Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Monday, September 27th. I'm Nyla Boudou.

Here's what we're following today. Germany and Europe without Angela Merkel. Plus, cautious

optimism for the coming COVID winter. But first, today's one big thing. Why the infrastructure

and spending bills on Capitol Hill could transform our day-to-day lives.

You're going to hear a lot this week about reconciliation and infrastructure. And I think it's

really easy to tune out when you hear headlines about this or numbers like this, 1.2 trillion dollars.

But it's a really crucial week for this of negotiations on Capitol Hill. And even if just half of

these proposals are successful, they could be completely transformative to our daily lives.

Whether that's through how we pay for childcare, college, or even how we access the internet.

Axios's Margaret Taliv has been talking to reporters in our newsroom about

how this could change our day-to-day lives. Good morning, Margaret.

Good morning, Nyla. First, are these deals really that big of a deal?

Something along the lines of like a new deal? They really are. What we're talking about is between

that Senate passed bipartisan infrastructure agreement that the House hasn't acted on yet.

And President Biden's a big spending bill that the House Democrats are driving. We talk about

the reconciliation bill. That's what we're talking about. That's three and a half trillion dollars

on the high end. We are talking about truly transformative stuff. And the benchmark that I've

been using for the last several weeks is that the two decades worth of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

cost somewhere in the neighborhood of two trillion dollars. And think about everything that that

entailed. And now think about something that's twice as big as that.

So how could it change transportation, for example?

That's a great example. The first thing right off the bat is that we already know that there's

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