It’s About the Timing – So the House of Representatives considered the $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan with the $3.5 trillion budget resolution proposal together, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, had promised, but this can full of federal spending got kicked down the sidewalk again. This seems something of an obvious deal, in that the budget resolution vote this week always was going to be a first-step procedural vote, simply a framework for budget programs. 

Bi-partisan infrastructure is … all but delivered to President Biden’s desk, which is what the Unbreakable Nine, expanded to 10, wanted immediately. They don’t want the $3.5 trillion budget resolution with its “social” infrastructure spending proposals, just as Senate Republicans and Democrats Joe Manchin III and Krysten Sinema don’t want it, at least without substantial cuts in spending. 

Progressive Democrats in the House will continue to push for it, however, making for an interesting autumn on Capitol Hill as they insist that $3.5 trillion is not even enough. 

•Progressives believe the Democratic majorities, thin as they are in the House and Senate, amounts to a “mandate” for a Democratic president’s efforts to reverse 40 years of supply-side Reaganomics. We have discussed this issue in home page debates at The Hustings since the beginning of Biden’s administration. For left-column takes on this:

•Scroll down this page past Stephen Macaulay’s column on Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, to Craig Fahle’s column, “Don’t Screw This Up, Democrats.”

•Scroll down two more columns on the left for Fahle’s “Enforce the Tax Laws We Have, by Giving the IRS the Tools to Do It,” on more IRS funding as a potential source for a portion of new infrastructure spending.

•Scroll to the second column from the top on Page 3 for Fahle’s “The Folly of Chasing a Bipartisan Deal on Infrastructure.”

•Go to Page 4, scroll down three columns for “Tax the Tuna,” by Michelle Naranjo.

•Also, Page 5, the second column, for “Earmarks are Like Cockroaches and Ants,” by Keith Tipton, and Page 7, five columns down, for Stephen Macaulay on “Biden’s Infrastructure Plan is Worth the Money.”