Dems Say Trump Agrees to Pursue Huge Infrastructure Deal

Plus, Medicare for All gets its first hearing

Pelosi, Schumer Say Trump Agreed to Spend $2 Trillion on Infrastructure

After meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that they and the president have agreed to pursue $2 trillion in spending over 25 years to upgrade the country’s infrastructure.

Now all they have to do is figure out what exactly the plan will do – and how to pay for it.

The lawmakers said they will meet with Trump again in three weeks, at which point the president is expected to provide some proposals for how to finance such a large-scale plan.

Schumer said that Tuesday’s meeting was a positive start marked by “goodwill” on both sides. “That was different than some of the other meetings that we’ve had,” he said outside the White House. “This was a very, very good start. … We hope it will go to a constructive conclusion.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders also called the meeting "excellent and productive," though her statement did not mention the $2 trillion figure.

Schumer said that Trump was “eager” to raise the top line of the potential package to $2 trillion and agreed to include funds for rural broadband. Schumer also said that Trump’s support was crucial given a divided Congress. "Because certainly in the Senate if we don't have him on board, it will be very hard to get the Senate to go along," he said.

Speedbumps Ahead

While rebuilding the country’s aging infrastructure has broad, bipartisan support, critics on both sides of the aisle expressed skepticism that the plan would come to fruition, given the gridlock that now defines Washington.

Speaking before the meeting concluded, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said that while he thought there was some interest on both sides in reaching a deal, he also suspected Democrats may be going through the motions “to make a show for trying to get a deal.” He also said that the White House will insist on changing environmental regulations as part of any infrastructure package, a potential red flag for Democrats.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway highlighted a potential conflict over the substance of the plan, saying that that Democrats think that infrastructure includes clean energy and building “dog parks and more bike trails,” while the Trump administration is focused on more basic elements such as roads, bridges and airports.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was more openly skeptical, tweeting, “What is the political upside of pretending to strike an infrastructure deal with the president that will never happen in a bajillion years?”

In the end, the biggest speedbump of all will likely be funding. “[I]t’s going to come down to money and pay-fors, as always,” said G. William Hoagland of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

For that reason, the second meeting between the president and Democratic lawmakers will be crucial and may determine whether any infrastructure package is passed during the remainder of Trump’s first term.

Tweets of the Day

Mulvaney on Tuesday also played down the significance of the $22 trillion national debt, leading Politico’s Ben White to tweet:

The Story Behind the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts

The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, has a new report detailing how Republicans created and passed their tax cuts in 2017. Here’s an overview from the piece:

"What would become known as the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or more commonly, the Trump tax cuts, was officially launched with six sentences in Trump’s first address to Congress on Feb. 28. There would be a ‘big, big cut’ for companies, and ‘massive tax relief for the middle class,’ he said. ‘Have to do it.’ For Republicans, the idea held promise.

“But by the time the measure was signed into law 10 months later, it had ridden a roller-coaster ride of flip-flops, exaggeration, hypocrisy, falsehoods and contortions. Rosy estimates of economic growth were summoned from right-wing pro-growth think tanks. Budgeting gimmicks made deficits disappear. Deals were cut. Historic Republican concerns about the long-term debt were abandoned. The result: flawed and ill-considered legislation that disappointed some tax experts ... and utterly flummoxed others."

Read the full report on The Center for Public Integrity website.

Democrats Are Divided as Medicare for All Gets Its First Hearing

The Democratic divide on health care and Medicare for All is fully in the political spotlight this week.

In his first official campaign speech, former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday said he supports giving Americans the option of buying into a Medicare-like plan. The position that sets Biden at odds with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a rival for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, who continues to champion a single-payer “Medicare for all” system and the virtual elimination of private insurers.

“Healthcare is a right, not a privilege,” Biden said during a campaign event in Pittsburgh. “Whether you’re covered through your employer or on your own or not, you should have the choice to buy into a public option plan for Medicare — your choice. If the insurance company isn’t doing right by you, you should have another choice.”

Biden’s plan would create a new government option, available through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, that would compete with coverage options from private insurers. Employers reportedly would also be able to buy into the public plan.

The Sniping Is Starting

“We are all trying to get to a place where we achieve universal health care. I think he sees it like that,” a Biden adviser told The Washington Post. “But if they want to go after him and Obama about their approach to health care, bring it on.”

A Sanders aide fired back, criticizing Biden for attending a private fundraiser with a health insurance executive. “Anyone defending the current dysfunctional system needs to explain why the average family should have to pay $28,000 a year for health care, while the CEO of Independence Health Group Daniel Hilferty made $4.8 million last year,” the aide said in a statement to the Post.

The political divide was evident again Tuesday as the House held its first hearing on Medicare for All. Some on the left had expressed concern that the lineup of expert witnesses would present less-than-full-throated support for Medicare for All, especially given House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s self-proclaimed agnosticism on the idea.

“For single-payer supporters, it is an achievement all on its own that House Democratic leaders agreed to hold a hearing at all on their proposal to completely overhaul American health care,” Vox’s Dylan Scott notes. “But that jubilation has been tempered by the nagging idea the Democratic establishment is still working to undermine Medicare-for-all.”

In the end, activist Ady Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was added to the roster. “If the richest nation in the history of the world really decided to, we could guarantee health care as a right and we could probably do it more quickly than people think but the problem is right now we’re not even trying,” Barkan told lawmakers.

Why it matters: “If private health insurers are one day put out of business by a government-run single payer health system, they may look back at Tuesday as the beginning of the end,” Bloomberg’s Erik Wasson and Alexander Ruoff say. “Yet the bill coming before the House Rules Committee won’t become law anytime soon and may never get a hearing in the committees that oversee Medicare.”

Even so, this week’s developments, including Biden’s embrace of a public option, are a sign of how dramatically the health care landscape has changed since the Affordable Care Act was being debated a decade ago. “The notion that a Medicare public option is now seen as a moderate idea shows how much the health-care debate has shifted among Democratic candidates,” Larry Levitt, of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation told the Post. “It doesn’t go as far as Medicare-for-all in simplifying the system, but it may avoid some of the political pitfalls.”

Those incremental steps aren’t good enough for supporters of a single-payer system. The question is whether Democratic primary voters will be swayed by progressives’ arguments that the system needs to be overhauled, or by centrists’ concerns that Medicare for All may be too radical a change for a party trying to ensure President Trump doesn’t win a second term. “Health care was a winning issue for Democrats in 2018,” says Axios’s Caitlin Owens, “and the party is still trying to figure out what would be a winning health care message in 2020 — playing it safe or swinging for the Medicare for All fences.”

What’s next: The Congressional Budget Office is due to release a report on Wednesday on the costs and effects of Medicare for All. And the House Ways and Means Committee has agreed to hold a hearing on Medicare for All legislation put forth by House progressives.

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A horse named Tax is running in the Kentucky Derby this Saturday. Just FYI.

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Chart of the Day: No Capex Boom

“The federal government will have to borrow an added $1 trillion through 2027 to pay for the corporate tax breaks” in the GOP's 2017 tax law, says Bloomberg opinion editor Mark Whitehouse. “So far, it’s hard to see what the country is getting in return.” Despite the tax changes, he says, businesses aren’t significantly increasing their capital expenditures.

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