Following months of bipartisan negotiation and a weekend of grueling procedural advances, the Senate yesterday approved an expansive $1.2 trillion infrastructure package. The sprawling bill — slated to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into rebuilding roads, airports, and railways, upgrading public transit systems, modernizing the power grid, and expanding broadband access — amounts to the largest investment in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure in decades.

The news delivers a significant political boost to President Biden, appearing to vindicate his campaign messaging that he would prove uniquely capable of forging bipartisan consensus. Yet the cost of bipartisanship was steep — the GOP managed to extract significant concessions, forcing Democrats to discard transformative elements of Biden’s ambitious vision to remake the nation’s public transit, healthcare, and energy grid.

Still, despite its considerable trimming, labor groups have voiced support for the package, saying it promises to “uplift millions of working families through good unions jobs.” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh expressed a similar sentiment yesterday, describing the bill’s passage as “great news for workers, families and communities across the nation.”

The bill now goes to the house, where it is poised to encounter a degree of resistance but ultimately projected to pass.  Several members of the House Progressive Caucus have signaled they intend to withhold support from the measure until the Senate approves the separate “big, bold” $3.5 trillion budget framework that seeks to vastly expand the nation’s patchwork social safety net. In an effort to preempt this push, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday assured those concerned the package does not do enough to address climate change or economic inequality that the Senate is “moving on a second track” to “make a generational transformation in those areas.” To that end, early this morning Democrats in the chamber approved a framework for the budget bill, touching off what will surely descend into a protracted legislative struggle.

An EPI report published Tuesday reveals that compensation for top executives at the country’s largest public firms has skyrocketed by over 1,300 percent since the ascent of the neoliberal consensus in the late 1970s — sharply eclipsing income growth for even the top 0.1 percent of wage earners. Indeed, the report spotlights that CEO pay continued to soar even as millions of workers were plunged into economic precarity during the pandemic.

Of course, it is no secret that CEOs at the largest corporations rake in grotesque salaries. Still, EPI’s report underscores that even in the face of renewed populist hostility to economic inequality, the stunning disparity between executive compensation and worker wages— the root of so much social dysfunction — continues to escalate.

Lastly, Tex. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) convened a special session of the Texas legislature last weekend aiming to block municipalities from requiring that employers provide paid sick leave, a measure several of the state’s major cities — including Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio — recently instituted.