“On Wednesday, Biden kicked off the process to undo Trump’s prolific environmental rollbacks — totaling nearly 100 during his presidency — and jump-start new climate regulation. One executive order covers a broad range of policies including methane regulations, energy efficiency standards for appliances, fuel efficiency standards for cars, and blocking the Keystone XL pipeline and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It will take months for agencies to review and rescind Trump’s environmental decisions, but tackling all these regulations at once shows the new administration’s commitment to climate action.”
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“The US will have to play catch-up once it rejoins the Paris agreement. Countries are supposed to impose stricter targets on themselves every five years, with the goal of limiting emissions to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. Several top emitters, including the European Union, submitted new targets on schedule last month, five years after the first round of targets in 2015.
Biden says he will reestablish the US as a global climate leader, implying that the US will set a new, ambitious 2030 target. But years of inaction under Trump have delayed US emissions reductions, making Biden’s job more difficult.”
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“new legislation for investment and standards will be essential to achieve the rapid emissions cuts the climate emergency calls for. With the narrowest Democratic majority in the Senate, climate legislation will be dependent on the will of the most conservative members of the party, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), and the intricacies of the budget reconciliation process”
“After eight months of back and forth, Democratic and Republican leaders announced on Sunday that they’ve arrived at an agreement on a roughly $900 billion plan. The House of Representatives will vote on the bill Monday, according to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.”
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“The legislation contains much-needed coronavirus relief including a weekly $300 enhancement in unemployment insurance, a new round of $600 stimulus checks, and renewed support for small businesses.
Lawmakers in both chambers will have a chance to review the bill — which is being attached to the annual government spending package — before they take a vote.”
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“The $900 billion legislation ultimately offers far less aid than a prior $2.2 trillion proposal House Democrats had put forth, and significantly more than the narrow $550 billion bill that Senate Republicans have favored. Democrats signaled Sunday that this wasn’t the last of the relief they planned to send out.”
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“$325 billion is dedicated to small-business aid including repurposed funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, a forgivable loan program that business owners can apply for to cover payroll and operational costs. These loans are aimed at businesses that have seen revenue declines this year. For many, however, this aid comes too late — according to a Fortune report, almost 100,000 small businesses have already closed permanently during the pandemic.”
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“$25 billion in rental assistance is included as well as the establishment of a federal eviction moratorium.”
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“$13 billion for food aid to help fund a monthly 15 percent increase in individual SNAP benefits, aid for children who received food support at school, and money for other programs including Meals on Wheels and WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children). Demand for such aid has spiked dramatically during the pandemic”
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“There is an extension of paid leave tax credits for businesses, which continues a policy established in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act”
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“other provisions as well, including $82 billion to help schools reopen; $15 billion in aid for airlines — which would be required to bring furloughed employees back — according to Reuters; and language that bans surprise medical bills for emergency care.
It also has new guidelines for the Federal Reserve after Republicans — led by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) — demanded emergency lending programs at the Fed be canceled in any final version of the bill.
As Vox’s Emily Stewart has explained, the Fed will be forced to eliminate several emergency lending programs created with CARES Act funding in the spring, and will be barred from restarting them without congressional approval. It will also return the unused portion of the $454 billion Congress allotted it under the CARES Act to the Treasury Department, something the Fed had agreed to do in November.”
“Miller’s record is full of freedom-impinging stains that, in theory, should unite just about everyone—conservatives, progressives, libertarians, and those in-between—in opposition. He is perhaps best known for his role in implementing a “zero tolerance” policy at the Mexican border, in which migrant parents were systematically separated from their children as part of a deterrence strategy. (Hundreds are yet to be reunited.) But while that may be the administration’s most infamous immigration controversy, Miller also worked to orchestrate Trump’s broader restrictionist policy. Some of those attempts came to fruition; others they didn’t. Some attempts were legal; others, perhaps not.
For example: Miller sought to embed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government group charged with safely assimilating migrant refugees into the United States. Miller reportedly hoped to ramp up deportations of the adults who came forward to sponsor migrant children. Unfortunately for Miller, it is against the law for the Department of Homeland Security to use federal funds in service of holding or deporting potential sponsors for unaccompanied alien minors, so they rejected the proposal. But the department did allow ICE to collect biometric data on those adults, potentially giving them the opportunity to track and deport them over minor offenses.
Similarly, Miller attempted to transfer an employee from the Treasury Department to an advisory role at the Social Security Administration in order to more easily track down personally identifiable information for deportations.
As special adviser, Miller pushed for the government shutdown at the end of 2018, which bled into 2019, lasting 35 days and becoming the longest shutdown in U.S. history—all to try to get $5.7 billion for a border wall. (The Republican-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House did not deliver, and Trump eventually declared a national emergency.)
Unsurprisingly, Miller opposed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program giving immigrants who came to this country as children temporary protection from deportation. Seventy-four percent of Americans—and 68 percent of Republicans—support the program. In leaked emails between Miller and Breitbart, he railed against DACA and birthright citizenship, and likened immigrants to terrorists. After all, Miller is the man who reportedly said he “would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.” Though Trump promised during his campaign to protect DACA recipients, he weaponized their precarious status for political capital; when the courts declined to strike down the program, Trump moved to limit who can apply for such protections.”
“While wildfires are a common occurrence in the Golden State, 2020 is wrapping up to be the harshest in modern history, a result of a mix of climate change, poor forest management, and citizens’ insistence on moving into wooded areas prone to fires.
Unfortunately, California seems hellbent on prohibiting market solutions from fixing that third problem. The state’s insurance commissioner has announced that the state is mandating that companies that provide fire insurance cannot drop coverage of properties within the areas affected by wildfires. This is the second year in a row he has done so.
This counterintuitive announcement by Commissioner Ricardo Lara is the result of a state law passed in 2018 that forbids insurance companies from canceling or refusing to renew policies of a residential property for a year after a declaration of emergency on the basis of the property being in an area in which a wildfire has occurred. Lara was actually the primary sponsor of the bill when he was a state senator, so while his hands are technically tied here, he’s directly responsible for this legal state of affairs.”
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“The marketplace has efficient tools for discouraging building homes in dangerous environments. When insurance companies refuse to insure people who live in places prone to fire, flooding, or other natural disasters, the market is sending consumers a very important message: “It’s not safe to live here. If you make the decision to ignore this warning, we’re not going to be fiscally responsible for your choices.”
Lara’s law subverts these market signals and turns insurance into, essentially, a form of state-enforced financial subsidy. The consequences for bad outcomes are both likely and well-known. Requiring insurance companies to continue covering these properties will encourage people to continue to live and build in places where it’s dangerous. Again, 31 people died as a result of these fires, and Lara’s primary interest is making sure that homeowners apparently don’t learn anything.”
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“People who decide to move to or live in areas that are at risk of wildfire should be free to do so, but it’s not the role of the government to shield them from an appropriate market assessment of the risks of doing so. California’s actions are actually fostering dangerous housing choices—ones which may lead to more deaths down the line—by getting in the way of very important market signals.”
Optimistic View: What Trump will do. Lone Candle. 11 11 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttw8tSXNesk&feature=youtu.be The biggest problem with Donald Trump as president Lone Candle. 7 22 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PexQGJj3C8w&feature=youtu.be More pain than gain: How the US-China trade war hurt America Ryan Hass and Abraham Denmark.
“Six days after President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the U.S. Department of Agriculture notified food safety groups that it was proposing a regulatory change to speed up chicken factory processing lines, a change that would allow companies to sell more birds. An earlier USDA effort had broken down on concerns that it could lead to more worker injuries and make it harder to stop germs like salmonella.
Ordinarily, a change like this would take about two years to go through the cumbersome legal process of making new federal regulations. But the timing has alarmed food and worker safety advocates, who suspect the Trump administration wants to rush through this rule in its waning days.
Even as Trump and his allies officially refuse to concede the Nov. 3 election, the White House and federal agencies are hurrying to finish dozens of regulatory changes before Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20. The rules range from long-simmering administration priorities to last-minute scrambles and affect everything from creature comforts like showerheads and clothes washers to life-or-death issues like federal executions and international refugees. They impact everyone from the most powerful, such as oil drillers, drugmakers and tech startups, to the most vulnerable, such as families on food stamps, transgender people in homeless shelters, migrant workers and endangered species.”
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“these final weeks are solidifying conservative policy objectives that will make it harder for the Biden administration to advance its own agenda”
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“The Trump administration is on pace to finalize 36 major rules in its final three months, similar to the 35 to 40 notched by the previous four presidents”
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“In 2017, Republican lawmakers struck down more than a dozen Obama-era rules using a fast-track mechanism called the Congressional Review Act. That weapon may be less available for Democrats to overturn Trump’s midnight regulations if Republicans keep control of the Senate, which will be determined by two Georgia runoffs.”
ProPublica is tracking those regulations as they move through the rule-making process.”
“Congress created the PPP when it passed the CARES Act in March, aiming to funnel billions of dollars through banks to businesses that were suffering from widespread lockdowns during the pandemic. The loans were mainly meant to cover payroll, a way to keep employees earning money while stopping companies from going under, and were designed to be completely forgiven if used properly.”
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“The SBA released an “EZ application” for PPP forgiveness on June 16, but business owners can’t submit the forms directly to the agency — they have to go through their lenders instead. And both banks and the SBA have barely gotten things off the ground.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the SBA received only about 56,000 decisions on whether to forgive loans from banks by September 8 — which amounts to just 1 percent of the 5.2 million loans issued. None had actually been forgiven as of October 1. Meanwhile, the SBA issued new information and rules on July 23, August 4, and August 11, and it still hadn’t finished creating a process for reviewing lenders’ decisions as of August 14. On October 1, the SBA said it would start forgiving loans after banks and borrowers complained.”
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“Even once the forgiveness process truly gets underway, many business owners aren’t sure exactly what paperwork will be required of them. Sixty-eight percent of the Main Street Alliance survey respondents were concerned that the process wasn’t clear, with two-thirds saying they don’t understand what’s eligible for forgiveness given the many changes in the program, and over half were confused about what documents are required. The details matter: About two-thirds fear not getting their loans forgiven, while 43 percent are concerned they won’t have any recourse if they feel a decision isn’t fair.”
“In a world in which economic reality mattered to politicians, grandiose spending plans coupled with soaring government debt would pretty much preordain grim tax policy. But we don’t live in that world. In ours, tax and spending proposals are crafted based on their appeal to target audiences of voters, with no regard for balancing books or averting financial catastrophe.”
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“It’s necessary, though probably pointless, to emphasize that neither Trump’s nor Biden’s tax plans come close to paying for the federal government’s anticipated spending spree in the years to come.”