As a case manager for a nonprofit that serves older adults, veterans and adults with disabilities in Texas, I’ve seen social services move online as a way to more efficiently get assistance to people without exposing them to the virus. And yet, this only exacerbates the digital divide. Many of my clients don’t even have […]
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“This would be the same experience for taxpayers if the filing season opened in late January,” the agency said. By law, the agency cannot issue refunds to people claiming the credit until after mid-February, as part of anti-fraud efforts. Updated Jan. 23, 2021, 11:43 a.m. ET The I.R.S. said taxpayers seeking prompt refunds should file […]
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WASHINGTON — President Biden will issue an executive order on Friday aimed at steering additional federal aid to families struggling to afford food amid the pandemic and at helping workers stay safe on the job. Mr. Biden, who has vowed to use the power of the presidency to help mitigate economic fallout from the pandemic, […]
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Still, there are some Republicans with principles. Unfortunately, they’ll be a problem, too. Mitt Romney deserves a lot of credit for standing up to the authoritarians who dominate his party. He was the only Republican senator who voted to convict Donald Trump after the late-2019 impeachment; he congratulated Biden and Harris almost as soon as […]
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To give Manchin his due, a more high-minded fear — shared by others in his caucus — is that we have just come through a long, ugly period of partisan norm-breaking. Surely the answer to Trump’s relentless assaults on decorum, to Mitch McConnell’s rewriting of Senate rules, is a return to the comity they cast […]
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All presidents come into office vowing to rapidly put into effect an ambitious agenda. But for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the raging coronavirus pandemic and the economic pain it is causing mean many things must get done quickly if he wants to get the economy going. In a speech Thursday on his $1.9 trillion spending […]
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“What that signals to me is that the new administration understands the magnitude of the problem.” — C. Nicole Mason, president and chief executive of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research In Her Words is available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on […]
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WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., racing against a surge in coronavirus cases and the emergence of a new variant that could worsen the crisis, is planning a vaccination offensive that calls for greatly expanding access to the vaccine while using a wartime law to increase production. In a speech on Friday in Wilmington, […]
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Here we go again. For the second time in 12 years a newly elected Democratic president is inheriting an economy in deep distress. And while it’s hard to focus on such things after last week’s Trumpist putsch, a lot depends on whether Joe Biden’s plan to deal with our economic woes is effective. The narrow […]
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Here’s what you need to know: Credit…Flo The developer behind Flo, a period- and fertility-tracking app used by more than 100 million women, on Wednesday settled federal charges that it had misled users about its data-handling practices by sharing their intimate health details with Facebook and Google. In its privacy policies, Flo had repeatedly promised […]
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American arts institutions ought not to give up their independence for crumbs. For now, especially as the pandemic subsides, the more urgent task is to encourage a richer cultural offering at the local level. A nimbler and more practicable solution to do that is with a White House Office for Culture, akin to the National […]
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Unprofitable and Out of Luck Sole proprietorships are the most common business structure in America, accounting for around 26 million businesses, according to the latest I.R.S. data. Many are sidelines — workers who pick up an occasional freelance project or collect royalties report it on their taxes as business income — but millions of people […]
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She did not directly mention the Paycheck Protection Program — the largest lending program by far in the agency’s nearly 70-year history — but she acknowledged the turmoil many companies are experiencing. “So many small businesses across the country have been devastated by the pandemic and economic crisis,” Ms. Guzman said. “A disproportionate impact has […]
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New claims for unemployment benefits remained high last week, the government reported on Thursday, the latest evidence that the pandemic-racked economy still has a lot of lost ground to make up in the new year. The labor market has improved since the coronavirus pandemic first pummeled the economy. But of the more than 22 million […]
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WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. denounced the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday as the violent expression of President Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat, calling it “an assault on the citadel of liberty” and saying the president had stoked the mob with his brazen and false claims that the 2020 election had […]
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The other health systems that filed the most lawsuits last year echoed that sentiment, emphasizing that they have not sued any coronavirus patients. St. Peter’s Health Partners, which runs a chain of hospitals in the Albany area and filed about 1,000 lawsuits last year, and Oneida Health, a health care system near Syracuse that filed […]
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The coronavirus vaccine may end the pandemic at some point, but for now its slow rollout is straining relations between the federal government and states and cities, and is adding one more huge challenge for overstressed health departments. In a tweet on Friday, President Trump said the states were to blame for the slow start […]
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The homes of Senator Mitch McConnell and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the two most powerful members of Congress, have been reported vandalized, days after the contentious passage of a stimulus bill that has been criticized as inadequate by a broad coalition ranging from progressive activists to President Trump. In a statement on Saturday, Mr. McConnell, Republican […]
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But when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in late September, Republicans were determined to quickly fill her seat before an election that could cost Mr. Trump the presidency, or them their Senate majority — or both. Abandoning the position that had led them in 2016 to block President Barack Obama from filling a vacancy months […]
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CLEVELAND — When evening arrives, Darryl Brazil sits on his porch and watches the world fall apart. His neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland has held on through years of hard times. It was rough around the edges in parts, but his block was quiet, or at least it used to be. Now, wild […]
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And while running big deficits might have once stoked fears about inflation — as too many dollars chased too few goods — price gains have been too low for comfort for years. Add to that the emergency needs prompted by the pandemic, and even the Fed’s leader, who had long warned about the nation’s debt […]
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The central, befuddling economic reality of the United States at the close of 2020 is that everything is terrible in the world, while everything is wonderful in the financial markets. It’s a macabre spectacle. Asset prices keep reaching new, extraordinary highs, when around 3,000 people a day are dying of coronavirus and 800,000 people a […]
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Bank fees are adding extra pain to some Americans’ pandemic-induced woes. In 2019, according to the Center for Responsible Lending, big banks collected more than $11 billion in overdraft fees from their customers, with 9 percent of customers paying more than 80 percent of the fees. For the first nine months of 2020, customers of […]
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If 2019 was the Year of Trump, then 2020 was the Year of Covid-19 and Trump. Only the most devastating pandemic in a century could have bumped our loudmouthed president into second place. That is, until Joe Biden also took him down a peg, in a free and fair election with an unambiguous result — […]
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“The more you hit the stimulus button, the less impact you see,” said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco. And the hardest hit sectors — dining, entertainment and travel — are unlikely to see much of a boost now, since consumers are wary of going out or live in […]
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But the majority of Senate Republicans still remain opposed to the plan. “What we ought to be doing is focusing on the $900 billion that we’ve already approved and that Secretary Mnuchin helped us negotiate,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas said. “Instead of taking appropriate credit for those good things, focusing on” the issue of […]
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The $900 billion pandemic relief package that President Trump belatedly signed Sunday night gained steam on Monday as an issue in the Georgia Senate runoffs, with the two Republican incumbents seeking to ride the tailwinds of the stimulus bill and claim credit for helping to bring aid to the state. “Help is on the way,” […]
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Maybe it was the visuals that did it. It’s hard to know what aspects of reality make it into Donald Trump’s ever-shrinking bubble — and I’m happy to say that after Jan. 20 we won’t have to care about what goes on in his not-at-all beautiful mind — but it’s possible that he became aware […]
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WASHINGTON — As an exercise in raw presidential power, it was a flop. As a political tactic, it backfired. And as a coda to his final weeks in office, President Trump’s threat to veto a $900 billion Covid relief and government funding bill merely underscored his tumultuous tenure in the Oval Office. For five days, […]
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In addition to the one-time payments of $600, the stimulus legislation would provide a $300 a week subsidy to all workers receiving unemployment benefits. It would also renew two programs created by the CARES Act in March: Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, which provides benefits to workers who have exhausted their state aid, and Pandemic Unemployment […]
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Hicham Oumlil, a self-employed fashion designer in Brooklyn, said that he and his wife, a furloughed interior designer, are both set to lose nearly $600 a week, leaving the couple and their 7-year-old son without a source of income. Having paid less than half of his rent each month for the past three months, Mr. […]
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