Category: Economy

Welcome back, Carter

Key Inflation Gauge Posts Fastest Annual Price Gain In 30 Years.

Consumer prices, excluding the volatile food and energy components, soared well beyond the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target in the year to June, reaching levels not seen since 1991 and reinforcing concerns about inflation.

The so-called core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, which excludes food and energy and is the Fed’s preferred method for gauging inflation, rose 3.5 percent in the 12 months to June, after rising 3.4 percent in the year to May, the Commerce Department said on Friday. The last time the core PCE inflation gauge saw a similar year-over-year vault was in July 1991.

The Fed looks to core PCE as the key inflation gauge that informs its monetary policy, which has an inflation target of a longer-run average of 2 percent.

Continue reading “”

World’s Largest Food Company Will Raise Prices Amid Inflation

Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company, announced it would hike prices in response to inflation.

As of June, inflation in the United States reached a year-over-year rate of 5.4%. Businesses and consumers are therefore seeking to retain their margins in the face of the diminishing purchasing power offered by the dollar.

As Nestlé CEO Mark Schneider explained to journalists on Thursday: “What we’ve seen this year is some kind of a turning point, where after several years of low inflation, all of a sudden it accelerated very strongly.”

CNN Business reports:

Schneider said he believes that inflation is transitory. But the owner of brands including Nescafe, Gerber and Cheerios said it would need to raise prices by roughly 2% to offset cost increases of 4%. Nestlé hiked prices by 1.3% in the first half of 2021.

The company can hedge against some cost increases, such as rising coffee prices, said Schneider. But it can’t avoid the rising cost of things like transportation, which puts pressure on the company’s margins.

Nestlé is not the only company to raise prices. CNN Business adds that General Electric, Unilever, and other large firms in a variety of industries are seeking to hedge against an increasingly salient inflation risk.

Meanwhile, many businesses are selling their items in smaller packages while maintaining the same price, a phenomenon known as “shrinkflation.” For instance, Walmart’s Great Value Paper Towels did not alter prices while reducing the number of sheets per roll from 168 to 120; Frito-Lay cut the typical bag of Doritos from 9.75 ounces to 9.25 ounces; and General Mills shrank its “family size” boxes from 19.3 ounces to 18.1 ounces.

A recent CNBC survey of leading CFOs revealed that at least one-third will be forced to raise prices if inflation continues. No financial executive said that they trust the Federal Reserve to effectively manage inflation over the next year.

Consumers are likewise feeling the effects of rising prices.

According to a survey from accounting firm KPMG, Americans are forecasting a 9% year-over-year increase in their back-to-school spend. Last year, they anticipated spending $247; this year, they anticipate spending $268.

Despite a strong economic recovery from COVID-19 and the lockdown-induced recession, inflation is counteracting a hike in Americans’ wages. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that “average hourly earnings” rose by 3.6% over the past year. After considering inflation, however, “real average hourly earnings” have diminished by 1.7%.

 

This is why demoncraps are pushing Delta Variant™ fear.

It’s a distraction.

They want people to fear the bug not the increase in gas, lumber and groceries

If SloJoe and his bunch of idjits in the accomplice media don’t divert attention away from this they will get trounced in the next election.

 

Wait till they figure out that ruining us means their economy tanks, since we won’t buy their crap. Appears that buying SloJoe was probably the stupidest thing they could have done.

China Threatens Nuclear War if U.S. Continues Investigating COVID-19 Origins.

The Chinese are warning about an impending nuclear war if the United States does not cease its investigation into the origins of the COVID pandemic. They warn that the Americans must call off their probe into the sources of the disease — a warning which has prompted many American analysts to conclude that the leaders in Beijing fear discovery of the truth: that they — the Chinese Communists — are the source of the pandemic.

The Chinese Communists have long experimented with bioweapons, and have apparently continued the nasty habit, both recruiting Western scientists and putting them to work on Chinese projects, and smuggling Westerners into projects within China itself. One of the world’s top China experts, British citizen Roger Garside, foresees a mounting crisis, since Beijing will have to confront a triple whammy:  a financial crisis, a moral vacuum, and widespread corruption. In an interview he gave recently about his new book, Garside summarized the situation grimly: China is outwardly strong but inwardly weak.

Continue reading “”

The White House Is Panicked Over Inflation (Even Though YOU Have the Most to Lose)

I’ve spent so much time writing about inflation these last few months that it’s been almost tempting to put on a leisure suit and light my office with a disco ball.

Almost.

Judging by Presidentish Joe Biden’s awful and awkward speech on Monday, there’s at least a mild panic in the White House over the surge in consumer prices — and the even bigger (but rarely addressed) spike in producer prices.

Last week you could see the panicked writing on the Oval Office wall.

ASIDE: I almost wrote “Oval Office walls,” but if you think about it, there’s only one.

While PJ Media’s own Tyler O’Neil has the full details on Biden’s stock-market-rattling speech, it’s the motivation behind it that interests me.

As I write this, the Dow is down about 2.5%, NASDAQ has shed about 1.5% of its value, and the S&P is down more than 2%. Those numbers have been getting worse all day — they didn’t recover any after Biden finished mumbling his way through yet another set of pointless remarks.

The White House had to know it was taking a big risk with the markets, giving Biden a microphone and the sad duty of at least tacitly admitting that the inflation threat is real. (Plus, unnecessarily working up fresh COVID panic, but that’s a subject for another column.)

Despite weeks of official denials that the months-long inflationary surge was only “temporary,” White House economic officials Brian Deese and Cecilia Rouse felt it necessary to meet last week with Larry Summers.

Why is that revealing?

Summers isn’t merely a former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and onetime economic advisor to Barack Obama, he’s also a longtime inflation hawk whom Democrats are “angry” with over his recent warnings.

MSN News described Summers as “the most prominent Democratic critic of Biden’s economic agenda,” who “blasted the size of the March economic relief bill.”

My guess is that Biden’s people got an earful from Summers, so much so that they felt they had to get out in front of this thing.

Continue reading “”

Biden is senile, or he considers his Treasury Secretary not a ‘serious’ economist.

I know, I know; Acknowledge the mighty power of ‘And‘.

Is he that stupid, or believes we are that stupid?
Of course, acknowledging the mighty power of “And” helps.

Biden Argues Massive Government Spending Will Help Fend Off Inflation, Not Exacerbate It

President Biden argued that a massive influx of [a] government spending bill will help fend off inflation, in a speech on the state of the economy at the White House on Monday.

The White House has dubbed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer plans to bring to the floor this week — and the $3.5 trillion budget resolution that Democrats plan to pass in the coming days without Republican support — the “Build Back Better” package. Biden said Monday that the two bills will help prevent, rather than exacerbate, runaway inflation.

“Whatever different views people have about the current price increases, we should be united in one thing: passage of the bipartisan infrastructure framework, which we shook hands on,” Biden said. “And my Build Back Better Plan will be a force for achieving lower prices for Americans looking ahead.”

Biden contended that investments in infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and broadband would eliminate economic “chokepoints” that currently raise prices on goods.

“If your primary concern is about inflation, you should be even more enthusiastic about this plan,” Biden said. “We can’t afford not to make these investments.”

During a question and answer session with reporters, Biden dismissed predictions of high inflation.

“There’s nobody suggesting unchecked [inflation] is on its way,” Biden said. “No serious economist.”

Former treasury secretary Larry Summers warned that Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill was “the least responsible fiscal macroeconomic policy we’ve have had for the last 40 years,” in a March interview with Bloomberg TV. That relief bill included funding for state and local governments, medical aid, and a round of checks to all Americans.

However, Summers has backed some investments in infrastructure.

“The investments on which Biden is focused are essential to the future of the country,” Summers told Politico last week. “Inflation fears should shape economic policies but it would be tragic if they stopped us from making urgently needed public investments.”

STEPHEN MOORE: OPEC and Big Oil’s New Best Friend, Joe Biden

The price of oil surged to $75 a barrel the other day under President Joe Biden’s green energy policies. The price was as low as $35 a barrel under former President Donald Trump because he believed in American energy dominance (“Drill, baby, drill”). So, more oil meant lower prices at the pump. It was effectively a massive, multibillion-dollar tax cut for lower- and middle-income earners of tens of billions of dollars a year.

But now, with the exploding demand for energy as the world economy reopens, the self-defeating Biden policy is to curtail oil drilling here at home, which is often done by the smaller and independent “wildcat” drillers. Instead, this administration enriches the major oil companies such as Exxon and Chevron with existing wells that are suddenly more profitable to drill. This is why the gas price at the pump is $3.29 a gallon nationally and above $5 a gallon in California.

Are these higher-energy prices transitory? Harold Hamm, one of the fathers of modern shale gas innovations, doesn’t think so. Instead, he predicts the price may surge to more than $100 a barrel, which means well over $4 a gallon at the pump.

The most significant deterrent to more drilling on these shores is the Biden de facto moratorium on domestic drilling on federal lands. How foolish is this? Up to an estimated $50 trillion of energy resources are right below our feet. This is like a buried treasure that could supply energy for 100-plus years. In addition, the royalties and taxes would help pay off some of our $30 trillion national debt.

Here’s the worst part of the story. None of this tomfoolery is doing any good for the environment. Even Biden’s own Energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, has complained that in some ways, the Biden policies are making carbon emissions worse by approving pipelines of dirty energy from Russia to Germany while killing pipelines from relatively cleaner oil and gas here in the United States.

What is clear is that the renewable energy push and the subsidies for electric cars and electric batteries aren’t going to change our fossil fuel energy demands for years. So, it is only a question of whether we get the oil from here at home or from some of our major adversaries, such as Russia.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that even coal is making a comeback. After years of low prices, the coal price is now spiking due to less production. Biden has declared war on American coal, which has led to the closing of coal plants across the country. As utilities begin to awaken to the low reliability of wind and solar power, coal is in demand as a backup energy source to prevent blackouts. The rest of the world, especially Asia, is still addicted to coal. China now builds coal plants at a faster rate than we shut them down.

What sense does it make to shutter American coal when we have more of it, a 400-year supply, than any other nation? And our coal is the cleanest.

So, the Biden energy plan is bad for jobs, bad for consumers, and bad for the environment. My prediction is that global and U.S. carbon emissions are going way up this year and next.

The irony of this story is that the industry that Biden and the greens hate the most is benefiting from his foolish policies.

And, yes, those are the Saudi oil sheikhs you are seeing rolling on the ground laughing at us.

This is good news as the deck replacement project has been in a holding pattern.

Lumber Wipes Out 2021 Gain With Demand Ebbing After Record Boom

Lumber, which at one point was among the world’s best-performing commodities as the pandemic sent construction demand soaring and stoked fears of inflation, has officially wiped out all of its staggering gains for the year.

Prices at Monday’s close are now down 0.6% for the year as demand eases and supply expands in response to earlier gains. The rally turned a common building product into a social media sensation and a flash point in the debate over U.S. monetary policy. At one point, lumber futures were trading as high as $1,733.50 per thousand board feet, more than quadruple the level of a year earlier.

Lumber’s drop is among the most dramatic examples of the easing in commodity prices after rallies in raw materials from copper to corn earlier this year fueled concern that rising costs would undercut the economic recovery. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last month cited lumber’s decline as evidence that price pressures will cool as supply bottlenecks from the reopening economy are worked out and stimulus fades.

Continue reading “”

BLUF:
In an article of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933…“Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

BLUF:
Not until World War II did joblessness finally begin to subside, in good measure because of military mobilization — important, but not the same as peacetime employment. 

BIDEN AS THE NEW FDR: It’s the same old bad deal for jobs.

President Biden doesn’t want merely to showcase Franklin Roosevelt. He wants to replicate him. As President Roosevelt once did with the New Deal, Biden intends to spend to spur growth, though Biden’s proposals are magnitudes greater. As Roosevelt once did, Biden argues that helping unions helps the worker, and he hopes to undo 27 states’ “Right to Work” option.

As Roosevelt did, Biden headlines jobs — the term “jobs” appeared more than 40 times in his recent address to Congress. The president suggests that endeavors to meet his social or environmental targets can simultaneously, synergistically serve his greatest economic goal, employment. “When I think ‘climate change,’ I think ‘jobs,’” he remarked.

As Roosevelt did, Biden calls for tax hikes on the rich as a moral imperative. And as Roosevelt did, Biden dares others to disagree, declaring that in “another era when our democracy was tested, Franklin Roosevelt reminded us — in America, we do our part.” Biden skeptics, the implication is, aren’t doing theirs.

Still, a review of the record of Roosevelt’s New Deal suggests that a sentient voter, slimed or not, might pause before signing up for the newest new deal.

When Roosevelt ran for office in 1932, a shocking one in four workers was unemployed. Roosevelt promised to get employment back to usual levels, which then as now meant one in 20 out of work, or 5 percent joblessness. He blamed the downturn in part on “obeisance to Mammon” — an unwillingness of wealthy Americans to share. To recover, the president suggested, America needed the federal government to provide “more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.” The gravity of the crisis, Roosevelt argued, warranted emergency authority for the chief executive — license to play around, applying even conflicting theories seriatim through “bold persistent experimentation.”

Once elected, Roosevelt hiked taxes on the rich and kept them high, even pushing an “undistributed profits tax” to eat at business savings. He ramped up tax authorities’ investigations and urged the authorities into punitive audits. The “green” component of the New Deal was reforestation: Roosevelt promised to employ 1 million men in restoring forests, parks and fields. To create additional jobs, Roosevelt poured hundreds of millions of dollars, then a large sum, into infrastructure: bridges, schools, power plants, and the establishment of new institutions such as the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the name of helping the working man, the New Deal instituted minimum wages. Roosevelt’s 1935 Wagner Act, a tiger of a law, gave the labor movement such power that unions were able to force large companies such as automakers to accept collective bargaining, willy nilly.

Meanwhile, the New Deal regulated — nonsensically — both business and agriculture.

Continue reading “”

I’d take him at his word. If the state of the economy isn’t really improving that is the direction the demoncraps want it to be moving.

Joe Biden Defiant in Face of Grim Economic Report: ‘Our Economy is Moving in the Right Direction’

President Joe Biden was defiant in reaction to the grim jobs and unemployment report released Friday.

“Today there is more evidence that our economy is moving in the right direction, but it’s clear we have a long way to go,” he said.

The president dismissed media commentary pointing out the disparity between the estimated job creation numbers and the jobs actually created in April.

“Listening to commentators today as I was getting dressed, you might think that we should be disappointed,” Biden said with a chuckle.

Unemployment rose to 6.1 percent in April, the report noted, the first time unemployment increased since April 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic began. Although analysts had expected up to a million jobs created in April, only 266,000 jobs were actually reported.

Biden stressed that the report was actually good news.

“Quite frankly, we’re moving more rapidly than I thought we would,” he said, arguing he always felt the recovery would be a “marathon” not a “sprint.”

Republicans questioned Biden’s decision to send expanded $300 a week checks to unemployed Americans until September 2021, arguing it was keeping workers on the sidelines during the pandemic.

But Biden said the economic news only proved the checks were necessary

“This is progress,” Biden continued. “And it’s a testament to our new strategy of growing this economy from the bottom up and the middle out.”

Biden also defended his call for $6 trillion in spending and dramatic tax hikes on businesses and the wealthy to boost the economy.

“The American people are counting on us. So, let’s get it done,” he said.

BLUF:
“The disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market,” said Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “One step policymakers should take now is ending the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit. Based on the Chamber’s analysis, the $300 benefit results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.”

Well, this may actually simply be a sort of ‘unintended consequences’, but to accept that, one must also accept the notion that the leftists controlling goobermint right now don’t want the economic destruction of our country so they can raise their Marxist idealistic Utopia from the ashes.

New Jobs Report Shows the Government Gets the Unemployment It’s Paying For
High unemployment benefits are getting the blame for disappointing job growth in the midst of a worker shortage

A disappointing new jobs report shows that hiring is down and the unemployment is rate is up, even as wages climb and employers complain about a shortage of workers. That apparent paradox has some policy wonks pinning the blame on expanded jobless benefits that pay workers more than what they could expect to earn working.

The economy added 266,000 jobs in April according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), while the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 6.1 percent, from 6 percent.

These numbers are well below forecasts from economists who predicted that April would see the addition of around 1 million jobs, and the unemployment rate falling to 5.8 percent. The BLS report notes that we’re still far away from a pre-pandemic labor market, when the jobless rate sat at 3.5 percent.

Despite persistent levels of high joblessness, other metrics show signs of a labor market that’s increasingly tight.

Continue reading “”

Free states faring far better than lockdown states in one huge way, new data show.

(Foundation for Economic Education) — When COVID-19 first came to our shores, it presented policymakers and elected officials with a crisis like nothing in living memory. In the year since, states have taken markedly different approaches to pandemic policy. Some, like New York, embraced sweeping government lockdowns and top-down mandates while others like Florida and South Dakota took a more humble, hands-off government approach, trusting individuals to make the best decisions for themselves.

The results are in — and they overwhelmingly vindicate the free states over the authoritarian experiments. First, we saw that states with the harshest restrictions didn’t necessarily achieve the best COVID-19 death outcomes. Florida has fared far better than New York and New Jersey, for example, and multiple studies have found no correlation between lockdown stringency and death rates.

Yet lockdowns have come at an enormous economic and human cost. We’ve seen mental health problems and child suicide spikes, an increase in domestic violence, an uptick in drug overdoses, and much, much more. And, of course, the economic toll of shutting down businesses and criminalizing “non-essential” livelihoods has been devastating.

The national unemployment rate was a poor if not disastrous 6.2 percent in February. Yet the just-released state-level unemployment rates for last month show that the devastation hasn’t been equal across the board. New Labor Department data reveal that many free states have returned to nearly their pre-pandemic unemployment rates — while lockdown states dominate the wrong end of the list.

Continue reading “”

He’s not wrong, but what I think the author misses is that a significant amount of the ‘stimulus’ was payoffs to states and cities, near bankrupt with budget deficits, bond and pension fund obligations.

Biden sleepwalks into a stagflation nightmare
US economy simply doesn’t have the productive capacity to meet the demand created by Biden’s stimulus package

NEW YORK – The Biden administration’s US$1.9 stimulus package, adding to last year’s $2 trillion in Covid-19 related handouts, has the effect of feeding sugar to a diabetic. The patient is on a sugar high, but at risk of collapse.

The US doesn’t have the productive capacity to meet the demand created by the federal government and the Federal Reserve. The result is stagflation—a combination of inflation and economic weakness that we last saw during the Jimmy Carter administration in the 1970s.

There are two big differences between now and the 1970s, though. The first is the explosion of US government debt. The second is China.

Instead of throwing money out of helicopters, the US should invest trillions of dollars in infrastructure, R&D, selective production subsidies (for example semiconductors) and science education. As it is, the Biden administration is putting the credit and future borrowing capacity of the US at risk in return for a temporary boost to output.

Continue reading “”

The fall of Chile is a warning to America

Back in the 1970s, the nation of Chile embarked on one of the boldest sets of free market economic reforms in history. The government called in the Chicago Boys, as they were called, led by Milton Friedman and other University of Chicago free market economists.

They were given a free hand to redesign the Chilean economic system with property rights, a low flat tax, privatization of the Social Security system, and industry deregulation. In 1991, Friedman wrote that Chile now has “the three freedoms: economic freedom, political freedom, and human freedom. It will be interesting to see if they can keep it.”

For four decades, the experiment worked better than anyone could have imagined. According to a study by economist Axel Kaiser for the Cato Institute: “Between 1975 and 2015 per capita income in Chile quadrupled to $23,000, the highest rate in Latin America (CNP 2016). As a result, from the early 1980s to 2014, poverty fell from 45 percent to 8 percent (CNP 2016).” Chile became one of the wealthiest nations in South America. And it happened in three decades, an eye blink of history.

The Marxists and intellectual class of Latin America always hated the free market reforms. They disparaged the Chicago boys as “fascists.” They spent decades attacking the policies (with the stooges in the American media echoing their protests) even as Chile became the jewel of South America.

The Marxists invented a narrative of “inequality,” “the rich were getting richer, and the poor were getting poorer,” and capitalism is evil.

They infiltrated all of Chile’s cultural institutions: the media, the schools, the universities, the Catholic Church, the arts, the unions, and even the corporate boardrooms. They spread their poisonous creed of collectivism to the populace.

Is any of this sounding familiar to our situation today?

Eventually, the leftists pulled off a political coup. In 2013, the Left won the Chilean presidency. The free market reforms were systematically replaced with “spread the wealth” platitudes. In October 2020, voters approved a rewrite of the constitution, and now property rights and the rule of law are in danger.

Chile is now in economic free fall. The poor are getting crushed. The rich are pulling their money out of the country. They have arrived at “equality.” Nearly everyone is suffering.

Meanwhile, back in America, we have an economic transformation of our own going on. The Biden administration promises to help the middle class by handing out trillions of dollars of free money to citizens and paying people more money for not working than working. We will borrow trillions of dollars and pray that the Chinese continue to buy up our bonds and that our currency holds up.

Many of our constitutional protections and congressional rules of behavior, such as the filibuster, which protects the rights of the minority, may be headed to the shredder. The election laws are getting rewritten to benefit, significantly, the party now in power — the Democrats. The House has passed a bill requiring millions of working-class people to join unions and pay dues. The Left is saying, don’t worry, this compulsion is going to help the working class. Sure.

A sock-it-to-the-rich tax increase is coming that will make the productive class and the job creators pay their “fair share” with tax rates of 50%, 60%, and 70%.

Will this story have a happy ending?

The answer to that question might be contained in the frightening example of what happened in Chile. It is what our children and college students should be learning in the classrooms — fat chance. The Left runs our schools now, too.

TL/DR: if traders were worried that inflation expectations are already soaring (and taking rate hike odds with them), just wait until it becomes common knowledge that Biden is hoping to more than double the funding needs for more government stimmies in just a few months…

What’s Next: Here Comes Biden’s $2 Trillion Infrastructure Package

Earlier today we published a recap of Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan from Rabobank’s Philip Marey in which he observed that “the Democratic approach may have spoilt the mood for bipartisanship in the near term. Republicans claim that the Democrats were not serious about finding a bipartisan consensus.” In short, since not a single Republican voted for the American Rescue Plan and centrist Democratic senators have shown that they are willing to use their leverage in the 50-50 Senate. “this will increasingly anger progressives as their left wing agenda continues to be watered down by senators of their own political party. Therefore, if Biden does not proceed with caution, this could already have been the high point of his administration.”

That would be the rational view. Alternatively, in a world where a flood of new debt is the only option left to perpetuating a failed status quo, one can also argue that record polarization notwithstanding, it will be in the best interest of both republicans and democrats to push the current spending spree to its absurd limits.

That’s where Biden’s upcoming boondoggle – his infrastructure plan – comes in, and as Marey concedes, “if you think that $1.9 trillion is a lot of money, this does not mean that Democrats are going to stop their spending spree here.”

Below is the Rabobank’s strategist preview of what could be the next big thing from the Biden admin: the $2 trillion infrastructure deal.

Continue reading “”

TRUMP WAS RIGHT:
Gas Is at $2.75 a Gallon and Projected to Go Nowhere But Up.

The secret sauce to the economy’s success and a sea change in foreign policy during the Trump administration was becoming an energy-independent nation. President Trump said during the campaign that Joe Biden’s Green New Deal policies would reduce domestic energy production and raise prices. Early indications are that he was correct.

“Looks like Pork is back on the menu, boys!”

Senate Narrowly Passes $1.9 Trillion COVID Stimulus Bill

The Senate voted 50-49 to pass Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package on Saturday, after a marathon session of voting on various amendments.

The bill was passed via budget reconciliation rules, which allow a simple majority to approve legislation in place of a filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold. The Biden administration had been pushing to pass the legislation before the week of March 14, when pandemic-related federal unemployment assistance is scheduled to expire.

Continue reading “”