Biden’s unfinished business
What’s left for President Biden to focus on as his second year gets underway? Quite a lot, actually.
Congressional Democrats are regrouping after a string of setbacks tarnished the end of Biden’s first year in office. Biden’s “build back better” legislation collapsed after Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic senator from West Virginia, pulled his support in late December. Inflation is now the dominant concern among voters, something Biden never saw coming. The 2022 midterm election season is basically underway, with Biden’s approval rating at a perilously low 42%.
Much of the campaigning for the ’22 midterms will revolve around Biden’s agenda, both what he has done and what he has left undone. The infrastructure bill Biden signed last November is genuinely popular. Other Biden action items are more controversial, one reason Democrats haven’t been able to enact them. Here are 5 of the biggest Democratic priorities left unfulfilled, even though Dems have controlled Congress and the White House for the last 12 months.
A minimum wage hike. Biden and many other Democrats favor a huge boost in the minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15. But a handful of Dems say that would be too high, because businesses in rural areas and other low-income parts of the country can’t pay as much as those in big cities. Had the $15-or-bust Democrats been willing to compromise, it’s possible Congress could have raised the wage floor to $10 or $11 last year, maybe with some Republican votes. But an all-or-nothing progressive wing led by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren has held firm, with nothing to show for it. Democrats aren’t even talking about trying to boost the minimum wage in 2022, because of legislative obstacles related to the Senate filibuster. Yet that’s based on the premise that a wage hike would be so large no Republicans would support it—not on the prospect of bipartisan support for a smaller wage hike, which would negate the role of the filibuster.
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Green-energy investments. Biden has the most aggressive plan of any president yet to transition from fossil fuels to green energy—but no legislative action to go with it. In November, the House passed a version of Biden’s “build back better” program that included about $550 billion in tax incentives and new spending on green energy, which would be the most Congress has ever appropriated toward climate action, by far. But there was a lot of other stuff in that $1.7 trillion BBB bill and, Manchin (plus one or two other Democrats) finally said no to such a costly and unwieldy package.
Most or all of those green-energy programs could come back as part of a slimmer bill in 2022, but it will get harder to pass anything meaningful as the November elections draw closer. Biden is using regulatory action to address climate change, by raising fuel economy standards, for example. And his administration is using a small amount of money from the infrastructure bill to cap abandoned oil and gas wells leaking methane, an important source of carbon emissions. These are relatively small moves, however, combined with the scale of the problem, which will ultimately require trillions of dollars in spending by governments around the world.
IRS Reform. Democrats spent a good chunk of 2021 building the case for tougher tax enforcement, to capture as much as $1 trillion American taxpayers owe but don’t pay. There are legitimate questions about how big this so-called tax gap is. But if the IRS could capture just a fraction of the money owed, it would be a big boost to revenue at a time when the national debt has soared to nearly $30 trillion and many Americans feel the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy.
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This, too, has gone nowhere, however. The BBB bill the House passed last November included $80 billion to beef up the IRS, but like all the other provisions, it’s stuck in the Senate. Democrats haven’t yet indicated whether they’ll try to revive this in 2022 or simply leave it on their provisional wish list.
Tax hikes. Biden campaigned as president vowing to raise taxes on businesses and the wealthy, with a fence excluding tax hikes on anybody earning less than $400,000 per year. The House BBB bill pared back Biden’s proposed hikes, but still would have raised taxes on millionaires and on some large companies. That, too, is now in abeyance as Senate Democrats mull whether to give BBB another try. Tax hikes to pay for green-energy and social programs were a core element of Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020. Yet Democrats haven’t been able to pass even modest tax hikes.
The SALT deduction. This was not an explicit Biden priority, but Congressional Democrats from several coastal states insisted on a more generous deduction for state and local taxes as a condition of supporting other Democratic proposals. The 2017 Trump tax cuts capped the so-called SALT deduction at $10,000, a move that hurt taxpayers in high-income blue states more than taxpayers in most red states. The House BBB bill would have lifted the cap to $80,000. You know the rest of the story. The SALT change is now on ice in the Senate, along with the rest of BBB.
Voters aren’t really clamoring for Congress to make any of these changes, so Democrats may end up dropping all of them while touting the infrastructure bill as a Biden achievement and hoping inflation doesn’t doom them in the midterms. Or, Democrats might decide they need a longer list of accomplishments heading into November, and try to pass some of these items in truncated or piecemeal form. Biden will be busy, either way.
Rick Newman is a columnist and author of four books, including "Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success.” Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman. You can also send confidential tips.
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