Biden Still Trying to Sell Build Back Better Plan That Has Stalled Out – By Yuval Rosenberg (The Fiscal Times) / February 18, 2022
President Biden earlier this week again pitched his Build Back Better agenda, telling a gathering of the National Association of Counties that his plan would help middle-class families “getting clobbered by the cost of everyday things” by capping child-care expenses and cutting the cost of prescription drugs. In a tweet Thursday, the president again touted that 17 Nobel Prize winners in economics have said the plan will ease inflationary pressures. “We can get this done,” Biden said.
But as The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan and Seung Min Kim report, “it’s not clear such a plan exists anymore, at least in any recognizable form.” Talks between the White House and key lawmakers about the plan “have virtually evaporated,” they report, even as “Biden sometimes makes it sound as though Build Back Better is on the cusp of passage.”
In reality, the plan is still clouded by questions about what any new version might look like: “It’s far from evident what, if any, version of Biden’s once-sweeping proposal could pass this year and what it would include,” Sullivan and Kim say. “Would it be a climate plan? A prescription drug initiative? A health-care bill?”
