Letter to the Editor: Build Back Better bill is a win-win

President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” and infrastructure bills have been making heroic efforts to help Americans improve their livelihoods.

As many as 50% of the American people were living paycheck to paycheck even before the pandemic caused business closedowns, resulting in supply chain problems. Here and abroad, people lost their jobs, creating less production of goods and services. Low supply and more demand inevitably resulted in inflation. The Build Back Better bill creates a scenario where our dwindling middle class can begin to gain better footing.

Build Back Better may not pass, though.

Why? Wealthy multinational corporate elitists and other big businesses continue to heavily influence our elected representatives in Congress with dark-money donations to perpetuate their goal of paying the smallest amount of taxes and making the most amount of money by any means necessary, all of which could stop the Build Back Better bill from passing. Lower-level workers often are lowballed on wages, creating families living-paycheck-to-paycheck. Regarding working conditions, too many businesses do not want the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulating them, which would reduce their profits.

The system outlined above really needs a breath of fresh air. Build Back Better provides some, but not all, of that desperately needed breath of fresh air for the working class, by providing needed financial assistance.

Poor pay and working conditions were not like that 50 years ago. Union workers brought OSHA into our workplaces to remove things like asbestos and to negotiate pay raises every three years, along with 20 paid medical/sick-leave days and two to four weeks’ vacation. Our pension funds have remained mostly secure over the last 50 years. Unfortunately, in other work venues around the country, state right-to-work laws somehow were able to come into existence, offering little or no benefit to their workers. Consequently, millions of workers chose not to return to work after the first wave of the pandemic began to subside. Older workers either retired or began looking for better jobs and pay, along with the younger workers.

Benefits of the Build Back Better bill include:

• Affordable nursing care in the home for the elderly without resorting to expensive nursing homes.
• Paid family and medical leave days to working Americans, so they can care for a newborn child and/or a sick parent.
• Discounts on the major expensive prescription drugs.
• Grants for 3- and 4-year-old children to attend preschool.
• Child credits to parents who live in poverty.
• More affordable medical expansion subsidies and more affordable housing.
• Child day care credits to assist lower- and middle-income working parents.

Not passing Build Back Better is inhumane.

Bill Clemens

Magnolia