The Big Beautiful Bill

By Robin Itzler

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors.  Any cartoons will have been added by me.  If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free.

Why not more DOGE cuts? There are two ways to cut spending with a simple majority: Reconciliation and Rescission

Let’s talk RECONCILIATION.  

The reality is that Republicans have a slim majority in both the House and Senate and lots of congressmen and senators who think they are quasi presidents. The “big beautiful bill” is a budget bill called “reconciliation.” By going the path of reconciliation, the bill only needs to pass the House and Senate with a simple majority. That means 51 votes in the Senate. Otherwise, it would need 60 votes, and we know NO Democrat senator would vote for it.

This is why the big beautiful bill does not include more DOGE cuts that we all want. If they were included, the bill would need 60 votes.

The big beautiful bill prioritizes spending on border security, energy and the tax bill. As Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene explains:

“This is not a federal reduction bill, it's a federal funding bill. If we don't pass this, the tax law will expire and taxes will be increased by 65% on most Americans. It also funds two of our top priorities - border security and deportations and American energy and destroying the Green New Deal. Again don't shoot the messenger, I'm just explaining it to you and not sugar coating it.”

The reason the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) states that the bill would “cost” $4 TRILLION in revenue is because the CBO thinks the tax cuts should NOT happen. They count the loss of revenue byhaving tax cuts as a “cost.”

Ah, if only we had a towering majority in Congress! But we don’t and part of our slim Republican majority includes RINOs. For the moment, this is the best we can do, but it’s the beginning, not the end.

Let’s talk RESCISSION.  

The reality is that we have a slim majority in both the House and Senate and lots of congressmen and senators who think they are quasi presidents.

On June 9, President Trump will be sending a DOGE rescission's package to Congress. The cuts included in the package are for foreign aid, USAID and National Public Radio (NPR).

By being a rescission package, it only needs to pass the House and Senate with a simple majority. That means 51 votes in the Senate. Otherwise, it would need 60 votes and we know NO Democrat would vote for it.

Democrats, RINOs and the legacy MSM want MAGA supporters to abandon President Trump. But his America First administration continues its “Promises Made, Promises Kept” mantra.

Click here to read Rep. MTG’s easy-to-understand explanation of the bill.

Democrats’ ‘reconciliation bill’ is anything but

October 6, 2021 By Eric Utter 

 

The Democrats’ $3.5 trillion infrastructure/reconciliation/”Build Back Better” bill is a total sham, a hoax, and yet another attempt to reward fat cat Democrat donors while sticking it to citizens who deviate from the party line. The bill would punish grieving families by dramatically increasing the death tax, to the tune (“Taps?”) of $54 billion.  Tax the rich? The bill would authorize local banks to report all transactions of $600 or more, including those from third-party applications like PayPal or Venmo. 600 bucks! Why?

Tax the rich? The bill would give a cool $200 million to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s favorite park/golf course, right behind her house in San Francisco. (Gotta take care of the Old Gal by sending some cash to her home district if you want to extract more favors from her later, right?).........This ridiculous and dangerous bill is 2,456 pages long...............To Read More.....

My Take -  A spending bill that's 2,456 pages long.  The average Bible is only about 1200 pages long.  Remarkable. 

An Example Of The Destruction In The "Reconciliation" Bill: Public Housing Bailout

September 30, 2021/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

Even this late in the process, it’s still impossible for a mere member of the public to find out in much detail what all may be buried in the massive “budget reconciliation” bill now making its way through Congress. And the whole thing may yet get stopped, or substantially reduced, by the unexpected good sense of a couple of Democratic Senators (or even just one). Nevertheless, there is enough general information about what is planned by the bill’s proponents to give us some insights into the economic wreckage that could be coming if these people get their way.

Among things included within the bruited $3.5 trillion price tag (undoubtedly way understated), you likely are aware of at least some of the largest components. Included are things like large expansions of child tax credits, pre-K education subsidies, childcare subsidies, Obamacare expansion, Medicare expansion, subsidies and tax credits for useless “green” energy projects, and on and on and on. But for today I’m going to focus on just one of the many vast spending expansions, namely the proposed $80 billion for bailing out public housing.

At one time, some of us thought $80 billion was a lot of money. Now, it is just one of the smaller crumbs buried in this multi-trillion dollar behemoth.

Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute has a good summary of this item today at RealClearPolicy, in a piece titled “Democrats Want to Hand America's Failed Public Housing an $80 Billion Slush Fund.” I have written frequently about the failure of socialist-model public housing generally, and of the New York City Housing Authority in particular, and also about the remarkable way that NYCHA and other public housing entities are somehow able time and again to parlay their ongoing disastrous failure into more and more and yet more taxpayer funding. (See, e.g., here and here.) The proposed “reconciliation” bill takes this game to a whole new level. It appears that the idea is to throw some massive spending numbers in with so many other massive spending numbers that nobody will be able to focus on this one issue or to object effectively. And the public housing bureaucracies will once again be hugely rewarded for failure, indeed with a far larger bailout than ever before.

Hendrix provides a brief chronology of this latest round. It started with President Biden at the beginning of his term proposing an incremental $40 billion for the nation’s failed public housing authorities. But then in April Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer got into the act:

Back in April, Sen. Schumer called on President Joe Biden to double his planned spending of $40 billion on public housing — “it’s just not enough,” said Schumer more recently. He wanted all of the original money just to pay NYCHA’s repair bill. And what Schumer wants, he gets: an increase to $80 billion in spending on public housing and enormous influence on securing half of it for a NYCHA bailout.

(My emphasis.). And just how much is the NYCHA “repair bill”? Readers of my previous posts know that NYCHA has gotten itself into a very deep hole by following the unworkable socialist model, where the game is to wait until your facility falls apart and then use the disaster to put the squeeze on the politicians for a bailout. NYCHA’s grim “projects,” mostly built from the 1940s to 1970s, after decades of incompetent maintenance, have basically reached the “falling apart” state. Should you come to New York as a tourist, you will definitely want to avoid going anywhere near these hideous and dangerous places, so I’ll have to give you a picture to illustrate how unpleasant they are:

By now most all of the major building systems in nearly all of the buildings need major upgrades or replacements — plumbing, electrical, heating, roofs, façades, windows, and so forth. And by the way, none of them have building-wide air conditioning, nor is there any feasible way to provide it in these older buildings, which is why you see so many window air conditioners in the picture. (Somehow the poor have plenty of money for air conditioners.)

So how much will all of this cost the taxpayers? In 2015 the de Blasio administration put out a big Report called “NextGeneration NYCHA,” which estimated a need for some $17 billion for these capital replacements and upgrades. They have about 170,000 apartments in their projects, so that number would represent about $100,000 per apartment. But that was just the beginning. In February 2018 they put out a revised number, which was $25 billion. In December 2018 an independent entity, the Regional Plan Association, put out its own estimate of what NYCHA needed for capital upgrades, and it was now $45 billion. A budget presented by NYCHA in December 2019 then put forth a new range of estimates, including a “worst-case” scenario of some $68.5 billion by 2028. That’s the latest I can find right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number has gone up even more since then.

At $68 billion for capital replacements and upgrades for 170,000 apartments, we’re now talking about some $400,000 per apartment. For comparison, the median sale price of a single-family home in the United States for August 2021 was $380,000 — and for that you own the place free and clear, without mortgage or need to pay rent. Also, fully half of the houses go for less. In other words, for well less than NYCHA is demanding in taxpayer bailouts, you could buy every one of the tenant families a fully-paid-up mortgage-free median single family house somewhere in the United States, and then bulldoze the horrible NYCHA projects and be done with them. That would provide all the NYCHA tenants much improved housing and for much less money. But of course it would also mean putting the entire NYCHA bureaucracy out of business, plus losing the big bloc of bought-and-paid-for Democratic votes represented by these lifetime-dependent public housing residents. Clearly, that’s not how this works.

So here is Hendrix on how the Schumer add-ons in the “reconciliation” bill would deal with the issue of capital needs of NYCHA and other public housing entities:

The Democrat’s reconciliation bill gives Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge the authority to allocate $66.5 billion in new public housing dollars however she pleases. Given its soaring repair bill, NYCHA alone could easily soak up every new discretionary dollar spent on public housing. Then there’s another $10 billion Fudge will get to spend under her agency’s “business as usual” formula plus $2.75 billion in grants under terms also set by the secretary. In short, it’s an $80 billion slush fund.

In other words, even though the cost has become completely unjustifiable and preposterous, you don’t expend one minute of energy to consider a better way to do the job for less. Instead you give the failed bureaucracy every dollar it wants, in the form of a gigantic slush fund with no strings attached, and you bury it somewhere in a multi-trillion dollar spending blowout and expect that nobody will notice how their hard-earned money is being thrown away.

Meanwhile, just a few points, both old and new, on how totally disastrous NYCHA’s failure has been:

• From the Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2018, “Anger as New York City Public Housing Residents Go Without Heat, Hot Water.”: “More than 143,000, or 80%, of New York City’s 175,000 public housing apartments have been without heat or hot water at times this winter, city officials said Tuesday. Tempers flared over widespread heat and hot water outages in New York City public housing at an unusually contentious City Council hearing. Some residents were in tears. . . . Residents have been left without heat sporadically throughout the winter, on average for two days at a time, according to city officials. The outages, which the city has blamed on aging boilers, have affected more than 320,000 people.” From City Councilman Ritchie Torres on then-NYCHA head Shola Olatoye: ““She has haplessly presided over a humanitarian crisis.”

• From the New York Post, March 17, 2018: “As Politico reported last week embattled city Housing Authority chief Shola Olatoye has been trying to win more labor flexibility, albeit with no backup from City Hall. Soon after taking over in 2014, she sought common-sense changes to work rules that have maintenance staff and other skilled workers on the job exclusively from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Friday. But the Teamsters vetoed her plan for staggered shifts. One result is the agency’s huge overtime bill, which (for example) leaves its plumbers as some of the very highest-paid city employees — five of the top 10 OT earners these last two years. The 2016 overtime king was NYCHA plumber Vincenzo Giurbino, who took home an added $228,000 atop his $141,152 base salary.”

• From Hendrix at RealClearPolicy today: “The pandemic highlights NYCHA’s long history of harming the health and safety of its residents. Just this month, New York City public health officials admitted that NYCHA residents are dying from Covid-19 at nearly twice the city rate. “The pandemic has trapped many poor New Yorkers in miserable living conditions in the city’s public housing system,” observed The New York Times. It turns out that one of the deadliest places to be in New York City during a pandemic is in a New York City Housing Authority apartment.”

• Also from Hendrix today: “[J]ust this week, Brooklyn’s District Attorney charged nine NYCHA contractors with bribery over the authority’s no-bid contracts. ‘We have every reason to believe that there are other superintendents being offered bribes,’ said DA Eric Gonzalez. Despite record levels of funding, ‘New York’s public housing isn’t getting better,’ admitted The New York Times. Sometimes more money means more problems. There’s an ‘ecosystem of people willing to make and take bribes at NYCHA,’ found the Brooklyn DA.”

One could go on indefinitely with this. The crime rate in all categories is also a multiple at NYCHA projects as elsewhere in the City. And I should also mention that the progressives in Congress want not only to bail out the existing failed public housing, but also to lift all restrictions on building more, and put up yet more funding for that. It will be just one more step toward the utopian world of perfect justice and fairness that they are planning for us. More and more taxpayer money for greater and greater failure and outright corruption.

 

Reconciliation Bill, as We Know It, Is Dead, Thanks To Senators Manchin, McConnell — and Schumer

By Lawrence Kudlow, Special to the Sun| September 30, 2021 

The so-called reconciliation bill, as we know it, from the House Budget and Ways and Means committees — the Senate never did produce a tax bill, but no matter — the reconciliation bill as we know it is dead. It died with a brilliant statement from Senator Joe Manchin. And with the cleverness of the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell.

If there is a vote, the outcome is still up in the air. Left-wing progressives might boycott the bill. Moderate Republicans might support it. At this point, no one knows. The big issue, though, is the $4 trillion-plus reconciliation budget, which Senator Manchin killed.

Now, there may be a new budget resolution that would contain Mr. Manchin’s conditions. It might also include Senator Sinema's concerns about taxes and spending. I think that would require months of re-negotiation and might never get done. Were the version right now brought to the Senate, it would fail 52 to 48.

Congratulations Senator Schumer. The New Yorker ignored Mr. Manchin in July. The Mountain State mensch, as the Sun calls Mr. Manchin, wouldn’t go away with his opposition. That was Mr. Schumer’s mistake, and President Biden’s same mistake, doomed the bill. Nor, let it be remembered for all time, was Mr. Manchin prepared to vote for a bill that fails to restore the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortions. Good for him.............To Read More.....

My Take - None of this changes my views on Manchin, McConnell or Schumer.  McConnell may be a master legislator, but he's not a real conservative, he can't be trusted and is a leaky vessel when the wind is blowing in the wrong direction.  Not to mention there are issues surrounding his actions that need to be investigated.  

Schumer is a corrupt leftist to the core and treasonous, or he's insane, which being a leftist of his ilk means being certifiable, otherwise they couldn't believe, say or promote their insane policies.  

As for Manchin, I never expected him to be the rock in the current, it's not in his character.  If he had an ounce of respectability and integrity, and had honest concerns about where the Democrats were going, he'd have abandoned the Democrat party and become a Republican, and he didn't. Then again, if he did the Republicans would just have had another pain in the butt backstabbing RINO to deal with.  

Having said that, if the Republicans take over the Senate I could see him making a change for the 2024 election in order to avoid being defeated.  West Virginia has become far more Republican during his tenure.  In 2010 he won his Senate seat with 54% of the vote in a special election.  In 2012 he won with 61%, but in 2018 his margin dropped to under 50%. He will see the handwriting on the wall and in my view will either retire or change parties.