Did you hear? President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 into law last week. The price tag is a cool 1.9 trillion dollars. The legislation and its cost has been bandied about since he won the presidency and I’ve been obsessed the whole time with how it matches the cool 1.9 trillion dollar tab of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. I mean, come on! A comparison of what Republicans and Democrats each did with $1.9 trillion within three years of each other? Let’s roll.
Wait, what now? I know, I know, they’re not the same except they are even though I know they aren’t. But they are. Choices abound is the concept that will come into play here and in that regard, they are the same enough. Neither garnered any support from the other party. Both parties employed the budget reconciliation process in the Senate and both laws contain temporary provisions that each party hopes to make permanent at a later date. Generally speaking, “Plan R” capitalized on Republicans’ new-that-year electoral power to enact a number of tax code reforms and tax cuts they had long wanted to enact, promising a dramatic increase in jobs as a result. Generally speaking, “Plan D” capitalized on Democrats’ brand new electoral power to “crush the virus” and rev up the economy plus some anti-poverty and racial equity provisions they had long wanted to enact.
Before we filter it all through our conscious politics lens of choice, let’s talk for a moment about intention. Intentions are our answers to the critical question, what do we want? They matter. When we are clear about and aligned with what we want, all the time, it makes the choices and decisions we make that much easier. My intention to be an Olympic gold medalist informs and undergirds my choice not to smoke cigarettes.
Sometimes the choices and decisions we make are easy, sometimes not. Always, however, they point to information about who we are and what we value. When a client from my psychotherapist days insisted he was seeing me because he had no choice, I insisted he did. We went back and forth for two or three of his ten mandated sessions before he offered that he was there so he could get “signed off.” Now we were getting somewhere. I asked what that meant to him and eventually, painstakingly he said that getting signed off meant making up for his past. It meant being a good dad to his 10-year-old son, while there was still time. Do you smell the intention? In that context, his choice — which he didn’t think he had — to attend court-mandated therapy while on probation revealed something to him about who he was and what he valued. “I have no choice” became “I’m choosing my son. I’m choosing fatherhood.” He saw the values he had under the choice: responsibility; hope; love; redemption; authenticity. It was a far cry from what began as a rather sullen, “I have no choice” — and it was right there all the time.
Sometimes the choices and decisions we make are easy, sometimes not. Always, however, they point to information about who we are and what we value.
Dollars are one of the most common ways that we Americans express our choices and, as we are saying, our choices reveal much to us about who we are and what we value. As President Biden himself has said, “Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.” So we arrive at today’s exercise. Plan R and Plan D have both been conveniently summarized by none other than congress.gov.
Step 1: Hold in your mind an intention you have for America
Step 2: Pretend you know nothing about who created either plan
Step 3: Peruse/skim one plan, take it in, measure it against your intention
Step 4: Repeat with the other
Here’s mine, Teacher.
There were virtually no words or phrases in Plan R that resonated with me at all. It seemed that eighty percent of it was about corporations, big businesses, wealthy individuals and families, and specific industries like oil and gas. I’m a conscious politics practitioner so…feelings. Reading this I felt heavy and bored if not agitated and uncomfortable. I’d surmise that the creators of this plan value Wall St. and money, political power, and corporations. Mostly power. It does not seem to address me or the people I care about. I do not feel a sense of inclusion or anything that aligns with what I want.
This plan had an abundance of words and phrases that resonated strongly with me including “tribal,” “workers,” “forgiveness,” “assistance,” “child care,” “treatment,” and “rural areas.” I gleaned that helping struggling Americans was the reason for this law. Again, feelings: relief; hopeful; optimistic; seen; heard; inspired. It seems that what’s most valued here is compassion. It’s being extended to Americans struggling with COVID-19, poverty, and racial inequity. I would assume that the people who created this plan value people, which is compassion and this law seems to me like compassion in action.
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I hope you’ll take a crack at this exercise, too. We can only ever surmise about others, which is why this isn’t about them. This is about encouraging conscious politics practitioners like us to look at government spending through the lens of choice to ascertain values. And if that seems like a lot, just practice at home with your own financial data. Do your spending choices align with what you want? Do you see what you value?
NOTE: Let’s discuss this exercise and anything else from these pages and your hearts and minds at this month’s Spiritual Workout for Politics & Current Events: the live, online, interactive version of The Conscious Politics Sunday Newsletter.
I invite you to attend as my guest by using coupon code SWPMAR.