From "The Good, the Bad, and the Odd in Biden’s Stimulus Plan" by Eric Levitz (NY Magazine).
January 16, 2021
"Senate Democrats could vote to abolish the legislative filibuster, and then pass Biden’s plan on a party-line basis."
"But West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has vowed to keep the filibuster in place. In effect, this means that all regular legislation will need 60 votes to clear the Senate. The only exception to this rule are bills passed through the budget-reconciliation process, which enables legislation pertaining to the federal budget to pass the upper chamber with a simple majority.... [I]t’s hard to see how Biden could really believe there are 10 GOP votes for a $15 minimum wage, or $350 billion in fiscal aid to states, or, frankly, most of the items in his proposal. It’s possible then that this gesture toward bipartisanship is intended to fail: Perhaps, the idea is to make the GOP an offer it can’t accept — but which the voting public overwhelmingly supports — and then say, 'Well, we tried for unity but those Republicans wouldn’t even support the $15 minimum wage that red state voters are clamoring for, so we’re just going to roll everything into one giant, partisan reconciliation bill.' Alternatively Biden may simply be making an opening offer full of provisions he’s ready to concede for the sake of a bipartisan compromise. Regardless, the proposal strikes a weird balance between maximalism and pragmatism.... Hopefully, Biden & Co. know what they’re doing."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
56 comments:
The minimum wage is always $0.
The Obama media would have immediately called this proposal “nuanced”.
The Biden media hopes Joe knows what he’s doing.
When I read these articles about intricate ways Democrats can achieve all their goals without bipartisan support, I immediately picture Wile E. Coyote, Legislativus Supergenius.
Big partisan reconciliation bills are the only way anything ever gets done in congress now.
Could that be part of our problem? Maybe that's why they're so highly respected.
The minimum wage is always zero.
Prove me wrong
Trust manchin thats funny.
Republicans knew this was coming the moment Democrats had the ability to do so.
Does anyone really think that wages should be in any way related to the value of the labor provided. The Democrats are so wise to finally break that silly relationship between value and wages. Any government employee can set you straight on this.
That's nothing. Wait until Nancy pushes through election reforms aimed at making the nation work just like California does. Then adding DC and Puerto Rico as states. And, as if to stick a giant middle finger into the eye of every American, stacking the Supreme Court.
On the side, a heaping dose of New Green Deal, student loan forgiveness, and an attempt to figure out how to throw in a medicare for all system. (believe me folks, you won't want it).
For the next two years, it's going to be an orgy of far left attempts to permanently change the country to a One Party Rule. And what freedom loving person wouldn't like that?
By the way, any time a politician in Washington talks anything about the economy or budgets, they should be laughed at and mocked relentlessly. None of them have created one job, or employed one person outside of the government. And not one of them have properly worked within a budget. There is nothing these people actually know about economics. Any talk of it is like John Kerry discussing nuclear treaties. Just utter nonsense.
The "fiscal aid to states" should be renamed "bailout for fascist governors that destroyed their state economies."
narciso said...
Trust manchin thats funny.
I trust Manchin more than I trust about 35 Republican senators. =/
The ONLY reason Romney and Murkowski do no stab their voters in the back here is that the filibuster is right now giving them some power to get more feed at the trough.
If they give Romney enough money he will sell out in a heart beat.
I don't believe in the minimum wage at all. And the idea of a single minimum wage for the entire nation is ridiculous. I would guess off the top of my head that the cost of living in DC is about 40-50% higher than in some small town in the South. A $15 minimum wage in much of Red State America will be devastating to the local economy and a lot of restaurants and small businesses. I think that is part of the intent, to hurt the states that didn't vote blue. I am not aware of red states clamoring for this bill, at least not where I live. Most people i know are fully aware that $15/hr X 0 hrs/week = $0. That you would try to ram a big wage increase through like that when many areas will be struggling to get up and going again after Covid lockdowns makes no sense. Are there any real economists on Biden's team?
Blogger Tommy Duncan said...Does anyone really think that wages should be in any way related to the value of the labor provided.
No one who understands economics would think such a thing, but people across the spectrum do argue for it when it suits them.
When Democrats put forth a pretty sounding or disastrous policy, the Republicans need to do more than say “no” or cry “socialism!” They need to explain their position and make sense of it.
Do the Dems really want to get rid of the legislative filibuster? It will make a lot of them have to vote against things they don't actually want, but get to vote for because they know the GOP will save them from the harebrained scheme.
Predict Joe will fold on Jan 21.
MountainMan said...
I don't believe in the minimum wage at all. And the idea of a single minimum wage for the entire nation is ridiculous. I would guess off the top of my head that the cost of living in DC is about 40-50% higher than in some small town in the South. A $15 minimum wage in much of Red State America will be devastating to the local economy and a lot of restaurants and small businesses.
Do you think they don't know that?
Do you think Joe Biden and the people that have their hand up his ass using him like a puppet have a single good intention with anything that they are doing?
It is time for people to grow up.
Joe Biden is the puppet for a fascist cabal that hates America and hates the people that live there.
I just read there that Florida is the “Deep South” so I guess it must be true. But most people think that the deep south ends somewhere north of Orlando and that Orlando south is dominated by Yankees. I don’t see how the link supports the idea that red states are “clamoring” for a $15 minimum wage, but I guess they need to keep repeating the propaganda.
"A $15 minimum wage in much of Red State America will be devastating to the local economy and a lot of restaurants and small businesses. “
They want people hopeless and on the dole, people on the dole are more reliably Democrat in their voting habits. If they wanted to improve wages at the bottom, they would be against flooding the labor market with illicit labor, you know, scabs, from Mexico and sounth.
Democrats have never had to work payroll and to do job performance reviews. Ignorance.
Now you have entry level $10 wage, then $11 to$11.5 after he probationary period. Salary review and 6 months another $1 bump. A year later, promotion and your making &17.
$15 minimum wage is not the minimum, its the maximum, and eliminates that first and second level promotion levels of jobs. So $15 lock you in for maybe 5 years. Of course you can quit and and get any other job...they all pay the same.
Also look for benefits to take a serious hit. Invisible things like short and long term disability insurance. That day a month earned PTO becomes .75 days per month. That portion of your health premium deducted from your check goes up, Family plan gets more expensive.
So that $3 dollar bump Harris/biden promise is going to cost you disability insurance and PTO. But keep believing they are protecting the little guy.
Lots of compensation is represented by earned value other than wage.
So now they’re telling us Biden doesn’t know what he’s doing.
They’ll be pushing him out sooner than I thought.
The true minimum wage, as others have stated, is $0.00 per hour. With no benefits.
THEOLDMAN
In fly over country you can buy a house 50-80k 3% interest 30year fixed = $125/month interest. tack on $125/month property tax, insurance, maintenance.
$12 wage X 2000 hours= $24K or $2k/mo. $250 housing/ 2000 income =12.5% of your income for housing. Lenders always tell you not to exceed 50%
Politicians lie, and it passes a serious ideas. This is just stupid pandering.
Joe Biden lied during the debates and said not one single person in Washington lost their job because they increased the minimum wage to $15.
So this is what we get.
I'm looking forward to the peaceful protests at Joe Manchin's home not being characterized as a threat to democracy or insurrection.
Joe Manchin is gonna do what Joe Manchin is told to do by his masters.
[I]t’s hard to see how Biden could really believe
The audacity of cognitive impairment!!
MountainMan said...
A $15 minimum wage in much of Red State America will be devastating to the local economy and a lot of restaurants and small businesses.
It has been in blue cities like Seattle, where it's been put in place by the city council.
You left the "gesture toward bipartisanship" out of your excerpt.
Of course, there isn't one in any event.
This is the boring that Althouse loves.
Celebrate relentless change through education, ideas and politics. Believe in secular universal humanism as though it were a universal law. Follow the latest moral cause and think ‘this is worth it. This will all work out.’
Promise the ‘neo-liberals’, Center Left, managerial class and liberal types order, and deliver some order through management and redistribution, but always dealing with the radical devil. Waste a lot of money and cause a lot of suffering this way.
Push away an Old Left, unions and classically liberal types over time, consolidating political power around the post 60’s new identitarians, The woke, the activists. Bring in new technocrats, managers and spoil sharers. There will be some competent management and some real leaders. Under the Civil Rights banner, turn some ideas into a kind of religion as they fuse with the past.
Often blame the religious, traditionalists, and many conservatives for most everything (especially if you believe it yourself) and especially if it means confirming your own current views on the moral good, freedoms and liberation.
Talk about your ‘Self’ a lot, often way too much, without really knowing why.
Potentially leave some or many things worse than you found them, remaining unaware that others, some living and all of those not yet born, will think their own thoughts about you.
If they think about you much at all.
Hopefully, Biden & Co. know what they’re doing.
God DAMN you, Althouse. I was drinking a cup of coffee when I read that. You owe me a quarter roll of paper towels.
I don't think Manchin will withstand the pressure from the other 49 Democrats in the Senate, and if he really looks like he will withstand it, a Republican Senator from a state with Democratic governor will commit suicide.
You think this is a joke, don't you?
And all of this presupposes that Mitt Romney won't switch parties in the interests of "bipartisanship".
My personal policy choice is more jobs over higher pay. I'd rather have 4% unemployment at $7.25/hour minimum wage that 8% unemployment at $15/hr minimum wage.
This article summarizes some of he observed effects in SF, NYC, and Seattle:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/happened-places-raised-minimum-wage-194711258.html
In Seattle, it appears that the largest effect was companies raising prices.
In NY, food prices did not go up, but there was an increase in unemployment from 4% to 4.3% over from Dec 2018 to Jul 2019. (during a time of dropping national unemployment)
In SF, it appears that low end restaurants disappeared.
Depending on how fast a wage increase would occur you could trigger business failures, unemployment, and/or inflation. Whatever the effects, I think they be most pronounced in rural America and then spread throughout the country.
Every politician has their price and with the Dems so close to total control not only for the next 2 years but permanently based on some of the far left’s huge wish list, we are about to find out Manchin’s price. Dems in control of California gerrymandered the GOP out of power even in GOP iron locked strongholds. So why not do it nationally, especially with the exodus from overwhelming blue states like CA & NY to red states, which increased ten-fold with the pandemic. The irony of the Dems complaining that the GOP gerrymandered Wisconsin is not only dripping, but is a flood.
BTW, the original “gerrymander” was a Democrat named Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts 1810-1812, More flooding irony...
Blogger Yancey Ward said...
And all of this presupposes that Mitt Romney won't switch parties in the interests of "bipartisanship".
I'd say it's 50/50. When is he up for election ? He probably knows he will be primaried. What has he got to lose? I don't think he has any serious principles.
When Democrats enjoy one party rule they need to be creative in assigning blame for their crap policies- why do you think Massachusetts habitually has a Republican governor? When there's an unimpeded political pathway they need to get very creative.
Democrats can be very creative.
When is he up for election ? He probably knows he will be primaried.
He won't run again...
...and yes, a higher minimum wage pushes out workers at the margin. The minimum, minimum wage is indeed $0.
Mitt Romney has the same chances of being re-elected in Utah as Brian Kemp has in Georgia. Basically every single one of the shithead Republicans is done.
Senate Dems have spent a lot of time as the minority since the Reagan realignment that ended the decades-long Dem dominance of Congress. With politicians, even Dem politicians, it's best not to pay too much attention to what they say -- they don't believe even half of it. Manchin is hardly the only Dem senator who wants to hold on to the filibuster -- it's what gives them a place at the table when they're in the minority, a status to which they may well return in 2022 and will certainly return to in the foreseeable future. And they know that their move in abolishing the filibuster so they could appoint a bunch of judges to the DC Circuit didn't turn out so well for them. But Manchin is one of the very few who feels safe in saying it openly (Sinema from Arizona is another one).
Joe Biden lied during the debates and said not one single person in Washington lost their job because they increased the minimum wage to $15.
Even if that were true, the fact that DC is rich (#3 large city in per capita income, half-again higher than Chicago's and treble Detroit's), geographically small, and surrounded by places with lower minimum wages (MD $10.10, VA $7.25) means you couldn't remotely generalize from it to the whole US.
"Manchin is hardly the only Dem senator who wants to hold on to the filibuster -- it's what gives them a place at the table when they're in the minority, a status to which they may well return in 2022 and will certainly return to in the foreseeable future."
I don't think this calculus holds true any longer. They are unlikely to rewin control in 2022- the only strong shot at picking up a seat now held by the Democrats is New Hampshire, and only if Chris Sununu runs. They might be able to defeat Kelly in Arizona and Warnock in Georgia if the states go back to in-person voting, but I see no chances of that happening now- the courts will prevent it long enough to get by the election. They will lose the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania seats, and will likely lose the North Carolina seat given the changes in voting methods that can't now be changed by legislation.
Also, add to this the addition of D.C. as a state, a law that can be passed if the filibuster is abandoned (including amnesty), and the Democrats have every incentive to get rid of it. Manchin is the only senate Democrat who I think supports the filibuster these days.
You really think so
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/senate/534565-manchin-removing-hawley-cruz-with-14th-amendment-should-be-a-consideration%3famp
the Senate is currently 51-49, the D's will probably lose at least 2 seats in 2022, the incumbent party always loses a few seats. Looking at the map, the R's look in good shape. But I dobut that will is the REAL reason the filibuster will stay in place.
The D Establishment doesn't actually want to pass a lot of the spending and tax bill favored by the Left. The filibuster is a good excuse for them to use. McConnell used it for 4 years under Trump. Schumer can keep the filibuster and pass anything in wants in a spending bill or declare whatever he wants a "spending bill". They did that with Obamacare.
The D and the R's played the same game with their supporters. Oh gosh, we tried to get that $15 minimum wage or that border wall built, but those damn Democrats/Republicans filibustered it.
Darn.
Why stop at $15 for a minimum wage? Why not $50? $100? $500?
Wouldn't it be great if we could all start arguing over scary economic policies the Dems promote, or scary procedural moves that would threaten norms, and not about the totally above-board, least fraudulent election ever?
No.
Maybe the brain trust of the Dem policy establishment really thought 8% or so was full employment, or maybe their overarching policy objectives have little to gain from higher employment. Either way, I find I'm not that interested in the penumbra of economic policy anymore, if these were ever all that interesting. Let Matt Yglesias annoy the folks who still read him while he nerds out on extremely arcane neoliberalia. The power behind Joey Fuckin Biden wants UBI. Lower labor force participation and higher unemployment increase the constituency for UBI. The rest of the conversation is floating trial balloons and layering the bullshit pretext for whatever economic policies they think they can get away with towards that objective.
Tantrum over
If I see one more paper that uses a lot of math and data analysis to say something like, while it may appear that a higher minimum wage will reduce employment, and the data backs that up, our analysis shows that less efficient employers are the ones who cut jobs, and this leads to more efficient employers gaining market share, which must mean that despite the fact that there are fewer jobs at first, there will be more jobs later, and better jobs! later from more efficient employers leading to a more efficient market which also means more, better jobs! all thanks to the measure that only seemed to reduce jobs at first because that's what we see when we measure the impact...well, it will probably be tomorrow, because I am not checking my texts anymore today because I'm tired of hearing from nerd friends with their heads up their asses.
The ultimate sentence of hope is a contrast to the last 4 years of invariable spotting of buffoonery. Speaking of which is the reminds me of the leaky, seasonal or at least highly variable extreme neutrality filter.
I’m not certain Congress voting to make DC a state passes constitutional muster without the express permission of Maryland. The Capitol District initially included large parts of Arlington and Alexandria. Those parts were returned to Virginia. Washington DC was ceded to the federal government as the seat of government. It wasn’t turned over to be a state. Article 4 Section 3 says a new state cannot be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other state without the consent of the legislature of the state. Since DC is historically and geographically part of Maryland if the federal government wishes to give up exclusive jurisdiction as defined by Article 1 Section 8 then by precedent the area needs to be returned to Maryland.
It’s not only the Arlington/Alexandria precedent. Whenever the federal government has given up jurisdiction over any fort the land has always returned to the original state of jurisdiction, never handed to another even if bordered by one.
Of course courts would probably rule no one has standing to challenge the decision. Sort of like elections.
Imagine...if we took a moment...and got on our knees, and thanked God for the blessings He has bestowed. Hot and cold running water in at least 2 rooms of our home. Heat in the winter. Cool in the summer. More food than you could ever eat.
Blessings for a people who have been taught to reject God. This glorious thing that we inherited cannot last.
I think I will miss the HVAC guys the most. Granted, I have a river nearby, so... water.
when [Democrats are] in the minority, a status to which they may well return in 2022 and will certainly return to in the foreseeable future.
Thanks to Georgia et al., I no longer have any confidence that Republicans will ever again be permitted to win an election in this "country."
Good friends of ours from Seattle say, "Washington has had universal mail-in voting for twenty years, and it works great! No problems!" We don't even bother to answer, but of course if we did our answer would be, "You're progressives. Of course you don't see any problems with progressives' winning every time." (This year they moved to Michigan and voted there. They admitted that their Washington ballots were "probably" back at their house in Seattle, but assured us that their even more progressive daughters would responsibly shred them. Not, you know, vote on their behalf, out of an innocent belief that their parents weren't going to vote in MI or a less innocent but, in their minds, totally justified desire to bump up Biden's popular vote total.)
Why in the world do we need a 15$ per hour minimum wage? Was out on the main drag in Cookeville last night, and the high dollar high visibility electronic billboard was advertising for Temp workers and offering 14.75 per hour. Trump fixed the minimum wage issue by creating enough demand for US workers that 15 is the market rate.
Post a Comment