What Biden’s Budget Reveals

Episode 67 Sneak Peek

Yesterday President Biden unveiled his second budget request. At $5.8 trillion, it touches on several issues at the core of his 2020 campaign, building out funding for affordable housing and education. Predictably, it will also please Washington’s hawks — and the defense contracting interests behind them — with what Bernie Sanders calls a “massive increase” in defense spending. There’s also a new minimum tax on billionaires on the table, which would raise $360 billion to support the administration’s goals.

President Biden @POTUS

The budget provides the resources we need to keep Americans safe — ensuring that our military remains the best-prepared, best-trained, best-equipped military in the world.

Voters made clear in 2020 that affordable housing remains a central lack in the daily lives of working- and middle-class Americans. In the presidential election, Biden ran on a housing platform that included providing a Section 8 housing voucher to every eligible American family and dramatically increasing affordable housing stock. These plans haven’t materialized. If passed, the new budget would provide 200,000 Section 8 vouchers (there are over 2.8 million families on waitlists) and increase HUD’s budget by $11.6 billion. In the past, Biden’s proposed funding for his housing agenda (think of Build Back Better) has been gutted. Now, with the stakes incredibly high, we’ll see what his administration is willing to fight for.

On KK&F, we’ll break down the budget and the political agendas at work behind it, delve into recent updates on the war in Ukraine, and touch on the other current events at the front of our minds. We’re lucky to be joined by Paul’s Ego from the Deep Fat Fried podcast for the discussion.

This week’s episode will be available to paying subscribers through Substack on Friday night. Everyone else can listen for free when it’s released as a podcast on Saturday through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and more.