Divide $3.5 trillion in half and you get $1.75 trillion — which makes the domestic policy framework President Joe Biden touted Thursday a pretty perfect encapsulation that half a loaf is better than none. Yes, Biden and fellow Democrats had to throw overboard prized priorities, including 12 weeks of paid family leave. That painful concession means America will remain the world’s outlier, failing to provide a fundamentally humane benefit to the parents of newborns.
Still, what survived is expansive indeed — nearly twice the 10-year cost of the Affordable Care Act, which Biden rightly coined a “big f---ing deal,” including: a half-trillion dollars in clean energy and climate investments; universal, free-pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds; subsidies guaranteeing that no family earning less than $300,000 will pay more than 7% of their income on child-care; more federal rental assistance, which is desperately needed to make the nation’s largest city more livable; the addition of hearing benefits to Medicare; and billions to help families care for their elderly loved ones in their own homes. The bill also rightly provides all $2.86 billion needed to fund health care for those sickened by the toxic air around the World Trade Center after 9/11.
Unlike the Bush and Trump tax cuts, sold on the false promise that they’d pay for themselves, Democrats propose footing the bill by, among other things, collecting a 15% minimum tax from large corporations and imposing a surcharge on the wealthiest Americans (5% extra those with incomes over $10 million, and another 3% on those with incomes above $25 million). The world’s smallest Stradivarius plays for them.
It is yet to be determined whether the egregious limit on the ability of Americans to deduct their state and local taxes against their federal liability — the SALT cap, which targets high-tax states like ours — will remain. For fairness, it should be removed.
In the end, however, the perfect can’t be the enemy of the good, either for moderates or progressives. What Biden has cobbled together here is surely good.
