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And keep in mind that it's not a one-off like the $6 trillion in debt-ballooning Covid relief that Manchin has unhesitatingly voted for in the past 15 months: it's $350 billion per year over a 10-year period, designed to be entirely paid for.
— Wiggles of Weimar (@Yastreblyansky) September 3, 2021
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| Image via African Skies. |
We've finally got some text on the Human Infrastructure budget reconciliation package, in the form of a one-page summary of budget topline items under four headings of spending categories (Families, Climate, Infrastructure and Jobs, and Healthcare), and a nine-page Memorandum addressed to Democratic senators, organized by committee, with very broad numbers for how much spending each committee is instructed to approve. Or saving in the case of the Finance Committee, which is instructed to come up with a plan to cut the deficit by "at least one billion dollars", which reminds me enough of Dr. Evil to make me laugh, but is evidently standard procedure in these matters, for reasons I'm not grasping:
There is ample precedent over the past fifteen years for using a nominal reconciliation instruction as a mechanism to allow a committee to bring forth legislation with larger budgetary implications than such an instruction suggests. Republicans used a nominal instruction amount to both the Finance and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committees to move forward with their efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2015 and 2017. The instruction to each committee in each case was to reduce the deficit by $1 billion.... In addition, Democrats used nominal reconciliation instructions in 2010 and 2007 to achieve important changes to health care and education programs. The 2010 example, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA) included a nominal instruction of $1 billion in deficit reduction to both the Senate Finance and HELP Committees. According to CBO, That bill impacted hundreds of billions of dollars in meeting those targets.
But it seems to be about "flexibility", and connected to the fact that they won't be asking the Congressional Budget Office to score the programs before the vote:
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| Children in New York City's universal pre-K program, abandoned by their selfish millionaire moms who'd rather be at a power lunch with their law partners. David Brooks begs, don't let this happen to the rest of America! Via Day Care Council of New York. |
Shorter David F. Brooks ("Power to the Parents!", New York Times 30 April 2021)"
We must allow parents to make their own decisions on building their families! I mean unless they make the wrong decisions, obviously we need to keep an eye on that.
This is such a great example of a particular manner of Republican argumentation, addressed to Biden's American Families Plan and its cruel and insidious attempt to force our nation's 3- and 4-year-olds into quality pre-kindergarten programs against their parents' desires.
That is—he begins with praise for the expanded child tax credit program of the American Rescue (to be extended out to 2025 under American Families), which gives parents $300 per month (for adjusted gross income of $150,000 for a couple filing jointly, less for higher incomes) per child under 5, $250 for kids 6 to 16, for the freedom it allows parents to decide what to do with the money