Sanders on the Reconciliation Bill _ Why at least 3.5 Trillion is Necessary

 For America's sake, we can't afford to cut $3.5 trillion spending plan

By: Senator Bernie Sanders
September 28, 2021

We live in an unprecedented moment as our country faces enormous crises including COVID, climate change, attacks on democracy, income and wealth inequality and the multi-decade decline of the American middle class. 

As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee I proposed a $6 trillion reconciliation bill which would begin addressing these long-neglected problems. A strong majority of the Democratic caucus supported that proposal, but not all. As a result, we made a major compromise to reduce that budget from $6 trillion down to $3.5 trillion. This entire package will not add to the deficit and be paid for by demanding that the very wealthiest people in our country and large, profitable corporations start paying their fair share of taxes. Poll after poll, especially among working class people, shows overwhelming support for what we are trying to accomplish. 

Now, for whatever reason, there are pundits out there who say we should compromise even more and cut back on addressing the long-neglected problems facing working families as well as climate change. Really? Please tell me where we should cut. 

Should we end the $300 direct payments to working class parents which have cut childhood poverty in our country by half?

Should we continue to ignore the dysfunctionality of our childcare system which forces millions of working families to spend 20-30% of their limited incomes on childcare and keeps over a million women out of the workforce? 

Should we deny low and moderate income young people the opportunity to get the higher education and job skills they need by making community colleges tuition free? 

Should we continue allowing the pharmaceutical industry to charge us, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs? 

Should we continue a situation where many millions of seniors are unable to afford to go to a dentist to get treatment for their rotting teeth, or buy the hearing aids and eyeglasses they need — or should we expand Medicare to cover those basic health care needs? 

Should we continue being the only major country on earth not to guarantee paid family and medical leave? 

Should we, as an aging society, force older and disabled Americans into expensive nursing home care or should we expand home health care and allow them the opportunity to stay in their own homes?

Should we continue to have 600,000 Americans remain homeless, or should we finally begin building the millions of units of low income and affordable housing that we need? 

And then there is the existential threat of climate change. 

When the planet becomes warmer and warmer, with unprecedented forest fires, drought, floods, extreme weather disturbances and acidification of the oceans are causing mass destruction, and when scientists tell us that we only have a few years to avoid irreparable damage to our country and planet, should we really continue to ignore this global crisis? 

This reconciliation bill is being opposed by every Republican in Congress as well as the drug companies, the insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry and the billionaire class. They want to maintain the status quo in which the very rich get richer while ordinary Americans continue to struggle to make ends meet. Well, I disagree. I believe that now is the time, finally, for Congress to stand up for working families and have the courage to take on the big money interests and wealthy campaign contributors who have so much power over the economic and political life of our country. 

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Why Washington Can Not Pass Vital Legislation

 Why Little Gets Done, 

 

Opinion | The Perils of "Minority Rule" | Steven Hill

After a strong start with his ambitious Covid relief bill and vaccination rollout, President Joe Biden's momentum has slowed considerably. Like President Barack Obama before him, he has now hit the buzzsaw of…Republican minority rule.

www.commondreams.org

 

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/16/perils-minority-rule

 

But - What about the Debt Ceiling ?

 

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist

Yesterday every single Republican senator voted to shut down the U.S. government and provoke a global financial crisis.

Of course, they claimed otherwise; Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, portrayed the vote against raising the debt limit as a test of Democrats’ ability to govern, and some of his colleagues claimed to be taking a stand for fiscal responsibility. But everyone involved understood that this was an act of political sabotage. And the terrible thing is that it might work.

The U.S. debt limit is a very peculiar institution, because when combined with the filibuster it gives a minority party the ability to undermine basic governance. You might think that once Congress has passed fiscal legislation — once it has passed bills that set spending levels and tax rates — that would be the end of the story. But if this duly enacted legislation leads to a budget deficit, which requires that the U.S. government issue debt, as few as 40 senators can then block the needed borrowing, creating a crisis.

And the crisis could be very severe. It’s not just that the federal government would run out of money, forcing curtailment of essential services. U.S. government debt plays an essential role in the global financial system because Treasury securities are used as collateral in financial transactions around the world. During the brief Covid-induced financial panic of March 2020 interest rates on short-term Treasuries actually went negative, as frightened investors piled into the safest assets they could think of.

Make U.S. debt unsafe — make the U.S. government an unreliable counterparty, because its ability to pay its bills is contingent on the whims of an irresponsible opposition party — and the disruption to world markets could be devastating.

So why would Republicans flirt with such an outcome? Because they’re completely ruthless — and they’ve learned the lesson of the New Jersey sharks.

Or, if you want to put it in slightly more pedestrian terms, the G.O.P. has now weaponized retrospective voting.

It has long been clear that voters are far less informed about parties’ policy actions than we’d like to imagine, even when those policies touch their lives directly. Earlier this year most Americans received stimulus checks thanks to the American Rescue Plan, which was enacted by Democrats on a straight party-line vote. Yet a poll of rural voters found that only half gave Democrats credit for those checks; a third credited Republicans, not one of whom supported the plan.

So what do voters respond to? In general, they tend to support the incumbent party when things are going well, oppose it if things are going badly — even if the positive or negative events have no conceivable relationship to that party’s actions.

The political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels like to use the example of the 1916 election, which was much closer than most people expected; in particular, Woodrow Wilson lost his home state of New Jersey. Why? Achen and Bartels make a compelling case that one major factor was the panic created by a wave of shark attacks along New Jersey’s beaches. Whatever you think of Wilson, he wasn’t responsible for those sharks. But voters blamed him anyway.

More prosaically, many presidential contests turn on how the economy was doing in the few quarters before the election, even though presidents usually have relatively little influence on short-term economic developments, certainly as compared with the Federal Reserve. When people voted against Jimmy Carter, they were really voting against Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman at the time, who pushed the economy into recession to curb inflation — but they didn’t know that.

Of course, retrospective voting isn’t new. What is new is the complete ruthlessness of the modern Republican Party, which is single-mindedly focused on regaining power, never mind the consequences for the rest of the country.

So ask yourself: If a party doesn’t care about the state of the nation when the other party is in power, and it knows that its opposition suffers when bad things happen, what is its optimal political strategy? The answer, obviously, is that it should do what it can to make bad things happen.

Sometimes the sabotage strategy is almost naked. Consider Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida. DeSantis has done everything he can to prevent an effective response to the latest pandemic wave — trying to block mask and vaccine requirements, even by private businesses. Yet this hasn’t stopped him from blaming President Biden for failing to end Covid.

And now comes the debt crisis. Nobody has ever accused McConnell of being stupid. He knows quite well just how disastrous failing to raise the debt limit could be. But the disaster would occur on Biden’s watch. And from his point of view, that’s all good.

Quick Hits

The economy consistently does better under Democrats.

But Republican presidents often win re-election because the economy does wellin their fourth year.

Americans deny receiving government benefits even when they actually do.

Partisanship and the Covid death toll.

Political orientation predicts science denial

 Adrian Bardon received funding from the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project at the University of Connecticut. 

Here’s what that means for getting Americans vaccinated against COVID-19

Vaccine refusal is a major reason COVID-19 infections continue to surge in the U.S. Safe and effective vaccines have been available for months, but as of mid-September 2021, only 65% of eligible American adults are fully vaccinated. In many areas, a majority of eligible adults haven’t taken advantage of the opportunity to get vaccinated.

In the U.S., polling on intent to get vaccinated shows a massive political divide. Counties that went for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election show higher vaccination rates than counties that went for Donald Trump. Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s summer meeting cheered the fact that the U.S. didn’t meet Biden’s July 4 vaccination goals for the country.

Politically motivated denial of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness tracks with a dramatic politicization of trust in science itself. In a survey conducted in June and July, Gallup found that the percentage of Republicans expressing a “great deal” or “quite a lot of” trust in science is down, shockingly, from 72% in 1975 to only 45% today. Over the same period, confidence in science among Democrats is up from 67% to 79%.

Scientific institutions have never been perfect, but overall they have a tremendous track record of success – both in basic research and in applied sciences like epidemiology and immunology. The vast majority of expert opinion on, say, antibiotics, radio waves, orbital mechanics or electrical conductivity is accepted without complaint by the general public. Evidently people are satisfied with applied science in almost all walks of life. 

So why is confidence in science so malleable, and what does a person’s political orientation have to do with it?

The rejection of scientific expertise with regard to COVID-19 vaccines appears to be standing in for something else. As a philosopher who has studied science denial, I suggest that this “something else” includes factors like distrust in public institutions and perceived threats to one’s cultural identity.

Ideologies that mesh with science denial

Identifying as a Republican is very strongly associated with embracing central tenets of conservative ideology. A 2021 public opinion study confirms that endorsement of conservative political ideology is currently the dominant predictor of anti-science attitudes.

Another recent study of anti-science attitudes identifies several tendencies particularly associated with conservative ideology. People who hold anti-science beliefs tend to be sympathetic toward right-wing authoritarianism – that is to say, they are conformists who defer to selected authority figures and who are willing to act aggressively in the name of those figures.

They also tend to support group-based hierarchy, with “superior” groups dominating “inferior” groups. Political psychologists call this “social dominance orientation” and see it in, for example, attitudes about racial or gender equality. 

Indeed, social scientists looking at the causes of science denial have increasingly narrowed in on two contributing causes. Certain personality traits, including comfort with existing social and cultural hierarchies and a predilection for authoritarianism, go along with a skepticism for science. So do closely related aspects of identity, such as identification with a dominant social group like white evangelical Christians. 

Conservative traditionalists from the historically dominant white Christian demographic in the U.S. have had the most reason to feel threatened by science. Evolution by natural selection is threatening to many doctrinal religious traditionalists. Climate science threatens the economic status quo that conservatives seek to conserve. The whole concept of a public health mandate runs counter to the “small government” individualism of political conservatives. 

Further, because COVID-19 has been starkly politicized since the beginning of the pandemic, public health measures have become directly associated with the political left. Rejection of such measures has consequently become a signal of political and cultural identity.

U.S. counties that skewed more heavily toward Trump in the 2020 election tend to have lower vaccination rates than those that skewed toward Biden. Charles Gaba/ACASignups.net, CC BY-ND

Other recent studies on science denial have shown that people who don’t have a lot of confidence in the honesty and reliability of others, as well as in social institutions like government, academia and media, tend to deny the dangers of COVID-19. Low social trust tends to track with conservative political orientation – in particular, with support for Trump. His supporters are much more likely to say that scientific inquiry is driven by political considerations. 

Grasping for a sense of control

Increasing economic inequality and racial and ethnic diversification are also part of the science denialism mix.

One school of thought in psychology, called compensatory control theory, holds that many social phenomena – including ideological science denial – stem from the basic human need for a sense of control over one’s environment and life outcomes. According to this theory, perceived threats to one’s sense of personal control can motivate denial of scientific consensus. The idea is that due to a combination of economic insecurity, demographic changes and the perceived erosion of cultural norms favoring whites, some people feel an existential threat to the white supremacy they’ve long benefited from – which in turn spurs them to deny government warnings about the dangers of COVID-19.

I believe this compulsive defensiveness plays a big part in the phenomenon of science denial, once trusted elites like politicians or news media hosts trigger the inclination to oppose some particular science-based public policy. You can’t control the coronavirus – or inequality, or a changing culture – but you can control whether you take the vaccine or wear a mask. This sense of control is implicitly but powerfully attractive on a deep, emotional level.

The need for control may also explain an attraction to politicians or media figures who promise to give you your power back by endorsing unproven, alternative home remedies. 

In the U.S., attitudes toward public health recommendations are tied up with political beliefs and identity.

Denial feeds on political polarization

As I discuss in my book, “The Truth About Denial,” I think that science denial, including COVID-19 vaccine denial, is probably best seen as the result of vicious feedback loops. Factors like economic pain, white Christian identity and low social trust play off one another in populations experiencing relative social and informational isolation. This denialism can take hold more easily in people who have chosen to limit their experiences to relatively homogeneous geographic areas, social contexts and news media environments.

In the short run, the failure of a society to vaccinate enough people to get COVID-19 under control will dramatically change life for everyone for years to come. The larger issue is the way science itself has become politicized in ways never seen before. This development endangers the ability of organized society to respond effectively to pandemics and other existential threats, including climate change. 

Is there any hope of depolarizing the issue of COVID-19 vaccination, or trust in science itself? I’d say probably not until leaders in conservative politics, media and religion exert a concerted effort to change the narrative.

[Get our best science, health and technology stories. Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter.]

 

Democratic Centrists and Right Wing Propaganda

 Paul Krugman,  Sept. 23, 2021.

Everyone who paid attention during the Obama years knew that Republicans would also try to undermine Democratic presidencies. Some of the G.O.P.’s actions — notably, the efforts of governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott to prevent an effective response to a deadly pandemic — have shocked even the cynics. Still, a Republican attempt to make President Biden fail, no matter how much it hurt the rest of the country, was predictable.

More surprising, at least to me, has been the self-destructive behavior of Democratic centrists — a term I prefer to “moderates,” because it’s hard to see what’s moderate about demanding that Biden abandon highly popular policies like taxing corporations and reducing drug prices. At this point it seems all too possible that a handful of recalcitrant Democrats will blow up the whole Biden agenda — and yes, it’s the centrists who are throwing a tantrum, while the party’s progressives are acting like adults.

So what’s motivating the sabotage squad? Part of the answer, I’d argue, is that they have internalized decades of right-wing economic propaganda, that their gut reaction to any proposal to improve Americans’ lives is that it must be unworkable and unaffordable.

Of course, this isn’t the whole story. We certainly shouldn’t underrate the influence of money: Both wealthy donors and Big Pharma have been nakedly throwing their weight around. Nor should we discount the importance of simple innumeracy: $3.5 trillion sounds like a lot of money, and you shouldn’t assume politicians understand (or think constituents understand) that this is proposed spending over the course of a decade, not a single year. It would amount to little more than 1 percent of gross domestic product over that period and would still leave overall government spending far below its level in other wealthy democracies. It also ignores the fact that the true cost, after net savings and new revenue, would be much less than $3.5 trillion.

And some politicians seem to suffer from the misguided notion that only spending on “hard” infrastructure, like roads and bridges, counts as investing in the nation’s future. That is, they haven’t caught up with the growing body of evidence for high economic returns to spending on people — especially spending that lifts children out of poverty.

Still, I often find myself surprised to hear politicians and pundits who don’t consider themselves part of movement conservatism peddling economic narratives that are nothing more than right-wing propaganda but have been repeated so many times that many people who should know better accept them as established fact.

I frequently hear, for example, that runaway spending and budget deficits caused the stagflation of the 1970s. In reality, federal debt shrank as a share of G.D.P. over the course of that decade (only to soar under President Ronald Reagan). To the extent that we understand ’70s stagflation, it seems to have been caused by a combination of oil shocks and feckless monetary policy. Big government had nothing to do with it.

I also sometimes hear even centrists giving Reagan’s tax cuts credit for turning the U.S. economy around. The truth is that most Americans did worse in the decades after the Reagan tax cuts than in the corresponding previous period; the post-Reagan boom, such as it was, was limited to a small number of wealthy people.

Finally, it’s amazing how many people believe that European economies with high social spending are severely damaged by reduced incentives to work. It’s true that during the 1980s and 1990s much of the Continent seemed to suffer from “Eurosclerosis” — persistent high unemployment, even during periods of economic expansion. But that was a long time ago. These days generous welfare states often have better labor market performance than the United States.

Take the example of Denmark, which Fox Business at one point compared to Venezuela. Indeed, if there were any truth to right-wing dogma, Denmark should be an economic hellhole. It has vastly higher social spending than we do; two-thirds of its workers are union members, and those unions are so powerful that they forced McDonald’s to pay its workers $22 an hour.

But the reality is that working-age Danes are more likely than their American counterparts to have jobs. It’s true that real G.D.P. per capita is slightly lower in Denmark, but that’s mainly because Denmark, unlike the U.S., isn’t a no-vacation nation; the Danes actually do take some time off from work.

The point is that as far as I can tell, those troublesome Democratic centrists are blinded by an economic narrative that was deliberately created to block progress and justify vast inequality. So they imagine that the Biden agenda — which is a fairly modest effort to address our nation’s very real problems — is somehow irresponsible and a threat to the nation’s future.

I would urge them to reconsider their premises. Biden’s proposed spending isn’t irresponsible and wouldn’t hurt growth. On the contrary, it would be deeply irresponsible not to invest in people as well as concrete, and if you look at the evidence, rather than repeating right-wing dogma, you realize that Biden’s agenda is actually pro-growth.

More on Biden’s economic plans

Poor People's Campaign on the Stimulus Bill

Forward together, not one step back!

Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

Co-Chairs, Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

 

PS -- Read the full letter below.

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi

Speaker of the House of Representatives

Washington, D.C. 20515

 

Dear Madam Speaker,

 

We are writing on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, about the vote on the Senate’s infrastructure bill this coming Monday. When we met with you recently, you listened to testimony from Black, white, and Latino Americans who know that it is not enough for Congress to only invest in the physical infrastructure of our roads, bridges, pipes and rails. On behalf of poor and low-income people across this nation, they implored you to “Hold the Line” and make clear to the Senate that the House cannot fund the physical infrastructure bill until the Senate commits to also funding the infrastructure of our daily lives by investing in healthcare, family leave, elder care, affordable housing, the environment and more.

 

The vote you have called for invites representatives of conscience to take a stand and use their power to insist that so-called “moderates” in the Senate do more to support the President’s “Build Back Better” agenda and, more importantly, to invest in the poor and low-income people who are too often ignored in our public life. This is what the delegation you met with asked for, and we thank you for keeping your word. Both of these bills are necessary and essential steps to lift from the bottom up and middle out. 

 

As we continue to lift the voices of America’s 140 million poor and low-income people, we know we need a Third Reconstruction to address the moral and constitutional crises we face in this country. As the wealthy and corporations invest millions to campaign against the investments the President has asked for, we have asked the White House to host a delegation similar to the one you met with to put a face on the real and urgent needs that demand action. We pray your leadership and courage will move this administration to take up this request, listen to poor and low-income people and show the nation why this legislation and so much more is needed.

 

Gratefully,

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II

President, Repairers of the Breach 

National Co-Chair, Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

 

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

Director, Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice
National Co-Chair, Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

 

  

17 Nobel Prize Winnners Endorse Biden's Stimulus Package

 Seventeen recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences have signed an open letter in support of President Biden’s Build Back Better package currently being considered in Congress. Below is a statement from Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz: 

The President’s economic agenda, the “Build Back Better” package being debated in Congress, would provide vital public investments in the nation’s physical and human infrastructure, as well as in our tattered safety net. These investments are long overdue—they were needed before the COVID-19 pandemic, and their necessity has been highlighted by the virus and the economic shock that came with it.

Some, however, have invoked fears of inflation as a reason to not undertake these investments. This view is short-sighted. These are importantly supply side measures, increasing the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, helping to improve our low employment-working age population ratio. Significantly reducing the fraction of children growing up in poverty and giving these children access to pre-K and college education will reap large dividends in years to come. We need safe school buildings and bridges, and affordable child and elder care, whether inflation is 2% or 5%. With the investments being financed by tax increases, the inflationary impacts will be at most negligible—over the medium term outweighed by the supply side benefits; and their progressivity will help address one of the country’s critical problems, the growing economic divide. 

The Build Back Better package will provide much needed support to a still-recovering economy, but it will accomplish much more than that. By meeting long-standing social needs, boosting long-term economic performance, and taking serious steps toward addressing the climate crisis we can already see unfolding, it would transform the U.S. economy to be more efficient, equitable, sustainable, and prosperous for the long run, without presenting an inflationary threat.

I am pleased that 16 other winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics join me in endorsing the contours of this transformative economic agenda. 

Read the open letter signed by 17 recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. 

Open letter from Nobel Laureates in Support of Economic Recovery Agenda

September 20, 2021
Economic Policy Institute

The American economy appears set for a robust recovery in part due to active government interventions over the past year and a half, including President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. But, reversing years of disinvestment in public goods and addressing the country’s long-term needs—including building toward sustainable and inclusive growth and facilitating our clean energy transition—will require more.

Success in the 21st century will require building upon the bi-partisan infrastructure deal that has passed the Senate, which prioritizes investments in our nation’s “hard” infrastructure. The President’s Build Back Better agenda employs a broader conception of infrastructure by making critical investments in human capital, the care economy, research and development, public education, and more, which will reduce families’ costs.

While we all have different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that key components of this broader agenda are critical—including tax reforms that make our tax system more equitable and that enable our system to raise the additional funds required to facilitate necessary public investments and achieve our collective goals. Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures.

Signed by 17 recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences:

• George A. Akerlof, Professor, Georgetown University
• Sir Angus Deaton, Professor, Princeton University
• Peter Diamond, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Robert Engle, Professor Emeritus and Co-Director of the Volatility and Risk Institute, New York University
• Oliver Hart, Professor, Harvard University
• Daniel Kahneman, Professor, Princeton University
• Eric S. Maskin, Professor, Harvard University
• Daniel McFadden, Professor, University of California, Berkley
• Paul Milgrom, Professor, Stanford University
• Roger Myerson, Professor, University of Chicago
• Edmund S. Phelps, Professor and Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University
• Paul Romer, Professor, New York University
• William Sharpe, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
• Robert Shiller, Professor, Yale University
• Christopher Sims, Professor, Princeton University
• Robert Solow, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Joseph Stiglitz, Professor, Columbia University

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The Common Good

 The common good is comprised of the values, ideals and norms shared by a society. It is what citizens expect of one another and what connects them to one another..

Explicitly, it consists of ideals like freedom, fairness, equality in the court of law, equal opportunity, respect for others and their opinions, a sense of community and trust in public institutions, such as universities and courts. R. Reich

The Common Good.  2018

Improve the Schools- Build Back Better

Two posts on specifics, What would a stimulus program like the $ 3.1 Trillion proposal mean specifically for schools.? Specifics, not generalizations.

Choosing Democracy: Improve the Schools- Build Back Better: We’re on the precipice of charting a bold new course for our country with the Build Back Better Act. With historic investments in school inf...