The $3.5 trillion budget bill passed by the U.S. Senate has game-changing potential for the middle class, poor, and the underserved.
It’s so enticing for African Americans and the historically underserved that some white politicians call it racist and anti-white.
“[The bill] discriminates against white people at every turn,” lamented former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey in an opinion piece for a New York newspaper.
If you’re white, you’re low-priority,” McCaughey wrote in the piece rich with irony. African Americans have faced white supremacy since the first Black person landed against his will on this nation’s soil hundreds of years ago. But, McCaughey continued to lament.
“Americans should be outraged — but not surprised. After all, President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March, also put into place an ugly system of discrimination against whites,” she posited.
“It offered debt relief to Black farmers but not white farmers. Another provision offered billions in aid to minority-owned and women-owned restaurants but told struggling restaurants owners who happened to be white men that they had to go to the back of the line.”
While there’s optimism for ultimate passage in both chambers of Congress because Democrats are using the reconciliation process for the budget, Sen. Schumer and others in his party know a battle remains ahead.
Moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia already has raised the possibility that he might ultimately vote against his party on the budget bill.
“I’m concerned about the grave consequences [for the nation’s debt] as well as the ability to respond to other crises,” Manchin said. “Given the current state of the economic recovery, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession — not an economy that is on the verge of overheating.”
A summary of the budget blueprint passed by the Senate shows that if passed, the bill would establish universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds and a new child care benefit for working families. In addition, it makes community college tuition-free for two years and increases the Pell grant award.
The bill also makes investments in historically black colleges and universities, minority-serving institutions and Hispanic serving institutions. It creates the first federal paid family and medical leave benefit and adds a new Dental, Vision, and Hearing Benefit to the Medicare program.
“When you look at this budget in its totality, it is the strongest hint yet that we have a president, an administration, that believes reparations to African Americans should happen,” said Adam Clevinger, a CPA in Landover, Maryland.
“The bill is like a downpayment for reparations even though it’s not only about Black people. It’s about helping all underserved people — people that whites and the wealthy have repressed for so long,” he said. “But, overall, it’s good for America.”
The proposed budget also attacks much of the climate and infrastructure provisions that the environmental scientists believe are needed to prevent ultimate human destruction.
It includes new clean energy tax incentives, electrifying the federal vehicle fleet and making the “largest-ever one-time investment” in Native American infrastructure projects.
“At its core, this legislation is about restoring the middle class in the 21st century and giving more Americans the opportunity to get there,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) insisted.
