If you haven’t heard of the reconciliation bill, then you probably have been in forced isolation for the past three months. The recon bill, a hotly debated piece of legislation that is consuming most of the media’s time right now, is $3.5 trillion worth of wish list that is about half of what the progressive Democrats want, and about $2 trillion more than the moderate Demarcates want. To pass the House, it will have to change.
Since nobody knows what the particulars are in the bill, everyone talks in generalities. It is time for Congress to put meat on the bones and tell us how much we are spending and on what. With concrete numbers, it would be easier to separate out all the energy/climate pieces so they could do a separate climate change bill that all the Democrats would be in favor of and even some Republicans.
That would make the rest of the reconciliation bill smaller and easier to swallow for moderate Democratic congressmen, leaving a stand-alone climate change piece to go through as its own bill, forcing all legislators take a stand on climate. We can watch the lobbyists scramble to kill the bill and see who takes their money. Joe Manchin’s open-door policy has seen a steady stream of lobbyists pour through. Will he change his stance on fossil fuel? Or will he finally capitulate so everyone wins.
David Deick
Atascadero
This article appears in Nov 4-14, 2021.
If you haven’t noticed, Congress no longer has open debates about its spending or legislation. The “social welfare” bill was put together in closed meetings of the powerful members of the House (other house members have not had a chance to read it), and appears to be nothing more than the transfer of more power to the federal government to enable expanded handouts which make the citizens (and other government agencies) permanently dependent on the power of Washington DC. At 2,000 pages, I suspect that it contains more corruption and more destruction of the citizens’ rights than we can imagine.
In the mid 1960’s Johnson’s “Great Society” bill was of the same character. It created mass dependency, incentivizing single parent households as opposed to two parent families, and providing cradle to grave welfare for able bodied adults. It can reasonably be credited with creating a crime ridden permanent underclass in our major cities.
There outta be a law.
Cain’t do it if it ain’t an “enumerated power”.
Let states fund business within a state
instead of Congress funneling money to
Congressional Districts in order to
line up votes supporting budget items.
It ain’t the federal gov’t’s job to support business with money grants.