Pushing ‘generational’ rebuilding

Wisconsin visit pitches infrastructure plan; funding is hurdle

President Joe Biden arrives Tuesday at the public transit center in La Crosse, Wis., on the first of a planned series of presidential trips to sell the $973 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill and to reassure the Republicans who helped craft it. In his speech, Biden said there is an urgent need for a “generational investment” in the nation’s crumbling underpinnings.

LA CROSSE, Wis. — President Joe Biden declared that there is an urgent need for a “generational investment” in the nation’s infrastructure, as he looked to sell voters Tuesday on the economic benefits of the $973 billion bipartisan package that still faces an uncertain future in Congress.

Biden traveled to La Crosse, Wis., population 52,000, and toured its public transit center, highlighting projects that would receive additional funding from the infrastructure bill. He argued that the package, which is held together in large part by the promise of millions of new jobs, is a way for the United States to assert both the principles of democracy and the economic might that can come from dramatic investments in the country’s future.

He said there is a critical need to improve crumbling infrastructure and stressed that a plan needs to be ambitious to not only improve Americans’ daily lives now but also to combat the growing challenges of climate change.

The visit to Wisconsin was the beginning of what the White House has declared would be a series of presidential trips to sell the bipartisan bill — and to reassure the nervous Republicans who helped craft it.

The process briefly fell into disarray late last week as Biden suggested the deal would be held up until he also received a separate package for infrastructure, jobs and education that would be determined solely by Democrats through the budget reconciliation process.

Biden said Saturday that this was not a veto threat, and by Sunday the package appeared back on track. But there is still anxieties on both sides of the aisle.

Some of the concern centers around how to fund the infrastructure bill. One way that the White House and a bipartisan group of senators agreed to is by reducing federal spending on unemployment benefits by about $70 billion. The administration says the changes will not reduce benefits for jobless Americans and that their proposal only will cut fraud and waste by improving “program integrity.”

But nonpartisan analysts estimate that fraud and overpayments are only likely to amount to closer to $35 billion in unemployment spending over the next decade. Budget experts do not believe it is credible that lawmakers could cut unemployment spending by as much as 20%, as the plan suggests, with no effect on beneficiaries. The provision was endorsed in negotiations by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., a centrist Democrat, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.

The fuzzy math on unemployment benefits is just one of the debatable assumptions the Senate and White House deal-makers made in claiming they are paying for more than $500 billion in new infrastructure spending with new revenue.

No issue emerged as a greater obstacle to the bipartisan infrastructure negotiations than how to pay for it, as lawmakers were hemmed in by political realities that constrained their options.

Republican lawmakers have refused to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, which ruled out the White House’s preferred proposals. The White House, meanwhile, refused to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year, which led them to rule out a gas tax that some of the lawmakers had pursued.

The resulting compromise consists of a hodgepodge of measures that are unlikely to create actual revenue that pays for the spending plan, according to half-dozen experts interviewed by The Washington Post. Instead, a number of the proposals take advantage of budget maneuvers to mostly satisfy budget scorekeepers.

Policymakers involved in the deal acknowledged details are sparse for now because key parts of the legislation are still being worked out. The administration has not publicly outlined the expected revenue from any of the financing provisions, stressing savings from higher tax enforcement.