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The $1.9-trillion COVID-19 relief bill that President Biden signed into law Thursday includes an initiative that looks a lot like guaranteed income for families. Starting in July, parents of children ages 17 and younger will get monthly cash grants of up to $300 per child, to spend however they please.

Could this be the start of a broader effort to combat poverty with bigger monthly checks? Some signs point to yes. Although no Republicans voted for the COVID bill, there has been bipartisan support in Congress for increasing the child tax credit and for turning it into a monthly payment, rather than a once-a-year reduction in one’s income taxes.

Speaking of families, the budget also aims to eliminate a provision that allows schools to provide free school lunches to all their students; instead, it aims to means-test which kids are allowed to have free lunch and which ones aren’t.

Recent reporting [shows] that some conservatives see [resurrecting] the expanded "child tax credit" as a "bargaining chip that we can use." The policy in question is a provision of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan that gave parents up to $300 a month for every child in their household.

Republicans have claimed over and over again that they are not trying to cut Social Security and Medicare. Heck, Joe Biden got them to agree they would not make cuts to the programs, in a memorable verbal maneuver during his State of the Union speech earlier this year.

And yet the Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) just released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party seeks to, you guessed it, cut Social Security and Medicare.

Not too long ago, radical environmentalists in Congress attempted to pass an extreme climate change agreement they dubbed the "Green New Deal." Though this legislation did not pass and is widely unpopular with the American populace, that has not stopped Democrats from trying to implement portions of the legislation at the state and local levels.

The hyper-fixation by Democrats, or as I like to call them, Spendorcrats, on alternative energy is a dangerous precedent by leadership in this country. Earlier this month, our country was on the brink of default because Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress neglected to negotiate a budget until the last minute, despite ongoing attempts by Republicans for nearly half a year.

House Republicans launched a biting attack Thursday against an aggressive Democratic Green New Deal plan to tackle climate change, with one senior GOP lawmaker contending it would be “tantamount to genocide.”

Republicans have sought to portray the Green New Deal proposal as a “socialist” takeover of the economy that would destroy the U.S., even though the non-binding resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is vague in its call to transition to a clean economy, create jobs and refurbish buildings to become more efficient.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans on Tuesday defeated the “Green New Deal” resolution that called for tackling climate change by moving the United States off fossil fuels, while Democrats said the vote was a political stunt on an issue that will not die.

FILE PHOTO: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks with reporters following a policy luncheon in Washington, U.S. March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Erin Scott

Congressional Republicans are reflexively rejecting the largest climate bill in U.S. history. But some of their allies fear the approach will backfire.

GOP lawmakers have attacked the climate and energy pieces of the Senate-passed Inflation Reduction Act, which devotes $369 billion to mitigating planet-warming emissions, by labeling it as modeled on Democrats’ Green New Deal. This line of criticism persists even though the compromise legislation negotiated by Senate Energy Chair Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer includes fossil-friendly provisions Republican legislators typically support.

Why businesses lobby To understand the techniques businesses employ to lobby for their interests, as well as the lengths to which they are prepared to go to safeguard these interests, we need to understand their incentives for doing so. The literature on lobbying identifies three main rationales for interest groups to develop a lobbying strategy: to achieve their political goals (Beyers 2008: 1192; Michalowitz 2007); to respond to organisational needs (Binderkrantz 2005; Lowery 2007); to react to contextual pressures (Baumgartner et al 2009; Mahoney 2007). Put simply, businesses are prepared to invest considerable resources into efforts to increase or at least maintain their bottom line. Alongside advertising, public affairs and market communications, lobbying public decision makers is a key component of these efforts. In fact, according to a recent study of lobbying and public affairs in Europe, “in the global marketplace, to be competitive means increasingly being able to exert pressure on government” (Bitonti and Harris 2017). “Knowledge of the political market” has come to be seen as “contributing directly to business performance” (Andrews 1996: 79). Miller (2006) even writes that “a company's return on lobbying and campaign contributions – let's call it return on political investment, or ROPI – is astronomically higher than any real investment it can make”. Academic studies confirm that corporate lobbying leads to higher shareholder value. In a study of more than 20,000 firms in 47 countries, Faccio (2006) found that, on average, firms experience a 2 per cent increase in shareholder wealth after the announcement that their executive or large shareholder is entering politics. Conversely, Faccio and Parsley (2009) observe a value loss of about 2 per cent after an event that disrupts a firm’s political connections. Particularly in high-stakes sectors, such as infrastructure or manufacturing, failure to secure contracts or maintain good relations with regulators can threaten the very existence of some companies (Bitonti and Harris 2017). Mathur et al. (2013) observe a positive correlation between how intensively a firm lobbies and its value creation. They therefore expect that most large firms will “pursue lobbying as a nonmarket strategy to create value” (Mathur et al. 2013). Businesses lobby policymakers for a number of reasons, such as winning contracts, entering new markets and protecting their position in existing markets, as well as influencing laws, regulations and public policies that affect their area of operations. Broadly speaking, there are two main arenas in which companies seek to consolidate political capital and exert influence: when interacting with the state as regulator and the state as purchaser. Influencing regulations and public policy Governments legislate and regulate on a huge range of matters, from product safety and packaging to intellectual property, fair trading Transparency International Anti-Corruption Helpdesk Businesses’ lobbying practices 5 practices, civil rights, environmental issues and so on. All such measures can directly affect how advantageous a given business environment is for a firm, and businesses consequentially have a clear incentive to try to lobby decision makers to make the marketplace as favourable as possible. Indeed, as well as adding market value, lobbying has been shown to result in favourable policy outcomes. Lord (2000) found that congressional staff in the United States perceived professional lobbying as the most effective means of influencing legislation. Winning public procurement tenders Governments are typically one of the largest players in a country’s economy. The government acts as purchaser of services and allocator of state resources, and public contracts form the backbone of many firms’ revenue streams. Particularly when it comes to public procurement processes, the winner-takes-all model ensures intense lobbying on the part of companies competing in the tender (Bitonti and Harris 2017).

In an effort to spur economic development, several bills have been introduced in Congress to resurrect Depression-era “public works” programs. Such legislation has been heartily supported by organized labor and other interventionist groups.

But such programs cannot reduce unemployment any more than the Depression-era programs did. The unemployment rate was higher in 1939—despite millions of workers placed in government jobs by the Roosevelt administration—than it was in 1.931 on the eve of President Roosevelt’s election.

The debate between “guaranteed” jobs or income played out in the 1972 primary between Humphrey and McGovern. Each candidate battled for the soul of the Democratic Party, with two competing versions for resolving unemployment and poverty. In Humphrey’s corner were the NAACP and AFL-CIO. Remnants of the anti-war movement and  backed McGovern.

There were no winners. After Humphrey’s primary attacks, McGovern , a third as large as Nixon’s guaranteed income plan (a precursor to the Earned Income Tax Credit), which  led the fight against. Then came the larger economic crisis of the 1970s: rising unemployment, high inflation, and stagnating wages. Democrats made an unusual move, endorsing the Humphrey-Hawkins Act in the 1976 platform, the first real attempt to establish a job guarantee since the late New Deal. House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill called it the “centerpiece.” Voters responded by electing a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, a 74-seat majority in the House, and Jimmy Carter, who officially committed to support the bill.

It took a half-century of growing inequality, a massive recession, a spoiler primary campaign by a self-proclaimed socialist, and the election of a quasi-fascist, but big ideas are here again for Democrats. Medicare for All, paid family leave, tuition-free college—not since the late 1960s and ’70s has the Democratic Party had such a bold, liberal agenda. Now, likely presidential candidates are even talking about job guarantees and universal basic income. The future seems left indeed. But before assuming that anything is possible, it is worth considering just how bad things had to get for these goals, many of which were first proposed long ago, to be revived—and what destroyed these causes in the past, when the progressive coalition was much stronger. Major reform of the kind now under consideration has only passed in times of extreme crisis. (Think about how much of the liberal Democratic state was enacted in a mere six years, shared between the New Deal and Great Society.) And while the party appears to have decided to “lurch left” to win back the blue-collar whites who voted for Donald Trump after voting for Barack Obama, there is no shortage of research demonstrating that American economic policy has long been well to the right of where voters actually want it. The job guarantee is a great example. Over the last month, progressives have been celebrating the legislation recently introduced by Senator Cory Booker, calling for a pilot job guarantee in 15 cities and regions, co-sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand. But this bill preempts universal job guarantee legislation being drawn up by Bernie Sanders and rejects even the limited job guarantee advocated by the Center for American Progress, suggesting that Democratic leaders still do not understand the severity of the problem. Those excited by the idea ought to remember, too, that it was liberals, not conservatives, who have killed job guarantee bills in the past. Direct job-creation seems foreign now, but it was the very heart of the New Deal. Virtually every penny spent in those years went to an alphabet soup of programs like FERA, CWA, PWA, CCC, and the WPA. These were responsible for thousands of schools, hospitals, parks, airfields, roads, sewers, trails, and other valuable infrastructure, helping lay the groundwork for the famous post-war economic boom. Every county in the nation but three had a major public works initiative. And for a solid decade, the U.S. government remained the largest employer in the nation. Joblessness also fell dramatically, if we count public labor—to 9 percent in FDR’s first term, and to 6 percent in 1941 (and this was before the war). No later Congress was more successful. The growth rates in that period were impressive, too, averaging between 8 and 10 percent, far better than most recovering economies. Kiran Klaus Patel, in his 2016 book The New Deal: A Global History, notes that direct job-creation was the most distinctly American feature of the New Deal, although many local governments have used the program in economic downturns through history. Philip Harvey, Steven Attewell, Edwin Amenta, and others have argued that FDR’s Committee on Economic Security saw the better-known insurance and welfare program as fallbacks, actually, to a primary, “forgotten leg” in the welfare state: public employment. Recent pieces on the job guarantee sometimes note that FDR gave the right to work the top spot in his famous second Bill of Rights. And with fear of depression returning after the war, farmers, unions, and liberals mobilized behind a Full Employment bill that ostensibly would have created a permanent WPA. But while a pair of racist southern Democrats and one northern Republican are often blamed for defeating this social democratic legislation, the best new research finds that it was already “one of the most conservative” proposals floating around Congress, before the House ever voted—watered down by the New Deal Keynesian economists who drafted and reworked what became the 1946 Employment Act (which provided full employment in rhetoric only). Happily, depression did not return. But in the fabled 1950s economy, unemployment steadily increased after three recessions, and then “automation” entered the lexicon. By the late 1950s, Walter Reuther, the left-labor leader, was calling for a March on Washington and a “Marshall Plan for the cities,” soon joined by civil rights leaders. John F. Kennedy responded with the first national job training program, but it did little. Lyndon Johnson followed with the Keynesians’ solution: a tax cut, expected to “unleash” the market and (what else?) “create jobs.” Unemployment fell, helped by the Vietnam War, but high rates of joblessness remained, particularly for the “unskilled” and discriminated groups. Very soon after LBJ’s War on Poverty began, various government departments began pushing for direct job-creation and calling for the government to become “employer of last resort,” ideas JFK and LBJ had many times rejected. But domestic welfare was subsumed by the war. Hubert Humphrey carried the banner in 1968, promoting federal planning for jobs, housing, and community development. But when he lost to Nixon, reformers in the party rejected this approach. “New Politics” Democrats turned to George McGovern, who implied that postwar Keynesianism had failed, and instead offered a far less popular solution with voters (and the poor): a “demogrant,” or universal basic income (UBI). Every American would receive an annual income of $1,000, instead of a job. The debate between “guaranteed” jobs or income played out in the 1972 primary between Humphrey and McGovern. Each candidate battled for the soul of the Democratic Party, with two competing versions for resolving unemployment and poverty. In Humphrey’s corner were the NAACP and AFL-CIO. Remnants of the anti-war movement and wealthy suburban liberals backed McGovern. There were no winners. After Humphrey’s primary attacks, McGovern quickly abandoned the demogrant, a third as large as Nixon’s guaranteed income plan (a precursor to the Earned Income Tax Credit), which Eugene McCarthy led the fight against. Then came the larger economic crisis of the 1970s: rising unemployment, high inflation, and stagnating wages. Democrats made an unusual move, endorsing the Humphrey-Hawkins Act in the 1976 platform, the first real attempt to establish a job guarantee since the late New Deal. House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill called it the “centerpiece.” Voters responded by electing a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, a 74-seat majority in the House, and Jimmy Carter, who officially committed to support the bill. But the same veterans of the Great Society killed it. Carter blamed high energy prices for “stagflation,” as well as unions—the largest army in the Democratic base. Despite support from civil rights and religious groups, Carter refused to provide an enforcement mechanism for the legislation, which passed, but in a gutted, toothless form, just like the earlier Employment Act. Ronald Reagan dismantled the job program Nixon had been forced to create just before his reelection. In response, Democratic Party elites followed the advice of the so-called New Democrats, and steadily moved right on “bread and butter” issues. When the Cold War ended, Bill Clinton, who cut his teeth on the 1972 McGovern campaign, reanimated the idea of converting the military—the longest-running, if unacknowledged, jobs program in the U.S.—to more economically and socially productive industries (as McGovern had suggested a generation earlier, taking off from the now-lonely work of Seymour Melman). But the idea never took. Even self-admitted socialists like Oakland’s Ron Dellums refused to close military bases in his district, emblematic of Democratic politicians across the board who failed to recognize defense as an endless source of patronage and pork. By the time Barack Obama became president, Democrats never entertained full employment in any serious, programmatic manner—highlighting how far they had strayed from their New Deal origins in terms of economic policy. Support for a government-imposed ceiling on unemployment, for socially useful, economically productive, and individually satisfying work, has remained extraordinarily high into the Reagan era and present. But popular support alone cannot enact legislation. Clear barriers, intellectual and institutional, stand in the way. Wall Street is considerably stronger, and unions are on their knees. Under Trump, an exciting groundswell of activism has appeared. But it is questionable whether the resistance is powerful enough to defeat the donor class, which is violently opposed to a job guarantee. And many of the special interest groups that have replaced the unions and civil rights groups of earlier decades remain “heads without bodies,” unable to marshal constituents to the cause. Grassroots organizations like Black Lives Matter or the National Women’s March, meanwhile, lack the deep pockets of these liberal lobbies. Democratic policy goals have lurched left, but there is no major effort underway to reform the electoral or legislative system, as the left in earlier periods believed necessary to any major policy goal. Even when the left had both the numbers and financing to rival the GOP, job guarantees were rejected for weak temporary programs because New Deal and Great Society liberals assumed, like their opponents, and most Democratic leaders today, that capitalism would eventually (one day! soon!) provide for all. The jobs vs. income debate is somewhat a false either/or, but it is not surprising that one-percenters in Silicon Valley and Democratic Party elites still favor the UBI overwhelmingly against a public option in the labor market, despite persistently lopsided support for one and not the other. A job guarantee threatens corporate power, while an income guarantee subsidizes it. If the latest job guarantee is not going to end like the rest, progressives will need to grapple with these ideological and institutional barriers. Or fail once more.

There are three problems with this potential interpretation. First, many marginals simply cannot or should not be included in our system of labor. People with disabilities and the elderly should not be forced to perform labor as a way to combat their own marginalization. Health concerns, among other potential complications, will prevent many marginals from participating in the labor force. Second, a jobs guarantee, unlike UBI, would specifically benefit vulnerable populations and therefore the American public is likely to associate it with these groups and further stigmatize them. A jobs guarantee which primarily helps employ people such as previously-convicted felons, people of color, people with disabilities, and single mothers is likely to become unpopular. Although these people would be working for the money they receive from the government, it is easy to imagine a jobs guarantee being attacked as another form of government welfare that fosters dependence. Third, even if a jobs guarantee remained highly 41 popular and was seen as a way to help poor Americans without facilitating their dependence, this very notion reinforces dependence itself as a degrading condition that must be avoided at all costs.

The  bears striking resemblance to the blueprint that far-right lawmakers unveiled in March, as they laid out the conditions in which they might support a debt increase — something many conservatives had never done in the past. Appearing at a , Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), the leader of the House Freedom Caucus, pledged to “shrink” Washington as rank-and-file far-right lawmakers swiped at “woke” federal spending.

“Truth be told, the preference was not to raise it at all and pay down the debts we currently have, so we didn’t need to raise it,” Perry said in an interview after the bill passed, noting that in conversation with GOP leadership, the caucus settled on the idea that “upfront dollar savings needed to be maximized.”

The Wall Street Journal reinforced this, reporting that Speaker McCarthy “wants to organize a bipartisan commission to look at the entirety of government spending, including mandatory spending programs like Medicaid and Social Security.” ....

These new statements from the Speaker demonstrate that the House GOP are reversing the promise they made to President Biden and the country in the State of the Union, and that to shield billionaires and multinational corporations from paying a cent more in taxes, they very much intend to slash Americans’ Medicare and Social Security benefits.

Social Security made one of its periodic returns to prominence in the midterm elections, as Democrats accused Republicans of plotting to cut (or end) the underfunded federal retirement program. But why is this even an issue? Why has Congress waited four decades to fix Social Security, when common sense says it’s easier to act sooner than later? The answer is that common sense is wrong: Americans nearing retirement have played a game of chicken with Congress for decades, refusing to support the additional taxes needed to keep Social Security solvent while daring their representatives to cut their benefits when Social Security’s trust fund runs out in 2035.

Older Americans will almost certainly win that game, since neither political party has the will to cut Social Security. The reality is that reform of Social Security and other long-term programs are in the hands of both citizens and politicians who benefit precisely from not reforming them.

“Nearly every Republican in the U.S. House just voted to slash the already inadequate funding of the Social Security Administration (SSA). If this bill becomes law, it will force SSA to close field offices, reduce hours, and lay off thousands of workers. This will make it far harder for Americans to claim the benefits they’ve earned.

Cuts to SSA are cuts to Social Security, and we will hold every single one of these members accountable.

Politically, the most crucial moment in President Biden’s State of the Union address was his declaration that “some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years.” Why did he say that? Maybe because Senator Rick Scott, when he was the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, released a fiscal plan last year with the bullet point “All federal legislation sunsets in five years.”

Seems straightforward, doesn’t it, despite cries of “lies” from the floor? But right-wing news media — well aware that Biden hit a nerve — has gone into overdrive insisting that his claim was false. Even some mainstream media figures have claimed that Biden was “over the top.”

Republicans have claimed over and over again that they are not trying to cut Social Security and Medicare. Heck, Joe Biden got them to agree they would not make cuts to the programs, in a memorable verbal maneuver during his State of the Union speech earlier this year.

And yet the Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) just released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party seeks to, you guessed it, cut Social Security and Medicare.

Social Security is back in the news. Some Republicans are angling to reduce benefits, while Democrats are posing as the valiant saviors of the popular program. The end result, most likely, is that nothing will happen. We have seen this story before, because this is roughly where the politics of Social Security have been stuck for about forty years. It’s a problem because the system truly does need repair, and the endless conflict between debt-obsessed Republicans and stalwart Democrats will not generate the progressive reforms we need. More than any other single institution, Social Security keeps the United States from becoming a truly Dickensian world of poverty and despair. Social Security, believe it or not, has a utopian heart: the idea that all Americans deserve a life of dignity and public support once they become old or disabled. This vision does, for now, remain utopian: many Americans are right to worry that, without savings or private pensions, their older years will be just as precarious and austere as their younger ones. Social Security is nonetheless the lynchpin of the U.S. welfare system, such as it is. In 2022 some $1.2 trillion flowed from the system to nearly 66 million people. Most of those people are retired workers, but not all of them. Millions are the spouses or dependents of retired workers; millions more are disabled people, or the spouses or dependents of the disabled. All in all, about one in four Americans over the age of eighteen receives benefits from Social Security. If not for Social Security, almost 40 percent of older Americans would be living in poverty. It is not going too far to say that the Social Security system, more than any other single institution, keeps the United States from becoming a truly Dickensian world of poverty and despair. Yet it has serious downsides, too. For one thing, benefits are low; even after much-needed cost-of-living increases, the average recipient will receive just over $21,000 per year. And for another, the Social Security trust fund will run dry in about twelve years, prompting an immediate benefit drop of about 20 percent (there is no realistic scenario in which benefits disappear altogether). For a middle-class family, that difference might not matter all that much, but for an elderly and disabled widow, already near the poverty line, it would be devastating. You probably already know most of this. Indeed, it’s become conventional wisdom that the Social Security system is in trouble and shouldn’t be counted on. How many times have you heard people scoff about their Social Security taxes or warn a younger coworker their benefits will never materialize? This shrugging nihilism might make sense for the wealthier among us, many of whom are indulging in the distinctly American ritual of creating an entrepreneurial plan for our looming disability and death. But the majority of Americans don’t have 401(k)s, and many millions, especially the poor and people of color, will rely on Social Security as their main source of retirement income. Despite this dire situation, there has not been a congressional vote, even in committee, on major reforms to Social Security since 1983. This has not been for lack of trying, at least among Democrats. In both the House and the Senate, there are serious bills, with significant support, to salvage the program. The most well-developed, known as Social Security 2100, has more than 200 cosponsors in the House. It’s an audacious bill, planning to expand Social Security benefits for the first time since the 1970s, focusing especially on the caregiving workforce. And in the Senate, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have put forth an even more ambitious plan, which would raise taxes and benefits while expanding the program’s solvency for decades. Still, the odds of anything happening with these bills are low, at least for now. In addition to the expected Republican intransigence, Democrats themselves are not united. The relevant division is between a politics of incrementalism and a politics of bold reform and expansion. Social Security 2100 is on the less ambitious end of the spectrum, especially as it has recently been rewritten to keep Biden’s promise of not raising taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. As such, the bill does little to address the solvency issue. The Social Security Expansion Act in the Senate is bolder and does more to address both equity and solvency—but few Democratic senators have cosponsored the bill, leaving it oceans away from the required votes.

“It’s incredibly difficult to balance the budget within 10 years,” said Marc Goldwein, a senior policy director at the , a group that backs deficit reduction. “It goes from being incredibly difficult to practically impossible if you start taking things off the table.”

The federal deficit is expected to be so large over the next decade that it would take about $16 trillion in spending reductions or new revenues to balance the budget by 2033. That’s about the size of the entire Social Security program. Or the entire Medicare program in addition to every anti-poverty program and refundable tax credit. Those outlandish examples come from a  analysis from the committee.