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Comment by pbourke | Hacker News Reader

The Fed controls monetary policy, and it’s still mostly independent of the administration. Trump often seemed displeased with Fed Chair Powell. Also the bull market started before Trump’s inauguration.

I don’t think you can blame Trump for the division in the country. For exploiting it: sure. But he didn’t create it.

I think that Democrats seriously misread the temperature of the country after the 2020 election. They thought they were granted a progressive mandate when really the voters wanted stability and competence with perhaps incremental progress on certain key issues. All evidence points in this direction, starting with the 2018 midterms when a slate of moderate candidates gave them a House majority (despite all the noise about a few celebrity progressive candidates). The moderate labor Democrat Biden was the nominee over Sanders and Warren, etc.

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Individual polling says that people did want a progressive mandate. The measures inside the Build Back Better bill each have 70 - 80% support when polled individually. But Build Back Better only has 40% support.

The messed up political system that forces the Dems to bundle the disparate measures together is the main culprit, and navigating that with only 50 senators is really hard.

50 senators combined with silly filibuster rules and Republican/Sinema/Manchin exploitation of the rules is the hand grenade the Dems are dealing with.

There's really nothing stopping Democrats from proposing much smaller bills containing only the most popular parts of Build Back Better.

Those bills would never get through the senate, because they can't use the budget filibuster-busting process like Build Back Better does and thus would need 60 votes.

It is absolutely possible to get 60 votes on the most popular measures like increased infrastructure funding. This has been done many times. The filibusters come up when bill authors try to bundle in less popular measures and ram those through simultaneously.

There's no way they could get 10 repubs plus Manchin and Sinema to support the very popular preschool provisions, to take one example among many.

Preschool can be funded at the state and local levels. There was never any need to make it a federal budget item. If voters want increased preschool subsidies (which I think is generally a good idea) then they should contact their state legislators.

I disagree with you, but it doesn't matter. You didn't falsify my point that this is one example among many in the BBB Act that a good majority of Americans support but that could never get 60 votes in the Senate.

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