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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. So, love him for it or hate him for it, President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan unveiled yesterday isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about climate, it's also about unions, it's also about family, and it's also about restoring some economic balance. After decades of the concentration of wealth in this country run amok. Here's Biden from his rollout speech yesterday, just saying it out loud.

President Joe Biden: We all will do better when we all do well. It's time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top down. It hadn't worked very well. For the economy overall it hadn't worked because Wall Street didn't build this country. You, great middle class, built this country, and unions built the middle class. It's time. This time, we'll rebuild the middle class, we're going to bring everybody along, regardless of your background, your color, your religion, no matter, everybody gets to come along.

Today, I'm proposing a plan for the nation that rewards work, not just rewards wealth. That builds a fair economy that gives everybody a chance to succeed. And it's going to create the strongest, most resilient, innovative economy in the world.

Brian: President Biden yesterday. We've got a couple of more clips to play that I think are also very interesting and even philosophically revealing, and we'll get to those. With me now is political economics correspondent, Megan Cassella. Her article is called "Biden looks for an infrastructure win where Obama and Trump failed." Megan, thanks for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Megan Cassella: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Brian: Your lead line says Biden will try to turn a long-running Washington punchline into a legacy-defining policy achievement, why do you call infrastructure a long-running Washington punchline?

Megan: Well, we all lived through the Trump administration, and I think we heard over and over again that it was infrastructure week. In the beginning, we thought it was really going to happen, we were going to see some infrastructure plans, then it started to become a punchline when the Trump administration wanted to change the narrative and distract from something else that was going on. We thought we might get an infrastructure week then, and of course, it never happened. Now despite all the jokes about infrastructure week for years and years now we may well have I'd say at least an infrastructure year, if not longer.

Brian: The clip we just played from near the beginning of the speech, cast some shade on Wall Street and some love on unions, and says that building the economy from the top-down, as opposed to from the bottom up, and from the middle out doesn't work. How much is Biden laying out a restructuring of the economy or a redistribution of wealth after decades of it being redistributed for most people to the top few percent?

Megan: That's definitely part of this plan. It's interesting how under the infrastructure umbrella, Biden has really found a way to touch on a number of his broader priorities, and one of them being a more redistributive tax policy and redistributing wealth, and tackling income inequality. I actually think we will continue to see him address that through the second part of this plan that we expect to be rolled out in a couple of weeks that will include more pay force and we expect other sorts of tax hikes as well.

This one focuses just on corporate tax hikes. That's how he'll pay for this. They say, even though they're spending the money over eight years, they will get back through revenue raisers over 15, so not exactly an equal 10-year plan as we're used to seeing, but over 15-years, at least, it would raise the money back by raising taxes on corporations. It's a way of finding something that at least most Democrats, if not all, Democrats should be able to rally around, and it touches on that priority that he just spoke about, about as you said, casting shade on Wall Street and making sure the biggest companies pay their fair share, as he says.

Brian: Politically, do you think he's going after the white working-class and white middle class, part of which is very Republican constituency by offering something and coupling it with a certain sense of grievance against Wall Street in the top few percent? Because let's face it, Trump got elected partly on running to a white working-class on grievance against elites, and the Democrats do it too. They do it in their way.

Megan: They do. It's an interesting question, and a really interesting point, and something that I think we'll see become a theme throughout Biden's term. In some ways, this is a way that he can look to try to win back some of those Trump voters, people who had been Democrats their entire life, the blue-collar workers who then found something in Trump that resonated with them and switch parties that way. At the same time, this is also something that Joe Biden has really championed his entire career in terms of blue-collar workers, pro-union, he's Little Joe from Scranton, and he went to Pittsburgh yesterday for this speech. He's clearly really trying to amp up that theme.

The other aspect, too, is that the White House in designing this plan did it in a pretty shrewd way, in where they're clearly looking for bipartisanship here. Many of the things that are going to be the most controversial, I should say, are saved for that second plan, and that's tax hikes on individuals, that's investments more in what they're calling a care infrastructure where there's some pushback that it's not quite infrastructure.

There's some of that in this first plan, but much of it is saved for roads and bridges and transit, that physical infrastructure, its broadband access, its access to clean water. These are the things where they're really hoping for bipartisanship, at least from some moderate Republicans, or from those white working-class voters, as you mentioned, who are probably, or at least the White House hopes they will look at this plan and say, "I agree that we should have more roads and bridges. I agree that the biggest companies should pay more in taxes," and so there's a lot to like here.

Brian: Listeners your day one questions about the Biden infrastructure plan welcome here for Megan Cassella, who covers Biden economics for Politico. 646-435-7280. If you have a question about this plan, you can offer day one opinion about this plan, too, but mostly, we're getting to know what's in it. This is a big plan with many moving parts. So questions, particularly welcome at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Or you can tweet or comment or question @BrianLehrer.

You mentioned a couple of times already, Megan, that there's a part one to this bill and a part two, and Biden said this one, the one he talked about yesterday, which he's framing around jobs is the first half, he'll unveil the second half later this month, which is built around the idea of family. Tell us more about what that part will include and how family and infrastructure become part of the same thing.

Megan: We don't know exactly what's in it yet, but there's widespread expectation it will include efforts to make the expanded child tax credit permanent, or at least to extend it for several more years. That's a step that was first taken in the American rescue plan that was just passed, they expanded it for just one year. There's efforts to make that permanent. There's discussion about universal pre-K, about making community college tuition-free, and much more investment in terms of families, there's likely to be something on paid leave, more on childcare.

They've alternated what they're calling this, I think they're going to call it the American Families Plan. They focus on the care infrastructure or human infrastructure. Their point there is that, in order for society to run better, not only do we need better roads and bridges that are more sustainable to pick storms, for example, and create jobs that way. For example, one thing that's been a big priority for the White House is getting women back to work, you can't get women back to work in a major way unless we do fix and invest in our childcare system. We know that from looking at the jobs data that women have dropped out of the labor force.

Elizabeth Warren actually was one of the first people to really start championing or repeating the line childcare is infrastructure. That's what we're going to see in that second plan. There's a lot of pushes for things that really help people in their homes and in their daily lives and framing it as infrastructure in part because it's one way of emphasizing this is something that the country needs in order to run better. They'll get some pushback on that, they're already getting that even in the first aspect of this plan that it's too broad. It doesn't just touch on physical infrastructure as we picture it, roads and bridges, but that's at least the argument they will be making.

Brian: The $2 trillion price tag we're hearing, is that just for the jobs portion or for the whole thing?

Megan: That's just for the jobs portion. The second portion is likely to be in the trillions as well. We don't know exactly what the price tag will be yet.

Brian: Wow. Even at that there's pushback from the left, you quote AOC in your article saying that this is too small, it doesn't go far enough, and we'll get to that, but let me take a call. Will, in Jersey City, you're on WNYC with Megan Cassella, who covers economics in the Biden administration for Politico. Hi, Will.

Will: Good morning. I'd like to know in this proposal, what specifically does the president have proposed to strengthen unions? I'm a member of the Teacher Union here in New Jersey, so I'm curious to hear specifically what proposals are you making to strengthen?

Brian: Will, thank you. We mentioned that in the clip that we played at the top. He particularly shouted out some love for unions. Are there provisions in here that would strengthen unions, and Will said he's in the teacher's union, that public-sector unions, including teacher's unions, are fairly strong relative to the private sector where they shriveled so much? In general, and with particular respect to private-sector unions, is there anything in this bill to strengthen them?

Megan: There is. The most significant of which is that it will include in this bill, the PRO Act that the House has been pushing. The PRO Act is an acronym for Protecting the Right to Organize. If Congress went ahead and passed this bill, just the way that Biden proposed it, it would include that bill that makes it easier for workers to form unions that extends collective bargaining rights to independent contractors. Most people I talked to about that bill say this would really revamp unions across the country by just filling out their ranks, making it so that many, many more workers can join unions and then strengthening them and instructing their rights and their power across the country.

Brian: Interesting. On the question of tax hikes, here's another clip of Biden from the speech.

President Biden: Here's what I'll do, I'll start with one rule, no one. Let me say it again, no one making under $400,000, will see their federal taxes go up, period. This is not about penalizing anyone. I have nothing against millionaires and billionaires. I believe in American capitalism. I want everyone to do well, but here's the deal, right now, middle-class couple, a firefighter and a teacher with two kids making a combined salary of say $110,000, $120,000 a year pays 22 cents for each additional dollar they earned in federal income tax, but a multinational corporation that builds a factory abroad, brings it home and sell it, they paid nothing at all."

Brian: Biden yesterday. Megan, do you have enough of the fine print to fact-check that yet? I imagine Republicans will argue that there are tax hikes for people making less than $400,000, depending on how you define tax hikes. Yes?

Megan: Right. What's interesting is that they're already-- Or I guess Biden's continuing to emphasize that he won't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. In this first plan, we only know they're only proposing corporate tax hikes in the first version. We don't even have the fine print yet to start to pass. We widely expect there to be some personal income tax hikes in the second round because they'll need another round of pay force or ways to pay for that plan.

That may well include raising the personal income tax rate, the top personal income tax rate that would affect the wealthiest Americans. That may well include increasing the capital gains tax or the estate tax, or Biden's a fan of something called the stepped-up basis, which affects wealthy heirs, and whether they'll have to pay taxes when that money is passed down to the next generation.

All of that likely will affect the wealthiest Americans. We don't know enough yet to know exactly how it'll be structured or who will be affected right now. All he's proposing for this first round is just to raise the corporate tax rate.

Brian: Listener on Twitter writes, "I love the opportunities for jobs. I did not see opportunities for offering training for good infrastructure jobs, plumbing, electric, green energy, et cetera, for Black, brown low-income community members and union membership opportunities." Are things like that in there?

Megan: That's an interesting question. I also have not seen much on training. That's not to say it's not in there, but the emphasis really here is on the jobs themselves, but on the point on making opportunities available for Black and brown communities, there are several provisions in here that do note that they want to make sure that some portion of the investments, 40% in some places, or certain proportions of those investments are going to disadvantaged communities, low-income communities.

In the research section there's some money preserved for HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges, and Universities. That's one of those overarching Biden priorities that we do see a little bit reflected here is narrowing income inequality, racial inequality, and that sort of thing.

Brian: Frank, in Lindenhurst, you're on WNYC. Hi, Frank?

Frank: Hi. Here's my concern. I'm 63, I'm semi-retired, I'm concerned about my savings. All of the printing of this money I'm worried it will devalue my savings. Now, it used to be my father who worked for a company and he got a pension, but, of course, that all changed with the 401K. I'm all for helping the lower classes have to their improve their life. I'm all for that.

Personally, I have a budget that's much less than $100,000 a year, I don't know what everybody else has budgeted, but I worked hard, I saved my money according to my advisors, I save enough, but I'm concerned that we're [unintelligible 00:15:53] they don't talk about the debt much at all. Trump raised it and now Biden is going to increase it, so I'm worried. Can you address that?

Brian: Although Frank, you know that for your 401K, the stock market, other than the pandemic shock went up and up and up during Trump, as the deficit expanded, and it's been going up and up and up during Biden with Wall Street knowing perfectly well what he has in mind.

Frank: Understood, but how long can we do that? I try to this modern monetary theory where people aren't as concerned as much about a debt as they used to with these economists. They're not guaranteeing us anything. We all saw the collapse in 2008 and I'm quite worried that that could happen again. People like me, I didn't aspire to make $250,000 or $400,000 or $500,000 or a $1 million. I never aspired to-- I'm very happy living with less than a six-figure salary my whole life. I'm very satisfied with living the lifestyle I have now, but I don't have to have to work anymore. I feel like I'm entitled now to--

Brian: To live on your retirement savings. Frank, I hear you. Of course, there could come a point with deficits and debt where that starts to happen. Megan, how would the Biden administration respond to Frank's concerns?

Megan: I can say that this has been top of mind in Washington among policymakers, just are we spending too much money? It's the right question to ask, and many, many people have been asking it and the Biden administration would tell you they've thought this out. For months now, they've taken that into account. They know there's a risk of spending so much money, especially now that the economy is already starting to recover. Is it too much money and the word you hear most often is overheating, and then that could spark inflation.

What they've landed on and these are-- Janet Yellen, for example, now Treasury Secretary also had been at the federal reserve. One of the most respected economic minds in Washington. She says we're not going to hit that point. The current chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell says a little bit of inflation could be good. That's what the federal reserve is designed. They have tools to get that under control. Everybody says they've learned from 2008 and they're not going to let it get to that point. Definitely, I understand the risk, and that's why there's been so much discussion of this.

The other thing is as was just mentioned, there's really been a transformation of thinking among most mainstream economists, if not all, that we don't need to worry about the debt in quite the same way that we did a few decades ago, or even more recently than that just a few years ago, partly because of the lower cost of borrowing money, and different things like that, that even just adding to the debt, isn't quite the same concern or worry. There doesn't need to be the same concern or worry as there once was.

This is top of mind for them certainly, and they would reassure you as they have been now to those who ask these questions for the last few weeks, that they have all of this at top of mind, and they don't think they're spending too much money instead, "We're investing it in the country, it will generate revenue." They're proposing ways to pay for most of it, and they'll make sure that inflation does not get out of control.

Brian: Right. The caller mentioned modern monetary theory which is progressive economics that argues that deficits don't matter to inflation or to ultimate debt crises in the ways that they once did, or that economists believe too that they did. I guess time will tell if we continue to borrow more and more money. Of course, before 2008, people thought that the housing market could only go up [laughs] and things like securitizing mortgages would guarantee profits. Frank, thank you. Call us again. On the other side of that, we have people like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as you quote in your article, and others on the left, saying that the Biden infrastructure bill doesn't go far enough in terms of size, what do they want?

Megan: They want much more in terms of investment. A big focus for Ocasio-Cortez and others is on climate. That many of these climate groups have been requesting or suggesting $10 trillion in spending over 10 years on climate alone. This Biden plan that encompasses some climate investments as well is just over $2 trillion over eight years, so it's not even close to what they've been asking for. Other groups have a smaller ask, but they want about $4 trillion on climate and labor over four years. Of course, everybody just wants more money here.

One of the reasons that this has become such a flashpoint and there's been so much lobbying and so much emphasis and focus on making sure that different priorities are reflected and reflected adequately here is that there's widespread concern and the conventional wisdom in Washington is that the Democrats will only get one more chance this year to pass a bill through reconciliation, meaning they don't need Republican votes.

Because of how tightly, how narrow the Democrats' majorities are, they only have three votes to lose in the house and none in the Senate. That because of the way things are those political dynamics, they won't get another chance after that to pass, possibly anything else before the midterms when the incumbent president's party tends to not do so well. Democrats feel like they only have possibly one more shot to get anything done in this Congress, and so everybody really wants to pile on and make sure their priorities are reflected.

Brian: Josie, in Fairfield, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Josie.

Josie: Hi. Thanks so much. I love listening to you and your show. My question is more about Solid Waste Management. Is there anything in this bill about how we can divert our waste from landfills towards more sustainable waste solutions, waste management solutions? Because when you look at the overall waste management hierarchy, the EPA and the European Union both agree that landfills are probably the worst way that we can manage our waste.

Of course, the first step in this is reducing the generation of waste followed by reusing, and then recycling, composting, then comes energy recovery, and last is landfill. Yet when we look at all of our policies, and the way the waste management business is in its current state, recycling is almost now wish cycling. Waste to energy facilities have a very bad report because they rest on the laurels of the pre-1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which has drastically improved the performance of these facilities. Is there anything in here that's going to lead us towards managing our wastes more responsibly?

Brian: Josie, thank you so much. Solid Waste infrastructure, is it in the bill? Do you know?

Megan: I don't know much about solid waste, in particular. I do know that they want to, for example, invest in some water efficiency and recycling programs. There is a little bit of that, I don't know how big of a component it is in this bill. I think overall, the fact that they're looking at upgrading a lot of this infrastructure and the physical infrastructure, and a lot of it is about clean water, I would imagine that wastewater is addressed there as well. It's not exactly the waste management that Josie was asking about, but I would imagine that if you're looking more into the fine print, there may well be some projects that come out of this, that do address some of the concerns that she's facing.

Brian: Thank you, Josie. Call us again. Also on the climate aspects of the bill, you note that it includes a call to end fossil fuel subsidies, do we as taxpayers still subsidize the mega profitable fossil fuel companies?

Megan: We do. It's one of the things that progressive Democrats, in particular, have been calling for so long, but now they're labeling it often the bare minimum, like the least we can do is stop subsidizing these companies, and that is something that Biden's proposing to do in this plan. It's obviously such a flashpoint because it really angers oil and gas companies. Lawmakers who are close with those companies will, of course, maybe have a hard time voting for something that ends those subsidies and close other loopholes and so forth that they benefit from. It will be interesting to see if that becomes a flashpoint or a central point of debate on Capitol Hill. We'll have to see.

Brian: We're talking about the Biden infrastructure bill, the first half of it unveiled yesterday by the president himself in the speech. We're talking about it with Megan Cassella who covers economics for Politico. Lisa, in Glen Cove, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I have a question about the SALT tax where you can't take any more than $10,000 deductions, personal deductions on your taxes. Tom Suozzi is asking that it be repealed in this act. It seems Newsday is reporting that the president has said that he will talk to him about it. I just want to know how good a chance you think we have of having it repealed.

Brian: Yes, and Tom Suozzi would be your congressman since you live in Glen Cove, right?

Lisa: Yes, he is.

Brian: We got his press release yesterday that said basically, "I'm going to vote against this bill unless it repeals the SALT tax." For people that don't know what that is, State and Local Tax S-A-L-T, that there's now a $10,000 limit on how much you can deduct state and local tax payments from your federal tax payments. You know, Megan, I'm sure you've seen that there are two different views on this on the left, one is that a lot of Democrats consider this a blue state tax because it is in the wealthier states which tend to be more Democratic, New York and California and New Jersey and Connecticut, in particular, where people have such high property taxes or pay such high local and state income tax rates that they do pay more than $10,000 in state and local taxes.

Limiting that which came from Trump was seen as a new tax on blue states. On the other hand, there are people on the left who say, "No, wait, if you're paying more than $10,000 in state and local income taxes, then you're in a higher income bracket, you're one of the wealthier people and so there should be this limit, that that's a progressive tax or a progressive limit on a tax deduction." I think I'm being clear, so how do you see this debate playing out among Democrats in Congress right now?

Megan: Yes, you laid that out really well. It's a really interesting debate since it's sort of intraparty, it's among the Democrats. Back to the original question of how good of a chance is congressman Suozzi have here, he was the first and there's a small group now of four house Democrats from New York and New Jersey, blue state Democrats that have come out publicly attach their name and said, "I'll vote against this if we don't address the SALT tax deduction here."

I mentioned earlier that the Democrats in the house only have three votes to lose. If that group of four stays united, they really do have some power here to resist, to oppose the bill really unless they get some of what they want assuming that no republicans come on board as there's lots of expectation we're not going to win over too many republican votes here. We reported, my colleagues in Congress reported that those four have come out publicly, but there's actually a few more, maybe 10 or 12 more that are thinking about coming out publicly that share the same concerns. If that group stays united and really keeps their feet in the ground about this, then it really could make a difference.

As you mentioned, of course, it's a debate within the party. I think the party recognizes overall that they want to get this done, and so maybe there will be some adjustments here, maybe won't be everything that the blue state Democrats want, particularly since as you mentioned there are other members of the party who feel that everything on SALT should stay the way that it. We'll see that play out. I think it will remain though a story for at least a while longer until they establish some sort of a compromise to get these blue-state Democrats back on board.

Brian: We'll have congressman Suozzi back on the program before too long to talk about that aspect of it. I know you got to go in a minute. I want to play one more clip because one of the lines from Biden's speech that you quote in your article is, "If we act now, in 50 years, people are going to look back and say this was the moment that America won the future." Here's an aspect of that, we've talked on the show before about how Biden has a long relationship with china's leader Xi Jinping and how President Xi seems to genuinely argue that democracy doesn't work, too much political gridlock to really move a country forward in the public interest. Beyond the nuts and bolts of roads and bridges and environmental sustainability, Biden yesterday cited this.

President Biden: I truly believe we're in a moment where history is going to look back on this time as a fundamental choice had to be made between democracies and autocracies. There's a lot of autocrats in the world who think the reason why they're going to win is democracies can't reach consensus any longer, autocracies do. That's a competition between America and China and the rest of the world is all about. It's a basic question. Can democracy still deliver for their people? Can they get a majority? I believe we can. I believe we must.

Brian: Democracy versus autocracy is at stake. Megan, the president used that argument to put pressure on Republicans to give him some bipartisan buy-in to show democracy can work.

Megan: He sure did. I think it's part of what I mentioned at the start of the White House clearly designed this proposal with trying to get bipartisan support for it, trying to get some Republicans on board, and that pitch yesterday was part of that. He's really appealing to the idea of one, we often hear the statistic that we're now 13th in the world for infrastructure as one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we should not be so low, and that we can do better.

It's an appeal to patriotism in a way and the can-do American spirit. It's also competitiveness a little bit and just we need better roads and bridges. It's something that everybody can see in their own communities. At its core, even though there's so much else in this bill at its core, that's going to be a main focus of it as well.

The other part being that one of the reasons we haven't done this in so long, there you can debate when exactly was the last time we had such an investment in the country's infrastructure, but often I hear that it was the 1950s under President Dwight Eisenhower, was the last time we really devoted so much money in terms of the size and the scope of this plan to infrastructure. It's been so long because democracies aren't good at implementing something like this, aren't good as Biden said, at agreeing on how to move forward. That's what he's trying to emphasize here as well to get some Republicans on board.

Brian: Yes. An investment, which you just used is such a keyword because he would argue that if this cost $2 trillion, or with part two coming along $4 trillion, that that's not expenditure. That's simply going to increase the debt and threaten people's 401Ks like one of the callers was worried about. At least, in Biden's argument, this is an investment that just like cutting taxes on the rich from the Republican side, they say, "Well, that doesn't decrease government revenue," though it does.

It ultimately comes out in more because it grows the economy, this is what Biden is arguing for this spending. Ultimately, it's an investment that's going to grow the economy, not shrink it. Debate engaged day one of the infrastructure plan debate in Washington, Megan Cassella, covers economics for Politico. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

Megan: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

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