However, child care and pre-K are still time-limited, lasting only six years.
LAID IN AMERICA PIRATED FREE
(This sets up for an interesting lame-duck session next year.)īecause Manchin implemented universal, free pre-kindergarten in West Virginia, that’s the only universal, free program left in the bill, though the child care subsidies are only cut off at 250 percent of the state median income, a pretty high threshold, thanks mostly to Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project making a big fuss about it. The expanded Earned Income Tax Credit for families without children also extends for just one year. But the expanded credit, up to $3,600 for children under 6 and $3,000 for children between 6 and 17, only goes forward for another year. The Child Tax Credit becomes fully refundable permanently, which by itself is a nice boost for low-income families. The family care and cash assistance piece is tenuous. Keep this site free and open for all to read. (Supply chain bottlenecks are raising costs for clean energy as we speak.) The Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator, sometimes called a climate bank, is designed to invest in green projects while leveraging private capital, an inroad for the financial sector to involve itself in the transition. There’s a $110 billion industrial policy piece here, emphasizing the jobs component of the climate crisis by investing in domestic supply chains for wind turbines, solar panels, steel, cement, and aluminum. The Civilian Climate Corps slots in here, with the investment folding into AmeriCorps, a not-very-well-run program. Sadly, that’s probably where we are as a species. There’s $105 billion for resilience projects, which fight the effects of climate change rather than mitigate its presence. We’re going to hope Americans take up the opportunity to green their lives at a somewhat cheaper cost. Other credits are for home energy, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles. That can include nuclear and carbon capture facilities, which have either been too cost-prohibitive to build or exist only on paper. The $320 billion tax credit framework is modeled on the Clean Energy for America Act, which includes production tax credits for anything carbon-neutral. The clean-energy tax credits, which last throughout the ten-year budget window, will stand alongside still-extant tax credits for fossil fuels, which Manchin demanded stay in place.
There is $555 billion, around 30 percent of this bill, earmarked for climate investments, though that stretches the definition. You cannot improve conditions for Americans if they don’t have a sustainable planet to live on. But what about what’s in here? Does it cohere to this standard of building back better? There will be a lot of focus on what didn’t make the cut paid family and medical leave and Medicare negotiation of prescription drug prices are the biggest omissions. It seems pretty clear that a framework, by itself, won’t be enough to get the House to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, although that’s what will be asked of progressives today in fact, that appears to be the purpose of this announcement.īut this is close enough to the final tally for the Biden agenda that we can assess it. It’s unclear whether this includes everything that will be in the final bill (in particular, drug prices and the state and local tax deduction are big wild cards), when the final bill text will be produced, and whether all 50 Democratic senators are on board (neither Joe Manchin nor Kyrsten Sinema has actually said that they would vote for this). After six months of wrangling, we have a framework from the White House on the Build Back Better Act.