Recently, I’ve heard complaints from common Democrats, like Sen. Joe Manchin, that the reconciliation bill (at roughly $3.5 trillion) is too much spending. This is silly and easily refuted.
There isn’t enough spending in it. With minor exceptions, each of the provisions provides badly needed support for society. And the proposal leaves out some really critical spending, which should have been included from the start.
This does not mean the package shouldn’t be criticized. For example, it is woefully inadequate in raising taxes on extremely rich individuals and companies. A really good package would have restored tax rates from before the Reagan Administration. Successive Republican administrations and Congresses have cut and cut taxes for the last four decades, but without helping American society in any noticeable way. And most of these tax cuts have simply added to the national debt. Just the tax cuts in the Trump Administration—before covid—added about $3.6 trillion to cumulative federal deficits, and over $4 trillion to the national debt. This money has mainly gone to enrich the rich. In fact, in 2020, billionaires alone in the U.S. gained nearly a trillion dollars in wealth.
How do we expect to deal with inflation and debt if we continue to run up the national debt to help out the already rich?
What should be added to reconciliation?
First, we should add a program to provide a higher minimum income. My proposal for an Equality Payment would increase incomes across the board.
The Democratic leadership is going to pathetically respond that they tried to increase the minimum wage in the last reconciliation bill and the Senate Parliamentarian shot it down. This is bogus for two reasons.
The first reason is they could have overridden her ruling and just passed the increase. But the second is that I’m not talking about an increase to the minimum wage. I’m talking about uniform payments to all working-age Americans. Since the Senate was able to pass a direct payment to parents in the form of the child tax credit, it is clearly just as feasible to pass a direct payment to working-age people through reconciliation.
What we see here is a total unwillingness of the political establishment to actually help out the people of the country. The child tax credit is widely praised for helping get children out of poverty, but children are a small fraction of the people living in poverty. The political class in Washington DC just doesn’t actually care about those people. I can understand. Homeless and destitute people don’t have lobbyists on K Street.
They have me.
And I’m advocating here for them. I think it is a travesty that people are living in pup tents on the sides of freeways because a society rich enough to boost billionaires into space doesn’t have the ready cash to boost the homeless into proper homes.
So, item one I want added to reconciliation is some form of Equity Payment. The amount should be at least $40/week, which is only the equivalent of raising the minimum wage to $8.25/hour. Is that too much to ask?
I don’t think so. According to my poll, “Should the federal government make direct payments to working-age adults to address poverty and low wages?”, nearly 60% of respondents answered Yes and nearly another 25% answered Maybe. Most people who look at this proposal, out of the narrow slice of the electorate on Daily Kos, are in favor. The American people would be, too, if Democrats had the leadership skills necessary to drive this discussion.
Second, reconciliation needs a new tax provision that scoops up any profits that might go to successful bounty hunters under the Texas Heartbeat Act. I’d like to see money paid to bounty-hunters, from whatever source (not just the state of Texas), taxed at the federal level and sent directly to the federal Treasury. This would eliminate the vast majority of such lawsuits, protecting the public from predatory anti-abortionists, by simply making these lawsuits unprofitable. (Other steps to take in response to the Texas law are spelled out here.)
Right now (with the reconciliation bill stalled in the Senate) is the perfect time to add this provision. Democrats could come down on the side of the issue favored by the clear majority of Americans. Roughly 60% of Americans think abortion should be legal in most cases.
Sadly, this would decrease the deficit by adding a revenue stream. But, hey, you can’t win them all!
Third, we should change reconciliation to put vastly more money into contraceptives. One of the reasons we have abortions at all is because contraception is imperfect. The federal government should spend more on reproductive research. A perfect contraceptive would be one a woman could use that (1) didn’t require the permission or knowledge of anyone else, (2) perfectly prevented conception, and (3) had no noticeable side-effects. Until we have that kind of contraceptive, we should be funding additional research.
And, beyond that, more money should go to providing contraceptives free for the asking. That should include not just the type you get at the pharmacy, but LARCs as well. The federal government should make this a priority. We should expand an existing program, perhaps some element of Social Security through its disability processes, to make contraceptives available free to anyone in the country.
(I should note that many abortions are not due to unplanned pregnancies, but rather pregnancies where the fetus develops abnormalities. This is not uncommon. Recent studies indicate that as many as half of pregnancies in twenty-year-olds result in miscarriages, which are thought to indicate that the body decides there is a problem with the fetus and goes through the natural process of stopping those pregnancies. More and better contraception won’t help with defects after conception. The only thing that will help is a humane view of abortions.)
And fourth, the federal government obviously needs to expand the amount of realistic sex education provided to young people. The Department of Education needs to provide training that can be used in primary and secondary education that trains people how sex works and how to prevent pregnancy and STDs.
The reconciliation bill should be expanded to greatly increase the spending for sex education in the schools, and it should specifically remove authorization for any spending on abstinence-only education. Our object is to cut down on the number of unintended pregnancies, not induce more.
In Summary
I want to see additional spending in the reconciliation bill for (A) Equality Payments, (B) additional research on contraceptives, (C) availability of contraceptives, and (D) enhanced sex education. And the bill should have a tax provision to take away any financial gains from states paying vigilantes bounties for stalking and harassing abortion providers and their allies.
Of course, there’s probably any number of other things that could and should be added to the reconciliation bill. It’s good, in that sense, that there’s a delay, because while we are waiting I and other people can be thinking about what else we should demand.
The stingy politicians in Washington need to expend austerity on their own lives. They have it clearly wrong when it comes to the reconciliation bill. If they have some specific thing they think can be done for less, then we need to see a specific proposal. But the criticism that “$3.5 trillion is too much” in the vacuum is completely meaningless. Unless they can point to a specific item that should be less and say why, they should simply be ignored.
By their peers.
By the press.
By the people.