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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique, fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say, so we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram, and I've got one foot in Nevada and the other in Arizona. I am standing dead center on the Hoover Dam, formerly known as the Boulder Dam, and it is 112 degrees Fahrenheit right now. I think that's about 45 degrees for my Celsius friends out there, and that is relevant because as we approach the Hoover Dam centenary, this crown jewel of American infrastructure is in bad shape.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not the dam's fault per se. It's the water. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River creates a reservoir. It's called Lake Mead. When full, it's the largest reservoir in the United States. But I'm looking at it right now, and you can see how far the water level has dropped. There's this high watermark, kind of like a giant bathtub ring. And then there's where we are right now, well below it. Water levels at the Hoover Dam have never been lower since it opened in 1936.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In its prime, this sucker shaped the American Southwest. Los Angeles wouldn't be the city it became without this dam. But now it's all in jeopardy. With record-breaking low water levels, this dam's producing a third less the hydroelectricity than it could be. It's one of the reasons California is at a high risk of power outages this summer and things stand to get much worse American infrastructure is old and the changing climate is rendering a heck of a lot of it outmoded It's why the president and both parties are trying to spend a ton of money to bring the country into the 21st century
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's why we here at Today Explained are dedicating a week of shows to talking about what needs to get done That's right, it's infrastructure week Week, Infrastructure Week, Infrastructure Week, Week, Week, Week. It isn't just Infrastructure Week at Today Explained. It's actually Infrastructure Week in Washington, D.C. Biden's speaking about his very big plans today. Senator Schumer is supposed to call a vote on Wednesday to start debate on a big infrastructure bill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Infrastructure Week, those two words, have a bit of a history in D.C. Infrastructure Week. It's all we've been talking about this week, right? Infrastructure. You know, fixing our old bridges, then jumping off them. We asked Lee Zoe to explain she's leading the charge on Infrastructure Week for Vox.
--:-- Lee Zoe: It started back during the Trump administration. So we have to build roads, we have to build highways. We're talking about a very major infrastructure bill. Pretty much every other week they would say they wanted to do something about infrastructure. My administration is working every day to deliver the world-class infrastructure. And it would never happen.
--:-- Lee Zoe: So it became this running joke. Let's see how badly you want it. Because if you want it badly, you're going to get it. And if you don't want it, that's OK with me, too. And it's really came back again during the Biden administration. Remember that bridge that went down? We got 10. Now it's it's not even just infrastructure a week. It's hot infrastructure summer because of how long things have been taking and how this is expected to continue, where we keep talking about progress on infrastructure. But at this point, there's yet to be an actual bill that's gotten passed.
--:-- Lee Zoe: Way back in March of this year, President Biden announced an ambitious plan that promised to rebuild the country's economy and its infrastructure. We covered it on the show. What happened to that plan? That plan actually got a ton of pushback from Republicans immediately. When I look at this, this is a staggering amount of spending like someone with a new credit card. Typically, infrastructure is a very bipartisan idea. And so you would think that it would be one of the easier things to get everyone on board with.
--:-- Lee Zoe: The issue is that there is a disagreement on what infrastructure is and how expansive that term should be. So you have Republicans who think that means what you would typically consider infrastructure. Roads and bridges and ports and airports. And then you have Democrats who've really expanded that definition to include things like caregiving provisions, paid family leave. And so, like, there's a fundamental disagreement about what infrastructure is.
--:-- Lee Zoe: And then on top of that, there's a disagreement about how to pay for it. And so those two in tandem have caused the conflict that we've seen so far. Well, take us back to March. The things introduced, it's huge, it's sprawling, it covers things that people think are infrastructure and things that people disagree about. What happens next? After that and you get the pushback from Republicans you also have them proposing their own version of the bill So Biden original plan was over trillion Guess what It grows the economy Benefits everybody Hurts nobody Republicans come back to him with something that's roughly $600 billion. And we don't really see a lot of progress.
--:-- Lee Zoe: And then this bipartisan gang forms. And it's about 20 people, including 10 Republicans, 10 Democrats. And they try to put their heads together to come up with something that everyone can agree on and get behind. Tell me about the gang. Who's in the gang? The gang is a lot of the cast of characters that you would expect. They are moderate Democrats and Republicans who love bipartisanship and really believe that Congress can work together.
--:-- Lee Zoe: And so you have people like Joe Manchin. It's doable in a bipartisan way. Take that victory. And then on the Republican side, you have Rob Portman. Infrastructure has always been bipartisan. Susan Collins, Mitt Romney. So they are really focused on trying to do something that can get both Democratic and Republican support.
--:-- Lee Zoe: I know they didn't get this thing done. A vote to start the process is supposed to happen this week. But how far does the gang get? Well, technically, they do have some semblance of success. Today, President Biden walking out of the White House with senators from both parties to announce they've struck an agreement to rebuild the nation's critical infrastructure. In answer to your direct question, we have a deal.
--:-- Lee Zoe: They get agreement on a framework and they get President Joe Biden sign off on it. And that's basically where they are right now. I clearly didn't get all I want. They signed off on a framework. That's not how a bill becomes a law. But how I hope and pray that I will. But today I am still just a bill. Right. If you look at actually what they put out, it is literally a table that has, you know, roads, bridges, transit. and the amount of money allocated to each is what the framework is.
--:-- Lee Zoe: What? And what they're in the process of doing now is writing the actual bill. That sounds like a sixth-grade homework assignment, Lee. Well, I mean— What would you do with $1.2 trillion? I do think it's been funny to see some of the press releases that have come out because some of them do look like they've been made on, like, Microsoft Paint. Oh, no. I will say this framework is a bit more sophisticated. You know, I'm going to say it probably looks like something out of Excel. Fancy. But the bill still hasn't been written yet. So that's what we're waiting on to see.
--:-- Lee Zoe: But there is an agreement on $600 billion in new spending and the idea that it's going to be paid for not using changes to the corporate tax code, at least this piece of it, which is a big issue Republicans had. $600 billion sounds a lot less than $2 trillion. Yes. So are the Democrats just going to take like a huge haircut for the sake of bipartisanship and then pass a much smaller bill? Is that what's going on here? Not exactly.
--:-- Lee Zoe: So they have their own plan to also pass a Democratic infrastructure bill that is going to be much larger and that is going to include a lot of the stuff that did not make it into the bipartisan plan. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer lauded the Democrats' proposal, a $3.5 trillion budget outline calling for more spending toward health care, child care, education and climate.
--:-- Lee Zoe: It would be paid for with taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans. This budget resolution will allow us to pass the most significant legislation to expand support and help American families since the New Deal. Since the New Deal, this is generational, transformational change. And they're doing what they are calling a two-track approach, where they will be taking votes on both bills roughly around the same time and pursuing both of them in parallel so that the bipartisan stuff gets done and the Democratic stuff gets done as well.
--:-- Lee Zoe: And what, the second huge thing they're going to do through reconciliation, is that how they get it done? Yes, that's the plan. They can do it with just Democratic votes since it will only need 51 votes to pass. So they have the entire caucus and Kamala Harris voting on that. The thing that they run into is that because the actual reconciliation bill itself won't be done until later in the year, it's possible that we see changes in momentum and internal divisions among Democrats potentially tripping up that legislation.
--:-- Lee Zoe: But they won't need Republican support if they can get all their members on board. Hmm. So you've got these two sets of legislation, one bipartisan, one not. Together, they'd fulfill a lot of Biden's promises when it comes to building roads and bridges and to do what he calls, I guess, human infrastructure. What are the chances all of this goes according to plan? That is the biggest question right now.
--:-- Lee Zoe: And there's certainly no sure thing on any of these for the bipartisan bill, still waiting to see just how many Republicans actually commit to it. And for the reconciliation bill, there are a lot of questions that are up in the air about what it will actually include. And it will have to go through the same process that we saw with the American Rescue Plan, where it needs to get approved by the parliamentarian, as well as actually get written by the committee before we know for sure what will happen to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What did we learn along the way on this journey, Lee? It felt like Biden was really committed to getting sort of bipartisan buy-in. He did on a smaller thing, and then he's just turning around and doing his bigger thing through this sort of nifty budget reconciliation tool that obviously the other side of the aisle won't like anyway. Is this truly bipartisan government in spirit? Did it matter at all to even try and get Republicans on board? Should they just have gone it alone the entire time?
--:-- Lee Zoe: It does feel like a really circuitous way to go about this And a large reason they did it this way is both because Joe Biden himself believes so much in bipartisanship but also because you had several moderate Democrats including Joe Manchin, who said they did not want to go forward on a Democratic-only bill until they considered a moderate one. And so you actually just have a lot of these Democrats who are pushing for bipartisanship because that's what they believe in.
--:-- Lee Zoe: And then you have some of them like Mark Kelly and Maggie Hassan, who will be up for re-election in the next cycle. And so for them, it's a way to probably appeal to moderates and independents in their state who might be happy to see that they did something with Republicans. Biden bet big on bipartisanship and that might work out. No guarantees. what's clear is that big, ambitious spending on ourselves isn't as popular an idea as it was, say, after the Great Depression. Biden's new New Deal versus the old one? In a minute, on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you. will have your email and calendars synced. You'll see all your relationships in a fully fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data. And they say you can build AI powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company. You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to adio.com slash today explained to get 15% off your first year. That's attio.com slash today explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Infrastructure, infrastructure week. President Biden and the Democrats say they're trying to recreate an infrastructure plan from almost 100 years ago. That was when Franklin, Delano Roosevelt's New Deal transformed every part of the United States. Especially the rural parts of the country because of the roads that they created, the farm-to-market roads, the schools that they built, modern schools, the electrification.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gray Brecken, he's a scholar at the Living New Deal Project at UC Berkeley in California, which has tried to catalog New Deal projects whose origins have been lost to history. So it's most of our airports, it's our zoos, it's the Triborough Bridge in New York, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Aid to the state for the building of state institutions. It's military bases because it's segged right into the war. Blood control and river work, federal public buildings, and the maintenance of agricultural services. It's wildlife refuges. It's the Red Rock Amphitheater outside of Denver. The Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's those beautiful murals that you see in all of our post offices, a thousand of which were built under the New Deal. It's entire universities like Brooklyn College. If the federal government, your government, had not done at least some of these things, the state governments would probably not have done them at all. out of their own resources. It's the roads we drive over and don't know it. It's electrification. It's the Tennessee Valley Authority, Bonneville Dam, Grand Coulee Dam.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's hydroelectric energy, which we get, and the water that we get, which have enabled sunbelt cities like Phoenix to arise and grow up. Right. It contributed enormously to our public health because at the beginning of the New Deal, a minority of Americans had safe drinking water, and once they had built the sewers and the water distribution systems and the sewage treatment plants, we all had safe drinking water, and we had public hospitals as well, too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's the restoration of the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, the Alamo, things we take for granted when we go and visit them. Add it all up, when next you wonder why the national government hasn't balanced its budget over the last six years. It's an immense legacy that we take for granted and we don't know where it came from because most of it's unmarked. And so we're sort of recovering it from the collective amnesia that we ever did such a thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why did we forget? How did we forget? I mean, we built America and then forgot about it? Well, Roosevelt, in initiating the New Deal, earned some very powerful enemies. That is, the wealthy. They called him a traitor to his class because he was wealthy himself. And so they didn't appreciate the fact that in order to pay for the New Deal, he instituted progressive taxation, estate taxes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He essentially was a friend of labor unions and the working man which made him enormously popular with working class people But very powerful people such as William Randolph Hearst really hated him for that because those taxes, those progressive taxes, put a real crimp in such things as his collecting and his building his castles. My friends, this whole system of income taxation has degenerated into a racket.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hearst, of course, was an extremely powerful person at that time. Like Rupert Murdoch today, he was a thought shaper for millions of people. And he called Roosevelt more communist than the communists themselves. Help us remember how the New Deal was implemented. Was Roosevelt talking about just creating jobs or was he talking about infrastructure? Was he pitching it the same way Biden is pitching his infrastructure spending?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Roosevelt had to address an immediate catastrophe, that is the Great Depression. He came in after four years of ever deepening economic crisis. And so what he did was he told the American people that we were engaged in something akin to war, except that this was a war against the Depression. So as in a war, all the stops were off as far as spending goes. It's an existential crisis, and the Depression was an existential crisis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He said, if it doesn't work, the New Deal doesn't work, I will be the last president, because he knew that the country was right on the verge of a revolution or another civil war, And he knew that one civil war was one too many. So what he did was pump huge amounts of money into the economy to put people back to work and to give them the self-esteem that they had lost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does that compare to the position Biden's in right now because of the coronavirus pandemic? Well, Biden actually is facing several existential crises at the same time. One is the pandemic that we have that we are not bringing under control as we should. And of course, the other is the climate crisis that we're confronting. But in fact, actually, Biden is in a different kind of Great Depression. That is that millions of Americans are experiencing a Great Depression individually. That is the enormous numbers of people that we see homeless on our streets. They are experiencing the Great Depression very personally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the things that was very interesting about the New Deal or the New Dealers is that they thought seriously about how government could be used to create a healthier society. And so what they did was they instituted not only physical public works, but what they called service projects such as home care, free education, food distribution and clothing distribution to the needy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They, in fact, actually did create a much healthier society by thinking consciously about that. We don't, and so we're creating exactly the opposite today. Clearly, based on the challenges President Biden's having getting this infrastructure bill through Congress, we are not looking at this kind of spending the way Washington was in the time of the New Deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, Roosevelt came into office with a very different situation because his predecessor, Hoover, a Republican who hated Roosevelt, had not been able to do anything about the Depression except watch as it got worse. So Roosevelt had an enormous popularity, and so what he had was a solidly Democratic Congress, which pretty much rubber-stamped anything that he or his brain trust wanted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Biden is in a very tough and very different situation. The Democrats have the slimmest of majorities. And it's not solidly Democratic in the way that Roosevelt had. So Roosevelt had it much easier in some ways, even though, of course, the Great Depression was an unspeakable calamity at the time, from which many people like my parents suffered their entire lives from a kind of PTSD.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are actually in a similar crisis or crises today. And I think that's one of the reasons that Biden so often looks back to Roosevelt and has a large picture of Roosevelt because he knows he's confronting crises similar to those that confronted Roosevelt when he came into office.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gray Brecken, he's a scholar at the Living New Deal Project at UC Berkeley. If you want to learn more about New Deal infrastructure in your area, check out their website, livingnewdeal.org. They have maps, maps that will help you identify New Deal projects all across the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is episode one of a five-episode series we're doing this week. We're not through with it. We're just previewing it. This ain't the whole show. We're just EQing it. We're going to talk about trains, toilets, childcare, and why it's so dang expensive to build stuff in the United States. So stay tuned. It is infrastructure week on Today Explained. Thank you. Thank you.
