The President has signed into law a $1.2 trillion physical infrastructure plan that is widely supported by the public. Yesterday the House passed its version of the $1.8 trillion Build Back Better human infrastructure bill. The fate and ultimate cost of that legislation will be determined in the Senate. Both pieces of legislation are victims of a long and tortured legislative pregnancy, that now overshadows their initial popularity. In addition, while these proposals started out as the focus of the nation’s political attention, more immediate issues have risen to the top of the publics concerns, and its unclear how these pieces of legislation will ease current economic pressures.
Give these political realities, these central pieces of the Democratic Agenda have to re-connect with the perceived needs of the voting public. This is both a communication and actual program--delivery task. Both need to take hold before the 2022 mid-term elections. The Democrats internal dysfunction gives Republicans a lot of running room, using the fractious internal Democratic arguments as proof of the deficiencies of these policies. Democrats also have to walk and chew gum at the same time. They have to address concerns about inflation, deal with the various gerrymandering and voter suppression actions taking place in the States and combat the overall political extremism that has blocked progress on every front.
In fact, these pieces of legislation are sorely needed and are, even given their seemingly large costs, a mere down payment on the collective needs of our nation. They are longer term solutions in a political world where “what did you do for me yesterday” decides a critical group of swing voters’ minds. The task is to convince us all that these investments are something that is being done for us yesterday, today and tomorrow. It’s the difference between telling your mechanic to just get your car back on the road, or fixing it so it’ll go another 100,000 miles.
Another difficulty is that these polices intertwine with each other to create a fabric of policies that support each other. We can’t “buy American” if we don’t rebuild our productive capacity. We can’t put Americans into these new jobs unless we have the training programs that give people the necessary skills. The new jobs will be low-paid and undesirable unless we strengthen workers rights to organize and insist on a fair share of their productivity. At a basic human level, we won’t solve our worker shortage unless we build a basic support structure for impoverished Americans to access the education and training to do the work. As a nation, we’ve had historic periods of change and adjustment, like the Great Depression, where we’ve had to step in and do these kinds of things. It’s just not been in this generations experience, so we have to get comfortable again with doing this.
It seems like we’ve gotten lost in the weeds as the debates drag on. The news focuses on the day to day inside baseball, while the average person wants to see signs of progress. It would be a real setback for necessary policy to fail, because of poor strategy and fractious politics.
We will now see the effort to explain and gather support for the physical infrastructure bill and soon some version of Build Back Better. How effective the Administration is, in addressing these shorter-term concerns, will be critical to opening people up to the longer term good it is trying to accomplish. In the end, the real question is are we cop out and tell our political mechanics to do a valve job or suck it up and have them install in a more powerful engine. Our votes will decide.
Ihg 11-20-2021
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