GQP Infrastructure Counterproposal Is Not A Serious Offer, Excludes Human Infrastructure

I told ya so! Republicans Are On The Wrong Side Of The American People On Raising Corporate Taxes (excerpt):

Just as they did with the COVID-19 Relief bill, Republicans are crafting a ridiculously small counterproposal which will be woefully inadequate in size and scope to address the actual need, and will insure that “someone else” besides their corporate masters pays for it. In other words, an unserious proposal that will be dead on arrival. And then they will piss and moan that Democrats are not being “bipartisan” when they reject the GQP’s ridiculous offer. The lazy media villagers will be stenographers parroting right-wing talking points about “bipartisanship” rather than explaining how the GQP counter-proposal is an unserious proposal.

We were told that Republicans were preparing a counteroffer to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal in the range of $600 to $800 billion. Ha! Not even close.

NBC News reports on the GQP’s lowball plan, Republicans unveil $568 billion counterproposal to Biden’s infrastructure plan:

Republicans on Thursday unveiled a $568 billion counterproposal to President Joe Biden’s sprawling $2.25 trillion infrastructure package.

The package details what Republicans believe should be counted as infrastructure, while Biden’s proposal includes funds to invest in care for children and the elderly as well as money to promote the production and purchase of electric vehicles. The package is roughly a quarter of the size of Biden’s plan, it calls for nearly double the amount of money to be spent on roads and bridges.

In total, the package calls for $299 billion for roads and bridges, $65 billion for broadband infrastructure, $61 billion for public transit systems, $35 billion for drinking water and wastewater, $44 billion for airports, $20 billion for rail systems, $17 billion for ports and inland waterways, $14 billion for water storage and $13 billion for safety purposes.

Wait for it – you know what is coming next:

The proposal also calls for the tax cuts passed under former President Donald Trump to be kept intact and to repurpose unspent federal funding passed as part of Covid-19 relief packages for infrastructure spending.

And there it is. Republicans are so damn predictable.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., called the infrastructure proposal “the most robust plan that we ever put forward as Republicans.”

That may be true, but just as I said, it is “a ridiculously small counterproposal which will be woefully inadequate in size and scope to address the actual need, and will insure that ‘someone else’ besides their corporate masters pays for it. In other words, an unserious proposal that will be dead on arrival.”

Now the media villagers will begin to play their ridiculous “bipartisanship” reporting game again. Republicans “will piss and moan that Democrats are not being “bipartisan” when they reject the GQP’s ridiculous offer. The lazy media villagers will be stenographers parroting right-wing talking points about “bipartisanship” rather than explaining how the GQP counter-proposal is an unserious proposal.”

Republicans do not value human infrastructure in our economy. Workers are expendable and can easily be replaced by machines.

And care givers? Who cares? Republicans feign that they are for “family values.” Since most care givers are women, this is a sexist dismissal of what is critically important to over half of the population. “Nearly 3 million American women have left the labor force over the past year in a coronavirus-induced exodus that reflects persistent pay inequality, undervalued work and antiquated notions of caregiving.” Nearly 3 million U.S. women have dropped out of the labor force in the past year.

The Biden infrastructure plan is being watched as a make-or-break moment for recognition of the role of caregivers as core infrastructure in the nation’s post-Covid rebuilding. As Biden pushes split infrastructure plan, working women see a make-or-break moment:

After seeing decades of gains made by women in the labor market erased by Covid-19, Rep. Katie Porter and others say it is time for President Biden to follow through on his campaign promise to offer permanent federal help on issues of critical importance to working women, from paid parental leave, to more expansive federal child-care support, and permanent child tax credits.

But it is not clear whether the opportunity will be achieved. The Biden administration’s recent decision to focus on traditional projects in a first infrastructure plan and push back the caregiving infrastructure policy to a separate proposal at a later date, is an issue more Americans will need to speak up about, and it is not solely an issue for women, according to Rep. Katie Porter[.]

“We’ve seen President Biden adopt that language of “Build back better,” not just with regard to physical infrastructure, roads or bridges, but also with regard to our care economy. But we’ve seen … President Biden he’s going to roll out the build roads and bridges, a traditional infrastructure… He said that the infrastructure relating to the care economy is going to be postponed until later, April or May.”

“I think we’re at a real inflection point where we need to be pushing our president to deliver on the promise he made, which is that the care economy, an investment in the care economy is an investment in our nation’s infrastructure because it’s an investment in our nation’s workforce,” Porter said. “Childcare is just as essential to people being able to do their job as a road or a bridge to get them there.” She added, “The people who do the important work of giving care, whether to seniors in nursing homes or child-care providers, these are infrastructure workers every bit as much as construction workers.”

The pandemic and the female labor force

The potential for once-in-a-generation change comes against the risk that the temporary imbalances in the workforce caused by Covid-19 turn into long-term setbacks. Without the right policy efforts, women may not recover to represent 50% of the workforce as they did before the crisis.

The representation of women in the U.S. labor force has retracted to a level not seen since 1988.

“We’ve gone backwards, almost a generation and a half, almost two generations in terms of female workforce participation,” Porter said.

Experts say the pandemic also is a unique opportunity.

[T]he road to career recovery is, by the nature of the labor market, going to be more difficult for women. Long-term wage gap pressures had been narrowing, but with millions of women out of the workforce for longer periods of time, it decreases their leverage in seeking fair wages when they attempt to return. The enforcement of laws over gender-based wage discrimination in the workplace has been weak, according to Brookings’ Bateman. Women attempting to return to work also often face questions about child care and the number of children they have — questions Porter noted are illegal to ask.

“We’ve seen in research before, when things are going great it is the men who get to make the decisions. When time are tough, when people do not have enough, it’s women who are told you have to find a way to make it work,” Porter said. “Part of reaction to the pandemic is women being asked to shoulder the burden of figuring out what to do in the middle of a crisis and in too many cases that is leaving the workforce.”

This is family values. White House closes in on ‘families plan’ spending proposal centered on child care, pre-K, paid leave

White House officials are closing in on a large spending plan centered on child care, paid family leave and other domestic priorities, according to two people aware of internal discussions. The package could amount to at least $1 trillion of new spending and tax credits, though details remain fluid.

The American Families Plan, the second part of the administration’s Build Back Better agenda, is expected to be unveiled ahead of President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress on April 28, the people said. It follows the approximately $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan that the White House introduced this month and that is just beginning to be debated by Congress.

While details remained in flux, the White House’s newest plan is expected to call for roughly $1 trillion in new spending and approximately $500 billion in new tax credits, according to the people aware of the internal discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Aides cautioned that the final details of the plan remained unsettled and were subject to change.

The measure is expected to be largely if not fully paid for with new tax increases centered on upper-income Americans and wealthy investors, the people said. The details of those tax measures remained unclear.

“President Biden has already put forward the first part of his historic plan to invest in the strength of America’s economy and families, and he’ll be outlining the second element of that proposal in the coming days,” Michael J. Gwin, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. “The details of that package are still being finalized, so speculation as to its final contents is premature at this point.”

The plan is expected to devote hundreds of billions of dollars to new programs that Biden highlighted during the presidential campaign and that are highly sought by Democrats in Congress. While final numbers had not been determined, the largest efforts are expected to center on roughly $225 billion for child-care funding; $225 billion for paid family and medical leave; $200 billion for universal prekindergarten instruction; hundreds of billions in education funding, including tuition-free community colleges across the country; and other sums for nutritional assistance, the people familiar with the matter said.

The tax-credits section includes an extension of the expanded child tax credit through 2025, the people said. The White House is set to reject pressure from a number of Democratic lawmakers — including Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Michael F. Bennet (Colo.), as well as Reps. Suzan DelBene (Wash.) and Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.) — to make the enhanced child benefit permanent. The expanded child tax credit, which offers families $3,600 per young child and $3,000 per older child, was first approved in the $1.9 trillion relief plan and is set to expire at the end of this year.

Brown, Bennet, and DeLauro said in a statement late Monday: “Congress has an historic opportunity to provide a lifeline to the middle class and to cut child poverty in half on a permanent basis. … Permanent expansion of CTC will continue to be our priority.”

Biden’s infrastructure and jobs plan would be funded by more than $2 trillion in tax increases on corporations. By contrast, as The Washington Post previously reported, the tax increases in the families plan are expected to include higher rates on wealthy Americans and investors, in addition to beefing up enforcement at the Internal Revenue Service. IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig recently told Congress that the United States is losing roughly $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year in large part because of tax evasion, particularly among the wealthy and corporations.

Taken with the jobs plan, Biden’s spending plans would amount to one of the most significant government transformations of the economy in decades. White House officials and congressional Democrats have not determined whether they will seek to move the jobs and infrastructure first or package it with the other proposal plan and try to pass both at the same time.

Republican opposition to the White House’s newest plan will probably be steeper than the opposition so far to the infrastructure proposal. The GOP is likely guaranteed to oppose the tax increases and the spending provisions in the newest proposal.

Because all that matters to the GQP is protecting plutocrats and their corporate masters from having to pay taxes. Republican greed is the reason why we cannot have nice things. One deplorable motive drives most of the Republican Party’s behavior: “At the end of the day, all Republicans care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force.” “As long as the money keeps rolling in and their billonnaire patron’s taxes remain absurdly low, that’s all Republicans care about and are willing to fight for.”