Slash those jobless benefits
Joe Biden hailed “one more giant step forward on delivering on that promise that help is on the way”, after Democrats took a critical step towards a first major legislative victory since assuming control of Congress and the White House, with a party-line vote in the Senate to approve a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill.
One senator was able to see to it that unemployed people would be kept poorer.
The marathon “vote-a-rama” session that preceded the final Senate vote featured the longest recorded vote in Senate history, just shy of 12 hours, on Friday, as Democrats scrambled to strike a deal with Manchin, a moderate who mounted a last-minute push to scale back unemployment benefits.
Bowing to Manchin, the resulting compromise will keep benefits at $300 a week instead of $400, as proposed by Biden and approved by the House. However, the benefits will be extended until October rather than August, and Democrats added a provision to provide up to $10,200 in tax relief for unemployed Americans.
Let them eat stones.
Early on Friday, the Senate rejected a proposal by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to include a $15-an-hour minimum wage increase, a top liberal priority and a key plank of Biden’s economic agenda.
Despite widespread public support for raising the federal minimum wage, Democrats remain divided over the measure. On Friday, eight joined all Republicans in blocking the amendment, which would have required 60 votes to pass.
If people can’t live on $7.50 an hour well they should have thought of that before they got born.
And there’s the difference between the parties in a nutshell. When was the last time eight Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to block a Republican bill or amendment?
On the bright side — the Democrats are going to pass a 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus bill. Even adjusting for inflation and economic growth, that’s almost twice as big as the 2009 stimulus. They basically told the deficit hawks, including “Democrats” like Larry Summers, to go fuck themselves. And while the GOP was happy to vote against this bill, they’re not interested in taking the argument to the public, which is why we’re being treated to all this Dr. Seuss culture war nonsense. In 2009, they were forming the Tea Party and screaming that the USA was going to turn into Greece any second now from all this deficit spending.
Oh, and part of that package is a big Obamacare expansion.
That really is progress. More to do, of course, but I’m celebrating tonight.
Also, on the minimum wage, the thing to watch for is if they can pass a minimum wage increase that indexes the minimum wage to inflation.
I would take a $12 minimum wage (e.g.) with regular cost-of-living increases over a $15 one without. Which is perhaps easy for me to say as I don’t have to live on a minimum wage, but I think in the long run it would be huge to not have to do a big partisan fight every 5-10 years to just keep up with inflation Especially if you need a Democratic trifecta just to have a shot at doing it. That’s part of how we got to the present situation.
That’s a valuable point, about inflation. Two of Australia’s welfare payments are tethered to really low things, and that kept our unemployment payment so low that, as of two years ago (once the exchange rate is factored in), it paid worse than Mississippi’s unemployment payment. The only good thing about ours being that it didn’t expire.
It’s all political posturing for no real reason in any case; does anyone really think Manchin’s voters give a fuck if it’s $300 vs. $400? Or that most people will remember this shit in 2022?
Same with the Equality Act virtue signaling mess… can’t pass and no one will care. Politicians really live on a different planet.
Top headline on CNN.com this morning for me was about how the Democrats “almost’ lost Manchin’s support for the bill. Democrats just got a massive COVID relief bill passed, and the story here is “Dems almost screwed up!”
It reminds me of that scene in The Simpsons where Burns is returning from the Harvard-Yale game (waving his Yale flag) and complaining to Smithers, “honestly, I don’t know why Harvard even bothers to show up — why, they barely won this year!”
Liberal media my ass.