Still, for all of Mr. Biden’s forceful rhetoric — he once pledged to no longer allow “a narrow, cramped view of the promise of this nation to fester” — his administration made little effort on Friday to focus attention on that principle or to highlight details about how an equity-driven approach would change the way the government spends its money.
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- A new year, a new budget: The 2022 fiscal year for the federal government begins on October 1, and President Biden has revealed what he’d like to spend, starting then. But any spending requires approval from both chambers of Congress.
- Ambitious total spending: President Biden would like the federal government to spend $6 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, and for total spending to rise to $8.2 trillion by 2031. That would take the United States to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II, while running deficits above $1.3 trillion through the next decade.
- Infrastructure plan: The budget outlines the president’s desired first year of investment in his American Jobs Plan, which seeks to fund improvements to roads, bridges, public transit and more with a total of $2.3 billion over eight years.
- Families plan: The budget also addresses the other major spending proposal Biden has already rolled out, his American Families Plan, aimed at bolstering the United States’ social safety net by expanding access to education, reducing the cost of child care and supporting women in the work force.
- Mandatory programs: As usual, mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare make up a significant portion of the proposed budget. They are growing as America’s population ages.
- Discretionary spending: Funding for the individual budgets of the agencies and programs under the executive branch would reach around $1.5 trillion in 2022, a 16 percent increase from the previous budget.
- How Biden would pay for it: The president would largely fund his agenda by raising taxes on corporations and high earners, which would begin to shrink budget deficits in the 2030s. Administration officials have said tax increases would fully offset the jobs and families plans over the course of 15 years, which the budget request backs up. In the meantime, the budget deficit would remain above $1.3 trillion each year.
During a news conference to introduce the budget on Friday, Ms. Young and Cecilia Rouse, the chairwoman of the White House’s National Economic Council — both of whom are Black women — did not mention the president’s equity agenda until a reporter asked about it toward the end.
And the budget itself does not try to quantify the effect of following the president’s guidance to make decisions based on a sense of racial equity. There is no “equity” section of the budget. Aides did not send out fact sheets to reporters on Friday promoting the “equity spending” in the president’s inaugural budget.
That left some of the public relations work to civil rights groups and other advocates, who quickly pointed to examples of spending that would benefit communities who had traditionally been left behind by previous presidents.
Sara Chieffo, the chief lobbyist for the League of Conservation Voters, an pro-environment group, pointed to the $936 million Accelerating Environmental and Economic Justice initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is aimed at cleaning up the environment in underserved communities.
“The importance of this administration’s proposal to make the largest-ever investment in communities of color and low-income communities who have been subjected to environmental racism for decades cannot be overstated,” Ms. Chieffo said.
Marcela Howell, the president of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, praised the president for investing in programs that specifically benefit Black women.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/us/politics/efforts-to-advance-racial-equity-baked-in-throughout-bidens-budget.html
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