Look what’s inside the bill, please

Here’s a scary number you’ve probably come across many times in recent weeks: $3.5 trillion. Here’s an inside-the-Beltway jargon term that’s come up an equivalent number of times: reconciliation. (Sounds like a marriage therapy outcome, not a congressional process that now shapes the national destiny.) Reporters endlessly, breathlessly, repeat the numbers of congressional votes presently tallied as pro and con.

Mainstream journalism treats the world we inhabit as if it were the World Series. What’s the score? What’s up with the homers and the ERA? The routine coverage is sprinkled with perfunctory references to “climate programs,” “social infrastructure” and “safety nets.”

And what’s moderate about the so-called moderates, who want to shield the wealthiest from higher taxes while letting the homeless continue to live under overpasses? Vagueness prevails, disguising the consequences of up-and-down votes. Come to think of it, I might have been unfair to sports reporters just now, since their readers would howl if they were imprecise about scores.

Meanwhile, back in the world where numbers register the substance and scale of actual programs, how many times have you read, or heard, a real explanation of what’s actually in the proposed $3.5 trillion bill, which the Biden administration calls the Build Back Better Act? Or the smaller numbers ($1.5 trillion, $2.5 trillion and so on) proposed by a dozen or so “moderate” or “centrist” Democrats (out of 270) and opposed by every single Republican member of Congress? How can we pretend to govern ourselves when the stakes of legislation are so grossly undercovered and distorted?

What do the monster numbers stand for? How many times have you read or heard that the $3.5 trillion figure encompasses a full decade of spending? If you worry about federal spending, $3.5 trillion over 10 years surely sounds more terrifying than $350 billion per year for 10 years — an annual sum which amounts, by the way, to less than half of this year’s proposed military budget. That imposing trillion figure drags 12 zeroes behind it.

How can we afford such a monstrosity? is the question that looms when reporters fail not only to tell us what the expenditures would buy for real people, but to tot up the material costs whether measured by the chances of reducing the scale weather disasters, by public health and prosperity, by the inequality and misery that would follow from failing to pass the law.

You’d have to scrounge through acres of newsprint or go full couch potato to scrape up an accounting of what’s actually in the $3.5 trillion bill. If you’re especially curious, Google would point you to an account of what’s in the legislation. But journalists, our public interpreters, could certainly help a lot if they were so disposed. For example, they could readily note:

To address an almost out-of-control climate, the legislation proposes a host of programs including polluter fees, rebates for sustainable home-based electricity and electrical vehicles (producing a net job gain estimated at 7.7 million), along with drought, flood control, wetland restoration and forestry programs at a time when the costs of the climate emergency are evident to anyone breathing.

Child care assistance for children under 5, and two years of universal pre-K.

A child tax credit and child nutrition. Twelve weeks of paid family and medical leave for U.S. workers.

Two free years of community college. At the community college near where I live, a year’s tuition this year will set in-state residents back $4,968.

Cutting prescription drug prices so that Americans, who sink billions into pharmaceutical research through the National

Institutes of Health, will no longer have to pay two to three times what foreigners pay. (According to one study, each of the 210 medicines approved for sale in the U. S. between 2010 and 2016 used research supported by the NIH, adding up to a total of more than $100 billion.)

Expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing aids.

$327 billion for affordable housing. $190 billion for services to help seniors, the disabled and home-care workers — of whom, in 2019, 18% were trying to get by below the federal poverty line.

Most of these public provisions exists in other prosperous countries, where all major parties, whether leftish or rightish, take them for granted as public obligations owed to the residents of a decent society. Europeans are aghast that we lack paid leave and public child care, while paying much more than them for health care which delivers inferior results.

This is by no means a full accounting. But it is a rare one. Good for CBS News and CNN online, from which I have drawn most of the items above, for telling Americans what is at stake in the proposed legislation. They are exceptional in this regard.

Do we not have a right to know?