America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
NAFTA MAN CLOSET REPUBLICAN JOE BIDEN SAYS CANCEL UNEMPLOYMENT!!! - I'VE GOT HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF 'CHEAP' LABOR ILLEGALS SCATTERED OVER THE COUNTRY
Biden drops corporate tax increase and cuts infrastructure plan by over $1 trillion in negotiations with Republicans
In private talks with Republicans at the White House on Wednesday, President Joe Biden offered to dramatically reduce his $2.25 trillion infrastructure package by eliminating a proposed corporate tax increase and cutting the total spending in the plan by more than half.
According to a report published by the Washington Post Thursday afternoon—based on information from an anonymous person familiar with Biden’s closed-door meeting with lead Republican negotiator Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia —the President outlined “a plan for about $1 trillion in new spending” and said “he could take the proposed rate increase off the table in an attempt to broker a compromise” with Republicans.
From the moment Biden announced the infrastructure bill, called “The American Jobs Plan,” on March 31, the Republicans declared it a nonstarter due to the proposed tax provisions. Biden had originally called for raising the corporate rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, partially reversing the cuts engineered by the Trump White House and Republicans in Congress in 2017.
While Biden’s original proposal is entirely inadequate to address the decaying, neglected and crumbling US roads, bridges, rails, pipelines, ports and information infrastructure, the Republicans have attacked it as being too costly and have called for an amount far below $1 trillion.
The White House has repeatedly appealed to the GOP to negotiate while simultaneously offering to scale back the plan in response to every objection from congressional Republicans. On May 27, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued a statement praising the work of Senator Capito “and her colleagues,” many of whom do not consider Biden to have won the 2020 presidential election or to have taken office legitimately.
Psaki’s statement said: “It is encouraging to see her group come forward with a substantially increased the [sic] funding level—nearing $1 trillion. We appreciate the hard work that went in to making this proposal and continuing these negotiations.” By that point, Biden had already agreed to cut the infrastructure proposal down to $1.7 trillion.
The WashingtonPost’s unnamed source reported that Biden still “intends to seek the tax increase” and that the White House “could pursue the policy outside of the infrastructure debate—or in the case that bipartisan negotiations ultimately collapse.”
Biden’s alternative tax plan “would amount to a new minimum corporate tax of 15 percent” and “take aim at dozens of profitable US corporations that pay little to nothing to the federal government annually.” The Post report continued, “The White House also proposed stepping up enforcement on corporations and wealthy earners who rely on loopholes to lessen their tax burdens, according to the person familiar with the talks.”
After news of Biden’s infrastructure climbdown became public, the White House reported that additional talks took place on Friday. The press statement said the president met with Senator Capito and House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio (Democrat from Oregon), and that they discussed a new offer from Republicans for a “$50 billion increase in spending across a number of infrastructure programs.” The statement continued, “The president expressed his gratitude for her effort and good will, but also indicated that the current offer did not meet his objectives to grow the economy, tackle the climate crisis, and create new jobs.”
The meeting with DeFazio was significant in that the congressman has advanced a surface transportation reauthorization bill in the House that would provide $547 billion in funding for infrastructure over five years without Republican support. The White House press statement said, “The President and Chairman DeFazio agreed on the benefits of continued engagement with Democratic and Republican Senators as the House work on infrastructure advances this coming week.”
Talks between the White House and Republicans are scheduled to continue on Monday, although the events on Friday have increased the likelihood that a bipartisan agreement will fall apart. While the Democrats have the ability to overcome Republican opposition by using the budget reconciliation process, they are refusing to use this option.
The pivotal role of West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin emerged again on Thursday when he said that he would not support passing the infrastructure package through budget reconciliation, a procedure in the Senate that requires a simple majority instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
Manchin called the notion of proceeding on a major piece of legislation without GOP support “a disaster waiting to happen.” Without Manchin’s support, Democrats do not have the 51 votes—including the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris—in the Senate needed to pass the bill under the budget reconciliation procedure.
The ongoing insistence by the White House on the necessity for collaboration with Republican supporters of the coup attempt of January 6, and the speed with which Biden has dispensed with major provisions of his infrastructure bill, expose the Democrats’ claims that the “American Jobs Plan” will “rebuild a new economy” and “create millions of good jobs” to be a fraud.
As Republican governors across the US move to end access to the $300-a-week federal supplemental unemployment benefits, the White House announced Friday that the assistance will come to an end in September.
The cutoff was provided for in the $1.9 trillion emergency legislation enacted earlier this year, and some Democrats at the time suggested the expiration date might be extended. But in the face of mounting demands by business groups and Republican state governments that the supplemental benefits be terminated immediately, Biden said Friday they would be allowed to expire.
Biden announced the decision after a jobs report released Friday showed the US added about 559,000 jobs in May. He said the extra money has been helpful to the unemployed but that it “makes sense it expires in 90 days.”
When the April jobs report showed fewer than 300,000 jobs created, business lobbyists and Republicans howled that the federal supplemental benefits were encouraging workers to remain idle instead of taking jobs. Now that the May report shows a more rapid expansion, the same forces claim that workers don’t need the supplemental benefits because there are supposedly plenty of jobs to take. At the root of this circular logic is that workers must be compelled by semi-starvation to take whatever job they are offered.
The emergency federal unemployment supplement was first enacted as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed by Congress in March 2020. Under the CARES Act, individuals seeking unemployment benefits were provided with an extra $600 per week. Congress allowed the program to lapse in the summer of 2020, only restoring it halfway, to $300 a week, in legislation enacted in December 2020. Congress extended this supplement as part of the American Rescue Plan that passed in March 2021, which is set to expire on September 6, 2021.
Approximately 15 million Americans are currently receiving some form of federal unemployment benefits. Although the majority of unemployed workers receive the federal payments on top of state-level unemployment payments, roughly 6 million workers, including gig workers and independent contractors, only receive unemployment benefits through the federal programs created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Labor Department data, US payrolls are still 7.6 million jobs below their pre-pandemic level. Economists and officials at the Federal Reserve had hoped for a gradual increase in employment as vaccinations spread and states moved to fully reopen their economies. In April, Fed chair Jerome H. Powell pointed approvingly to the March jobs report, which showed nearly a million jobs added in the US.
But the pace of hiring has slowed in recent months. The US added 559,000 jobs in May, falling short of the expected 675,000. In April, only 278,000 were added when analysts were expecting a million. Although economists have said multiple factors are driving America’s job shortage, including the fact that the pandemic is ongoing, Republicans have blamed the enhanced unemployment benefits for discouraging people from returning to work.
In a bid to force workers back to work, multiple Republican governors announced they will stop participating in the federal government’s supplemental unemployment benefits program in June. Millions of workers will receive their final federal benefits this month, as these governors pull the plug on the federal assistance, claiming the money has caused a “worker shortage.”
The states opting out of the program include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
According to a CNBC analysis, as many as 4 million workers will be impacted by the planned cuts in Republican-controlled states. Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders protested that the Biden administration is legally required to pay workers the benefits if their states refuse to do so, but officials have made it clear no action will be taken to help struggling workers.
When asked if the federal benefits were impacting employment, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters, “I think that’s a really difficult thing to analyze given that we have created a historic number of jobs in the last four months … I would leave it to you and your outside analysts to decide whether that is a big factor in terms of economy and date or whether that is a political discussion we’re having.”
Psaki added that governors “have every right” to “not accept” the extra benefits and “that’s OK.” It is, however, not the Republican governors who are being hurt, but the unemployed workers who have the misfortune to live under their rule. But “that’s OK,” says the White House. So much for the Biden administration’s supposed sympathy for working people and the “middle class,” about which he speaks endlessly.
In reality, multiple studies have found little to no correlation between the federal benefits and the labor shortage. A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showed few out-of-work Americans would turn down a job offer just to continue receiving an extra $300 a week in supplemental federal jobless aid, except in the case of the lowest-paid positions.
Another report from Congress’s Joint Economic Committee found that ending the federal programs early will cost those states’ local economies over $12 billion. Workers receiving supplemental assistance through the program will lose over $755 million. The report estimated every dollar of financial assistance to unemployed workers generates $1.61 in additional economic activity.
Child care is also a concern of millions of workers who are also parents. The child care industry was decimated during the pandemic with parents keeping their children at home. The industry is rebuilding but in some areas, child care is still in short supply. Furthermore, workers are concerned with returning to the workplace and interacting with unvaccinated coworkers. Although 52 percent of the adult population has been fully vaccinated, the percentage is misleading because a high percentage of adults over 65 are not part of the workforce.
Meanwhile, the Fed is buying $120 billion in bonds every month and holding its main policy interest rate at near-zero, policies that benefit the ultra-wealthy. These bond purchases are more than seven times what the government spends monthly on unemployment benefits.
Joel Kotkin: The Middle-Class Will Revolt Against Progressives
The college-trained progressives in Joe Biden’s White House are creating a bipartisan revolt by ordinary, middle-class Americans, says Joel Kotkin, a left-of-center California demographer who has long been critical of Silicon Valley’s political demands.
“A specter is haunting America, a great revolt that threatens to dwarf the noxious rebellion led by Trump … a new middle-class rebellion against the excesses of the Left,” Kotkin says in a June 4 article for Newsweek.
He continues:
This new middle-class rebellion is being bolstered by a wide-ranging intellectual rebellion by traditional liberals against the Left’s dogmatism and intolerance. Indeed, what we’re about to see has the potential to reprise the great shift among old liberals that had them embracing Reagan in reaction to the Left’s excesses of that generation.
Biden’s policies on race, housing, hiring, “equity,” and crime are deeply unpopular among many Americans, whether white, black, or Latino, he argues. Biden is similarly losing the middle class on immigration,” he wrote.
He said the Democrats’ education, anti-patriotism, crime, energy, and jobs policies are also harmful to many ordinary Americans:
Major pushback on how the progressive Left sees American history is also brewing. Americans by and large remain patriotic, including the poor and working class. This patriotism stands in stark contrast to the prevailing view among progressives, which casts America as the intrinsically and irredeemably evil spawn of slaveholders and racists. This simply does not constitute a popular program to the middle and lower classes, a gap that could become more and more meaningful—especially as the message of the Left spreads.
California shows where progressives will drag Americans unless there is a revolt against their green war on jobs, he argues:
California provides a precursor for the emerging climate regime. Our state’s fixation on renewable energy, along with the closure of natural gas and nuclear plants, has helped drive the cost of electricity and gas to the highest in the continental U.S. It has also systematically undermined key blue collar industries like energy, construction and manufacturing, which have stagnated or shrunk, while regulations designed for climate reasons have helped boost home prices to the nation’s highest.
Still, Kotkin is getting praise from mainstream politicians, including J.D. Vance, who is now running for an Ohio Senate seat as a Republican.
Vance has a matching criticism of the nation’s investor-dominated economy. He wrote in 2020:
The [coronavirus] has revealed an American economy built on consumption, reliant for production on regimes either indifferent or actively hostile to our national interest. Production, where it still exists in our country, clusters in megacities, where “knowledge economy” workers live uptown from the low-wage servants (disproportionately immigrants) who clean their laundry, care for their children, and serve their food.
Perhaps we shouldn’t build our cities like that. Perhaps we should make things in America. And if not all things, then at least enough so that the next time China unleashes a plague, it can’t threaten us with a loss of medicines and protective equipment.
In recent days, even Joe Biden and his commerce secretary have championed wage and training policies that contradict Wall Street’s demand for more imported consumers, renters, and workers.
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