Stimulus & Bailout Watch Thread
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- Start date
no lie
today some guy was bragging about going to wvu and partying
and in front of a whole group i just popped in and said west virginia is hillbillies and trash
he was VEXED
also
2k please
2k please
BobbyWojak
Superstar
Speaking of Joe Biden
The Senate victories in Georgia have opened up possibilities for Biden, particularly on additional COVID relief. On Friday he promised rapid action on what would be a third relief bill. Even before the plan comes out—and that’s been promised this week—Biden said he would use executive action to continue freezing student loan payments, though he stopped short of using his own authority to cancel student debt. (He said he would ask Congress to cancel the first $10,000 of borrowers’ loan obligations; that might be part of the relief package.)
The very good news here is that Biden is announcing very early that the price tag would be in the “trillions” of dollars and he doesn’t particularly care about the deficit implications. “It is necessary to spend money now,” Biden said. “With conditions like the crisis today, especially with such low interest rates, taking immediate action—even with deficit financing—is going to help the economy.” Biden is simply not taking the bait out of the austerity trap.
So what’s going to be in this package? First and foremost there are the $2,000 checks. Biden has made a point of continuing the populist messaging on the checks from the Georgia runoffs, that $600 was too small. He recognizes that something 80 percent of the country or more will qualify for will simply overshadow the rest of the package, and he’s leading with it.
I’m aware of Joe Manchin rejecting the idea of $2,000 checks, though his office walked that back pretty quickly and on Sunday said he prefers targeting without dismissing the concept entirely. The pound of flesh Manchin may extract is more means testing, but Biden wouldn’t be leading with this very popular measure if it couldn’t pass.
Other parts of this package likely include extending the unemployment insurance boosts beyond March, more money for the vaccine rollout, and state and local aid, the major missing piece on the fiscal side from the last bill. There’s also likely to be more rental assistance, small business help, and funding to allow schools to reopen.
This is a broad package, not just an “immediate” run of checks, as Biden promised in Georgia. It’ll take some time. The inclusion of state and local aid in particular, meanwhile, virtually ensures that the bill would have to be carried out through budget reconciliation, the process by which the Senate can pass budget-related items with a simple majority. Everything in this package would be almost certain to qualify. Senate Republicans are unlikely to support anything with state and local funding in enough numbers to avoid the filibuster.
It’s likely that Biden gets three budget reconciliation bills before the 2022 midterms. There’s one available per fiscal year, and none have been used for the current one. The plan that appears to be taking shape is: a COVID relief bill for Fiscal Year 2021, a broad infrastructure package funded through tax hikes on the rich for FY 2022, and a package to be named later for FY 2023.
The administration should be concerned that the complexities of budget reconciliation, and their impulse to at least test regular order and give Republicans a chance to pass another relief package, will bog down what was a signature campaign promise. It’s my belief that $2,000 checks, an 80-20 issue in the country, has a super-majority in Congress. It could probably carry upon it some things, like vaccine relief, but not everything, and particularly not municipal funding.
The checks can serve as a trust-building exercise. A significant portion of the left is skeptical that the Biden team is committed to making a difference in the lives of ordinary people. Checks have become somewhat totemic in this sense, and can be used to dispel that skepticism. Reconciliation is always available later if Republicans decide to be on the wrong side of an 80-20 issue. Plus, you want to save the reconciliation bills to maximize what can pass on a simple majority. (If we didn’t have a filibuster we could just have the novel concept of majority rule, but some Democratic Senators would rather preen than enable the popular will.)
Number of Vaccine Doses Given
8.02 million, with a total of 1.8 million since last checking in on Friday. The percentage of allocated shots administered has jumped to 36 percent. West Virginia is up to 72 percent of its supply, and one major reason is that it rejected the federal plan to partner with CVS and Walgreens to vaccinate long-term care facilities. Instead the state relied on independent pharmacies with existing relationships with nursing homes, and they’re running laps around the big chains. North Dakota, another state with significant local pharmacy ownership, is also doing well, and Oklahoma just stripped CVS of responsibility for vaccines at veteran’s centers. The fifty layers of corporate middlemen appear to be the problem for the chains, relative to the flexibility of local practitioners.
Monopolies create hidden harms beyond price: who wrote a book about that?
High quality poster
Veteran
Whatever goodwill they’ve done this election cycle will be wiped out in 4 years if they nix that student loan shyt 
Mafukkas wouldn’t vote for republicans but people would stay home.
Mafukkas wouldn’t vote for republicans but people would stay home.
We gotta lobby our members of Congress to get that debt erasure up.Whatever goodwill they’ve done this election cycle will be wiped out in 4 years if they nix that student loan shyt
Mafukkas wouldn’t vote for republicans but people would stay home.
Biden is only going to pause interest and payments through his and his Ed Secretary powers to start
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Flex Luger
Job Is Finished
Flex Luger
Job Is Finished
DJ Paul's Arm
Veteran
Ethnic Vagina Finder
The Great Paper Chaser
And it’s also not enough if you don’t get it in the first place.
I know 5 people who won’t get it at all. They will get it in the form of a rebate credit but they owe taxes everything so it will basically offset some of what they owe.
So if you owe the IRS, you ain’t getting shyt, if you didn’t get it up front.
NeilCartwright
All Star
Curious to see what the UI extension (if any) will be
Shortly before the 2016 election, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican nominee for vice president and the speaker of the House, told a group of college Republicans why he thought Democrats winning control of the Senate would be a policy nightmare.
“Do you know who becomes chair of the Senate Budget Committee?” Mr. Ryan asked. “A guy named Bernie Sanders. You ever heard of him?”
Republicans have long feared the prospect of Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, taking the helm of the powerful committee given his embrace of bigger government and more federal spending with borrowed money. With Democrats reclaiming the Senate, that fear is about to become a reality. Mr. Sanders, the most progressive member of the chamber, will have a central role in shaping and steering the Democrats’ tax and spending plans through a Congress that they control with the slimmest of margins.
Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and twice ran unsuccessfully for the party’s presidential nomination, said he would move quickly in his new role to push through a robust and deficit-financed economic stimulus package soon after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.
“I believe that the crisis is of enormous severity and we’ve got to move as rapidly as we can,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview.
“Underline the word aggressive,” he said. “Start out there.”
Despite Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate, Mr. Sanders is expected to exert heavy influence over taxes, health care, climate change and several other domestic issues. That is because his role as budget chairman will give him control over a little-known but incredibly powerful congressional tool that allows certain types of legislation to win Senate approval with just a simple majority.
That tool — a budget mechanism called reconciliation — allows Congress to move some legislation without gaining 60 votes. It has become the vehicle for several major legislative efforts this century, including tax cuts under President Trump and President George W. Bush, and the final version of President Barack Obama’s signature health care bill.
The reconciliation process begins with lawmakers adopting a budget resolution, originating in the House and Senate Budget Committees, which can include directions to congressional committees on how much to increase federal spending or taxes.
The nature of the process effectively gives Mr. Sanders a leading role in deciding how expansive — and expensive — Mr. Biden’s ambitions for new taxes and spending will be.
Mr. Sanders said in the interview that he wanted an initial, emergency stimulus package to be “big.” He thinks it must include an additional $1,400 in direct payments for adults and children, on top of the $600 that Congress just passed, along with money for states and cities to fund coronavirus vaccine distribution, testing and contact tracing. He also wants to create an emergency universal health care program, so that anyone can get medical treatment during the pandemic, whether they currently have insurance or not.
Mr. Sanders said he had been speaking with Mr. Biden about the scale and timing of stimulus legislation. He said that he did not intend to try to force his long-held priorities, such as “Medicare for all,” into a relief bill. However, he does intend to test the legal bounds of how reconciliation can be used so that Democrats can pass policies that go beyond traditional budget items and address “structural problems in American society.”
Mr. Biden’s aides say they will work closely with Mr. Sanders and the other committee leaders who will write the legislation to fit Mr. Biden’s policy dreams into legislative text. But it will require some negotiation and compromise. Mr. Sanders’s presidential campaign proposals dwarfed Mr. Biden’s in cost and in reach. Mr. Biden pointedly does not support Medicare for all, and in laying out his priorities for the next stimulus, he has not emphasized the temporary health care coverage expansion that Mr. Sanders favors.
Neither Mr. Sanders nor Mr. Biden has specified the exact size of the next stimulus bill, though the president-elect is expected to outline his economic plan on Thursday. Mr. Sanders said the legislation, which could cost more than $1 trillion, should look to raise revenue in “a progressive manner,” suggesting he would push to include tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations. Under Senate procedure, the details of any tax increases would come from the Finance Committee and be spearheaded by a liberal Democrat, Ron Wyden of Oregon, who has also vowed to move aggressively on stimulus and raising taxes for corporations and the rich.
“You have to start with the proposition that everybody has to pay their fair share.” Mr. Wyden said in an interview.
Mr. Biden’s aides say they will work closely with Mr. Sanders and the other committee leaders who will write the legislation to fit Mr. Biden’s policy dreams into legislative text. But it will require some negotiation and compromise. Mr. Sanders’s presidential campaign proposals dwarfed Mr. Biden’s in cost and in reach. Mr. Biden pointedly does not support Medicare for all, and in laying out his priorities for the next stimulus, he has not emphasized the temporary health care coverage expansion that Mr. Sanders favors.
In sign of how far their alliance has come, however, Mr. Biden said last week that he nearly tapped Mr. Sanders to be his labor secretary, though he decided against it because it would have risked losing Mr. Sanders’s seat — and Senate control — in a special election.
Mr. Sanders has said he will work cooperatively with President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Senate’s Democratic leaders. Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
More moderate Senate Democrats could also pose a challenge given the party’s slim majority. Some Democrats oppose several of the spending programs that Mr. Biden has proposed, along with many that Mr. Sanders supports. Even what appeared to be unifying policies could run into roadblocks. Last week, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the most conservative Democrat in the chamber, signaled that an additional $1,400 per person in direct payments would not be a high priority for him in a stimulus bill, though he did not rule out voting for expanded payments.
Mr. Sanders said he planned to work cooperatively with Mr. Biden and the Senate’s Democratic leaders, leaving his fight for Medicare for all to his work on the health committee. He said he was confident that his reconciliation legislation “will have strong support among Democrats.”
Harry Reid, a former Democratic Senate majority leader, said Mr. Sanders was not as ideological in his committee work as he might appear from his presidential campaigns. Mr. Reid picked Mr. Sanders to be the ranking member on the Budget Committee in 2014 and pushed back against some criticism from his Democratic colleagues who worried that Mr. Sanders was a problematic choice because he was a democratic socialist.
“Even though he is a person who is known as a real progressive socialist, he never was a problem for my caucus,” Mr. Reid said in an interview. “He didn’t try to be a rebel.”
Mr. Sanders will have some delicate matters to handle, such as the confirmation of Neera Tanden, Mr. Biden’s pick to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Ms. Tanden was a top aide to Hillary Clinton, who defeated Mr. Sanders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, a victory that still rankles many of Mr. Sanders’s progressive supporters. Ms. Tanden and Mr. Sanders have clashed since that election, with Mr. Sanders accusing Ms. Tanden in 2019 of “maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas” after ThinkProgress, an independent editorial branch of Ms. Tanden’s think tank, criticized Mr. Sanders for the size of his income from writing a book.
“Let me not worry about Neera right now,” Mr. Sanders said, adding that his top priority would be the stimulus.
To guard against the possibility of Democratic defections, Mr. Sanders might also need to woo some Republicans, even after their party made his potential chairmanship a point of attack in recent elections.
The top Republican on the committee will most likely be Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who promised on Twitter in October that if his party won the Senate then he, not “socialist Bernie Sanders,” would lead the Budget Committee.
Grover Norquist, the conservative activist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, said that having Mr. Sanders lead the committee would only exacerbate the rapidly mounting federal deficit.
“He doesn’t have a sense of discipline in terms of total budget numbers, so sky’s the limit as far as he’s concerned,” Mr. Norquist said. “The gravity will be toward more, more, more, without a resting place.”
Asked about conservatives’ fears, Mr. Sanders was pointed. He said polls showed the tax and spending increases he planned to bring forward were popular among wide swaths of voters, including Republicans, even though the party’s lawmakers tended to dislike them.
“They should be worried,” he said, referring to his Republican colleagues. But their constituents, he said, should not be.