President Biden announces $1.75T spending plan - here's what's in it

Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman, Brian Sozzi, and Brian Cheung discuss President Biden's latest spending bill.

Video Transcript

BRIAN CHEUNG: Let's shift gears and talk about that major news coming out of Washington, DC, as President Biden is set to speak at 11:30 in just over an hour about the Build Back Better framework which he unveiled not long ago. It's that $1.75 trillion plan.

We've got some details of that already, a 15% corporate minimum tax on large corporations. It would also include a 1% tax on corporate stock buybacks in addition to that 15% global minimum tax, which we know Secretary Yellen has been trying to shuttle around the world and lobby for. There will also be a 5% tax on income above $10 million and a 3% tax on income for those above $25 million. And again, this will all be kind of spurred by increased IRS enforcement, which might imply some more resources for that agency.

Now, where will the spending go? There was a breakdown, again released by the White House earlier this morning, showing that about $400 billion would go into child care and preschool. Again, this is of that $1.75 trillion total. $555 billion would go into clean energy and climate investments, with $200 billion going into child tax and earned income tax credits.

Again, we're still poring over the details. Still need to hear from the president in over an hour. But Julie, I know one notable omission from the framework, at least as we've learned so far, has been parental leave, a pretty hot topic, which I know people on Twitter were also buzzing about in the last few weeks.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, definitely. And we should mention, by the way, the spending plan-- and I know this has been emphasized before, but just to reiterate. This is not a one-year plan, right? This is a plan over a decade, that $1.75 trillion in spending.

So indeed, universal preschool is part of this plan. But paid parental leave is not. And it's paid leave, not just parental, by the way. It's paid carer leave. And this has gotten a lot of attention not just because of what's going on in Washington in terms of policy but what's going on in Washington in terms of personnel. That is Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took parental leave upon the birth of his twin sons and was criticized for that by the podcast host Joe Rogan.

And then Joe Lonsdale, who is a venture capitalist-- he's associated with Palantir. He also chimed in and tweeted about this. And he says, great for fathers to spend time with their kids and support moms. But any man in an important position who takes six months of leave for a newborn is a loser. In the old days, men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future. That's the correct, masculine response.

I mean, I don't even know where to begin on this. But there was a bit of a pile on on Lonsdale after this tweet, this questionable tweet, questionable at best. And I think it's important to mention that the US is last among rich countries in terms of mandated paid national leave, the only rich country that does not offer this, which is just pretty astonishing. The other countries that don't offer these kinds of measures are small sort of Pacific Island nations.

The interesting thing about this paid leave proposal, when it was in the spending package, it wasn't just for moms, it wasn't just for dads. It was for, as I mentioned, any type of family member who would be caring not just for a newborn, by the way, but for other ill family members. So it was a pretty expansive measure. And there was pushback among some members of the Senate, including Joe Manchin, against that. And it is indeed being left out of this latest proposal. We'll see if that's where it ends up staying, right?

But Brian Cheung, obviously, I get a little fired up about this issue.

BRIAN CHEUNG: No, I mean, and for what it's worth, Joe Lonsdale, actually he's been tweeting through it this morning. But he said this probably would have been better as a private comment in retrospect to be debated and moderated amongst friends.

I mean, for what it's worth though, I think we do have to acknowledge that, despite the controversy around what he was saying and kind of leaning on these traditional male-female roles within the household, this is probably a prevailing view. And I think that it is something that, as he kind of acknowledged in his half-walk-back there, that people do think about in terms of the composition of the labor force, who's the one that's going to work, who's the one that's taking care of the kids.

And obviously, in the case of Pete Buttigieg and his husband, their type of situation is something that is becoming more common in the United States. And I think that the acknowledgment of needing time, regardless of whether or not you're a man or a woman, to take care of a newborn human being, I think, is something that is definitely entering the zeitgeist here.

Obviously, the fact that Washington is even talking about it is probably a step from probably 20 years ago when there were opportunities to be doing something similar. So even if it didn't make it through to this bill, obviously it does still appear to be a priority, at least among some lawmakers. And that debate will probably heat up, if it's not during this round of a debate, certainly in the rounds of debates to come.