the DON JONES INDEX… |
|
|||
|
GAINS
POSTED in GREEN LOSSES
POSTED in RED |
|
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|
11/5/21… 14,532.73
10/29/21…
14,447.45 6/27/13… 15,000.00 |
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(THE DOW JONES
INDEX: 11/5/21…35,606.36; 10/22/21…34,912.56; 6/27/13… 15,000.00) |
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LESSON for October 29, 2021 – SHOULDA CALLED SAHL!
So
Joe’s flown off to the Old World, leaving behind a dumpster of old problems –
most of which arise from his own party.
Unable to close the deal on his physical or personal infrastructure proposals,
stymied on his intent to finance them by taxing the billionaires – dogged by
DINO Democrats Manchin and Sinema and whipsawed
between them and the liberals in the House, Biden has been called everything
from a socialist and a reprobate to a demented old fossil.
Democrats
now look to December 3rd as that beautiful wall, on the other side
of which highway funding lapses, as their new drop-dead deadline as both the
terrible two Senators and the liberals stick to their guns.
When CNN asked if it would take until Dec. 3 for them to
pass it, which is when highway funding would lapse after the stopgap that
members approved before disapparating for the
weekend, House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer said, “no, I don’t think” it will
take that long.
In term of when they will finally vote on the bipartisan
infrastructure bill, Hoyer said, “I hope soon.”
“Our members have been saying for months that these
two bills need to be, need to go together and that we need to have the
legislative text,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, head of the House Progressive Caucus,
told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
The epic fail and aerial escape anti-climaxed a week of a
thousand cuts, as the “human” infrastructure bill… originally $3.5 trillion for
a literal Christmas grab-bag of goodies for the needy, the greedy, the
grumblers and the gamblers... shriveled to a Halloween haunted plot of rotting
pumpkins.
The legislation, liberal experts said, expertly, would also
aim to start cutting climate pollution and put the United States on a track to
reduce emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030. It would provide clean-energy
tax credits and an electric vehicle tax credit that would lower the cost of an
electric vehicle by up to $12,500 per middle-class family, the officials said.
All this was lost on (or, in the majority of cases, simply
denied by) Republicans – some of whom even support the (physical)
infrastructure measure but most lawmakers in that party oppose both bills, and
Biden can only afford to lose three votes in the House to get either passed. (Reuters)
In addition to their slight majority in the House, Democrats
only narrowly control the Senate, with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris
holding the tie-breaking vote, meaning legislation must win support across a
wide swath of progressives and more moderate members of the party – which
presently consists of a caucus of two… West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Rep. Kweisi Mfume,
a Democrat from Maryland, said President Biden told the caucus that they are “within inches” of a
deal with moderate Democratic Sens. Manchin Sinema,
though he didn’t mention them by name.
The inches remained inches as Joe flew off to Italy, then Glasgow.
Senior administration officials told NBC that the measure
will total about $1.75 trillion in funding, which they described as “the most
transformative investment in children's caregiving in generations, the largest
effort to combat climate change in history, a historic tax cut for tens of
millions of middle-class families and the biggest expansion of affordable
health care in decades.”
But the latest version does not include funding for paid
family leave, “a priority for many Democrats, including several women
lawmakers.”
NBC News reported Wednesday that Democrats had dropped that
proposal for paid family and medical leave from the spending package after
Manchin expressed opposition. Biden had originally proposed 12 weeks of paid
leave, then last week it was reduced to four weeks before it was eliminated
altogether.
The measure would also have provided for universal free
preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds, extend the child tax credit that was
created in a previous coronavirus rescue package, and reduce health insurance
premiums by an average of $600 per year for more than 9 million Americans who buy
insurance through the Obamacare marketplace, the officials said.
White House officials had hoped that the measure will be
fully paid for through new taxes and would reduce the deficit by generating about
$2 trillion in revenue through an array of changes to the tax system; officials
stressing that no one making less than $400,000 would have their taxes raised.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., told reporters Thursday afternoon
he supports the price tag of the bill because "that was negotiated."
But Manchin has not nor has ever been that particular
roadblock – his issue is coal. Sinema was. And if
she had any alternative proposals for revenue enhancement short of Maggie
Thatcher and Ben Carson @999 poll tax, with rich, middle class and poor all
paying the same percentage (or, as the farthest right right
Republicans advocate) same sum, she wasn’t revealing her plans, if any.
Still, President Joe tried to project confidence CNN
reported, as he and the legislators traipsed into Friday morning’s House
Democratic Caucus meeting in the Capitol.
"It's a good day" Biden said, adding,
"Everyone's on board."
During the meeting, Biden told lawmakers: "I don't think
it's hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency
will be determined by what happens in the next week." He also emphasized a
key theme from his presidency -- that the American must show the world that
democracies can outperform autocracies and meet modern challenges.
"The rest of the world wonders whether we can
function," Biden said.
By mid-morning, however, it was evident not everyone was on
board quite yet. Liberal members of Congress said they wanted to see more
details after key items, like paid family leaves, were swept away; bagged,
tagged and tossed onto the sidewalk for removal. And they remained firm in
demands the social spending bill pass simultaneously with the infrastructure
deal.
“We spent hours and hours and hours over months and months
working on this," Biden tried to put a happy face on the fiasco. "No
one got everything they wanted, including me. But that's what compromise is.
That's consensus. And that's what I ran on."
The newest proposal amounts to $1.75 trillion, down from the
original $3.5 trillion request. It includes priorities like funding for climate
change, childcare and universal preschool. It relies on new taxes, including
one aimed at millionaires and billionaires. But, NBC noted, “it omits many Democratic
priorities, like paid family leave and free community college.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., chair of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus, told reporters after the meeting with Biden that while he
had made a "compelling speech" for both the infrastructure bill and
the economic measure, she said that many members of her caucus still feel that
they want to see legislative text and want to vote on both bills together.
Jayapal said in a statement later Thursday that the
overwhelming majority of the progressive caucus had voted to endorse in
principle the Build Back Better framework released by the White House. But she
added that dozens of caucus members continue to insist on passing the two bills
in tandem.
“Members of our caucus will not vote for the infrastructure
bill without the Build Back Better Act," she said. "We will work
immediately to finalize and pass both pieces of legislation through the House
together.”
Bernie Sanders told progressive members that he supports
their demand for legislative text before they agree to vote for the bipartisan
infrastructure bill, according to two aides familiar with Sanders' thinking.
“No legislative text, no [bipartisan infrastructure plan],” one aide said of
their position. (NBC)
Similarly, Rep. Ilhan Omar,
D-Minn., the progressive caucus whip, said Thursday there are concerns that Sinema or Manchin may not follow through on a framework.
She said the caucus position remains that the Senate should pass a bill first
before they agree to support the infrastructure bill.
"There is certainly a trust issue," Omar told NBC
News. "I mean, people who are constantly changing their position can't be
trusted. So we have to actually have legislation that we vote on in order to
trust that that legislation would be the final bill."
A denizen of the Fourth Estate asked House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi, (D-Ca) if she trusted Manchin
and Sinema.
"I trust the president of the United States," she
demurred.
Pretending
that nothing was out of order, Congress discussed plans to hold a vote on
Thursday on the infrastructure bill, and the House Rules Committee released a
preliminary text of the 1,684-page bill. "So
we're on a path to get this done," Pelosi said. "But for those who
said I want to see text, the text is there. For you to review, for you to
complain about, for you to add to or subtract from, whatever it is."
Biden’s voyage to Europe on Thursday to meet with other world
leaders in Scotland to discuss climate change, was supposed to give him an
element of his agenda to promote (NBC).
Instead, it kicked off a Halloween Hell Week, Mischief Night and Tricks,
no Treats, that commenced with a High Noon (EST) address to the press and the
public, wherein he promised to put an end to methane (cow farts?), build a
highway to the sky and… citing how great we were in the past and how we have
fallen, Make America Great Again.
Though without the terminology… (See the text as Attachment One)
In remarks from the White House ahead of his midday
departure, Biden framed the months-long haggling over the deal as a good-faith
effort to find middle ground between liberal and moderate Democrats. He literally fell to his knees and begged his
own party to fall in line. "I need
you to help me; I need your votes," a “person familiar with the matter”
quoted Biden as saying. "I don’t think it's hyperbole to say that the
House and Senate (Democratic) majorities and my presidency will be determined
by what happens in the next week."
(Reuters, See Attachment Two)
"We spent hours and hours and hours over months and
months working on this. No one got everything they wanted, including me. But
that's what compromise is, that's consensus. And that's what I ran on,"
Biden said in his speech from the East Room.
Again: "(I)t's not hyperbole to say that
the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what
happens in the next week," Biden said.
“We are at an inflection point.
The rest of the world wonders whether we can function."
We can’t.
That, of course, is the third Obvious Problem – under Mitch McConnell’s
direction and the looming shadow of Donald Trump, Republicans have pledged to
destroy the Biden Administration wherever, whenever and however they can… no
matter what collateral damage accrues to the nation. (Obvious Problems numbers one and two center
upon the two refusenik Democratic Senators: Joe Manchin of West Virginia is
adamantly opposed to any climate change measures that damage his state’s
critical… and imperiled… coal industry, while Kyrsten
Sinema (Arizona) has wrapped herself in the flag of
freedom, free enterprise and free lunches for the plutocracy – refusing to
confiscate even a shiny penny from the billionaires.
Calling Joe’s proposal “still robust”, ABC News
admitted that paid family leave and efforts to lower prescription drug pricing
are now gone entirely from the package, drawing outrage from some lawmakers and
advocates.
“With
support for even the narrowed package still an issue,” a patently delusional
Biden said, as he left the Capitol, "I think we're going to be in good
shape." (See the numbers crunched
by Yahoo News, Attachent Three, and the Washington
Post, Attachment Four.)
"Not everyone got everything they wanted, not even
me," Biden conceded in his White House remarks. "But that’s what
compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on."
House liberals were not in a
compromising mood. "If a vote on
the BIF is held today, I'm a no," Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., told the
Fox. "I feel a little bamboozled
because this is not what I thought was coming today." Bush's fellow "Squad" member, Rep.
Rashida Tlaib, R-Mich., reportedly said, "Hell no on BIF" after
she left a meeting with fellow Democrats.
Nor did Republicans see any
consensus and are expected to reject both the bipartisan infrastructure
bill – duly dubbed "BIF" – and the spending packages as "socialist" agendas, the biggest hurdles facing the
president’s cornerstone legislation are in his own party.
The usual suspects treated the
American president with a leavetaking shower of
garbage and stones, preparatory to showing the leaders of the civilized
world. An especially harsh Wall
Street Journal editorial called the deal-making debacle… which Biden
downgraded to a “framework”, as opposed to actual legislation… “phony”, but with social and fiscal damages that are real.
“(T)he blueprint the White House released is more frame than work.
The jerry-rigged plan is an enormous expansion of government with quarter-baked
entitlement programs that will retard work and $1.85 trillion in tax increases
that will distort and limit investment. The $1.75 trillion cost that Democrats
have assigned their bill is an illusion. They use phony accounting to finance a
few years of new spending with 10 years of tax increases.”
Fox sniped at the
noontime ramble, remarking that… in
what has appeared to become his new presidential tradition… Biden left without
taking questions, this time not only walking off stage but jetting off for his
weeklong European trip to attend the G20 summit and the climate summit in
Glasgow, Scotland, adding that the President “has previously walked away from
an inquisitive press following addresses on the botched withdrawal from
Afghanistan, a poor September jobs report, and the supply chain crisis.”
"A faux victory lap on the
domestic front before heading overseas," is how Fox co-host Kayleigh McEnany described it.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., tweeted:
"What are you afraid of? Your Far Left Socialist
agenda?"
As he flew off to the Old World in a hot tub
of humiliation and defeat, President Joe could have used a little help in
slapping down the trolls besieging him from left, right and center of the
Washington buzzard.
Sixty-two years ago, SenatorJohn
F. Kennedy was having certain difficulties of his own… trailing in a close
election to succeed a popular President; his campaign floundering in a sea of
perceived inexperience and privilege.
Fortunately, JFK had an ace up his sleeve…
the candidate’s father, Joseph, who commissioned a stand-up comedian Mort Sahl, whom the New York Times called “an inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic… a
self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy … then
at the apex of his popularity with live gigs, television appearances and a top-selling
record album: “live at the Hungry i in San Francisco”
(the i stood for
intellectual). He’d hosted
the 1959 Oscars along with Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and Lawrence Olivier, had
enjoyed regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with
audiences full of celebrities and had recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest
example of modern stand-up comedy on record,” the album “At Sunset.” (Though
recorded in 1955, it was not released until 1958, shortly after the release of
his official first album, “The Future Lies Ahead.”)
Perhaps his most notable contribution to that campaign was
the gag which inspired JFK’s quip at his own
expense — about a telegram from his wealthy father. “Don’t buy a single more
vote than is necessary. I’ll be d—ed if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”
But, once elected, JFK felt the sting of Sahl’s expertly aimed arrors of
sarcasm, as did many other icons of liberalism.
After Kennedy took office, he found
himself on the other end of Sahl’s ruthless pen. Sahl fans who knew
him for anti-Eisenhower and anti-Nixon roasts were dismayed to learn that the
crafty Canadian’s true mission was satirizing all politicians, and they didn’t always appreciate Sahl’s Kennedy jokes.
No political figure was in the safe zone,
Rolling Stone eulogized, “whether they were Democrat or Republican.” The politically skeptical comic once
declared, “Democrats are the left wing of the Republican party. Do you want
vanilla or French vanilla?” Another time, the Times of Israel reported, he
said: “Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they
deserve everything they’ve stolen.”
“A lot of people I have met in the
Democratic Party are extremely expedient,” he said. “Once it’s over, they don’t
want to know you. Of course, that’s not generic to the Democrats.”
He even earned posthumous plaudits from the Saudi Gazette;
the Kingdom pronouncing that “Sahl's biting political
commentary won him legions of fans starting in the 1950s and has been credited
as the inspiration for modern stand-up comedy,” and that the “comedic
blunderbuss,” prided himself on poking fun at all sides, often asking at shows:
"Is there anyone here I haven't offended?" with zingers like…
"A
conservative is someone who believes in reform.
But not now."
Or: "Liberals
are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good
for 10 minutes."
Joe Kennedy viewed the comedian’s continued
potshots at his son as disloyalty almost reaching the depths of despicability
that Saudis had for Adnan Khashoggi but, according to Sahl,
the Kennedy patriarch merely applied pressure to have him silenced rather than
dismembering him physically. And when he didn’t, Sahl
wrote in “Heartland,” his 1976 memoir, “the work began to dry up.”
Though he never reclaimed his central place in the
entertainment firmament, Mr. Sahl was somewhat
resurgent in the 1970s, partly because Watergate had reinvigorated the public
appetite for derision aimed at politicians. He recorded an album, “Sing a Song
of Watergate”; was booked by television hosts like Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and David Frost;
and continued to do college concerts.
“I’m not 18 anymore,”
he lamented in “Heartland,” “but I’m the angriest man on any campus I visit.”
When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Sahl
was devastated and the tragedy foreshadowed a decline in the comedian’s
fortunes that lasted for years. He quickly became convinced that Kennedy had
been killed as part of a CIA plot and he accused the government of staging a
massive cover-up. Audiences stopped laughing and his bookings plummeted. He devoted much of his monologues to reading
long passages from the report by the government’s Warren Commission, which had
been appointed to investigate the assassination – a side road also taken by
Lenny Bruce, who would regale his paying customers with transcript of trial
text until they stopped paying.
Lenny Bruce committed the same sin around this time, though
Bruce spent time onstage dissecting the transcripts of his own court trials on
charges of obscenity and drug possession. Bruce died of an overdose in 1966, at
the age of 40. Sahl, who was just two years younger
than Bruce and an uneasy friend till the end, avoided that degree of
self-destruction, but he vanished from the public light for a few years.
After Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, Sahl’s
popularity cratered as he committed to conspiracy theories and began mocking the
Warren Commission report on stage. Naturally, he felt his faltering popularity
was also the result of a conspiracy.
A leftist conspiracy.
The easy target of the Nixon presidency restored
some of Sahl’s popularity during the 70’s. Sahl made a
comeback with the reemergence, then implosion, of the abortive second term of
Nixon’s presidency which — from his landslide over George McGovern in 1972 to
the Watergate hearings of ’73 and his resignation in ’74 (according to the
liberal blog, Slate) —served as a perfect
scene-setter for Sahl’s subtly savage satire
and shrewd social observations.
But he never came all the way back. Over the past few
decades, he hosted some short-lived cable shows, wrote a few unproduced movie
scripts, and did infrequent nightclub gigs. He became a comedian’s
comedian—venerated by other comedians, especially those old enough to know that
they wouldn’t be doing what they were doing if it weren’t for him—but he never quite
kept up with the shifting times in a way that restored his appeal with a
broader audience. Not long after his Watergate revival, he spent a few years as
a resident comedian at a big
hotel in Las Vegas—as clear a sign as any that his brand of humor had gone
mainstream: a triumph, but an ambivalent one for an artist who had once been
fueled by an avant-garde edginess.
“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about
the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in
“Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was
said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don’t think Gene
McCarthy is bad company. I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I
don’t think that Garrison is bad company.
“I learned something, though. The people that I went to
Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with
in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from
the grave for justice.”
Often hailed and imitated by later,
lesser liberal comedians and warily respected, if not feared, by the potentates
and powerful, Sahl, nonetheless, counted Ronald
Reagan among his friends and admirers (although not to the extent of giving his
administration any more slack than he’d afforded Kennedy). In the 1980s he frequently ridiculed his
Reagan, but, reported the Times of Israel, he said the president was never
offended.
“If you’re his friend, it doesn’t matter if
you’re an escaped con,” Sahl once said of
Reagan. Democrats, he added, were often
not as forgiving. In the 1990s, Sahl had fallen out
of favor with them when he complained that President Bill Clinton’s only
lasting legacy would be his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
From an essay and his interview for the
Library of Congress (See Attachment Five)…
LOC: Comedy today,
I would say, has changed considerably from what it used to be. What has been lost?
MS: We’ve lost
everything. Too many comedians today--they comfort themselves with mock
debates. As far as I’m concerned, nobody is really covering the President.
These late night shows are not doing it. Jimmy Kimmel; Jimmy Fallon, that’s not
“The Tonight Show.” It should be funny. It can be funny, if you have any
skills. No wonder people are tearing Comcast out of their houses.
LOC: Do you think
YOUR style of comedy changed over the years?
MS: Not much. I’m
still going for the throat. But the standard has to be funny.
As the numerous
tributes following his death at 94 elucidated, Morton
Lyon Sahl was born on May 11, 1927, was not even a
born in America phenom… he grew up in Montreal, to a Canadian mother and a
father who worked at tobacco shop in New York. The family would move to
California when Sahl was still a young child
(Politico).
After high school, he joined the Air
Force but… according to the rogerebert.com website (operated by others since
the critic’s demise a decade ago@ )... “soon grew
disenchanted with the conformity of service, rebelling by growing a beard and
writing articles critical of the military for a local newspaper.”
After his discharge in 1947, he
attended USC, majoring in traffic engineering and city management, but after
receiving his degree in 1950, he decided to drop out of the masters program to
try to make it as an actor, playwright and comedian.
At first, he had little success—at
one point, he and a friend rented their own theater to put on experimental
one-act plays but struggled to find an audience—and did odd jobs while
continuing to write. He then hit upon the idea of performing his plays as
comedic monologues, but this approach attracted little attention at first.
Eventually, he convinced the owner of a San Francisco nightclub to let him
audition and he earned a regular performing spot. After a few weeks, lines from
his act began appearing in the work of influential San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. With
that seal of approval, audiences began to come out in droves to see what all
the fuss was about.
Mr. Sahl was married and divorced
four times, first to Ms. Babior; then to China Lee,
the first Asian American model to be a Playboy centerfold, from whom he was
divorced for the second time in 1991; and finally to Kenslea
Motter, from whom he was divorced in 2009. Mr. Sahl and his second wife had a son, Mort Jr., who died in
1996 of a drug overdose. No immediate family members
survive.
The Times obituary called Mr. Sahl
“a shock to the comedy system. Other groundbreaking (and safely dead) comedians
— Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory,
Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Richard Pryor among
them — would pour into his wake, seizing on the awareness that audiences were
hungry for challenge rather than palliation. And for social commentators who
took to the airwaves in the half-century after he began to speak his mind —
from Dick Cavett to Don Imus,
Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart — Mr. Sahl
was their flag bearer as well.”
(If a younger generation of comedians considered Mr. Sahl an inspiration, he did not return their love. He
said in a 2010 interview that he found their comedy
“kind of soft” and urged them to “take more chances.”)
“He just doesn’t bring to mind any other performer in the
history of show business,” Mr. Cavett said after
watching Mr. Sahl perform in 2004.
For one thing, he looked different from other comics of the
time, eschewing the expected jacket and tie in favor of a more collegiate,
informal look in an open-necked shirt and a V-neck sweater. And he peppered his
routines with the language of youth and jazz — he was bugged, he dug this or
that, he dated a lot of chicks. He took the stage carrying a rolled-up
newspaper, a prop that was also a prompt; in Mr. Sahl’s
performances, he talked about, anguished over and ranted at the news, spinning
it with sardonic digressions, cryptic asides and blistering zingers.
“I’m for capital punishment,” he declared. “You’ve got to
execute people — how else are they going to learn?”
|
OCTOBER 22 –
OCTOBER 28 |
|
Friday, October 122 2021 Infected: 45,400,506 Dead:
735,374 Dow:
35,291.13 |
Doctors and politicians promises
that this is the week that booster shots and kiddie vaxxes
will roll out this week. TV Dr. Jah
says it’ll be OK to mix and match shots while Rep. Wyler (R-NH) spreads disinfo that the vaccines are full of octopus DNA and
promoted by the Vatican. Other
congressman Matt Gaetz probed by DOJ in Bannon
indictment kerfluffle.
Economy taking hit after hit… gas prices hit $7/gallon in Gorda, CA. Intel
execs say chip shortage will last until 2023, maybe longer. Budget deficit rises to 2.77 for 2021 –
second worst ever. Publishers react to
paper shortage by cutting books.
FBI confirms dead man in Florida swamp is Brian (RIH) Laundrie. Triceratops
fossil skeleton sold for $7M, piddling compared to the $32M that a T. Rex
brings. Mawozo
kidnap gang leader Wilton Juvet promises to kill
Haitian hostages as widespread riots complicate negotiations. |
|
Saturday, October 23, 2021 Infected:
45,427,504 Dead:
735,801 |
Baldwin movie set shooting probers
focus on a non-union prop man for providing the hot (loaded) gun that killed
cinematographer and wounded director.
With program budgets expiring on Halloween and President Joe slated to
go to Glasgow for a climate summit, the pressure for an infrastructure
solution accelerates. Dems cut back
spending on the “human” inf. bill to mollify renegades Manchin and Sinema… “In a fifty-fifty Senate,” Biden snaps, “every
Senator is king.”
Royalty suffers as QE2 hospitalized for an undisclosed ailment that
the doctors say “is not Covid.” More woke pressure forces the Brits to
designate more minority homes as being “historical” residences. |
|
Sunday, October 24, 2021 Infected: 45,444,284 Dead: 735,941 |
Escalating
street violence prompts community outrage in Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Chicago, Brooklyn and L.A. (anti-cop sentiment declines). Why do we just live to die? Asks a school
principle. Shrinks blame the “stresses
of lockdown”, partisan agitators blame “redlining and race.” Bomb cyclone (or some now call it
“atmospheric river”) hits Northwest.
High winds tip stranded container ship over, spilling containers of
Christmas goodies into the ocean. Governors’ races in New Jersey and
Virginia highlight off-season elections in two weeks. Trump wannabe closes in against former Gov.
McAuliffe in the latter… social issues like critical race theory in the
schools, vaxxing and masking are driving a
Republican wave. Politicians and
celebrities flock to Richmond and the DC suburbs to whip up enthusiasm among
the bases. “You’re going to set the
direction of Virginia and the country for generations to come,” advises
Obama. But President Joe is still
without his deal as he faces the possibility of going to Glasgow
empty-handed. |
|
Monday, October 25,
2021 Infected: 45,545,583 Dead: 737,316 Dow:
35,258.61 |
It’s
National Greasy Food Day. President Joe and Nancy say they’re closer
to a budget, tax and infrastructure deal… again. Manchin goes to Delaware as Biden
houseguest; says he supports taxing the rich (but that was Sinema’s issue – his goal is coal). But liberals can engage in some light
reading – Barry and Bruce write “Renegades”; Springsteen touts the “critical
patriotism” of “Born in the USA”. Labor shortage impacting trash pickups
nationwide and spur Amazon warehouse workers to protest their plight. Kelloggs strike
rolls on and a consumer complains that her strawberry Pop Tarts had only a
handful of strawberries – mostly apples and pears. She’s suing for $5M. Businessman collects $80K in plague relief
handouts, stiffs employees and buys a rare Pokemon
card Full plate for sports fans. Tom Brady throws record 600th
touchdown pass. Braves and Astros meet
in the World Series, starting tomorrow.
And the NBA season begins. |
|
Tuesday, October 26, 2021 Infected: 45,609,053 Dead: 738,881 Dow: 35,756.88 |
FDA
approves Pfizer kiddie vaxxing 17-1. So they can get shot and go back to
school? Nope – it now goes to a panel
at the CDC and, if approved, another ream of red tape. They say maybe Christmas. So the kids will have to get shot another
way. NIH director Doctor Francis
Collins says: “we don’t want another surge.” President Joe gifts Elon Musk with $13.8B
worth of charging stations for all those Teslas
sold to Hertz, and Elon unseats Bezos as richest (North) American with $253B,
so Jeff goes out and declares he’s building his own space station and also
that Amazon will experience no holiday delays,. Continuing the do-it-yourself craze, Fox
News will start up Fox Weather that will give a voice to climate change
denialists while FaceBook promises it will “serve”
young adults (in the way that the sci-fi writers mean “to serve man”. MicroSoft
(remember them?) complains, blaming Russian hackers for its troubled bottom
line. Japanese princess marries a commoner and
is promptly kicked out of the Royal Family.
Maybe it’s because hes a lawyer? |
|
Wednesday, October 27,
2021 Infected: 45,703,958 Dead: 741,231 Dow: 35,460.69 |
Pfizer
hits kiddie vax roadblock… FDA now in the bank, but CDC is questioning the
short shelf life of the vaccines. The
latter also suggests “immune-compromised” get a fourth booster shot – so many
have not received three and more than a few: none. The good news: At least 77% have now had at least one
shot. Sen. Sinema says
she’ll vote for a corporate tax, but won’t say how much as Infra/Budget
squabble squabbles along. With his
deals and his popularity crumbling, President Joe may be changing his slogan
to Build Back Later. That other BBB charges those auto warranty
scams (particularly CarShield) as, well, scams. So CarShield
blames its F rating on the pandemic and sues the BBB and rotsa
ruck finding jurors not enraged by all those auto warranty robocalls NASA discovers an extra-galactic planet
orbiting a black hole in the Whirlpool Galaxy. Name does not sound promising for Space
Explorations. Profits are up up up at Google and MicroSoft (take that, Moscow!) and prices are up up up up
for holidays… Halloween candy and costumes, Thanksgiving’s turkey, even
Christmas trees! |
|
Thursday, October 28,
2021 Infected: 45,826,141 Dead: 743,359 Dow: 35,760.83 |
President
Joe speaks. And speaks. (see above)
And flies off to Europe in humiliation and disgrace after being
crushed between the moderate (rightists) and leftists in his own party after what
are called “frantic” meetings crash. Mark Zuckerberg changes the name of FaceBook to Meta (as opposed to fixing all the problems
of Nazi and pedophile posters).
Comedians predict trolls will draw penises on the sagging infinity
logo that looks like blue balls. His
billionaire competitors are just content to get richer against the odds…
Amazon dubs the NHL Seattle Kraken rink the “Climate Pledge Arena.” Richard Branson’s Space X suffers a toilet
malfunction. Generals predict that the hypersonic
Chinese nukes are making a “Sputnik moment”.
So many supply chain boats full of containers of toys and gimmicks may
anger them further – the chip shortage is already impacting American
automakers. Hot for the holidays: Grey Poupon markets mustard wine. No hot dog jokes, please. |
|
Another
treat of the week for the Don, which scored one of its highest gains ever due
to an employment rate so hot that companies are having trouble finding
workers (and some even have to raise wages!).
The ending of supplements to the Covid-unemployed
certainly had something to do with motivating Don Joneses to get off the
couch and go to work although problems remain – without which the Don might
even have gone back to its 15,000 starting rate eight years ago. These include lack of childcare (difficult
to fix since childcare workers still make at or below minimum wage), fear of
the plague, lack of transportation… old and new cars are costlier, as is gas…
and an occupational and educational mismatch (truck driving schools closing,
for example, and not being reopened). Otherwise, the good news also extended to
the Dow and even the government… which increased receipts, as usual, but also
cut spending (a rarity!) although if the two infrastructure bills were to
pass, that would be the end of that!
Another problem… even if only the $1T physical legislation passes…
skilled construction work, recycling and green energy jobs are already going
unfilled and, unless there is a supplemental charge to be paid for training,
problems might be waiting ahead. But, as the holidays start clocking in,
maybe a suitable compromise infrastructure bill will be passed, maybe a renewed attention to climate change and
alternate energy will spark an upsurge in “green” jobs that both red and blue
partisans can support… maybe
childcare and service workers can be paid a decent wage. Maybe one Republican Senator will tell Mitch and Trumpsy to go to hell and maybe Democrats will trim more
fat, not lean, from their budgets. One can dream… |
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CATEGORY |
VALUE |
BASE |
RESULTS |
SCORE |
SCORE |
OUR SOURCES and
COMENTS |
||
INCOME |
24% |
6/17/13 |
LAST |
CHANGE |
NEXT |
10/22/21 |
10/29/21 |
SOURCE |
Wages
(hourly, per capita) |
9% |
1350 points |
10/8/21 |
+0.62% |
11/5/21 |
1,481.15 |
1,481.15 |
|
Median
Income (yearly) |
4% |
600 |
10/22/21 |
+0.022% |
11/5/21 |
674.83 |
674.98 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 35,693 701 |
*Unempl. (BLS – in millions |
4% |
600 |
10/1/21 |
-8.33% |
11/5/21 |
418.21 |
418.21 |
|
*Official (DC – in millions) |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
-10.2% |
11/5/21 |
464.47 |
511.83 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 8,408
7,630 |
*Unofficl. (DC – in millions) |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
-4.91% |
11/5/21 |
406.06 |
426.00 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 14,270 3,602 |
Workforce Participtn.
Number
Percent |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
+0.6% +0.9% |
11/5/21 |
318.29 |
321.15 |
In 153,279 3,792 Out 100,054 391 Total:
253,333 4183 |
WP % (ycharts)* |
1% |
150 |
10/8/21 |
-0.16% |
11/5/21 |
152.23 |
152.23 |
https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate
61.60 |
OUTGO |
(15%) |
|||||||
Total
Inflation |
7% |
1050 |
10/8/21 |
+0.4% |
11/5/21 |
973.36 |
973.36 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.4
nc |
Food |
2% |
300 |
10/8/21 |
+0.9% |
11/5/21 |
272.56 |
272.56 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.9 |
Gasoline |
2% |
300 |
10/8/21 |
+1.2% |
11/5/21 |
251.94 |
251.94 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +1.2 |
Medical Costs |
2% |
300 |
10/8/21 |
+0.1% |
11/5/21 |
285.05 |
285.05 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
+0.1 |
Shelter |
2% |
300 |
10/8/21 |
+0.3% |
11/5/21 |
287.33 |
287.33 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.3 |
WEALTH |
(6%) |
|
||||||
Dow Jones Index |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
+0.43% |
11/5/21 |
386.60 |
388.28 |
|
Home
(Sales) (Valuation) |
1% 1% |
150 150 |
10/1/21 |
+16.91% -1.09% |
11/5/21 |
199.77 177.56 |
199.77 177.56 |
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics Sales
(M): 6.29 Valuations (K): 352.8 |
Debt
(Personal) |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
+0.11% |
11/5/21 |
270.17 |
269.86 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 65,282
357 |
|
||||||||
AMERICAN ECONOMIC
INDEX (15% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS) |
||||||||
NATIONAL |
(10%) |
|
||||||
Revenue (trilns.) |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
+4.06% |
11/5/21 |
332.75 |
346.26 |
debtclock.org/ 3,891
4,049 |
Expenditures
(tr.) |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
+0.83% |
11/5/21 |
217.32 |
219.13 |
debtclock.org/ 6,894
837 |
National Debt
tr.) |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
+0.07% |
11/5/21 |
318.17 |
317.96 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 28,910
929 |
Aggregate Debt
(tr.) |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
+0.03% |
11/5/21 |
372.32 |
372.19 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 84,921
950 |
GLOBAL |
(5%) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Foreign Debt
(tr.) |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
+0.18% |
11/5/21 |
274.57 |
275.07 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,647
633 |
Exports (in
billions) |
1% |
150 |
10/8/21 |
+0.42% |
11/5/21 |
189.80 |
189.80 |
|
Imports (bl.) |
1% |
150 |
10/22/21 |
+0.35% |
11/5/21 |
113.90 |
113.90 |
|
Trade Deficit
(bl.) |
1% |
150 |
10/8/21 |
+4.37% |
11/5/21 |
94.32 |
94.32 |
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 73.3 |
SOCIAL INDICES
(40%) |
||||||||
ACTS
of MAN |
(12%) |
|||||||
World
Affairs |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
+0.1% |
11/5/21 |
383.27 |
383.65 |
(Rich) world leaders meet, greet and eat in
Italy. They’ll solve the problems of
the world, won’t they? Military overthrows
government in Sudan, immediately massacres crowd of protesters. |
Terrorism |
2% |
300 |
10/22/21 |
-0.2% |
11/5/21 |
220.39 |
219.95 |
Haitian
kidnappers threaten to kill hostages, then go dark. Illegal border crossings, spurred by Haitian
meltdown, spike. Taliban called
ambivalent about 2,000 ISIS-K terrorists said to be in Afghanisan. |
Politics |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
+0.1% |
11/5/21 |
437.71 |
438.15 |
President
Joe flies away to escape Washington Wrasslin’. Star chamber hauls oilies
up who deny that they’re promoting climate change denial (they’re not). Other star chamber keeps hauling up faces
in the crowd from the J-6, |
Economics |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
+0.2% |
11/5/21 |
402.63 |
403.44 |
Starbucks
raising wages. Amazon doesn’t, but
pledges to deliver more packages than FedEx and UPS despite truck driver
shortage. Worker shortage forces Ben
& Jerry to raise prices and cut less profitable flavors. Hertz orders 100K Teslas,
sending the corporate value over 1T, and they’re now Number Six, though
profits are also up, up, up at MicroSoft and
Google. Lack of spending during the
worse of the plague enabled 3.7T in savings, and Don Jones wants to spend it
all now, Facebook changes its name to
Meta, debuts a limp infinity logo. |
Crime |
1% |
150 |
10/22/21 |
+0.2% |
11/5/21 |
238.02 |
237.54 |
Hate crimes up in 2021 – FBI cites 63% increase for
blacks, 76% for Asians. The week in
murder: Non-union armorer blamed for Baldwin shooting on the set of
“Rust”. Disgruntled employee kills two
at Nebraska grain facility; Boise mall shooter bags six, two die; Mom and boyfried
arrested with corpse of 9 year old dead at least a year. Sex scandal strikes Falwell’s Liberty
U. Global drug sting nets 150 pushers,
$31M. Colombia arrests its #1 druglord. Ex-Gov. Cuomo hauled off to jail for “excessive
touching”. (Watch out President Joe!) |
ACTS of GOD |
(6%) |
|
||||||
Environment/Weather |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
-0.4% |
11/5/21 |
401.26 |
399.65 |
45 climate change protesters arrested for blocking
traffic in NYC (and creating another toxic emission cloud). E2 tornado stricks
unlucky Lake Charles, La. Bomb Cyclone
(or atmospheric river) strikes West Coast.
6.5 EQ strikes Taiwan. Fox News
starts Fox Weather to deny climate change danger. |
Natural/Unnatural
Disaster |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
-0.2% |
11/5/21 |
404.38 |
403.57 |
Alec
Baldwin shoots (accidentally?) the cinematographer on his film set. NYC faces meltdown as cops, firefighters
and garbagemen promise to quit jobs rather than get vaxxed. Coast Guard rescues 25 humans stranded in
dead boat off San Diego and 12 year old boy rescued from 13 footlong
crocodile at Cancun’s Club Med. Two
killed as Tx drag racer plows into crowd.
Tufts lacrosse player chokes to death in hot dog eating contest. |
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE
INDEX (15%) |
||||||||
Science,
Tech, Education |
4% |
600 |
10/22/21 |
+0.3% |
11/5/21 |
399.26 |
400.46 |
NASA
discovers extragalactic planet orbiting a black hole far, far away. Space X fixes malfunctioning toilet that
could make Space EXplorations very
uncomfortable. QE2 ill, will skip
Glasgow climate change summit. |
Equality
(econ/social) |
4% |
600 |
10/22/21 |
+0.1% |
11/5/21 |
403.57 |
403.97 |
ICE to stop raiding schools, dragging out screaming
kids and sending them back to from where they came. Students (who pay 40-50K year) protest
slummy dorms at Howard. State Department
to issue “X” passports to transgenders.
|
Health Plague |
4% |
600 |
10/22/21 |
-0.3% +0.2% |
11/5/21 |
399.66 -
103.64 |
398.46 -
103.43 |
“Alarming”
rise in colon cancer as Covid sucks up all medical
resources. WalMart
recalls poisonous Aroma Therapy room spray.
Critics fear cannabis edibles will be given out to poison kids this
Halloween. Plague causes rising
cigarette sales after 20 years of decline. Pfizer’s
kiddie vaxx at 1/3 dose is 91% effective for 5 to
11 year olds. CDC suggests fourth dose
for immune-compromised. Singer Ed
Sheeran gets it. |
Freedom and
Justice |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
-0.1% |
11/5/21 |
460.88 |
460.42 |
NHL player
accuses minor league coach of sex abuse, wins lotsa
cold cash. USC suspends date rape
fraternity, McDonald’s sued and striken for
“harassment”. SCOTUS greenlights Texas
abortion law (until 11/1).
Whistleblowers contend that Facebook makes more money on hateful and
violent posts and sho’ nuff
– its stock value is rising so fast that it now promises to “serve” young
adults. |
MISCELLANEOUS and
TRANSIENT INDEX (7%) |
||||||||
Cultural
incidents |
3% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
+0.2% |
11/5/21 |
530.91 |
531.97 |
Circuses
are back (but without animals).
Phantom of the Opera returns to Broadway. RIP Mort Sahl
(see above), actor Peter Scolari (Tom Hanks’ “Bosom Buddy”); Jay Black (of
the Americans); Michael Tyler (Gunter, Central Perk barista on “Friends”) R(etiring)IP: Carli Lloyd, the Tom Brady of women’s soccer. |
Miscellaneous
incidents |
4% |
450 |
10/22/21 |
-0.2% |
11/5/21 |
486.46 |
485.49 |
High (prices) for the holidays: Halloween costumes,
Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas presents all up, up, up! Gutter humour:
Amazon and UPS promises no delays in Christmas
deliveries of those expensive packages.
Over 900 in-air assaults set record for 2021, but airline prices are
falling – one way New York to Miami for $31.
Sex scandal at Falwell’s Liberty U. RIH: Boise Mall shooter Jacob
Bergquist (who also possessed marijuana).
|
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The Don Jones Index for the
week of October 22th through October 28th, 2021 was UP 85.28 points.
The Don
Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired
Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell,
Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator.
The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well
as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell,
environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna
Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The
Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial
“Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties
promulgating this and/or other such slanders.
Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC
donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com
ATTACHMENT ONE – From Whitehouse.gov
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Today, I am pleased
to announce that after — after months of tough and thoughtful negotiations, I
think we have a historic — I know we have a historic economic framework.
It’s a framework that will create millions of jobs, grow the economy, invest in
our nation and our people, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity, and put
us on a path not only to compete, but to win the economic competition for the
21st century against China and every other major country in the world.
It’s fiscally responsible. It’s fully paid for. Seventeen Nobel
Prize winners in economics have said it will lower the inflationary pressures
on the economy.
And over the next 10 years, it will not add to the deficit at all; it will
actually reduce the deficit, according to the economists.
I want to thank my colleagues in the Congress for their leadership. We’ve
spent hours and hours and hours over months and months working on this.
No one got everything they wanted, including me, but that’s what compromise
is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on.
I’ve long said compromise and consensus are the only way to get big things done
in a democracy, important things for the country.
I know it’s hard. I know how deeply people feel about the things that
they fight for. But this framework includes historic investments in our
nation and in our people.
Any single element of this framework would fundamentally be viewed as a
fundamental change in America. Taken together, they’re truly
consequential.
I’ll have more to say after I return from the critical meetings in Europe this
week. But for now, let me lay out a few points.
First, we face — and I know — I apologize for saying this again: We flace [sic] — we face an inflection point as a
nation. For most of the 20th century, we led the world by a significant
margin because we invested in our people. Not only in our roads, in our
highways, and our bridges, but in our people, in our families.
We didn’t just build an Interstate Highway System, we built a highway to the sky.
We invested to win the Space Race, and we won.
We were also among the first to provide access to free education for all
Americans, beginning back in the late 1800s.
That decision alone to invest in our children and their families was a major
part of why we were able to lead the world for much of the 20th century.
But somewhere along the way, we stopped investing in ourselves, investing in
our people. America is still the largest economy in the world. We
still have the most productive workers and the most innovative minds in the
world. But we’ve risked losing our edge as a nation.
Our infrastructure used to be rated the best in the world. Today,
according to the World Economic Forum, we rank 13th in the world.
We used to lead the world in educational
achievement. Now, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development ranks America 35th out of the 37 major countries when it comes to
investing in early childhood education and care. And we know how our
children start impacts significantly on how they’ll finish.
We can’t be competitive in the 21st century global economy if we continue to
slide.
That’s why I’ve said all along: We need to build America from the bottom up and
the middle out, not from top down with the trickle-down economics that’s always
failed us. I can’t think of a single time when the middle class has done
well but the wealthy haven’t done very well. I can think of many times,
including now, when the wealthy and the super-wealthy do very well and the middle
class don’t do well.
That’s why I proposed the investments Congress is now considering in two
critical pieces of legislation — positions I ran on as President, positions I
announced when I laid out in the Joint Session to Congress what my economic
agenda was.
These are not about left versus right, or moderate versus progressive, or
anything else that pits Americans against one another.
This is about competitiveness versus complacency. Competitiveness versus
complacency. It’s about expanding opportunity, not opportunity
denied. It’s about leading the world or letting the world pass us by.
Today, with my Democratic colleagues, we have a framework for my Build Back
Better initiative. And here’s how it will fundamentally change the lives
of millions of people for the better.
Millions of you are in the so-called “sandwich generation,” who feel
financially squeezed by raising a child and caring for an aging parent.
About 820,000 seniors in America and people with disabilities have applied for
Medicaid — and they’re on a waiting list right now — to get home care.
They need some help. They don’t have to be put — they don’t have to be
kicked out of their homes. But they need a little help getting around,
having their meals made occasionally for them.
They don’t want to put them in a nursing homes not because of the cost, but
because it’s a matter of dignity. They want to stay in their homes.
But it’s hard. You’re just looking for an answer so your parents can keep
living independently with dignity.
For millions of families in America, this — this issue — is the most important
issue they’re facing. It’s personal.
So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to expand services for
seniors so families can get help from well-trained, well-paid professionals to
help them take care of their parents at home — to cook a meal for them, to get
their groceries for them, to help them get around, to help them live in their
own home with the dignity they deserve to be afforded.
Quite frankly, what we found is that this is more popular or as popular as
anything else we’re proposing, because the American people understand the
need. It’s a matter of dignity and pride for our parents.
Thirty years ago, we ranked number seven among the advanced economies as a share
of women working. You know where we are today? We rank 23rd.
Twenty-third. Seven to twenty-three. Once again, our competitors
are investing and we’re standing still.
Today, there are nearly 2 million women in America not working today simply because
they can’t afford childcare.
A typical family spends about $11,000 a year on childcare. In some
states, it’s $14,500 a year per child.
We’re going to make sure nearly all families earning less than $300,000 a year
will pay no more than 7 percent of their income for childcare. And for a
family making $100,000 a year, that will save them more than $5,000 on
childcare.
This is a fundamental game-changer for families and for our economy as more
parents, especially women, can get back to work and work in the workforce.
I’m looking at a lot of significant press people in front of me. A lot of
them are working — working mothers. They know what it costs.
I remember when I got to the Senate. I lost my wife and daughter in an
accident. My two boys. I started commuting 250 miles a day because
I had my mom and my dad and my brother and my sister to help me take care of my
kids because I couldn’t afford childcare, and I was getting a serious salary —
$42,000 a year.
We’ve also extended the historic middle-class tax cut — that’s what I call it —
middle-class tax cut for parents. That is the expanded Child Tax Credit
we passed through the American Rescue Plan.
What that means is, for folks at home, they’re getting $300 a month for every
child under the age of 6, and $250 for every child under the age of 18.
We’re extending that for another year.
The money is already a life-changer for so many working families. This
will help cut child poverty in half this year, according to the experts.
But that’s not all it does. It changes the whole dynamic for working
parents. In the past, if you paid taxes and had a good income, you could
deduct, under the tax code, $2,000 per child from the taxes you owed.
But how many families do you know — of cashiers, waiters, healthcare workers —
who never got the benefit of that full tax break because they didn’t have that
much to deduct? And it wasn’t refundable, so it either came off of your
tax bill or you didn’t get full credit.
Why should somebody making $500,000 a year or $150,000 or $200,000 a year get
to write it off their taxes? And the people who need the help even more —
they don’t have that much tax to pay, they don’t get the benefit, and they have
the same cost of raising their children.
Eighty percent of those left out were working parents who just didn’t make
enough money. That’s why, in the American Rescue Plan, we didn’t just
expand the amount of the middle-class tax cut, we also made it refundable.
This framework will make it permanently refundable — making sure that the
families who need it get a full credit for it, in addition to those who are
already getting full credit.
They’re going to make sure that every three- and four-year-old child in America
will go to high-quality preschool. That’s part of the legislation I just
brought up to the Congress.
Studies show that when we put three- and four-years-old in school — school, not
daycare; school — we increase by up to 47 percent the chance that that child,
no matter what their background, will be able to earn a college degree.
As my wife Jill, who’s in the back here, always says: Any country that
out-educates us is going to outcompete us.
We can finally take us from 12 years to 14 years of universal education in
America.
We also make investments in higher education by increasing Pell Grants to help
students from lower-income families attend community colleges and four-year
schools.
And we invest in historically Black universities — colleges and universities —
HBCUs, minority-serving institutions, and Tribal colleges to make sure every
young student has a shot at a good-paying job of the future.
This framework extends tax credits to lower premiums for folks on — who are in
the Affordable Care Act for another three years.
For 4 million folks in the 12 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid — all the
rest have — this framework will enable you to get affordable coverage.
And Medicare will now cover the cost of hearing aids and hearing checkups.
This framework also makes the most significant investment to deal with the
climate crisis ever, ever happened — beyond any other advanced nation in the
world.
Over a billion metric tons of emissions reductions — at least 10 times bigger
on climate than any bill that has ever passed before and enough to position us
for a 50 to 52 percent emissions reductions by the year 2030.
And we’ll do it in ways that grow the domestic industries, create good-paying
union jobs, and address longstanding environmental injustices, as well.
Tax credits to help people do things like weatherize their homes so they use
less energy, install solar panels and develop clean energy products, and help
businesses produce more clean energy.
And when paired with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, we will truly transform
this nation.
Historic investments in passenger rail. I know everybody says, “Oh, Biden
is a rail guy.” That’s true. But passenger rail and freight rail
and public transit — it’s going to make hundreds of thousands — take hundreds
of thousands of vehicles off the road, saving millions of barrels of oil.
Everybody knows and all those studies show: If you can get from point A to
point B on electric rail, you won’t drive your car; you’ll take the rail
service.
We also learned that in most major cities in America, minority populations —
the jobs they used to have in town, they’re now out of town. Roughly 60
percent of the folks, they don’t have vehicles, so they need to have a means to
get out of town to their jobs, to be on time. That’s what — this will do
that, like it did for Detroit.
Ninety-five percent of the 840,000 [480,000] school buses in America run on
diesel. Every day, more than 25 million children and thousands of
bus drivers breathe polluted air on the way to and from school from the diesel
exhaust.
We’re going to replace thousands of these with electric school buses that have
big batteries underneath and that are good for the climate. I went down
to the — one of the manufacturing facilities — saw them, got in one, drive them.
They do not expend any — they do not expend any pollution into the air.
We’ll build out the first-ever national network of 500,000 electric vehicle
charging stations all across the country. So, when you buy an electric
vehicle, and you get credit for buying it — when you buy an electric vehicle,
you can go all the way across America on a “single tank of gas,” figuratively
speaking. It’s not gas; you plug it in. Five hundred thousand of
them — these stations along the way.
We’re going to get off the sidelines on manufacturing solar panels and wind
farms and electric vehicles with targeted manufacturing credits. You
manufacture, you get a credit for doing it. These will help grow the
supply chains in communities too often left behind.
And we’re going to reward countries for paying good wages — for companies, I
should say — for good wages and for sourcing their materials from here in the
United States.
That means tens of millions of panels and turbines, doubling the number of
electric vehicles we have on the road within just three years.
And we’ll be able to sell and export these products and technologies to the
rest of the world, creating thousands more jobs because we are, once again,
going to be the innovators.
We’ll also make historic investments in environmental clean-up and
remediation. That means putting people to work in good-paying jobs at
prevailing wage; capping hundreds of thousands — hundreds of thousands of
abandoned wells and — gas wells — oil and gas wells that need to be capped
because they are leaking things that hurt the air; putting a stop to the
methane leaks in the pipelines; protecting the health of our communities.
It’s a big deal.
And we’ll build up our resilience for the next superstorm, drought, wildfires,
and hurricanes that represent a blinking “code red” for America and the world.
Last year alone, these types of extreme weather events you’ve all been covering
and you’ve all witnessed, and you’ve –some of you have been caught in the
middle of have caused $99 billion in damage to the United States within the
last year — $99 billion. And we’re not spending any money to deal with
this? It’s costing us significantly.
I met — in Pittsburgh, I met an IBEW electrical worker who climbs up on those
powerlines in the middle of the storm to try to put transformers in to keep the
lights on when the storms hit. He calls himself “100 percent union
guy.” His job is dangerous.
As he said, and I quote, “I don’t want my kids growing up in a world where the
threat of climate change hangs over their heads,” end of quote.
Folks, we all have that obligation — that obligation to our children and to our
grandchildren.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill is also the most significant investment
since we built the Interstate Highway System and won the Space Race decades
ago.
This is about rebuilding the arteries of our economy. Across the country
now, there are 45,000 bridges and 173 miles — thousand miles of roads are in
poor condition. Some of the bridges you don’t even take a chance of going
across; they’ve shut down. They can’t be built back to the same standard
because the weather is not going to get a lot better. We just got to keep
them from getting a heck of a lot worse. We have to build back better and
stronger.
No one should have to hold their breath as they cross a rundown bridge or a
dangerous intersection in their hometown. We’re going to put hardworking
Americans on the job to bring our infrastructure up to speed — good union jobs
at prevailing wages. Jobs you can raise a family on and, as my dad would
say, can have a little “breathing room.”
Jobs that can’t be outsourced.
Jobs replacing lead water pipes so families can drink clean water, improving
the health of our children and putting plumbers and pipefitters to work.
Jobs laying thousands of miles of transmission lines to build a modern energy
grid.
Jobs making high-speed Internet affordable and available everywhere in rural
and urban America, particularly including the 35 percent of rural America that
currently goes without it right now.
This pandemic has made clear the need for affordable and available high-speed
Internet.
The idea of a parent having to put their kids in the car for virtual learning,
drive and sit in the McDonald’s parking lot so that their child can access the
Internet when school is taught virtually is not only unnecessary, it’s just
wrong. It’s wrong.
As I said before, these plans are fiscally responsible. They are fully
paid for. They don’t add a single penny to the deficit. And they
don’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. In fact,
they reduce the deficit. Here’s how:
I don’t want to punish anyone’s success. I’m a capitalist. I want
everyone to be able to — if they want to be a millionaire or billionaire, to be
able to seek their goal. But all I’m asking is: Pay your fair
share. Pay your fair share. Pay your fair share. And right
now, many of them are paying virtually nothing.
Last year, the 55 most profitable corporations in America — 55 of them — paid
zero — zero — in federal income tax on about $40 billion in profit. If
they report big profits to their shareholders, they should be paying
taxes. It’s that simple.
That’s why the Build Back Better Framework will have a 15 percent minimum on
the largest corporations — a minimum tax of 15 percent. The top 1 percent
of the wealthiest Americans evade, it’s estimated by the experts, $160 billion
a year in federal taxes. That’s wrong. We’re going to change that.
I want to emphasize what I said from the beginning: Under my plans, if you earn
less than $400,000 a year, you won’t pay a single penny more in federal taxes,
period. In fact, these bills continue cutting taxes for the middle class
— for childcare, for healthcare, and so much more.
Let me close with this: For much too long, the working people of this
nation and the middle class of this country have been dealt out of the American
deal, and it’s time to deal them back in.
I ran for President saying it was time to reduce the burden on the middle
class, to rebuild the backbone of this nation — working people and the middle
class. I couldn’t have been any clearer from the very moment I announced
my candidacy.
That’s why I wrote these bills in the first place and took them to the
people. I campaigned on them. And the American people spoke.
This agenda — the agenda that’s in these bills — is what 81 million Americans
voted for. More people voted than at any time in American history.
That’s what they voted for. Their voices deserve to be heard, not denied
— or, worse, ignored.
Because here’s what I know: If we make these investments, there will be no
stopping the American people or America. We will own the future.
I have long said it’s never been a good bet to bet against the American people
— I’ve said that to foreign leaders as well as everybody here in this country —
which means it’s always a good bet to bet on the American people. Just
give them half a chance. And that’s what we’re doing. That’s what
these plans do.
They’re about betting on America, about believing in America, about believing
in the capacity of the American people.
If you look at the history of the journey of this nation, what becomes crystal
clear is this — I’ll say it again: Given half a chance, the American people
have never, ever, ever, ever let the country down.
So, let’s get this done. God bless you all. And may God protect our
troops. And I’ll see you in Italy and in Scotland. Thank you.
ATTACHMENT TWO – From Reuters
BIDEN PUSHES $1.75 TRILLION SPENDING
BILL, PROGRESSIVES PUSH BACK
By Trevor
Hunnicutt and Richard Cowan 5:49 PM EDT
WASHINGTON, Oct 28 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on
Thursday unveiled a $1.75 trillion economic and climate change plan that he
said unified Democrats then was quickly rebuffed by members of his own party.
"We have a historic economic framework" that will
create jobs and make the United States more competitive, Biden said after a
last-minute trip to Congress to convince reluctant progressives to support the
spending plan. He then departed for a summit of leaders from the Group of 20
countries in Italy.
He left behind a U.S. Congress bubbling with conflicts and
unanswered questions, but one that seemed to be inching towards votes on his
economic agenda, perhaps within days.
How, exactly, it could come together remained a puzzle.
It was unclear whether moderate Democrats who want a related
bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed first are on board. Some
progressive Democrats will only vote for the infrastructure bill with the more complicated spending measure, and multiple lawmakers would like to see changes to
Biden's framework.
It was also unknown whether a handful of House Republicans
were still committed to vote for the bipartisan bill, or if it even matters.
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi discussed plans to hold a vote on
Thursday on the infrastructure bill, and the House Rules Committee released a
preliminary text of the 1,684-page
bill.
"So we're on a path to get this done," Pelosi
said. "But for those who said I want to see text, the text is there. For
you to review, for you to complain about, for you to add to or subtract from,
whatever it is."
The fight over $2.75 trillion in spending that could shape
the U.S economy for years to come will play out in coming days with Biden, who
has been heavily involved in negotiations, thousands of miles away. He won't
return to the Washington until Wednesday.
In a meeting with House Democrats on Thursday, Biden
pleaded for their support, according to a person familiar with the matter.
"I need you to help me; I need your votes," the
person quoted Biden as saying. "I don’t think it's hyperbole to say that
the House and Senate (Democratic) majorities and my presidency will be
determined by what happens in the next week."
Biden ran for president on a promise to curb growing inequality in America, using education and social spending paid for by companies
and the rich. He vowed to depart from Republican tax-cutting including a 2017
tax reduction under his predecessor, Donald Trump.
The president had hoped to reach an agreement before the
Rome summit, where a global minimum tax will be high on the agenda, and a
climate conference in Glasgow, where Biden hopes to present a message that the
United States is back in the fight against global warming.
"Not everyone got everything they wanted, not even
me," Biden conceded in his White House remarks. "But that’s what
compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on."
U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, who chairs the
Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the group would need to see any text of
a spending bill before promising to vote on the infrastructure legislation.
The White House said the larger spending plan framework
Biden presented on Thursday would be fully paid for by repealing certain tax
rebates passed under Trump and imposing surcharges on corporate stock buybacks
and the earnings of the wealthiest Americans.
The framework includes $555 billion in spending for climate
initiatives and six years of preschool funding among other top agenda items.
But it does not include paid family leave or a tax on
billionaires. Some influential lobby groups and constituencies were angered by
the absence of key Biden administration pledges.
"We are outraged that the initial framework does not
lower prescription drug prices," AARP, an advocacy organization for the
elderly, said in a statement.
The absence of paid leave, Democrats noted, leaving the
United States as the only rich country and one of the few nations in the world
that doesn't provide maternity leave.
"The deal isn't done until the Senate acts.. this is not done," Senator Ron Wyden, an
advocate of paid family leave, said.
Some Republicans support the infrastructure measure but
most lawmakers in that party oppose both bills, and Biden can only afford to
lose three votes in the House to get either passed.
In addition to their slight majority in the House,
Democrats only narrowly control the Senate, with U.S. Vice President Kamala
Harris holding the tie-breaking vote, meaning legislation must win support
across a wide swath of progressives and more moderate members of the party.
ATTACHMENT THREE – From the Washington
Post
HERE’S WHAT IS IN THE $1.75 TRILLION BIDEN BUDGET
PLAN
Taxes, climate, health care and
child care would all see substantial changes if Democrats approve the package.
By Tony Romm,
Amy Goldstein
and Dino Grandoni Yesterday at 10:48 a.m. EDT|Updated yesterday at 3:11 p.m. EDT
President Biden on Thursday unveiled a roughly $1.75 trillion blueprint for
overhauling the country’s health care, climate, education and tax laws, as he
seeks to break a logjam among his party’s liberals and moderates that has
stalled his economic agenda for months.
The plan includes some of Biden’s earliest policy
priorities, including new spending to enhance child care and offer
prekindergarten free to all American families. But it also shelved some of the
Democrats’ most favored plans, including an effort to provide paid leave to
millions of workers — one of many casualties in the party’s efforts to reduce
its original, $3.5 trillion price tag.
What is in Biden's latest budget plan
President Biden's blueprint of $1.75 trillion in
spending to address the country's health care, climate and education, along
with $100 billion for immigration reform.
= $1 billion
Clean energy and climate investments
$555 billion
Child care and preschool
$400 billion
Child tax and earned income tax credits
$200 billion
ACA premium subsidies and the Medicaid gap
$130 billion
Home care
$150 billion
Housing
$150 billion
Equity and other investments
$90 billion
Higher ed and workforce
$40 billion
Immigration
$100 billion
Medicare hearing
$35 billion
Source: The White House
FROM ARTUR GALOCHA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Biden presented the plan on Capitol Hill in a
private meeting with House Democrats earlier Thursday, after which many
Democrats said they are still negotiating its specifics and haggling over
what’s in and out of the package. He still must convince lawmakers including
Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who helped drive Democrats to scale back
their policy ambitions in the first place.
WHAT TO KNOW
·
What’s in the plan for health care?
·
What’s in the plan for families?
·
What’s in the plan for climate?
·
What’s in the plan for taxes?
·
What was left out of the package?
What’s in the plan for health care?
Senior administration officials
characterized the plan’s health-care elements as the biggest expansion
of affordable care in a decade, predicting the changes would extend coverage to
7 million people. But the framework is far more modest than the goals that
Biden first proposed. In particular, the president still wants Medicare to be
able to negotiate lower drug prices but could not persuade enough congressional
Democrats to support the idea, according to senior administration officials,
who briefed reporters Thursday on the condition of anonymity to describe a plan
that was not yet public at the time.
·
Extension until 2025
of expanded premium subsidies for most Americans who purchase health plans
through Affordable Care Act marketplaces, as begun in the spring through the
American Rescue Plan law.
·
Allow until 2025
low-income people in a dozen states that have not expanded Medicaid to buy ACA
health plans without paying a monthly premium.
·
Expansion of Medicare
benefits for older Americans to include hearing benefits.
·
$150 billion for an
expansion of home- and community-based services for older people and people
with disabilities — less than the $400 billion Biden
initially proposed for this purpose.
What’s in the plan for families?
Some of the most ambitious and expensive plans
put forward by the Biden administration seek to ease the financial burdens
facing millions of American families, particularly low-income parents with children.
The White House described the investments as the most transformative proposal
targeting caregiving in “generations,” pointing to a slew of new programs and
tax credits that date back to some of Biden’s earliest campaign promises.
·
Universal, free prekindergarten
for all 3- and 4-years-olds, which the White House has described as the largest
expansion in such education programs since the creation of public high school
roughly a century ago.
·
The prekindergarten
effort is part of a broader, $400 billion bucket of funds to help Americans
afford child care, aiming to ensure families who earn less than $300,000
annually spend no more than 7 percent of their income on child care for kids
under age 6.
·
A one-year extension
of expanded, refundable child tax credits, which would continue to be paid out
on a monthly basis, continuing a pandemic-era relief program.
·
Roughly $150 billion to construct,
rehab and make available roughly 1 million affordable homes, as well as
additional aid to provide rental assistance and help first-time home buyers.
·
New higher-education
aid, including an increase to the maximum Pell Grant, by $550, for roughly 5
million students in need, and additional investments to boost historically
black colleges and universities.
What’s in the plan for climate?
The Biden administration aims to secure $555
billion in spending to address climate change,
an amount the White House says makes the bill the biggest clean-energy
investment in the nation’s history.
·
The bulk of the
clean-energy measures comes in the form of tax breaks for companies and
consumers that install solar panels, improve the energy efficiency of buildings
and purchase electric vehicles. The EV tax credit in particular could lower the
cost of such a vehicle by $12,500 for a middle-class family, according to the
administration.
·
Additional financial
incentives for making the wind turbines and other clean-energy equipment
domestically and in union-organized factories.
·
A new Civilian Climate
Corps to hire perhaps 300,000 young people to restore forests and wetlands and
guard against the effects of rising temperatures.
What’s in the plan for taxes?
Senior administration officials insist the
$1.75 trillion plan is financed in full, raising nearly $2 trillion over 10
years. Initially, the White House had hoped to raise even more money by
ratcheting up rates on corporations and wealthy Americans,
a move that would have unwound the tax cuts imposed under President Donald
Trump in 2017. But Biden had to abandon that plan in the face of opposition
from Sinema, who opposed tax increases. In the end,
they say their plan preserves Biden’s commitment not to raise taxes on
Americans making under $400,000 annually. Among the most critical revenue
raisers:
·
A new 15 percent
corporate minimum tax on large corporations, part of a broader effort on the
part of the White House and Democrats to address the fact some companies reduce
their tax burdens to zero.
·
A new tax targeting
companies that perform stock buybacks.
·
A new tax surcharge
targeting the wealthiest Americans. The proposal would impose a new 5 percent
rate on those with incomes above $10 million and an additional 3 percent surtax
on incomes above $25 million.
·
Roughly $400 billion
to empower the Internal Revenue Service to pursue tax cheats, with a focus on
Americans at higher incomes.
What was left out of the package?
Trimming a package to $1.75 trillion from its
original, $3.5 trillion size forced Biden to make considerable trade-offs,
including on some of the Democrats’ signature policy goals. Manchin and Sinema raised concerns about advancing a large package, and
without their support, Democrats would not have been able to advance a package
at all.
How spending in Biden's budget plan stacks up
Biden’s initial proposals
Latest spending deal
Proposals included in the spending deal
The $1.75 trillion plan includes policy
priorities from the American Families and American Jobs plans
Biden announced earlier this year.
$678B
$555B
$454B
$425B
$400B
$400B
$200B
$150B
0
Clean energy and climate investments
Child care and preschool
Child tax and earned income tax credits
Home care
$213B
$200B
$193B
$151B
$150B
$130B
$90B
$40B
Housing
ACA premium subsidies and the Medicaid gap
Equity and other investments
Higher ed and workforce
New spending not in initial proposals
Priorities excluded from the deal
Major spending initiatives from the American
Families Plan that were cut
$225B
$109B
$100B
$35B
$0
$0
$0
$0
0
0
Immigration
Medicare hearing coverage
Paid family leave
Free community college
Notes: The bipartisan infrastructure plan also
includes $15 billion for electric vehicles. Tax credit amounts include outlays
and reductions in revenue. The child and earned income tax credit proposed cost
of $454 billion was calculated by subtracting described costs (all except these
tax credits) in American Familes Plan from total AFP
cost; then subtracting an estimate of the cost of 10 years of child and
dependent tax credit (based on the CBO's final score of the American Rescue
Plan).
Source: White House, Congressional Budget Office
BY ALYSSA FOWERS AND JOE FOX/THE WASHINGTON POST
By Thursday morning, Democrats insisted that
many of the eliminated provisions remain on the table. For now, though, here is
what has been removed:
·
Prescription drug prices: Biden
and progressive Democrats have wanted to empower Medicare to negotiate directly
with pharmaceutical manufacturers to try to get lower prices for seniors, a
party campaign promise. But resistance from some moderates — and intense
lobbying from the drug industry — prompted lawmakers to leave out a measure
that would have also raised new money to help pay for other parts of the
legislation.
·
An even bigger Medicare expansion: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other congressional
progressives initially had hoped to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and
hearing. The latest version includes only coverage for hearing, amid opposition
from Manchin.
·
Paid family leave: Even Biden stressed
during the 2020 race that he hoped to address a long-known deficiency in the
U.S. safety net, which leaves millions of Americans without paid family or
medical leave. Democrats proposed 12 weeks of benefits, then scaled it down to
four weeks, to the chagrin of some members — before dropping it entirely due to
Manchin.
·
Clean energy: Many of the
aggressive steps Biden and other Democrats hoped to take to further cut
emissions, including a comprehensive program to reward electric utilities for
switching to renewable energy, have fallen out of the plan due to opposition
from Manchin, who represents a coal-heavy state. Still, the bill’s enactment —
coupled with executive action Biden is already taking — may enable the U.S. to
meet the president’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half (based on
2005 levels) by 2030.
·
A billionaire’s tax: In the late stages
of talks, Sinema and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
emerged with a new idea: A plan to tax roughly 700 of the wealthiest Americans, including the likes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who owns The
Washington Post) and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. But they ultimately dropped the idea,
a riff on Warren’s earlier wealth tax proposal, amid opposition from Democrats
about its feasibility. A broader effort to raise taxes on wealthy Americans and
corporations, unwinding the tax cuts under former president Donald Trump, had
been jettisoned.
ATTACHMENT FOUR – From yahoo news
HERE'S WHAT'S IN BIDEN'S BUDGET DEAL — AND WHAT IT
WOULD MEAN FOR YOU
By
Christopher Wilson Thu, October 28, 2021, 12:57 PM·
President Biden announced a framework for his
$1.75 trillion Build Back Better domestic spending plan Thursday after months
of negotiations among Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Over the course of those talks, a number of
provisions were stripped out to gain the support of all 50 Democratic senators
who were needed to pass the bill, but the White House has touted the agreement,
saying it will fulfill the goal to “rebuild the backbone of the country.”
“I think we’re going to be in good shape,”
Biden said while leaving Capitol Hill on Thursday morning after spending an
hour urging legislators to support the deal.
If it has the votes to pass Congress, Build
Back Better would follow the $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief passed along
party lines by Democrats in March.
The budget deal is likely to be accompanied by
a bipartisan bill, already passed by the Senate in August, that allocates about
$550 billion in new spending toward infrastructure like bridges, roads,
waterways and broadband internet. That bill has been stalled in the House for
months as progressives pushed to pass a budget deal alongside it.
The White House is calling on House Democrats
to pass the infrastructure deal now, but some progressives are hesitant to do
so until the budget plan has also passed.
The budget deal, although significantly
smaller than the original $3.5 trillion version progressives originally tried
to pass, is still the biggest expansion of the nation’s social programs in
decades and will affect millions of Americans.
It’s still unclear whether the budget deal has
enough votes to pass, but if it does, this is what it will mean for you.
For parents
The deal includes a one-year extension of the
expanded child tax credit passed earlier this month. As a result, most
Americans will continue receiving up to $300 per month per child under the age
of 17. Because the credit is fully refundable, even the lowest-income families
who make too little to pay taxes would receive the full benefit. Studies have found the program is keeping more than
3 million children out of poverty.
The plan includes free, universal preschool,
as well as funding to limit the costs of child care. Families making up to 250
percent of a state’s median income will see their total expenditures on child
care capped based on their annual earnings. The high costs of child care have
been cited as one reason that many Americans are not returning to the
workforce. Both those programs are funded for six years.
Medical
Medicare will now cover hearing aids for older
Americans. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had been pushing for full coverage of
vision and dental as well, but it was not included in the bill.
There is funding to reduce the premiums for
those covered through the Affordable Care Act, as well as providing health
insurance to 4 million lower-income people who live in states that do not offer
the expanded Medicaid program. There is also a program to reduce a waiting list
for in-home care for older and disabled Americans as well as improving the
wages for those doing that care. Biden had pitched that program as part of
a “human infrastructure” investment.
Climate
The plan includes $555 billion to both
incentivize clean energy production, an attempt to move the country from fossil
fuels to wind and solar, and provide tax credits to Americans to buy solar
panels and electric cars. The White House wanted to have a deal on climate to
point to when Biden and a number of his top staffers attend the U.N. Climate
Change Conference in Scotland next week.
Housing and immigration
The White House states that the $150 billion
being spent on housing will result in more than 1 million affordable homes,
saying it will ensure the “public housing stock in big cities and rural
communities all across America and ensure it is not only safe and habitable but
healthier and more energy efficient as well.” The plan also includes funding to
help with a backlog of 9 million visa applicants as well as addressing border
processing and asylum claims.
Funding
Tax increases in the bill are targeted toward
higher-earning Americans and corporations. There are new surtaxes on incomes
over $10 million and $25 million, as well as a corporate minimum tax of 15
percent on corporations of $1 billion or more. There is funding included for
the Internal Revenue Service to target tax cheats as well as a 1 percent tax on
stock buybacks.
What’s not in it
After opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin,
D-W.Va., paid family and medical leave were dropped from the package, leaving
the United States as the only developed nation without a paid leave
program. Manchin
also nixed the Clean Electric Performance Program, a key climate
initiative in the bill.
Another one of Biden’s key proposals, two
years of free community college, was ultimately left out of the deal as well.
Due to resistance from a small number of Democrats, a proposal to reform
prescription drug pricing — a longtime campaign promise and a potential avenue
for funding the programs — also did not make the bill, nor did a tax on
billionaires.
ATTACHMENT FIVE – From the Library of Congress (loc.gov)
“At Sunset”--Mort Sahl (1955)
Added to the
National Registry: 2011
Essay by Daniel
Blazek
Recorded in 1955,
Mort Sahl’s “At Sunset,” is the earliest example of
modern stand-up comedy
on record. No
comedian before Mort Sahl had ventured very far from
the clownish mother-inlaw joke or other such
vaudevillian patter. But Sahl broke new ground
performing stand-up in a
quick, literary
way, molded in part by the rhythms of jazz and poetry of San Francisco. It had
been the standard
for comedians to don a suit and tie, stick to formulas, and try not to provoke
the audience. “You
couldn’t get on stage without a chorus of showgirls and a singer behind
you,” Sahl once said. But Sahl defied
the norm, wore casual sweaters, and addressed the
audience as if
they were a close acquaintance. On “At Sunset,” Sahl
both rambles and zooms at
breakneck speed
through unique topical and political terrain. “At Sunset” is a well-spun
pastiche
of sophisticated
ideas, an understated celebration of free-speech, and what historian Gerald
Nachman has called
“a tightly packed time capsule of mid-fifties lore.”
Sahl’s topical act
reflected both the country’s ideals and post-war disillusionment. His knowing
jabs at
politicians and consumer society was courageous and thoroughly modern. It was
bold
anti-establishment
satire that foretold that of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and Richard Hooker’s
“MASH.” Sahl was tackling the topics of an emerging modernist
world: globalized, militarized,
and industrial. He
is acutely aware there is an absurdity around every corner and he peppers his
act with clever
turns of phrase. For example:
On the United
Nations (“we now have 58 new enemies”); politics (“Roosevelt is to blame for
all
our psychological
problems”); changing sexual mores (“some motels will require luggage”) ;
student protests
(“University of Cal students say Yankee go home”); poetry (“there’s symbolism
that the grass is
green”); finance (“it’s banker approved, but I don’t approve of bankers”);
music
(“east coast jazz
is any record without Shorty Rogers”); the military (“every time there’s a
submarine
sighting, there’s a Salinas lettuce strike”); and psychology (“I’m not geared
toward
total
acceptance”).
“At Sunset”
demonstrated Sahl’s zestful exuberance at describing
society’s rules being enforced
to absurdity.
There’s an underlying satire of strident militancy taken too far, the language
of
legalese deconstructed.
His contradictory thoughts and eloquent delivery essentially defined
stand-up comedy
for the modern era. Generations of comedians from Woody Allen and Shelley
Berman and pundits
from Andy Rooney to Jon Stewart are in his debt.
One
well-constructed comedy bit from “At Sunset” describes an overly analytical
bank teller
dissecting a
robber’s demands. The robber says, “Just act normally.” The teller says,
“Define
your terms.” A
young Woody Allen who saw Sahl perform in New York,
was said to be deeply
affected by Sahl’s act. Allen’s first directorial comedy film, “Take
the Money and Run,”
contains a similar
bank scene where the teller cannot read the robber’s note: Does this say “gun”
or “gub”?
In his long
career, Mort Sahl has been called a “modern Will
Rogers,” a “moralist” by Studs
Terkel, and the
leader of the so-called “sick” comedians by “Time” magazine (a loose
association that
included 1960s comedians Nichols and May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, and
Shelley Berman).
As Sahl saw it, the most cynical comedians are given
latitude if their cynicism
is directed in
broad and general terms, but when you got specific you were called “sick.” Sahl
was adept at
naming names. As biographer Gerald Nachtman has
noted, “To use musicians’
terms, Mort really
gets into the quarter notes on these issues [politics]. He knows the details
and
the nuances, and
in many cases he knows the players personally, and he
knows their histories and
how they all
intertwine.…”
Jazz and jazz
musicians should likely be credited with helping to define the improvisatory freeflowing style that Sahl and
all subsequent comedians commandeered. “At Sunset” was recorded
between sets at a
Dave Brubeck concert at Sunset Auditorium in Carmel, California. Jazz was
Sahl’s first love, and,
as a GI bill student, he found himself cutting classes to hang out in the
bohemian jazz dens
of Berkeley. Sahl later wrote in his memoir,
“Heartland,” “The debt to the
humor of jazz
musicians in general and Joe [Maney] in particular
was never paid by the
moviemakers/mythmakers.”
The improvisational influence of jazz informs all of Sahl’s
work and
on “At Sunset,”
you hear the musings of a true audiophile.
On “At Sunset,” Sahl jokes about a special jazz recording, where “every
time you play it, the
solos are
different.” He mentions in jest the use of a “Swedish cactus needle” as a
record stylus
and jokes about
using his entire house as a stereo speaker (perhaps a later influence on Steve
Martin’s comedy
bit about a massive “googlephonics” audio system). Sahl refers to jazz albums
where, “the liner
notes are sung and the lyrics are printed on the back.” All kidding aside, Sahl
took his love of
music seriously. He would emcee the first Monterey Jazz Festival, and won the
Entertainer of the
Year award from “Metronome Magazine,” the only non-musician ever so
named. He opened
for other musicians like Stan Kenton, and wrote liner notes for jazz artists
including Bud
Dashiell & the Kinsmen, the Paul Desmond Quartet, as well as for comedian
Shelley Berman. He
brought Berman and Jonathan Winters to record for Norman Granz’s
formerly jazz-only
label Verve Records.
Sahl’s ear for music
served him well as a comedian, but he did not set out to become an
entertainer. Mort Sahl’s father, Harry Sahl, was a
failed playwright turned civil servant, and
Mort inherited his
father’s literary ideals amidst the rigors of practicality. At 17, idealistic
Mort
enlisted in 1945,
only to have the war end and be stationed in Alaska for five years. Frustrated
by the Army, he
took advantage of the GI Bill to attend UC-Berkeley to study urban planning in
1950. His military
experience and academic training combined to form a Kafkaesque
worldview, and
like his father before him, he wrote plays that went nowhere.
“I discovered I
had to talk,” he said. Sahl’s plays served as raw
material for his gnawing
ambition, and his
sense of urgency compounded in the post-war boom. He cut his own path of
informed discourse
straight from the day’s headlines, arming himself with a newspaper on stage
to take on the
day’s current events. “Jazz musicians were saying…my newspaper was my axe
and I improvised
within a chord structure.…” Originally, he learned his craft in late-night
Berkeley coffee
houses, which bristled with politics, poetry and jazz. Not the typical
environment to
birth a comedy revolution, but he found the quickest shortcut to the stage was
to
perform his own
material.
Sahl called himself
“Cal Southern” early in his career and fashioned himself after the folksy
Herb Shriner. He dropped
this persona quickly, however. “It’s what I say that’s funny, not me,”
he said. Sahl’s gleeful impetuosity could have gotten him
blacklisted in the early 1950s, but
progressive San
Francisco largely embraced his edgy style. Making jokes about topical events
and sitting
Presidents was simply unheard of until Sahl tried it
out.
In 1953, he
performed at the fabled folk spot, the hungry i. It
was a shaky start at first, but he
turned the venue
into a hot ticket for relevant political satire. Sahl
helped carve a niche, not only
for comedians, but
for comedy as entertainment outside the typical nightclub environment. He
helped Lenny Bruce
get work there, and although Bruce would later be lionized for championing
free speech
(particularly in regard to religion), Sahl pioneered
free speech in politics. Sahl
commanded a
three-year stint at the hungry i and would sharpen
his chops to sold-out audiences.
He became the
toast of the town but also had his share of detractors. Hecklers threw pennies
and
at times it wasn’t
even safe for him to leave the club.
Sahl himself is no
particular fan of “At Sunset.” It was an unauthorized release set to capitalize
on the success of Sahl’s landmark official first album, “The Future Lies
Ahead” (otherwise
known as “Mort Sahl, Iconoclast”). Released in 1958, “The Future Lies
Ahead” brought Sahl’s
revolutionary
style of comedy to a national audience, and does so with a certain measured
political focus.
“At Sunset” was recorded three years earlier, but released a few months after
“The Future Lies
Ahead,” and then retracted. Nonetheless, “At Sunset” has no less charm, albeit
a bit less polish,
than Sahl’s official albums. “At Sunset” offers an
aural glimpse into the cradle
of modern American
stand-up, revealing the breadth of Sahl’s talent
teeming within the 1950s
jazz cognoscenti.
While “At Sunset”
has a bit less political commentary than his other albums, it has a much faster
pace.* Sahl’s early love of auto racing could partly account for
the brisk turns of phrase that
propel the
recording forward. Said Sahl, “I made the first
comedy record in America, and
although I hadn’t
bargained for much more than telling jokes in San Francisco and racing sports
cars…I like measuring
distance, covering it, determining where I was, navigating across the alien
planet...” On
record, Sahl careens from topic to topic, hardly
stopping to gauge his audience.
(Perhaps it’s no
coincidence that lightning wit Robin Williams also made his mark in the San
Francisco comedy
scene.) He told his biographer, “I was afraid no one would laugh and I
wanted to pretend
I wasn’t noticing the audience. I didn’t want the audience to get the idea I
was
telling a joke and
waiting for a laugh.”
Mort Sahl, “iconoclast,” didn’t wait for our laughter, but thank
goodness, we eventually caught
up.
AND
This interview
with MORT SAHL was conducted by the Library of Congress on May 5, 2017
Library of
Congress: What are you feelings, in 2017, about the
“At Sunset” album? I read
at one time that
you had some mixed feelings about it.
Mort Sahl: You know, it was illegal. It was stolen, recorded, by
the Weiss Brothers who ran the
Fantasy record
label. They sold it commercially without any permission…. Later, they even
sold the hungry i reunion. I was never compensated. And it was the first
[stand-up] comedy
record!
LOC: You never saw
any proceeds from the album at all?
MS: No. But it
opened up the whole record business to me and I signed with Verve records
after that. I then
brought a lot of other comics to them—Shelley Berman, George Carlin, Mike
and Elaine. None
of them had been recorded before. And I brought them Jonathan Winters, too.
LOC: Have you
listened to the album in subsequent years or is it a bit of a sore point?
MS: It’s not a
sore point, I just haven’t indulged myself. I think it was pretty revolutionary
at
the time…and still
is. Today, still, many comedians are still pretty cautious. The country is
obviously in
trouble right now. The stakes are higher than ever and comedians don’t say
anything! All they
do is discredit people personally. It’s like this whole [Stephen] Colbert
versus Trump
thing—there’s no subtly there…
I was on stage
last night and I gave a medical report about Donald Trump. I said he was
hospitalized for
an attack of modesty.
Comedy should come
out of opinion and it should take on the established order and make an
audience take a
second look at something. Too much comedy today is vulgar, not cleaver. I say
that as a
comedian, and as a consumer.
LOC: You were on
stage last night?
MS: Oh, yes, I’m
on stage every Thursday. I’m at Lucy Mercer’s theater, the Throckmorton
Theatre in San
Francisco, Mill Valley. I’ve been doing every Thursday for two years now. And
we have a sold out clientele now. The book [“Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of
Modern Comedy” by
James Curtis] is out now and that helps a lot but a lot of it is thanks to her.
LOC: Comedy today,
I would say, has changed considerably from what it used to be.
What has been
lost?
MS: We’ve lost
everything. Too many comedians today--they comfort themselves with mock
debates. As far as
I’m concerned, nobody is really covering the President. These late night
shows are not
doing it. Jimmy Kimmel; Jimmy Fallon, that’s not “The Tonight Show.” It
should be funny.
It can be funny, if you have any skills. No wonder people are tearing Comcast
out of their
houses.
LOC: Do you think
YOUR style of comedy changed over the years?
MS: Not much. I’m
still going for the throat. But the standard has to be funny. I like to go to
something that is
recognizable but people chose to ignore like the recent testimony of [James]
Comey from the
FBI, or the recent White House correspondent’s dinner in Washington—that
[dinner] is
absurd, it’s a self-congratulatory orgy.
You know, for
comedy to work, dramatically, something must be at stake and, right now,
America is at
stake. But, too often, these comedy guys now only care about getting on and
then
getting off and
getting rich.
LOC: Do you think
comedy can play a role in American democracy?
MS: It played a
role back with Will Rogers; it crystalized the problem. Bob Hope, Mark Twain.
And then the trail
starts to drivels off.
LOC: After “At
Sunset,” you went on to make additional albums. Do you have a favorite
among them?
MS: No. I think I
made eight or so. I had complete freedom, I could be completely topical.
You know, all
those people I brought to Verve--they all ended up outselling me, by the way.
I think Jonathan
Winters was the most talented person I ever worked with; he was truly gifted.
And he was
Republican! He used to be so good on Jack Paar
because Paar would just turn him
loose and he’d be
so unpredictable.
TV should not be
predictable. Comedians have to challenge the power. Comedians should be
dangerous and
devastating AND FUNNY--that’s the hardest part.