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Jonathan Chait dives into the Republican opposition to the bill:
Republican Senators say they would love to pass a big infrastructure bill. They are publicly begging Joe Biden to stop his partisan strategy and sit down with them to negotiate a bill both parties can support. The trouble is that their demands for how to produce this bipartisan agreement go around in circles.
But there’s a catch: They don’t like paying for it by raising taxes on wealthy people — or, as Republicans delicately call them, “job creators.” Everybody knows that Republicans would rather let every last road in the land crumble to dust and revert to traveling by horseback and mule before they raised taxes on job creators by a penny. “The worst way to pay for it is to tax job creators,” says Wicker.
No surprise that Republicans who begged for a “bipartisan” infrastructure bill are now so vocally against it and insist it look like a typical Republican giveaway to corporations.
As Stephen Collinson at CNN notes, this bill can transform America, especially since the Biden administration is taking a realistic and forward-looking approach to what infrastructure really means in the modern economy:
In one example, the President has stretched the definition of infrastructure to insert $400 billion in the bill to revolutionize home health care for the elderly and disabled. In another he’s also seeking billions to supercharge America’s development of electric vehicles to fulfill another political priority — the elimination of fossil fuels in the fight against climate change. And, after a year in which millions of workers relied on home internet connections to work remotely, the plan also includes $100 billion to build a high-speed broadband infrastructure that would reach the whole country.
And President Biden’s response:
“It’s kind of interesting that when the Republicans put forward an infrastructure plan, they thought everything from broadband to dealing to other things was … infrastructure. Now they’re saying that only a small portion of what I’m talking about is infrastructure,” Biden said. “So it’s interesting how their definition has changed but they know we need it.”
It’s not just broadband Republicans are objecting to. Even funding for pipes doesn’t fall within their ridiculously narrow and wrong definition of “infrastructure.”
On a final note, James Downie at The Washington Post gets to the root of the Republican opposition:
So how would Republicans pay for upgrades that they agree are needed? Well, there they sound pretty much stumped. “I’m open to suggestions about that,” said Wicker. “One way you pay for it is by seeing significant improved economic growth,” suggested Reeves — which, as CNN host Jake Tapper pointed out, “doesn’t really answer the question.” […]
Remember, whenever the Trump administration launched one of its many ill-fated “infrastructure weeks,” Republicans rarely balked at the price tags — not because those proposals were always funded but because they didn’t make the wealthy and big business pay more of their fair share. So if Biden does sit down with Republicans to talk about paying for an infrastructure package, everyone in the room should be clear on one thing: Republicans don’t really care if this bill — or any other Democratic bill — is paid for. They just don’t want their friends covering the cost. The good news for Democrats is that view is a loser with voters.
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