Recovery spending should meet social needs.

 

Next round of recovery spending is about meeting social needs The next round of ambitious public investments should help provide a better and fairer society, addressing pressing social challenges and persistent market failures. Read the blog post »

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Stop AAPI Hate Rally in Atlanta, GA - March 20, 2021

I Represent El Paso. What I’m Asking For Doesn’t Include Open Borders.

  

I Represent El Paso. What I’m Asking For Doesn’t Include Open Borders.

Veronica Escobar. 

Until we address what motivates vulnerable people to leave their home countries, they will continue to come.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/opinion/border-migrants-central-america.html

Until we address what motivates vulnerable people to leave their home countries, they will continue to come.

By Veronica Escobar

Ms. Escobar is a Democratic representative from El Paso.

March 24, 2021

 

Many Republicans are eager to blame President Biden for the increase in families and children arriving at the border, but the truth is that this is not a new phenomenon. Since 2014, as Central American migrants have come, generous border communities like El Paso have ensured that they are safe and cared for. Meanwhile, the rest of the country wrings its hands, politicians complain about the “crisis at the border,” businesses across the country benefit from the labor of these hard-working individuals — and nothing changes.

Americans must finally acknowledge that the real crisis is not at the border but outside it, and that until we address that crisis, this flow of vulnerable people seeking help at our doorstep will not end anytime soon.

Presidents’ words are a minor factor in migrants’ decisions to leave their homeland. Overwhelmingly and consistently, Central American refugees tell stories of fleeing violence, persecution, food insecurity and calamitous economic conditions in their countries. Back-to-back hurricanes and storms that have made it impossible to rebuild are new motivations to go north.

At most, what politicians say changes only the tone of the pitches criminal organizations make to the migrants they prey on, pitches of hope with a compassionate administration or fear with a cruel one. Policies limiting legal avenues for immigrants encourage them to undertake desperate measures to enter the United States, making it more difficult for agents and more profitable for criminal organizations.

Closing the border isn’t a real solution. It’s clear that even the most draconian efforts by the Trump administration — walls, family separation, expulsion — did not stop the flow of migrants to the southwestern border. Neither did a deadly pandemic. The Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy put an unsustainable burden on Mexico, and pushing people back into that country fuels even more of the criminal activity that already plagues  it.

The Biden administration’s challenge is not just the number of children arriving at the border; it’s also that the previous administration effectively obliterated existing systems and infrastructure (flawed as they were), failed to work collaboratively on an orderly transition and created a backlog of vulnerable people on the other side of our ports of entry.

Politically, it’s never the “right time” for immigration reform. Even politicians genuinely seeking solutions have often been afraid to tackle the issue because there’s no quick and easy fix.

We came close in 2013. The Senate passed a bill with 68 votes. But John Boehner, then the speaker of the House, refused to bring the bill to the floor. Since then and especially during the Trump era, xenophobia has become useful politically to some as well as a tool of division.

The good news is that we now have an administration willing to work on the issue. It will take significant collaboration and something in very limited supply: patience.

Mr. Biden should engage the leaders of the Western Hemisphere for a summit that identifies shared responsibilities, challenges and opportunities. Engaging Northern Triangle countries, fully restoring the Central American Minors program (which allows children to apply for refugee status in their home countries) and reinstating aid (practices curtailed by former President Donald Trump) is a good start. But a multilateral approach must include our Canadian allies and address the causes of the migration coming not just from Central America but from Mexico as well. We need a shared plan with a focus on security to combat crime and persecution that includes cracking down on gangs and other criminal organizations and creates accountability for politicians and officials who turn a blind eye to criminals.

We must stop treating vulnerable children and families like a national security threat. We have to rethink our facilities and processes to include social workers, humanitarian aid workers and other civilian personnel at our processing centers to greet those who seek refuge here with humanity. And we need to reimagine the infrastructure where families and children are processed.

We also need to understand that climate change has made some of the poorest parts of our globe too difficult to inhabit. Hurricanes and drought are causing food insecurity and mass migration. We shouldn’t be surprised that populations in hard-hit areas have no choice but to leave.

Another driver is our country’s eagerness to employ migrant labor. A majority of unaccompanied children and families from Central America come to the United States to reunite with family members (parents, children, siblings or spouses) who are working here in construction, meatpacking, agriculture or the hospitality industry — paying taxes, helping their employers be profitable and supporting our economy. Many immigrants are the very essential workers we’ve depended on during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Congress must enact immigration reform. Last week the House passed H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act, as well as other measures that would create a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those granted temporary protected status for humanitarian reasons and agricultural workers and their families. They are promising, yet they address only a small fraction of the people already living and working here. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has introduced another important piece of legislation that would take a multifaceted approach to immigration, including dealing with the root causes of it. (These bills also highlight why many of us believe we must eliminate the filibuster, which has been an instrument of gridlock for immigration reform.)

The Biden administration must work with Congress to reform the Department of Homeland Security. Border Patrol agents have been performing duties unrelated to their law enforcement functions, like data entry for processing migrants and child and family supervision. Agents should be on the ground, focused on collaborating with law enforcement partners to track criminal activity and apprehending those who pose a true threat to our security.

Those of us who represent border communities can help the administration reshape a system that has focused on border militarization, a flawed and expensive strategy that we should all agree — after decades and hundreds of billions of dollars — is a failure.

If we continue to ignore the facts and use the same failed approaches of the past, we shouldn’t be surprised when we have the same conversations every year. The Biden administration is willing to try new approaches and focus on solutions; it wants to restore order and humanity once and for all. It deserves a chance.

I’m not asking for open borders. I’m simply asking for open minds.

Veronica Escobar is a Democratic representative from Texas.

 

 

WHO Chief Blasts 'Grotesque' Vaccine Inequality as Rich Nations Block Speedy End of Global Pandemic

WHO Chief Blasts 'Grotesque' Vaccine Inequality as Rich Nations Block Speedy End of Global Pandemic

Viet Thanh Nguyen on Roots of Anti-Asian Hate from U.S. Colonialism to A...

The Rich Continue to Not Pay Their Taxes

 David Dayen, The American Prospect

’Cause I’m the Taxman One thing about living in America is that you know that the rich are getting away with something, and the moments of change sometimes come about by finding out what. That could be the outcome of this very interesting paper from some researchers (including Gabriel Zucman), which indicates that the top one percent of households failed to record 21 percent of their income, a missing portion that ranges even higher as you go further up the ladder. This is growing worse because of partnerships, which got even larger tax benefits from the Trump tax cuts.   "How do you think they got so rich," you say. It adds up to about $175 billion in tax savings every year, enough to fully fund the child tax credit increase. Now the only way to get at some of this is through the kind of enforcement that’s going to require reinvestment in the IRS. But just shifting the mix of where the agency devotes its enforcement resources would help. As one of our original Day One Agenda pieces from tax law professor Victor Fleischer noted, audit rates for taxpayers earning over $1 million dropped four-fold between 2015 and 2018. Reinvigorate that and at least some of the tax gap is shrunk. That’s why it’s one of the most impactful things President Biden can do on his own, and part of our executive action tracker. This tax season will prove to be an early test.

Current readings on rhw Economy and Covid

 Readings on the Economy and the Pandemic

 

Max Sawicky.

 

https://www.cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2021-01-Federal-Budget-Sawicky-1.pdf

 

https://cepr.net/report/how-to-make-joe-bidens-budget-better-part-ii-public-investment-and-the-green-new-deal-do-everything/

 

https://cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2021-03-Federal-Budget-III-Sawicky.pdf

 

Nursing homes, private Equity and Covid

 

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2021/0321barclay.html

Why are Refugees Fleeing Guatemala ?

 The American nun became an important voice against torture around the world and U.S. involvement in the Guatemalan conflict.

Sergio Palencia Frener

February 26, 2021

Sr. Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun who founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (Photo courtesy of TASSC)

I had seen too much: I was a witness, not only to torture but to the fact that an American was the boss of a Guatemalan torture squad.

Dianna Ortiz, Capture, Torture, Escape, 2007.

On February 19, 2021, American nun Dianna Ortiz passed away. Her testimony of torture and rape in 1989 showed to the world the brutality of the Guatemalan regime, and the support of experts in torture from the American government. Ortiz case situates the Guatemalan torture centers between 1980 and 1989 at the same level of ignominy as Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1944, or of the U.S. prison of Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, between 2002 and 2003.

Dianna Ortiz lived in Guatemala during a moment of escalating state violence between 1987 and 1989. Despite anonymous threats, she decided to continue her educational work among Maya-Akateko communities in the northwestern highlands. She was kidnapped by the Guatemalan police and military, who tortured and raped her on November 2, 1989. Ortiz managed to escape and denounced the hellish conditions in which thousands of Guatemalans died, with the complicity of the United States.

Life in the Guatemalan Highlands During the War

Dianna Ortíz was part of the Order of Saint Ursula. In 1987, at the age of 29, she was entrusted to travel to San Miguel Acatán, an Indigenous Mayan-Akateko municipality located in northwestern Guatemala. Just six years before, Acatán had been one of the first municipalities to suffer attacks by the Guatemalan army at the beginning of the genocidal campaigns. Since 1981, the villages of Chimbán and Coyá were bombed and invaded by infantry. The military believed both villages functioned as training centers for the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP).

In Acatán, soldiers dismembered Antil Torol, a Maya spiritual leader of the Akateko communities. When I visited in 2011, people still remembered this Mamin or elder. According to the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH, 1999), led by the United Nations, people from San Miguel Acatan suffered multiple kidnappings, tortures, and displacement.

The Guatemalan army did not like the presence of foreign priests and nuns, capable of denouncing in their countries the rampant terror in the countryside.Sister Ortíz arrived five years after these events. She worked on educational projects with survivors of the war. The Guatemalan army did not like the presence of foreign priests and nuns, capable of denouncing in their countries the rampant terror in the countryside. In his book Through a Glass Darkly, Thomas Melville reconstructs the life of a Maryknoll priest who witnessed the 1982 scorched-earth campaigns in Huehuetenango. The military believed Dianna Ortiz could help the rebels or denounce the government’s crimes. In 1988, the bishop of the province of Huehuetenango received letters threatening the work of the Ursulines and Dianna Ortiz.

Since then, Guatemalan State intelligence agents followed her, took photos, and sent multiple rape threats. In those years, the military regime considered enemies not only the armed insurgents, but also human rights organizations, religious networks, and families of the disappeared, such as the Group for Mutual Aid (GAM, Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo).

American Intervention, Intimidation, and Kidnappings

During the 1980s, the United States supported the military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. It had established military bases in Honduras and supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The main goal of Ronald Reagan’s administration was to defeat, both politically and militarily, the revolutionary movements in the Central American isthmus. Sister Dianna Ortiz arrived when the Guatemalan army wanted to destroy guerrilla-controlled territories. Two of these rebel territories were the Ixcán jungle and the Ixil Cuchumatanes, located east of San Miguel Acatán, where Ortiz worked on local education projects.

Despite the Guatemalan military offensives between September 1987 and April 1988, the Communities of Population in Resistance (CPR) managed to survive and consolidate their territories for the next 10 years in the department of Quiche. Meanwhile, state intelligence networks planned the kidnappings and executions of organized students, religious, and peasants who, they thought, could support the revolutionary movement. In her case for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1997), Ortiz spoke of anonymous threats beginning in 1988.

By then, the Guatemalan government focused on dismantling student organizations at the University of San Carlos. Between August and September 1989, the Guatemalan State kidnapped 10 students: Silvia Azurdia, Víctor Rodríguez, Iván González, Carlos Contreras, Aarón Ochoa, Hugo Gramajo, Mario de León, Carlos Cabrera, Carlos Chutá, Eduardo López, as Ruth del Valledocuments. Many of them later appeared in the streets with cruel signs of torture. In this context, after multiple threatening letters, members of the police and the army kidnapped Dianna Ortiz on November 2, 1989 at a retreat center in Antigua Guatemala.

What Ortiz suffered marked a watershed in her life. In a conference held in 2007, Sister Ortiz remembers the day of her torture as the day of her death and resurrection. After escaping from her captors, a Maya Indigenous woman helped her in the streets of Guatemala City. In her 2007 speech, Ortiz portrays this Maya woman appearing to her as the Lady of Guadalupe.

Since 1989, Sister Dianna Ortiz denounced the role of her own government in the sinister counterinsurgency in Guatemala.Since 1989, Sister Dianna Ortiz denounced the role of her own government in the sinister counterinsurgency in Guatemala. She brought a case against General Héctor Gramajo, Minister of Defense in Guatemala between 1987 and 1990. By then, General Gramajo was pursuing a master’s degree at Harvard University. Ortiz won the case and Gramajo never again could re-enter U.S. territory. General Gramajo had been one of the strategists of the scorched-earth campaigns under the governments of Generals Romeo Lucas García and Efrain Ríos Montt, between 1981 and 1983.

For sectors close to the U.S. Embassy and the Guatemalan government, Sister Ortiz's denunciation sought to prevent further military aid to this Central American country. The Guatemalan military spread the slander that Ortiz was enmeshed in a crime of passion, the same version they used to diminish the political implications of Bishop Gerardi’s assassination in 1998 after publishing the Truth Commission (REMHI). Thomas F. Stroock, back then the U.S. ambassador in Guatemala, denied the participation of U.S. personnel in the torture chambers and blamed far-right paramilitaries for Ortiz's kidnapping.

Voice Against Torture

Despite the smears, Dianna Ortiz played an important role in the declassification of part of the U.S. intelligence communications. Ortiz was the founder of the International Coalition for the Abolition of Torture and the Support of Survivors (TASSC). In 2002, together with Patricia Davis, she published the book The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In 2005, following the publication of photographs at the Abu Ghraib torture center in Iraq, Dianna Ortiz played an important role opposing torture during the George Bush administration.

Ortiz's testimony contributes the following points to the historiography of the Guatemalan war. First, the collaboration between the United States and the Guatemalan State, not only in matters of finance, military instruction, and weapons, but of a whole school of torture. This international network of counterinsurgency has also been studied by Lesley Gill and Patrice McSherry  in Central and South America. Second, Ortiz's testimony included descriptions of death pits at the Old Polytechnic School. Similar practices were used at northern Quiche military bases, as described by witnesses to Jesuit anthropologist Ricardo Falla. More recently, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation found more than 500 bodies in another military base in Cobán, Alta Verapaz.

Dianna Ortiz knew and suffered the underworld of torture in the Guatemalan genocide.Bishop Gerardi, who was murdered by the military, used to say that only through knowing what actually happened during the war can peace be achieved. Dianna Ortiz knew and suffered the underworld of torture in the Guatemalan genocide. She went down to Xibalbá, the reign of death and evil according to the Popol Wuj. She emerged from a terrible experience to open herself to life and, with that, to the memory of Indigenous and mestizo Guatemalans who died during the dictatorships. Through Ortiz’s words, we can embrace the memory of Silvia Azurdia and Victor Hugo Rodríguez, Guatemalan students who were tortured and died around the same time. Dianna Ortiz bet everything on life and threw herself into the ocean of faith, from which she articulated the mystery of life beyond the face of death.

For this reason, amid the swamp of everyday, to assume history–in Guatemala, Kurdistan or Minneapolis– is to face the real meaning of knowledge in the world, which ceases to be that of an undifferentiated account of the passage of time to become the testimony and the decision to be willing to know. The task of historical knowledge, as it progresses, ceases to be that of the accumulator of bricks or books and becomes that of a warrior. Dianna launched herself into the void of meaning and, in its core, found something that turned her into a witness to an era. Along with survivors of El Mozote (1981) and San Francisco Nentón (1982) massacres, such as Rufina Amaya and Mateo Ramos Paiz, Dianna Ortiz became one with the poor Central Americans, making their wounds and hopes her own.

---

Sergio Palencia Frener is a sociologist and writer. He is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works on history, conflict, and resistance in Mesoamerica, especially Guatemala.

NACLA Reports on the Americas,. 

 

What Is in the Bill ?

 David Dayen, the American Prospect 

Tomorrow, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan will be signed, maybe the largest pure economic uplift bill in U.S. history. Considering that Congress had to add $60 billion in tax measures to adhere to that pre-set price tag, it’s closer to $2 trillion in outlays.   One of the big complaints with the bill from the likes of Larry Summers was particularly incoherent. He didn’t mind a lot of spending, it’s just that it should be channeled to public investment, not just giving away a bunch of money. This is critically wrong on a number of levels, but the biggest is that the ARP does in fact bring lasting public investment in certain areas, and considering that it’s so big, that makes it a huge one-year investment bill as well. Much of these investments prevent deterioration, but a smaller hole to drag out of in the future certainly helps matters. And some will create pockets of durability, things that will be remembered as part of the ARP. That’s especially true if key investments are eventually made permanent.

The section-by-section summary of the bill has already yielded a number of surprises popping up in political media. But these haven’t gone far enough. Let’s start with the health infrastructure investments. There’s a section on providing medical supplies and personnel for rural healthcare providers, something that will be difficult to dislodge post-pandemic. There’s $7.6 billion for state and local health department workers and another $7.6 billion for community health centers, which provide basic care to poor communities. For context, Bernie Sanders got $11 billion for community health centers in the Affordable Care Act over five years, and it made a significant difference.  Then there’s the school funding, $128 billion dedicated to K-12. The formula under which it will be given will deliver more to the poorest schools, up to $8,000 per student in low-income districts like Cleveland. Outside of a 20 percent set-aside to address lost learning in the pandemic year, that funding has a pretty wide discretion, meaning it can be used to make long-term investments in schools like improving ventilation, which can serve as both pandemic preparedness and better learning environments. These have proven to make a difference in the classroom. The $39 billion in child care grants can rebuild care infrastructure, which our special report last year showed is desperately needed. Thought about as a one-year investment it’s absolutely enormous. There’s also a $7 billion Emergency Connectivity Fund for remote learning, which comes too late but can help provide lasting broadband infrastructure. The $200 million for libraries is also a broadband infrastructure investment for those who have no other options for connectivity. There’s also $30.5 billion for public transit, which will go toward arresting the sector-wide crisis from low pandemic ridership, which easily could have spiraled into permanent cutbacks. This will sustain transit budgets until 2023 in some areas.

I’m not a huge fan of the $2 billion snuck in for IT and cybersecurity, but it will modernize federal agency systems. There’s $100 million for better air quality monitoring, which will last. This is all on top of the $350 billion investment in state and local governments, which thanks to a last-minute change, can go toward service improvement in things like water, sewage, and broadband. While being from Los Angeles and seeing up-close our pandemic-driven crisis in public budgeting makes me happiest that this money will avert those tough choices (see Janet Yellen on how we learned from the financial crisis not to offset federal stimulus with state and local austerity), there’s no doubt some of this money will pour into lasting investments and upgrades in key systems. Similarly, the $31 billion for tribal governments, the largest investment in those communities in some time, will likely include lasting infrastructure; some of it is earmarked for housing. Finally, there’s a term I cannot stand—investment in human capital. But when you have legislation that for one year would reduce poverty from 13.7 percent to 8.7 percent and cut child poverty by more than half, you are freeing people from many day-to-day stresses and putting them in position to succeed. When you have airline workers being told to tear up their furlough notices, and an economic recovery time that’s twice as fast as previously projected, and economic growth at the fastest level since the Korean War, that likely means better bargaining power for labor and more opportunity for rising wages. These investments allow people to contribute and succeed.

It’s no wonder Republicans, who voted against the ARP en masse, are already trying to take credit for it. Not all of these above-mentioned items will leave permanent investments in place. In fact, they’ll need to be fought for to ensure this isn’t just a blip. This is the beginning of a second War on Poverty, not the end. What Democrats do next, and whether this bill sets up for a midterm victory, will tell that story. But there could be as much as $100 billion in investments here, if not $200 billion. As a one-year boost, at the most optimistic level that’s equivalent to a decade-long, two trillion-dollar infrastructure package proposed by a guy named… Larry Summers.

 

 

'They Run on Shrinking the Vote': Tens of Millions Threatened by GOP Attack on Voting

'They Run on Shrinking the Vote': Tens of Millions Threatened by GOP Attack on Voting

Elected Officials Move to Tap Fiscal Power

 

Move Over, Nerds. It’s the Politicians’ Economy Now.

NYT.  March 10,2021

Analysis. Neil Irwin.

American political leaders have learned a few things in the last 12 years, since the nation last tried to claw its way out of an economic hole.

Among them: People like having money. Congress has the power to give it to them. In an economic crisis, budget deficits don’t have to be scary. And it is better for both the economy and the democratic legitimacy of a rescue effort when elected leaders choose to help people by spending money, versus when pointy-headed technocrats help by obscure interventions in financial markets.

Lawmakers rarely phrase things so bluntly, but those are the implications of a pivot in American economic policy over the last year, culminating with the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill. It is set to pass the House within days and be signed by President Biden soon after. And while this vote will fall along partisan lines, stimulus bills with similar goals passed with bipartisan support last year.

Leaders of both parties have become more willing to use their power to extract the nation from economic crisis, taking the primary role for managing the ups and downs of the economy that they ceded for much of the last four decades, most notably in the period after the 2008 global financial crisis.

It is an implicit rejection of an era in which the Federal Reserve was the main actor in trying to stabilize the nation’s economy. Now, elected officials are embracing the government’s ability to borrow and spend — the “great fiscal power of the United States” as Fed Chair Jerome Powell has called it — as the primary tool to fight a crisis.

“That’s really been the story of this recovery,” Mr. Powell said at a recent hearing. “Fiscal policy has really stepped up.”

Keep up with the new Washington — get live updates on politics.

The new relief bill is similarly a rejection of the concerns of centrist economists, including the former Treasury secretary Larry Summers and the former I.M.F. chief economist Olivier Blanchard, that its size and structure invite inflation or other problems. Democratic lawmakers have concluded that the favorable politics of this plan outweigh such risks.

If sustained, this assertion of control over economic management by elected leaders would be as momentous a change as the one that followed the Paul Volcker Fed in the 1980s.

“This is an enduring regime shift,” said Paul McCulley, who teaches at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “Having the tools of economic stabilization work a whole lot more through the fiscal channel and a whole lot less through the monetary channel is a profound, pro-democracy policy mix.”

 

Continue reading the main story

It is in distinct contrast with the experience after the 2008 financial crisis.

There was a large 2009 fiscal stimulus action, but a mix of legislative politics and deficit concerns by some officials in President Barack Obama’s inner circle restrained its size. Many of its components were relatively invisible to the average voter. And when the economy remained weak into 2010 and beyond, Republicans and many Democrats focused on deficit reduction. “Stimulus” became a dirty word in Washington.

The Fed stepped in, undertaking quantitative easing (essentially, buying bonds with newly created money) and other untested strategies in an effort to keep the expansion going.

But central bankers’ tools are limited. They can adjust interest rates and push money into the financial system in hope of making credit easier to obtain. That can spur more investment and spending, which in turn can generate more jobs and higher wages.

Sound circuitous? It is — the economics equivalent of a triple bank shot in billiards.

In the 2010s, the strategy sort of worked. There was no dip back into recession, and the expansion was the longest on record, until the pandemic ended it. But it took years and years for the economy to return to health, and it was a deeply unequal recovery in which owners of financial assets saw the biggest gains. That the effort was led by unelected central bankers reduced its democratic legitimacy, by appearing as if it were merely an effort by elitist institutions to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.

“You can do it and it can be successful, but the income and wealth inequality consequences of it will stink to high heaven,” Professor McCulley said. “You can do it that way, but it is anathema to democratic inclusion.”

By contrast, fiscal authorities can spend money directly, funneling it where it is needed, without expectation of being paid back. The United States has done exactly that over the last year on a scale with no parallel since World War II.

The new $1.9 trillion package includes, among other provisions, $1,400 payments to most Americans, a new child care tax credit that will put $300 per month in the bank accounts of most parents of a young child, help for those facing eviction or foreclosure, and billions of dollars in grants for small businesses. Public opinion polling finds it considerably more popular than other major domestic policy legislation in recent years.

“For all the failures and weaknesses of American democracy over recent months, this is a dramatic demonstration of democracy’s power to act,” said Adam Tooze, a Columbia University economic historian who has written extensively of the aftermath of the financial crisis. “When it comes to delivering popular policies at the right moment, working on the basis of established constitutional norms, they’re doing that, which is infinitely to be preferred to an economic policy that depends on well-meaning enlightened technocrats.”

Some lawmakers, especially on the left, have raised the notion that relying on congressional action to support the economy improves democratic legitimacy.

Frequently Asked Questions About the New Stimulus Package

How big are the stimulus payments in the bill, and who is eligible?

The stimulus payments would be $1,400 for most recipients. Those who are eligible would also receive an identical payment for each of their children. To qualify for the full $1,400, a single person would need an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or below. For heads of household, adjusted gross income would need to be $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly that number would need to be $150,000 or below. To be eligible for a payment, a person must have a Social Security number. Read more. 

“This legislation has everything to do with restoring the confidence of the American people in democracy and in their government, and if we can’t respond to the pain of working families today, we don’t deserve to be here,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of the Biden bill, known as the American Rescue Plan Act.

Republicans unanimously opposed the Biden legislation, but it has not been quite the scorched-earth opposition to deficit-widening action seen during the Obama administration.

 

As evidenced by previous rounds of pandemic relief, there has been enough common ground between Democrats and Republicans to reach bipartisan agreements of relatively large scale, including the $2 trillion CARES Act enacted last March.

“A relief package like this one might not have been everything both parties wanted, but a compromise deal that provides help to Americans is better than no deal at all,” said Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, at the outset of the House debate on a $900 billion bipartisan bill in late December.

All in all, Congress and the Trump and Biden administrations have authorized about $6 trillion in pandemic relief spending over the last year, about 28 percent of 2019 G.D.P. (Less than that will ultimately be spent, because the economy’s improvement has left some programs with more money allocated than they needed.)

The bipartisan agreement around many of the components of the pandemic aid legislation suggests a future model for how the United States government responds to economic crises. For example, in the past the federal government has extended the duration that jobless people are eligible for unemployment insurance payments during recessions, but has not expanded the size of those payments.

The CARES Act, by contrast, increased unemployment checks by $600 a week, aiming to replace the income lost by those forced out of work. Subsequent legislation has included smaller increases. Economists generally say that this has been a well-targeted policy that has helped temporarily jobless people to keep paying their bills — and has softened the collapse of demand in the economy.

“We’re at a watershed moment where this type of tool will be used in future recessions,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist of the global accounting firm KPMG. “What we did here is different and unique, and we are going to learn whether it was effective at providing a bridge to the other side of the pandemic.”

There are risks in the Biden administration’s approach, of course. If the concerns described by Mr. Summers and Mr. Blanchard about the size of the new relief bill materialize, and the result is excessive inflation or some type of crisis, Democrats will pay a price for their actions.

But that’s the thing about democracy: It has much clearer mechanisms for holding elected officials accountable for their economic policy decisions than it does for scrutinizing appointed experts for their interest rate policies. If Americans don’t like the results, they have a straightforward way to make it known: at the ballot box in November 2022 and November 2024.

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What’s in the Stimulus Bill? A Guide to Where the $1.9 Trillion Is Going

March 7, 2021

 

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/upshot/politicians-not-central-bankers-economy-policy.html?\

A Stunning Step Forward

 

A Stunning Day

Something extraordinary happened today which is worth celebrating—the most far-reaching expansion of government help to children and families since FDR. A year ago, a universal basic income was a radical fringe idea. Well, we’ve just enacted it for families with children. And once in place, this will prove almost impossible to dislodge. Imagine the politics next fall when Democrats propose making the child tax credit permanent, and Republicans propose a massive tax increase on American families. My sources say Biden is committed to making this policy permanent. Consider the arithmetic. A family with two parents and three kids will be getting about $14,000 a year. It just happens that this is almost identical to what a minimum-wage job pays if you work full-time ($7.25 an hour times 2,000 hours). This is revolutionary, and will compel employers to pay a great deal more to get workers. Think of what it took to make this transformative social policy mainstream. It took a pandemic. It took the improbable Democratic victories in Georgia to get 50 Senate votes. It took rare Democratic unity. And it took the radicalization of one Joe Biden. Even more remarkably, while the two previous transformative Democratic presidents, LBJ and FDR, had huge Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, Biden has done it with fumes. Sometimes, things break right. It’s a day to celebrate.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Poor People's Campaign- Sacramento

SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Poor People's Campaign- Sacramento:   We refuse to be silent as our elected leaders undermine access to the ballot box, destroy healthcare and the social safety net, and deny l...

More on the American Rescue Plan

 

View this email in your browser March 8, 2021 Something Fundamentally Changed—For Now Our government is finally willing to fight a crisis at the scale of the problem. But they’ve yet to prove a desire to do it permanently   2021 Stimulus  America Recovery and Re-investment  Act - cost.   $1.9 Trillion.   Cost of 2017 Corporate Tax cut.    $ 1.9  Trillion over 10 years.             ( addition to national debt 2.2 Trillion)   Cost of development of F 35 fighter jet    $ 1.7 Trillion,  David Dayen, American Progress. When we last left things, there was some breaking news on the unemployment bits in the American Rescue Plan. Directly after publication, we had an impasse, one of the longest Senate votes in history, a refusal and finally an agreement from Joe Manchin, and a compromise of the compromise that amounted to three less weeks of extended unemployment. It was a lot. Things progressed smoothly after that, however, and tomorrow the House of Representatives will give final passage to a $1.9 trillion package that, with the exception of the loss of the $15 an hour minimum wage provision, maintains all the basic contours of the plan then-president-elect Biden laid out in January. It even added an important measure to save the retirement benefits of more than a million unionized workers in multiemployer plans; that was not in the initial Biden package. I said last week that journalists are trained to focus on what’s new and what’s changed in a developing story rather than taking a step back. But I’m actually seeing a lot of stories that actually try to connect with the achievement of the American Rescue Plan. And it does represent a new way forward in American politics; but only if we can keep it. An eligible family of four—which includes virtually the entire middle class, and 86 percent of the country overall—will receive $7,600 in additional payments beyond current law, $8,800 if their children are both under 6. And another $4,000, instead of coming bundled with tax refunds at the end of the year through the Child Tax Credit, will be a monthly payment. The balance sheets of sectors of American life that truly struggled in the pandemic, particularly mass transit and child care, are being restored, wiping out the self-fulfilling cycle of austerity and decline. That goes too for state and local governments, who are made whole for the combination of revenue erosion and significantly expanded pandemic costs. Poor schools might finally be able to upgrade facilities with a share of the $130 billion intended to speed reopening. While it adheres to the health care solutions in the Affordable Care Act, you might say that this bill puts “affordable” back into the equation, by significantly increasing the subsidies available to families on the insurance exchanges. (It also incentivizes holdout states to expand Medicaid, though I doubt that will work.) While there was a colorable argument that the IRS could do this anyway, it clears away taxation for student loan forgiveness, removing an objection to President Biden canceling that debt. Support Independent, Fact-Checked Journalism Unlike the CARES Act, all of this aid targets the lower- and middle-income ends of the scale. Small businesses got more in prior bills but they share in some of the bounty here. Most important, it brought aid at the scale of the problem, within the time frame of the problem, and with government firmly at the helm of the solution. And it was massively popular. My first emotion, paradoxically, was anger. Not at the painful defeats and chinks in the armor of the bill. It was anger that we haven’t been operating this way for the past 40 years, meeting crises—many of them enduring crises—with government-backed solutions, not market nudges or tax-advantaged savings accounts. We didn’t respond to the global financial crisis this way, or the crisis of child poverty, or homelessness, or the uninsured, or really any domestic challenge. And we could have. The political system was not impervious to its allure. It was a choice. And while this change really is fundamental—deficit hawks really have been cast out of the temple, free-market solutions left on the shelf—it’s also fragile. We have the outline of a child allowance but it expires in a year. The ACA subsidies expire in two years. The massive expansion of unemployment eligibility for a much wider group of workers is now done on Labor Day weekend. There’s a modicum of ongoing public investment, but mostly this returns us to a steady state, with decisions to make from there. Those decisions will be carried out in a booming economy with low unemployment, where desperation and precarity will still be present, but in the shadows where it’s toiled for decades. We could make all of that permanent, with automatic stabilizers that kick in during downturns, and Federal Reserve bank accounts for every American to fill when needed. We could ensure that federal support sustaining critical features of public life remains in place. We could choose to not build a pop-up safety net but an ongoing one. There’s a theory out there that, once you give families $300 per month per child for a year, once you make everyone on the exchanges eligible for subsidies, that Congress won’t be able to take that away. I’m not so certain. Members have the logic of emergency behind them, that they could step in when needed but that it’s “appropriate” to step back thereafter. The pandemic changed some thinking about the importance of government action, but there’s no guarantee that will hold beyond a crisis moment. It will require continued vigilance. The good news is that Americans like this new era. They think it made more sense to make progress than to seek bipartisanship. Republicans ran to the safety of criticizing the cancellation of Dr. Seuss rather than try to combat this. People will get their checks and see the economy roar back in short order, in tandem with vaccinations that appear to emerge from a government authority. And maybe they’ll think that we don’t have to only roll out this kind of policy firepower during a pandemic. We can tackle the crises that happen every day.