The struggling Chesapeake Bay restoration effort stands to get a hefty infusion of funding from the ambitious $1.2 trillion infrastructure deal reached over the weekend in the U.S. Senate.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act calls for providing $238 million over the next five years to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program, which coordinates the state-federal restoration effort.
The Bay restoration effort is among $21 billion in environmental remediation projects that would be funded under the bill. The 2,702-page measure also includes money for physical infrastructure, such as highways, bridges, transit and rail, airports and ports, power and water systems, waterways, broadband access and electric vehicle charging stations. . . . The bipartisan infrastructure bill, which is expected to pass the Senate with the backing of Republican leaders, also slashed funding for clean energy tax credits intended to help fight climate change.
But the bill increases spending overall on environmental remediation above what Biden had proposed. It would provide funds for cleaning up abandoned mine land and Superfund sites, as well as for improving the resiliency of degraded ecosystems, such as the Great Lakes, Puget Sound and Gulf of Mexico.
The Chesapeake restoration effort also could get additional help from the bill’s proposal to boost funding nationally for water and wastewater infrastructure. Two EPA programs that provide loans to states for upgrading sewage and stormwater treatment facilities and for enhancing drinking water systems each would get an additional $14.7 billion over the next five years. That would more than double the current annual level of funding for such projects.
This is on top of an already generous helping from the ordinary budget process.
The Chesapeake Bay Program received $87.5 million for fiscal year 2021, and President Biden has proposed increasing that by $3 million for fiscal year 2022, which starts Oct. 1. The House has already approved that level of funding. The infrastructure measure, if passed, would boost that by roughly 50%, providing an additional $47.6 million a year.
I would be more sanguine about this if I didn't expect most of this to be frittered away in administration. There certainly are "infrastructure" type projects that could use the boost. Dealing with the "Conowingo Dam" problem is foremost among them. For almost a 100 years, the Conowingo Dam has been protecting the Bay by catching sediments coming down the Susquehanna River from Pennsylvania and New York. The pool behind the dam is now full, and no longer catching these sediments. However, costs for doing that dredging could be $48-267 million dollars annually, indefinitely. That pretty much eats up all the wiggle room from frittering.
An analysis of spending on Amazon following the distribution of the latest coronavirus stimulus, a massive $1.9 trillion package, suggests that people are using it to let off some steam.
The global e-commerce firm Pattern said that the biggest surges in sales were for the PlayStation 5 and a female sex toy called the “.”
Sales in the past week of Sony’s game console rose 511%, and the Rose's sales (check Amazon for the description) shot up 334%.
Alex reports a lot of "stimulus guitars" are being sold, too. If you would like a nice Paul Reed Smith guitar courtesy of the federal government, may I suggest buying one from him at his Reverb site?
Executives in the booming sex doll industry say that within a decade their dolls will be able to walk, talk and feel sensations as well as emotions.
Dolls available now can smile, moan and hold a conversation – but soon they will be ambulatory and be able to feel sensation and respond in kind.
The leading company in the “Westworld”-style humanoids, RealDoll confirmed to fans on its site that it is working on dolls that can walk on their own as well as have a more realistic voice (current dolls sound like Amazon’s Alexa).
A RealDoll representative, who goes by the pseudonym Brick Dollbanger, told the Daily Star that the next generation of AI sex robots will also have sensors in its erogenous zones that respond to human touch.
“The AI will know what you’re doing to her body and will respond accordingly,” Dollbanger said. “I predict this will be a major breakthrough in synthetic sexual companionship.”
"I do not support defunding the police," Gupta said during the hearing. "I
have in fact spent my career advocating, where it's been necessary, for
greater resources for law enforcement for things like body-worn cameras,
office wellness and safety programs, and any number of measures."
That
position is in contrast with
testimony
that Gupta provided to the committee in 2020 following the deaths of George
Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks, which took place during police
encounters. Floyd's death in particular sparked nationwide protests and calls
for police reform, marked by the left-wing movement to defund ‒ and in some
cases abolish ‒ police departments.
"While front-end systems
changes are important, it is also critical for state and local leaders to heed
calls from Black Lives Matter and Movement for Black Lives activists to
decrease police budgets and the scope, role, and responsibility of police in
our lives," Gupta wrote.
“The FAA cares as much, or more about us wearing masks as they do about the
safety of passengers and pilots on the aircraft we a re working,” he told
Berenson.
The whistleblower stressed that this is happening
throughout the entire country, affecting “every airplane for every airline in
America.”
The Biden administration is reportedly coming under legal fire over a climate
executive order
signed on Jan. 27.
A coalition of 12 states — led by Missouri
Attorney General Eric Schmitt — filed a lawsuit Monday suing the
administration over the order, claiming it has the potential to have a serious
economic impact through the expansion of federal regulatory power,
Fox Business
reported. The other state attorneys general joining the action were from
Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South
Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.
The states argue the order, titled
“Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle
the Climate Crisis,” doesn’t have the authority to issue binding numbers for
the “social cost” of greenhouse gases to be used in federal regulations, Fox
Business reported. Schmitt said the regulations will stifle manufacturing
and harm agriculture in Missouri and hundreds of thousands of workers in those
industries in his state, Fox Business reported.
“Under President
Biden’s executive order, which he didn’t have the authority to enact, these
hard-working Missourians who have lived and worked this land for generations,
could be left in the dust,” Schmitt said in a statement, the news outlet
reported.
The suit claims the impact from the $9.5 trillion “social
cost” of greenhouse gases will stretch across the nation.
“In
practice, this enormous figure will be used to justify an equally enormous
expansion of federal regulatory power that will intrude into every aspect of
Americans’ lives — from their cars, to their refrigerators and homes, to their
grocery and electric bills,” the suit states, Fox Business reported.
“It’s appalling. The White House told reporters that they wanted them to
say that this speech was uplifting and hopeful and so reporters did that or
these propaganda outlets did that, when in fact it was anything but. It was
remarkably ungracious, there was no mention of what the previous
administration did. The only thing that has really worked in this entire
coronavirus pandemic is developing the vaccine,” Hemingway continued.
She
also noted that Biden traded gratitude for the previous administration’s
efforts to facilitate and distribute a safe and effective COVID vaccine for
threats.
“There were these threats that if you didn’t do what Joe
Biden wanted, you might lock the country down again and then to pick
Independence Day as the day where he says he might allow people to gather is
just so un-American. And just, you know, Joe Biden doesn’t get to tell me
when I can have a barbecue in my backyard, and certainly not to tie that to
Independence Day,” Hemingway said. “It does feel like we’ve lost something
as a country that so many people are willing to do this type of draconian
restrictions from the government for this level of a problem. If they’re
willing to do it for this situation for this length of time, it’s a very bad
sign for the days to come.”
Georgia just reported that $1,200 just appeared in our bank account from the IRS. Are you eagerly awaiting your $600 payment (assuming you're eligible)? Want the full $2,000? Personally, the virus emergency hasn't impacted us all that much; our income hasn't changed, and we probably spent less due to less travelling. Giving us the extra money and expecting us to spend it to stimulate the economy isn't going to work. Our kids, on the other hand, have not been as lucky. One owns a small business, the other trying to go to school. I doubt either amount would cover their losses.
U.S. taxpayers no longer own any of automaker General Motors. The Treasury sold the last of its remaining 31.1 million GM shares today.
The taxpayer loss on the GM bailout finishes at $10.5 billion. The Treasury department said it recovered $39 billion from selling its GM stock, and had put $49.5 billion of taxpayer money into the GM bailout....
The administration is thrilled that they surreptitiously handed $10.5 billion (with a "b") to it's union supporters.
A friend of mine asks if he can write the stock loss off on his income taxes.
"I can only say: I'm sorry, America," he wrote. "The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time."
Huszar told "Fast Money" that the bond-buying program, which was supposed to increase credit availability to consumers and businesses, didn't do so.
"There was actually a net decrease in mortgage lending," he said. "In fact, until 2012 mortgage lending was at a 15-year low."
"Let's be honest, 50 percent of Americans don't own stock," he said. "There's a certain amount of trickle-down monetary policy involved here. And there's a real question as to whether that works compared to the huge costs that the program has."
...
"By virtue of reflating the markets, we've potentially taken the emphasis out of breaking up what is ultimately a banking cartel in the United States," he said, adding that "0.2 percent of banks control 70 percent of assets in this country."
