Democrats Need to Count Up, Not Down

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : If and when they do, they will have the opportunity to begin highlighting the key elements that survived -- including universal pre-K, expanded health-care subsidies, and massive investments in green energy.
58% : The reconciliation bill devotes a head-turning $555 billion toward this, primarily via tax incentives for shifting to renewable energy and tax credits to promote more domestic manufacturing of the components associated with it.
48% : That forced Democrats to jettison or severely scale back a daunting list of priorities, including free community college, Medicare dental benefits, higher tax rates on the wealthy and corporations, paid family leave, and a system to pressure utilities to accelerate their transition from fossil fuels to renewable-energy sources.
46% : In its reduced form, the reconciliation bill no longer justifies the frequent comparisons to the New Deal and Great Society that were common at the larger price tag (and which Biden reportedly repeated at his meeting with House Democrats yesterday).
46% : With the clean-electricity standard removed, environmental analysts say the bill on its own won't reach Biden's goal of cutting U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030, but most say that the remaining tax incentives will nonetheless advance the United States far enough to still meet that goal if combined with other initiatives such as further federal regulation.
44% : That is, if they can avoid replicating the bitter postmortems that occurred after similar resistance from a handful of center-right Democratic senators forced the removal of some progressive priorities from the Affordable Care Act in 2010, particularly a public option to compete with private insurance companies.
44% : "If crime is up and inflation is up, taxes are up, that's going to override what the Democrats do, or claim they've done, because people won't see those programs for a while," the Republican pollster Glen Bolger told me recently.
43% : Environmentalists were deeply frustrated when opposition from Manchin, whose state ranks second in production of coal and sixth in natural gas, forced the removal of a clean-electricity standard that would have combined financial incentives with penalties to push utilities toward greater reliance on renewables.
43% : But some research studies, such as a recent project by the pollsters Joel Benenson, a Democrat, and Neil Newhouse, a Republican, have found that most voters do not see the legislative fight as particularly relevant to their immediate concerns, and that many worry that more government spending will fuel inflation.
37% : Biden "is trying to crystallize some policy consequences from the growing concern with working-age families and children, which along with universal health care has been the big missing piece in the American system of public social provision," says the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol, who has studied the history of the U.S. social safety net.
35% : The reconciliation legislation's current price tag nearly equals the combined net new spending in former President Barack Obama's stimulus plan and the Affordable Care Act, dwarfs the new public spending that former President Bill Clinton achieved, and raises enough new revenue to offset the losses from former President Donald Trump's $1.9 trillion tax cut (although opposition from Sinema blocked the repeal of that bill's tax-rate reductions for corporations and high-income earners).

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