Watered Down Budget Bill Might Not Be Worth Saving

Democrats say that they are now very close to having a budget bill that "both sides" of the Party can agree on, but the majority of the best parts of the bill have already been destroyed. Is what's left worth saving, or should Democrats cut their losses and risk not delivering anything to the American public? This is the conundrum that the Party is facing, and both outcomes don't leave the Democratic Party with a lot of hope for the future. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Democrats say that they are very, very close to having a deal on the budget bill, a budget bill that is now under $2 trillion. And you think back just two weeks ago, it was about three and a half trillion dollars, but now it's under 2 trillion, six months ago, it was going to be $6 trillion. But now, now it's not. And the reason for that is because all of the good pieces of the piece of legislation have been cut out of it. Free community college, gone. Climate initiatives, gone. Childcare, scaled down. Medicare expansion, scaled down. Paid leave, scaled down. Raising taxes on the wealthy, possibly out of the legislation altogether. But Democrats think they got that deal. Oh, we're going to get there even though Sinema is 100% against any kind of wealth tax here in the United States, even Joe Manchin was reported yesterday has kind of warmed up to the idea like, okay, maybe, maybe I'm okay if we do it, you know, to this certain amount. Sinema still remains 100% opposed to this.

So the question I have once again, and I asked this last week, but is this bill even worth supporting at this point? What good comes from it? A little bit, right? We're going to get some kind of Medicare expansion. We may get a couple of drugs where we can negotiate the prices through Medicare. We may not, and we're certainly not going to get all drugs negotiated, but we may get a couple and that's going to help people, right. We're gonna get a little bit of paid leave. We're going to get a little bit of childcare. But it's crumbs. But the alternative to crumbs is nothing. Which is better? Obviously you'd rather have crumbs than have nothing, right? Well, it's not that simple folks because here is the trap that the Democrats have actually laid for themselves and this is what drives me crazy about this. If they do not pass anything at all, the voters are going to be and they're going to lose in the midterms. If they do vote and pass this crumb legislation, then the progressive wing of the party is going to get attacked by the progressive voting base saying, you guys caved. You made these big grand lofty promises and then you caved and gave us nothing.

You could have voted against it and retooled it. Eh, could they though? Could we actually retool this piece of legislation and pass something meaningful that actually helps the American public? I don't know that that's possible. And of course you also have, if they pass it and give people crumbs, they're going to look at it and say what happened? We had a $6 piece of legislation that was going to usher in an era of new clean energy, new clean energy jobs, childcare, drug price negotiation, free community college and you give us nothing and that's without Republican obstruction, you obstructed yourselves. And then they could lose based on that. As it stands right now, there's no winning scenario for the Democratic party and it's 100% because of things they did to themselves. This is not Republicans stepping in and ruining the legislation. This is the Democrats themselves. And at this point, no matter which way you slice it, block it, obstruct it, pass it, whatever, it's a lose, lose, lose situation for the Democratic party.