In “Bipartisan Group of Senators Say They Reached Agreement on Infrastructure Plan” the New York Times’s Emily Cochran writes:
The framework is expected to include about $579 billion in new spending as part of an overall package that would cost about $974 billion over five years and about $1.2 trillion over eight years... The outline is expected to address a narrower range of physical infrastructure projects and to avoid the Democratic push for tax increases; but it is also likely to suggest indexing the gas tax to inflation as one of the mechanisms for paying for the plan.
Translated into English, they’re saying: Don’t increase taxes on the rich (lots of who aren’t paying taxes); instead, let’s tax the middle class more by increasing gas taxes (and probably taxes on electric vehicles too).
Sounds like a perfect Republican plan, doesn’t it?
In what sense are Republicans compromising at all here? They already said they want a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill that doesn’t raise taxes on the rich, and here’s a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill that doesn’t raise taxes on the rich. In other words, Democrats are giving up the store and Republicans aren’t giving up much of anything.