View this email in your browser

Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Jan. 11, 2021

Biden's New Relief Package

The president-elect has choices to make out of the gate

 

President-elect Biden in Wilmington, Delaware on Sunday. (Susan Walsh/AP
Photo)

The End of Unsanitized?

Well, yes. Starting on Inauguration Day, January 20, we are going to
retire Unsanitized and begin First 100, a daily report on the opening
months of the new Biden administration.

There are several reasons for this. First, there isn't a lot of
daylight at this point between reporting on the pandemic and reporting
on the early days of the Biden term. His political fortunes are tied to
COVID response, on a public health and economic level, and he's well
aware of that. To an unusual degree, very little of an articulated,
prioritized agenda has been laid out or even speculated upon, separate
from the immediate crisis. There's a plan to distribute the vaccine
and a plan to provide some measure of relief for those struggling. There
isn't much else there. So First 100 will cover very similar territory
as Unsanitized, from the perspective of the new administration.

Second, the path of the virus and the endgame is now clear, and tied up
tightly with public policy. There's the race between the vaccine
rollout and the more transmissible variants of the disease; there's
the race between mass immunization and dwindling economic support.
Biden's decisions will determine how that proceeds, and what path
we'll find ourselves on by the summer and fall.

And finally, where other facets of executive branch policy move into the
foreground, the shift enables me to cover them, free from the relentless
lens of the pandemic. We started Unsanitized on the belief that it was a
once-in-a-lifetime story that demanded full attention. Though far too
many have forgotten, it's still dictating our social and economic
lives. But this is also a moment of transition, and how the Biden team
will approach a host of policies in addition to the pandemic will have
just as critical an impact. First 100 allows me to spread my wings and
delve into those areas.

Unsanitized, by its final edition, will have run roughly 245 editions,
with virtually no break since last March. It was an honor to explain the
impact of the pandemic every day, to write a first draft of history.
I'll take the same care with First 100 through Thursday, April
29-the 100th day of the Biden presidency.

Support Independent, Fact-Checked Journalism

Speaking of Joe Biden

The Senate victories in Georgia have opened up possibilities for Biden,
particularly on additional COVID relief. On Friday he promised rapid
action

on what would be a third relief bill. Even before the plan comes
out-and that's been promised this week
-Biden
said he would use executive action to continue freezing student loan
payments
,
though he stopped short of using his own authority to cancel student
debt. (He said he would ask Congress to cancel the first $10,000 of
borrowers' loan obligations; that might be part of the relief
package.)  

The very good news here is that Biden is announcing very early that the
price tag would be in the "trillions
"
of dollars and he doesn't particularly care about the deficit
implications. "It is necessary to spend money now," Biden said.
"With conditions like the crisis today, especially with such low
interest rates, taking immediate action-even with deficit
financing-is going to help the economy." Biden is simply not taking
the bait out of the austerity trap.

So what's going to be in this package? First and foremost there are
the $2,000 checks. Biden has made a point of continuing the populist
messaging on
the checks from the Georgia runoffs, that $600 was too small. He
recognizes that something 80 percent of the country or more will qualify
for will simply overshadow the rest of the package, and he's leading
with it.

**Read all of our Unsanitized reports here**

Click to Support The American Prospect

I'm aware of Joe Manchin rejecting the idea
of $2,000
checks, though his office walked that back pretty quickly and on Sunday
said he prefers targeting

without dismissing the concept entirely. The pound of flesh Manchin may
extract is more means testing, but Biden wouldn't be leading with this
very popular measure if it couldn't pass.

Other parts of this package likely include extending the unemployment
insurance boosts beyond March, more money for the vaccine rollout, and
state and local aid, the major missing piece on the fiscal side from the
last bill. There's also likely to be more rental assistance, small
business help, and funding to allow schools to reopen.

This is a broad package, not just an "immediate" run of checks, as
Biden promised in Georgia. It'll take some time. The inclusion of
state and local aid in particular, meanwhile, virtually ensures that the
bill would have to be carried out through budget reconciliation
,
the process by which the Senate can pass budget-related items with a
simple majority. Everything in this package would be almost certain to
qualify. Senate Republicans are unlikely to support anything with state
and local funding in enough numbers to avoid the filibuster.

We Depend on Your Donations

It's likely that Biden gets three budget reconciliation bills before
the 2022 midterms. There's one available per fiscal year, and none
have been used for the current one. The plan that appears to be taking
shape

is: a COVID relief bill for Fiscal Year 2021, a broad infrastructure
package funded through tax hikes on the rich for FY 2022, and a package
to be named later for FY 2023.

The administration should be concerned that the complexities of budget
reconciliation, and their impulse to at least test regular order and
give Republicans a chance to pass another relief package, will bog down
what was a signature campaign promise. It's my belief that $2,000
checks, an 80-20 issue in the country, has a super-majority in Congress.
It could probably carry upon it some things, like vaccine relief, but
not everything, and particularly not municipal funding.

The checks can serve as a trust-building exercise. A significant portion
of the left is skeptical that the Biden team is committed to making a
difference in the lives of ordinary people. Checks have become somewhat
totemic in this sense, and can be used to dispel that skepticism.
Reconciliation is always available later if Republicans decide to be on
the wrong side of an 80-20 issue. Plus, you want to save the
reconciliation bills to maximize what can pass on a simple majority. (If
we didn't have a filibuster we could just have the novel concept of
majority rule, but some Democratic Senators would rather preen than
enable the popular will.)

We'll see what's in the package later in the week.

Number of Vaccines Given

8.02 million
,
with a total of 1.8 million since last checking in on Friday. The
percentage of allocated shots administered has jumped to 36 percent.
West Virginia is up to 72 percent of its supply, and one major reason is
that it rejected the federal plan to partner with CVS and Walgreens to
vaccinate long-term care facilities. Instead the state relied on
independent pharmacies

with existing relationships with nursing homes, and they're running
laps around the big chains. North Dakota, another state with significant
local pharmacy ownership
,
is also doing well, and Oklahoma just stripped CVS

of responsibility for vaccines at veteran's centers. The fifty layers
of corporate middlemen appear to be the problem for the chains, relative
to the flexibility of local practitioners.

Monopolies create hidden harms beyond price: who wrote a book about that
?

We Can't Do This Without You

Today I Learned

* There's just no question that the Capitol Riot was a mass
super-spreader event
.
(CNBC)

* Members of Congress were certainly exposed
,
and even though most have been vaccinated they can still transmit.
Making the inauguration an incredibly dangerous event that probably
shouldn't be held. (Washington Post)

* Andrew Cuomo has been a huge impediment

to the vaccine rollout. (Jacobin)

* New York City's vaccination bureaucracy looks counter-productive
.
(Comptroller Scott Stringer on Twitter)

* Dodger Stadium will be transformed into a mass vaccination site
.
(Los Angeles Times)

* States need to be much more flexible

about who gets the vaccine, on the principle that anybody getting it
helps everybody. (New York Times)

* With all the plaudits to Israel about the quick vaccination of their
citizens, it's worth pointing out that their denial of shots to
Palestinians

is immoral. (Wall Street Journal)

**Click the social links below to share this newsletter**

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Copyright (C) 2021 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States