The Morning: Biden’s big plan

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March 23, 2021

By David Leonhardt

Good morning. Biden has a plan to reshape the

American economy.

Windmills in Wyoming. Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times

Breaking the pattern
A new president needs to make choices. Recent history suggests that an
administration has only about a year to push major legislation through
Congress before attention turns to the midterm elections (which rarely go
well for the party in power). Any bill not at the very top of the president’s
list is unlikely to happen.

For the past few decades, new presidents have focused on two issues above
all others: taxes and health care. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both
made expanding access to health insurance their top long-term priority,
with Clinton failing and Obama succeeding. George W. Bush focused on
cutting taxes, and Donald Trump tried to cut taxes and repeal Obamacare.

President Biden will break this pattern.

His advisers are preparing a set of proposals intended to reshape the U.S.
economy and other parts of American life. If they pass, they will almost
certainly have a more lasting effect on people’s lives than the virus-relief
bill that Biden signed two weeks ago. And while the proposals include
measures on health care and taxes, they are broader — more diffuse, a
critic might say — than the top priorities of other recent presidents.

During last year’s campaign, Biden described the package with the phrase
“build back better.” It is an attempt to create a more prosperous, equal and
sustainable economy. It’s the Democratic Party’s answer to decades of
rising inequality and growing damage from climate change.

The virus-relief bill was “an emergency response,” as Senator Bernie

Sanders says on the latest episode of Ezra Klein’s Times podcast. “Now we
have to deal with the long-term structural problems facing our country
that have long, long been neglected, way before the pandemic. And that is
the need to rebuild a crumbling infrastructure, the need to address the
existential threat of climate change, the need to create many millions of
jobs, decent-paying jobs.”
The White House has not yet released all of the details, and they will
probably change as the package moves through Congress. But here’s an
overview of what we know about the major pieces.

An electric vehicle charging station in Baker, Calif. Philip Cheung for The New York
Times

What Biden would do

Infrastructure. The centerpiece of the package is a set of proposals to
improve the country’s infrastructure, including money for roads, bridges,
broadband access and energy-efficient houses and electric cars. Many of
the infrastructure provisions are “directly related to the fight against
climate change,” our colleague Jim Tankersley told us. “Administration
officials essentially see those two goals — building out 21st century
infrastructure and transitioning to a low-carbon future — as inseparable.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Times’s Lisa Friedman

that she was encouraged by what she had heard about the infrastructure
policies and likened them to her Green New Deal plan. “One of the big
goals we had when we introduced the Green New Deal was to show how
people thought about climate change from being a billion dollar problem
to a trillion-dollar opportunity,” she said. “This infrastructure package
generally seems to be shaping up in that kind of framework.”

Education. Biden wants to expand public education on both ends of the

age spectrum. His plan is likely to make pre-K universal for both 3- and 4-
year-olds, through federal funding of local programs, and would increase
funding for community colleges. The ultimate goal is to move the public-
education system from its current K-12 system to something that starts at
age 3 and extends through two years of college.

Child payments and paid leave. The virus-relief bill included a few
large items to help middle-class and poor families — but they all expire in
the next year or so. This new package would extend a monthly child
payment that starts at $250 per child for most families, as well as a big
expansion of paid family leave. These provision would significantly reduce
both economic and racial inequalities.

Health care. Biden’s plan would expand Obamacare by extending several

two-year provisions in the virus-relief bill, The Times’s Margot Sanger-
Katz says. It would cut costs for nearly every family that receives coverage
through the law and expand subsidies to some making more than
$100,000 a year.

The package may also include a measure to limit how much

pharmaceutical companies can charge Medicare for prescription drugs,
which could lead to lower prices for private insurance plans.

The plan does not appear to include another idea Biden has said he favors
— expanding access to government insurance plans, through a public
option or allowing younger people to buy into Medicare.

Paying for it
Lower prescription-drug costs would cover some of the package’s $3
trillion to $4 trillion in new spending over 10 years. But a bigger source of
money would be higher taxes on the affluent — people making at least
$400,000 a year — and on corporations.

Republicans are unlikely to support any such tax increases, which means
Democrats would need to pass major parts of the package through a
Senate mechanism known as reconciliation. Bills that go through
reconciliation need only 51 votes in the Senate, rather than 60, to pass.

What’s next: Biden’s advisers are leaning toward splitting the package
into two different bills, partly in the hope of securing Republican support
for some of them.

That won’t be easy. Congressional Republicans have almost uniformly

opposed the top legislative priorities of each new Democratic president
over the past three decades.

THE LATEST NEWS

The Virus

U.S. health officials are questioning AstraZeneca’s vaccine trial

results, saying that the company may have released outdated
information that “may have provided an incomplete view of the
efficacy data.”

Poorer countries could wait years for vaccines. That’s bad for
everyone.

Some people who recovered from Covid say their sense of smell
remains distorted.

Colorado Shooting

The scene after a gunman attacked a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., yesterday. Chet
Strange/Getty Images

A gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Colorado. A police

officer who responded to the scene was among the fatalities.

A suspect is in custody. The authorities released no details about the

gunman or the motive. Here’s what we know.

“We ducked and I just started counting in between shots, and by the
fourth shot I told my son, ‘We have to run,’” one customer said.

Politics
 The U.S., Canada, Britain and the E.U. placed economic sanctions
on top Chinese officials over their role in human rights abuses
against Uyghurs.

Two conservative Republicans — Eric Greitens in Missouri and Mo

Brooks in Alabama — announced Senate bids.

Senator Elizabeth Warren didn’t get a cabinet job, but she still
wields influence in Washington.

Other Big Stories

A demonstration outside Parliament in London last week. Mary Turner for The New York
Times

Protesters have rallied across Britain in opposition to a bill that

would give the police more power to crack down on nonviolent
demonstrations.

The U.S. Supreme Court will review a case considering the death
penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon
bombers.

Since Ellen DeGeneres apologized over accusations of workplace

misconduct, her talk show has lost about one million viewers, more
than 40 percent of its audience.

Opinions

“My small personal hell has an expiration date,” Michelle Goldberg,

a Times columnist, writes about receiving the Johnson & Johnson
vaccine.

By providing subpar weight rooms and less reliable virus testing,

the N.C.A.A. is treating its women’s basketball tournament like
 “some kind of cheap subsidized junior varsity,” The Washington
Post’s Sally Jenkins argues.

Morning Reads
Ancient: The oldest wooden sculpture is 12,500 years old. It’s teaching us
about prehistory.

Lives Lived: Elgin Baylor played above the rim in a Hall of Fame career
with the Lakers. His acrobatic brilliance foreshadowed the freewheeling
shows put on by future N.B.A. stars. Baylor died at 86.

If you’ve found this newsletter helpful, please consider subscribing to The

New York Times — with this special offer. Your support makes our work
possible.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Mireille Lee, 15, left, and her sister Elodie, 13, started the TikTok account
@alifeofliterature in February. Peter Flude for The New York Times

Welcome to BookTok
TikTok’s influence is selling thousands of books. Some enthusiastic
readers — mostly women in their teens and 20s — are posting videos of
themselves reading or recommending novels. Occasionally, they sob into
the camera after a particularly devastating ending.

“It becomes this very emotional 45-second video that people immediately
connect with,” the director of books at Barnes & Noble told The Times.
“We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales — I mean tens of thousands of
copies a month — with other social media formats.”
One example: “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller. Sales spiked after
a popular TikTok video last year, and the book is now selling roughly nine
times as many copies a week as it was in 2012, when it won a prestigious
fiction award. The book is currently third on the New York Times best-
seller list for paperback fiction.

Seeing the potential, some publishers have begun paying — or sending free
books to — users with large followings. The fees range from a few hundred
to a few thousand dollars per post. For now, though, the majority of these
videos remain unsponsored, happening organically.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Susan Spungen.

Crunchy tofu coated in panko and sesame seeds pairs nicely with a
coconut-lime dressing.

What to Listen to
Lana Del Rey’s sixth major-label album, “Chemtrails Over the Country
Club,” finds the singer “scaling back, seeking more insular insight,”
Lindsay Zoladz writes in a review.

Virtual Travel
See the Meroe pyramids — around 200 in total, many of them in ruins —
in Sudan.

Late Night
The hosts talked about spring breakers in Miami.

Now Time to Play

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was intimacy. Here is today’s
puzzle — or you can play online.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Bad inventions? (four letters).

If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See
you tomorrow. — David

P.S. The Times’s newest class of fellows hails from 17 states and Puerto
Rico, as well as Britain and Vietnam. One of them has a Ph.D. in physics.

You can see today’s print front page here.

Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about a food critic who lost her sense of
smell. On the latest “Sway,” the artist Beeple — discusses NFTs.

Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Sanam

Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at
themorning@nytimes.com.

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