View this email in your browser

 

**MARCH 30, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Taking Road Repair on the Road

Tomorrow, President Biden travels to Pittsburgh to unveil his landmark
proposal to rebuild America better. In the historic home of the American
steel industry, Biden will lay out many of the particulars of his
$3-to-$4 trillion bills to shore up the nation's decrepit roads,
bridges, water systems, power grids, and such; to substitute clean
energy for our fossil fuel-reliant system that threatens the
planet's livability; to build energy-efficient affordable housing; to
recharge American manufacturing; to fund a care-economy infrastructure
(universal pre-K, free community college, child care); and to pay for
most of this with the greatest boost to tax progressivity since World
War II.

He will, of course, do more than lay out the particulars. He'll make
the case. He'll say that we're a nation that has allowed itself to
decline during the past four decades of physical infrastructure decay,
wage stagnation, cascading inequality, and declining intergenerational
mobility, perhaps even noting that all the while China has become the
world's other great power by investing in infrastructure and raising
incomes while we have not. China, he has already said in last week's
press conference, now is claiming that autocracy delivers for its
citizens better than democracy has delivered for ours. He probably

**won't**say what I said last week in writing about his press
conference: that in their opposition to what the Whigs once called
"internal improvements," today's Republicans have effectively become
China's "useful idiots"-an earlier generation of Communists' term
for Americans and other Westerners who favored policies that helped the
Soviet Union, though they themselves believed they were anti-Communist.

Biden clearly understands what perhaps was the fundamental mistake of
the Obama administration: securing, in its $787 billion stimulus bill, a
beginning of an effective economic policy, but then failing to tell
Americans how it positively affected them-which meant foreclosing any
possibility for following it up with a more adequate stimulus. Americans
received significant tax relief from that package, but rather than send
it to them in a visible check, the Obama-ites opted to slightly reduce
the payroll tax deduction on biweekly checks, making the reduction all
but imperceptible. Signs on infrastructure improvements that read "Obama
Stimulus Funds at Work" were never made. The failure to publicize these
achievements was one of the reasons that the Democrats lost Congress in
2010.

So tomorrow's Pittsburgh speech must be only the beginning of this
administration's campaign to explain and make the case for its
initiative. Biden must traverse the Midwest laying out the jobs that
will be created and the union-level wages they will come with; he must
also talk about his proposed investment and tax changes that will favor
domestic rather than overseas manufacturing. He should travel to Texas
to explain how his legislation will upgrade the state's power grid and
water systems that failed during the winter's cold snap. He should lay
out his plans for solar energy, and the jobs they will create, when
he's in Arizona and Nevada. And so should Vice President Harris and a
host of Cabinet members.

Hit the road, Joe, and don't you come back with anything less than 70
percent support for your proposals. It's out there if you can make the
case.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

[link removed]

Despite Border Patrol Denials, Questions Still Loom Over Rio Grande
Video

Was an immigrant crossing genuine or staged? BY MARCIA BROWN

North Carolina Botched an Emergency Re-entry Program for Returning
Citizens

A re-entry program that quarantined people with possible COVID-19
exposure endangered their lives and reproduced the prison conditions
they left behind. BY JAROD FACUNDO

Biden's Income-Support Revolution: Don't Leave Out the Elderly

The supposed three-legged retirement stool of savings, pensions, and
Social Security is collapsing. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

First 100: Every Congressional Democrat Gets Their Own Infrastructure
Bill

The difficulties of pleasing everyone in a big tent caucus at once. BY
DAVID DAYEN

To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to
subscribe. 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Copyright (c) 2021 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States