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Democrats, who have long advocated increasing the amount of financial relief distributed across the country, plan to hold a vote on Monday to approve a stand-alone bill that would increase the payments to $2,000. It is unclear whether that legislation will stand a chance in the Senate, where Republicans have long been resistant to spending more than $1 trillion on pandemic relief.

the president was “posturing to make himself, to bring himself back as the hero of the American people”

We need more direct relief flowing to families, small businesses, including finishing the job of getting people that $2,000 in relief, direct payment. $600 is simply not enough when you have to choose between paying rent, putting food on the table, keeping the lights on.

Each time, he made the required payment to the I.R.S. for income taxes he might owe — $1 million for 2016 and $4.2 million for 2017.

The Democrats have seized on his income tax bills as a symbol of the inequalities in the current tax system.

“Why should a firefighter, an educator, a cop — why should a welder, why should a steelworker pay a higher tax rate than the super wealthy?” Mr. Biden asked Monday during a campaign stop in Cleveland. “Why should you pay more taxes than Donald Trump, for God’s sake?”

While small businesses have had to adapt reluctantly to a cashless world, many tech firms, banks and credit card companies have pushed for one, said Jay Zagorsky, a professor at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University.

“The economy is bifurcating, sort of splitting in two parts, and there’s one part that’s taking a beating,” he said.

For many people paying for things digitally is a convenience, but for the growing segment of the population in poverty, “going cashless is quite expensive,” he said. Hidden fees, such as for failing to keep a minimum balance in an account or on a prepaid card, can be debilitating.“If you can’t keep $10 to $15 on a credit card — that’s a great sum of money for some people,” he said.

Cryptocurrency advocates like Catheryne Nicholson, the chief executive of BlockCypher, have proposed Bitcoin as a solution to problems in the existing financial system, such as getting loans to the millions of people who do not have bank accounts.

“The designs don’t just happen out of happenstance,” he said. “You can learn so much about our culture from just learning about what appears on our coins.”

But Dr. Kemmers said that aside from their symbolism, she was “not that optimistic about the long-term future of coins.” With one exception: “Commemorative coins might be something that will last.”

To date, Russian hackers have only been arrested while traveling abroad. In 2016, a Russian cybercriminal was arrested while vacationing in Prague on charges he hacked LinkedIn, the social network, and other American companies.

The vast majority of ransomware outfits are based in Russia, where authorities have protected hackers from extradition.

According to Emsisoft, nearly 10 percent of ransomware victims now see their data leaked online, a jarring development for hospitals, who are legally responsible for protecting medical data.

And in 2014, American Secret Service agents coordinated with authorities in the Maldives to extradite a Russian cybercriminal to Guam. The hacker was later found guilty on 38 counts of hacking U.S. retailers and sentenced to 27 years in prison. Russian officials called the extradition a “kidnapping.”

The government’s $525 billion Paycheck Protection Program gave more than 5 million businesses a one-time cash injection to pay workers and other expenses, including rent, but most recipients have now spent the money.

By August, collections had rebounded to nearly 80 percent, but some tenants, like movie theaters, clothing retailers, hair salons and gyms, were much further behind.

He hadn’t paid his full rent for months, but he had reached out to his landlord, the Falls Investors, hoping to discuss options. Instead, he got a letter in late July telling him payment in full was due in five days. When he missed that deadline, his landlord locked him out.

“Florida created an unconstitutional system that prohibits people from voting until their debts are paid,” said Julie Ebenstein, an ACLU attorney involved in the case against the law. “Now the state is objecting to those debts being paid. The state seems intent on preventing voting, rather than collecting payment.”

The suit reflects the pushback against the power of the nation’s largest corporations, and especially technology giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Conservatives like President Trump and liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren have been highly critical of the concentration of power in a handful of tech behemoths.

set off a cascade of other antitrust lawsuits

A victory for the government could remake one of America’s most recognizable companies and the internet economy that it has helped define since it was founded by two Stanford University graduate students in 1998.

The company says it has strong competition in the search market, with more people finding information on sites like Amazon. It says its services have been a boon for small businesses.

The lawsuit comes two weeks after Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee released a sprawling report on the tech giants that accused Google of controlling a monopoly over online search and the ads that come up when users enter a query.

It controls 90 percent of the market for online searches, according to one estimate.

Google last faced serious scrutiny from an American antitrust regulator nearly a decade ago, when the Federal Trade Commission investigated whether it had abused its power over the search market. The agency’s staff recommended bringing charges against the company, according to a memo reported on by The Wall Street Journal. But the agency’s five commissioners voted in 2013 not to bring a case.

European Union has brought three antitrust cases against Google in recent years, focused on its search engine, advertising business and Android mobile operating system. Regulators in Britain and Australia are examining the digital advertising market, in inquiries that could ultimately implicate the company.

Also, the Biden plan—or some version of it—is likely to advance in Congress only if Democrats keep a majority in the House and take control of the Senate

they only want to repeal parts of the law and that they would focus those changes on corporations and households making more than $400,000.

the top 1% of households would see their after-tax income drop by 16% in 2022. That’s an average tax increase of $265,640.

The middle 20% of households would get a tax cut worth 1% of after-tax income, or an average of $620.

But there are two main ways in which middle-income families could pay more. One is through Mr. Biden’s proposed reinstatement of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. The campaign, citing Trump administration language, describes that as a fee, not a tax. The payments are required by the tax code, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the penalty for failing to purchase health insurance is a tax.

So anyone owning stocks could be affected and eventually, companies may raise wages less than they otherwise would.

He would temporarily expand the child tax credit to $3,000 from $2,000 and add another $600 for children under age 6

in general Democrats now enter the political arena as the party of wealth.

Traditionally, “the right,” for better and for worse, is the party of large property holdings, of bosses and managers and cultural guardians, of dominant belief systems (religious and secular), and of elite education institutions that set the boundaries of what knowledge and lore are proper to pass on to tomorrow’s generations. If America has such a party today, it is not the Republicans.

Biden’s most loyal followers by occupation included professors (94 percent), librarians (93 percent), therapists (92 percent), and lawyers (88 percent)

Trump got homemakers (96 percent), welders (84 percent), HVAC professionals (82 percent), farmers (75 percent), and custodians (59 percent)

They are also the party of education and prestige. On the eve of November’s election, Bloomberg News analyzed which employees gave the most to Donald Trump and which the most to Joe Biden. Biden swept the commanding heights of the economy. He got 97 percent of the contributions at Google and Facebook, 96 percent at Harvard, 91 percent at the consultants Deloitte, and (back here on planet Earth) 90 percent at the New York City Department of Education

the economic hand that Trump had to play in last fall’s elections was stronger than almost anyone outside of the working class understood, and the results—at least in terms of the swing-state popular vote—correspondingly closer.

“It feels to me like the party’s getting pushed into it,” said Julius Krein, an investor who publishes the quarterly review American Affairs, in an interview this winter. “Donors, especially, don’t want it to be a working-class party. And certainly the old guard not only doesn’t think of itself as such, but is quite hostile to that, and to any policy that could possibly lead in that direction. But it’s getting pushed there because all the elite are going to the Democrats.”

Trump’s administration worked out well for American workers, at least up until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. Unemployment was under 4 percent for most of 2018 and 2019. The good times reached even those to whom prosperity had historically been slowest to arrive. Unemployment among Black men, a whisker under 20 percent in March 2010, had fallen to around 5 percent in November 2019. According to The Economist, gains were concentrated in professions where workers had heretofore faced competition from immigrant labor, such as housekeepers and maintenance workers

Krein doubts whether anything that could be described as Trumpism happened at all. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 was renegotiated to American workers’ advantage, but that did not lead to the renaissance of manufacturing that candidate Trump had tirelessly promised in 2016. The wages of the lowest-paid workers went up, but that may be due to minimum-wage hikes enacted in dozens of states and cities.

There is a philosophical disagreement about how one gives the working class more power. To boil it down to the basics, Democrats believe in more unions and Republicans believe in less immigration.

Krein is generally skeptical of the Republican Party’s traditional economic policies. “Contrary to the pervasive mythology of entrepreneurialism and creativity,” he writes, “it is glaringly obvious to today’s professional elite that the neoliberal economy is allocating capital, and especially talent, very poorly.

the extraordinary 2017 tax cuts, the only significant piece of domestic legislation passed in Trump’s four years. A supply-side piñata without precedent, it encouraged the corporate “buybacks” that can spur stock prices (padding executive bonuses) but can destabilize corporate finances (increasing the likelihood of layoffs in a downturn)—quite the opposite of what Trump had seemed to promise on the campaign trail.

Now Rubio has a simpler message: These are my people. I will fight for them. It beats the perennial Republican approach of theorizing about incentives and the capital gains tax.

Among Senate Republicans, it is Rubio who has laid the biggest bet on working people. He has a lot of ideas. He has urged fighting stock buybacks, reauthorizing Small Business Administration loan programs, and limiting Covid aid to universities with endowments of more than $10 billion

The core of his agenda, said Rubio, “is the availability of good-paying jobs that allow people to raise families, to retire with dignity, to live in safe and stable communities—that’s where life is lived.”

Hawley does often sound like a throwback. He criticizes the sexual revolution, the “woke mob,” and those who propose to rechristen military bases named after Confederate generals. In this sense, his appeal to the working class is less direct than Rubio’s. He is using, in classic Reagan fashion, the correlation between working-class status and conservative cultural attitudes to win over voters without making class appeals at all.

In early December, Hawley and Bernie Sanders staggered their speeches, swapping floor time back and forth, in hopes of rallying the chamber to deliver Covid aid in $1,200 direct payments to parents. It was eyebrow-raising, Senate staffers said, because such moments require close staff coordination, and each senator pledged solidarity to the other. “I’m proud to yield the floor to him,” said Sanders of Hawley. “I’m delighted to join with Senator Sanders,” Hawley responded, adding: “Working families should be first on our to-do list, not last.”

Until recently, few congressional Democrats have been inclined to do battle with the tech companies, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren being among the conspicuous exceptions.

Tom Cotton, a Harvard-educated Republican lawyer from tiny Yell County, Arkansas, is trying to use China the way Hawley uses Big Tech

When the public compares the two parties on the question of protecting the working class, it is still Democrats who come out on top—but not by a lot.

In 2008, two young thinkers, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, wrote a book called Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. The authors warn that “Sam’s Club Republicans”—cheekily named after a Walmart-owned chain of cut-price warehouse stores where few urban Democrats had ever set foot—were losing ground. And these voters were beginning to notice that their party wasn’t doing anything for them. The old Republican entrepreneurial rhetoric of unleashing this and untrammeling that was ceasing to resonate. Worse, it now served the other party’s base.If Grand New Party was the first call to arms in the remaking of the party, it went largely unheeded

The most closely attended-to conservative voice on this issue is Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney adviser who heads American Compass, a conservative think tank that calls for “widely shared economic development.

Nearly all the Republicans loosely aligning themselves with working-class interests listen to Cass, and it’s partly because he has a theory about the economic history of this century and how it led to our present predicament.

As Cass sees it, the weakness of structures has been explained by the work of M.I.T. economist David Autor, who has given us a new understanding of how labor markets work under globalization.

A “China shock” wiped out a good deal of manufacturing employment after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, Autor has shown. “Skill-biased technical change” drove college-educated workers’ compensation up and that of the noncollege-educated down

The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton gathered similar evidence of the collapse of labor markets and the rise of regional inequality in their 2020 book on opioids, suicide, and life expectancy, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a book that is often read as an X-ray of how eastern Ohio and other parts of Appalachia were struggling as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were vying for the presidency in 2016

the embrace of this coming-of-age saga as an all-purpose explanation of Trump’s new pitch to the working class was misguided, for Vance was already in his thirties when it was published. “The story that he is telling,” Cass insisted, “is of what was going on in the late ’90s, during what we think of as the go-go years, the boom years, the very best years.”

Indeed, an interesting general question arises to challenge Republicans about the 1980s and 1990s—were the policies arrived at outright wrong?

“If you talked to Republicans and gave them truth serum,” one congressional political adviser admitted, “a majority would say we had it wrong for decades on immigration and trade. We were too quick to look just at the lower price of goods and how that ultimately helped people, and didn’t spend enough time looking at people who were directly hurt by factories being closed and lower wages.”

Cass’s central insight is: Tight labor markets are good. That is how unions work to drive up wages, and if conservatives want higher wages, they will need to overcome their “foolish orthodoxy” on the matter.

At the same time, you can’t believe unions are good and say any amount of immigration is fine. Limiting immigration raises wages—which is a key reason that the postwar labor movement supported immigration restrictions

From a supply-and-demand perspective, mass immigration does the same thing as offshoring and de-unionizing: It exposes workers with American labor protections and lifestyle expectations to competition from workers without them

Republicans’ rapport with the working class may turn out to be more natural than it now appears. They won’t have to “come up with” policies for helping the workers, still less to “reinvent” themselves as a working-class party

they will follow the logic of the situation to embrace the sort of policies Democrats followed when they were the party of the workers and the Republicans the party of the bosses.

A German Army investigation later determined that as many as 90 civilians had been killed. At the time of the attack, Germany was widely criticized by its partners in Afghanistan, and the events plunged the country into a bitter debate about the role of its military forces during peacetime.

In 2018, Germany’s top civil court ruled that, under international law, a state was not obligated to pay out compensation to individuals. The court also found that the state could not be held liable for instances of dereliction of duty by soldiers serving on foreign missions.

The European court found that the federal prosecutor’s decision to drop an investigation into the commanding general was justified “because he had been convinced, at the time of ordering the airstrike, that no civilians had been present” at the attack site.

The European court’s ruling comes as the Biden administration is debating whether to honor a deal that President Donald J. Trump struck with the Taliban last year.

The subpoenas span documents from January 2011 to August 2019, including his tax returns, from Mazars

He added: "The Supreme Court never should have let this 'fishing expedition' happen, but they did."Mazars, in a statement, says it is "committed to fulfilling all of our professional and legal obligations."

Last July, the Supreme Court, voting 7-2, rejected the Trump's broad claims of immunity from a state criminal subpoena seeking his tax returns and said that as president he was not entitled to any kind of heightened standard unavailable to ordinary citizens. The justices sent the case back to the lower court so that the president could make more targeted objections regarding the scope of the subpoena.

In October, a federal appeals court said "there is nothing to suggest that these are anything but run-of-the-mill documents typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct."

"The subpoena is geographically sprawling, temporally expansive, and topically unlimited --all attributes that raise suspicions of an unlawful fishing expedition," William Consovoy wrote. "Even if disclosure is confined to the grand jury and prosecutors," he said "once the documents are surrendered" confidentially "will be lost for all time."

Biden, over the course of his first month in office, has relentlessly pressed lawmakers to pass his cornerstone legislative proposal, which includes funding for schools, vaccine distribution and infrastructure, states and localities, direct payments and extensions of expiring unemployment insurance programs.

Among those signed onto the letter are bold faced names including David Solomon, chairman and chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs; Stephen Schwartzman, the chairman and CEO of Blackstone; Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google; John Zimmer, the co-founder and president of Lyft; Brian Roberts, the chairman and CEO of Comcast and John Stankey the CEO of AT&T.Read More

Republican support, to this point at least, has remained non-existent, with even moderate GOP senators amenable to talks calling Biden's proposal too large in scale and scope given the trillions in emergency aid deployed over the first year of the pandemic.

Biden, however, has been steadfast that his mandate is to "go big," and in recent days has challenged opponents of his plan to outline specifically what they'd like to strip from the package.

"Now critics say the plan is too big," Biden said at the White House on Monday. "Let me ask the rhetorical question -- what would you have me cut? What would you have me leave out?"

"Strengthening the public health response to coronavirus is the first step toward economic restoration," the executives wrote. "The American Rescue Plan mobilizes a national vaccination program, delivers economic relief to struggling families, and supports communities that were most damaged by the pandemic."

“Medical care is one of the less important determinants of life expectancy,” said Joseph Newhouse, a health economist at Harvard. “Socioeconomic status and other social factors exert larger influences on longevity.”

The United States has relied more on market forces, which have been less effective.

For spending, many experts point to differences in public policy on health care financing. “Other countries have been able to put limits on health care prices and spending” with government policies

One result: Prices for health care goods and services are much higher in the United States.

“The differential between what the U.S. and other industrialized countries pay for prescriptions and for hospital and physician services continues to widen over time,”

The degree of competition, or lack thereof, in the American health system plays a role

periods of rapid growth in U.S. health care spending coincide with rapid growth in markups of health care prices. This is what one would expect in markets with low levels of competition.

Although American health care markets are highly consolidated, which contributes to higher prices, there are also enough players to impose administrative drag. Rising administrative costs — like billing and price negotiations across many insurers — may also explain part of the problem.

The additional costs associated with many insurers, each requiring different billing documentation, adds inefficiency

“We have big pharma vs. big insurance vs. big hospital networks, and the patient and employers and also the government end up paying the bills,”

Though we have some large public health care programs, they are not able to keep a lid on prices. Medicare, for example, is forbidden to negotiate as a whole for drug prices,

once those spending constraints eased, “suppliers of medical inputs marketed very costly technological innovations with gusto,”

, all across the world, one sees constraints on payment, technology, etc., in the 1970s and 1980s,” he said. The United States is not different in kind, only degree; our constraints were weaker.

Mr. Starr suggests that the high inflation of the late 1970s contributed to growth in health care spending, which other countries had more systems in place to control

These are all highly valuable, but they came at very high prices. This willingness to pay more has in turn made the United States an attractive market for innovation in health care.

The last third of the 20th century or so was a fertile time for expensive health care innovation

being an engine for innovation doesn’t necessarily translate into better outcomes.

international differences in rates of smoking, obesity, traffic accidents and homicides cannot explain why Americans tend to die younger.

Some have speculated that slower American life expectancy improvements are a result of a more diverse population

But Ms. Glied and Mr. Muennig found that life expectancy growth has been higher in minority groups in the United States

even accounting for motor vehicle traffic crashes, firearm-related injuries and drug poisonings, the United States has higher mortality rates than comparably wealthy countries.

The lack of universal health coverage and less safety net support for low-income populations could have something to do with it

“The most efficient way to improve population health is to focus on those at the bottom,” she said. “But we don’t do as much for them as other countries.”

The effectiveness of focusing on low-income populations is evident from large expansions of public health insurance for pregnant women and children in the 1980s. There were large reductions in child mortality associated with these expansions.

A report by RAND shows that in 1980 the United States spent 11 percent of its G.D.P. on social programs, excluding health care, while members of the European Union spent an average of about 15 percent. In 2011 the gap had widened to 16 percent versus 22 percent.

“Social underfunding probably has more long-term implications than underinvestment in medical care,” he said. For example, “if the underspending is on early childhood education — one of the key socioeconomic determinants of health — then there are long-term implications.”

Slow income growth could also play a role because poorer health is associated with lower incomes. “It’s notable that, apart from the richest of Americans, income growth stagnated starting in the late 1970s,”

History demonstrates that it is possible for the U.S. health system to perform on par with other wealthy countries

That doesn’t mean it’s a simple matter to return to international parity. A lot has changed in 40 years. What began as small gaps in performance are now yawning chasms

“For starters, we could have a lot more competition in health care. And government programs should often pay less than they do.” He added that if savings could be reaped from these approaches, and others — and reinvested in improving the welfare of lower-income Americans — we might close both the spending and longevity gaps.

While other countries worry that recent layoffs may become permanent, most German workers stayed on the payroll thanks to rapid expansion of the Kurzarbeit, a century-old government system that pays companies to retain employees on shortened hours through temporary crises. Germany was able to expand the Kurzarbeit — and much else in the way of social services — thanks to its famous frugality.

Because Germany went into the pandemic with a government surplus, it could support its locked-down economy with direct payments to families, tax cuts, business loans and other aid amounting to 55 percent of gross domestic product, or roughly four times more than the United States’s rescue package as a share of G.D.P.

It was only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous, Republican-leaning states — Arizona, Florida and Texas — and polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, that the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the virus.

Trump and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will dissipate on its own. Aides view the coronavirus task force — which includes Fauci, Birx and relevant agency heads — as a burden that has to be managed, officials said.

. An internal model by Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers predicts a looming disaster, with the number of infections projected to rise later in August and into September and October in the Midwest and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the data.

As the nation confronts a once­in-a-century health crisis that has killed at least 158,000 people, infected nearly 5 million and devastated the economy, the atmosphere in the White House is as chaotic as at any other time in Trump’s presidency — “an unmitigated disaster,” in the words of a second former senior administration official.

“It’s extraordinary that a country that helped eradicate smallpox, promoted HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide and suppressed Ebola — we were the world’s leader in public health and medicine, and now we can’t even protect our own people from the most devastating epidemic in decades.”

Asked who was to blame for the pandemic’s dark summer turn, Pelosi said, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”“The delay, the denial . . . the hoax that it’s going to go away magically, a miracle is going to happen, we’ll be in church together by Easter, caused death,” Pelosi added.

In Trump’s White House, there is little process that guides decision-making on the pandemic. The president has been focused first and foremost on his reelection chances and reacting to the daily or hourly news cycle as opposed to making long-term strategy, with Meadows and other senior aides indulging his impulses rather than striving to impose discipline.

“He sits in the Oval Office and says, ‘Do this,’ or, ‘Do that,’ and there was always a domino blocker. It was John Bolton or H.R. McMaster on national security or John Kelly. Now there are no domino blockers.”

What’s more, with polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop for the boss. They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus.

“Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle.”

Although Fauci, Birx and other medical professionals sit on the coronavirus task force, many of the more pressing decisions lately have been made by the smaller group that huddles in the morning and mostly prioritizes politics. The cadre includes Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner and strategic communications director Alyssa Farah.

The policy process has fallen apart around Meadows, according to four White House officials, with the chief of staff fixated on preventing leaks and therefore unwilling to expand meetings to include experts or to share documents with senior staffers who had been excluded from discussions.

Luciana Borio, a director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council during the first two years of the Trump administration, decried “a response in disarray hampered by a lack of clear, consistent public health-oriented guidance to the public.

“It’s very difficult to know who to trust,” Borio said. “To expect the public to sort out the facts in a time of tremendous stress leads to inconsistent and disparate actions, and that really hurts our collective effort to fight the virus.”

What also has frustrated a number of the president’s allies and former aides is that he simply seems uninterested in asserting full leadership over the crisis, instead deferring to state leaders to make the more difficult decisions while using his presidential bully pulpit to critique their performances.

“A suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid requires a national strategy that includes standards and significant federal funding. Such a strategy is lacking right now.”

The Trump administration has resisted devising a national testing program and instead ceded the task to state governments, even as cases of infection average more than 60,000 a day and some people wait 10 days or longer for test results, delays that render the results essentially useless.

While some states have been able to largely meet the needs of their populations, the federal government is the only entity with the power to coordinate testing across state lines, push and enable manufacturers to increase production of test kits and supplies, surge those supplies as needed and ensure fair payment.

Without federal coordination, states, businesses, hospitals — and soon schools and universities — find themselves competing with each other for limited supplies, often overpaying as a result.

Despite repeated calls to invoke the Defense Production Act to help resolve testing-supply shortages, the administration has resisted doing so. Trump and several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely seen as a federal failure.

“Other countries have taken this virus seriously, trusted their public health officials and scientists, and now they’ve flattened the curve,” he said. “Meanwhile, our situation gets worse and worse every day and some Americans think, ‘Oh, that’s just the way it is.’ But that isn’t how it has to be.

He’s just not oriented towards things that even in the short term look like they’re involving something that’s hard or negative or that involves sacrifice or pain,” a former senior administration official explained. “He is always anxious to get to a place of touting achievements and being the messenger for good news.”

Rather than provide housing for the homeless, cities offer showers, day care centers and bag checks.

We have decided to live with the fact that some of our fellow Americans will die on the streets.

“There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,” Leilani Farha, then the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, said after a 2018 visit to Northern California.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve done outreach on every continent,” Dame Louise Casey, who directed homeless policy for several British prime ministers, said after touring homeless encampments in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other American cities.

almost 40 percent of workers in households making less than $40,000 a year have lost work. Women in Need NYC, which runs shelters, warned this week that New York faces a “mass increase” in homelessness

Countries confronting homelessness with greater success than the United States, including Finland and Japan, begin by treating housing as a human right

the first law of real estate applies to homelessness, too: Location, location, location. The nation’s homeless population is concentrated in New York, the cities of coastal California and a few other islands of prosperity.

Well-educated, well-paid professionals have flocked to those places, driving up housing prices. And crucially, those cities and their suburbs have made it virtually impossible to build enough housing to keep up.

The government calculates $600 is the most a family living at the poverty line can afford to pay in monthly rent while still having enough money for food, health care and other needs. From 1990 to 2017, the number of housing units available below that price shrank by four million.

While there are roughly 80,000 homeless people in New York on any given night, more than 800,000 New Yorkers — more than 10 times as many people — are scraping by, spending more than half their income on rent.

According to one analysis, a $100 increase in the average monthly rent in a large metro area is associated with a 15 percent increase in homelessness.

In 2018, eight out of every 10,000 Michigan residents were homeless. In California, it was 33 per 10,000. In New York, it was 46 per 10,000.

in recent decades, wealth and homelessness have both increased — a stark illustration of the inequalities that pervade American life.

Having failed to address homelessness during the longest economic expansion in American history, the nation now faces a greater challenge under more difficult circumstances

The federal government already provides housing vouchers to help some lower-income families. The families pay 30 percent of their monthly income toward rent; the government pays the rest. But instead of giving vouchers to every needy family, the government imposes an arbitrary cap. Three in four eligible families don’t get vouchers.

The program costs about $19 billion a year. Vouchers for all eligible households would cost another $41 billion a year

Where to get the money? Well, the government annually provides more than $70 billion in tax breaks to homeowners, including a deduction for mortgage interest payments and a free pass on some capital gains from home sales. Let’s end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.

Without a significant expansion in the supply of housing, adding vouchers would be like adding players to a game of musical chairs without increasing the number of chairs.

Market-rate construction can help: More housing would slow the upward march of housing prices. New York and San Francisco are the nation’s most tightly regulated markets for housing construction,

Tokyo, often cited as an international model for its permissive development policies, has expanded its supply of homes by roughly 2 percent a year in recent years, while New York’s housing supply has expanded by roughly 0.5 percent a year. Over the last two decades, housing prices in Tokyo held steady as New York prices soared.

In California, for example, construction of a five-story apartment building that meets minimum standards costs an average of $425,000 per unit,

Without public aid, the apartments would need to be rented for several times more than the $600 a month affordable to a family living at the poverty line.

Proposals for a big increase in affordable housing construction inevitably call to mind the troubled public housing projects of the mid-20th century. They offer one clear lesson: Avoid housing that concentrates poverty

there is a solution — to build subsidized housing as part of mixed-income developments and to spread the developments out, putting them not just in cities but also in the surrounding suburbs.

Helsinki, Finland, a city of just 600,000 people, builds about 7,000 units of mixed-income housing a year. That’s a big reason Finland is the rare European country where homelessness is in decline.

Extending this approach to the entire homeless population would be expensive. To take one example, King County, which encompasses Seattle, would need to increase annual spending on homelessness to roughly $410 million from $196 million to help each of the county’s 22,000 homeless families, according to a study by McKinsey. That’s about $19,000 per family.

Even if the cost per person were twice as high, the nation’s homeless population could be housed for $10 billion a year — less than the price of one aircraft carrier.

there is worse to come. Homelessness rises during recessions, the federal funding is temporary and state and local governments face huge drops in tax revenue.

Reframing the debate — asking what is necessary to end homelessness — is an important first step for New York and for other places that are failing this basic test of civic responsibility.

Americans must decide whether we are willing to let elementary school students spend nights in guarded parking lots

We must decide whether it’s worth spending just a little of this nation’s vast wealth to ensure that no 60-year-old woman needs to sleep on the same bench in downtown Santa Monica

In almost every state, property tax assessments were higher in areas with more black and Hispanic residents

The gap between white families and minority households remains large — 10 percent — when you combine data for Hispanic and black families

“We’ve always considered that in addition to paying your regular tax, there was a black tax that goes along with it,”

“It’s almost like it’s in the soil,” he said. “It stretches all across the board. It’s not just real estate. It’s not just housing. It’s not just food deserts. It’s not just racism on the street. It’s not just that you can’t get a cab at night. It’s everything.”

“The structure of the property tax system operates to disadvantage black Americans,” she said. “That’s how structural racism is. It’s built into the system. The property tax system itself discriminates against black Americans.”

One in five black households have reported missing a mortgage payment since mid-March, compared with about 1 in 20 white ones

Facing the accumulated disadvantages of centuries of repression and systemic racism, black Americans are likely to earn less than similar white workers in lower-paying service jobs, a dynamic that makes it more difficult to buy a home. Now, by hitting those jobs first and hardest, the coronavirus pandemic has made a bad situation worse

“During the Jim Crow era, local white officials routinely manipulated property tax assessments to overburden and punish black populations and as a hidden tax break to landowning white gentry,”

white officials going to extreme lengths to hike black taxes. In one such case in 1932, a black North Carolina resident was taxed for the value of two stray dogs that had been seen on her property.

Many county assessors intentionally overvalued black properties, sometimes in direct retaliation for black political action

As early as 1901, W.E.B. Du Bois showed that because of their unequal tax burden, black people paid more in taxes than they received in public education funds,

The fiction that “black people take services but they don’t pay taxes” remains widespread,

The values of black-owned homes tend to grow more slowly than values of white-owned ones. The white people who make up the vast majority of home buyers tend to avoid black neighborhoods, which cuts black sellers off from many potential buyers.

Given that difference in price appreciation, if an assessor assumes a black-owned home gains value as quickly as a white-owned home, the assessed value of the black-owned home will quickly outstrip its market value.

Nearby white families benefit from the opposite trend: Their homes increase in value more rapidly than their assessments, giving them an ever-growing tax break.

the appeals process illustrates how much of the property tax system functions in a way that penalizes black wealth, even as it appears neutral on its face.

While neighborhood and race are the biggest drivers of the property tax gap, the economists found others

As part of their study, the economists reviewed 3.4 million property tax appeals from Chicago and surrounding Cook County and found black homeowners were significantly less likely to appeal their property tax assessments. When they did appeal, black homeowners were less likely to win. And when they won, they earned smaller assessment reductions.

“White people feel more comfortable working within the system that was set up to make them succeed,”

“It makes sense that a black family who has been disenfranchised from these systems wouldn’t challenge it.” It is also difficult to work within the system for Latinos, many of whom do not speak English as a first language, she added.

was not taught about appealing property taxes or any of the other small strategies white homeowners have used to accumulate generational wealth.

“They feel their property taxes were being used to push them out of their places, especially when communities started gentrifying,” Avenancio-León said. It helped him see how property taxation can be used as a means of social engineering.

the duo, then working on doctorate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley, combined 118 million real estate transactions and assessments from 2005 to 2016 with maps of more than 75,000 local taxing entities — such as counties, school districts, airport authorities and utility districts.

They used the maps to sort homes into areas that faced the same property tax burdens, identified the races of homeowners using federal mortgage data, and looked at every time a dwelling was assessed and then sold in the same year. That allowed them to compare a home’s assessed value and its market value, alongside the homeowner’s race and ethnicity.

The property tax gaps are worst for low earners, but even the highest-earning black Americans pay more on average in property taxes than similarly well-off white peers living nearby.

Whether or not these gaps were caused by explicit racism, Brown said, “you should be just as outraged that this is going on, and we should find a way to fix it.”

"We're in the middle of this fourth industrial revolution," he noted. With all the changes in technology, he said, Americans are wondering, "Will there be a middle class? What will people be doing? ... There's genuine, genuine anxiety."

Biden's interview -- his first since the election that also included Harris -- underscored a complete course correction from Trump's attitude towards the virus.

There is a question, however, whether Biden's calls for national unity will resonate among people who didn't vote for him after Trump's relentless attacks on the legitimacy of his victory in the presidential election.

Biden's call to action may carry greater urgency now that the virus is taking hold in rural areas of the heartland with comparatively rudimentary health care systems, which escaped the first wave of infection that concentrated in many cities that tend to vote for Democrats.

Biden will take office amid the most extreme domestic circumstances of any president since Roosevelt, with sickness and death rampant and millions of Americans unemployed, hungry or at risk of losing their homes.

"I asked him to stay on the exact same role he's had for the past several presidents, and I asked him to be a chief medical adviser for me as well, and be part of the Covid team," Biden told Tapper

Trump has frequently mocked the wearing of masks. He is holding holiday parties inside the White House in defiance of his own government's health recommendations.

it is conceivable that one of Biden's first acts after delivering his inaugural address in 47 days will be to put his mask back on.

Biden said in the interview he had asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Trump has marginalized and insulted, to continue his current role as the nation's top infectious diseases specialist in Biden's administration and announced an effective promotion for the globally respected expert. Fauci told NBC on Friday that he immediately accepted.

More than 276,000 people have now died from coronavirus in the United States and the nation set a new record for hospitalizations on Thursday with more than 100,667 people being treated for Covid-19.

Biden emphasized that he and Fauci spoke about the fact that "you don't have to close down the economy" if Americans are following through with other safety protocols to prevent the spread of the virus.

"When Dr. Fauci says we have a vaccine that is safe, that's the moment in which I will stand before the public and say that," Biden said. People have lost faith in the ability of the vaccine to work

The President-elect said it is already clear to him from his conversations with governors across the country, as well as 50 Democratic and Republican mayors, that they will need a significant amount of money to get the vaccine where it needs to go.

"It's going to cost literally billions of dollars to get this done. We can keep schools open. We can keep businesses open. But you have to be able to get the vaccine distributed."

The President-elect noted that the Trump administration has been "cooperating with us of late" and looping them in on the plans for how they are going to deliver on the vaccine, but he said, "There's not any help getting out there."

Come Christmas time, there's going to be millions of people see their unemployment run out. So, there's a whole range of things that have to be done."

What's immediately needed is relief for people in their unemployment checks; relief for people who are going to get thrown out of their apartments after Christmas because they can't afford to pay the rent anymore; relief on mortgage payments; relief on all the things that are in the original bill the House passed," Biden said. "People are really hurting. They're scared to death."

"President-elect Biden, and his leadership and listening to scientists, believe that if we all wore our masks for 100 days, we would have a significant reduction in the transmission of the virus," said Rick Bright, a former Trump administration vaccine expert who resigned after warning the administration ignored warnings about the early spread of Covid-19.

Since the first day Biden asked her to join him on the ticket, she said he has been "very clear with me that he wants me to be the first and the last in the room" on major decisions

Biden told Tapper that his Justice Department will operate independently, and that he would not direct them on how or who to investigate: "I'm not going to be saying go prosecute A, B or C -- I'm not going to be telling them," Biden said. "That's not the role, it's not my Justice Department it's the people's Justice Department."

He said he planned to enlist Harris on whatever the most urgent need was at a given moment, much as he did for President Barack Obama as vice president.

"Whatever the most urgent need is that I'm not able to attend to, I have confidence in turning to her," Biden said, noting that was dissimilar from former Vice President Al Gore's approach, which was to handle an entire issue portfolio like the environment. "Look, there's not a single decision I've made yet about personnel or about how to proceed that I haven't discussed it with Kamala first."