Dems Slam GOP Infrastructure Plan Before It's Even Released

By Yuval Rosenberg

Democrats Dismiss Republican Infrastructure
Offer, Before It’s Even Introduced

Republicans are still working on their scaled-back
counterproposal to President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion
infrastructure plan, but Democrats say they’ve already heard enough
to know the GOP offer is a non-starter.

The GOP plan, being spearheaded by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito
(R-WV), the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works
Committee, is likely to total $550 billion to $880 billion, with
the costs paid for with user fees and unspent Covid relief
funds.

Capito told reporters Tuesday that she hoped to have a
“conceptual” infrastructure proposal by the end of the week and
that the Republican offer would present a contrast to Biden’s
sweeping blueprint. Republicans have criticized the scope of
Biden’s plan and the corporate tax increases the president has
proposed. The GOP offer is expected to focus on roads, bridges,
ports and airports, as well as water infrastructure, broadband
access and updating the electric grid. Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell said Tuesday that Republicans were “open to a more modest
and targeted” package. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS)
said he thought the GOP’s initial offer "might be
somewhere south of $600 billion.”

That’s enough for Democrats to say the GOP plan will fall far
short. “Six hundred billion dollars is not what the country needs —
the country needs $2 trillion,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo
told
Politico. “It’s not nearly enough.”

Politico’s Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine
report that Senate Democrats are also dismissing
the nascent GOP plan, suggesting that it’s too small to be useful
as the basis for bipartisan talks:

“Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called the proposal
‘totally anemic’ and an ‘insult’ to Biden’s offer. Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Mass.) summarized Democrats’ feelings by observing that
‘the Republican proposal does not meet the moment.’
“’A far cry from $2.5 trillion,” added Sen. Mazie Hirono
(D-Hawaii). ‘Until the Republicans realize the needs are far, far
greater from what they’re proposing, I don’t know that we’re going
to get much further. I hope so … but we’re not going to wait
forever.’”

The bottom line: The dynamics of the infrastructure talks
may be reminiscent of those on President Biden’s $1.9 trillion
Covid relief package. In that case, Republicans’ initial offer,
also less than a third the size of Biden’s proposal, was promptly
rejected and Democrats moved quickly to pass the legislation on
their own. But there may be more interest in reaching a bipartisan
deal on at least part of the infrastructure plan, and less pressure
to act quickly.

There’s still a long, bumpy road ahead before lawmakers settle
on an infrastructure plan.

Meanwhile, lawmakers are wasting no time lobbying to receive
federal infrastructure money for their districts. Democrats are
already highlighting specific projects to the Biden administration,
from bridges in Minnesota to rail tunnels in New Jersey, and GOP
lawmakers are getting in on the action, too. “Even Republicans who
have been disinclined to support Biden’s economic agenda have
pushed their pet projects at a moment when Democrats are vying to
spend big,” The Washington Post’s Tony Room
reports.

Number of the Day: 200 Million

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that by the end of the day,
the U.S. will have achieved his stated goal of administering 200
million Covid-19 vaccine doses within the first 100 days of his
administration. “Today, we did it, today we hit 200 million shots
in the 92nd day in office,” Biden said at the White House.

Biden also highlighted new tax credits for small businesses
intended to defray the costs of getting employees vaccinated. The
credits, which were part of the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill
signed into law in March, will be in effect between April 1 and
September 30 and reimburse companies up to $500 per day per
employee getting vaccinated.

“I'm calling on every employer, large and small, in every state,
to give employees the time off they need, with pay, to get
vaccinated,” Biden said. “Any time they need with pay to recover,
if they're feeling under the weather after the shot. No working
American should lose a single dollar from their paycheck because
they chose to fulfill their patriotic duty of getting
vaccinated.”

Another Battle Brewing Over Lowering
Prescription Drug Prices

The White House is expected to include proposals to lower
prescription drug prices as part of President Biden’s next big
spending plan, focused on caregiving and what the White House calls
“human infrastructure.” In anticipation, House Republicans and
Democrats are going on the offensive, reintroducing their own
drug-pricing plans.

That GOP legislation “contains dozens of provisions with
bipartisan support aimed at lowering the price of prescription
pharmaceuticals,” The Washington Post’s Paige Winfield Cunningham
reported Wednesday. “Most of the provisions are relatively minor,
involving things such as expanding transparency or tweaking
incentives, but the bill would cap what seniors pay out of pocket
for Medicare drugs for the first time ever.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are expected to reintroduce sections of
their own legislation to lower drug prices, known as H.R. 3, as
early as Thursday, The Hill
reports.

The fight ahead: Biden’s plan and the Democratic bill are
expected to call for allowing the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) to negotiate prices for drugs in the Medicare
program, a key element of the Democratic health care agenda.
Republicans don’t want to go that far, objecting to what they call
“government price control.” They also argue
that a Democratic health reform passed by the House in late 2019
would have hobbled drug companies’ efforts to develop Covid-19
vaccines and treatments.

“That argument seems dubious,” Winfield Cunningham writes,
“considering the federal government has paid pharmaceutical
companies billions of dollars for developing, manufacturing and
distributing six different coronavirus vaccines.” But a
Congressional Budget Office analysis did estimate that the 2019
Democratic reforms would have led to lower revenue for drugmakers
and lower investment in research and development. As a result, CBO
estimated, eight fewer drugs would be brought to market from 2020
through 2029 and about 30 fewer drugs would be released over the
following decade.

The bottom line: The drug-pricing debate to come is
likely to sound a lot like the one we had in 2019, and the result
could be much the same, too. “Expect to hear Republicans talk about
their bill a lot, but it won't go anywhere,” Winfield Cunningham
writes, adding that it’s far from clear that Democrats will be able
to pass some portions of their legislation. “Even if they use
budget reconciliation, requiring just 50 votes in the Senate,
they're operating on extremely narrow margins. And while allowing
direct negotiations with HHS is likely to pass muster within budget
reconciliation rules, other parts of the bill, including the
international pricing index, might not.”


Read the full story at The Washington Post.

Progressive Lawmakers Introduce Plan for Free
College for Most Families

A group of progressive lawmakers led by Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-VT) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) released a plan Wednesday to
make college free for most American families, paid for by new taxes
on investors.

The legislation, called the
College for All Act, would eliminate tuition at
community colleges and allow students from households earning less
than $125,000 per year to attend public universities at no cost. It
would also double the Pell Grant maximum to nearly $13,000, up from
the current $6,495, and increase funding for historically Black
colleges and universities, among other things.

The costs of the proposal are to be covered by new taxes on Wall
Street trading. A separate bill released Wednesday, called the Tax
on Wall Street Speculation Act, calls for a tax of 0.5% on stock
trades, a 0.1% tax on bond trades, and a 0.005% tax on derivative
trades. The taxes could raise as much as $2.4 trillion over 10
years, the bill’s backers
say, while also reducing excessive trading.
Critics argue the tax proposal offers something of a contradiction,
since if it reduces trading activity, it will also reduce the
revenues it generates.

Sanders and Jayapal have introduced similar measures before,
Roll Call
notes, but this is the first time Democrats have
controlled the Senate when they’ve done so. President Biden has
endorsed some parts of the proposal in the past, but not the whole
package.

Foxconn’s $10 Billion Wisconsin Project Gets
Scaled Way Back

In 2017, Foxconn, a massive electronics manufacturer based in
Taiwan, committed to spending $10 billion to build an LCD
manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. Fueled by roughly $3 billion in
state tax credits and millions more in state-funded site
improvements, the facility was to generate as many as 13,000 jobs,
turning tiny Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, into a global high-tech
hub.

At the groundbreaking ceremony in 2018, then-President Donald
Trump and then-Gov. Scott Walker, both Republicans, sang the
praises of Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, with Trump calling him “one of
the great men of the world, one of the great business leaders of
the world,” while referring to the still theoretical plant as “the
eighth wonder of the world.”

“America is open for business more than it has ever been,” Trump
said, neatly patting himself on the back for a job well done.

This week, current Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat,
announced that the state was drastically reducing the scope of the
deal — confirming critics’ fears that the agreement was something
less than realistic. In the latest iteration, Foxconn has agreed to
spend $672 million to build a factory that will employ 1,454
people. The incentive package has been reduced more than
thirty-fold, with the state offering about $80 million in tax
breaks.

“I made a promise to work with Foxconn to cut a better deal for
our state,” Evers said. “The last deal didn’t work for
Wisconsin.”

The bottom line: From the start, critics of the Foxconn
deal accused the company of promising far more than it could
deliver and charged Walker with putting too much public money into
a sketchy deal. The renegotiation of the agreement will save
Wisconsin residents money, though there’s no way to get back the
hundreds of millions of dollars already spent by state and local
agencies to prepare the site, or to recover the dozens of buildings
torn down, some seized through eminent domain.

“The cleared, prepped site is bigger than Central Park, with
nearly 100 homes and small farms bulldozed to make way for
Foxconn,” The Wall Street Journal
reported. “For now, the site houses a few shell
buildings and a nearly complete glass-and-steel dome that can be
seen from nearby Interstate 94.”

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