One Of The Most Unpopular Bills In Recent History

 

Solution To Infrastructure Problems Is Still Far From Done

On Thursday, President Biden held a news conference with 10 senators (5 Democrats and 5 Republicans) to announce that a bipartisan agreement has been reached on an infrastructure bill. All of them celebrated this as a major accomplishment. It's not.

The agreement only provided about $600 billion in new infrastructure spending -- far from the $2.1 trillion that President Biden had asked for. And it's not even assured that this inadequate bill could be passed in the Senate. Only 5 Republicans were at the news conference, but 10 would be needed to pass the bill in the Senate.

And progressives have said they will not vote for the bill unless a companion reconciliation bill accompanies it that will provide far more than the bipartisan bill. Currently, those progressives have their reconciliation bill up to between $5 and $6 trillion. They are throwing every dream they have into the bill. But that is unrealistic. To pass a reconciliation bill, they will need the votes of all 48 Democrats, both Independents, and the Vice-President. Some moderate Democrats (like Manchin and Sinema) are not going to vote for a $5 to $6 trillion bill. 

Speaker Pelosi has said she will not allow a vote in the House on the bipartisan bill unless it is accompanied by a reconciliation bill (and President Biden has said he would not sign it with a reconciliation bill). I think the most that could be hoped for is a reconciliation bill between $1 and $2 trillion -- a bill that would restore what was cut out of President Biden's original proposal to reach bipartisan agreement.

Even that would be very difficult to achieve. Minority Leader McConnell has said he would try to kill the bipartisan bill if it is accompanied by a reconciliation bill -- and he may have enough votes to filibuster it to death.

To be blunt, infrastructure is still a mess. And there's a long way to go to get the problem solved. We would be lucky if two bills on infrastructure could reach Biden's desk by September -- and the odds are still good that no bill will be approved!
 

Minimum Wage Raise Is Dead (And GOP Is Rejoicing)

Our economy was already in trouble before the pandemic hit this country. While the rich were getting richer, the working and middle classes were struggling to stay up with inflation. And the gap between the wealth and income of the top 1% and the bottom 90% was larger than before the Great Depression, and it was continuing to grow.

The pandemic just made things even worse. The rich kept on getting richer, while millions lost their jobs.

The biggest thing to correct the economy, and make it fairer for everyone, would be to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The relief bill proposed by President Biden included that minimum wage. The bill would not only provide money necessary to fight the Coronavirus, but would start putting the U.S. economy back on track. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen now.

The Democrats were trying to pass that relief bill by using the reconciliation process. A Senate rule says that process can only be used for items that involve taxing and spending. And on Thursday, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that the provision to raise the minimum wage did not meet that criteria -- and therefore could not be included in the bill.

Frankly, I don't understand that ruling at all. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would affect both taxing and spending. Many of those receiving the raise would start paying taxes (which they don't do now because they live in poverty), and many (perhaps millions) would no longer qualify for government benefit programs (food stamps, etc.) which would affect government spending in a positive way. 

Republicans are celebrating the decision. They only care about the rich, and have always opposed raising the minimum wage. In fact, some of them have proposed doing away with the minimum wage and letting businesses pay even less than $7.25 and hour (the current minimum wage). They are still trying to claim that raising the minimum wage will cost jobs. That's not true, and has been disproved in all the states and cities that have raised the wage.

This means there will be no minimum wage raise for the next two years. That's because the Republicans, while they don't control the Senate, have enough votes to kill any attempt by filibustering it to death. It would take 60 votes to pass a minimum wage bill in the Senate, which means at least 10 Republicans would have to support it. That is simply not going to happen, because there are 10 Republican senators that give a damn about workers.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has provided its first disappointment. It is going to wimp out and accept defeat. Senate experts say Vice-President Kamala Harris could overrule the Senate Parliamentarian and keep the minimum wage proposal in the bill -- but the administration has signaled that it will accept the ruling. They are afraid the relief bill would not pass the Senate with the minimum wage proposal in it.

President Biden says he still supports the $15 an hour minimum wage and will continue to fight for it.

Sadly, those just sound like empty and meaningless words now.

Even sadder is that the American public supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Note the chart below, which reflects the results of the new Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between February 19th and 22nd of a national sample of 1,500 adults (including 1,201 registered voters). The margin of error for adults is 2.7 points, and for registered voters is 3.0 points.

As Written, GOP Plan Can Be Filibustered By Democrats

(Cartoon image is by Nate Beeler in The Columbus Dispatch.)

The Republicans knew that if they tried to pass a repeal of Obamacare outright, the Democrats in the Senate would filibuster it to death (i.e., force it to have an unreachable 60 votes). So they decided to do it in a sneaky way -- by attaching repeal to a budget reconciliation bill (which cannot be filibustered). But it looks like they may have screwed that up.

A budget reconciliation bill can only contain items that affect the government's budget -- and one of the parts of repeal the GOP included in the bill does not meet that requirement. The bill contains a provision that requires people who have a lapse in insurance to pay more to the insurance company in the first year after purchasing insurance. The problem (for Republicans) is that provision does not affect the budget in any way. It only affects the size of the premiums that an individual must pay the private insurance company.

The Republicans had included the provision to help insure people don't drop their insurance (and then buy it again after they are sick) -- which would cause premiums for everyone to rise. But if they keep the provision in the reconciliation bill, then Democrats will be able to filibuster the bill (and it would only take 41 of them to kill the bill).

Once again, the congressional Republicans have shown that their most common attribute is incompetence. They have had years to come up with a plan, and still screwed it up.

GOP Is Preparing A January Bill To Destroy Obamacare

 (All of the charts on this page are from the Kaiser Family Foundation.)

The Hill is reporting that congressional Republicans are already preparing a bill to do away with Obamacare. They want to have the bill, which will be passed in early January, ready for Trump's signature on Inauguration Day.

They know they can't outright repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The Senate Democrats would filibuster that to death. So, their plan is to defund Obamacare through a Budget Reconciliation Act (which cannot be filibustered, and can be passed in the Senate on a simple majority vote). Without any money, Obamacare would be effectively dead.

Republicans are scared though. They know that doing away with Obamacare will take health insurance away from more than 20 million people, and that could be catastrophic at the next election. To take care of that, their bill will delay the defunding for 18 to 36 months -- in the vain hope that in that time someone on the GOP side will come up with a plan that will help that 20 million keep insurance.

There's no much real hope of that happening though. They have floated various ideas, and none of them would save insurance for those who got coverage under Obamacare (and none would cut the cost of insurance or medical care). They seem to be living in a fantasy world. You can't take health insurance away and save it at the same time -- not without coming up with either a plan very similar to Obamacare or creating a single-payer plan (both of which they say they will not do).

The Republicans seem to think that most Americans hate Obamacare, and want to see it go away. But while a plurality say they view Obamacare unfavorable -- about 45% compared to 43% who view it favorably (see top chart) -- that does not mean they want Obamacare to die.

When the Kaiser Family Foundation asked what should be done with Obamacare, they got the following results -- 19% said to move forward with the law as it is, 30% wanted to expand it, and 17% wanted to keep it and scale it back. Only a tiny 26% wanted it repealed (see the top chart below).

What is it that people don't like about Obamacare. That is answered in the bottom chart below. It seems that the general public, Democrats, and Independents like everything about Obamacare except the individual mandate (the requirement that everyone have insurance or pay a penalty). Republicans liked everything except the individual mandate and the employer mandate.

That's right, all four groups liked everything else about Obamacare -- including providing subsidies to help people buy health insurance and giving states the right to expand Medicaid. It is just the individual mandate that is disliked. Obviously the public has been misinformed. They don't understand that the mandate applies to only a tiny minority, and without everyone having insurance the premiums for insurance would go sky-high (because insurers cannot just insure sick people).

While Obamacare is a big improvement over what we had before it was passed, it is far from perfect. It needs to be amended to cover all citizens and to control health care and health insurance costs. But killing Obamacare off will not solve those problems, especially since the GOP has no plan to address those issues.

It now looks like the Republicans will quickly kill Obamacare now that they control the government, but I think they are making a huge mistake -- and that mistake is going to rebound and bite them on the ass.

The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll was done between November 15th and 21st of a random national sample of 1,202 adults, and has a margin of error of 3 points.