Joe Biden's 2024 Menu: The Rich.
:)
President Joe Biden on Thursday rolled out his proposed budget for fiscal 2024, an ambitious plan that would raise taxes on the rich and on corporations while expanding the social safety net. It would cut nearly $3 trillion from the federal deficit over the next decade by imposing a 25 percent minimum tax on the richest Americans. If you want to read the entire 185-page document, have at it!
Of course, it also won't do a single bit of that, because Republicans won't pass any of the major parts of the plan, particularly not the tax increases, but also not the social safety net parts like paid family leave, childcare, or Biden's plan to rescue the Medicare trust fund for at least 25 years.
Not a bit of it will become law except the most routine keep-things-as-they-are parts, which will no doubt end up in yet another omnibus spending bill passed barely in time to avoid a government shutdown. If then. Oh, also, the part that increases defense spending by about 3.2 percent, to over $835 billion, will probably do just fine. But whatever defense budget eventually passes in the fall won't be accompanied by the tax increases that would make the expenditures slightly less odious.
So why even offer a budget that's not going to get passed by Congress? For starters, presidents have to submit a budget request in early February (traditionally by the first Monday, but everything moves slow these days) to get the process rolling, and the budget reflects the administration's priorities, even if the opposition is able to block them. Also, let's remember that Donald Trump's budgets, which zeroed out entire federal agencies, were entirely exercises in rightwing fantasy. And yet somehow we still have the National Endowment for the Arts.
So sure, a federal budget is mostly aspirational, and this year, Biden's budget serves two practical purposes: It sets out markers for where he wants his government to go in a second term (you know, if he runs), and it's also an opening bid in the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. Republicans say they want to cut federal spending because the deficits are too high, and Biden's budget is over here saying "Yeah? You show me how you'd reduce the deficit by $3 trillion in 10 years, ya mooks."
Former Obama administration official Kenneth Baer, who served in the Office of Management and Budget, explained to the Washington Post,
"As one of the people who has spent many a long night writing and editing a budget, I take umbrage at the people who say it’s a meaningless document. It’s not a meaningless document. [...] It sets the terms of the debate. It shows what’s important to you, your commitments and what you really want."
So let's take a look at what's in this thing and what that says about what Joe Biden wants.
The Rich Still Need To Be Eaten
Speaking at a union hall in Philadelphia yesterday, Biden emphasized that his third budget proposal is aimed at "investing in America and all of America," because "Too many people have been left behind and treated like they’re invisible. Not anymore. I promise I see you."
To that end, the $6.8 trillion budget plan (over 10 years) includes about $5 trillion in tax increases on the wealthiest individuals and corporations, most of which will go to cover new programs that Biden has previously put forward but that haven't yet been enacted.
Some specific tax increase proposals may sound familiar because some of them were in the original version of Build Back Better, but were removed after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said Donald Trump's 2017 Big Fat Tax Cuts for Rich Fuckwads couldn't be reversed, not even a little.
- Raise the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, which would still be lower than the 35 percent rate prior to Trump's 2017 cuts. It would also raise the tax rate on foreign earnings from 10.5 percent to 21 percent, to reduce the incentive for companies to move operations out of the USA.
- Repeal Trump's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by returning the top marginal tax rate to 39.7 percent from the current 37 percent. This would affect taxpayers making $400,000 a year for individuals, or $450,000 married filing jointly.
- Tax capital gains the same as income for people making over $1 million, and close the carried interest loopholefor chrissakes finally.
- Increase the surtax on corporate stock buybacks from one percent to four percent
- A new minimum tax on billionaires, assessing a 25 percent minimum tax on all income of the wealthiest tenth of one percent of Americans. That's a follow-up to the minimum corporate tax that was included in last year's Inflation Reduction Act.
- Raise Medicare taxes on those making more than $400,000 a year, and make more types of income eligible for Medicare taxation. We detailed that plan right here. Medicare would also be able to negotiate prices on more prescription drugs sooner, creating additional savings that would go to the Medicare trust fund.
Nice Things We Need
The budget also includes some domestic programs that were good ideas when they were proposed in Build Back Better, and were still good ideas when Joe Manchin demanded they be removed from Build Back Better. A few have been downsized for the budget plan, which also adds some items that weren't in BBB.
- Restore the enhanced child tax credit and make it permanent. Hell yes. It markedly reduced child poverty in the US, and it's damn near criminal that it was allowed to lapse. Also way better for America's children than allowing them to work in meatpacking plants.
- College affordability. The budget calls for higher maximum awards for Pell grants and for a $500 million grant program to make two years of community college free — not quite the full free community college program Biden originally ran on.
- Universal Pre-K and affordable child care. Not quite the full programs proposed in Build Back Better, but as CNN summarizes, this would fund "a new federal-state partnership program that would provide universal, free preschool. The spending plan would also increase funding for existing federal early care and education programs."
- Paid family and medical leave — another big priority that still needs doing. 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave; for fuckssake let's get this done. Yeah, in 2025 after we retake the House and expand the Senate majority.
- More free school meals. During the pandemic, we gave every kid eat. The Biden budget would provide $15 billion to enable wider free lunches, though hey, since it's a wish list, why not just say we want universal free school lunch? Kids learn better if they're not hungry.
- Make the IRA's Obamacare subsidies permanent. The enhanced premium subsidies, which started out as part of the American Rescue Plan, have helped reduce the percentage of Americans without healthcare coverage to record lows. But they're set to expire in 2025.
- Reduce maternal mortality. It's still a crisis, with far greater rates of maternal mortality for Black women than for white women. The budget calls for $471 million in funding to expand maternal health care, particularly in rural areas. It would also require all states to provide Medicaid postpartum care for 12 months instead of the current 60 days.
- $35 per month insulin for all Americans. It was included in the IRA for folks on Social Security, so let's make that the standard for those on private insurance or who have no insurance at all. It's literally a matter of life or death.
- Lower prescription drug prices for seniors. The IRA put a $2000 cap annual on out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries (going into effect in 2025). Biden wants to further limit copays for generic prescription drugs for chronic conditions to $2.
Yes, We Still Need Climate Spending
While the Inflation Reduction Act was the biggest American investment ever in fighting the climate emergency, Biden's budget proposal also recognizes that there's a lot more that needs doing, so it calls for still more funding to move America closer to reaching our Paris climate agreement goals. We want to wrap this sucker up, but take a look at this CNBC piece for more details on how the budget would expand our transition to clean power and cutting carbon emissions. Among the basics:
• $24 billion for climate resilience and conservation
• $16.5 billion for climate science and clean energy innovation
• $6.5 billion for energy storage and transmission projects
• $4.5 billion for jobs building clean energy infrastructure
• $3 billion for advancing adaptation finance
• $1.8 billion for environmental justice initiatives
• $1.2 billion for the Energy Department’s industrial decarbonization activities
Want even more info? I'm leaving a tab open with the White House fact sheet on the budget's climate priorities, because this is what the agenda for keeping the planet habitable should look like.
So those are some darn good priorities — and a blueprint for the 2024 campaign, too.
And now, back to two years of hearings on Twitter and Hunter's laptop. Total waste of time, but they may help make a very strong case for not letting Republicans anywhere near power again.
[2024 Budget of the US Government / WaPo / CNBC / NYT / CNBC]
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Biden Assembles Re-Election Dream Team Of Democratic All Stars ... And Eric Adams
Well, ya gotta invite him.
Joe Biden’s running for president … again! It’s not official yet — an announcement is expected in April — but he’s been clear that he’s running again, most recently during his remarks Sunday in Selma, Alabama.
According to the Washington Post, Biden has started assembling a “'national advisory board' with Democratic governors, senators and other political stars." They will travel the nation and act as his surrogates. This move is reportedly intended to "unify party leaders and minimize the chance of dissent.”
Biden is currently leading his only declared primary opponent, Marianne Williamson, by about 50 points, so the party seems fairly united around Uncle Joe. However, it’s good to shore up support and head off any surprise challenges from candidates who don’t induce giggle fits.
Biden aides said some Democrats are still being asked to join the effort, but they have already enlisted more than20 national figures. They include such influential governors as Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Wes Moore of Maryland, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Phil Murphy of New Jersey.
We like Gavin Newsom. Yes, he’s the governor of a solidly Democratic state but it feels good when it takes bold (if safe) political stances. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer handily won re-election in a swing state and her coattails helped flipped the state Legislature. Wes Moore is Maryland’s first Black governor and the nation’s only Black governor. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro soundly defeated insurrectionist Doug Mastriano, dealing a major blow to Donald Trump’s next top coup ambitions. This is going well.
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Rounding out the advisory board are longtime Biden allies, including Sen Christopher A. Coons (Del.) and Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (Del.), as well as Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.) and Rep. Veronica Escobar (Tex.). New York Mayor Eric Adams and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are also part of the group.
Sorry, I dozed off as soon as I read “Sen. Christopher A. Coons” but snapped back awake at the end with “Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.” She’s great, and her history-making victory kept a reduced-for-quick-sale Donald Trump out of the mayor’s office. But who’s that before her — New York Mayor Eric Adams? Whaaaaaa …?
This guy?
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Gotta agree with The Editorial Board's Dr. Mia Brett: "Eric Adams is extremely conservative with a low approval rating by New Yorkers. Not only will he not be helpful for re-election but his advice on Dem priorities and policies should be completely ignored."
A Quinnipiac University poll of New York City registered voters from February showed that 37 percent approve of Adam's performance while 43 percent disapprove and 20 percent don't know. The "don't know" number is harsh. If you're not certain whether someone sucks or not, you should at leas give them the benefit of the doubt. That's how I got second dates.
“A law-and-order mayor confronts a cold winter of discontent as crime far eclipses all other voters’ concerns,” said Tim Malloy, the polling analyst at Quinnipiac University, who apparently also wants to write Shakespearean tragedies.
Democrats nominated a cop who governs like a cop, and voters still aren't happy. Worse, he has just 43 percent approval among registered Democrats (38 percent disapprove, 19 percent don't know). A good number of Democratic politicians in the state might fall firmly in the disapprove camp.
Dismal polling numbers aside, it would just be rude for Biden not to include Adams, the (more or less) Democratic mayor of the greatest city in the world if you don't count New Orleans.
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Joe Biden's Wild Idea To Save Medicare: Tax The Rich Instead Of Cutting Benefits
Is he allowed to say that?
President Joe Biden today presented his plan to keep the Medicare progam solvent for at least 25 years, by raising Medicare taxes on those making more than $400,000 annually and by negotiating lower prices for a wider range of prescription drugs. That's a sharp contrast to Republicans, who have been insisting that the best way to save Medicare is to cut its funding and raise the eligibility age, because old people are living it up too much.
Medicare's trust fund is currently on track to start running low in 2028, as more benefits are paid out than revenue comes in. Yes, that's us damn Baby Boomers aging. As the Washington Post (gift link) explains,
Roughly 60 million seniors depend on Medicare for their health insurance. Because the program is spending money at a much faster clip than it brings in funding, it faces automatic federal cuts starting in 2028, raising the nightmare scenario of medical providers refusing care to senior citizens if Congress and the White House don’t address the looming shortfall first.
Biden will include the Medicare funding proposal in his fiscal 2024 budget plan, due out later this week, but he previewed it today in a New York Times op-ed and in a White House fact sheet.
In the Times, Biden was glad to take credit for one of the "two biggest health reform bills since the creation of Medicare," which were put in place by Barack Obama and by himself: Obama's Affordable Care Act, and Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which not only capped insulin costs for seniors at $35 a month, but included substantial improvements to Medicare coverage as well.
The Affordable Care Act embraced smart reforms to make our health care system more efficient while improving Medicare coverage for seniors. The Inflation Reduction Act ended the absurd ban on Medicare negotiating lower drug prices, required drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare if they increase prices faster than inflation and capped seniors’ total prescription drug costs — saving seniors up to thousands of dollars a year. These negotiations, combined with the law’s rebates for excessive price hikes, will reduce the deficit by $159 billion.
We have seen a significant slowdown in the growth of health care spending since the Affordable Care Act was passed. In the decade after the A.C.A., Medicare actually spent about $1 trillion less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected before the A.C.A. reforms were in place. In 2009, before the A.C.A., the Medicare trustees projected that Medicare’s trust fund would be exhausted in 2017; their latest projection is 2028. But we should do better than that and extend Medicare’s solvency beyond 2050.
Democrats probably need to make a lot more noise about how Obamacare actually extended the solvency of the Medicare trust fund by 11 years, don't you think? Hell, I write here about healthcare policy and I didn't know that.
The major parts of Biden's plan to extend the trust fund's solvency well into the middle of this century involve an incremental tax increase on the wealthiest Americans, coupled with giving the government the ability to negotiate more prescription drug prices sooner than the timeline already in the IRA.
On the taxation side, Biden's proposal would increase the existing Medicare tax rate on "earned and unearned" income — i.e., capital gains and investment income – over $400,000 from its current 3.8 percent to 5 percent. As the fact sheet notes, yeah, damn right this is about evening out just a little bit the huge advantages the investor class has legislated for itself since the Reagan years:
Since Medicare was passed, income and wealth inequality in the United States have increased dramatically. By asking those with the highest incomes to contribute modestly more, we can keep the Medicare program strong for decades to come.
Another provision would involve closing loopholes in the Medicaid tax, to make sure very wealthy folks can't avoid it via accounting games:
High-income people are supposed to pay a 3.8 percent Medicare tax on all of their income, but some high-paid professionals and other wealthy business owners have managed to shield some of their income from tax by claiming it is neither earned income nor investment income.
As the Post explains, this would expand the Medicare tax to apply to
more kinds of income from pass-through firms — businesses in which the owners pay taxes on their personal income taxes. Currently, these kinds of business owners do not pay this tax.
Again, that would be for pass-through income over $400,000, not to small businesses like, say, this little mommyblog. Hey, if this passed and you people want to help keep Medicare solvent, we won't mind if you donate a lot more so we're subject to that provision!
The other side of the proposal would simply speed up the schedule under which Medicare would be allowed to negotiate prices on the costliest prescription drugs, by allowing the program to "negotiate prices for more drugs and bringing drugs into negotiation sooner after they launch." Savings from these negotiations would go into the Medicare trust fund.
In addition, the Biden plan would provide additional savings to Medicare beneficiaries. They'd see lower co-pays for the drugs whose prices get negotiated, plus a $2 copay cap for certain generic drugs for chronic conditions, and elimination of cost-sharing for up to three mental or behavioral health visits per year.
The trick, of course, would be getting any of this passed in a Congress where Republicans control the House, or for that matter getting the 60 votes in the Senate needed to get past the filibuster. That makes the proposal more of a marker for the 2024 elections — and a counter to Republican demands to slash Medicare and Social Security in exchange for not crashing the economy over the debt ceiling, that time bomb that's still ticking out there in the inky shadows.
And then there's fixing the funding for Social Security, whose trust fund is in less immediate trouble than Medicare's — it's fully funded through 2033 — but hey, one fight at a time. Expand payroll taxes on high incomes, tax the fuck out of stock buybacks, and maybe tax Elon Musk every time he tweets something stupid.
[WaPo (gift link) / White House / NYT]
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Joe Biden Marches For Truth In Selma
Biden makes his first visit as president to Selma for 'Bloody Sunday.'
President Joe Biden shared some difficult truths with the crowd assembled yesterday to commemorate the 58th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," when Selma, Alabama, police officers brutally beat Black civil rights marchers. He somberly observed that voting rights are still under attack. President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act days after "Bloody Sunday," but the conservative Supreme Court has actively undermined the law.
"Selma is a reckoning. The right to vote ... to have your vote counted is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it anything’s possible," Biden said. "Without it, without that right, nothing is possible. And this fundamental right remains under assault. The conservative Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act over the years. Since the 2020 election, a wave of states and dozens and dozens of anti-voting laws fueled by the ‘Big Lie’ and the election deniers now elected to office."
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Voting rights activists understand what's at stake and while most appreciate that Biden is keeping the issue in the spotlight, they also would like to see actual progress made. Biden said, "We know we must get the votes in Congress," but there's no longer any viable path now that Republicans control the House and would probably actively remove Black people's voting rights if they could. There was an opportunity during the past two years to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after the late congressman from Georgia and civil rights legend, as well as the For the People Act. The John Lewis bill would've strengthened the Voting Right Act, and the For the People Act would've restricted partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts (arguably, how Republicans "won" their piddly ass majority), removed existed hurdles to voting, and addressed a corrupt campaign finance system.
Sen. Joe Manchin opposed the For the People Act, claiming "that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy." That's of course gibberish. Republicans are the ones attacking voting rights and democracy itself, so any realistic response would be "partisan." It's not a shock that Republicans didn't support "Stop Republicans From Cheating" bills.
Manchin and literally one other Republican announced a "bipartisan compromise" on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but neither Manchin nor Sen. Kyrsten Sinema from the Sinema Party would bend on the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass anything.
Biden again stressed, "I made it clear I will not let a filibuster obstruct the sacred right to vote.” Good to know he's on the right side, even if Manchin and Sinema (and the senators they likely provided cover for) failed to act when it mattered.
The activists who crossed the bridge that's still named after Confederate general and Klan leader Edmund Pettus "forced the country to confront hard truths,” Biden said, “and to act to keep the promise of America alive.” He added, “On this bridge, blood was given to help redeem the soul of America."
Biden didn't ignore the loud voices from the Right who insist that America's soul is spotless and needs no "woke" redemption. He called out the efforts to whitewash history.
“History matters," he said. "The truth matters, notwithstanding what the other team is trying to hide. No matter how hard some people try, we can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know.We can’t just choose what we want to know and what we should know. We should learn everything. The good, the bad, the truth, who we are as a nation. Everyone should know the truth of Selma.”
When Biden spoke, marchers shouted “We love Joe” and “Bring it home." Black voters will prove key to Biden's re-election, and while there's frustration over lack of movement on voting rights, there is collective appreciation for the administration's other achievements. Tornadoes devastated Selma early this year, and yesterday, Mayor James Perkins declared that “we will build back better." He also thanked Biden for his disaster declaration that helped the city with debris cleanup and removal.
But true friends can maintain their affection while also keeping it real. The Rev. William Barber II, a co-chair of Poor People’s Campaign, and six other activists wrote Biden and members of Congress to demand an "action-rooted commemoration of Bloody Sunday."
If the President or other politicians are going to come to Selma, they should come on Bloody Sunday, when John Lewis and others were beaten and almost killed, to declare that the fight for voting rights and the restoration of what they marched across that bridge for is not over.
How true.
You can watch the president's remarks at Selma here:
[Associated Press / New York Times / Washington Post]
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