your leadership on this and thank you bob and mike -- i hope we can have you back because it's going to be an ongoing discussion, unfortunately. something we are going to have to deal with. i just want to let you know we have some important conversations coming up. we will be talking about voting rights and the american democracy. we are in the process of scheduling a timely discussion on hamas, gaza and beyond with a former director of the mossad. that will be fascinating. then later in june, we have exciting rising leaders to meet. so, thank you very much, everybody. hope to see you next week. [captioning performed by the

national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] politico.com headline, "biden's budget goes big on spending in a bid to lift the middle class. -- middle-class." kaitlyn emma joins us on the phone. guest: thanks for having me. host: let's talk about priorities. congress needs to approve the budget and often that does not happen when the president put forth his plan. what is the white house saying are there priorities? -- guest: this is interesting in

the sense that it combines the president past -- president's request for 2022. he is proposing overall funding levels for defense and nondefense spending but it is also combining his vision for infrastructure and the american families plan. it is sort of this big sweeping documentary for the president's vision outlining what he would like to spend on when it comes to federal agencies and also highways, childcare, education, public health, climate change, and to your point, you are discussing this interplay between defense and nondefense spending, the biden administration beliefs domestic programs and education programs and public health and climate change and childcare and highways have been underfunded for too long in comparison to the amount of money that has been spent on the pentagon.

this budget, over the course of 10 years, seeks to correct that and spend more money on those programs compared to military funding. like you said, it is something that is rarely enacted, this is a sweeping vision for the president, essentially a wish list for spending. host: the president is getting pushback from republicans, including lindsey graham who says the pentagon budget needs to be increased. how is the administration dealing with that? guest: he has not only getting pushback from republicans, he is getting pushback from democrats. this issue with defense spending is one that is difficult for the biden administration to navigate. he is getting criticism from republicans who believe that flat funding the military is untenable. it is not something that is even an option. there are some democrats who

feel the same way. there district has defense interests and that is something that she really believes in, that the pentagon needs an adequate funding. you have democrats who are also saying that even the numbers proposed are too high. essentially they believe that the pentagon is bloated, it needs to undergo major financial audit, it could substantially tolerate billions of dollars less. it would be interesting to see how democrats take this budget and ultimately decide to fulfill that. i spoke to chairman john yarmuth the other day, he told reporters he didn't think it was going to be possible for democrats to

pass a budget in the house because of the defense number. it is difficult. in lieu of that, they may have to do something with the numbers , rather than vote on the budget they may just have to set overall funding levels and avoid this messy roll call vote in the house where everybody has to go on the record about defense funding. caitlin emma from politico, i want to share with you this headline from the washington post, "democrats seek to speed up infrastructure based on comments made over the weekend by pete buttigieg." he appeared on fox news sunday and was asked about the middle-class tax increase to pay for all of this. [video clip] >> right now in this moment we have a decision to make. what are we going to do with tax rates? the president is saying, let us not charge middle-class

americans more. middle-class americans are paying enough. let's make sure that corporations and the wealthy are paying their share. we believe that is going to raise the kind of revenue we need to fund the proposals the president has put forward. look at the american jobs plan, the infrastructure vision the president put out. the entire thing is paid for across 15 years. by year 16, deficit goes down and do not with one penny from the middle-class. host: let's parse two parts of what the secretary said over the weekend, because the spending would be eight years, the payback would be 15 years, and there has been discussion that middle-class families would pay a price to fund the transportation and infrastructure programs. guest: what is interesting about some of the plants the president has outlined, which are plans, they are heavily dependent on tax reform, raising taxes, tax

increases in order to pay it. what is interesting about what secretary buttigieg said was that these plans would be paid for within 15 years. normally you are operating within a 10 year budget window, so a 15 euro -- a 15 year window is interesting. it's not just how these things are scored. there has been discussion about -- for example, the president's proposed corporate tax rate, wanting to increase that to 28%. a lot of democrats are not comfortable with that. the white house has shown an openness to may be moving somewhere on that figure. that is the state of infrastructure talks. essentially what this budget does is it gives democrats the go ahead to use what is called the budget reconciliation progress -- process to pass

these plans without republican support. unlike what we saw with pandemic aid this year where they used the same process and said to republicans, we are going to do this without you, and they did it quickly, they are still talking in the senate. these talks are still ongoing, especially when it comes to infrastructure. it is this very slow going process. tax reform -- it remains to be seen what role this will play in paying for it because a lot of folks feel the president's plans are never going to survive in congress, or a lot of the plan so far is dependent on beefing up irs enforcement and bringing in new revenue that way. some folks think that is an unreliable source of money. it remains to be seen how that ultimately plays out on capitol hill. host: congress is in recess for memorial day.

the senate is back next week. the house is not back until june 14, flag day. guest: we are in this weird moment where this budget just came out, and kind of everybody is back in their districts. a lot of folks are on vacation. both parties have set this unofficial deadline of having something together on infrastructure by july 4. that is a very short time. chuck schumer said that no matter what, democrats will be moving something in july. regardless of the vehicle. that could be a reconciliation bill where democrats use this budget measure to deploy this special process they can use the past things without republicans, or maybe they will be -- or there will be a bipartisan bill.

but for the next few weeks, we are twiddling our thumbs while talks have been behind the scenes and we will have to see how quickly congress decides to move because thi >> c-span's "washington journal" -- we discussed policy issues that impact you. coming up tuesday morning, we will preview the week ahead at the white house with usa today white house correspondent and the former cbo director talk about the state of the economic recovery and the biden administration's economic policies. also, the friends of the earth