Biden tried to do quite a lot better than the blue line initially, and Manchin unexpectedly blocked the first bill in the senate after it passed the house. They had to go back and redo a whole scaled-back version that was the actual blue-line-predicted version.

Here’s a pretty good overview of what made it into the second bill, and here’s a recap of how it worked in practice after a couple of years in action.

My overall feeling is, even the yellow line is nowhere near enough, but our current political class is bent on self-destruction because they don’t actually grasp how bad it is (and will not, until it’s even more too late than the too late it already is). But still, reducing it to the blue line is fuckin amazing within the current environment in Washington. The question should be “how do we get it lower than that now” as opposed to “how exhaustively can we shit on the guy who got the first round of changes done.”