America Defeats the British Crown...Again.
America Defeats the British Crown...Again.
And maybe a couple things on Biden's first big legislative win.
Folks, before we get into the should-reads from the week and holy moly that Oprah interview of Meghan and Harry, I want to give you this incredibly perfect tweet:
One for the ages. Link for the interview is here. I only saw parts, but from what I saw…yowzers.
The actual, substantive news is that Biden and Senate Democrats passed his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package on Saturday. I have already written a lot about this bill, but a few final thoughts.
Michael Cohen (not…that Michael Cohen) and I are in agreement that it’s a BFD. It will fundamentally transform the American economy. Some aspects of this bill are temporary, and others are permanent.
Related to that, Noah Smith notes that Biden and the Democrats have essentially created a $300 a month payment for families with children and that it could easily become permanent. That on its own could cut child poverty in half.
Lizzie O’Leary provides a detailed debunking of inflationary concerns.
Goldman Sachs has integrated the bill into their analyses and thinks that it could shrink unemployment to 4.1% by the end of this year. For context, it is 6.2% right now.
A neat little thing in the bill that I think is being overlooked: Section 9675 (about page 481 in the bill), says that all student loan forgiveness is tax-free until 2025. That is a big deal on its own, but to me that is a hint that Biden could move to forgive some student loan debt via executive order.
And that unemployment rate is fresh out of the oven, because on Friday we got our first jobs report of the Biden Presidency! Under his first, full month in office, the economy created 379,000 jobs. All around, that’s a good sign that we are on our way to recovery. However, in their release, the Department of Labor noted that even with this level of sustained job growth every month, it would take almost three years for the U.S. to make up for all the lost jobs during the pandemic. And when you look at their actual data, you can see how the economic recovery has somewhat stalled:
Another fun thing to note: Since Donald Trump’s presidency ended with him losing around 60K jobs a month (3.6 million total) during his tenure, you can now officially tell people that Joe Biden created more jobs in one month than Donald Trump did in four years.
Top Democrats in New York are calling for Andrew Cuomo to either resign or for him to be impeached. His days are numbered. If you want to read a fun article from (the now-defunct) Gawker about a crazy theory surrounding Cuomo, click here. For the record, I don’t think it’s true. But it should give you some idea as to how many legal issues have surrounded Cuomo for years.
I loved this piece by my old pastor, Tim Keller.
That is it for me folks. I had a longer post about “cancel culture” on Thursday, if you want more to read. Pic this week is from our hike yesterday in Boulder.
