 It's Wednesday. It's 11 o'clock. It is March the 10th, 2021. I'm Tim Apachele, your host, and welcome to What Now, America. The title of the show today is 1.9 trillion COVID relief passed. Will it help? And I'm going to go right to our guests on this very, very topic. I'd like to welcome Jay Fidel, Stephanie Dalton, and Winston Welch. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Tim. Jay, about 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes ago, the house passed the 1.9 trillion dollar COVID bill. It now goes to President Biden for signature. This is a huge financial package that they basically could not get any Republican support on both in the House and in the Senate. So much for bipartisanship negotiations and agreements. That didn't happen. But here we are with this huge, huge COVID relief package. And I guess I'll go to the question is, is it really going to hit the target market that it was intended to help? Now, we know that if you're going to get $1,400 as an individual, your wage level should not exceed $75,000. But if you look at a wage of $75,000, particularly in the red states, in the rural areas, that's not bad wage. That's pretty good. And so my question is, is this 1.9 trillion, a little too generous? I have to go out to the mailbox and wait for my check. Not at all clear it's coming. And there's $150,000 joint filing return, you get that too. And there's rules around it. But you're right to raise the question, because maybe there's some people who really don't need it. And whether your income is a good a good conditional, a good parameter on whether you should get it, maybe that's not right, because some people who have a lot of income in the tax return don't have a job, maybe they've been digging into savings, maybe it's not so good for them anymore. Anyway, they threw it on the wall. That's what happened here. And they threw it on the wall weeks and weeks ago, I guess when Joe Biden was first inaugurated. And okay, and they stuck with it. You got to give them credit. There's a lot of provisions in that bill you really wonder about it. I mean, Indian reservations, really, they're trying to correct every ill that you could ever imagine in the country. And a lot of it got by the screening process. And it's still there. They threw it on the wall and a lot of it stuck. Well, is this a result because they knew they're going to have to go through a reconciliation process, and they could do it that way and basically stoke it up with all sorts of things they normally wouldn't get to passage. Yeah, I mean, the idea was relief from COVID make the whole country, you know, better, better economic form. And I think it will do that. But for a while, you know, what strikes me, I wonder how you guys feel about this is, okay, $1,400. That's it. That's it. Well, let's now let's back up a little. You know, if you're a family of four, and you have two children under the age of seven, each child is going to be $3,600. So you had 3,600 and 3,600 plus another 1,400 plus the spouse of 1,400. That's quite a bit of income into one family of the United States. Andrew, what was his name? Andrew Wang would say, Yang would say, how about repeating that? How about doing some kind of thing where it happens every other week or every month for six months for a year? Sort of a guaranteed income, if you will, to keep things going. And I really don't like the idea of giving out lump sums like that, because people, you know, can spend it instantly. How long is it take you to spend a lump sum? Not very long. And if they have no reserves now, for whatever reason, they're not going to reserve much of that. So it's going to be spent and gone. I mean, I'm not saying it's a bad idea. It certainly will, you know, generate a lot of cash in the economy. And that's probably good. And it's a good start for Joe Biden and the Democrats. What troubles me, and you mentioned it more than anything, is that it was completely political. And every Republican voted against it. There is no sign of collaboration here between the parties, none zero. And the next thing that has to happen is we get into the Voting Rights Act, which is really important for the long term. And we're going to run into that same, you know, partisan vote. And I'm really sad about that, because I don't think that's going to pass. You can't do reconciliation on that or on so many other things that he has lined up in his pipeline. So I think, you know, this actually may be it. I mean, I'd be interested in how you guys feel about the other bills in the pipeline. Is he going to get them through on a bipartisan basis? The answer is probably no. Why? Because they would vote against them as a matter of principle. They want to make them look bad. They'll never vote for any initiative, good, bad or otherwise. Well, as I said in the last show, they didn't use the last reconciliation process under the Trump administration. So Joe Biden has that one. And then, of course, he just used one for the COVID passage. So he's down to one reconciliation process left in his bag of tools. But let me just... It sounds like a canasta, maybe, or a poker. It sounds like a game. You have no monopoly. Maybe you have one more choice and choose. Or if you're golfing, it's called a mulligan. You got one mulligan left. Yeah, right. Pew just came out with a poll that 70% of Americans like this COVID bill as is. Now, that might have been taken after the $15 wage was in or out. I don't know. But I think they approved what Joe Biden was doing on this effort. And 28% opposed it. So it's rare to get 70% agreement on anything in this country. It's amazing. It's registering so high for this COVID relief package. I think there's two aspects to that, Tim. One is that he's been selling it. And the Democrats have been selling it as hard as they can possibly sell it. It's the one thing they've been working on more than anything else sell the country. The other is who's going to say no to a free lunch? Who in the world is going to say no here you get all this money, money, money, money. You don't want to say no? The only people who say no for reasons that are not at all clear is Republicans. That's irrational. But most human being people are not going to say no to a free lunch. There aren't. And that goes to my question. Is the GOP senators and representatives in the house, are they risking a great deal by alienating those who really want to see this? And that means their own constituents. My answer is that, yes, some of their constituents would be wondering and scratching ahead with what happened in Congress, in the Republicans in the House and Senate. But on the other hand, remember, the fickle finger moves on. The press moves on. The news cycle moves on. And they figured there's plenty of time for the public who got irritated to forget all about that. And it would be up to Joe Biden and the Democrats to remind them over and over and over again, especially at the next election. All right. Thank you. Hey, Winston, they took out that very controversial $15 per hour minimum wage out of this COVID relief package. Joe Manson probably had a big say in that. Do you think that was a good move or a bad move not to press further, to either retain it or was it a wise idea to remove it? Oh, I mean, he's the leader of the Democratic Party now. He's New York. He's the control mechanism or the pain point. So what Joe wants is going to get. He did say, I think I read something that he said he was open to something about the filibuster. I might have read that wrong, but I thought that there was probably the screws of being put on him on the other side as well saying, dude, look, are you in our party or not? Because at some point, like Jay was saying, there was no Republicans voted for this. And as this moves down the road, what else is going to be voting rights actor or anything? I think what they'll find agreement on is probably other large scale things like infrastructure projects that bring the pork home. These bills are always just filled with everything. The kitchen sinks. Some of them some things like that $15 an hour you mentioned in a lot of states getting 1400 bucks is a lot of money. If you're in Alabama or Mississippi or West Virginia, that's a lot of money. It's 1400 bucks, but it's not going to go as far in San Francisco or Seattle or New York or Honolulu. But if that was what was going to prevent it from happening and where the minimum wage is what is the minimum wage, $7 an hour or something insane, that has to come up on its own. Maybe it's just done by the states. I don't know, but if they had to take it out, they needed to take it out. And if that's what caused it to pass, of course we need to have a living wage, but that's a completely different discussion on that we have literally trillionaires in this economy and I'm all for people being rich. Being rich is glorious, but we also have incredible disparities of income of opportunity now in America that are showing up educationally, socially, and in other ways. And that needs to be addressed at a more structural, fundamental level. But like you said, 70% of people said, yeah, this bill is great because who doesn't like free money? And the 28% that said they don't like it, you'd be hard pressed to find a company or an individual that's going to send back that check to the government if it comes to their house on principle. I bet the government's not going to get a lot of refunds on that. And it's probably think I would be surprised if organizations, even like the American Enterprise Institute or whatever organization didn't apply for their PPP loans and all of that as well, because if they weren't, then they weren't doing, well they could stand on principle, but if they weren't doing that, then maybe they were sort of neglecting their responsibilities for financial prudence of what they're given. So yeah, it's- All right, well let me take the other position on this. Let's say it's, you know, 15 years ago and the Tea Party is just emerging and the Tea Party, if you remember, one of their main principles was deficit control. So the first COVID relief was $2.1 trillion. The second one, which was this at the end of December of last year, was $900 billion and this was $1.9, so if you do some fast math, you're over $5 trillion. Now apparently deficits don't matter anymore for both the Democrats and the Republicans, but at some point we can't just keep rolling money off the printer machines and expect not to have either inflation or a collapse in U.F. dollar. Well that's coming down the road, but it's not here right now. Right here right now, people are out of work, they're out of money, there's a rent moratorium expiring. Even here in Hawaii, I was reading what was it, 50% of businesses didn't pay at least one month's rent last year. I think that was something like that in specific businesses. It was whatever happens in the future with inflation or the dollar going down. I mean, it's just sort of inevitable, I think, on some level, which is why you've seen these crazy things with Bitcoin going on like fake, this is a non, there's nothing there, but people are pouring money into it because they're seeing that in the future. However, as we saw with the Republican Party, they're not a party anymore that's based on principles as we understood, conservative, principle conservatism, the kind that perhaps Liz Cheney represents, very few, you can pick them out that are willing to stand up and say that, and it's probably what maybe a quarter of the party left that has some principle conservatism. So anything about like, spend as much as you want, the principles that we used to understand as conservative principles, they're not there right now. They may come back. It would be nice to see. Can I just jump in on this? I mean, ultimately, we're going to have to pay the piper. Tim is right to raise the issue. At some point along the way, we're going to have to reckon with this, and it's going to hurt us. It's going to hurt the stock market. It's going to hurt the economy. Nobody wants to talk about that, but we don't know where that is. At the end of the day, we're going to have to pay the piper. Yeah, but it's not today. It's not today. People need that. They need the two trillion today, and I think it's a conceptual number. If you ask the average American what's America's debt, they don't know, but they do know that housing prices in Hawaii went from $780 to $920 as an average sales price last year on Oahu. That's a huge increase in the price. So all of this stuff is going to figure out into calculus somewhere down the road, but for right now, they're worried about keeping food on the table, keeping the roof over their head, and so they're going to welcome that release period. Okay. Hey, Winston, thank you. Hey, Stephanie, I'm going to kind of return back to a question I asked Jay, and that is again, if you're a couple and you're earning $150,000, you're going to get $2,800 immediately, probably in the next week, since you're home or through your bank account. Do you have automatic deposit? Was that level too high? Should have been $100,000 for a couple and $50,000 for an individual, or do you think the level set was appropriate and just right? Well, that's an interesting question. I haven't really thought much about it as a specific number or what the cut is, but of the cut at the level of income is. I think that does a repeat of what there was before, so I guess can be. It was a repeat, yes. The other point is no matter, all those people making that kind of money, they're probably as you or Jay mentioned earlier, they're not necessarily going to spend that money on new hot dogs for their kids. I mean, they're going to spend that money all over the place. So all that money is, they should put some in Bitcoin or some savings if they don't have any, which Winston mentioned earlier. But anyway, that money's all going into the economy. So that's going to start whipping things back up. Well, is it going in the economy? What if people had to borrow money for the last year just to put food on the table and pay the utility bills and pay the mortgage and they had to borrow? I would think if they now have an influx of cash, they have an opportunity to pay that debt back down. Well, sure, but lots of them didn't have that problem if you're getting up to $150K a year. Well, there you go. I guess my point is, I'm not sure this money is going to the exact proper target market. I think there are a lot of people that have more need that you could have spread this out further for the people at $100,000 as a couple or $50,000 as an individual. I don't know. I guess my point is that it is all going to come back around to all of us because it's going in the economy one way or another after those people in high need are going to pay off what they need. The other aspect of this is that I've learned from Brian Schatz's statements to Hawaii that this is actually going to relieve Hawaii, and I don't know about the other states, maybe it's similar, but we're going to be relieved of this catastrophe of a huge deficit. In fact, we're going to be on our way back up to par. Even the state collection of taxes is not as dire as they thought it was. So we're not going to be as short there. So there's a really good point that's made actually by the Republicans because a lot of that money is going to more than those kinds of payments to people. I mean, education's gotten a huge batch of money. It's going to make a huge difference, all the small business. There's millions and millions, which I won't go back over here, but that I wrote down that are going to all these other places to heart. They're going to, you know, the national fund for access to or saving the workforce. So there's millions and millions, hundreds of millions coming from this bill into other places in Hawaii that are going to just bounce to Hawaii. But, you know, around the nation, I guess, I think this is an opportune time to bring up Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham's comments that part of this COVID relief bill had dedicated $5 billion to farmers, minority farmers to either gain access to loans they weren't allowed to gain access to through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And so give them access for that or pay off debt to forgive loans that they had been carrying just to keep their farms in existence. And Lindsey Graham referred that to as reparations. And that's the exact term he used. And I guess what I'm getting at is there are, like most bills, I call them a Christmas tree, and everyone in the middle of the night hangs a little Christmas tree ornament on it. To what degree do you have sorts of ornaments on this? They got to take money home. Look at Kentucky. Mitch McConnell has so much money. They got bridges they don't even need down there. The people are still starving. But my point is that for Biden's point of view in the administration, this is a one-shot deal, as you all already- Oh, I want to speak to that. I think that's really an excellent point. You know, this discloses, this reveals to us that Congress is dysfunctional and the government is dysfunctional. In a perfect world, with all those economists, really high-quality economists in the administration, they would tune the economy. They would say, well, okay, it's March. Let's do this in March. And this is April. We'll do a little something in April. And we'll keep on going down the pike and we'll adjust everything depending on how the economy and all these other factors, including COVID and the vaccines, are working. But we can't do that. Why? Because we're not bipartisan. You can't get these bills through every day. You know, look how long it took Biden to get this one. You know, it started, what, in the 20th of January and now only. And this is this big priority. So, you know, what I'm saying is that ideally, in a perfect world, Congress would be able to act in a much more nimble fashion, recognizing that it cannot, will not, does not act in a nimble fashion, that everything is clogged up in Congress. And you can't repeat this kind of bill. That's what we have. It's not the best solution. Yeah. And it's so much like a football game, right? So, every scrimmage, you can, that they have an overall plan to get to the goal, okay? But it's every single inch centimeter is a scrimmage to get there. And that seems to be more our model of government, especially these days. And there isn't any cooperation at all, except to be in each other's ways. So, if that's the way our government has been, you know, deployed, we need to start thinking about what Biden might help lead us to thinking about, which is back to compromise negotiation, arbitration, whatever it is that you can change this game so we can meet the needs of the people. But I think back to the point is that this is one time and it may be, Biden's not going to get another thing through depending on what comes up. I agree. I mean, Joe Biden said, go big. Let's go big. And I think he did. Yeah, I think he did it. This will hold him and get him through some tough stuff to come. And hopefully he can turn it around. We'll see. Yeah. Okay, thank you, Stephanie. Appreciate it. Jay, in the southern states or around the country, 43 states, actually, we have over 253 bills proposed that will limit voting access for constituents or non-constituents. That's quite a staggering number. We know we have a proposed bill HR1. Later in August, I believe there is another bill on HR4, which is called the John Lewis Voting Act that will come up on the August 2021 calendar in the legislature. You brought up the point that this is a critical bill that needs to be looked at because what the GOP is trying to do is really curtail access to the voting boost. And they know that's why they lost Georgia. They know that's the sole reason why a red state went blue. And you had two Democrat senators elected over two GOP-established senators. What are your thoughts about this attempt by the GOP to thwart a fair and clean election? Yeah. I mean, aside from the destruction of the planet by climate change, and I suppose the previously very threatening COVID, maybe it's not so threatening today, except the variants, this is the most threatening thing to our democracy. A, they're succeeding. They're in a civil war, and they're in so many state houses passing so many bills that are obviously disgracefully racist and voter suppression against every principle of the Founding Fathers. It's really hideous, and the world is looking at us as a joke. Let me run down this list and get your reaction to it of some of the things that there are in their bills throughout the South and other parts of the country, Iowa as well. One, it'll be a misdemeanor not to deliver food or drink to people standing in line. That's crazy. The restriction of the ballot boxes dropped around various counties. They want to severely limit the number of drop-off boxes for your ballot. Increased ID registration requirements. No absentee voting, unless you have a really, really good reason that only fits their definition of why you should even think about voting absentee. Cutout weekend voting, and that's directly, I think, directed at Black Americans that go to church on Sunday, and a big tradition is souls to the booth, the voting booth on Sunday. So if you take out the voting on Sunday, they have nowhere to go. It's all racist, and it's all anti-democratic, and here's the worst thing. They're passing these bills. They're passing them in various legislatures, and of course there are lawsuits questioning them on constitutional grounds, which should wind up in the Supreme Court. This is the big test of the Supreme Court, whether they will preserve our democracy. But here, on the other side, in Congress, that bill, that's the voting rights bill, it's coming up now, and I guess it's important for Biden. It should be. He's trying to get it through, but you know, the Republicans are never going to vote for it. And if we have Clutcher and the filibuster, it's not going to pass. It's simply not going to. There's no reconciliation possible with that bill. Let me throw this out. Joe Biden just recently signed an executive order, expanding voting rights, access to voting booths. How does that executive order counterplay off all these 153 bills in various states? Which one takes priority? An executive order or something passed by an individual state legislature? The courts will have to decide, but you know, it's not a pretty picture. And the reality is that the legislation passed by these various Republican state houses, state legislatures, is going to have to be tested in court and may fail. I mean, what I mean is the attacks on them may fail. So what we have now is pandemonium, a civil war, chaos between now and 2022. And the trouble is that we ought to pay attention to the crises that are going on in the country, not having a civil war. It's the wrong time for that. It's always the wrong time for that. So that goes down to Winston's comment about Joe Manchin and his role in the Senate and how he's the key vote, and whether or not, really come down to whether or not the filibuster should be eliminated or not. Winston, you correctly stated that he is open now to some revisions of the filibuster. Now in the old days, you remember that movie with Jimmy Stewart, Mr. Washington, Mr. Smith, goes to Washington and he's doing a filibuster on the floor in the House of Representatives and he's going on and on. Well, I think Joe Manchin is open to getting back to those days where you just don't go, okay, you don't get the 60s, next item. Joe Manchin may be in favor of having a Lindsey Graham or a Ted Cruz stand on the Senate floor until they run out of breath to exercise their filibuster rights and to not make it easy for them like they have it now. Winston, what do you think about that? I think if I were Joe Biden, I would be pouring every possible federal resource into West Virginia. Everyone gets his own bridge, everyone gets his own school, gold-plated toilets, whatever he can do. You mean to Abraham Lincoln of Paola to get your amendment to the 13th Amendment passed? Sadly, whatever works. But, you know, as I was looking just online for this, HUD, the Urban Housing and Urban Development for the US, they said that low income in Honolulu in 2019, if you were looking for a loan or to qualify for subsidized housing or affordable housing, single person living on Oahu in 2019 was $67,500. So the 75, well, that seems like a lot. It's just above the low income level. The average mean wage here as by assuming a Bureau of Labor Statistics, and I still think that those are accurate, 54,900 in 2019. So this money even in Hawaii will go a long way for a lot of people. Now, you know, those are mean, those are means are not real. But I think that, you know, I still, I wake up every day now, I don't have to go and check what Joe Biden did or didn't do. I don't worry about the state of the nation. We're not in a state of hyper alert anymore. I think everyone is calmer now. He, you know, by pulling out the minimum wage and the, oh, what was the unemployment thing was going from 400 to 300 or something like that. These were minor changes relatively compared to the massive bill that went through. So he got some pork out. He got some some payback right now, what he needed to do. And now we can get down to the to good governance and getting rebuilding, restructuring, reforming, and stabilizing our entire system that was dismantled before our eyes these last four years. I think that's what he's going to concentrate on. It seems there's no giant scandals coming out of his administration. There's no incredible gaps that we have to look at. So I think, you know, for a while, I think if we can just settle on a little bit more boring, everyone's going to be calmed down. Joe Biden is the baking soda that this nation needs. And I'm going to settle on a lot more boring. Thank you. After the last four years, I could use a lot more boring. We've run out of time, we've run out of time, but I'm going to go around the horn here and get your last comments or what you think is in store for the country in the next week. Stephanie, to you. Thank you. I think there is a nightmare going on that we cannot let up on. In fact, we need to do something about it, which is as Jay mentioned, and I was interrupting him because the Civil War was about states rights. I mean, that's all I ever heard about. I never heard a thing about slavery or read about it in all of my US history courses a long time ago. But anyway, it's states rights. And that's what's happened is now they're building up the states, as they have built up the states, and they're building up the states rights issue. So that's what the Supreme Court will be asked to deal with again, as to what is it that is going fair, well, either federal or the states rights. And then I wanted to just mention that thank you for Biden's camouflaging of this $15 minimum wage lure, because I see it as a lure to get the Republicans in and then also to let it go so that they'll feel that they've had a piece of the action. So I credit him with that and well done. And Joe Manchin, of course, wants to be a good guy. And he's, but he also wants to have it both ways. So I don't know how that's going to come out. But we now have the standard up $15 minimum less Virginians would love that too, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you, Stephanie. So much. Jay, your last thoughts, comments, what's up for the next week? Oh, well, we'll see what the rest of Joe Biden's initiatives are. We'll see how well they do. We'll see more of those bills in the Republican state houses all across the country. I can't take of anything more that, and may see some action on the filibuster. I believe that'd be a very positive move. You know, one of the things the problems with the Constitution is it hasn't been amended often enough. The country has gone through zillions of changes, profound changes every day. Has the Constitution kept up? No. And has, you know, has the law kept up? And I think it's very important that we make the changes necessary to comport with the changes in our society. One of them is getting rid of the filibuster. The other thing I want to say is, I think we're all together on this, and that is that we got a problem looking for 2022. It's only around the corner. And if the Republicans, potentially under Trump's influence, you know, take the Senate, take the House, we are going to be back exactly where Winston would like to leave. We're going to be back where we were in chaos and in legislation that doesn't give a rip about the people. That's why voting rights is so important. That's why we have to keep our eyes on 2022. All right. Thank you, Jay. I like the idea of a Hawaiian style con con, maybe every 50 years in this country. Who knows? All right, Winston, your last thoughts, comments, concerns, questions? Well, you know, we're always evolving towards a more perfect union and things happen slowly on that level. And I, you know, when you can go into a country like Japan after the war and rewrite the Constitution and you put in women's rights straight out of the bat and those sorts of things, that's nice. It doesn't always mean that they exist because they're still ranked just above, you know, a lot at the bottom of the barrel for those types of things. So we have our mechanisms in this country. It's not perfect. We have a lot of work to do. There's no doubt about it. There's a lot of dangerous elements out there. But when this main demagogue and irritant has been gone and out of our sight and out of our sound for even a short period of time, we are, we will forget and people will enjoy this piece that they have with their friends, with their neighbors, with their co-workers of just not having to have this in their face screaming all the time. Now I'm not watching Fox News and America One or whatever they're playing. And I'm sure it's the same old hits. But I think on some level, people realize, you know what? That was not good for our nation on many levels. And if Joe Biden is smart, he will try and look at the actual real grievances, if there are any, that are under the ugliness, under the pettiness, under the awfulness and say, was there anything there? And if so, let's try and address it. We have the most qualified person to ever occupy the White House period. He's doing a fantastic job. I'm just looking forward to seeing how he can move forward. Like Stephanie was saying, that $15 an hour, including the Republicans, maybe some of them will realize it's in their best interest ultimately to work towards a better America. And that's my hope for this week and for the next two years and four years and forever. Okay, you get the last word and great words. Those were, I want to thank my guests, Jay Fidel, Stephanie Dalton, and Winston Welch. Thank you for joining us on What Now America. Join us next week, Wednesday, 11 o'clock. I'm Tim Epichella, your host. We'll see you next week. What Now America? Aloha.