WASHINGTON – President Biden's "Build Back Better" plan took its nearly final, shrunken shape on Thursday. And it would mean that under Medicaid, more elderly Americans could start getting home care that would keep them out of nursing homes. It would mean that seniors would finally be able to get care for hearing problems under Medicare. And it would mean that families getting hundreds of dollars a month because of the expanded child care tax credit would get those payments for at least another year.
But the compromise plan, which remains on shaky political ground, also abandons some of the Democratic Party's lofty promises. Paid family leave – a key provision sought by Sen Kirsten E. Gillibrand, a New York Democrat – didn't make it into the bill. Neither did a Medicare expansion for vision and dental coverage, or a plan to make community college free to all Americans.
And a provision that's especially important to New Yorkers – restoring the full deduction for state and local taxes – remains in question as the Democratic-led Congress prepares to act on the Build Back Better plan and a companion bipartisan infrastructure bill.
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President Joe Biden declared Thursday he has reached a “historic economic framework” with Democrats in Congress on his sweeping domestic policy package, a hard-fought yet dramatically scaled-back deal announced hours before he departs for overseas summits.
In the end, the $1.85 trillion Build Back Better plan is about half of what Biden wanted: a bitter compromise made to placate two Senate moderates that threatens to alienate progressives on both sides of Capitol Hill.
But to hear Rep. Brian Higgins, a Buffalo Democrat, tell it, it's a necessary compromise.
"This is a rock-solid investment into the development of all our people," he said.
Still, Higgins especially lamented the loss of the paid family leave provision, even though New York State already has its own family leave plan.
So did Gillibrand.
“Until the bill is printed, I will continue working to include paid leave in the Build Back Better plan," she said in a statement.
Paid family leave got dropped after Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, objected to it, saying it should be dealt with in separate legislation.
Manchin is one of two moderate Democrats, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who demanded that the Build Back Better bill shrink dramatically and be entirely paid for by tax changes to be included in the measure.
Higgins said he understood why those compromises had to be made.
"This is the process," he said. "We have 435 members of the House. There are 100 members of the Senate, and it's a 50-50 Senate with a vice president acting as the tie-breaker. Everybody can't have their own way."
But that process left Biden's agenda in a tenuous place. Manchin and Sinema did not say flat out that they back the compromise, and that left a number of House progressives threatening to vote against the companion $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
Part of the uncertainty stemmed from the fact that the Build Back Better agreement Biden announced Thursday has not yet been crafted into a bill. Major potential parts of it – including the so-called SALT deduction – remain in flux.
The Republican Congress of 2017 limited the SALT deduction to $10,000 per household, thereby increasing federal taxes in high-tax states like New York. Higgins has said approximately 125,000 Erie County households saw a tax increase because of the limit placed on the SALT deduction, with the average increase reported at $815 a year.
Higgins said Thursday he's confident some sort of expansion of the SALT deduction will be included in the final package, as did another of the deduction's chief advocates, Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi of Long Island.
"No SALT, no deal! I am confident it will be part of the final deal," Suozzi said on Twitter.
While the deal remains unfinished, Biden announced that Democrats have largely agreed on a framework that includes huge changes. All children ages 3 and 4 would be eligible for universal pre-K. Some $555 billion would be set aside to address climate change, in part through tax credits and rebates encouraging Americans to invest in solar rooftops and electric vehicles. Other provisions would expand Pell grants for college students, coverage under the Affordable Care Act, affordable housing and the earned-income tax credits for low-wage workers.
Biden said the plan includes a series of changes that would more than pay for the measure, including a minimum corporate tax, a surtax on the wealthiest Americans and increased tax enforcement.
Republicans rejected all of the above.
“Right now, Americans are faced with rising costs in every facet of their lives, our southern border isn't secure, supply chains are falling apart, and our energy independence has been compromised," said Rep. Chris Jacobs, an Orchard Park Republican. "Rather than focus on any of these real crises facing our nation, the president has focused his time on forcing through a multitrillion-dollar partisan agenda that hikes taxes, radically expands the scope of the federal government and will hurt our economic recovery.”
But Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, said the Democratic Congress was on the cusp of enacting landmark legislation.
"We came here to do the hard things, the important things, the things that will impact Americans – working-class Americans, middle-class Americans, those struggling to get into the middle class and those struggling to stay there," Schumer said. "It will impact those people for generations."
