•Will anyone – progressive Democrats, moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans – be satisfied with President Biden’s social infrastructure program? No doubt Trumpist Republicans are reveling in Democrats’ lack of discipline. Read our debate by scrolling down to the next item in the three columns, by Jim McCraw in the left column and Stephen Macaulay in the right column, and email your comments to editors@thehustings.news
Disappointment Expected, Delivered – Real gross domestic product (GDP) rose at an annual rate of just 2.0% in the third quarter of the year, according to an advanced estimate by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s a severe drop from the second quarter’s 6.7% annual rate and is being blamed on reduced retail sales and services due to the Delta variant of the coronavirus and to supply chain bottlenecks. Economists are expecting healthy GDP growth for the remaining months of the year. Nevertheless, third-quarter GDP growth was low enough to add urgency to the White House’s bipartisan infrastructure bill languishing in the House of Representatives …
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I’ve Gotta Fly; Let’s Pass These Bills – President Biden stopped by the Capitol Thursday morning before flying off for Rome with a new $1.75-trillion social spending budget reconciliation bill he expects all Democrats in the House of Representatives to pass, The Washington Post reports. The new social bill framework includes expanded Medicare benefits, clean energy initiatives (just ahead of his attendance Monday at the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland), free pre-kindergarten, child care aid and an extension of the child tax credit. It cuts more extensive Medicare expansion and paid leave for new mothers, WaPo outlines.
The cut for paid leave had gone from 12 weeks initially proposed in the White House’s $3.5-trillion Build Back Better program, to four weeks, before getting spiked altogether.
Presumably, Biden’s latest and maybe final proposal accounts for the ever-shifting demands of Sens. Joe Manchin III, D-WV, and Krysten Sinema, D-AZ. If Biden can get the House to pass both the social spending bill and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill ($550 billion in new spending), the infrastructure bill would be ready to deliver to his desk for signing.
The social program budget reconciliation framework would be completely offset by taxes on multinational corporations’ overseas profits, a minimum tax on the nation’s largest corporations, a surcharge on the highest-income households and new IRS enforcement, Roll Call reports.
Biden is on Air Force One today headed for Rome to meet with Pope Francis. He is also scheduled to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron before heading to Glasgow[CD1] Sunday for the UN climate conference.
Note: The White House really needs a win on bipartisan infrastructure, coming between today’s poor Commerce Department numbers on third-quarter GDP growth and next week’s Virginia elections.
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Report: U.S. Intel Failed to Predict Swift Taliban Takeover – Leading U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan following U.S. military withdrawal, according to a review of nearly two dozen documents from four agencies reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Summaries of classified documents reviewed by the newspaper’s reporters tracked Taliban advances from Spring 2020 to July 2021.
A key example of the documents dated May 17 of this year, a month after President Biden announced the September 11 withdrawal deadline, was titled; “Government at risk of collapse following U.S. withdrawal.”
Note: This recalls U.S. intelligence failures accusing Saddam Hussein of harboring weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a couple of years into our nearly 20-year commitment to Afghanistan. It seems we’ve learned nothing and done nothing about the shortcomings of our intelligence agencies in the last 18 or so years.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Charles Dervarics