USA 2020 Elections: Thread

[grarpamp]

Biden, the Asshole Tera-$tatist no one wants in their life...




Biden, Bargaining, & Betrayal: It's Not The Top-Line Number... It's
The Bottom-Line Goal

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/10/05/its_not_the_top-line_number_--_its_the_bottom-line_goal_146509.html

The news from Washington is all about back-room negotiations,
divisions among Democrats, and their failure to reach a spending deal,
so far. It’s an easy story to tell, but the focus on dollars and deals
obscures a larger question: What’s really at stake in these
negotiations?

First, let’s consider the bargaining and betrayals. Those begin with
bipartisan agreement to pass a “roads and highways” bill, which will
cost over $1 trillion. To pass it, President Biden explicitly promised
Senate Republicans and moderate Democrats that the bill would be
considered separately from a larger, more controversial measure to
establish new social-welfare programs.

Within hours, Biden tried to renege on his promise. Furious resistance
from senators forced him to return to his original position, but the
episode left everyone wondering who was in control and whether Biden
could be trusted. Even so, the bill did pass the upper chamber with a
strong bipartisan majority: 19 Republicans, including Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell, joined the 50 Democrats.

Supporters expected the bill to be approved by the House where
Democrats hold a slim majority and some Republicans might vote with
them on infrastructure, as they had in the Senate. But no. Speaker
Nancy Pelosi held up the bill and refused to allow a vote until the
House had first passed the social-welfare legislation. Moderate
Democrats pushed back and, to appease them, she finally agreed to
sever the two bills and allow a vote on roads and bridges first. That
vote, which she promised would take place on Sept. 27, never happened.
The roadblock was the Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Pramila
Jayapal from Seattle. Faced with their refusal, Pelosi reneged on her
public pledge to moderates.

That’s the impasse, as it currently stands. Joe Biden went to Capitol
Hill, hoping to convince House Democrats to do something — anything.
He failed. The progressives stayed together, holding the
infrastructure bill hostage to their larger goal of more social
spending.

The progressives’ problem is that, even if they get the welfare bill
through the House, they don’t have the votes to pass it in the Senate.
A smaller one, maybe, but not the whole wish list. Democrats Joe
Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have said they won’t vote for the whole
$3.5 trillion package. Those two may have quiet support from a few
other moderate Democrats, who are letting Manchin and Sinema take the
heat.

Progressives say they have already conceded too much.

They wanted to spend more than $6 trillion on the social bill and
“compromised” with the White House for $3.5 trillion. They won’t go
any lower, they insist, but nobody really knows if that’s true.
Manchin, whose deep red-state gave Biden just 29.7% of the vote, has
said he won’t go over $1.5 trillion. This summer, he secretly gave
that number in writing to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who
never shared it with Pelosi. Now that the number is public,
progressives have bitterly rejected it as “far too low” and begun
insulting Manchin and Sinema.

There is obviously a deal to be made on “roads and highways,” but any
agreement on social-welfare spending will have to be close to
Manchin’s number. What’s not clear is whether progressives will
continue to hold both bills hostage until they get what they want.
That’s the heart of the back-room negotiations, which have revealed
deep cleavages among Democrats.

These negotiations, and journalists’ focus on top-line costs, are
obviously crucial, but they are only part of the story. The other part
is what progressives — and the Biden administration — hope to
accomplish and what it would mean for the country. Their goal is not
simply to spend a lot of money in this one bill. Their goal is not to
pay for it, even though they are perfectly happy to “tax the rich.”
These bills are so large that taxes will inevitably fall on the middle
class. They seem utterly indifferent to the prospect of higher
inflation, fueled by more spending and already at its highest levels
in three decades. All those costs are bearable if they advance the
progressives’ central goal: to install a whole series of
cradle-to-grave social programs, including preschool child care, paid
family leave, free college, and so on.

Those programs are extremely difficult to rescind once they’ve begun,
so the goal is to get them started. Progressives know — and the whole
country should understand — that piling on these vast new programs
would be a major step in turning the United States into a
European-style social democracy, along the lines of France, Germany,
Spain, or Italy.

That transformation began under Franklin Roosevelt and vastly expanded
under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The next important step was
Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. If successful, Biden’s effort to
add big, new social programs would make him a transformational
president, even if he served only one term and accomplished nothing
more.

Voters never elected Biden to do that. Nor did they give him and his
party anything like the overwhelming majorities FDR and LBJ won when
they launched this trajectory. Quite the contrary. Biden won narrowly,
and Democrats barely carried Congress. They have a four-vote majority
in the House and a 50-50 Senate. Biden himself promised to govern from
the center-left, reach across the aisle, and restore normalcy after
the tumult of the Trump years.

He has done none of that, ignoring his own promises and his party’s
failure to win a mandate for tectonic changes. His plummeting poll
numbers show voters realize they have been fooled twice over. First,
they thought, wrongly, that Joe Biden was competent. He had decades of
Washington experience in the Senate, after all, and served eight years
as vice president. That mirage of competence vanished with the
humiliating debacle in Afghanistan and the uncontrolled, illegal
immigration on the southern border. Second, they believed his promise
of moderation. Voters’ reaction to these unhappy realizations can be
summarized in two words: buyer’s remorse.

If Biden had been the moderate he advertised himself to be, he would
have twisted arms to pass the bill on roads and bridges, separated it
from the bill for more social programs, and taken the limited victory.
He could have honestly said he delivered on his promise to “build back
better.” That’s not what he’s done. What he has done is pursue an
ambitious, social-democrat agenda, one his own party rejected when
primary voters chose Biden over Bernie Sanders.

Surely Biden knows he will never get his entire program through the
Senate. But he’ll pass as much of it as he can. Doing so combines
three central elements of the Democratic long-term agenda, pursued
steadily since the mid-1930s:

    (1) overturn federalism and replace it with a centralized state;

    (2) use this administrative state to impose detailed regulations
on the economy and society; and

    (3) redistribute federal funds to favored groups (and tax
disfavored ones) to retain political control.

Implementing those goals has slowly transformed America, at least
since the mid-1960s.

Biden wants to take the next, large leap before his party loses power.
Whether he, Nancy Pelosi, and the progressive caucus can actually make
that leap — and land safely — is the real prize in this back-room
bargaining. The fight is ultimately over how much they can centralize,
regulate, and redistribute.






White House Plans To Quadruple COVID Rapid Testing Despite Decline In Cases

As more rapid at-home COVID tests are approved by American regulators,
the Biden Administration is reportedly preparing another "investment"
in rapid at-home tests (despite lingering criticisms about the
frequency of false positives produced by these tests, helping to
contribute to America's COVID "casedemic").

According to Bloomberg, the Biden Administration is preparing to
announce a $1 billion purchase of rapid at-home COVID tests with the
intention of "expanding the availability of such products in the
coming months".

Of course, as we have reported time and time again, the more testing,
the more cases. With this latest investment (which has yet to be
officially announced) the US will be on track to 4x rapid testing
capacity by December. The plan will involve distributing the free
tests to an additional 10K US pharmacies, bringing the total number of
free testing sites to 30K (including 20K pharmacies).

So far, rapid at-home testing has proven less reliable than lab
testing. Despite this, the Biden Administration is still planning to
pour billions of dollars into its effort to quadruple the level of
COVID testing by December, according to BBG. According to an
administration official who spoke with BBG, the US has been producing
roughly 30MM rapid at-home tests a month - a figure that's expected to
grow to more than 200MM a month by the end of the year.

The Administration is justifying the decision to increase testing with
the fact that not enough American adults have been vaccinated (even
though scientists now believe "herd immunity" is essentially out of
reach for humanity, even if 90%+ of the population has been fully
vaccinated).

Furthermore, this latest $1 billion commitment comes on the heels of a
$2 billion investment in rapid testing announced by the administration
last month (that order included buying tests from pharma giants Abbott
Labs and Celltrion). Biden is also using the Defense Production Act to
help bolster production.

The FDA just cleared a rapid at-home test from Acon Labs. The agency
says that test could double rapid at-home testing capacity in the
weeks ahead as the company says it can produce more than 100MM tests a
month by year's end. Other manufacturers of rapid at-home tests
include Abbott, Quidel Corp, Becton DIckinson, Access Bio and OraSure.

With cases finally declining in the US, authorities this week have
praised Merck's new "miracle drug" that purports to successfully treat
COVID if taken within 5 days of infection for both vaccinated and
unvaccinated cases (if a patient can afford it).

But all of this isn't enough for the Biden Administration. Case
numbers are falling, yet the White House continues to try and coerce
unvaccinated Americans to accept the jab.

Bottom line: if you're excited to see COVID cases declining, just wait
a few weeks until the White House can ramp up testing again and revive
the "casedemic", triggering a new wave of media scaremongering, even
if hospitalizations and deaths continue to wane.