The Congressional Budget Office has released its score of the bipartisan infrastructure bill:
Enacting Senate Amendment 2137...would decrease direct spending by $110 billion, increase revenues by $50 billion, and increase discretionary spending by $415 billion. On net, the legislation would add $256 billion to projected deficits over that period.
Conservatives are shocked that it turns out the bill won't pay for itself. Meh. I say the big news is that this so-called "$1.2 trillion bill" increases discretionary spending¹ by only $305 billion. Over ten years. That represents about a 1.5% increase in federal discretionary spending.²
And we spent six months haggling over this? Seriously? It's literally peanuts.
¹Which is only about a third of the total federal budget to begin with.
²There's also an additional $196 billion in "contract authority." However, that's relatively meaningless since it doesn't specify any actual spending, which is controlled by each year's appropriation bill.
I don't care how little it is. It helps Biden. He can say "bipartisan" and journalists will swoon. Also, Trump will throw a tantrum.
I'll take *anything* that strengthen's the Democrats' hand for 2022.
Nah, the lamestream media will look at the underwhelming numbers in the bill, & question the Democrat president's commitment to bipartisanship, if that's really all he's willing to meet the GQP halfway on.
This. Also it’ll help w Manchin & Sinema when the reconciliation bill rolls around, and that’s the significant one.
“And we spent six months haggling over this? Seriously? It's literally peanuts.”
Why yes… you did. No one outside the media gives a darn about this. I have no idea why you all made this out to be come sort of huge deal, but the media and the political class decided this was the ONE big thing that would save the country or something.
We’d all have been better off if no one had paid any attention. Maybe we’d have gotten a couple more bridges repaired. Bases on the summer construction season where I live, there is no shortage of money or project work anyway.
How’s that California high speed rail project going for you? Oh yeah…
But more than a decade later, California High Speed Rail has been an epic disappointment, plagued by repeated delays, ballooning costs and years of mismanagement and legal and political battles; to date, no segments of the project have been completed.
This country is broken beyond repair. It is incapable of basic governance.
At least no one's talking about a "Grand Bargain" yet.
It's an ugly win....if it actually crosses the finish line.
It may--gives the Republicans cover for when they claim credit for money being invested in their districts by the reconciliation bill--that they'll all vote against.
I came across one analysis--maybe even Kevin linked to it earlier?--that tried to figure out why things cost so much here. One point they made was that other countries are doing repairs, replacing bridges, etc., all the time. Here, it's always done in fits and starts--every project is a brand new adventure. Massive push to build bridges--then nothing, for years. The experience and workforce move on, and the cycle starts over again.
Healthcare costs also inflate the labor costs of building anything in America. In most of our peer countries, labor costs don't include many/any healthcare costs because those systems fund most/all of healthcare through general tax revenue. The healthcare costs are on a different set of books, and thus the infrastructure project appears "cheaper" to do over there vs. here.
Example: A contractor hiring 100 workers to build a road in a foreign country at $60,000/year each is on the hook for $6M in total labor costs. But a contractor hiring 100 workers to build the same exact stretch of road in the US at $60,000/year each will shell out $6M in payroll *and* another maybe $6,000/year each in healthcare premiums or $600,000 in healthcare costs... making that same road built for $6M somewhere else cost $6.6M in the US.
true....
And in local meetings, e.g. school boards, the general public conflate cost per worker with take home pay. They'll get upset that the teachers cost much more than their take home pay.
The fringe benefits: health care, FICA, unemployment, etc., probably run closer to 30% of the salary, with most of that being employer contribution to heath care. So it may be more like employee costs may be $9 million vs $6 million in other countries. An exact analysis gets tricky because their are tax benefits for providing healthcare.
A valid point and one that some employers have been making very emphatically in annual compensation letters to their people. Total pay includes the employer side of FICA and Medicare, health insurance if any, retirement plan contribution if any, and maybe other benefits. When I was involved with hiring in a salaried field several years ago I think they were saying you have to add between a third and 40% to stated salaries to figure the total cost to the employer. OTOH, any outfit that bids on projects knows these costs to the last farthing.
Also, though, iirc the biggest difference in infrastructure costs between us and other industrialized countries is land acquisition. Regulatory approvals can also cost a lot more because of overlapping jurisdictions-- lots more submissions to prepare, lots more time eaten up, and both consultants and time cost money.
McConnell, et al, will refer back to this bill when the Democrats are preparing the upcoming budget reconciliation, and say "We worked hard for months, cooperated with our friends across the aisle, and hammered out agreement on a bipartisan infrastructure bill that works for all Americans, and now the Democrat Party is trying to ram this overpriced socialist wish list down our throats."
No one will remember that reconciliation was always part of the Administration's plan, to make up for the express intent of Republicans to block any significant assistance to the American people.
I don't know anybody who claimed the bipartisan bill was going to be the big bill. The big bill was always going to be the reconciliation bill. How big the big bill gets to be remains to be seen.
That said, the bipartisan bill is probably the bigger bill ... politically.
About that word "literally" ....
I think this is right, because I think for Biden the process is the message. His big medium-term project, it seems to me, is to try to get republican congresscritters, particularly senators, to detach from gqp primary voters and position themselves much more around general election voters instead.
It's a way to try to de-MAGAfy the R party in Washington-- to entice them into being regular politicians instead of cultists. Senators don't run often but they have to run statewide, and that, with their egos, gives potentially major leverage. In fact I think he'd probably have done it this way even if Manchin and Sinema were always on board with going big in reconciliation. (Manchin may actually be, who knows, but the kabuki show sure hasn't hurt him at all.)
Who knows whether this could work, and the trump guy winning that Ohio primary may upset these kinds of calculations, but if a spectacle like this, with a semi-sham result, has a chance to move some senate Rs away from the cult, I'll call it a price I'm willing to pay-- as long as the reconciliation bill really does the heavy lifting of making up for 40 years of woeful and systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and laying the groundwork for the next 40-50 years.
Shouldn't we instead be talking about what is unfolding in Afghanistan? A humanitarian crisis will be upon the place soon, and likely Biden will forever be the guy who recklessly and suddenly pulled out of Afghanistan. And why did he do it? Because Americans are still getting killed or we couldn't afford it? No, it's just because we were tired of thinking about it. That is not a good reason to leave at all.
I fear the rapid fall of Afghanistan is going to forever taint the Biden presidency. Trump will be happy, he'll score points with voters. It's ironic, because Biden is making the hasty exit like Trump always wanted to.
How about because we would never do what was needed to pacify it? He ended a mission that would never succeed.
It's a waiting game in hoping the other side one day weakens and things change. We still have 28,500 troops in S Korea to hold off the barbarian rulers to the North. The war ended in 1953. Meanwhile S Korea slowly evolved economical and politically. They now have a democracy rated as highly as the U.S. Not saying that Afghanistan is the same as S Korea, but 30 years from now, who knows. But now there is going to be an Iran-like state formed instead.
Also, what "mission" are you referring to? Having women and girls protected from extreme abuse? In 2019, Afghan women constituted roughly 27% of the civil service and parliament. Since 2001, Afghan women have also made significant gains in education, healthcare, and culture. 40% of Afghan girls are enrolled in secondary schools—before 2001, they were barred from secondary education altogether.
Perhaps Afghans really are culturally incapable of achieving a civilized country, but personally I don't think we should just throw our hands up and leave.
Any Republican position on anything is a crime.
It's who they are.