I read the transcript. 220m Covid shots in 100 days. Competency at governing and execution. Was Crenshaw, Fox News, and the GOP impressed with deafening claps? “If the Biden Administration wants to impress us,” he (Crenshaw on Fox News) said, “You know what? Double the goal. Say 200 million vaccines in 100 days. I will be impressed. I’ll go on the record right now and say that I will be impressed if you can do that.” 'Meeting the climate crisis is about jobs jobs jobs'. Finally, messaged on the right thing to tackle climate. Can't give too much credit though - it's not so hard when it's true. 'Technologies, we have been falling behind, and the basic science stuff'. Me like. But it's a bit conservative, IMO compared to the previous admin goal of - star trek logos in the new Space Force. 'Family first' policy, what a thief. Republican thing for decades. Wonder what happens there. edit: Historic inflammatory to have two women sitting behind a white man.
Was busy during his address but caught MSNBCs feedback when I got home. Sounds like Biden channeled his inner FDR.
No joke there! A Trump speech is nothing more than ad lib BS, calling people childish names, and tooting his horn.
haven't quoted Althouse in a while but this one seems appropriate. I think she makes a good point--this is not the Biden that most people voted for. https://althouse.blogspot.com/2021/04/i-didnt-watch-bidens-speech-last-night.html I didn't watch Biden's speech last night. by noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) I see — reading the NYT this morning — that he made "costly proposals" that "amount to a risky gamble that a country polarized along ideological and cultural lines is ready for a more activist government." Was that something America voted for last autumn? Obviously, not. It doesn't seem fair to spring this on us now. He should have had to run on that plan. Why did he beat Bernie? If this was to be the plan, we deserved a chance to vote for Bernie — or not. But the moderate, Biden, was pushed to the fore, pushed out in front of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who forthrightly represented this kind of government. Maybe one of them would have beaten Trump, but the Democratic Party edged them aside and gave us the seemingly innocuous Biden. It was an offer to get us back into balance, back to normal. It was a con. Oh, but perhaps, everyone knew it was a con, so America really did vote for this. Prove democracy still works by only doing what you told us you'd do, back when we voted. I agree with her. If Biden intended to out-Bernie Bernie, he should have run on that plan.
I don't doubt it's a crazy world but there is no guarantee they get that money back or that it appreciates in value. We got a lot of people with a lot of disposable income and the card market is notorious for radical shifts. If **** really hits the fan who is going to be trying to buy a James rookie card for over 5 million dollars?
spend spend spend https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-cradle-to-grave-government-11619650937?mod=opinion_lead_pos1 Biden’s Cradle-to-Grave Government His latest $1.8 trillion plan rejects the old social contract of work for benefits. By The Editorial Board April 28, 2021 7:02 pm ET The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it. *** We’d call the price tag breathtaking, but by now what’s another $2 trillion? Add $2 trillion or so each for the Covid and green energy (“infrastructure”) bills, and that’s $6 trillion of new spending in 100 days. That doesn’t include the regular federal budget of more than $4 trillion a year. No worries, mate, the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt. But the cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide. The White House talking points pitch this in the smothering love of the welfare state: “making care affordable”; free medical and family leave; “free education”; two years of “universal pre-school”; “invest in the care workforce.” Subsidies and millions of new care givers, all licensed and unionized, will nurture you through the challenge of earning a living and raising a family. One question to ask is: Haven’t we tried this before? What is Head Start if not government pre-school education and child care? Weren’t school lunches and the Women, Infants and Children program supposed to prevent child hunger? Food stamps, welfare checks, child-care subsidies and a supplement to earned-income, plus public housing. Weren’t all of these programs and more from previous decades supposed to end poverty? Why did the trillions of dollars spent on those programs fail? And if they didn’t work, why do we need more? For the candid answer, listen to Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Democrat who explained the political calculation this week to the Washington Post: “Once everyone’s in, all the parents want in. Then it’s not a poor person’s program or a poverty program. It’s an education program. . . . That to me, that is essential. It changes the center of gravity once it’s for everybody.” So much for the “safety net” to prevent poverty. This is now about mainlining benefits to middle-class families so they become addicted to government—and to the Democratic Party that has become the promoting agent of government. Democrats are enamored of this principle of “universality” because it has worked to sustain the popularity of Social Security and Medicare, despite their failing finances. But those programs promise benefits in return for work across a lifetime. The Biden New Deal isn’t a deal at all. Most of its programs are free handouts on the model of the 1960s Great Society. The new pre-school entitlement will go to all families, as would free community college. The tax-credit expansion to $3,600 per child in the Covid bill, which Mr. Biden wants to make permanent, is on top of the other welfare subsidies. The Biden plan also makes permanent an expansion of ObamaCare subsidies for more affluent adults, eliminating the subsidy cap that was 400% of poverty. A new paid family leave entitlement will be an incentive for companies to drop leave benefits that already cover most workers. All of this adds up to healthy guaranteed annual income largely untied to the social contract that requires work, which is the real path to independence and self-respect. *** The White House is also less than honest about how it will pay for all this. Its short answer is that more taxes on the wealthy and more IRS audits are enough. But that doesn’t come close. The permanent child-tax credit expansion would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, according to our friends at Cornerstone Macro. The White House says it only costs $420 billion, but that’s because it only includes four years through 2025. The new entitlements ramp up slowly but explode in the later years, while the tax increases are immediate and won’t raise the revenue they expect. That’s especially true of the increase in the top tax rate on capital gains to 43.4%, which would lose money by all historical experience. The White House tries to get around this by eliminating the step-up basis for paying capital gains at death, meaning an heir would pay the tax based on accrued value over a lifetime. This is a back door addition to the current death tax rate of 40%. The White House also predicts that unleashing thousands of new IRS agents will find $700 billion in unpaid tax bills. But this prediction is based in part on old IRS data, before the 2017 tax reform that removed many tax loopholes, especially in the corporate tax code. The only benefit of the IRS audit army is that its $700 billion bogey replaces what would be another tax increase. The new taxes are destructive, but their impact will take time to be felt as the post-pandemic economy soars. The GOP shouldn’t ignore the taxes and spending. But a more potent political target may be the bill’s tripling down on a welfare state that disdains the dignity of work and seeks to make Americans the wards of government. Appeared in the April 29, 2021, print edition as 'Cradle-to-Grave Government.'
David Marcus at The Federalist weighs in: https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/29/bidens-unfair-menthol-ban-is-bad-for-black-smokers/ excerpt: Even the American Civil Liberties Union has objected to a racialized approach to smoking. The group opposed a House bill in 2020 that sought to ban menthols on the very basis of its disproportionate impact on black Americans. They also oppose this ban. Encouraging the black community in particular to engage in an illegal cigarette marketplace will only increase dangerous police interactions, the very thing progressives claim they wish to make less common. This is just another example of a race-based leftist policy destined to go hopelessly awry to the detriment of black Americans. Just as defund the police efforts have led to skyrocketing crime rates in black communities across our country, which is why black voters overwhelmingly oppose the idea, banning menthols will introduce dangerous fake cigarettes and needless police interactions. Smoking is a choice that a relatively small percentage of Americans make, fully aware of the health consequences. The idea of banning cigarettes altogether is a terrible one, especially as states fall all over themselves to legalize the smoking of mar1juana. But targeting such a ban on just one racial group is an awful tobacco policy and an even worse policy on race. It is not the job of the federal government to try to create conditions of perfect safety for all Americans, or even for black Americans. The crisis of the past year should make crystal clear the dangers of unintended consequences when the state seeks to protect us like a mother protects an infant. The bottom line is that Americans should have the freedom to choose to smoke — all Americans. That includes black Americans. It really seemed like progressives had thought of every possible way to divide our country further and further on racial lines, but apparently they had not. Now even our vices are to be boxed off into racial categories by Biden and his army of bureaucrats. Soon there will scarcely be a sliver of our society left not defined and dealt with on the meaningless basis of skin color. more at the link
That's less than the world's billionaires took in last year in profits. Taxing the rich won't cramp their lifestyle. Taxing the rich proportionately won't do anything less than make hard working Americans working payday to payday be able to finally have money for healthcare, allow Mom's have an option to actually stay home and raise their kids like most used to be able to do, and more families being able to live a better life. Funny how some of those same kids from the 60's are crying socialism over a better life their middle class parents had when they were young, and the rich were taxed at much higher rates than the past few years. Trickle down economics did nothing but make everyone but the wealthy work much harder for less.
Dave Schuler puts it more succinctly: http://theglitteringeye.com/preliminary-observations-on-the-non-state-of-the-union-message/ Borrowing to pay operating expenses is a bad idea whether you’re talking about a family or a country. Road repair, health care, elder care, and child care are all operating expenses. If you’re committed to the idea that they should be funded by the federal government, that should be completely paid for through tax dollars. If you can’t pay for them through tax dollars, they shouldn’t be within the province of the federal government.
Seems like a lot of the big-ticket items match campaign priorities and promises. Here's a run-down from late January before he really got going, via those whacky European-- er, British, observers at the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53575474 Invest in green energy, raise minimum wage, universal pre-school, investments in science and education, etc. All sounds pretty expensive. I dunno, look through his campaign priorities here. I don't think they've gone back and rewritten this: https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/ I think people's perceptions of "not Bernie" are one thing. What Biden was actually talking about while Trump tweeted about how he would overturn an election if he lost ... that didn't get much run, but it was different from slow old moderate Joe.
T Once you exclude the coup-supporting Republicans from the real Americans the numbers really look a lot better for Uncle Joe.
