still ruin and then rule the ruins. They have no interest or ability to govern in a competent manner.

[Deleted]

That's why the conversation has to become about positive things, about doing things, forward momentum. Positivity is contagious too^[1]. Make America Dynamic Again, Mister!

Let the Republicans be mired in culture wars.


[1] Now, I need my mid-morning coffee.

[LFC]

Another hand wringing piece about Joe Biden negotiating with Republicans. I'm not really worried about Biden. He already showed he's willing to walk from a shitty deal. I'm worried about Manchin and Sinema. And I continue to love Jen Psaki. She is one tough, smart cookie.

Biden has already come down from an initial offer of about $2.3 trillion for infrastructure, suggesting to GOP senators on Friday that Democrats could do a $1.7 trillion bill by trying to do separate legislation for manufacturing and cutting some funding for roads, bridges, and broadband.

Republicans initially countered with a $50 billion increase to their roughly $550 billion plan, a move that White House press secretary Jen Psaki suggested was inadequate.

“Our concessions went 10 times as far as theirs,” Psaki said on Monday. “So the ball is in their court.”

Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Psaki said the president expects this latest round of negotiations to reflect “a week of progress.” And she described Biden’s counterproposal cutting nearly half a trillion dollars from the infrastructure plan as a “good faith effort” that should be met in kind.

“The president’s only line in the sand is inaction,” Psaki said, adding that the president was “encouraged” by Republicans working on a counterproposal—even one that leaves intact Trump’s tax cuts that were largely aimed at the wealthy.

“If they don’t want to touch the 2017 tax cuts, a $2 trillion tax cut that did not end up having a windfall back to the American public, that’s their decision,” she said.

[LFC]

The GOP continues to talk but and not deliver.

A group of GOP senators made the cynical and likely futile move on Thursday of responding to President Biden’s infrastructure plan with a proposal that accounts for around a tenth of the spending that the White House has proposed.

The GOP proposal, which Republican senators described as a reasonable alternative, constitutes a fraction of the $1.7 trillion in spending that Biden has already offered as a concession from his initial proposal of $2.3 trillion. That’s largely due to GOP reluctance to finance any new spending, opting instead to scavenge unused money from elsewhere.

While GOP senators heralded the counteroffer as approaching $928 billion, there’s a big catch at the heart of it: only $257 billion is new spending. The remaining $671 billion, senators said, comes from repurposing money that was appropriated for the response to the COVID pandemic.

“There’s a tremendous amount of money that was approved in previous bills, trillions of dollars, and many hundreds of billions have not even been spent yet,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) told reporters.

The hollowness of the counterproposal may be by design for Republicans, who have dragged out mostly unproductive negotiations for weeks. Everyone in Congress is aware of the uphill battle Democrats will wage in the 2022 midterms: historical precedence and largely GOP-controlled redistricting will make it difficult for Democrats to retain control over both chambers of Congress.

That leaves Biden’s party a very short window to legislate before members’ focus shifts to campaigning, a clock Republicans are eager to run down.

This particular debate comes down to the question of payfors. Biden has committed to create new revenue to fund the infrastructure package, a key requirement of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Biden has also already lowered his initial offer of $2.3 trillion down to $1.7 trillion as a concession to the GOP, who have been predictably and publicly wary of the moderate tax increases in the Biden plan.

But the GOP proposal unveiled today, with its $257 billion in new spending, ends up offering only a fraction of the new spending that Biden proposed: It would cover 15 percent of Biden’s already stepped-down offer, and 11 percent of the initial offer.

“This is substance and significance that we’re bringing forth,” averred Sen. John Barasso (R-WY).

As usual they refuse to pay for anything ... EVER.

While Barrasso called Thursday’s counter-proposal “a real offer,” the seemingly unsurpassable areas of disagreement remain the same as when this group of Republican senators unveiled their original counteroffer back in April.

Then too, they insisted that the legislation be paid for, but took almost all the viable methods of doing so off the table: no changes to the tax code post-former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, and no deficit spending.

All they offered up to fulfill their own requirements is the previously appropriated COVID funds, and some vague gesturing in the direction of “taxing people who use the infrastructure.” At Thursday’s press briefing, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said that they are putting other payfors on the table too — and proceeded to mention only taxing electric vehicles.

And it comes after more than a decade of Republicans demanding that Democrats provide extensive and detailed revenue plans for any priority that they wanted to push.

[goldenvalley]

"taxing people who use the infrastructure" User fees and such? Highly regressive and news flash!...high income earners also use water, drive on roads, need somewhat educated people to exploit as employees.

[LFC]

More on the "negotiations." I'd be more interested if I believed they were real.

[goldenvalley]

Why are the Democrats continuing this dance?  The Republicans clearly don't want to spend any money on the big picture of infrastructure needs and apparently really regret passing that COVID relief bill earlier this spring.

Maybe swinging for the fences on the infrastructure bill was a miscalculation by the Biden Admin but I suspect they misunderstood the depth of Republican commitment to blocking most anything that comes with the Biden Admin and assumed they would feel chastised by 1/6 to the point of giving in to large parts of that bill as they did on the relief bill.

[pnwguy]

May 27, 2021 18:58:26 GMT goldenvalley said:

Why are the Democrats continuing this dance?  The Republicans clearly don't want to spend any money on the big picture of infrastructure needs and apparently really regret passing that COVID relief bill earlier this spring.

Maybe swinging for the fences on the infrastructure bill was a miscalculation by the Biden Admin but I suspect they misunderstood the depth of Republican commitment to blocking most anything that comes with the Biden Admin and assumed they would feel chastised by 1/6 to the point of giving in to large parts of that bill as they did on the relief bill.

We need to come to the conclusion that with VERY few exceptions, any current Republican office holders now are dedicated to authoritarian power, rule by oligarchs, and doing whatever destruction they must wield to make everything their way.  No wonder so many rank and file MAGAts trust Putin over Biden.  Putin is the poster boy of what they want GOP government to be.

[jackd]

It is painful and maddening to watch Joe Manchin whine and beg for Republican cooperation that is never going to come.

[Traveler]

I don't have time to subject myself to keeping up with the palaver, but is Manchin ever gonna catch on?

[Deleted]

May 28, 2021 1:34:20 GMT Traveler said:

I don't have time to subject myself to keeping up with the palaver, but is Manchin ever gonna catch on?

Let me see if I understand correctly: is West Virginia going to change?

Manchin is not being led down the garden path. He's a willing participant in this charade.

[LFC]

Interesting proposal on business taxes.

President Biden on Wednesday reportedly offered to lower his initial corporate tax hike proposal during a private meeting with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), the GOP’s lead negotiator on infrastructure, according to the Washington Post.

The Post reported that the President is willing to forgo the corporate tax rate of 28 percent that he initially proposed in an effort to reach an agreement with Senate Republicans on infrastructure.

Instead, Biden reportedly recommended a new, minimum corporate tax of 15 percent in an effort to ensure that all corporations pay taxes. In exchange for the President’s corporate tax rate drop, Republican would need to agree to at least $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending.

However, Biden still plans on seeking the corporate tax hike and is open to pursuing the policy outside of infrastructure negotiations.

[Traveler]

The POG shot that down already, no?

[jackd]

The POG plus Manchin and Sinema. I think you're wrong about Manchin "coming around" on the reconciliation. Manchin is for Manchin; nobody else. His "vote for the Democrats" without filibuster waiver is meaningless.

[Deleted]

Jun 5, 2021 16:59:55 GMT jackd said:

The POG plus Manchin and Sinema. I think you're wrong about Manchin "coming around" on the reconciliation. Manchin is for Manchin; nobody else. His "vote for the Democrats" without filibuster waiver is meaningless.

Manchin will come around to reconciling with two ideas:

1. Modernity is not for West Virginians, and equally, West Virginians are not for modernity.

2. The country might not be but Joe Manchin will be alright with Republican majority.

Come to think of it, Joe has already reconciled.

Beside Manchin (does he really have pronounced manly chin?), Manchin is also for coal and guns. Goes well with theme #1.