These three under-discussed, intra-Democratic divides threaten to derail the Biden presidency
Time for truth and reconciliation. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photos: Getty Images A president’s legacy is rarely defined by any single legislative defeat. Barack Obama failed to shepherd climate legislation through Congress, but that did not stop him from passing a landmark health-care law. Donald Trump couldn’t repeal Obamacare, but he still secured a historically large corporate tax cut.
The biggest division among congressional Democrats lies, of course, between progressives and moderates. The former view the reconciliation bill’s $3.5 trillion price tag as a compromise; many of the latter see it as exorbitant. Over the weekend, Joe Manchin vowed to vote against a $3.5 trillion bill, citing concerns about the impact of such spending on the deficit — or, if financed by tax increases, the competitiveness of America’s corporate sector.
On Monday, the Ways and Means Committee unveiled a draft proposal for empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices with insurers. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll taken in June found that 88 percent of voters approve of that policy; among Republican voters, support stood at 77 percent. A similar dynamic has surfaced on the issue of long-term care for the elderly. Biden has proposed investing $400 billion into such care, so as to both boost the wages of home health aides and clear the Medicaid waiting list for at-home care. In August, the progressive firm Data for Progress polled a long list of provisions in the reconciliation bill. None attracted more support than long-term care for the elderly.
Bernie Sanders versus Nancy Pelosi. For the most part, the Democratic Party’s leadership and its left flank have been working hand in glove on the reconciliation bill. But there is one notable conflict. And it’s one that doesn’t map that well onto traditional ideological battle lines. After all, Sanders supports beefing up ACA subsidies, and Pelosi backs expanding Medicare beneficiaries’ benefits. The issue is just one of priorities. And the Vermont senator’s priority is to enhance the health-insurance benefits that a disproportionately middle-class constituency currently enjoys, while Pelosi’s is to extend publicly subsidized health insurance to Americans who presently lack any decent coverage option .
To help offset the cost of their corporate tax cut in 2017, Republicans put a $10,000 cap on the amount of state and local taxes that Americans can deduct from their federal tax bills. The cost of this change fell overwhelmingly on high-income individuals in blue states, which tend to have higher property and income taxes than Republican ones.
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