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leilamulveny

Stimulus Bill, Merrick Garland and Biden News: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The vote will come seven weeks into Mr. Biden’s presidency, as the growing number of vaccine doses given to Americans offers hope that the country is on course to move beyond the worst of a pandemic that has killed more than half a million people in the United States.
  • The president and House Democrats also sought to increase the $300-per-week unemployment benefit to $400, but the Senate kept it at its current level and tightened income caps for receiving stimulus payments.
  • The legislation establishes an aggressive effort by the new president to drive down poverty, as the measure offers substantial benefits for low-income Americans, including a sizable one-year expansion of the child tax credit.
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  • Mr. McCarthy sought to equate the progressive policies in the bill with socialism, and said “House Democrats have abandoned any pretense of unity.”
  • The bill that will go before the House on Wednesday differs in notable ways from the legislation that the chamber initially approved last month. It no longer contains an increase to the federal minimum wage, which Mr. Biden had proposed and House Democrats had included in their bill, but the Senate omitted.
  • The bill, which cleared the Senate on Saturday, would send direct payments of up to $1,400 to many Americans and extend a $300-per-week federal unemployment benefit until early September. It would provide funding for states and local governments as well as for schools to help them reopen. The bill also contains money for coronavirus testing, contact tracing and vaccine distribution.
  • Mr. Biden is expected to sign the bill Friday. All but one Democrat, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, voted in favor.
  • Congress gave final approval on Wednesday to President Biden’s sweeping, nearly $1.9 trillion stimulus package, as Democrats acted over unified Republican opposition to push through an emergency pandemic aid plan that included a vast expansion of the country’s social safety net.
  • It would provide another round of direct payments for many Americans, an extension of federal jobless benefits and billions of dollars to distribute coronavirus vaccines and provide relief for schools, states, tribal governments and small businesses struggling during the pandemic.
  • “With the stroke of a pen, President Biden is going to lift millions and millions of children out of poverty in this country,” Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said. “It is time to make a bold investment in the health and security of the American people — a watershed moment.”
  • “House Democrats have abandoned any pretense of unity,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader. “This isn’t a rescue bill, it isn’t a relief bill. It’s a laundry list of left-wing priorities that predate the pandemic.”
  • “This bill represents a historic, historic victory for the American people,” Mr. Biden said at the White House following the measure’s approval, thanking Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House.
  • The bill also includes $30 billion for transit agencies; $45 billion in rental, utility and mortgage assistance; and billions more for small businesses and live performance venues.
  • Federal unemployment payments of $300 per week would be extended through Sept. 6, and up to $10,200 of jobless aid from last year would be tax-free for households with incomes below $150,000. It would also provide a benefit of $300 per child for those age 5 and younger — and $250 per child ages 6 to 17, increasing the value of the so-called child tax credit.
  • And for six months, it would fully cover COBRA health care costs for people who have lost a job or had their hours cut and who buy coverage from their former employer.
saberal

South Korea Will Pay More for U.S. Troop Presence - The New York Times - 0 views

  • South Korea said on Wednesday that it had agreed to increase its share in covering the cost of the American military presence by 13.9 percent this year, removing a prolonged dispute in the alliance ahead of a joint visit by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III.
  • Differences over how to share the cost of keeping 28,500 American troops in South Korea have kept the allies at odds for years. The issue became particularly contentious under former President Donald J. Trump, who demanded that South Korea drastically increase its payments —
  • Over the weekend, the United States and South Korea agreed to a five-year deal to increase the military payments, subject to legislative approval in both capitals. Under the agreement, South Korea will pay $1 billion this year, 13.9 percent more than its annual payments in 2019 and 2020, officials said on Wednesday. From next year through 2025, South Korea will increase its portion annually at the same rate it boosts its defense budget — at an average of 6.1 percent per year until 2025.
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  • “By smoothly addressing the key pending alliance issue early on after the launch of the Biden administration, South Korea and the United States demonstrated the robustness of the firm alliance,”
  • North Korea has long campaigned for the American troops’ withdrawal, arguing that the threat they posed, including their joint war games with the South Korean military, had forced it to develop nuclear weapons.
  • How to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table will be a key topic when Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin visit South Korea next Wednesday and Thursday, meeting President Moon Jae-in and other senior South Korean officials. North Korea has yet to react to their planned visit or the joint military drill by Washington and Seoul.
  • Mr. Moon’s government hopes that the Biden administration will follow up on the diplomacy started by Mr. Trump rather than going back to former President Obama’s policy of “strategic patience,” which focused on squeezing North Korea with sanctions.
anonymous

A Black Nonprofit Got A 6-Figure Payment From Someone Whose Family Enslaved People : NPR - 0 views

  • A nonprofit group that helps Black and marginalized communities in Kentucky has received a six-figure donation from a white donor who says they recently inherited family wealth — and then learned that their great-grandfather owned enslaved people.
  • As they received their windfall, the inheritor grew curious about the origins of the family's money."They investigated their family history to find out their great-grandfather had enslaved six individuals in Bourbon [County], Ky.," Croney said as the nonprofit announced the donation this week.
  • Because the great-grandfather did not record the enslaved persons' names, the donor couldn't track down the descendants of the people the ancestor had owned. Croney said that because the donor was "aware of how hoarding wealth is a huge contributing factor of inequity in this country, they decided that they should give most of it away."
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  • The donation is the latest in a string of high-value reparations payments from white people who have unearthed ties to racism and slavery in their family history — finding details such as the value assigned to enslaved people in a ledger, and notes identifying a grandmother as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
  • The money brings a significant boost for Change Today, Change Tomorrow, which has grown remarkably since Ryan first started the organization as a way to secure school supplies for teachers. Its programs now range from providing hot meals and snacks for students to public health outreach for new parents and menstruation products for those who need them, as well as making food deliveries — including fresh produce from a Black-owned farm.
  • The donor's identity has not been revealed, but the nonprofit said the person lives in the South.
  • Among those receiving reparations is Soul2Soul Sisters, a Colorado group co-founded by the Rev. Dawn Riley Duval. The money helped her organization grow — and like Ryan, Riley Duval says reparations are absolutely necessary, given the ties that have long bound racism and economic inequality in the United States
  • The donor who wired money to Change Today, Change Tomorrow is calling for other white people to pay reparations, even if their ancestors didn't own enslaved people.
  • The leaders of Change Today, Change Tomorrow echoed that sentiment. And they acknowledged that, given the sum heading their way, it wasn't until a wire transfer had taken place that it seemed real. Now, they added, they have more work to do.
  • Referring to the reparations payment, she added, "We don't have the luxury to kind of just sit on it, so it's literally money that's going to go right back into the community."The donor has never lived in Kentucky, Croney said, adding that the person found the organization by searching around on the internet. Louisville has played a prominent role in the national discussion on racism and police violence since last year when police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her home. Activists are still calling for accountability in that case.
zoegainer

These Businesses and Institutions Are Cutting Ties With Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A growing number of companies and institutions have taken actions against President Trump and his associates since the deadly rampage at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday by the president’s supporters.
  • Facebook’s announcement came four days after it banned Mr. Trump from posting on its platform at least through the end of his term — after years of defending its hands-off approach.
  • And several digital platforms — including Snapchat, YouTube, Twitch, Reddit and Twitter — also recently limited or suspended Mr. Trump on their services.
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  • The P.G.A. of America announced on Sunday night that its board of directors had voted to terminate an agreement to play the P.G.A. Championship — one of golf’s four prestigious global major men’s championships — at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.
  • Citigroup, which gave $1,000 in 2019 to the campaign of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the senators who voted against the certification of the Electoral College results, said it had paused all campaign contributions until March.
  • Morgan Stanley said it suspended contributions to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results of the election, but has not suspended contributions across the board.
  • Deutsche Bank, which has been Mr. Trump’s primary lender for two decades, and Signature Bank, are also seeking distance from him and his business.
  • “Last week’s attempts by some congressional members to subvert the presidential election results and disrupt the peaceful transition of power do not align with our American Express Blue Box values,”
  • The New York State Bar Association has started an inquiry into whether Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, should be removed from its membership
  • AT&T, Amazon, Comcast, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Ford, Best Buy and Marriott International also said they had suspended or ended contributions to members of Congress who voted against the certification of the Electoral College vote last week.
  • Hilton said it had already suspended its political contributions because of the impact of the pandemic, and that, because of the Capitol Hill violence, it would keep its PAC suspended indefinitely.
  • Wagner College on Staten Island also said on Friday that its board of trustees had voted to rescind the degree it gave to Mr. Trump in 2004.
  • In 2017, both Lehigh and Wagner considered revoking the degrees after Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” who violently clashed in Charlottesville, Va. The schools later decided to let Mr. Trump keep the degrees.
  • The P.G.A. of America announced on Sunday night that its board of directors had voted to terminate an agreement to play the P.G.A. Championship at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.
  • The hotel giant Marriott International said it was taking similar action.
  • Four of the country’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, said they would temporarily stop sending donations from their political action committees.
  • The banks have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and donated to candidates of both parties
  • The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced on Friday that it was suspending political contributions to Republicans in Congress who tried to block the electoral vote tallies for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • The association is one of the nation’s largest federations of insurance companies, which provide health insurance to about 109 million Americans.
  • The decision to strip Mr. Trump’s resort of hosting the second of four major tournaments on the tour’s calendar was a heavy loss to a president who has emphasized his portfolio of golf resorts and spent significant time on the course while in office.
  • Lehigh University in Pennsylvania awarded Mr. Trump a degree in 1988, after its president called the real estate developer a “symbol of our age — all the daring and energy that the word tycoon conjures up.” On Friday, two days after the attack on the Capitol, the university said in a statement that its board of trustees had “voted to rescind and revoke the honorary degree.”
  • Wagner College on Staten Island — the New York City borough where Mr. Trump has remained popular — announced on Friday that its board of trustees had voted to rescind the degree it gave to Mr. Trump in 2004. No explanation was given.
  • On Sunday, Laurie L. Patton, president of the college, said it had initiated the process to consider revoking that degree because of Mr. Giuliani’s role in “fomenting the violent uprising against our nation’s Capitol building,” which Ms. Patton called “an insurrection against democracy itself.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
  • The online payment platform Stripe will no longer process payments for Mr. Trump’s campaign website, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
  • Under the terms of that policy, Stripe users must agree not to accept payments for “high risk” activities, including for any business or organization that “engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property.
mattrenz16

Live Updates: House Pushes Senate to Approve $2,000 Stimulus Checks - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, on Tuesday blocked an effort to hold an immediate vote to increase stimulus checks to $2,000, saying instead that the Senate would “begin a process” to consider bigger payments, along with other demands issued by President Trump, leaving the fate of the measure unclear as more Republicans clamored to endorse it.
  • Mr. Trump had held the package hostage for days, insisting that lawmakers raise the direct payments to $2,000 from $600, remove a legal shield for companies like YouTube and Facebook and investigate “very substantial voter fraud.”
  • Mr. McConnell’s decision to block a vote on increasing the stimulus payments came as a growing number of Republican senators voiced support for the larger checks, and as pressure mounted on the Senate to vote on the measure.
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  • They joined a handful of others, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who have backed increasing the checks to $2,000.
  • While Democrats all support larger checks, they are unlikely to endorse a hasty overhaul of the legal shield currently in place for social media companies, especially measures put forward by Republican senators aimed at confronting what they believe is anti-conservative bias.
  • The House voted on Monday evening to increase the size of the checks to $2,000, daring Senate Republicans to either approve the heftier sum or defy Mr. Trump.
  • In signing the relief bill on Sunday night, Mr. Trump claimed in a statement that the Senate would “start the process for a vote” on legislation that would increase direct payments and pledged that “much more money is coming.”
  • Republican lawmakers in the House were visibly frustrated with Mr. Trump’s demand. Some of the president’s closest allies, including Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, and Jim Jordan of Ohio, voted against the measure, and Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, complained on the House floor that the proposal had been “hastily dropped on us at the last minute” and wouldn’t assist those who needed it most.
martinelligi

An overview of the healthcare system in Taiwan - 0 views

  • Taiwanese citizens can see any doctor without a referral. They may also go to any level of hospital directly, as they wish. However, larger, more popular hospitals charge a higher co-payment and can be overcrowded. Seeing a GP is much cheaper.
  • Although the insurance scheme is run by the government, private providers including doctors and hospitals dominate the healthcare market. There are more private establishments than the public ones. All providers claim and compete for payments fro
  • Owing to the single insurer system, Taiwan's NHI has one of the lowest administrative costs in the world, typically under 2% of total healthcare spending. Every year, the Department of Health negotiates with physicians and hospitals to set the global budget, and this helps keep the cost of the NHI down.
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  • There is a high level of health seeking behaviour in Taiwan. It is part of the Taiwanese culture to take medicines or to seek medical help frequently, even for minor ailments. The average outpatient department visit rate is 14 times per year per person2. This is substantially higher than the equivalent rate in the UK
  • As in the health systems of many countries including the UK, significant financial problems exist in Taiwan. The payment systems for healthcare providers are formulated in global budget and based on the care provided. The new pharmaceutical agents and medical technologies that emerge also pose financial dilemmas to the health system. Currently, the Taiwanese NHI does not take in enough money from premium payment to cover the entire healthcare provided by the hospitals and other healthcare personnel. The government often has to provide additional funds to keep the system running.
hannahcarter11

Democrats to Unveil Up to $3,600 Child Tax Credit as Part of Stimulus Bill - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • Top House Democrats are preparing to unveil legislation that would send up to $3,600 per child to millions of Americans, as lawmakers aim to change the tax code to target child poverty rates as part of President Biden’s sweeping $1.9 trillion stimulus package.
  • The proposal would expand the child tax credit to provide $3,600 per child younger than 6 and $3,000 per child up to 17 over the course of a year, phasing out the payments for Americans who make more than $75,000 and couples who make more than $150,000.
  • The credits would be split into monthly payments from the Internal Revenue Service beginning in July, based on a person’s or family’s income in 2020. Although the proposed credit is only for a year, some Democrats said they would fight to make it permanent, a sweeping move that could reshape efforts to fight child poverty in America.
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  • The one-year credit appears likely to garner enough support to be included in the stimulus package, but it will also have to clear a series of tough parliamentary hurdles because of the procedural maneuvers Democrats are using to muscle the stimulus package through, potentially without Republican support.
  • With House Democratic leadership aiming to have the stimulus legislation approved on the chamber floor by the end of the month, Congress moved last week to fast-track Mr. Biden’s stimulus plan even as details of the legislation are still being worked out.
  • But the child tax credit could provide an opportunity for some bipartisan support, since Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, introduced a similar measure that would send payments of up to $1,250 per month to families with children.
  • Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, warned on Sunday that the United States labor market was stalling and in a “deep hole” that could take years to emerge from if lawmakers did not quickly pass the stimulus package.
  • Ms. Yellen said that passing the stimulus package could allow the economy to reach full employment by next year. Failing to do so, she said, could leave the jobless rate elevated for years to come.
  • Researchers at Columbia University found that Mr. Biden’s overall stimulus proposal could cut child poverty in half in 2021 because of the expansion of the child credit, as well as other changes to tax credits and expansions of unemployment and food assistance benefits.
xaviermcelderry

Trump's Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance - The New York Times - 1 views

  • The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
  • Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
    • martinelligi
       
      investigation with IRV
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    • martinelligi
       
      TV show made by Trump, contestants compete for a job with him
  • often direct conflict of interest with his job as presiden
  • “Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.
  • Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.
  • An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
  • “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe.
  • Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.
  • He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.
  • The leak of Mr. Nixon’s small tax payment caused a precedent-setting uproar: Henceforth, presidents, and presidential candidates, would make their tax returns available for the American people to see.
  • that he might release the returns if President Barack Obama released his birth certificate.
  • He often claims that he cannot do so while unde
  • r audit — an argument refuted by his own I.R.S. commissioner.
  • Throughout his career, Mr. Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years. That provision has been the background music to Mr. Trump’s life.
  • “They say, ‘Trump is getting rich off our nation,’” he said at a rally in Minneapolis last October. “I lose billions being president, and I don’t care. It’s nice to be rich, I guess, but I lose billions.”
    • martinelligi
       
      depreciation: a reduction in the value of an asset with the passage of time, due in particular to wear and tear.
  • “consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.
  • Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.
  • The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.
  • Hair stylists, table linens, property taxes on a family estate — all have been deducted as business expenses.
  • he ethical quandaries created by Mr. Trump’s decision to keep his business while in the White House have been documented. But the full financial measure of his extraordinary confluence of interests — a president with a wealth of business entanglements at home and in myriad geopolitical hot spots — has remained elusive.
  • how heavily he has come to rely on leveraging his brand in ways that pose potential or direct conflicts of interest while he is president.
  • he president’s conflicts have been most evident with Turkey, where the business community and the authoritarian government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have not hesitated to leverage various Trump enterprises to their advantage.
  • Some of the largest payments from business groups for events or conferences at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties have come since Mr. Trump became president, the tax records show.
  • Beyond one-time payments for events or memberships, large corporations also pay rent for space in the few commercial buildings Mr. Trump actually owns.
  • his barrage of derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him two of his biggest and easiest sources of cash — licensing deals with clothing and mattress manufacturers that had netted him more than $30 million. NBC, his partner in Miss Universe — source of nearly $20 million in profits — announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant; he sold it soon after.
  • each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line.
  • He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
  • Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
  • The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
  • Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.
peterconnelly

U.S. Will Start Blocking Russia's Bond Payments to American Investors - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Biden administration will start blocking Russia from paying American bondholders, increasing the likelihood of the first default of Russia’s foreign debt in more than a century.
  • As a result, Russia will be unable to make billions of dollars of debt and interest payments on bonds held by foreign investors.
  • Biden administration officials had debated whether to extend what’s known as a general license, which has allowed Russia to pay interest on the debt it sold.
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  • “If Russia is unable to find a legal way to make these payments, and they technically default on their debt, I don’t think that really represents a significant change in Russia’s situation,” Ms. Yellen said. “They’re already cut off from global capital markets, and that would continue.”
  • “We can only speculate what worries the Kremlin most about defaulting: the stain on Putin’s record of economic stewardship, reputational damage, the financial and legal dominoes a default sets in motion and so on,” said Tim Samples
  • Sanctions experts have estimated that Russia has about $20 billion worth of outstanding debt that is not held in rubles.
  • Russia owes about $71 million in interest payments for a dollar-denominated bond that will mature in 2026. The contract has a provision to be paid in euros, British pounds and Swiss francs.
  • Adam M. Smith, who served as a senior sanctions official in the Obama administration’s Treasury Department, said he expected that Russia would most likely default sometime in July and that a wave of lawsuits from Russia and its investors were likely to ensue.
  • “The interesting question to me is, What is the policy goal here?”
Grace Gannon

As Apple Pay Arrives, Witnessing the Next Step in Money. Maybe. - 0 views

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    Many technological companies like Google, Verizon, and AT&T have attempted to replace bulky wallets with virtual methods of payment; however, this has only proved successful under Apple's management. Apple Pay service is a secure platform containing the user's credit card information and bank account information in order to make payments.
Javier E

Owner of a Credit Card Processor Is Setting a New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a Year - NYTime... - 0 views

  • Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000.
  • Under a financial overhaul passed by Congress in 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission was supposed to require all publicly held companies to disclose the ratio of C.E.O. pay to the median pay of all other employees, but it has so far failed to put it in effect. Corporate executives have vigorously opposed the idea, complaining it would be cumbersome and costly to implement.
  • his unusual proposal does speak to an economic issue that has captured national attention: The disparity between the soaring pay of chief executives and that of their employees.
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  • The United States has one of the world’s largest pay gaps, with chief executives earning nearly 300 times what the average worker makes, according to some economists’ estimates. That is much higher than the 20-to-1 ratio recommended by Gilded Age magnates like J. Pierpont Morgan and the 20th century management visionary Peter Drucker.
  • “The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi
  • Mr. Price, who started the Seattle-based credit-card payment processing firm in 2004 at the age of 19, said he would pay for the wage increases by cutting his own salary from nearly $1 million to $70,000 and using 75 to 80 percent of the company’s anticipated $2.2 million in profit this year.
  • Of all the social issues that he felt he was in a position to do something about as a business leader, “that one seemed like a more worthy issue to go after.”
  • The happiness research behind Mr. Price’s announcement on Monday came from Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. They found that what they called emotional well-being — defined as “the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience, the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant” — rises with income, but only to a point. And that point turns out to be about $75,000 a year.
  • Of course, money above that level brings pleasures — there’s no denying the delights of a Caribbean cruise or a pair of diamond earrings — but no further gains on the emotional well-being scale.
  • As Mr. Kahneman has explained it, income above the threshold doesn’t buy happiness, but a lack of money can deprive you of it.
Javier E

The Making of the Fox News White House | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.”
  • The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”
  • Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.”
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  • Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”
  • Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”
  • Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.
  • Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 P.M. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”
  • Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.
  • Kushner now has an almost filial status with Murdoch, who turns eighty-eight this month, and numerous sources told me that they communicate frequently. “Like, every day,” one said.
  • Ailes told Murdoch, “Trump gets great ratings, but if you’re not careful he’s going to end up totally controlling Fox News.”
  • In private, Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator. But, for all their differences, the two men had key traits in common. They both inherited and expanded family enterprises—an Australian newspaper; an outer-borough New York City real-estate firm—but felt looked down upon by people who were richer and closer to the centers of power.
  • both men have tapped into anti-élitist resentment to connect with the public and to increase their fortunes. Trump and Murdoch also share a transactional approach to politics, devoid of almost any ideology besides self-interest.
  • In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton
  • Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.
  • he had entered our country and was saying, ‘I’m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.’ It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”
  • “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”
  • In 1996, Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America’s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, Levin argues, “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.
  • As Hundt sees it, “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’ ”
  • Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd.”
  • In certain instances, however, Fox executives enforced journalistic limits.
  • Such niceties no longer apply. In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn’t “condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that the “unfortunate distraction” had “been addressed.”
  • For all of Ailes’s faults, Van Susteren argues, he exerted a modicum of restraint. She believes that he would have insisted on at least some distance from President Trump, if only to preserve the appearance of journalistic respectability embodied in the motto Ailes devised for Fox: “Fair and Balanced.
  • Fox News was hardly fair and balanced under his leadership. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” reports that Ailes was so obsessed with bringing down Obama in 2012 that he declared to colleagues, “I want to elect the next President.”
  • Don’t kid yourself about his support for immigration,” she said of Murdoch. “Rupert is first about the bottom line. They’re all going out to play to their crowd, whether it’s Fox or MSNBC.” (After leaving Fox, Van Susteren was for a short time a host on MSNBC.) Fox’s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called “migrant caravan” was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016—the height of the Presidential campaign.
  • Ailes and Trump were friendly. “They spoke all the time,” a former Fox executive says. They had lunch shortly before Trump announced his candidacy, and Ailes gave Trump political tips during the primaries. Ken LaCorte contends that Ailes took note of “Trump’s crazy behavior”; but Trump’s growing political strength was also obvious. According to the former Fox executive, Trump made Ailes “nervous”: “He thought Trump was a wild card. Someone Ailes could not bully or intimidate.”
  • in 2016 that the network’s executives “made a business decision” to give on-air stars “slack” to choose their candidates. Hannity was an early Trump supporter; O’Reilly was neutral; Megyn Kelly remained skeptical
  • Kelly kept pressing Trump: “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect President?” But he’d already won over Republican viewers. (Fox received a flood of e-mails, almost all of them anti-Kelly.) The showdown helped shape Trump’s image as shamelessly unsinkable.
  • Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.
  • Ailes, meanwhile, joined Trump’s debate team, further erasing the line between Fox and conservative politicians. Ailes also began developing a plan to go into business with Trump. The Sunday before the election, Ailes called Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, and said that he’d been talking with Trump about launching Trump TV, a nationalist competitor to Fox. Ailes was so excited that he was willing to forfeit his severance payment from Fox, which was attached to a non-compete agreement. He asked Bannon to join the venture and to start planning it as soon as Trump lost the election.
  • Any hopes that Fox would clean house after Ailes’s departure vanished on August 12, 2016, when Fox named two Ailes loyalists as co-presidents: Jack Abernethy, an executive who managed Fox’s local stations, and Bill Shine. The opinion side of Fox News, which Shine had run, had won out, as had his friend Sean Hannity.
  • For years, Ailes had been the focus of liberal complaints, and so when Fox pushed him out many people thought that the channel would change. They were right. The problem, Fox’s critics say, is that it’s become a platform for Trump’s authoritarianism. “I know Roger Ailes was reviled,” Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. “But he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.” Murdoch may find this development untroubling: in 1995, he told this magazine, “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian societies can work.
  • News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.
  • Murdoch “was gone a lot,” adding, “He’s old. He likes the idea that he’s running it, but the lunatics took over the asylum.”
  • Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.
  • ” The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network’s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered—and, with him, so was Trump.
  • Richie told me, “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.” He said that he’d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that “she did her homework—she had it.” He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but “when they killed it she was devastated.” Richie believes that the story “would have swayed the election.
  • Shine became “an expert in collecting and enforcing soft power,” adding, “He was responsible for on-air contributors to programs, so ultimately you were auditioning for Bill Shine. He was the one who would give you the lucrative contract. He controlled the narrative that way.
  • some people at Fox called him Bill the Butler, because he was so subservient to Ailes. A former Fox co-host says, “He’s perfect for the White House job. He’s a yes-man.” Another Fox alumnus said, “His only talent was following orders, sucking up to power, and covering up for people.”
  • Ailes and a small group kept a close eye on internal talent. “We had a file on pretty much everyone,” the former Fox executive said, adding that Ailes talked about “putting hits” in the media on anyone who “got out of line.”
  • If a woman complained about being sexually harassed, he said, Shine or other supervisors intimidated her into silence, reduced her air time, or discontinued her contract. The former executive recalls, “Shine would talk to the woman with a velvet glove, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’—and, if that didn’t work, he’d warn her it would ruin her career.”
  • Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, “I don’t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.”
  • Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump’s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.
  • Murdoch appears to have been wise in securing a rapprochement. Telecommunications is a highly regulated industry, and under Trump the government has consistently furthered Murdoch’s business interests, to the detriment of his rivals. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that “there have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world” involving telecommunications “that are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”
  • Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox’s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company
  • In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair’s hope of becoming the next Fox.
  • The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN
  • “There may be innocent explanations.” But, he adds, “Trump famously said you’re going to get sick and tired of winning, and that may not be true for the rest of America, but it sure is true of Murdoch.” He says of Murdoch, “He’s an incredibly cunning political player. He leaves no fingerprints. He’s been in the game of influencing government behavior to his benefit longer than most of us have been alive.”
  • Ann Coulter, who has been feuding with Trump over his immigration policy, said that the President told her that “Murdoch calls me every day.” She recalled that, “back when Trump was still speaking to me,” she complained to him that Fox was no longer inviting her to appear. She said that Trump told her, “Do you want me to call Murdoch and tell him to put you on?” Coulter accepted Trump’s offer. He may have called Hannity, not Murdoch, she says, but in any case she was invited back on Fox “within twelve hours.”
  • “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.”
  • Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”
  • Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material.
  • Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected
  • Sometimes such pushback has a salutary effect. Recently, Chris Wallace told Sarah Sanders that her claim that “nearly four thousand known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally” every year was wildly inaccurate. Showing Fox’s clout, the White House has dropped the talking point.
  • Unlike Glenn Beck, Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. Benkler and his co-authors studied Fox’s coverage, and found that not only did the channel give the Seth Rich lie a national platform; it also used the conspiracy story as a distraction, deploying it as a competing narrative when developments in Mueller’s investigation showed Trump in a bad light. In 2017, after Rich’s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.
  • By then, Fox hosts had begun pushing a different conspiracy: the “Uranium One” story, which Hannity called “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.” On an October, 2017, broadcast, Hannity claimed that Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had given “to Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty per cent of America’s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons.” Ostensibly, the deal was in exchange for giant payments to the Clinton Foundation. Hannity also claimed that “the corrupt, lying mainstream media” was withholding this “bombshell” from Americans, because it was “complicit” in a “huge coverup.”
  • other reporting had poked holes in it, revealing that multiple government agencies had approved the deal, and that the quantity of uranium was insignificant. Yet Fox kept flogging it as the real national-security scandal involving Russia.
  • Alisyn Camerota was a co-host on “Fox & Friends” for years before joining CNN, in 2014
  •  ‘Fox & Friends’ was a fun show, but it was not a news show,” she says. “It regularly broke the rules of journalism. It was basically Roger’s id on TV. He’d wake up in the morning with some bee in his bonnet, spout it off to Bill Shine, and Shine would tell us to put it on TV.” She says that the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot Web sites” for content, and adds, “Never did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was ‘This is going to outrage the audience!’ You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those were the standards.”
  • Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism.
  • Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.
  • a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!”
  • Judging from the timing of Trump’s tweets, Gertz believes that the President records “Fox & Friends” and views it from the beginning, often with a slight delay. As Trump watches, he frequently posts about points that he agrees with. Since August, 2018, Media Matters has tallied more than two hundred instances of Trump disseminating Fox News items to his fifty-eight million Twitter followers. “Trump serves as a carnival barker for Fox,” Levin says, giving invaluable promotional help to the channel.
  • Fox hosts sometimes reverse their opinions in order to toe the Trump line: Hannity, who in the Obama era called negotiations with North Korea “disturbing,” now calls such efforts a “huge foreign-policy win.” But Gertz has come to believe that Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fo
  • White House aides confirm that Trump has repeatedly walked away from compromises at the last moment because Fox hosts and guests opposed the deals.
  • According to a Senate staffer, one high-profile Republican senator claims that his preferred way of getting the President’s ear is by going on Fox. He calls a friendly host and offers to appear on the air; usually, before he’s taken his makeup off in the greenroom Trump is calling him
  • Fox hosts played a key part in driving Trump’s recent shutdown of the government and his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border. Hannity and Dobbs urged Trump nightly on their shows to make these moves; according to press reports, they also advised Trump personally to do so.
  • For the next thirty-five days, Hannity and the other Fox hosts kept cheering Trump on, even as polls showed that the American public was increasingly opposed to the shutdown. Oliver Darcy, of CNN, says that Democrats, rather than negotiating with Trump, “might as well call Sean Hannity and get him on the phone,” adding, “It seems we sort of elected Sean Hannity when we elected Trump.”
  • “The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.
  • Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that “he can’t afford to lose Fox, because it’s all he’s got.”
  • Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. Cable ratings at both Fox and MSNBC dip when the news is bad for their audience’s side. Van Susteren likens the phenomenon to audiences turning away when their sports team is losing
  • A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn’t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, “Shine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it’s gotten worse.” The source says, “Trump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes’s gofer.”
  • Shine has practically ended White House press briefings. Trump prefers to be his own spokesman. “He always thought he did it the best,” a former senior White House official says. “But the problem is that you lose deniability. It’s become a trapeze act with no net, 24/7. The shutdown messaging was a crisis. There was no exit strategy.”
  • “It was always clear that this wasn’t just another news organization,” Rosenberg told me. “But when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.” With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, “it’s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters—the White House and the audience.” In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump’s critics that “Fox is no longer conservative—it’s anti-democratic.”
  • For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country’s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law.
  • Hannity has spoken of “a coup,” and a guest on Laura Ingraham’s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, “It’s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.”
  • “In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”
brookegoodman

Answering 6 key questions about Congress' coronavirus response package - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • (CNN)Congress is gearing up to vote on its largest emergency aid package in US history in order to respond to the coronavirus outbreak and its economic fallout. But the legislation has raised plenty of questions as lawmakers race to nail down specific language. Here are at least a few answers based on CNN's reporting:
  • There's a lot of focus on the individual checks, but I'm firmly of the mind the small business loan piece of this is far and away the most important given what's happening right now.
  • The bill directs $350 billion for loans to small businesses and nonprofits with under 500 employees. The loans would be guaranteed by the Small Business Administration but the actual lender would be approved banks and financial institutions, which should get the money out the door faster. Businesses could receive up to $10 million in loans to float employee salaries, payroll expenses, mortgage and other debt payments. If used for those purposes, the loans would be forgiven in the future. It's a huge deal if it works properly.
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  • Under the plan, individuals who earn $75,000 in adjusted gross income or less would get direct payments of $1,200 each. But which tax return is that based on?
  • Federal student loan borrowers would get a reprieve from payments until October and any interest that would have accrued during that period would be waived.
  • Depends -- and I'm not trying to dodge here, but everyone's circumstances are different, so I don't want to generalize. Say an individual is claimed as dependent by their parents, then that's an automatic no. Say you live on your own, are not claimed as a dependent and had a summer job, then yes.
katherineharron

Stimulus package: White House, Senate reach historic $2 trillion deal amid growing coro... - 0 views

  • The White House and Senate leaders struck a major deal early Wednesday morning over a $2-trillion package to provide a jolt to an economy struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, capping days of marathon negotiations that produced one of the most expensive and far-reaching measures Congress has ever considered.
  • The full details have yet to be released. But over the last 24 hours, the elements of the proposal have come into sharper focus, with $250 billion set aside for direct payments to individuals and families, $350 billion in small business loans, $250 billion in unemployment insurance benefits and $500 billion in loans for distressed companies.
  • Under the plan as it was being negotiated, individuals who earn $75,000 in adjusted gross income or less would get direct payments of $1,200 each, with married couples earning up to $150,000 receiving $2,400 -- and an additional $500 per each child. The payment would scale down by income, phasing out entirely at $99,000 for singles and $198,000 for couples without children.
brickol

$1,200 stimulus checks for all? All you need to know about the US coronavirus bailout |... - 0 views

  • With large areas of the US shut down, stock markets crashing, industries facing collapse and soaring unemployment, the US government is set to pass the most expensive bailout in US history in attempts to save the US economy.Democrat and Republican leaders of Congress, along with White House officials, have been scrambling to make a deal in around-the-clock negotiations and finally announced early on Wednesday that they have reached an agreement. The Senate is expected to vote on the bill on Wednesday.
  • The bill is worth about $2tn, which will go to businesses, corporations and directly into the pockets of Americans. It has six main components: Direct payment to most Americans. $250bn to bolster unemployment insurance. $350bn in loans for small businesses that may be forgiven if firms use them to keep workers on payroll. $500bn in aid for hard-hit industries and states and $50bn for airlines. $130bn in aid to hospitals. $150bn to help state and local governments.
  • There has been some compromise. Republicans agreed to some major changes from their original bill. More money will be given to large companies in hard-hit industries, but Democrats have also pushed for strict oversight of the loans. More aid will also be given to the healthcare sector and more funds will be earmarked for unemployment insurance after pushes from Democrats.
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  • The plan is for individuals to get up to $1,200 and married couples to get up to $2,400, including $500 for each child. The size of a check would diminish gradually for those whose income is above $75,000, while individuals earning more than $99,000 and couples earning more than $198,000 will not be getting any checks. The checks will be based on a household or individual’s 2018 tax return unless they filed their 2019 tax return, in which case it will be based of their 2019 return.
  • Democrats and even some Republicans are adamant that corporations are given fair assistance that will not end up in the pockets of wealthy shareholders or corporate executives.
  • Companies who receive government assistance will also see restrictions on stock buybacks, which is when a company buys shares of its own stock to increase the value of its shares, ultimately helping their wealthy stockholders and corporate executives. Commercial airlines have been known for buying back their own shares.
  • The deal extends unemployment insurance by 13 weeks and covers self-employed and furloughed workers, offering workers $600 a week for those additional four months in addition to what a state will provide through their own program.
  • The bill will relieve burden on the healthcare sector by including a “Marshall Plan” that will give $130bn in grants and assistance to hospitals. The bill also boosts Medicare payments for hospitals treating patients with Covid-19.
lmunch

The inside story of how Pennsylvania failed to deliver millions in coronavirus rent relief - 0 views

  • As a result, Pennsylvania tenants in dire need of assistance, some of whom had been living day to day in fear of losing their homes, missed out on roughly $96 million of $150 million in federal coronavirus relief.
  • unemployment spiked to 16.1 percent in April.
  • In May, the state legislature approved a spending package that included $150 million for rent relief from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, as well as $25 million to help homeowners who had fallen behind on their mortgage payments
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  • They put a $750 monthly cap on the assistance each family could receive. In parts of Pennsylvania, that’s less than the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment. Assistance through the mortgage program was capped at $1,000 a month.
  • In addition, landlords who accepted the assistance payments had to agree to treat $750 as full payment of rent, regardless of the actual amount owed. Many balked. And tenants couldn’t receive the aid unless their landlords agreed to take part.
  • Some weren’t eligible because they weren’t yet behind on rent, or had landlords who wouldn’t participate. Others couldn’t produce the right paperwork. Many applications arrived incomplete, requiring hours of follow-up by local agencies.
  • To qualify, tenants couldn’t earn more than the median income in their county. They also needed to have filed for unemployment since March 1, 2020, or have lost at least 30% of their income. Both presented difficulties. To prove a loss of income, applicants needed paperwork to show their current income, as well as their income from before the pandemic — pay stubs from January or February, for instance.
  • A reform bill introduced by Democrats had been referred to the committee. But, despite pleas from officials and advocates for both landlords and tenants, Senate Republicans did not act on it.
  • A bill that would have made more sweeping changes to the program — replacing the $750 cap with a more flexible standard and allowing applicants who couldn’t document their loss of income to sign a certification form, instead — passed the state House unanimously later in October. But Republican leaders in the Senate did not bring it up for a vote, saying Wolf’s changes were enough
  • While federal law allows state and local governments to spend up to 10% of their allocation on the cost of running their programs, Pennsylvania limits those expenses to 5%. That number was a compromise after Senate Republicans initially proposed a 2% cap that local officials said would be untenable.
  • And this time, if Pennsylvania cannot spend the new funding quickly enough, the state could lose some of it to other states. Federal law says that, starting Sep. 30, the U.S. Treasury can redistribute unused money to state and local governments that have already spent at least 65% of their allocation.
  • Bryce Maretzki was in charge of a $150 million effort to keep Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable tenants in their homes.
aidenborst

Child tax credit: 5 ways the stimulus package is expected to reduce poverty - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Joe Biden's sweeping $1.9 trillion relief package represents one of the largest federal efforts to reduce poverty in the last half century.
  • The massive legislation, which the President is expected to sign Friday, provides aid to low-income Americans in numerous ways. Attention has focused on the third round of direct stimulus payments, but the bill also offers parents a guaranteed stream of income and gives childless workers a bigger tax break.
  • The package's key measures are expected to slash the poverty rate by about a third and reduce the share of children in poverty by more than half, according to estimates from both Columbia University and the Urban Institute.
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  • The provisions would cut the poverty rate among Black Americans by 38%, Hispanic Americans by 43% and White and Asian Americans by around 24%
  • In total, 16 million fewer people will be living in poverty in 2021
  • But there's one big catch. The benefits are all temporary -- a mix of one-time infusions and assistance that lasts no longer than a year.
  • "Getting this far is a huge win and a sign of progress in the conversation, as well as immediately putting money in people's pockets," said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, director of the income and work supports team at The Center for Law and Social Policy, a left-leaning group.
  • "I certainly don't think it's a done deal, but I think there's a lot more opportunity than there has been in the time that I've been working on these issues," she continued.
  • The enhanced portion of the credit will be available for single parents with annual incomes up to $75,000 and joint filers making up to $150,000 a year.
  • The key change is that the tax credit will become fully refundable so that more low-income parents could take advantage of it.
  • Families can receive a credit of $3,600 for each child under 6 and $3,000 for each one under age 18, up from the current credit of up to $2,000 per child under age 17.
  • It provides direct payments worth up to $1,400 per person to married couples earning less than $160,000 a year, heads of households making less than $120,000 and individuals with incomes below $80,000.
  • Those who have lost their jobs will continue to receive federal support through September 6. The relief package extends the $300 weekly boost to unemployment benefits and two key pandemic jobless benefits programs.
  • The bill also calls for making the first $10,200 of unemployment payments tax-free for households with annual incomes under $150,000.
  • Food stamp recipients will see a 15% increase in benefits continue through September, instead of having the enhancement expire at the end of June.
  • This amounts to about $25 more per person per month, or just under $100 per month for a family of four.
  • The package nearly triples the maximum credit childless workers can receive to $1,502, up from $543.
  • The minimum age to claim the childless credit will be reduced to 19, from 25, and the upper age limit will be eliminated.
  • This is the largest expansion to earned income tax credit since 2009.
aidenborst

What you'll get from the stimulus: Child tax credit, unemployment and more - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The $1.9 trillion coronavirus package contains a wide range of benefits to help Americans who are still struggling with the economic fallout of the pandemic.
  • The House of Representatives passed the bill on Wednesday, paving the way for President Joe Biden to sign it into law later this week.
  • The bill provides direct payments worth up to $1,400 per person to married couples earning less than $160,000, heads of households earning less than $120,000 a year and individuals earning less than $80,000 a year.
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  • Individuals earning less than $75,000 will receive the full $1,400. Married couples earning less than $150,000 a year will receive $2,800 -- and families with children are eligible for an additional $1,400 per dependent. Heads of households earning less than $112,500 a year will also receive the full $1,400 plus another $1,400 per dependent.
  • The jobless will receive a $300 weekly federal boost to unemployment benefits and get those payments through September 6.
  • The bill also calls for making the first $10,200 of unemployment payments tax-free for households with annual incomes under $150,000.
  • Food stamp recipients will see a 15% increase in benefits continue through September, instead of having it expire at the end of June.
  • The bill will send roughly $20 billion to state and local governments to help low-income households cover back rent, rent assistance and utility bills.
  • It authorizes about $10 billion to help struggling homeowners pay their mortgages, utilities and property taxes.The bill also provides $5 billion to help states and localities assist those at risk of experiencing homelessness by providing safe, socially distant housing, for example. Another $5 billion goes to emergency housing vouchers for those who are homeless.
  • Qualifying families can receive a child tax credit of $3,600 for each child under 6 and $3,000 for each one under age 18, up from the current credit of up to $2,000 per child under age 17.The enhanced portion of the credit will be available for single parents with annual incomes up to $75,000 and joint filers making up to $150,000 a year.
  • Enrollees will pay no more than 8.5% of their income towards coverage, down from nearly 10% now. Also, those earning more than the current cap of 400% of the federal poverty level -- about $51,000 for an individual and $104,800 for a family of four in 2021 -- will become eligible for help.
  • The bill provides $15 billion to the Emergency Injury Disaster Loan program, which provides long-term, low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration. Severely impacted small businesses with fewer than 10 workers will be given priority for some of the money.
  • It also provides $25 billion for a new grant program specifically for bars and restaurants. Eligible businesses may receive up to $10 million and can use the money for a variety of expenses, including payroll, mortgage and rent, utilities and food and beverages.
  • Workers being paid at or just above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour will not see a boost in pay.
  • The $1.9 trillion coronavirus package contains a wide range of benefits to help Americans who are still struggling with the economic fallout of the pandemic.
aidenborst

The world went on a debt binge last year. There could be a nasty hangover - CNN - 0 views

  • Desperate to save their economies from complete collapse, governments borrowed unprecedented amounts of money on the cheap to support workers and businesses during the pandemic. Now, with recovery in sight, a big risk looms: interest payments.
  • Spurred on by rock-bottom rates, governments issued $16.3 trillion in debt in 2020, and they're expected to borrow another $12.6 trillion this year, according to S&P Global Ratings. But fears are growing that an explosive economic comeback starting this summer could generate inflation, potentially forcing central banks to raise rates sooner than expected.
  • Should that happen, the cost of servicing mountains of sovereign debt will jump, eating up government funds that could otherwise be spent on essential services or rebuilding weakened economies.
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  • "A big jump in interest rates would be very costly," said Ugo Panizza, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. "Central banks will face very, very complicated tradeoffs if inflation does go up."
  • The moves have been triggered in part by growing confidence about the next phase of the pandemic. As vaccination campaigns allow governments to lift some restrictions, consumers are expected to rush to restaurants and hop on planes. That could push up prices, which central banks have pledged to keep under control.
  • US lawmakers approved a mammoth $1.9 trillion stimulus package on Wednesday that could send prices higher and increase pressure on the Federal Reserve.
  • The Congressional Budget Office projects that publicly-held government debt in the United States will climb to nearly $22.5 trillion by the end of fiscal 2021. That's equivalent to 102% of annual gross domestic product. In Italy, the ratio stood at 154% at the end of September, while Greece was almost at 200%.
  • Interest costs are even more sensitive to inflation and rate hikes because of the pandemic response.The UK government borrowed £270.6 billion ($377 billion) between April 2020 and January 2021, and higher interest rates mean increased payments on that debt.
  • "Just as it would be irresponsible to withdraw [economic] support too soon, it would also be irresponsible to allow future borrowing and debt to be left unchecked," he said.
  • "It is a real concern," said Randall Kroszner, who served as a Federal Reserve governor from 2006 until 2009. If US debt payments suddenly go "from being quite low to being quite significant," that could weigh on the recovery and slow economic activity, he added.
  • Panizza said that Italy needs to refinance or extend the due date of about one-seventh of its debt every year. If interest rates were to go up by 2%, that would add about half a point of GDP, or roughly $9.9 billion, to debt servicing costs annually. That's a "substantial" amount, he emphasized.
  • "This is not something that we have a lot of experience with," Kroszner said.
aleija

Opinion | To Motivate Workers, Republican Governors Experiment With Pain - The New York... - 0 views

  • Only about 61 percent of the adults in Montana are employed at the moment. That leaves more than 300,000 who aren’t working. So I was surprised when the state’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, declared in May that Montana is experiencing a “labor shortage.”
  • Beginning June 27, the state will reduce weekly payments to unemployed workers by $300, cutting off a federal subsidy that was scheduled to run through early September.
  • This struck other Republican governors as such a good idea that 23 other states have since announced plans to follow Montana’s example. Together they intend to reject more than $26 billion in federal aid payments to 4.5 million unemployed workers — money that would have helped those workers and surely would have been spent mostly in those states.
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  • A lot of people are going to get hurt, and the pain will not be distributed randomly.
  • The legacy of the racism that infected so many of the New Deal’s achievements is particularly bitter for Black workers, who continue to live disproportionately in the states that provide the least aid to those who lose their jobs. During the last recession, only 23.8 percent of unemployed Black workers received benefits, compared to 33.2 percent of white workers, according to a 2012 analysis by the Urban Institute. Those who qualify for benefits also get less money. On average, the 11 former Confederate states replace just 40 percent of lost wages, compared to an average of 46 percent in the rest of the United States.
  • Although Americans generally agree that government should not act with racist intent, the unemployment safety net was designed with racist intent. And it continues to work in the way that it was designed, allowing Mississippi to badly serve Americans who live there.
  • For opponents of the federal supplements, any evidence the payments are allowing people to stay out of the job market or are driving up wages is seen as damning.
  • President Franklin Roosevelt and his lieutenants knew that a stronger safety net would drive up wages. They understood that helping those who weren’t working would help those who were working, too.
  • The average amount that workers got, relative to prior wages, has also been in steady decline.
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