President Joe Biden and Democrat leaders announced Thursday they have reached a deal on their multi-trillion spending plan. The deal, which needed Senators Joe Manchin (D-VA) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), includes more than $2 trillion in new taxes to cover $1.75 trillion in new spending.
To get there, Machin and Sinema are reported to have capitulated and agree to many of the more controversial parts of the bill, including half-a-trillion dollars in “green new deal” energy schemes.
But to appease Mancin and Sinema, the price public price tag has been slashed in half from an original top-line price of $3.5 trillion down to a top-line price of $1.75 trillion.
No Republicans are expected to vote for the bill which, if passed, will push the nation’s debt over the $31 trillion mark for the first time in history.
It remains to be seen if Manchin’s requirement that the pro-life Hyde Amendment be re-inserted survived the negotiations. Hyde prevents the government from using tax dollars to pay for millions of abortions.
“After hearing input from all sides and negotiating in good faith with Senators Manchin and Sinema, Congressional Leadership, and a broad swath of Members of Congress, President Biden is announcing a framework for the Build Back Better Act,” announced President Joe Biden in an online press release.
Manchin and Sinema have long held up the legislation, citing concerns over the bill’s price and its potential to cause unintended collateral damage, to the chagrin of progressive Democrats.
Since the bill’s inception, Manchin, Sinema, and others have spoken against the laundry list of proposals from their party: incentives for clean energy, encouraging electric vehicles, carbon taxes, expansion of the government’s role in health care, increasing tax rates, and a measure to let the IRS snoop into Americans’ bank accounts, among others.
The bill’s broad expenditures are: $200 billion in welfare in the form of monthly payments, $555 billion for “clean energy and climate investments,” $130 billion to expand the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which when originally passed was to have already been fully funded. It also includes $150 billion for housing initiatives, a $40 billion higher education bailout and $100 billion to pay for what is expected to be two million illegal immigrants that will have entered the country in 2021. There’s also $90 billion for a vaguely-worded “equity and other investments,” which Republicans have said is code for financial support of radical political groups across the country and the full installation of critical race theory into the nation’s K-12 schools.
In order to meet their promise to craft a fully paid-for bill, the budget will also include a long list of new revenue schemes. According to the White House release, these new revenue schemes include estimated revenue of: $325 billion from a 15 percent minimum corporate tax, $125 billion from a new “stock buyback tax,” $350 billion from “Corporate International Reform to Stop Rewarding Companies That Ship Jobs and Profits Overseas,” $230 billion from Democrats’ new “billionaire tax,” $250 billion from “closing [the] Medicare tax loophole for [the] wealthy,” and $400 billion from new “IRS investments,” among others.
Absent from the bill is paid family leave, a keystone of the bill for progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Even though Manchin and Sinema are seemingly satisfied with this new deal, it remains to be seen whether it will pass.
–Trusted wire services