Preview of @POTUS budget released today: “tax breaks for families, lower health care costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.” https://t.co/Qg8kNDFU2i — Kristen Orthman (@KristenOrthman) March 11, 2024 Per the Associated Press: President Joe Biden on Monday released a budget proposal aimed at getting voters’ attention: It would offer tax breaks …
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Fighting for American FamiliesPost + Comments (296)
So, on the same day President Biden released his budget — which includes tax breaks for families, lower health care costs, & higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations — Donald Trump just told CNBC he will cut social security & medicare. Biden & Trump are NOT the same. Period.
— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) March 11, 2024
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Biden hoped to be a peacemaker. Now he knows he has to be a warrior. Efforts at bi-partisanship, reconciliation & mutual understanding have not contained Trumpist extremism. GOP capitulation shows that defeating it is the only option
My column-free access https://t.co/AKGShJVxyL— EJ Dionne (@EJDionne) March 10, 2024
E.J. Dionne, at the Washington Post — “Biden hoped to be a peacemaker. Now, he knows he must be a warrior”:
Two ideas about how to move the United States back to normal, less acrid politics have warred with each other ever since Donald Trump rode division and resentment to power. On one side were calls for big-hearted efforts at reconciliation and mutual understanding. On the other was an insistence that the extremist virus had to be contained before anything better was possible.
President Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday was about many things, especially a furious energy that countered talk about the limitations of his age. But above all, it marked the final collapse of the reconciliation strategy. It was an acknowledgment that sermons about putting aside our differences are out of touch with the country we have become…
A strategy of warfare requires tactical decisions. Rallying Democrats was the first priority of his speech, but Biden made two of his other top objectives obvious. He intends to fight hard for the kinds of Republicans and independents who rallied to Nikki Haley’s candidacy by making clear that he will stand up for Ukraine’s survival and stand strong against Vladimir Putin’s threats. His pointed contrast of Trump with Ronald Reagan reminded many Republicans of a heritage their soon-to-be nominee would squander by “bowing down to a Russian leader.”
Biden’s emphasis on reproductive rights, including in vitro fertilization, also appeals to a large share of middle-of-the-road and even moderately conservative suburbanites, particularly women, who see radicalism in the drive to upset the old status quo on abortion access…
Pundits frequently deride policy proposals as “laundry lists.” But offering detail about what government could do to ease the day-to-day problems of the non-affluent — from health care to child care to the curse of “junk fees” and “price gouging” — is popular with the many voters who long to escape the trenches of our cold civil war. It’s a vision of a politics that refocuses on the everyday. And Biden’s plea for tax fairness calls the bluff of a political adversary who is about as “populist” as the dues-paying members of Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster.
Still, there’s no way back to the normal skirmishes of democracy and the possibilities of civic friendship without first routing those who threaten democracy itself. They thrive only in a politics that sees domestic enemies everywhere and view groups they dislike as “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Biden finds his comfort zone in compromises over infrastructure bills and budgets. He’ll have to live the next eight months far from that happy place, doing battle against the forces of “resentment, revenge and retribution” that make the approach to public life he loves impossible.