As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
Americans aren't the only ones who will benefit from the Biden Administration's economic policies:
The U.S. ascent ends — at least for now — China’s long reign as the principal engine powering the $90 trillion global economy.
Free spending by the Biden administration — coupled with the Federal Reserve’s ultralow interest rates — is driving the nascent U.S. boom and lifting other countries, where governments have not responded as aggressively to the pandemic. As Americans spent their $600 government stimulus checks in January on furniture, laptops and clothing, the U.S. imported a record $221 billion worth of goods. And that was before a round of $1,400 checks in March.
“We are ahead of the world,” said Kristin Forbes, who was one of President George W. Bush’s White House economic advisers. “And a meaningful share of the stimulus is likely to leak abroad.”
An American recovery from the global pandemic will lift boats internationally if executed as it appears it will be. No more "America First" bullshit.
Biden wants to be a transformational President, and bring his party along with him:
... Biden is cutting a dramatically different figure. After Congress passed his administration’s mammoth $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus, Biden introduced an even more ambitious legislative plan to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure, create million of new jobs and better align the economy to reckon with the imperatives of climate change — all to the tune of perhaps $4 trillion in spending over the next decade.
“It’s going to create the strongest, most resilient, innovative economy in the world. It’s not a plan that tinkers around the edges,” Biden said of his proposed legislation on Wednesday. “It’s a once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we’ve seen or done since we built the interstate highway system.”
To be sure, Biden faces an uphill battle in Congress, with Republicans and even moderate Democrats wary of the ballooning U.S. deficit and the possibility of growing inflationary pressures. But the sweep of his ambition is striking and could, argued left-leaning commentator Robert Kuttner, mark a transformation of the Democrats from decades of being “a Wall Street neoliberal party.”
“Historians and politicians are already comparing the ambition with [Franklin D.] Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program,” Guardian columnist Will Hutton wrote enviously from across the pond. “In British terms, it’s as though an incoming Labour government pledged to spend £500bn over the next decade with a focus on left-behind Britain in all its manifestations — real commitments to leveling up, racial equity, net zero and becoming a scientific superpower.”
On April 22, President Biden will host a virtual Leaders Summit on Climate, to which 40 world leaders have been invited. After four years of the climate- hostile Trump regime, we still have a chance to reverse global climate change:
... Scientists used to “treat carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as if it was a simple control knob that you turn up” and temperatures climb accordingly, “but in the real world we now know that’s not what happens,” [climate scientist Michael] Mann said. Instead, if humans “stop emitting carbon right now … the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly.” The actual lag effect between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise, then, is not 25 to 30 years but, per Mann, “more like three to five years.”
In short, this game-changing new scientific understanding suggests that humanity can turn down the heat almost immediately by slashing heat-trapping emissions. “Our destiny is determined by our behavior,” said Mann, who finds that information “empowering.” [snip]
To prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature, humanity must cut emissions in half by 2030, Mann said, citing 2018’s landmark report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That will require a rate of change “unprecedented” in human history, according to the IPCC scientists: emissions had to fall by 5 percent year after year. But if a re-elected Trump spent an additional four years pushing the world’s biggest economy in the opposite direction, hitting the 2030 target would become “essentially impossible,” Mann said. If emissions don’t begin falling until 2025, they would have to decline by roughly 15 percent every year over the following five years. “That may be, although not physically impossible, societally impossible,” Mann said. “It just may not be economically possible or socially viable to do it that [fast].”
You'd be hard pressed to pick the swampiest Trump ass- kisser among Republican governors, but certainly Floriduh's Ron DeSantis has to be among the top contenders. Like Trump, he's been politicizing vaccine distribution efforts:
Publix grocery chain pharmacies in Florida were chosen to distribute nearly a quarter of all COVID-19 vaccines in the state weeks after the company donated $100,000 to a PAC supporting GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, “60 Minutes” reported Sunday.
The money trail was one of several linking wealthy supporters of DeSantis to special vaccine access, whether it was a greenlight to boost business as a vaccine provider, or special access to getting the shots.
In another example, the wealthy Republican city of Palm Beach was given 1,000 vaccine doses from an early, limited supply, the TV news show reported. A number of communities of color in the county, meanwhile, lagged far behind in access to the vaccines as Publix, the state’s largest supermarket chain, was allowed to decide on its own where to focus its efforts to distribute the vaccinations.
Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi compared the situation to a free-for-all “Hunger Games,” with desperate Floridians scrambling for vaccinations and wealthy GOP contributors almost always coming out on top.
Sounds like pay to play to us. Very, very Trumpy. And Republican.
Speaking of Trumpy, here's pure, hardcore Trump grifting for you -- fleecing supporters with a "recurring contribution" default donation:
... Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.
Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.
As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.
Suckers.
Wrapping up, Infidel 753 has his usual excellent link round-up to posts from around the Internet (where we found the article on climate change amelioration). It's a weekly, encyclopedic array of topics that should have a subject of interest for everyone.
