{"id":542877,"date":"2021-03-06T23:18:39","date_gmt":"2021-03-07T03:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/?p=542877"},"modified":"2021-03-06T23:26:26","modified_gmt":"2021-03-07T03:26:26","slug":"bidens-covid-rescue-plan-grinds-toward-senate-approval","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/542877\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden’s Covid rescue plan grinds toward Senate approval"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>WASHINGTON\u00a0 – US Democrats were on track Saturday for a final vote on President Joe Biden\u2019s massive Covid-19 relief package after agreeing to scale back unemployment benefits, with passage increasingly likely in the evenly divided Senate.<\/p>\n

With the sun rising in Washington, bleary-eyed senators continued their all-night session voting on nearly two dozen amendments and counting as they hammered out the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, which Biden insists will revive the pandemic-hit US economy.<\/p>\n

Negotiations in the Senate had frozen the chamber\u2019s action for more than 10 hours Friday, before the Democrats reached a compromise with moderate Senator Joe Manchin, who had balked at the scale of the benefits.<\/p>\n

“This agreement allows us to move forward on the urgently needed American Rescue Plan,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.<\/p>\n

Republicans have stood uniformly opposed to the giant package, but Democrats — who cannot afford to lose a single vote — united to beat back repeated efforts to derail the legislation.<\/p>\n

The action came against a backdrop of strong US economic data signaling that the world\u2019s largest economy may finally be healing.<\/p>\n

Yet the economy was still short 9.5 million jobs compared with February 2020, before the pandemic began.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s economic advisers said the current pace of job gains meant it would take two years to recover to pre-virus levels.<\/p>\n

“We can\u2019t go one step forward and two steps backward,” Biden said Friday at the White House. “The rescue plan is absolutely essential to turning this around.”<\/p>\n

But the whole bill came under threat by an impasse over the amount and duration of supplemental unemployment insurance benefits for people left jobless during the pandemic.<\/p>\n

Democrats had struggled to keep Manchin\u2019s support for expanded unemployment aid in the measure. Ultimately he agreed to a compromise that reduced jobless benefits from $400 to $300 and extended them to September 6, rather than through October as many Democrats had wanted.<\/p>\n

“We have reached a compromise that enables the economy to rebound quickly while also protecting those receiving unemployment benefits” from being hit with unexpected tax bills, Manchin said in a statement. The amendment passed 50-49 along party lines. (AFP)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n

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WASHINGTON\u00a0 – US Democrats were on track Saturday for a final vote on President Joe Biden\u2019s massive Covid-19 relief package after agreeing to scale back unemployment benefits, with passage increasingly likely in the evenly divided Senate. With the sun rising in Washington, bleary-eyed senators continued their all-night session voting on nearly two dozen amendments and counting as they hammered out the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, which Biden insists will revive the pandemic-hit US economy. Negotiations in the Senate had frozen the chamber\u2019s action for more than 10 hours Friday, before…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47748],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-542877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}