#shalanda

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Zeke Miller at AP, via HuffPost:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration on Monday sent Congress an urgent warning about the need to approve tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to Ukraine, saying Kyiv’s war effort to defend itself from Russia’s invasion may grind to a halt without it. In a letter to House and Senate leaders and released publicly, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned the U.S. will run out of funding to send weapons and assistance to Ukraine by the end of the year, saying that would “kneecap” Ukraine on the battlefield.

She added that the U.S. already has run out of money that it has used to prop up Ukraine’s economy, and “if Ukraine’s economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop.” “We are out of money — and nearly out of time,” she wrote. Biden has sought a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other needs, but it has faced a difficult reception on Capitol Hill, where there is growing skepticism about the magnitude of assistance for Ukraine and where even Republicans supportive of the funding are insisting on U.S.-Mexico border policy changes to halt the flow of migrants as a condition for the assistance. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House has passed a standalone assistance package for Israel, which is fighting a war with Hamas in Gaza, while the White House has maintained that all of the priorities must be met.

The White House is warning Congress that aid for Ukraine is whittling down, and if no more funding is approved, then Ukraine's efforts to defend itself from Russian invaders will be all for naught.

See Also:

Daily Kos: White House warns of impending crisis in Ukraine assistance funding

[govtshutdown]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/31/white-house-congressional-spending-government-shutdown/

It's not just the budget that's on the line, so the White House is trying to recenter the conversation. Good luck with that

[bighermie]

WATCH: 2022 Video of Budget Director Shalanda Young Claiming Joe Biden Used $1.9 Billion Border Wall Funds For "Community Consultation" Resurfaces | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila

[meandmybigmouth]

THE PERFECT POLITICAL STORM!

[lboogie1906]

Shalanda Delores Young (August 29, 1971) is a US policy advisor who is the first African American woman to serve as Director of the US Office of Management and Budget. She served as Deputy Director from March 24, 2021 - March 17, 2022, and before that as chief of staff of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee. The Senate confirmed her to this Cabinet position with bipartisan support in March 2022. Her confirmation makes her the fifth African American woman appointed to President Biden’s Cabinet.

She, a native of Baton Rouge, grew up in Clinton, Louisiana. She earned a BA from Loyola University New Orleans and an MΑ of Health Administration from Tulane University. She moved to DC, where she worked as a Presidential Management Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. She was the first African American woman to serve as chief of staff on the House Appropriations Committee and received bipartisan praise for her work in that role. She served on the committee for more than 14 years and took over as chief of staff in 2017.

She was involved in drafting proposals related to the 2018-2019 federal government shutdown and the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She was responsible for $1.3 trillion in annual appropriations legislation, disaster relief, and “important aspects of COVID-19 spending,” according to the White House.

She promotes two principles that guide the way OMB and the Biden Administration approach Federal spending. The first is to ensure that the federal government is making the right investments. As a new mother, who gave birth to her daughter in October 2021, she is interested in child care and supporting families. The second issue, she said, is fiscal responsibility. She pointed out that the Biden administration has proposed ways to fund its new spending proposals and said this is the “right fiscal and economic” approach. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #alphakappaalpha

[meret118]

The proposed rule, which the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council will publish Monday, would also institute pay transparency measures that require contractors to disclose compensation ranges in job postings.

“Relying on a candidate salary history can exacerbate pre-existing inequality in our pay structures and disproportionately impact women and workers of color,” Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters.

The regulation and proposed rule are both part of an effort for federal employers to disclose expected salary ranges in job postings and reduce pay secrecy to help workers negotiate.

[scottguy]

All the cruel cuts to regular American people proposed by the current Republican party listed.

Read it and be outraged.

[quotesfromall]

Advances are cash outlays made by a Federal entity to its employees, contractors, grantees, or others to cover a part or all of the recipients' anticipated expenses or as advance payments for the costs of goods and services the entity receives. Prepayments are payments made by a Federal entity to cover certain periodic expenses before those expenses are incurred.

Shalanda D. Young, Financial Reporting Requirements

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Barry Blitt, The New Yorker

* * * * 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 9, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

“Show me your budget,” President Joe Biden is fond of saying, “[and] I’ll tell you what you value.” Today, Biden introduced his 2024 budget at the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Biden’s 182-page, $6.9 trillion budget plan advances a vision of the United States based on the idea that the government should invest in workers, families, and infrastructure to increase the purchasing power of those on the “demand side” of the economy. It offers a stark contrast to the theory of the Republicans since the 1980s, that the government should cut taxes and slash government spending to free up capital for those at the top of the economy—on the “supply side”—with the idea they will use that money to invest in new business that will then hire more workers.

So-called supply-side economics was championed as a plan that would enable everyone, from workers to financiers, to thrive together as the economy boomed, but it never produced the kind of growth its promoters promised. Instead, when combined with dramatically increased defense spending, it exploded deficits and added dramatically to the national debt.

At the same time, wealth moved upward dramatically. A 2020 Rand Corporation study found that from 1975 to 2018, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. The Biden administration has set out to address this inequity by reimposing the rules that used to prevent corporations and the wealthiest Americans from gaming the system, and by making it easier for working men and women to make ends meet.

So far, Biden’s policies have created record numbers of jobs and kept unemployment numbers low, and today’s budget builds on those policies. Director of the Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young told reporters that the budget plan was based on four values: “lowering costs for families, protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare, investing in America, and reducing the deficit by ensuring that the wealthiest in this country and big corporations begin to pay their fair share, and cutting wasteful spending on Big Pharma, Big Oil, and other special interests.” And, she added, “It does all of that while ensuring that no one earning less than $400,000 per year will pay a penny more in new taxes.”

Biden has called for rolling back Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cut, bringing the corporate rate up from 21% to 28% (it was 35% before the 2017 cuts). Biden proposed to raise the tax on capital gains for people earning at least $1 million a year from 20% to 39.6%. He wants a 25% minimum income tax rate for households worth at least $100 million, that is, the wealthiest 0.01% of taxpayers, who currently pay a rate of 8%. The plan calls for reversing the Trump tax for those making more than $400,000 a year, putting the top income tax rate to 39% from 37%. Other increases are all in this same vein: increasing revenue from the wealthiest Americans.

Biden’s budget document is not just about funding the government; it is a signal of the principles he might carry into the 2024 presidential contest. It offers Biden’s own blueprint for improving the lives of children, their caregivers, and other ordinary Americans, then undercuts Republican complaints about such investments by emphasizing that Biden’s plan—unlike anything the Republicans have offered—will cut the deficit over the next decade.

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promptly tweeted that Biden’s budget is “completely unserious. He proposes trillions in new taxes that you and your family will pay directly or through higher costs. Mr. President: Washington has a spending problem, NOT a revenue problem.”

But McCarthy and the Republicans have not been able to agree on any of the cuts they claim they want to make, and so have not released a budget of their own. Biden has repeatedly asked them for one. He said today: “I want to make it clear. I'm ready to meet with the Speaker anytime—tomorrow, if he has his budget. Lay it down. Tell me what you want to do. I'll show you what I want to do. See what we can agree on. What we don’t agree on, let’s see what we—we vote on.”

Instead of offering a budget plan, Republicans appear to be trying desperately to reassert control over the national political narrative, shoring up the virtual political reality that has given them such power even as it continues to take hits.

A number of reporters, including Nicholas Riccardi and David Bauder of the Associated Press and Nicholas Confessore and Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, are using documents from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against the Fox News Network to show how both Trump and then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) appealed directly to Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch for political support on the Fox News Channel (FNC). Murdoch passed the requests on to FNC executives, and FNC hosts promptly began to do as they were asked.

This pipeline from the Republican Party to the FNC included support for Trump’s tax cuts (“Once they pass this bill we must tell our viewers again and again what they will get,” Murdoch wrote), private sharing of Biden’s 2020 ads with Trump’s campaign, and attacks on Biden. (“Just made sure Fox banging on about these issues,” Murdoch advised. “If the audience talks the theme will spread.”) That support included pumping up Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in his own race (“Could Sean say something supportive? We can’t lose the Senate if at all possible,” Murdoch wrote).

But by 2020 they had created an audience that depended on that narrative, and when they threatened to abandon FNC if it told the truth that Biden won the 2020 election, FNC hosts pushed the lie that Trump won out of fear they would lose their viewers.

The ecosystem that established a virtual political reality is now increasingly under assault.

Today, Bryon M. Large, presiding disciplinary judge of the Colorado Supreme Court, publicly censured Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis for misconduct after she “repeatedly made misrepresentations on national television and on Twitter, undermining the American public’s confidence in the 2020 presidential election.”

Ellis agreed that she had “made…misrepresentations while serving as counsel for the Trump campaign and personal counsel to President Trump.” Top among them was her insistence that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, including her statements that “we know the election was stolen from President Trump and we can prove that,” “the election was stolen and Trump won by a landslide,” and so on.

In Congress, Republicans are holding hearings designed to shore up their narrative, but they are not delivering the smooth sound bites the party needs. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), held another hearing today, this one focused on the idea that the government pressured Twitter to suppress stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

But Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), the ranking Democratic member of the committee, immediately noted that the Republicans would be using material for the hearing that they had not shared with the Democrats, and Jordan got flustered and angry. Then Aaron Blake of the Washington Post fact checked Jordan’s allegations and noted that his theory that the FBI was secretly strategizing to protect Hunter Biden—during Trump’s administration—ignored key events and that two key witnesses had recently contradicted Jordan’s theory in sworn testimony.  

Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), chair of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, said yesterday he is leading an investigation into the last congress’s House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, as well as on security failures around that event. That investigation, too, might not go well for the Republicans. The January 6th Committee asked Loudermilk to come talk to the committee members voluntarily about a tour he gave of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021. He refused. Video showed that a man from that tour marched on the Capitol the next day, saying, “There’s no escape, Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler. We’re coming for you.”

Finally, today, Republican reputations took a hit when a jury found Larry Householder, the Republican former speaker of the Ohio House, and Matt Borges, the former leader of the Ohio Republican Party, guilty of racketeering conspiracy. In 2017, FirstEnergy Corporation began to funnel $61 million to Householder through dark money groups to enable him to get allies elected and take power. Once in charge, with the help of Borges—who was then a lobbyist—he got a $1.3 billion law through the House to bail the failing company out. Federal prosecutors say it is the largest corruption case in state history.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[meandmybigmouth]

FAIR? THIS IS FAIR?

[meandmybigmouth]

MAGA AND THE GOP AGENDA MATH!

AMERICA! THE LAND OF SACRIFICIAL LAMBS TO THE RICH!

[dankusner]

CONGRESS Debt avoidance a recurring theme

A proposed bipartisan commission to address the issue appears dead

WASHINGTON — For Mike Johnson it was effectively a Day 1 priority. It’s well past time, the newly elected House speaker said in October, to establish a bipartisan commission to tackle the federal government’s growing $34.6 trillion in debt. “The consequences if we don’t act now are unbearable,” he said, echoing warnings from his predecessor and other House Republicans. More than six months later, the proposal appears all but dead, extinguished by vocal opposition from both the right and the left. The collapse underscores an unyielding dynamic in Washington, with lawmakers in both parties loath to consider the unpopular tradeoffs that would be necessary to stem the nation’s swelling tide of red ink — particularly in an election year. Facing the reality that any fiscal commission would almost certainly suggest that Americans pay more or get less from their government, lawmakers have time and again done what they do so well: punt the problem to the next Congress. And they seem poised to do so again. Many Democrats and left-leaning advocacy groups oppose the commission because they fear it would recommend cuts to Social Security benefits. Some Republicans and right-leaning groups are against it as well, fearing the panel would recommend tax increases. They’ve labeled the commission a “tax trap.” “I’m disappointed that we haven’t got as much momentum as I thought we would,” said Rep. Jodey Arrington, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., sponsor of the debt commission bill in the Senate, was even more pessimistic. “No one seems to care,” Manchin said. “It’s a shame, $34.6 trillion in debt. No one cares about it.” The debt commission legislation, modeled after previous efforts, would create a 16-member panel to recommend steps that could be taken to balance the federal budget at the earliest reasonable date and improve the long-term fiscal health of Medicare and Social Security. The commission would have 16 members — 12 from Congress, evenly divided by party, and four outside experts without voting power. The GOP-controlled House Budget Committee advanced the bill in a 22-12 vote. The fiscal realities that would face any commission are well documented and center to a large extent on Social Security and Medicare, which consume an ever-growing share of the federal budget, and interest payments on the nation’s debt. For Social Security, the reserves for the The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund will run out in 2033. At that point, the program will have enough tax revenue coming in to pay about 79% of scheduled benefits. For Medicare, the trust fund covering inpatient hospital stays, hospice care and stays at skilled nursing facilities has sufficient funds to pay full benefits until 2036. At that point, 11% spending cuts would be required to match incoming revenue. Supporters of a new debt panel noted that they modeled their bill on something that has succeeded in the past — commissions to consolidate the nation’s military bases. Still, Democratic lawmakers and the White House are skeptical of forming a debt commission. Shalanda Young, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told lawmakers in a recent hearing that the administration was concerned that the one thing on the table for the commission would be Social Security benefit cuts, not asking high-income Americans to pay higher taxes. “It will be borne on the backs of those who paid into the system and rely on this program to retire in peace,” Young said.