The Country's Biggest Problems? Partisan Divide Is Huge

By Yuval Rosenberg

Biden’s Bumpy Road to an
Infrastructure Bill

President Joe Biden held his second bipartisan infrastructure
meeting with lawmakers on Monday, as Republicans try to craft a
scaled-back counteroffer to the president’s $2.3 trillion plan and
Democrats consider whether or how long they should try to work with
the GOP.

Biden told reporters Monday that he was ready to discuss not
just what is included in any infrastructure legislation but also
how to pay for it. “I am prepared to compromise, prepared to see
what we can do and what we can get together on. It's a big package,
but there's a lot of needs,” he said.

The lawmakers meeting with the president were all senators or
representatives who had been governors or mayors — chosen to meet,
Biden said, “because they know what it's like to make things work,
to make sure that you get things done and deal with infrastructure
and the needs of your community.”

Behind the scenes: Monday’s meeting was just part of a
broader outreach effort by the White House, as CNN’s Paul LeBlanc
and Phil Mattingly
report.

“For the last three weeks, Cabinet officials and senior White
House aides have fanned out in a full-scale part-listening and
part-sales-pitch tour on Capitol Hill, according to administration
officials, with phone calls and meetings across both chambers and
parties and with top staffers of key leadership and committee
offices.
“Biden's legislative affairs team had made 139 calls to
members and top staffers as of last week, with Cabinet secretaries
holding 27 calls directly to members, including seven Republicans.
Biden's policy teams have held 26 staff briefings, including nine
at the member level, including one for GOP leadership, officials
said.
“Administration officials are working on multiple fronts to
gauge what pathways might exist with Republicans, and perhaps more
crucially, where Democrats are on their policy preferences given
the exceedingly narrow majorities in the House and Senate.”

At the same time, a group of 10 senators from each party is also
trying to figure out what the contours of a bipartisan
infrastructure package might look like — and how to pay for it,
Axios’s Hans Nichols
reported Sunday. And in an appearance on “Fox News
Sunday,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) joined Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) in
suggesting that a smaller, $800 billion package more focused on
roads, bridges and the like could win bipartisan support. “There is
a core infrastructure bill that we could pass…So let’s do it and
leave the rest for another day and another fight,” Cornyn said.

Democrats eye 25% corporate tax rate, not 28%: Even as
the two parties warily feel each other out, a number of Democrats
are pushing the White House to raise the corporate tax rate from
21% to 25%, shy of the 28% Biden has proposed. Axios’s Nichols
reported that Senate Democrats are likely to settle on 25%, and the
president will go along. “Democrats close to the White House expect
Biden will accept 25% and pocket it as a political win,” Nichols
said, adding that Biden’s proposal to raise the rate U.S.
multinational corporations pay on foreign earnings from 10.5% to
21% is likely to survive intact.

The bottom line: There’s a long way to go before any
infrastructure legislation is ready. “The many dynamics at play are
setting the stage for a lengthy and laborious path for getting the
infrstructure [SIC] package to the president’s desk,” The
Washington Post
reports. “Unlike Biden’s coronavirus relief bill,
which he signed in his seventh full week in office, there is no
urgent deadline for an ambitious plan on the scale the White House
wants, all but guaranteeing the legislative fight will take
months.”

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Introduce $180 Billion
Plan to Rebuild Public Housing

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(D-NY) introduced a proposal Monday to refurbish public housing
throughout the U.S.

The “Green New Deal for Public Housing” would spend up to $180
billion on grants over 10 years to “retrofit, rehabilitate, and
decarbonize the entire nation’s public housing stock,” Sanders said
in a
statement. Affecting nearly 2 million people
living in the nation’s 950,000 public housing units, the plan would
aim to enhance building efficiency, improve water quality and
upgrade energy sources to include solar power. The bill includes
provisions addressing labor standards and job training, with the
goal of creating thousands of high-paying jobs in the green
economy.

The bill would also repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which caps
the number of public housing units at 1999 levels and severely
limits the construction of new public housing.

Influencing Biden’s plan: By proposing far more than the
$40 billion the White House says it wants to spend on public
housing, the progressive lawmakers may be trying to shape President
Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal. Republican
opposition to including green energy plans in the infrastructure
package – “Republicans are not going to partner with Democrats on
the Green New Deal or on raising taxes to pay for it,” Sen. John
Barrasso (R-WY) said last month – has inspired some liberal
Democrats to call for going it alone, in the hope of passing a
massive bill on a partisan basis that touches on a wide variety of
their priorities.

“Probably our best bet would be one bill — and it should be a
large bill,” Sanders told
The New York Times. “I think it’s just easier and
more efficient for us to work as hard as we can in a comprehensive
broad infrastructure plan, which includes human infrastructure as
well as physical infrastructure.”

Deep Partisan Divide on Problems Facing the
Country

Democrats and Republicans don’t agree much on what they see as
the biggest problems facing the U.S., according to new poll data
from
Pew Research.

While more than two-thirds of Democrats and those who lean
Democratic cite gun violence, health care affordability, Covid-19
and racism as serious issues, less than half of Republicans and
those who lean Republican agree, with just 18% citing gun violence
and 19% citing racism. Climate change and economic inequality face
similar differences in opinion.

Republicans are far more concerned about illegal immigration and
the federal budget deficit, the top two issues cited by more
conservative adults.

Overall, 49% of poll respondents said they think the deficit is
“a very big problem,” but partisan opinions on the deficit have
changed substantially over the last few months. “Since last summer,
Republicans and Democrats have diverged sharply in their views of
whether the federal budget deficit represents a very big problem,”
Pew said. “Today, 71% of Republicans say the federal budget deficit
is a very big problem – 22 percentage points higher than the share
saying this in June 2020. By comparison, about three-in-ten
Democrats (31%) now say the deficit is a very big problem – 14
points lower than the share saying this last summer. As a result,
Republicans are now 40 percentage points more likely than Democrats
to say the deficit is a very big problem, a stark contrast to the
lack of a substantial partisan gap in these views 10 months
ago.”

Amazing Political Fact of the Day

“In 1993, the last time a president asked Congress to vote in a
significant tax hike, the typical congressional district
represented by a Republican was 14% richer than the typical
Democratic district, according to household income data from the
Census Bureau. By 2020, those districts were 13% poorer.”

– Bloomberg’s Gregory Korte in an
article Monday about President Biden’s effort to
raise taxes on high-income households, which now lean Democratic.
“President Joe Biden is asking congressional Democrats to vote for
a tax increase that will test a long-held liberal article of faith:
that many wealthy Democrats won’t mind paying more in taxes if they
can be convinced the money would lead to greater prosperity for
everyone,” Korte says.

Chart of the Day: Major Savings

American households are poised for a massive spending spree that
will boost the economy for many months to come, Joseph Brusuelas,
chief economist at the consulting firm RSM,
wrote Monday. A big part of that increase in
spending will be fueled by the remarkable increase in personal
savings seen over the last year, a run-up that was driven by fears
of the pandemic, worries about job loss, a sharp reduction in
opportunities to spend – and by the federal government’s
unprecedented pandemic relief efforts that flooded the economy with
liquidity.

Rather than a problem that could potentially spark inflation, as
some critics see it, Brusuelas says the savings overhang is a
positive factor that will help get the economy back on its feet.
“In our assessment,” Brusuelas says, “the fact that government
benefits softened the blow of financial hardship plus the
restoration of confidence in the government’s ability to respond to
hardship will allow for a quicker recovery than prior shocks to the
economy.”

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