Political Roundtable Part XXX

[CobraCommander]

Fuel cost coupled with supply chain issues followed by pandemic issues are going crush economy in q1 and destroy dem mandate by 2024....it happens - but Biden ain’t handling this well...first va then the general election- Biden is no Obama - Biden has not handled anything masterful. Voting against trump only works once, and if you win, you will be judged by your ability to lead.

No fan of trump but Biden ain’t handling his presidency well at all.

[dobrojim]

Fingers crossed big time. Dems have made VA a much better place. It would be
hugely unfortunate if the voters punished them and let the pubs gain control.

FWIW, I voted weeks ago. VA expanded voting access!

[Pointgod]

Fingers crossed big time. Dems have made VA a much better place. It would be
hugely unfortunate if the voters punished them and let the pubs gain control.

FWIW, I voted weeks ago. VA expanded voting access!

This is all the needs to be said. Dems have the structural advantage, the have the voter advantage and they hands down have the better policies. If they lose it’s simply a turnout problem, literally nothing else. It’s especially annoying that the media has seemed to forget the lesson from Stacy Abrams.

[Ruzious]

McAuliffe vs Youngkin can be huge as far as setting the tone for 2022 elections. And Trump has stuck his nose in this so deep, a wipeout win for McAuliffe would be huge.

Hala at Ayala!

Really, I think Biden just needs a win on the infrastructure bill - without stumbling on the words Build Back Better bill. I love that it includes revenue increases of $2 trillion to cover the 1.75 trillion costs (over 10 years). Otoh, looking at a 25 page preview of it, tax simplification was definitely not one of its goals.

[Pointgod]

I’m sure that regardless of the results both parties will learn the wrong lessons from the Virginia Govenrors race.

[verbal8]

I’m sure that regardless of the results both parties will learn the wrong lessons from the Virginia Govenrors race.

If the Dems learn not to run generic experienced candidates, there are worse lessons to learn.

While I have my doubts about the true distance between Youngkin and Trump, the GOP took steps to avoid super Trumper Amanda Chase being the candidate.

[Pointgod]

I’m sure that regardless of the results both parties will learn the wrong lessons from the Virginia Govenrors race.

If the Dems learn not to run generic experienced candidates, there are worse lessons to learn.

While I have my doubts about the true distance between Youngkin and Trump, the GOP took steps to avoid super Trumper Amanda Chase being the candidate.

The problem with this line of thinking is that the Dems ran an open primary where Mccauliffe won by 50 points or something crazy like that while the Republicans rigged their primary so the crazy Trump acolyte couldn’t win.

If you want to blame the candidate, then you have to blame the primary voters as well. Democrats had the voter registration edge, recent election results were in their favor, but it was still a blood bath. This was a turnout problem and the question is why.

[TGW]

Trump is going to be spiking the football tomorrow.

[Zonkerbl]

Trumpkin won. More interesting to me is the crushing defeat of city question 2 in Minneapolis. Both sides thought it would be close but votes against the practical application of #defundthepolice were 56%.

Unfortunately noone thought to do an exit poll, so we have no idea if the unexpected surge of no votes were mostly white or black or what.

Interestingly, Amy Klobuchar actively campaigned against it, while Ilan Omar supported it.

I think Minneapolis is a good test case though. Clearly what they proposed was just more than they could swallow, particularly in a year with a lot of violent crime.

Back to the drawing board I guess.

[Pointgod]

Trumpkin won. More interesting to me is the crushing defeat of city question 2 in Minneapolis. Both sides thought it would be close but votes against the practical application of #defundthepolice were 56%.

Unfortunately noone thought to do an exit poll, so we have no idea if the unexpected surge of no votes were mostly white or black or what.

Interestingly, Amy Klobuchar actively campaigned against it, while Ilan Omar supported it.

I think Minneapolis is a good test case though. Clearly what they proposed was just more than they could swallow, particularly in a year with a lot of violent crime.

Back to the drawing board I guess.

I could have told you that city question would fail just from the way it was proposed. People like stability and there’s no way in hell they’re going to vote to replace police without knowing what the replacement actually is. Even if the majority of people support it.

Progressives need to learn that Twitter isn’t real life and while activists are great when it comes to building awareness and drawing attention to important issues, creating policies or laws are a different beast.

[Zonkerbl]

I love Angela Davis to death but you should not let her write your city budget proposals, I think is the lesson to learn from this

[dobrojim]

Fingers crossed big time. Dems have made VA a much better place. It would be
hugely unfortunate if the voters punished them and let the pubs gain control.

FWIW, I voted weeks ago. VA expanded voting access!

This is all the needs to be said. Dems have the structural advantage, the have the voter advantage and they hands down have the better policies. If they lose it’s simply a turnout problem, literally nothing else. It’s especially annoying that the media has seemed to forget the lesson from Stacy Abrams.

No I think dems have some of their own structural disadvantages primarily in messaging.
Their policy advantages are more nuanced and less emotional. The GOP knows messaging
and how to push buttons. This has been true my entire life.

[Zonkerbl]

In all fairness the Communists had the same problem in 1917. They were like the dog who caught the car. They absolutely knew what they wanted to abolish but had no idea what to replace it with.

Which is unfair to Minneapolis' proposal, they did know what they wanted to replace it with but were too sparse in details on how they were going to do it.

"Eh we'll edit it in post" is not a viable budget proposal.

[dobrojim]

I’m sure that regardless of the results both parties will learn the wrong lessons from the Virginia Govenrors race.

If the Dems learn not to run generic experienced candidates, there are worse lessons to learn.

While I have my doubts about the true distance between Youngkin and Trump, the GOP took steps to avoid super Trumper Amanda Chase being the candidate.

Clearly McAuliffe was a weaker candidate than dem primary voters expected. Old White guy re-tread.
Nothing to get excited by.

And the Loudoun Co school folks really handled the assault by the 'troubled gender fluid guy'
about as badly as they could have.

[pancakes3]

while dems lost ground in Northern VA suburbs, it looks like the real tipping point was losing Tidewater regions like Va Beach and Chesapeake.

[FAH1223]

Read on Twitter

Read on Twitter

Nearly a week after the alleged “framework” for the Build Back Better Act was introduced, two new agreements that were not part of that framework were added in. First, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a modest drug pricing reform deal, which while certainly a step down from more expansive Medicare negotiation proposals, would cut some out-of-pocket costs for patients and save hundreds of billions of dollars for the government. Separately, several congressmembers from high-tax states in the Northeast touted progress in getting a five-year repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap into the final legislative package, which would deliver money mostly to the top 5 percent of income earners.

These two items are linked. Many of the same members of Congress who are holdouts on drug pricing are the ones pushing for the SALT cap repeal. And the budget savings from the drug price reform will be canceled out by the cost of repealing the SALT cap. This deal, months in the making according to my sources, means that we’re getting a social-policy bill where the largest single program could be a tax cut for upper-middle-class households.


Maybe that was necessary to get the votes for the more significant achievements in Build Back Better. But it doesn’t make it less distasteful. And it does reflect badly on Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal’s decision on Monday to endorse a vote for both Build Back Better and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which she previously vowed could not happen without assurances that the Senate would pass the former. By doing so, Jayapal and the progressives gave up whatever role they had to play in this final round of negotiations. She cut the deal before it was deal-cutting time, in other words. And we’re now seeing the results.

Many of the same members of Congress who are holdouts on drug pricing are the ones pushing for the SALT cap repeal.

Let’s look at these two deals. As far as I can tell, the drug pricing deal is largely the concept favored by a small band of industry-funded holdouts—Scott Peters (D-CA), Kurt Schrader (D-OR), Kathleen Rice (D-NY), Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), Lou Correa (D-CA), and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) in the House, and Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Tom Carper (D-DE), Chris Coons (D-DE), and (maybe) Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) in the Senate.

The agreement does allow for Medicare price negotiations within Parts B (drugs used by hospitals) and D (prescription drugs sold at pharmacies). But it would only apply to drugs outside their FDA exclusivity period, the time in which medications have guaranteed monopolies over the market. This varies between nine years for certain small-molecule drugs to 12 years for biologics, which are more complex and typically higher-cost. Orphan drugs, which treat rare illnesses, would be exempt from any negotiation. These are also usually expensive. “Small biotech” companies are also exempt from negotiation until 2028, and drugs from those companies with less than $200 million in Medicare spending are exempt permanently.


So in some cases, the drugs most in need of price negotiation wouldn’t have them for over a decade. And no drug could get a negotiated price at launch, which is likely to lead to higher launch prices.

Peters put out a competing reform bill in September that included exactly this feature. He wanted it only to apply to Part B; the agreement got him to add Part D, but doesn’t make the rates accessible to private insurance, limiting their scope. H.R. 3, the template bill used by most of the caucus, allowed for 25 drugs to be negotiated in the first year and 50 each subsequent year. This agreement delays negotiation to 2025, and only starts with ten drugs, rising to 20 by 2028.

The reference price for negotiations, unlike an international index used in H.R. 3, is a percentage of the 2021 average manufacturer price; as those prices are already high, that ensures that the result of negotiations will still be a relatively expensive drug. And the enforcement mechanism for drug companies that refuse to participate in negotiations is unclear; there’s an excise tax, but a deal sheet on the agreement says that it’s assumed “never to be levied.”

Just like in the Peters bill, the agreement has an annual cap on out-of-pocket spending for Medicare recipients; it appears to be a flat $2,000, whereas Peters’s started lower for poorer seniors and rose higher. A smoothing proposal allows seniors to pay for their drugs in monthly installments instead of when getting specific drugs. And individual drug prices would not be allowed to rise above the rate of inflation, beginning in 2022. However, the inflation cap references 2021 as the base year, limiting the benefit relative to using a year in the past as the base and restricting increases above that inflation-adjusted level. This will delay real improvements on prices in the short term, which as a political matter is just insane.

Lowering drug prices isn’t only good policy in itself; it adds possibilities for everything else you can do.

Insulin, a notoriously high-cost drug given that it’s been around for a century, is also incorporated into the agreement. (Peters’s bill had a $50-per-month out-of-pocket cap for insulin; Schumer said that the agreement would drop that to $35 per month.) The cap applies to patients on Medicare and in private insurance.

House leadership praised the agreement, and importantly it got endorsements from Sinema and Menendez. It’s obviously a pale imitation of legitimate drug pricing reform. But the drug industry was opposed to doing anything, and they oppose this proposal.

The underlying question to me about drug pricing reform was always what Congress would do with the budget savings. There’s no actual score here, but it’s likely to save between $200 billion and $300 billion over a decade for the government. You could put that toward making pre-K or child care permanent, increasing the likelihood of red-state take-up. You could extend the Child Tax Credit another year. Lowering drug prices isn’t only good policy in itself; it adds possibilities for everything else you can do.


But pretty obviously this became a way to find money for the SALT cap. What’s being discussed now is a five-year suspension of the cap, from 2021 to 2025. This would cost roughly $475 billion, and the giveaway is wildly regressive; $400 billion goes to the top 5 percent of income earners.

Some gimmickry may allow Democrats to say it doesn’t cost anything. The cap was scheduled to roll off in 2026, so if they do a five-year suspension that comes back in 2026, technically they can argue that there’s no net change in revenue. Realistically that’s absurd, but if called on it, Democrats can point to the drug pricing money, arguing that they have plenty of cushion to absorb the tax cut.

The biggest proponents of SALT cap repeal are in high-tax states like New Jersey, New York, and California, where wealthy residents who itemize their taxes would benefit the most. Gottheimer in particular (seen in the Capitol on Tuesday wearing a “No SALT, No Dice” pin) has been vocal about demanding something on SALT. So he, and Menendez, and Peters, and others in high-tax states can agree to modestly lower prescription drug prices in exchange for a tax cut for their residents. In some cases, it’s precisely the same pharmaceutical executives whose companies lose some profits but who will gain a massive tax break.

This weds several wavering Democrats to pass Build Back Better, though it doesn’t do much for Sinema and Manchin, who represent low-tax areas. And the deal is not a slam dunk. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is already out with a statement noting that, under the SALT cap suspension, “the top 1% would pay lower taxes after passage of the Build Back Better plan than they did after the Trump tax cut in 2017. This is beyond unacceptable.”

But there were other options here. A high-income tax proposed by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) would have given the relief to the type of people Gottheimer and others have put in the forefront: somewhat upper-middle-class people who were carrying most of the burden of paying for a share of the Trump tax cuts. But it would have eliminated all deductions above the $400,000 earnings threshold and made the rules equal throughout the country, regardless of state tax policy.

This idea never got out of the policy shop. Jayapal’s Progressive Caucus could have taken a stand on it as a solution to the SALT problem. And they could have engaged in the drug pricing debate, as the caucus did in 2019 when they hammered out an agreement with Speaker Pelosi. That would have put them on the playing field with an actual proposal as these elements were being negotiated.

Instead, Jayapal cut her deal and took off. Maybe she took the perspective of Ted Kennedy, whose theory of progressive politics was to fight like hell to secure the left edge of the possible, and then agree to the terms. But with the terms now being set, I’m not sure that giving up early was the most advantageous strategy.

[Pointgod]

Fingers crossed big time. Dems have made VA a much better place. It would be
hugely unfortunate if the voters punished them and let the pubs gain control.

FWIW, I voted weeks ago. VA expanded voting access!

This is all the needs to be said. Dems have the structural advantage, the have the voter advantage and they hands down have the better policies. If they lose it’s simply a turnout problem, literally nothing else. It’s especially annoying that the media has seemed to forget the lesson from Stacy Abrams.

No I think dems have some of their own structural disadvantages primarily in messaging.
Their policy advantages are more nuanced and less emotional. The GOP knows messaging
and how to push buttons. This has been true my entire life.

I’d say messaging is not something structural per say because it’s something that the party has full control of. The GOP are messaging masters because they’ve built an ecosystem where the same message is amplified without making it explicit. CRT is messaged by Youngkin as parental choice, but everyone really knows what it’s a dog whistle to white people.

This should be a huge blinking siren to those idiot moderates in congress to get their head out of their ass and actually pass legislation. You can’t run on nothing (they passed the American rescue plan but it’s a what have you done for me lately electorate) and the base will reward you for actually doing what you said you’d do. And this isn’t just passing infrastructure but actually passing voting rights, police reform, women’s healthcare, immigration all the major things you run on. The problem is that the moderates are so scared of their own districts that they doom the rest of the party by doing nothing.

The Democrats need to go on the offensive against Republicans and Biden needs to be more visible and talk about key issues every single chance he gets. The one thing Trump knew how to do was promote the hell out of the party despite the fact that he was a blatant liar and everything he did actually hurt his voters. What should scare the hell out of everyone about Virginia and New Jersey is that Democrats had the advantages structurally. What happens in states when Republicans have instituted voter suppression and willingly throw out election results?

[Zonkerbl]

Yeah SALT was a slap in the face to wealthy, well educated, urban living liberals, who are probably disproportionately represented in small donations. We donate thousands of dollars each year to various causes. So it's not surprising when we ask for SALT to be repealed there are people who will listen. I don't mind paying more taxes, but I mind my govt salary tax hike going to subsidize a tax cut for billionaires, that's bs.

[closg00]

while dems lost ground in Northern VA suburbs, it looks like the real tipping point was losing Tidewater regions like Va Beach and Chesapeake.

Totally removing all ideologies, Youngkin was by-far the batter candidate and still only got 50.7% of the vote.

[Pointgod]

while dems lost ground in Northern VA suburbs, it looks like the real tipping point was losing Tidewater regions like Va Beach and Chesapeake.

I was watching the numbers come in real time and the comparison of last night to 2020. One thing that really stood out is the total votes for Republicans only slightly decreased while the Democratic vote share was 30-40%. That simply isn’t sustainable for any party. Democrats have to figure out how to keep turnout high in major voting centres and where they can limit the bleeding from other areas. Right now Republicans can juice up rural areas, claw back suburban areas and count on natural attrition or suppress the vote in urban areas without having to actually turnout new voters.