Following a party-line vote that terminated the Biden Administration’s budget proposal at the beginning of October, the Federal Government is trying to avoid a future shutdown, once again. Even though the U.S. government shutdown was delayed from October to the first day of December, it remains possible. After three weeks of redrafting, the Biden Administration has come back to congress with a new budget reconciliation bill. According to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party plans to have a united agreement on the bill by the first week of November. Assuming the Democratic Party reaches a unanimous agreement in the House and Senate, swaying the vote of Conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, among others, the bill should narrowly pass.
The aforementioned budget package is the primary focus of President Biden’s agenda, at least on the domestic front. For some time, there were fears amongst the president’s supporters that this bill would not pass, eliminating many of the sweeping reforms and additions to federal spending necessary to his goals. Despite the changes made to accommodate dissenters within the Democratic Party, the spending bill still includes reforms in education, childcare, healthcare, climate change, infrastructure, and taxation.
The bill establishes free Pre-K and limits child care spending to a maximum of 7% of a family’s income for lower and middle-income households. It also guarantees a month of paid family leave for those earning under $100,000 per year and sets up a multi-billion dollar federal child nutrition program. President Biden has also called for the bill to include many additions to both Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Among these additions are the inclusion of vision and dental care, an extension in who receives benefits from the ACA, and investment in new environmental and racial justice initiatives in health care. To fund some of these new incentives, the bill also calls for an increase in the capital gains tax rate to 25 percent, increases the top income tax bracket to 39 percent, and the corporate tax rate to 28 percent.
Despite the extensive elements of the bill, it’s merely a shell of Biden’s original proposal. The original bill fell victim to partisan politics, though the modifications make it a far more universally acceptable proposal, one that will struggle to have widespread backlash as we move into the midterm elections in 2022. The Democratic process works slowly and is, at times, ineffective. But, in the case of this budget reconciliation bill, Democracy seems to have done its job, resulting in a more balanced proposal that is likely to pass in the coming weeks.
