Robin Hood in Reverse

Everything you need to know about Trump’s Robin Hood in reverse budget — and his infrastructure scam — plus how the House just voted to set disability rights back by 28 years. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Just six weeks after jacking up the deficit by $1.5 trillion to give huge tax cuts to millionaires and wealthy corporations, President Trump laid plain how he plans to pay for them in the budget he released this week. To unpack the budget’s winners and losers, Rebecca is joined by Chad Bolt, senior policy manager at Indivisible. Next, this week wasn’t just budget week — it was also infrastructure week, with the release of Trump’s long-awaited infrastructure plan. Rebecca is joined by Kevin DeGood, director of infrastructure policy at the Center for American Progress, to unpack what’s in the plan. And finally, nearly 28 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act became the law of the land, this week the House lobbed a major attack on disability rights by passing a bill that would gut the landmark civil rights law. Rebecca talks with Anita Cameron, a longtime activist with ADAPT, about how it feels to be fighting to save the ADA nearly three decades after she fought for its passage.

This week’s guests:

• Chad Bolt, Senior Policy Manager, Indivisible
• Kevin DeGood, Director of Infrastructure Policy, Center for American Progress
• Anita Cameron: disability rights activist, ADAPT

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read more of the gory details on Trump’s budget (AKA: how Trump wants to pay for his giant millionaire and corporate tax cuts) — and check out Annie Lowrey’s tweet threadasking 60 questions the Trump administration should have asked before unveiling their silly “food box” proposal
• Check out what Trump’s Robin Hood in reverse budget would mean for women, children, older Americans, people with disabilities, communities of color, LGBTQ individuals, veterans, and rural communities through these fact sheets
• Learn more about how Trump’s infrastructure plan is just another scam
• Read up on the attack on the ADA that just passed the House — and hold your member of Congress accountable (note: a dozen Democrats shamefully voted for the bill)
• The week of February 19th is recess week! Find town halls and other recess activities near you through Indivisible’s handy recess guide

This program aired on February 16th, 2018

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. With the ink barely dry on Trump and congressional Republican’s partisan tax bill giving huge tax cuts to millionaires, billionaires and wealthy corporations Trump’s budget released this week lays plain how they plan to pay for, by slashing Medicaid, nutrition assistance and other basic supports that help everyday American make ends meet. Surprise, surprise, except it’s surprising no one. With me is Chad Bolt, he’s guru of all things budget and lots more at Indivisible, he’s also one of my dear friends and a friend of the show. Chad thank you so much for coming back.

CHAD BOLT: Hey Rebecca, good to be here again.

VALLAS: So I laid out a couple of the things that this budget does let’s zoom out a little bit. What is in Trump’s budget this week?

BOLT: Sure so just to start big picture what we see in this budget is huge cuts to programs that families rely on and really huge cuts across the board. They really left no stone unturned in terms of places to make deep cuts so just big picture it’s just a 29% cut to the State Department, it’s a 14% cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for programs that help people afford housing. It’s a 23% cut to the EPA so really just across the board drastic reductions in funding for programs that we need.

VALLAS: One of the things that to me, and I want to mostly focus obviously on the cuts to programs that families rely on but one of the things to me that has gotten not nearly the attention it deserves is huge, huge cuts, actually 80% cuts to the Centers for Disease Control, programs that specifically are about reducing and addressing outbreaks of infections diseases overseas. Apparently Trump and his friends in Congress don’t think that we need to be preventing the next Ebola outbreak or whatever else is going to end up coming over here.

BOLT: It is kind of hard to believe and hard to count the number of ways this budget would put Americans at risk and this is one of them.

VALLAS: Now zooming in a little bit more on the kind of programs and policies that help families make ends meet. One of the things that to me I will admit I was actually surprised about reading in the budget was that after spending the better part of 2017 trying to take away health care from tens of millions of Americans by repealing the Affordable Care Act and ending Medicaid as we know it, Trump has shown us he’s nowhere near down trying to do that. He actually keeps repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the end of Medicaid as we know it in this budget.

BOLT: That is exactly right. So we know he’s going after Medicaid administratively with work requirements which I know you’ve talked about on this show.

VALLAS: And we’ll talk plenty more about, you’re not off the hook yet even though we’ve talking about it lots.

BOLT: I know you will. But as you said, this budget assumes some form of ACA repeal modeled after the Graham-Cassidy proposal which was a block granting of Medicaid which we know would result in huge, huge cuts to the Medicaid program, something in the order of $300 billion. And again, Medicaid, this is something that people rely on for their health care and we know that if this proposal to block grant it went through, people just wouldn’t be able to get the healthcare that they need, states would lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to keep their people healthy.

VALLAS: And I think the reason that I was surprised to see this, it’s not like it’s a new idea obviously. Taking away health care from tens of millions of Americans, that’s become central to the Republican platform in the new world that we apparently live in, I think the reason I was surprised to see that was because after trying and failing to do it through legislation last year, Republicans started to say OK fine, we’re going to move on and it sounded from Mitch McConnell and others in Congress like they were saying look we’re done trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, that’s not in the cards anymore. I think Trump’s budget in a lot of ways is a reminder that we need to not be resting on our laurels when we hear those kinds of assurances from folks in congress.

BOLT: That’s exactly right. What this signals is that Trump is not giving up on ACA repeal, it is dogmatic to the Republican brand at least for some including Trump and it just means that we cannot let down our guard either. This is something that they will not rest on doing frankly until they’re not longer in control of the congressional agenda.

VALLAS: Now as you mentioned it’s not just health care that Trump and his colleagues in Congress are hell bent on taking away from millions if not tens of millions of Americans. This budget makes very clear that they also want to take away food as well as housing from people who are struggling to afford the basics. Tell me a little bit about what these cuts to nutrition assistance look like in this budget.

BOLT: Well this is a huge, huge cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP or what’s been known as food stamps. It’s a $213 billion cut and a proposal that’s gotten —

VALLAS: Which is like a third of the program, right?

BOLT: Yes, yes it is a huge chunk, this is about helping families afford food. We’re talking about the basics here. It’s a $213 billion cut and a proposal that’s gotten a lot of attention is this idea of transforming a big portion of the program to a box delivery program. This is, and they are literally selling it, I wish I were making this up but I’m not, they are selling it as the “Blue Apron”-ing of the SNAP program which is absurd. Blue Apron may be a better way to cook, it is not a better way to deliver SNAP benefits to the American people who need it.

VALLAS: Let’s talk a little bit about that. Of all the pieces of the budget this actually has gotten surprisingly a lot of attention. This food box idea, they’re actually calling it “America’s Harvest Box”

BOLT: The harvest boxes.

VALLAS: The harvest box which sounds not just Orwellian but I don’t know, like a bunch of consultants sat around in a room and said how do we make SNAP cuts sound really good? I know, let’s use language that happens around thanksgiving. Maybe they played with like America’s cornucopia box and settled on harvest because it was fewer syllabus and more people would know what it was but let’s talk about what it actually is.

BOLT: It suggests that the food you’re going to get is fresh produce as in just harvested. But we’re talking about canned fruit, pasta, cereals, it is no means a balanced diet of food that you’d get in this box and we haven’t even gotten into the question of what we do we do when someone has a food allergy, when they have specific dietary restrictions that of course if they were shopping for themselves that they would know how to shop for. There’s just so many unanswered questions about how this would work and not even getting into the questions of would this save money. Right now what the government does is transfer funds electronically to someone’s Electronics Benefit Transfer, their EBT card that they shop with. you’re talking about turning that into a whole packaging and delivery system. It’s hard to imagine that would achieve the savings that they claim it does in the budget.

VALLAS: I want to talk a little bit about some of the unanswered questions here. Before we get into what to me was one of the best responses to the America’s Harvest Box proposal which came from Annie Lowrey on twitter.

BOLT: Perfect, yes.

VALLAS: She’s a writer for New York Magazine among other things, one of my favorite people out there when it comes to snark when snark is due.

BOLT: That thread is still going. The questions are still coming.

VALLAS: Are they still coming because there were 60 when I looked last.

BOLT: Right.

VALLAS: But before we get into that I think to me one of the things that just needs to be said about this proposal is that it is just such a classic example of how conservatives who claim to be the party of smaller government are huge fans of big in your face, in your life government when it comes to poor people.

BOLT: That’s exactly right. I have to say the Trump administration is getting their ideas for cutting the budget from the advertisements on Pod Save America. I shutter to think what might be next. I’m pretty sure Me Undies is a big advertiser on Pod Save so I just shutter to think about what’s next but this is just not a proposal that I think is going anywhere. I think even Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director has a hard time defending this before congress. He was in front of the House Budget committee taking hard questions from some members about how this would actually work. It is true that the government runs, the USDA runs a food delivery system for seniors but serves 600,000 people, not the 40 million people that rely on SNAP and those are for seniors that rely on these delivery boxes because they in many ways can’t get out of their house all the way to them. These are not families that can get to grocery store and shop for themselves.

VALLAS: So let’s get into some of the questions that Annie Lowrey posed because I feel like a lot of these are exactly the right questions to be asking but they also point out what a not well though through proposal this is to be included in something like the president’s budget, his priorities for the country and his vision for how we deliver nutrition assistance in this country to people who are struggling to feed their families.

BOLT: For sure.

VALLAS: So she starts off and these questions start pretty basis, what if you don’t receive your box one month? What if you’re homeless and you don’t have an address where someone can ship a box? What if you don’t have a place to receive mail? What if you move frequently? What if you have allergies? Something that is not contemplated here, lots of people have restrictions on what they can eat. I am one of those people who live with a chronic stomach illness and has real particulars about what I can eat and digest? What if the box gets wet, or animals get into it? All really good questions to start with. What were some of your favorites that she posed?

BOLT: I don’t have the twitter thread in front of me, I’m a bad Off Kilter guest because I didn’t come prepared. I think the questions around what if you move, what if the government doesn’t have your address, dietary restrictions, these are all serious questions that don’t appear to have though through by the administration at all.

VALLAS: And as you have pointed out, harvest sounds like healthy food which I think it probably why they use that kind of term to dress this up but I think the thing that blew me away was that there isn’t going to be any fruit or vegetables in the boxes!

BOLT: Right. That’s exactly right. There may be some canned fruit or vegetables but these are not harvested as the name suggests. This is not fresh produce. And I think it’s a horribly paternalistic, insulting arrogant way to approach making sure people have the food assistance that they need.

VALLAS: Which if it’s not even going to be nutritious food like fruits and vegetables makes no sense if it’s starting from a place of not trusting low income families to feed their families with nutritious food, one of those memes out there that never seems to die even when the USDA takes a look at these things finding as it did about a year ago that low income families who turn to SNAP don’t make substantially different food choices at the grocery store than families who don’t turn to SNAP. It was in response to one of those outcries of oh my God people are using their food stamps for junk food and to me in these conversations the missing piece in all of these is if we want to be equipping low income families with what they need to make these choices for their families then we need to be making sure that SNAP benefits are adequate to afford not just junk food which is cheaper but more expensive food more nutritious food usually ends up being. I’ll close out this SNAP box piece, because there’s a lot more to talk about but obviously this is one that really struck a chord with a lot of people.

BOLT: You’re about to close the harvest box.

VALLAS: Oh God, I’m about to close the harvest box, I am Chad, you won, you won that round, you totally did. But I think the other thing that has to get pointed out here is the people who are chomping at the bit and how many different food metaphors can I put into this same segment Chad.

BOLT: You might say they have a strong appetite for this.

VALLAS: Guess who has a strong appetite for this food box proposal, it’s President Trump and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s friends in Big Ag who would love to see their pockets lined if they can get contracts to be the providers of the food that goes in these boxes.

BOLT: That’s exactly right. You pointed out something earlier that was really important about what we know about the choices that families make that receive SNAP benefits and one other statistic that we know has to do with fraud in the SNAP system and how low it is. When you see drastic proposals like this one and huge budget cuts to SNAP Republicans always bring fraud into the conversation like this is something that we have to do just because it’s so bad. It’s the fraud, the prevalence of fraud in SNAP is at almost record lows, it’s 1.5% in the most recent years that we have data for this and that’s down from highs of 4% in the 90s so these are very extremely low levels even when you compare it to other programs across the government. It’s just not a good reason or case to make for doing this to American families.

VALLAS: And I think we should say and then say again, the food box proposal which is getting perhaps more attention than almost any of the other cuts in this budget that are going to impact struggling families is something that we should obviously look at and criticize and think about seriously but we need to not lose sight of the fact that it comes alongside this huge cut to this critical program that as you mentioned is about a third of the overall program itself. Just lopping off a third of the program. In a way that we at the Center for American Progress have found would mean 7 million, more than 7 million fewer Americans receiving nutrition assistance in their time of need.

BOLT: That’s exactly right. And just to mention, the huge $200 billion plus cuts to SNAP almost half of that is from new eligibility restrictions and new requirements for the program. So about half is through this box proposal but even more serious and even more dangerous because I think the other half of that, the eligibility restrictions, we may actually see come to fruition. That was a little fruit joke.

VALLAS: Oh, oh I missed it! I’m glad you actually pointed it out to me so I didn’t miss yet another bad pun.

BOLT: That’s the sign of a bad pun, it has to be pointed out to listeners. [LAUGHTER] So $84 billion worth of this cut is related to new eligibility restrictions and broader time limits on the amount of time that somebody can receive SNAP benefits.

VALLAS: Which is something that Republicans often like to refer to as work requirements, it’s something we’re also watching now play out in the Medicaid context with Trump as we’ve talked about on this show many times now having decided to let the states for the first time in the Medicaid program’s 5 plus decade history take away health insurance from people who can’t find a job or get enough hours at work. This is a policy that is already in place in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program but Trump is actually calling to make it worse. How could he make it even worse than it already is?

BOLT: Well it’s particularly heinous for seniors because currently under the SNAP program if you are 60 or older you generally are not subject to time limits. He wants to raise that age to 62 which exposes about 2 million seniors to losing their food assistance.

VALLAS: So that and lots more in the space of trying to go after the so-called undeserving poor that Trump and his colleagues in congress are singularly focused on. Not just in this budget but in their entire agenda, it also extends into the housing context where in this budget as we knew was coming because of some leaks that happened a couple weeks back.

BOLT: Yeah.

VALLAS: He also has decided that people should be effectively made homeless if they can’t find a job fast enough and are receiving housing assistance.

BOLT: Yeah, it’s really terrible. Losing your housing assistance doesn’t help you find a job. This is not able moving people to work in fact it’s much harder to get a job if you don’t have stable housing. It’s much hard to find a job if you don’t have stable health care which is another outcome of their attempt to add work requirements to Medicaid. So he’s doing by adding these requirements the opposite of what he said he would do. He’s making it harder for people to find work.

VALLAS: So but Chad I feel like it’s all OK and really going to help people if we just call it workforce development instead of cuts, right?

BOLT: That’s right, I forget, we’re calling this workforce development now. Thanks to Paul Ryan he’s a brilliant rebrander, at least he thinks he is. So yeah these proposals to take health care away from people, take food, housing away from people it’s all in the name of workforce development.

VALLAS: Which is sort of amazing also in the same week where we’re seeing a budget that again slashes workforce development programs that provide job training and skills development and community engagement opportunities for seniors, all kinds of the very things that would be encompassed in the term workforce development if it weren’t being use as code for taking away people’s food, housing and health care.

BOLT: Yeah, thinking big picture here I just can’t remember a time in DC, spin is always part of politics but I struggle to remember a time when what an administration said they were doing and what they were actually doing were just such stark opposites of each other. As you just said, in the name of workforce development, taking away people’s benefits while cutting actually workforce development program, something else revealed by this budget, I know you’re going to talk about later in this show, infrastructure. On the very same day he put out an infrastructure plan to try to persuade us all that he’s serious about infrastructure, he cut hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure programs in the budget. And I’m thinking of the example of $500 million from the Department of Transportation TIGER grant program which helps state and local governments fund transportation projects. It’s so popular and so oversubscribed that only 5% of applicants actually get funded. So this is a very popular federal program that Trump decided he wants to get rid of in his budget. Again as I said on the very same day he said he’s serious about infrastructure.

VALLAS: Were you a Seinfeld watcher, Chad?

BOLT: Friends only.

VALLAS: Really?

BOLT: Uh, Seinfeld, I’m not going to say it was before my time because I don’t know if it was —

VALLAS: It was definitely not before, you’re not that much younger than me.

BOLT: Well Friends and Will and Grace were my two Thursday night NBC shows.

VALLAS: Those are solid choices but I have to say I thought our friendship was deeper than this and now I have serious questions about you as a person. Ok so we’re going to set that aside so in Seinfeld and by the way when someone asks you are you a Seinfeld watcher the correct answer is yes.

BOLT: Alright.

VALLAS: It’s sort of like in Ghostbusters if someone asks you a God, if someone asks you are you a God you said yes.

[LAUGHTER]

BOLT: Yeah so I haven’t seen that movie either.

VALLAS: You’ve never seen Ghostbusters?

BOLT: I know, I’m just going to exit stage right now.

VALLAS: I feel like this segment is over and there is nothing you can do to come back from this. Wow, ok, so I’m going to set my feelings aside for a minute.

BOLT: I hope everyone has enjoyed the very last episode of Off Kilter featuring Chad Bolt they will ever air on this podcast.

VALLAS: So I was going to say and I guess I’ll just educate you instead of allowing you to say you agree because you don’t know what I’m talking about. There was a concept in Seinfeld that was about Bizarro-land. So there was Jerry Seinfeld and then there was Bizarro Jerry. And then there was George Costanza and Bizarro George Costanza. I sort of feel like we’re in Bizarro-land. As you were describing, where there’s what they say and then there is what they’re actually doing. Could not agree more. One of the things —

BOLT: I’m going to 100% agree with that because I’m so familiar with the concept of Bizarro-land [LAUGHTER] It sounds exactly like a perfect analogy.

VALLAS: Good recovery Chad, good recovery. So one of the things that was not in this budget that was a real notable omission was any mention of raising the federal minimum wage. And to me any conversation about so-called work requirements and taking away people’s basic assistance in the name of somehow workforce development, any conversation missing the connection to the poverty level minimum wage is missing the real story here. President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan can tell us every day of the week that the best way out of poverty is a job but they’re hoping that we forget that the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in 8 years, over 8 years and that as a result a minimum wage worker today has to work an extra 3 months to earn the same in real terms as she did in 2009 the last time that the minimum wage was raised by congress and that that is why so many low wage workers have to turn to nutrition assistance, to Medicaid in order to make ends meet.

BOLT: That’s exactly right and I want to say one thing that we saw out of the last jobs reports that Trump was bragging about was the increase in wage growth and much of that actually was that actually was on January 1st many states raise their state minimum wages so millions of workers saw a boost in their wages because state minimum wages went up which in large part explained the wage growth that we saw in the last jobs report that Trump was bragging about. He somehow forgot to mention though that it was because of increases in the minimum wage but it’s so important for low wage workers.

VALLAS: So I mentioned up at the top that the story here all really begins with the tax plan that was signed into law at the end of last year that is now in effect that gave huge, huge tax cuts to millionaires, to billionaires, to ja-gillionaires, let’s not leave them out. To wealthy corporations and that that is the huge $1.5 trillion hole in the deficit that Republicans are now looking to close with all of these kinds of cuts and more. So bring us up to speed with what’s going on with the tax law now that it’s in effect is everyone getting big beautiful paychecks thanks to this tax plan like Trump said?

BOLT: Well that’s what I heard, in fact I heard that folks were going to be getting a $4,000 raise out of this, I haven’t seen mine yet, I’m going to have to talk to my boss about that.

VALLAS: Ezra, if you’re listening, you just got called out to give Chad a well-deserved raise I have to say, although maybe not because of his failure to have ever watched Ghostbusters or Seinfeld which should definitely go in his performance review.

BOLT: Yeah, alright that’s a new metric, I’ll put it in. I mean we saw Paul Ryan’s tweet a couple weeks ago now about the how important it was that a worker in Pennsylvania was getting $1.50 more in her paycheck and I think it just speaks volume that Paul Ryan thought that was a selling point of this tax bill, like $1.50 more. Look, I want to say, I went to school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I have shopped at the Costco in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I’m a Costco member, I get it, there’s a lot of value in a Costco membership. But take that and compare it to the $6 billion that Exxon got out of this tax bill, that Chevron got out of it. Everything that we see going on with stock buybacks, there’s a new report out today that’s up on CNN Money, there has been $171 billion in stock buybacks which for listeners, a stock buyback is a way for corporations to return wealth to their shareholders and so you see corporations that Trump said would give workers a huge raise instead they’re choosing to do shareholder friendly activities, return money to their shareholders. And maybe give folks a one time bonus but a lot of the companies that we saw come out swinging with yeah, we just got our tax cuts and we’re giving out bonuses. I’m thinking of Wal-Mart as an example. They gave out bonuses and then they announced the closure of a bunch of their stores. They fired a bunch of their store managers with the opportunity for them to apply later on for a lower position; they closed 20% of Sam’s Clubs and then announced more layoffs. Doesn’t sound like a good tradeoff to me.

VALLAS: But I got this dollars and two quarters in front of me now Chad that I didn’t have before so I’m supposed to be really grateful, right, to Paul Ryan and to Donald Trump.

BOLT: Well you should be because when you add that to your harvest box —

VALLAS: Oh right.

[LAUGHTER]

BOLT: You’re really rolling.

VALLAS: Except I don’t have health care anymore either so many that dollar fifty is going to actually have to go really, really far so thank you for bringing us up to speed and of course as people will remember from listening to the show over months from the tax plan and that debate, of course many families are actually going to see their taxes go up overtime, it’s just not happening immediately because of how it is structured in a very smart way to make it look upfront like some folks are being helped whereas in out years it’s going to be a trend in the opposite direction. But there was also a really big bombshell from OMB Director Mick Mulvaney at a hearing up on Capitol Hill having to do with the tax law.

BOLT: That’s exactly right. So what we saw out of the Trump budget obviously it’s a statement of his priorities a statement of his values. We saw hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to programs families rely on but the other thing we saw was a glimpse into the amount of revenue that the federal government will bring in through taxes over the next decade. And Trump’s own budget director admitted that because of the tax law, the federal government $1.8 trillion fewer, $1.8 trillion less because of the tax law. I mean what the budget told us was the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress gave trillions of dollars away to corporations and the wealthiest Americans in tax cuts and the bill has come due.

VALLAS: And this might now sound on it’s face like a huge bombshell to people who have been hearing for months that Republicans just blew a huge hole in the deficit which we all know that they did. The reason this ends up being such a big bombshell admission from budget Director Mulvaney is because all along President Trump and his whole administration has literally been lying to the American people telling us oh but these tax cuts are going to all but pay for themselves and this show that not only do they know that is not true but now that the law is actually signed and in effect they’re no longer ever really keeping up that lie.

BOLT: It shows just what a deep, deep hole these tax cuts have put us in. I mean $1.8 trillion is a lot of money and folks have to remember that the next time there is a disaster somewhere and Republicans in congress say well I’d love to do more federal disaster aid but we’ve got to offset it to cuts to other programs. Or take for example Trump, this infrastructure plan it’s only a small percentage of what we need for infrastructure and the reason we can’t do more is because we just gave all the revenue away through tax cuts to the rich and corporations.

VALLAS: So Chad thank you for that super helpful rundown about all the things in a 400 plus page document so the rest of us don’t have to read it. Well not me, I actually read it with you. So we read it so everyone else didn’t have to. But I think the last thing to close on here as we all take this in and think about the significance is how out of step this budget document which really is a blueprint of Trump and Republicans in congress’s priorities for the country. How out of step it is and how complete opposite it is from what the American people actually want and I’m not just talking about Democrats here or progressives. I’m talking about people across party lines, new polling that the Center for American Progress just did and that just came out a few days ago really puts that in stark relief because it finds that 80% of Americans oppose cuts to Medicaid, 78% of Americans oppose cuts to home heating assistance, we didn’t even talk about LIHEAP which they would completely eliminate in this budget. 78% of Americans oppose cuts to Social Security Disability benefits, another program hugely cut in this budget. It goes on and on and taking that even a step further, Americans say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supports these kinds of cuts so I’ve got to say 2018 is a lot of things but it’s an election year in addition to all of those things so it’s going to be an interesting November to watch if Republicans continue on this course.

BOLT: Couldn’t agree more, and in the meantime if you want to let your members of congress know just how out of step they are I have good news. This coming week, the senate and the house are both on recess so they are back in your home state, back in your home district, they might be having town halls, they might be showing up at other public events. Indivisible’s got everything you need to confront your members of congress about the issues that matter to you. So go to recess.indivisible.org, you can find town hall questions about the budget and about the tax scam that we just talked about. We’ve also got stuff there on DREAM, on bank deregulation bill coming up there in the Senate after recess. All the resources that you need, recess.indivisible.org.

VALLAS: And if you want to share your story of how the Trump budget cuts would impact you and your family you can also, as you know if you’re a listener of the show, go to Handsoff.org and share your story and get involved with the campaign to stop these budget cuts to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations so that rich people can put another boat inside their bolt. Chad Bolt is the guru of many things over at Indivisible but one of them is budget and boy am I thankful for that even though his movie and TV watching habits are apparently terrible.

BOLT: One thing I am not a guru of is Seinfeld apparently.

VALLAS: I’m going to help you fix that, it’s a long weekend so I’m going to hold you hostage all weekend, sorry to your husband because that’s what we’re going to be doing is catching you up but thank you for coming back on the show. You’re sort of the best I think is accurate to say at this point. Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break.

Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

Welcome back to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week wasn’t just budget week, it was also, drumroll please, infrastructure week with President Trump releasing his long awaited infrastructure plan. You can already hear the snark in my voice because you know what’s coming but to help me dig into the proposal and cut through the wonky jargon, I’m joined by Kevin DeGood, he’s CAP’s guru of infrastructure policy and someone who says he can’t be intentionally funny, I would disagree because he’s one of the funniest people at the Center for American Progress. Kevin, thanks for joining the show and I hope you brought the funnies.

KEVIN DEGOOD: Thank you Rebecca, I’ll try, I’ll try. Infrastructure is a barrel of laughs.

VALLAS: Couldn’t you have at least come up with an infrastructure pun?

DEGOOD: Yeah that’s where again I’m falling short already.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: It’s a bridge full of … no.

DEGOOD: It’s a bridge over the laughs? See, we’re already in the hole.

VALLAS: We’re already in the hole but let’s get out of the hole. So Kevin, was the plan that President Trump released his massive infrastructure investment or so called investment, was it was you expected? What’s in the plan?

DEGOOD: Well sadly it’s exactly what we expected because what we expected was that it would be a complete scam. And that’s exactly what we got. So the president has for starting on the campaign trail and running all the way through to this day talked about how he was just going to rebuild America, everything would be big and beautiful and gleaming and new and the number he’s been throwing around lately is $1.5 trillion. To say that that’s wrong is an understatement. If we look at the plan in combination with the budget what we see is that the administration actually wants to cut federal spending on infrastructure. So the budget has over the ten year window $280 billion in cuts to federal infrastructure programs and the plan only calls for $200 billion of expenditure so we’re talking about a cut of roughly $1.40 for every $1 of proposed expenditures. So the effect of that would essentially be to reduce total construction employment and to reduce total infrastructure work around the nation. On top of that, the president wants governors and mayor to go out and do that actual hard work of raising the money so part of how they get to this big fake number is they basically say well we’re going to put a few dollars on the table at the federal leaving aside the cuts and this will cause mayors and governors to go out and raise huge sums of money. So that’s the other thing that’s baked into this plan is that administration like all Trump business ventures, he wants all the credit but he wants everybody to take the risk and do the work. So this plan is really handing off a huge burden to governors and mayors and basically saying you go out and raise gas taxes and tolls and other user fees that we know from economic analysis fall disproportionately on low and middle income residents so that’s really what their vision is. Their vision is a cut and a burden and we’re here to try to educate people about why that is.

VALLAS: Now a lot of the conversation at the state and at the local level when it comes to budgets is about how they’re cash strapped, how they actually can’t afford even their own existing obligations especially over the course of decades as more and more of what used to be done at the federal level and funded at the federal level has been devolved to the state level and the local level. Is this a bill that states and cities can afford?

DEGOOD: No and I think the other point is worth making here is this bill would actually exacerbate regional economic and political divisions because when you talk about the kinds of cuts that are embedded in the budget, what that would mean is core federal programs like in particular the highway trust fund which provides dollars on a formula basis every year, they go to every single corner of the country, places big and small. That money would disappear and replaced with a pool for competitive dollars and in order to even show up with an application you have to raise new money. Well we know from experience that the places that are more likely to be able to raise taxes on their constituents are places that are already economically thriving. If we look at 2016 we saw a couple of big ballot initiative out on the west coast, one was in Seattle which is going to raise billions of dollars in the coming years, another one was in Los Angeles county called measure M. Measure M is going to raise more than a billion dollars over the next 40 years but it’s also fair to point out that Los Angeles county’s annual GDP is more than $700 billion. That’s more than most countries so that’s not really a model for the rest of the nation. If you’re talking about Akron, Ohio, you’re talking about a place in Appalachia, you’re talking about the panhandle of Florida. You can go all over the nation and you see places that are facing a great deal of economic distress, it’s just unrealistic to say to the governors and those mayors well just turn around and hit up your folks.

VALLAS: Now you mentioned that we have to be looking at this infrastructure plan in tandem with Trump’s budget released this week. So actually kind of helpful that the two coincided in timing because we can look at them side by side and you’ve mentioned that there are all of these cuts of core infrastructure funding in Trump’s budget at the same time that he’s waving his hands over here saying don’t look at the budget look at my infrastructure plan which is all kinds of investment even though that doesn’t really pan out as you described but a piece of this is also and I feel like this is the part that’s getting the least attention out there, the plan actually says and you have to read the fine print to get to this. That it needs to find $200 billion in offsets for what the investment of federal dollars is going to come from. So they don’t actually want to invest new money, they want to pay for it is translating that in Washington language there. And it’s unspecified budget cuts, that’s the language that this plan uses. Where do we think that’s going to come from, and how do we square that in the Robin Hood in reverse budget that Trump just put out that slashes everything from nutrition to Medicaid and more?

DEGOOD: It’s true that the budget’s work is that you don’t pair spending and cuts, you don’t actually line those two things up. But what we do know is looking at existing federal infrastructure programs that they call for $280 billion in cuts to those. So the largest one is the highway trust fund which is as I mentioned earlier provides formula dollars to state DOT’s and to local transit operators. And over the ten year window that program would face a cut of $164 billion. So that’s really the foundation upon which states and regions really build their infrastructure programs and so it’s taking away those formula dollars and then placing this uncertain pool of discretionary dollars in front of them that would be on net less than what they’re receiving now. So that’s the big challenge. I think the other thing that bears mentioning is that this plan also has enormous deregulatory components to it. In many respects, this is actually an environmental deregulatory bill masquerading as a spending bill. They want to talk about it in terms of jobs and construction but really what’s embedded in here are huge rollbacks to as our environmental team has determined, 9 foundational environmental laws. That’s the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, Superfund, National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA, which you’ve probably heard a lot about lately.

So really what they’re trying to do is eliminate the ability of people to stand up in their communities and say this project is going to create harms and we need to be involved in it’s planning and how it is ultimately designed and built so that we can to the greatest extent possible minimize disruptions to neighborhoods, to people’s lives and to natural environments and wildlife. And there’s a lot of misinformation out there, the administration has pushed crazy numbers about how long it takes to go through an environmental review and permitting process. They’re pushed completely false numbers about how many projects even have to go through that. The truth of the matter is of all of the thousands of federally funded projects, both infrastructure and other that have to go through some form of review. It’s a very small percentage, we’re talking in the low single digits of projects that actually have to go through this process and the reason is that big projects are complicated and they often have potentially large negative consequences. If we can, we want to mitigate them.

VALLAS: So this can sound really technical but I think what I hear you describing is that the Trump administration in the name of an infrastructure plan is actually proposing changes to existing review processes that are all about making sure that we protect wildlife, the nation’s air, our water, and that we really think about the impact that development is going to have on tearing through our communities, harming wildlife, polluting our air, polluting our water before we green light these kinds of projects.

DEGOOD: Right and really it’s a question of a little bit of time on the front end spent thinking about what the impacts are going to be, can save us an enormous amount of pain and cost later on down the road. So I think there’s one great historical example worth mentioning and that is the Kissimmee River in Florida. The Kissimmee River in Florida was this meandering, more than 100 mile long great river that went from south of Orlando all the way down to Lake Okeechobee and then it fed into the Everglades and into the aquifer that is the sort of water for all of southeast Florida. And because this river occasionally flooded eventually the Army Corps came in prior to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and essentially destroyed an entire river. It turned it into these five stagnant pools and the result of this was basically no fish or wildlife or aquatic plants could survive. There was no air in the water, it wasn’t really a nature existing river and that in today’s dollars was maybe $160 or $170 million, I can’t remember off the top of my head. The partial restoration of the Kissimmee River is going to cost us more than $1 billion.

VALLAS: And I’m looking at one of your reports and I think the number is $194 million.

DEGOOD: There you go, $194 million. So we can see that if we just spent a little bit more time asking some fundamental questions about is there a way to balance the need for some flood control and development with the need to maintain the functioning of a natural system like a river that we wouldn’t find ourselves backed into this corner. And we can think about the replicated, maybe not on the scale of the Kissimmee River with every project but thousands and thousands of times a year we make changes to the built environment that have real meaning for people’s lives. So in and urban context that can mean displacement of homes and businesses through imminent domain, that can mean noise, that can mean direct pollution, there’s lots of ways in which there can be severe harms. In the past we can look at urban renewal programs where we plot interstate highways through entire neighborhoods that no longer exist or we created physical barriers that made it harder for people to access jobs or education or health care and those are real concerns that we have to take seriously because again, we fundamentally pay the price when we make bad decisions.

VALLAS: Now, one of the phrase and this is a heck of a buzzword, it’s like the caricature of a Washington buzzword and jargon but this is one of the words that’s sort of in the ether as everyone is talking about this infrastructure plan is public-private partnership. This is everywhere in Trump’s messaging about what this plan is about and in media talking about it. What does the public-private partnership, what is this concept about, how does it play into Trump’s infrastructure plan and what does it really mean in English?

DEGOOD: Public-private partnerships are the at the end of the day to throw out another jargon-y word, they’re about procurement which is to say that governments buy physical stuff and services everyday and infrastructure is something that ultimately the public buys. We buy roads, we buy transit lines, we buy water systems, we go out and we buy these things and we have to have a process for that. And a public-private partnership is just an alternative form of procurement. So it has some potential advantages if structured well, it can at times require that the private sector take on a little bit more of the risk for delivering a needed infrastructure asset on time and on budget. There are lots of complexities to it that we probably can’t get into now. I think that maybe even more than all that, the thing that’s important to remember is that the private sector never puts in free money. Any time that we talk about how are we going to pay for our needed infrastructure, that that money always ultimately comes from us in the forms of taxes and user fees and that the money that the private sector can put into these deals is extremely expensive. So when we talk about moving private money off the sidelines which is another term that gets thrown around along, we should remember that when a government goes out to borrow for a major project and they issue municipal bonds, they’re typically paying around 3 or 3.5% for that debt. Private equity often looks for 10 to 15% annual return. So if you think about that in terms of say your home mortgage if you can imagine the difference between paying 3 or 4% interest rate on your home mortgage and paying 15% that would change your monthly payment enormously. Well it’s the same for the government. When the private sector puts equity into these deals they expect to be repaid with a very high margin. Now there are occasions when that makes sense, but they are very few and far between. They tend to be for projects that we talk about as being mega projects. They tend to be very complicated and you’re paying that premium because you want the private sector to take on certain elements of project delivery risk but that’s in a sense almost irrelevant to what we’re really talking about. When we talk about we have a national infrastructure deficit of roughly $2 trillion according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, public-private partnerships are this sort of side fight about what is the best method of procurement for a multibillion dollar mega project. But it has nothing to do with the fact that if we want to close the infrastructure gap we need to raise the money to do that. It’s just that simple.

VALLAS: So is this another way that we’re watching the Trump administration try to line the pockets of Wall Street investors while it claims that it’s doing things the American people want?

DEGOOD: Absolutely, there’s a certain, I think, insidious connection between their push towards privatization and the cuts that they call for in the budget so if you’re a governor and you wake up the next morning and you realize that the federal government has taken away one of the largest sources of money that you get from Washington to do your surface transportation infrastructure, now all of a sudden you might be more amendable to the sharks that are circling saying to you hey we’ve got this proposal, maybe we think we could add some tolls to this state highway. Maybe we could work out a 40 year concession agreement where we’re going to provide you this upfront payment that kind of looks like revenue but in point of fact is actually a really expensive loan. So I think the push towards privatization and the cutting of federal formula funds are connected.

VALLAS: So privatization by another name that most people don’t understand. And why would they because it doesn’t really mean anything in English, it’s just classic Washington jargon. So Kevin in the last minute or so that I have with you you called this infrastructure plan a scam. Similar language to a lot of how we’ve been referring to over the past many months the tax plan which was not tax reform at all, it was a tax scam that gave millions, billions, excuse me, trillions, let’s get the decimal here right, to corporations, to the wealthiest people in this country in the form of huge tax cuts. Why is this a scam and what would a real investment in infrastructure actually look like?

DEGOOD: Great question, it’s a scam because the promise made to the American people was clear. It’s just unambiguous, President Trump promised he was going to invest in America and he’s actually calling for cuts and in my book that constitutes a scam. I think what the progressive community needs to get behind is a plan that has 5 characteristics. It needs to be robust, comprehensive, equitable, sustainable, and targeted.

VALLAS: You know I’m going to make you translate that.

DEGOOD: I know, we’re going to translate that. So robust means we want to get at least a trillion dollars of additional funding direct spending over the next ten years. Comprehensive means we have to spend those resources not just on highways and aviation but we need to take care of school reconstruction, rehabilitation, low income housing, clean energy, it needs to be all of the fundamental aspects of infrastructure that the nation needs for renewal and growth. It needs to be equitable in that we need to be focusing those investments on the kinds of projects that are going to create opportunity for all and not just a select wealthy few. It needs to be sustainable in that we need to protect our natural habitats, we need to protect our communities and we need to make sure that the United States is living up to it’s global climate commitments. And it needs to be targeted and by that I mean it’s not just a simple question of what’s the total dollar volume. It’s we need to spend this money in a smart way and one of the smartest ways is to target resources where they’re needed the most so that means taking a hard look at needs estimates and where do we have real problems. It’s not just that we need to spend more money on clean drinking water but we need to spend more money on clean drinking water in the places that have real contamination and real danger. So it needs to be those five things and I think that’s where we are trying to drive the conversation over the next year.

VALLAS: And a lot more to watch in the weeks ahead as Trump and his colleagues in congress try to sell this infrastructure scam to the American public so I’m sure we’ll be having you back soon if not to make good puns, if not make us laugh at least to make us know more than we already did about infrastructure. Kevin DeGood is the director of all things infrastructure at the Center for American Progress. Kevin, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break.

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Welcome back to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. It’s been nearly 28 years since the Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark civil rights legislation that ensured that people with disabilities have a equal opportunity to participate in public life was enacted. But this week the House of Representatives passed a bill misleadingly titled ADA Education and Reform Act, which would gut the provision of the law that requires restaurants, movie theaters, malls and other places of public accommodation to be accessible to people with disabilities. It would do this by creating onerous red tape for people with disabilities seeking to enforce their rights under the law. The law was passed mostly on a party line vote, although 12 Democrats shamefully joined most Republicans in voting for this attack on disability rights just hours after disability activists with ADAPT were arrested at the capital protesting the bill. I spoke with one of those activists, Anita Cameron who has been putting her body on the line to fight for disability rights since before the ADA became the law of the land nearly three decades ago. Let’s take a listen.

So Anita you were one of the protestors and one of the activists who nearly 3 decades ago was literally crawling on the steps of the United States capital in Washington DC to spend a message to lawmakers that disability rights needed to be the law of the land. That ultimately was part of what ended in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act that became law in 1990. You were back in Washington this week watching this law be directly attacked by the bill that the House has now passed. What was it like to be sitting there watching lawmakers talk about unraveling the legislation that you fought so hard to achieve three decades ago?

ANITA CAMERON: I was angry. I was actually enraged and it angered and devastated me to hear members of congress do this, it angered to hear them making excuses about the predatory lawyers. My whole thing is well then craft legislation that addresses what these lawyers are doing, not that strips away the civil rights of people with disabilities. And I was really so thankful for Congressman Lewis and Congressman Rochester and some of the others that spoke out against HR 620. But Congressman [INAUDIBLE] had added some amendments that would have done away with the more controversial points of this. It would have made this odious hateful legislation somewhat palatable. He wasn’t the only one, a couple of other legislators added, but I knew this thing was going to pass because each amendment that would have made this bill a little less odious was struck down and I mean struck down handedly. And so when we saw that I was like this thing is going to pass. This thing is going to pass and then as the vote began we started to chant “Don’t take our rights away, hands off the ADA” and we were pretty loud so we couldn’t hear the sergeant at arms or anyone else. We couldn’t hear I think I caught a little glimpse of some of the members of congress rubbernecking, leaning back, looking up but then things ended pretty quickly because the next thing I knew the police were there. Trying to do some scare tactics, intimidation it was just to have this pass after we made our voices known and I know that they could hear us at some point. In the face of us doing this just to do this was a slap, a total slap in our face.

VALLAS: Well and the day before the hearing, or the day before the vote there was a hearing that was a procedural hearing, it was a box that members of congress needed to check so that they could move the bill to the floor and take that vote and you and several others folks from ADAPT showed up at that hearing and you ended up being arrested at that hearing for demonstrating against the bill.

CAMERON: Yes, yes. We were charged with [INAUDIBLE] That was on Tuesday, yesterday’s action our charge was disruption of congress. But the hearing, and that was another place where Congresswoman [INAUDIBLE] who was my actual congressman spoke very eloquently about what HR 620 would do to the life of people with disabilities. And even Congresswoman Maxine Waters, she was actually testifying about another set of bills, she referred to HR 620 in that she was against that. I’m not surprised, obviously while the protesting was going on, they recessed the hearing until they got us out of there and then wound up releasing it which, I’m really angry because this seems to me a concerted effort to strip rights away from people with disabilities. And in doing that to try to divide and conquer by pitting these immigrants communities against the disability community and I think was really low ball and slimy but I’m, these legislators who do this in the fact of that are beholden to big business, not their constituents and certainly not their constituents with disabilities.

VALLAS: So now this fight is going to move to the senate where all eyes are watching whether Leader McConnell and other Republicans in the senate are going to be interested in taking up this legislation now that it has passed the house. What is your message to the senate when it comes to whether they should consider this legislation?

CAMERON: Don’t do it, don’t even consider this. There are, we’ve been told by a couple of Democratic senators that they’re going to vote to not have this bill see the light of day and I hope and pray that this bill does not see the light of day in the senate. And that’s our message. Don’t follow suit with the house in scaling back our civil rights and gutting the most important civil rights legislation for people with disabilities. Don’t do it. Resist the urge.

VALLAS: And for folks who want to see real life examples of how this legislation would impact people with disabilities in the 21st century I would encourage folks to visit the hashtag on twitter #HandsOffmyADA where people with disabilities have been sharing stories of restaurants and stores and buildings that they’re still not able access in 2018, 27 years almost 28 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted into law. Anita thank you so much for your tireless fighting on behalf of disability rights to get the ADA into place and now to try to stop it from being torn down. And I know you’re on a bus right now with a bunch of other ADAPTers heading back out of Washington DC so thank you for taking the time to join us for the show.

CAMERON: Thank you, my pleasure, it’s an honor.

VALLAS: And I’ll talk to you soon I’m sure as this debate continues and heads over to the senate.

And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.