What Has Joe Biden Done?
President Joe Biden takes a photo with Union Workers, Monday, November 15, 2021, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
We are not quite a year into the Biden Presidency, and already pundits, politicians, and OT commentators are trying to hang unliftable millstones around Joe Biden’s neck. As I have previously noted, a big chunk of that is probably Democrats … inconsistent at best … messaging on their agenda (an area that Republicans have had locked down as a superpower for 40+ years).
Since we find ourselves also in the season of lists (Here’s a great one) I thought I might compile a list of the Good, the Bad, and the Useful of things that have and have not been accomplished by the Biden Administration in these first 10 months. I’ll grant that this isn’t an exhaustive list – his groundbreaking political appointments of women, people of color and Native Americans could be their own post for instance – but of the big picture stuff I think it’s a good summary.
There’s the things his Administration has actually accomplished:
- Passage of his $1.9 trillion coronavirus and economic relief bill (which seems to have actively lowered child poverty),
- Rejoining of the Paris climate accord
- Rejoined the UN Human Rights Council.
- Ended the war in Afghanistan (A Trump Campaign Promise Fulfilled!).
- Restored funding to veterans’ mental health programs, which were cut by Trump.
- Canceled some student loan debts.
- Passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package (Another Trump Campaign Promise Fulfilled!).
- Sustained border apprehension rates begun under Trump, resulting in 1.7 million apprehension in Fiscal 2021.
- Got 197 million Americans fully COVID vaccinated
- Dispensed 41 million booster shots
- Released 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to address gas price inflation
- Followed a court’s order to reopen oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico
There are things that have benefitted Americans, but Biden may not actually control:
- Unemployment continued its “Reopening” downward trend from the Trump Administration’s waning days, decreasing from 6.3% in January to 4.6% in October.
- The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.6 % in October and has remained within
a narrow range of 61.4 % to 61.7 % since June 2020. The participation rate is 1.7 percentage
points lower than in February 2020. - Moderate wage growth
There are things he hasn’t delivered on:
- Ending Covid
- Lowering murder rates
- Building Back Better
- Taxing the Rich
- Protecting voting rights
- Lower Gas prices – though they do seem to finally be trending down.
- Controlling Inflation (which really may be a perception vs. reality sort of thing).
All of this against a backdrop that has seen his approval ratings slide from 57% to 42%. Of course, Donald Trump’s approval rating at the same time in 2017 was a mere 37% so clearly more people approve of Joe Biden the did Trump at the same point in his presidency. Mr. Biden is doing better than the other branches of the federal government however, as overall approval of both Congress (21% ) and the Supreme Court (40%) is also lower than his (though he and SCOTUS are about to enter a no bueno horse race it appears).
What did Donald Trump accomplish in the same time frame?
- Passage of the $1.7 Trillion Tax cut,
- Confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to SCOTUS
- Instituted a travel ban on entry from certain majority Muslim countries
- Declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel
- Withdrew from the Paris Climate accord and the Transpacific Partnership
- Began repealing Net Neutrality
- Rolled back Obama Administration Cuba regulatory changes
- Approved the Keystone XL pipeline
- Presided over the arrest of slightly over 100,000 people at the US border
- Signed 3 VA reform laws into effect.
Who was more successful? Who less? Well, I suspect my readers know my answer to that, but I’ll leave you to be your own now better-informed judges.
Happy Holidays!
Considering the repeated difference between polling and Trump’s election results, we need to assume his 37% was higher, maybe even +5%.Report
HIs first election results – maybe, though that 37% approval was a year in to his presidency, and he never started out strong. He was at 45% when he took office, and his 4 year average was 41%. Lets also not forget that while he won the Electoral College, he didn’t win the popular vote the first time; the EC vote flipped the second time, and his popular vote loss the second time was slightly over twice the size of the first election. So no, I don’t think there was any real or meaningful difference.Report
Not just the first election, the second election was also not the total blow out the polling suggested. Ergo the polling wasn’t correct, and likely was NEVER correct.
That suggests Trump was more popular (or rather, less unpopular) than reported. That’s ugly but whatever.Report
“Approval” may be one thing, votes at the ballot box something else. You might vote for someone you disapprove of or are neutral about because “He’s the guy from my party” or “The other guy looks even worse.” You might approve of someone but not vote for them for similar reasons.Report
Yes, that exactly.
Thing is with most Presidents we translate “approval” into “we approve of the job he’s doing and will vote for him”. With Trump “disapproval” can sometimes mean “I disapprove of what he says and of him banging porn stars but will vote for him anyway”.
Trump was a different person than President Trump.
Joe Biden isn’t a person, there’s only President-Biden.Report
Contemporary American politics can’t be understood any more by using conventional metrics.
By conventional metrics- job growth, wage growth, inflation, crime, war- America is doing great and the incumbent should coast to an easy victory.
But the opposition party has become a radicalized revolutionary faction, where their main objection isn’t what the incumbent party is doing. Their main objection is that the incumbent party exists.
Even in places where they hold unrivaled power, places like Texas, Alabama Florida- the opposition party is united in their rage and fury. The speeches by the leader of their party are not calm promises of peace and prosperity, but dark and brooding lists of grievances.
American politics today is the politics of Northern Ireland or the Balkans.Report
I’m not trying to use this as a way to understand contemporary American politics – I’m pushing back on the media, pundit and OT commenter narratives that he’s done nothing. Like so much else, its a lie, and I don’t believe in coddling the lies or the liars.Report
I get that, and agree with the point.
I’m thinking more along the lines of how no matter what Biden does, about 40% of the voters will hate his existence.Report
They may, though I remain of the belief that Democrats steadily improving economic conditions – especially for rural and semi-rural whites – will alleviate some of that. Republicans have been successful in using fear and economic scarcity (and a healthy dose of scapegoating) to motivate people to support them. Take away the economic component and I suspect that number will shrink because a good many of those folks want to be heard and seen and their issues acted on. If Democrats are acting on their economic fears and Republicans are not that’s not nothing.Report
This assumes a more rational electorate than the one that exists. In reality, modern American electoral politics seems incredibly tribal more than anything else. Any movement seems to be based around educational polorization with the less educated going to the Republicans. There used to be a racial component towards this but now there isn’t.Report
That is a nice bout of optimism but the facts do not seem to hold it up.Report
The loud screaming White Americans of whom Chip speaks are operating form fear – fear of loosing social status, fear of loosing economic status, and fear of being treated systematically (if not individually) the way the system treats minorities. They have bathed in that fear – stoked by their elected representatives every day – for 40 years. Those are the facts.
But take away one of those fears and what will they do? A sizable majority seem most concerned about earnings, savings and other “kitchen table” economic issues. If we do in fact ameliorate those issues – and Biden is moving the economy in that direction – there is a sizable chunk of that 40% who will no longer offer opposition. Sure, they may never come out and cheer that leftists and liberals were right, but they will be subject to way less fearmongering. If your wages are going up consistently, your benefits are stable, and your kids are doing as well or better then you did, you aren’t going to be willing to scream about Jose stealing your job.Report
But as Erik Loomis will frequently point and I believe correctly, a lot of their perception of status comes from being white and that being white is superior to nearly everything else. LBJ has a famous quote about this.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
One of the conclusions I have come to over the past few years is that a lot of political analysis, especially left-wing analysis with a socialist bent has a really time grappling with psychic wages. A lot of people just do not want them to be true especially if it comes to racial/social issues. The fear is probably because admitting those things are very real and important to people might as well lead to the question of “now what do we do?”
I get and understand that a lot of people are still flummoxed by the unraveling of the New Deal coalition. But the coalition is over and is probably not coming back. We need to learn to deal with with the fact that a lot of people might see the supremacy of white, nominally Christian, heterosexuals (or heterosexual males) as being in their interests and they will vote accordingly.
How did they lose status? Is it merely deindustrialization? Or did a vague “those people” “cut the line?”Report
Down here it started with the first oil crash in the 1980’s, followed by zero investment in economic development or industry. There wasn’t a lot of line to be cut. And while they do indeed see white conservative allegedly Christian males as good and right and wholesome, that never really mattered until they were loosing salary, loosing pensions and watched their kids leave the state to get what looked like decent jobs that also died in the Dot Com crash and the Great Recession.
I don’t expect the pople who voted for David Duke as Louisiana’s governor becasue of his KK roots to change; I do think there’s still a small, and fast closing window to recapture the ones who voted for him because he promised to revive the oil patch.Report
And I think the evidence suggests otherwise. I wish you were right but I am not seeing it.Report
Electoral evidence shows that the switch to Republican voting started in the more suburban and modern areas of the South and spread out to the more rural areas over several decades. Bubba did stay loyal to down dicket Democratic politicians.Report
“The speeches by the leader of their party are not calm promises of peace and prosperity, but dark and brooding lists of grievances.”
Evergreen tweet, as the kids say.
“American politics today is the politics of Northern Ireland or the Balkans.”
Wow. That’s…different? We need more ski mask murals, to say the least. Very behind on that front.
Also who’s the prods in this context? I want to make sure I’m on the correct side. I can supply my own ski mask, so no worries there.Report
Actually the comparison to Northern Ireland and the Balkans was wrong and I retract it.
In those situations there was a plausible case for oppression on both sides.
Our current state is more like America in the 1920s and 30s.Report
It is a bit of hyperbole, partially because we live so far apart from each other but I don’t think it is hard to deny that polarization exists, is getting worse, and currently the right-wing is much more angry and furious about it. There is a large backlash brewing and has been brewing about even the vaguest left social politics for many years now. The right-wing does often seem to hate the existence of places that do not follow their codes and modes and the pretenses of federalism are falling away to “national conservatism” because federalism allows NYC and SF and LA and Portland and blue states to exist and thrive. Ahmari can easily move from NYC to a red-state where drag queen story hour is not a thing but he wants to live in NYC with all its conveniences and not have to deal with liberals.
People under 43 seem to have generally liberal politics but the ones who don’t are very militant in their politics and in ways that are much more intense and potentially violent or actually violent in ways that are different than the conservatives I knew in college. You can sense the seething rage quite clearly.
COVID and vaccination should not be political and yet they are and continue to be so.Report
we live in an age and mode that demands hyperbole, because how else do you get people to listen to you? it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened in the history of humanity. it’s why everything the “other” is doing is always a huge “ism” – of socialism, totalitarianism, terrorism, indoctrination, white supremacy, etc etc and so forth.
like i said, it’s the worst!
online spaces – in addition to delivering the dumbest hot takes to me directly via twitter because i follow too many journalists* – also help craft and subsequently distort so much of our perception of the surrounding world in tremendous part because hyperbole is its currency. the stuff that rises to the surface most quickly is often real news (in that it happened, factually) wrapped in a “creative” crunchy coating that’s not necessarily dedicated to better understanding of issues.
combine that with the ability to filter out the undesirable content of any kind (e.g. i only heard the song old town road recently, and certainly not willingly), and you end up with a population less able to tolerate differences small and large, because everything is the worst, and everyone is out to get you, and everywhere is terrible, and every moment is [etc], and every noise sounds like BTS. (i have BTSDS, clearly)
now for a brief trip into anecdata land: i live in trumpland now, having previously lived in not-trumpland** (despite trump having haunted nyc for decades). i have a lot of conversations with neighbors, etc, in various contexts – often in the context of “what do we do about college?” as the vast majority of these folk are non-college grads and know i work in the field or that i used to participate in local workshops and roundtables on this topic. they tend to be fruitful conversations (in that accurate information is taken away and questions are addressed, even if they don’t love the answers) and most of these parents, even the non-white ones, give off some trumpish culture vibes to some degree. the amount of this variance across racial groupings surprises me sometimes, though i should know better by now – this may be my own instance of twitter poisoning, btw.
anyhoo, one thing that sticks out is during these discussions there’s quite often a bleed-out of suspicion about the local college specifically (and the concept of colleges in general) revolving around costs or “fit” concerns. but one universal locally is the topic of professors there. interesting convos to have, in large part because i don’t get defensive about it (said college doesn’t pay me and i’m not on their “team” as it were) and in no small part because unlike most of the professorial yutzes at the college*** i come from a working class background and fully get the belief (with foundations in both lived truth and unnecessary paranoia, mind you) that these other folk are looking down their noses at you and your life, race, religion, etc.
most surprising to me is that one of the commonalities of (specifically) both black and white families in this group, btw, is this central belief. asian and hispanic families have never raised it, but their population is much smaller in my sample set.
i generally don’t tell these families “don’t worry, they don’t even think of you or your way of life in any kind of actuality” because i don’t think it would help anyone feel better nor help me better communicate with them.
without these interactions i’d have labored under a far stronger and less accurate set of beliefs about trumpland. now, a different set of largely negative beliefs about trumpland have been strengthened, especially when the state boe was playing cowardice footsie about mask mandates in the fall. but even that was far more cross-racial (and far less cross-class) than i assumed initially, despite the experiences lovingly rendered above.
my long-winded point being that “You can sense the seething rage quite clearly.” as you say above makes me wonder: have you actually had these discussions face-to-face, or is it via the distortion engine of our shared cyborg emergence? the engine rewards expressions of rage along with expressions of shock at said rage. so long as someone is paying attention, nothing else matters. interpersonal interactions may not be more comforting, but they’re a slightly richer palette.
contra chip (huge shocker i know secure your monocles lest they slip into your old fashioned and ruin this dinner party) the historical roadmap that feels most similar is the 1970s, where we had a lot of sometimes deadly, often destructive, but ultimately ineffectual political violence. or even the spate of DC bombings in the first half of the 80s. i don’t *love* it in the slightest, and if i could snap my fingers to make it go away i would, but i think this drive to hyperbole and rabbit holes is genuinely damaging in a way that outstrips typical “the kids these days”**** albatrosses, which are always important to resist in the strongest terms, as we should with any idea that we love or crave.
~hooray for add and procrastination~
* in addition to no longer following academic researchers whom i enjoyed previously until they got fully into the k-hole of BTS fandom and became raving lunatics, following industry, specialist, and large outlet journalists on twitter has really ruined my enjoyment of many writers and undermined my trust in their processes and finished work. one bright exception is issac chotiner, who is exactly who you’d think he’d be on twitter. and there are others who retract tweets, or publish corrections whose work i tend to regard with less suspicion due to their behavior…but they’re outnumbered and the system doesn’t reward accuracy after the fact.
** one of the reasons the expressions of outrageous outrage over the juvenile chuckles of “let’s go brandon” were so exasperating is that i know i didn’t hallucinate all of the “he’s not my president” and “f*** bush” stickers and shirts and window signs when i lived in brooklyn. saying ‘f the president not on my team’ (or more generally ‘f the president, never trust a sociopath’, which is my preferred default setting) is utterly and completely quotidian, but to absorb the howls of the blue check brigade you’d think this was entirely unprecedented. it’s infuriating, and only partially ameliorated by knowing most of the blues were 7 when the 2000 elections happened
*** “some of my best spouses are professors”
**** except those drips on tik tok and youtube pretending to have tourettes or other neuro/psych disorders for attention. i hope they straighten themselves out and grow up, because that is not a good look. it’s how we got tucker carlson.Report
Say what you will about the ineffectual political violence of the 70’s and 80’s, the soundtrack was much, much better.
(Excellent comment. Everyone should read it.)Report
This just amounts to what I said in the other thread about Jews in New Jersey- “Oppression? I can’t see any oppression! Stop being so hysterical!”
Oh, you’ve met Trumpists and they were nice to you? How delightful! So have I- I’m related to them!
Too bad this doesn’t change anything.
I’ve actually met Muslims who supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and would have applauded had he been murdered.
They too, were sweet and loving people.
American democracy hangs by a thread because the Trumpists see it as an impediment to their goals.Report
In other words, lack of evidence means nothing to you.Report
Part of the problem is the whole “overpromise/underdeliver” thing.
You mention the $1.9 trillion coronavirus and economic relief bill. This is a great example.
Remember the whole debate over $1400 vs. $2000 checks?
If someone felt that they were promised a $2000 check and, instead, received a $1400 check and were told “we’re already counting the $600 you got last time”, would the $1400 feel like an accomplishment or a failure to deliver?
I submit: It would feel like a failure to deliver.
If we want to know why some people feel vaguely deflated after all of these wonderful accomplishments, I think that looking at their disappointment in the context of the whole “what they were promised” thing.Report
This is one where I think the media has done him a disservice while intending to bolster him. The whole ‘next FDR’ thing has never been plausible with the makeup of the Senate. It’s bad enough to do hackneyed propaganda but at least do it well.Report
It’s not just the media, though.
There is a bullet point up there about how Biden’s cancellation of some student debts is a win.
Here’s what Schumer tweeted two days ago:
Schumer doesn’t acknowledge that particular bullet point.
I’d not be surprised if others don’t.Report
As others keep hammering me, half a win is better then no win, but national level Democratic leadership isn’t willing to message on half a win.Report
“half a win”
That got me wondering.
It’s probably closer to somewhere between 2% and 4% of a win.Report
Depends on your definition of win.Report
On one level, I kinda get the feeling that there are a lot of students out there who just think that Biden gets elected, Biden signs executive order, then student debt is gone. Poof.
Like, they’d express surprise that there’s a PSLF program that they actually have to fill out forms for.
But that’s just a feeling. If there were better messaging teams out there, maybe we’d find that that 2-4% would go up. Or down. Or something.
THAT SAID. This also flitted across my timeline today.
Report
Once again, proving you will do anything rather than speak favorably about a Democrat.Report
Saul, we’re in the comments to an essay talking about all of the great things that Biden has accomplished and lamenting that he’s not getting his fair due.
I’m trying to explain why people might not see Biden’s accomplishments as All That.
You want me to list off the things that Biden has been good at? They’re things that you’re not going to be crazy about.
And, yeah, I do have insight into the whole “wanted more than what they got” thing when it comes to Biden.
More than that, I also know how people tend to respond to exhortations to clap louder.
I think it’s nice that you think that Biden’s doing a great job, though. It must feel good to have a president who represents you so well. I’m kinda envious.Report
Eh, those guys mostly voted for Bernie anyhow. I’m not sure which policy is the bigger transfer to the wealthy- student debt elimination or SALT.Report
I’m not convinced the media is truly interested in bolstering his administration. I think instead they enjoy controversy, and over-promising on his behalf, knowing he can’t come close to delivering, makes for sensational headlines. It’s all about the clicks.Report
Agreed. They desperately, desperately need to try and keep business booming like it was during Trumps years. Bad news moves eyeballs.Report
I give him a win for complying with the court order and successfully reinstating stay in Mexico. He should make it his own policy and trumpet it.Report
This is a good one. I laughed.Report
One thing I’m amused that Joe Biden has done and no one has given him credit for is massively scaling down the drone war.
https://airwars.org/conflict-data
LGM mused on how not even the administration has been touting this. On reflecting on the matter, though, I think I can see the method to keeping mum about it. It’s an attempt to bypass the security ratchet. If you’re quiet about scaling down something like drone wars then if there isn’t a terror attack you can post-hoc claim credit for it at an opportune moment. Bragging about it while doing it, though, is a huge invitation for an attack and if one happens you’ll take it right to the gut.
Still I think it’s something BIden should be given credit for. Especially by libertarians.Report
Over there they call the military industrial complex The Blob and accuse the media of conscious or unconscious bias in favor of eternal war.
Normally that seems a bit woo for my taste but the reaction of normally trusted media outlets like NYT and WaPo to the Afghan pullout was eye opening.Report
It was eye opening for me to. I’ve always said that the “non-aligned” media has an alignment of its own that has some notable Venn overlaps with liberal alignments but not entirely. War is an area where there’s definitely some big gaps.Report
I remember way back in the Radley Balko agitator days he would say that the media is best understood as statist. I think there’s a bit more too it than that but it explains this particular blow up pretty well. At the very least there’s a strong ‘the government can’t fail, it can only be failed’ undercurrent in the media regarding war and foreign policy.Report
That sort of parses. The media likes things that are big, dramatic and simple to explain. Wars tick all those boxes.Report
I’ve often thought that the media is biased towards “do something!”, whether the something be spending, law-passing, military action, etc., since that’s the average Joe’s first reaction as well — it didn’t occur to me to call that “statist” but I suppose it is.Report
It’s what ‘do something’ in practice translates into in our system. It’s easy to mistake this as ‘liberal’ and that’s not to say there is nothing about the media that’s liberal. In a lot of areas the statist inclination can overlap well and appear indistinguishable from a lot of moderate left of center preferences in domestic policy.
What doesn’t make it into media that isn’t expressly conservative much is the possibility that there are things the government is not good at, and unlikely to get good at, no matter how much money is thrown at it. The distinction is exposed every once in awhile when the media generally falls in line behind state action of a nature that isn’t particularly liberal, like war.Report
Its more than just clicks, though, that motivate media outlets.
For example, conservatives used to complain angrily about how the media portrayed dramatic, awful stories of poor people, like Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, or stories like Erin Brockovich.
But we don’t really see much like that any more. We have outlets like Politico or Axios whose main stock in trade is palace gossip and intrigue and even the mainstream places like NYT or WaPo tend to go with insider chatter as if they were the only ones that matter.
My theory is that journalism has become a white collar profession practiced by the same sort of people who went to school with the corporate elite and have the same sort of worldview.
Not necessarily liberal or conservative, but just sort of invested in the status quo.Report
White collar and non-profit. I get the distinct vibe that people who go after gigs with the NYT are people who’re confident that Mummy and Papa will help keep them in their comfortable little NY loft if the chips are ever down.Report
Concur, there have been some notable improvements on that front. It’s a shame they have to be done so quietly.Report
I feel the same way but the more I mull it over the more keeping super quiet about it makes sense to me.Report
Note that, per a chart on page 2, the strikes in Iraq and Syria, where the overwhelming majority of the civilian deaths occurred, were clustered in 2016-2017, so that was already wound down long before Biden took office.
I don’t know much about foreign policy, so I’m not claiming any expertise, or making any more general claims about how much or little Biden improved on Trump’s record in this department. Maybe Trump would have ramped up strikes again if he’d won a second term.
But looking just at those charts, early Trump looks a lot like late Obama, and early Biden looks a lot like late Trump.Report
*shrugs* Most of Obama’s deficit spending can be attributed to W.’s late term. It isn’t. Trumps economic numbers were mostly a simple continuation of late Obama numbers. They still get attributed to Trump.
I’m sure you have a point about the over all trajectory of drone striking and, to be fair, Biden has only had a year. So he could, I suppose, embroil us in a new war to try and get his numbers up into Obama or Trump territory.Report
FYI, the federal government already taxes the rich much more heavily than the lower and middle classes. What Biden has wisely been prevented from delivering on is a promise to raise taxes on investment income to the highest level in the OECD and tax high-end wage income even more disproportionately than it already is.
I think Biden should also get credit for things he hasn’t done. Specifically, he’s resisted calls from the left wing of the party to pack the Supreme Court and to unilaterally declare a blanket student loan jubilee.Report
So you don’t see returning the high end income tax bracket back to its pre Trump level as a good thing, even if it fund programs that actually help your fellow citizens? I’m not surprised, but given the utter lack of willingness by those folks to actually, ya know, trickle any of it down . . . .
Your OECD statistics are also questionable, as the US is nowhere near the top of the OECD countries in either Composite Effective Average Tax Rates, Composite Marginal Tax rates, or even Tax Competitiveness (which wraps up the investment tax burdens – https://taxfoundation.org/2021-international-tax-competitiveness-index/#Profiles). Meaning we have a LOT more room to actually tax folks before we do real economic harm.
Sure, in absolute dollars. But that’s not your real beef, your real beef is:
https://taxfoundation.org/rich-pay-their-fair-share-of-taxes/
Now, go look at the incomes of those people, and how few of them can actually afford to live even modestly in America. Given that the bottom 80% of American housholds own a mere 11% of the nation’s wealth; that ultra wealthy households actually pay an effective tax rate a full percent below the bottom half of American households (since their “income” is all from investments that they take and repay loans against for their living expenses), and that CEO’s presently earn 300 times the average wage of their workers, and frankly they are lucky we just want to go back to status-quo ante Trump.Report
Multiple news sources have reported that the Dems are bringing back the State tax deduction. This will be a large tax cut for the rich.Report
It’s essentially a wealth transfer from low-tax states to high-tax states.Report
This is kind of true but I will care about it when the principle is adhered to by the GOP.
Fiscal responsibility hasn’t been a credible criticism from conservatives since the George HW Bush admin. There’s somehow always room for cuts when they’re in charge, but not when the Democrats are.Report
They haven’t had credibility since the 13 tax increases under Reagan because the deficit grew too quickly under voodoo.Report
SALT passed the House – I actually doubt it survives the Senate. The House knows this. So does the Senate.Report
I owe you a coke. This is one area where Manchin may do some actual good.Report
Remains to be seen. The Senate might strip the SALT provision out (I hope they do) and if they do I am 100% certain that Pelosi will get it through the House without it. Of course if the right wanted to maintain the SALT provisions they could offer a few votes in the house and Senate to that effect and it’d be dead as a doornail- but we all know that only Democrats have agency.Report
And no wealth tax.Report
Much of Biden’s failures come from Manchin and Sinema believing they represent the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth rather than the states of West Virginia and Arizona. If they would agree to gut the filibuster and the Democratic Party could engage in strict party line voting, a lot more could be accomplished.Report
Query if the Republicans net one seat in the Senate in ’22, what they’d do with a filibuster-less majority. If you guessed “stop everything dead in its tracks and loudly say it’s all Biden’s fault” then your marker would be where mine would also go.Report
Absolutely. McConnell would be in full obstruction mode and try to knee-cap Biden. I wouldn’t be surprised if they allowed Biden to have a cabinet.Report
Quibble: Trump did not declare Jerusalem was Israel’s capital. Israel did that itself many years ago. Trump recongized Jerusalem as the capital by moving an embassy there.
Though it was controversial at the time, there has seemingly been little fallout from it, so, okay. Maybe I got too alarmed about it at the time it happened. Biden hasn’t seen fit to revisit the matter and there may be neither any need to do so or the cost of doing it (economic and political) might not be worth whatever benefit might be gained thereby.Report
The discussion we had at the time.Report
And yet multiple allegedly credible media sources said he did exactly that in their lists. So perhaps the right way to frame it is that Trump saw yet another opportunity to throw red meat and then the media flubbed the narrative because its Trump and you don’t need to be 1000% right.Report