Budget reconciliation

Wednesday

Matt McDonald

Progressive scare tactics won’t work on Joe Manchin

Are progressives serious about winning over Joe Manchin? If so, they’ve got a funny way of showing it. The Democratic senator from West Virginia is one of the main obstacles preventing Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act from passing through budget reconciliation. Manchin has a problem with the bill’s $3.5 trillion price-tag and is pushing for a smaller total, citing disdain for needless government wastage. He took a similar approach earlier this year to the Biden infrastructure package, negotiating a bipartisan deal with his moderate Republican colleagues. That’s Joe Manchin: your archetypal politicker who believes legislation is best passed through compromise. American progressives, however, are singing from an entirely different song sheet.

manchin

Tuesday

John Steele Gordon

Who’s targeted by the $600 IRS reporting requirement?

Tucked away in the reconciliation bill now bogged down in Congress is a requirement that banks report the annual deposits and withdrawals from every bank account that has activity of more than $600 a year. It would not list individual transactions, just the total money flow in and out. Ostensibly, this is to catch rich people who have been under reporting income. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen gave as an example: “High-income individuals with opaque sources of income that are not reported to the IRS, there's a lot of tax fraud and cheating that's going on.” Wages, salaries and fees are already reported to the IRS through W-2 forms. So is investment income. That sort of income is what a large majority of American families depend on.

irs

Friday

Rupert Darwall

Biden walks naked into a climate conference

Nye Bevan, the British socialist, famously denounced the nuclear unilateralists in his party for sending a future foreign secretary 'naked into the conference chamber’. Unless Congress passes the stalled budget reconciliation bill, President Biden will fly to the COP26 Glasgow climate conference, which starts in less than three weeks’ time, in a similar state of undress. Before the Paris agreement in 2015, UN climate change conferences were about hammering out the texts of binding climate treaties and agreeing to emissions reduction targets. All that has changed. Climate change targets are now decided in advance by individual countries in their Nationally Determined Contributions, draining climate conferences of drama and turning them into a giant show-and-tell.

climate

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

Kyrsten Sinema’s harassers shouldn’t get a pass from Biden

Ever wonder why President Biden doesn’t take questions very often? Or more accurately, why his staff doesn’t allow him to take questions? The easy lay-up handed to him about an altercation between an activist organization and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema offers a perfect example. Biden was asked whether he believes it was appropriate for immigration activists to follow Sinema into a women’s restroom and film her. The President, who could have resoundingly condemned the behavior using the podium of the presidency of the United States, chose not to. In fact, he passively endorsed the activists’ conduct by saying that ‘it happens to everybody’ and that ‘the only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service around them.

kyrsten sinema