[music]

President Biden: Madam Speaker, Madam vice president.

[applause]

President Biden: No president has ever said those words from this podium. No president's ever said those words, and it's about time.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden did make history by speaking those words last night. He also said these.

President Biden: Now after just 100 days, I can report to the nation, America is on the move again.

[applause]

President Biden: --peril into possibility, crisis to opportunity, setbacks into strength.

Brian Lehrer: Biden said those words last night. He also said these.

President Biden: For too long, we failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis. Jobs, jobs, jobs.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: Biden said those words last night. He proposed his American Family Plan with paid family leave, plus two years of pre-K and two years of community college free, and a promise that no American family making less than one and a half times their state's median income would pay more than 7% of their income on childcare. These American Family Plan items would be paid for by a tax increase on corporations and on Americans making over $400,000 a year. About government coordinating all that, Biden also said this.

President Biden: Throughout our history, we think about it, public investment in infrastructure has literally transformed America, our attitudes, as well as our opportunities. The transcontinental railroad, the interstate highways united to oceans and brought a totally new age of progress to the United States of America. Universal public schools and college aid opened wide the doors of opportunity. Scientific breakthroughs took us to the moon, now we're on Mars. Discovering vaccines [crosstalk] gave us the internet and so much more. These are investments we made together as one country, and investments that only the government was in a position to make.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden said those words about government and his American Family Plan and his infrastructure jobs plan. In the Republican response, Senator Tim Scott said these.

Senator Tim Scott: Less than 6% of the President's plan goes the roads and bridges. It's a liberal wishlist, a big government waste, plus the biggest job-killing tax hikes in a generation. Experts say, when all is said and done, it would lower wages of the average American worker and shrink our economy. Tonight, we also heard about a so-called family plan, even more taxing, even more spending to put Washington even more in the middle of your life from the cradle to college. The beauty of the American dream is that families get to define it for themselves. We should be expanding opportunities and options for all families, not throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best.

Brian Lehrer: With all of that as a start, it's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We can take your reactions to either speech. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, and with us now syndicated Washington Post columnist, economics and politics columnist, and CNN commentator, Catherine Rampell. Catherine, thanks for joining us on the morning after. Welcome back to WNYC.

Catherine Rampell: Great to join you.

Brian Lehrer: You heard those clips, you saw the speeches, what's your headline.

Catherine Rampell: I think the headline here was that this was, an optimistic conciliatory speech, in which the president of the United States expressed a desire to work with Republicans, but was willing to barrel ahead if, in fact, Republicans didn't cooperate with his agenda. It wasn't confrontational. Even it said at one point, I think, "I don't want to be confrontational," or something to that effect, but talked about, "Here's my case for helping the middle class, for helping lower-income families through jobs, through various kinds of safety net additions, and here's why I think it would help you America, but all of us need to get on board." The takeaway is basically that his version of unity is about doing things that he thinks will help American families, whether or not Republicans in Congress necessarily decide to get on board.

Brian Lehrer: You're an economics wonk. Let's get into some of these economics proposals that have to do with families. You wrote about these two expansions of the childcare system, universal pre-K, and this is where it gets a little dense, but really meaningful, 7% of your income cap on childcare for families making up to one and a half times their state's median income. Explain what that means to people and how new and important you think it is.

Catherine Rampell: I think this is a very big deal. For decades now, there have been discussions, pleas, about the need for greater childcare support for American families. A majority of women have been in the labor force for something like 40 years, so this is a problem for women and for men, frankly, for at least that time period. There have been periods throughout that history where it looked like we were on the verge of having some sort of, if not universal childcare support system, some greater access to it. Including, of course, when President Trump was in office, there had been discussions about this, and then they went nowhere. If this were to happen, I think it would be a very, very big deal.

The way that Biden is constructing this proposal-- and again, it's a proposal. We don't even have legislation yet, although there's some legislation that looks similar, that's already on the Hill, that'll get to. The way that it would work is that, on a sliding scale, Americans would pay either nothing or up to 7% of their income if they're, in fact, lower-income or middle income as defined by up to one and a half times your state's median income level. You would basically get a voucher that you could use at any licensed care facility in your state. Whether that means a traditional large childcare center, a family-based, childcare facility, something run by a public school, early head start, et cetera. Again, the amount that you pay is kept based on your income. The amount that the provider gets is linked to the quality of that program, as defined by some probably the state and national standards.

The idea being this will incentivize higher-quality programs, and also make childcare more universally affordable, which of course it is not now. One of the lessons of the past year among many other painful lessons is just how fragile the nation's childcare infrastructure is, and how much of the rest of the economy collapses when childcare is out of reach, whether because traditional childcare facilities themselves are closed or, of course, schools are going virtual. Again, I think this would be a very, very big deal if it happened. There's a lot of political support among both Republicans and Democrats, I should say, general public I'm talking about, not necessarily lawmakers, for doing something like this.

This plan, by the way, would only be for children up to age 5. That particular voucher-like system that I was just describing. Of course, there are childcare needs for children who are older as well, and as far as I can tell, the main thing that they are doing there is by proposing to permanently extend a tax credit that partially offsets the cost of childcare. This is an existing tax credit that's been around for decades, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. It was expanded by the American Rescue Plan, which passed last month. Biden is proposing to make that expansion permanent.

Brian Lehrer: He said four years more of education. That's how he framed the section of his speech. "K through 12 isn't enough. We need four more years of free education." He's talking about those two pre-K years, and then two years of free community college, which is not four years of free public college, like Bernie Sanders ran on. He did not say anything about cancellation of existing student debt. How do you see the college piece and politically house Biden's left flank on this?

Catherine Rampell: The college piece, in some ways, is not that different from what the previous administration that Biden served in had also proposed. You may recall that Obama had also proposed free community college, not free four-year public college, which is

what the Bernie Sanders wing of the party has been pushing. I think that this is generally a pretty progressive way to think about expanding educational opportunities. In addition to the community college piece, of course, Biden also talked about making Pell Grants more generous. Those are targeted, of course, to lower-income people who are enrolling in school. It's focused on people who might be on the margin of being able to obtain some sort of post-secondary education who are likely to be lower-income people.

I think there's another important element here which is that he has proposed investing more money in retention and graduation of those students, which is where our current system is a massive failure, both at the community college level and elsewhere in making sure students who enroll ultimately graduate, particularly, if they're part-timers, in part because there are so many other pressures on your life, if you're a nontraditional [unintelligible 00:11:03] student, going to community college, hoping to have a career transition of some kind.

I think these are generally the good building blocks for a policy that would improve mobility. Now, whether those will be enough to satisfy the Bernie Sanders' contingent of the left is a totally separate question. They have been agitating, not only for four-year free college but also, as you mentioned, massive student debt forgiveness to the tune of up to $50,000 in student debt forgiveness. If you crunch the numbers, that ends up meaning that a lot of people who are likely to have high incomes, people who go to graduate school, who get MBAs, or become dentists, or lawyers or whatever, who do have those very high-dollar amounts of student loan debt, who could, in the end, afford to pay them off, it's an investment, they would also get some debt forgiveness. The distributional consequences of this are not as progressive as something that would be maybe more targeted in student debt forgiveness, which Biden has talked about in the past. He talked about it during the campaign, but it's not part of this particular proposal.

Brian Lehrer: All right, listeners, what did you think of either speech? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Spencer in Berkeley Heights, you're on WNYC with Catherine Rampell from The Washington Post. Hi, Spencer.

Spencer: Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Catherine. Thank you for taking my call.

Catherine Rampell: Good morning.

Spencer: Good morning. My reaction to President Biden's speech, first of all, was a welcome change in tone and tenor from the previous administration's State of the Union, which had our country teetering on the verge of a never-ending hellscape. It was nice for a president to be able to convey more realistically that we were starting to push the needle in the correct direction, and that there was potential for us to be able to see an upside over the next few months, if not years.

What got in my craw though was the response from Senator Jim Scott. Biden talked about the idea for bipartisanship, for discussion of ideas. Biden pushed over proposals. There are things at the bargaining table to talk about, and Jim Scott's response was, "Why haven't the kids gone back to school yet?" That was the first thing that came out of his speech, completely oblivious to the fact that half a million people are dead from COVID-19, children are still considered to be an attack vector, teachers are not happy about having to go back into schools that are not necessarily properly prepared for such circumstances. It's a double shot against both Biden and potentially any teachers' unions.

Then further on for Scott to comment about how Biden's plans were laid on details when the man only had an hour and 10 minutes to talk about every single problem that the country is facing, a lot of which originated under Republican policies in the first place. Unfortunately, for most Republicans, and I emphasize the word most, it's hard to find a Republican who is currently a politician who's going to go ahead and engage in the same kind of bipartisanship that Biden did. Biden went so far as to thank Republicans for passing content, for passing legislation. We didn't get anything close to that. Chris Christie, who is an analyst on ABC, last night, his response to Biden's speech was, "It sounded like a 15-year-old with a credit card and no limit." It was, again, for a lot of people in the Republican-- Excuse me. A lot of politicians in the Republican camp, it's still night and day. The reason why it's night is because they never opened their eyes.

Brian Lehrer: Spencer, thank you for all of that. To that point at the end, about what Chris Christie said about Biden being like a-- what did he say? A 15-year-old with a credit card? For you as an economics columnist, Catherine, how much does all of this pay for itself?

Catherine Rampell: It depends on how you do the budgeting. Biden has said that, not that these things will pay for themselves, but he will have fiscal offsets. Meaning that if it costs X dollars to extend the child tax credit, then we will raise X dollars through some other means, including higher corporate income-- well, in this case, I guess capital gains taxes for that particular bundle of proposals. He has proposed a number of ways to pay for stuff.

Now, on the sidelines, officials from the White House have been arguing that these policies will pay off on their own, independent of how they get budgeted by the CBO, et cetera. They're playing a little bit of games with the budgeting by saying, for example, "These things will be spent over, for example, on the infrastructure plan, something like eight years, but we're going to pay for it over 15 years," which is not traditional, but I guess it could work out.

The other question is, how many of these pay-fors will actually happen? There's a fair amount of resistance even within the Democratic Party to doing all of the things that Biden has said. He's put a lot of constraints on himself on how he will raise revenue, including by saying no additional taxes will be levied on anyone earning or any household earning under $400,000, which rules out something like 95% of households. Even on the corporate income tax side, Democrats have indicated that maybe they're not going to go as high as 28%, which is what Biden had proposed for the corporate income tax rate, but they would go to 25%.

It seems like even if Biden's plan on paper does add up so that it doesn't add to deficits over some timeframe he has constructed, Democrats may not necessarily be willing to go along with all of those pay-fors and may instead end up saying, "You know what? Maybe we don't need to pay for everything. Republicans didn't pay for everything. They didn't pay for their tax cuts. They didn't pay for their spending increases. Why do we need to be held by different roles?"

Brian Lehrer: Jasmine in Prospect Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jasmine. Thanks for calling in.

Jasmine: Hey, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you fine, yes.

Jasmine: Great. Oh, my gosh, I [unintelligible 00:17:57] I called a long time ago on a different segment, [unintelligible 00:17:58] Brooklyn. Just to preface, I'm white. I'm a trans woman. I'm a counselor with Identity House in New York City, which is our oldest LGBT peer counseling organization in the city. I want to talk about basically the frustration around the minimum wage, the fact that I think that Biden withdrawing on it and effectively not using his power to pressure it through more. I think [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: He did say $15-- Just for the record, he did, going up to $15 minimum wage in the speech last night. Go ahead.

Jasmine: Right, yes. I just want to say that the fact that he deferred to the parliamentarian there and that when we have years and years of Republicans filibustering and shoving in a Supreme Court seat, and he wanted to defer to the parliamentarian there. My point is that I think it's sad that our cultural memory, at least in general, a lot of the time on the left and certainly amongst centrists that has already seemed to already slip into the background, meanwhile, of course, Biden and a lot of centrists continue to be patted on the back.

Anytime they give a shout-out to trans people or queer people, or in movements for Black Lives or Stop Asian Hate, they're given all these ally points for that, when in reality and in my personal experience as a peer counselor, every single social issue is tied to people's ability to make enough money to survive and to be independent from parents, family, an abusive spouse, if they need to. Every social issue from a trans person moving out of their house and affording the care they need, to a woman stuck in a domestic violence situation but not being able to move out because they can't make enough money to survive. I really [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: When he said last night-- because this is getting some news coverage, when he

he said young transgender people are so brave, he used that word, and he said to transgender people, "We have your back," or "I have your back," that's getting a lot of coverage as groundbreaking for a president to say.

Jasmine: Yes. That's nice. Truthfully, Brian. My feeling is that's nice, certainly better than Trump. It's not a Black and white issue here. It's good for him to be recognizing that. He's very much following the cultural tide. However, the left is, by and large, just not tying direct economic games directly into identity politics. My overall politics generally follows that, and it's beyond frustrating because [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: One more thing that he would probably say at you, and [crosstalk] what you have to say about it, he would probably say that all of these jobs programs in the American jobs program, as he calls it, and the American Family program, as he calls it, are targeted to reduce inequality and certainly in racial terms I'm not sure that he tied LGBT to that exactly, but to bring up all these ways, where people are not making a decent living, and he didn't rewrite it, he has not emphasized the minimum wage as something that he's going to fight through, or he thinks he can't get through the Senate, but there are all these other economic things he would say that are huge.

Jasmine: Again, my general take is that that's nice but I really want everyone anytime we push an identity politics type of declaration, "I support trans people, I support Black people," we need to have an economic statement tied to it. I want more people on the left to have that stance because I don't think it's enough to put up a sign in your window but not fight for people on a financial level too.

Brian Lehrer: Very important, Jasmine, thank you very much.

Jasmine: Yes. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: As we run out of time, Catherine we're going to bring on Congressman Adriano Espaillat next, with your politics columnist hat on, how much of everything we've been talking about, everything and Biden's American Jobs Act, Families Act, the Families Act is the new part from last night, how much does he need 60 votes in the Senate to pass these things and if so, can he shame 10 Republicans into voting for these American Family Plan middle-class benefits, because they're going to be popular?

Catherine Rampell: All indications so far are that Republicans are not going to play ball. They have been critical of the infrastructure plan. They have so far been critical of the American Families Plan, although it's a difficult stance to maintain, given, as you point out, most of its individual elements, including greater access to childcare, paid family leave, et cetera, are quite popular. They're going to cast their objections as something along the lines of, "These are too broad. It's a liberal wish list. It's not focused enough, et cetera," but I think there will be no way to satisfy those criticisms.

[crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Well under what they call-- I'm going to rush you only because we're short on time, but under what they call the reconciliation system, if it's a budget bill, he can do it with the 51 votes, like they did with COVID relief. I'm asking you, do the American Family Plan items, like the cap on how much a family would spend for childcare or free pre-K or community college fit into that or would he need 60 votes, if you know?

Catherine Rampell: It depends on what the Senate parliamentarian says on a bunch of these things. I suspect some of them will qualify and will pass what's called the Byrd Rule as being sufficiently related to the budget, and some of them may not. That may set up some very difficult fights in the weeks and months ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Washington Post syndicated columnist and CNN commentator, Catherine Rampell. Catherine, we always appreciate it.

Catherine Rampell: Thank you.

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