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President Joe Biden's United States of America

W. K. Lis said:
Nice when the USA has its own vaccine manufacturing companies within the USA. Unlike Canada, after the Conservatives sold off its vaccine manufacturers because it would be cheaper for us versus getting vaccine sooner.
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We don’t know if the previous vaccine manufacturing capacity would have been able to make any of these covid vaccines.
 
Not to be laid on Mr. Biden's doorstep, but as general U.S. Political news, placed here.

Senator Chuck Schumer has stalled reforms to U.S. Flood Insurance.

We're all seen repeated floods in the U.S., often in the same exact spot, more than once, and wondered why on earth anyone would build in a floodplain or within easy range of an Oceanic storm surge............

The most common answer, after 'its legal', is that the U.S. Federal government has subsidized people's flood insurance who live in high-risk areas.

So finally, this year, FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency) moved to reform that program, raising premiums on higher risk properties to reflect their actual risk, and then lower premiums for those on lower risk properties.

As a matter of law, FEMA is already precluded for raising anyone's premium by more than 18% in a single year. So while some people might seen their insurance bill quadruple over time, it would be phased in over 10 years or more.

But Mr. Schumer, apparently in a move to protect extremely affluent homeowners who have oceanside property, has moved to stall the reform.

Link here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/...type=Homepage&section=Climate and Environment

Why would people be cynical about politics? Sigh.
 
Here's an incredible story:


Shortly after the Atlanta spa shootings, on March 17, 2021, a man beat up a 76-year-old Asian grandmother on Market Street in San Francisco, only for her to defend herself with a wooden stick she found nearby and beat up the man who beat her up. She lost an eye in the ordeal, but the man who beat her up had his just deserts and had worse injuries than she did.

You can fund her here:

www.gofundme.com

Help my grandmother recover from this trauma, organized by John Chen

Hi everyone, I am fundraising for my grandmother that was racially attacked tod… John Chen needs your support for Help my grandmother recover from this trauma
www.gofundme.com www.gofundme.com
 
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The rise in Asian hate crimes all over the world is absolutely sickening.

Not just the US. Canada and the UK has seen a rise in Asian hate crime as-well .

www.vice.com

This Is What Anti-Asian Hate Looks Like in the UK

Racism against East and South East Asian people is on the rise here, too.
www.vice.com www.vice.com


www.ctvnews.ca

New report details 'disturbing rise' in anti-Asian hate crimes in Canada

There has been a disturbing surge in anti-Asian hate in Canada during the pandemic, including physical assaults against children and elderly people being spat on, according to a new report.
www.ctvnews.ca www.ctvnews.ca



https://twitter.com/x/status/1373924984129785856

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/loc...o-anti-asian-violence-protest-police/2956585/
 
Subject to getting it through Congress; it would appear that Biden is set to propose/implement a 2 Trillion dollar infrastructure package, over 8 years. It would be financed by raising the US Corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% (this was the rate pre-Trump).

 
Biden Administration is musing about a Global Minimum Corporate Tax.

The column discussing it here, by John Ibbitson is derisive and obtuse, but that's standard for his work, still an interesting idea.

www.theglobeandmail.com

Opinion: Global minimum corporate tax: making the world safe for U.S. tax increases

Why would other countries enlist in Janet Yellen’s effort to set up a global tax cartel?
www.theglobeandmail.com www.theglobeandmail.com

Column is not currently paywalled.
 
Meanwhile...

America’s gun problem, explained​


The public and research support gun control. Here’s how it could help — and why it doesn’t pass.

From link.

On Thursday, it happened again: a mass shooting in America. This time, a gunman killed eight people at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis.

Already, the shooting has led to demands for action. “10 Republican Senators — including Indiana’s @SenToddYoung & @SenatorBraun — decide whether we are going to do something about this deadly epidemic or continue to do nothing and live with this death every damn day.” the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence tweeted.

But if this plays out like the aftermath of past mass shootings, from Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to Las Vegas in 2017, the chances of Congress taking major action on guns is very low.

This has become an American routine: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence starts up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues to experience levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress; nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.

So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it’s important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States but also America’s unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
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1) America’s gun problem is unique​

No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times the rate of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to 2012 United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
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To understand why that is, there’s another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the 2018 Small Arms Survey.
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Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.

That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population, as surveys from the Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey suggest.
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These three basic facts demonstrate America’s unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
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2) More guns mean more gun deaths​

The research on this is overwhelmingly clear: No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths...

And it’s clear when you look at the data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) across developed nations. Data compiled in 2018 from GunPolicy.org shows the United States is an extreme outlier in both categories.
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Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America’s unusual levels of gun violence — particularly mental illness. But people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, had a mental illness. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” Stone concluded. Other research has backed this up.

Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, enabling them to defend themselves from a shooting.

Yet high gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.

Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process...
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