Another Republican President, Another Recession.

American billionaires grew in number and expanded their collective fortunes by $2.1 trillion since Covid-19 sparked a worldwide pandemic nineteen months ago, according to a new analysis unveiled Monday.

"Targeted tax increases on billionaires, including the proposed Billionaire Income Tax, would rebalance the tax code and reduce these glaring abuses in who pays for the services we all depend on."

An overall 70% surge of wealth among the nation's richest individuals since March of 2020 has resulted in approximately 130 new billionaires, found the new report released by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). In a statement, the groups noted that there are now 745 people with "10-figure bank accounts" compared to the 614 that existed when the pandemic first hit.

In total, those 745 billionaires now hold $5 trillion in collective wealth, which the groups note is "two-thirds more than the $3 trillion in wealthheld by the bottom 50% of U.S. households."

While ATF and IPS have been tracking the explosive growth of the uber-wealthy throughout the pandemic, the latest figures come as Democrats in Congress continue to negotiate with themselves over the cost and scope of President Joe Biden's 'Build Back Better' agenda which aims to provide expanded Medicare, paid family leave, universal childcare and pre-K, bold climate action, and an expanded childhood tax credit to alleviate childhood poverty and provide a more robust economic foundation for millions of working American families.

According to IPS/ATF:

The great good fortune of these billionaires over the past 19 months is all the more stark when contrasted with the devastating impact of coronavirus on working people. Almost 89 million Americans have lost jobs, over 44.9 million have been sickened by the virus, and over 724,000 have died from it.

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To put this extraordinary wealth growth in perspective, the $2.1 trillion gain over 19 months by U.S. billionaires is equal to:

• 60% of the $3.5 trillion ten-year cost of President Biden's Build Back Better plan.
• The entire $2.1 trillion in new revenues over ten years approved by the House Ways and Means Committee to help pay for President Biden's Build Back Better (BBB) investment plan.

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At the heart of their latest analysis, said ATF executive director Frank Clemente, is the failure to adequately tax these outrageous and growing fortunes.

"This growth of billionaire wealth is unfathomable, immoral, and indefensible in good times let alone during a pandemic when so many have struggled with unemployment, illness, and death," said Clemente. "For practical and moral reasons, Congress must start effectively taxing the outsized gains of billionaires."

Like other advocates, IPS and ATF are calling for much higher and stricter taxation on the windfall profits of the billionaire class—especially in light of the social needs that the pandemic has made so apparent.

Currently under consideration in Congress is the Billionaires Income Tax (BIT) bill, spearheaded by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.), chairman of the Finance Committee, which Clemente and Chuck Collins, director of IPS' Program on Inequality and the Common Good, say is the best piece of legislation to target the wealth of the super-rich. As the new analysis notes:

Most of these huge billionaires' gains will go untaxed under current rules and will disappear entirely for tax purposes when they're passed onto the next generation.

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Under Wyden's BIT, billionaires will start paying taxes on their increased wealth each year just like workers pay taxes on their paychecks each year.

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The tax will apply only to taxpayers whose wealth exceeds $1 billion: about 700 households. It will be assessed annually on tradable assets, such as stocks, where the value of the asset is known at the beginning and end of the year. For non-tradable assets, such as ownership in a business or real estate holdings, taxes will be deferred until the asset is sold.

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"Billionaires are undertaxed and playing hide-and-seek with their substantial wealth," said Collins. "Targeted tax increases on billionaires, including the proposed Billionaire Income Tax, would rebalance the tax code and reduce these glaring abuses in who pays for the services we all depend on."

In a statement last month following the release of a White House report on the average income tax rate of U.S. billionaires, Wyden said that it's shameful for the nation's wealthiest to pay lower tax rates than most working Americans.

"Billionaires are paying a mere 8 percent tax rate, lower than millions of working Americans," said Wyden.

"It's time for a Billionaire's Income Tax that ensures billionaires pay taxes just like the nurses and firefighters," he added. "Nurses treating Covid-19 patients pay their taxes with every paycheck, and they know it's fundamentally unfair that billionaires and their heirs may never pay tax on billions in stock gains. Instituting a Billionaire's Income Tax would go a long way toward creating one fair tax code, rather than one that's mandatory for working people and another that's optional for the fortunate few."

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The federal government has seized two vehicles, and is threatening to seize a lake house, allegedly purchased illegally with COVID-19 relief money by a Kansas City-area businessman.

The property was seized from several real estate companies incorporated in Kansas by Joseph Campbell, with most operating under a version of the name Titan Fish.

According to a complaint filed by the U.S. attorney's office in Kansas, in early 2020 Campbell submitted 20 applications to the Small Business Administration for federal disaster loans made available under the CARES Act.

Most were deemed duplicates of other applications, the complaint says, and five were granted.

Campbell's companies received nearly $1 million in aid that was supposed to be used to pay debts, payroll and other bills that could have been paid had the COVID-19 pandemic not occurred.

According to an affidavit filed by Richard Littrell, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service, Campbell's applications contained false information and he used the money he received to purchase two vehicles and a lake house in Morgan County, Missouri.

“Based on the information set forth in this affidavit, there is probable cause to believe Campbell committed violations of wire fraud and money laundering," said Littrell, who conducts money laundering investigations as part of the Kansas City Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces.

Littrell later added that there is probable cause that the vehicles and property “were purchased with proceeds derived or obtained from the wire fraud violations."

The two vehicles — a 2019 Dodge Ram 1500 and a 2017 Ford Explorer — have been seized by the government. The lake house has not yet been seized.

Campbell did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

Danielle Thomas, spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Kansas, said she cannot comment on open cases beyond what is available in the public record.

Titan Fish, based in Shawnee, Kansas, is described on its website as “special situation investors that focus on unique investment opportunities in real estate, energy and other real assets."

The company garnered attention in 2017 when it purchased the former Rockwood Golf Club in Independence for $550,000 from a company that had owned the property for several years.

Just months after that purchase, the Independence City Council voted to buy the golf course from Titan Fish for $1 million in order to use it to build a solar farm.

The deal drew FBI scrutiny over a series of donations to Independence Mayor Eileen Weir days before she voted to approve the purchase.

Those donations came from four political action committees connected to lobbyist Steve Tilley, a former state lawmaker and longtime friend and adviser to Missouri Gov. Mike Parson.

Tilley's lobbying firm represents Independence's utility and the company chosen to operate the solar farm.

In 2019 Tilley began representing Titan Fish, and a year later was part of a proposal involving Titan Fish to repurpose a power plant owned by Independence.

Titan Fish and Tilley severed ties shortly after details of the proposal were made public.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell last week to a new low point since the pandemic erupted, evidence that layoffs are declining as companies hold onto workers.

Unemployment claims dropped 6,000 to 290,000 last week, the third straight drop, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s the fewest people to apply for benefits since March 14, 2020, when the pandemic intensified. Applications for jobless aid, which generally track the pace of layoffs, have fallen steadily from about 900,000 in January.

Unemployment claims are increasingly returning to normal, but many other aspects of the job market haven’t yet done so. Hiring has slowed in the past two months, even as companies and other employers have posted a near-record number of open jobs. Officials such as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had hoped more people would find work in September as schools reopened, easing child care constraints, and enhanced unemployment aid ended nationwide.

Yet so far, that hasn’t happened. Instead, some observers are starting to consider whether some of those who had jobs before the pandemic, and lost them, may have permanently stopped looking for work.

On Tuesday, Christopher Waller, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, said that two million of the 22 million jobs lost to the pandemic may not return anytime soon because retirements have accelerated so quickly since COVID-19 hit.

The Labor Department’s report Thursday also showed that the number of people receiving jobless aid continues to fall steadily. In the week of Oct. 2, the latest data available, 3.3 million people received unemployment benefits, down from 3.6 million in the previous week.

A year ago, nearly 24 million people were getting unemployment aid.

About 7 million people lost jobless benefits in September after two emergency programs, set up in March 2020, expired. One of the programs provided aid to gig workers and the self-employed, who traditionally are not eligible to receive unemployment insurance, and the second covered workers who have been unemployed for longer than six months. And an extra $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits expired nationwide Sept. 6.

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Kentucky, Idaho, South Dakota and Iowa reported the highest increases in the rates of workers who quit their jobs in August, according to a new glimpse of quit rates in the labor market released Friday.

The largest increase in the number of quitters happened in Georgia, with 35,000 more people leaving their jobs. Overall, the states with the highest rates of workers quitting their jobs were Georgia, Kentucky and Idaho.

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics builds out a portrait of August’s labor market, with historic levels of people leaving jobs and a near-record number of job openings showing the leverage workers have in the new economy. It offers the first detailed insight into the state-by-state geography of this year’s Great Resignation.

“It is a sign of health that there are many companies that are looking for work — that’s a great sign,” said Ben Ayers, senior economist at Nationwide. “The downside is there are many workers that won’t come back in. And long term you can’t sustain a labor market that’s as tight as it is right now.”

Nick Bunker, an economist at the online jobs platform Indeed, said it was notable that more-rural states had the highest quit rates.

“Service-sector jobs tend to be concentrated in more dense, urban parts of the country, so to see the quits rate pick up in other places was interesting,” he said. That “may be a sign there’s more competition in those parts of the country than other parts.”

As the Delta wave grew in August, the states with the most new infections also saw hotter job markets than the country as a whole. Employees quit or were hired at rates matching or exceeding the national average in the ten states with the highest rates of new infections that month: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.

The data comes on top of another government snapshot showing that 4.3 million people quit jobs in August — about 2.9 percent of the workforce, a pandemic-era record.

The phenomenon is being driven in part by workers who are less willing to endure inconvenient hours and poor compensation, and are quitting to find better opportunities. There were 10.4 million job openings in the country at the end of August — down slightly from July’s record high, which was adjusted up to 11.1 million, but still a tremendously high number. This gives workers enormous leverage as they look for a better fit.

Yes, the office is back. It just might never be the same.

Mary Kaylor is part of that groundswell.

She left her job in early July after her employer began calling workers back to the office, saying they’d have to be at their desks at least four days a week.

But her old commute — 90 minutes each way, or worse with traffic, from where she lives north of Baltimore to her office in Alexandria, Va. — was no longer acceptable to her.

“It was affecting my health, and I couldn’t get my work done,” she said. “I decided, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

So Kaylor resigned, even though she did not have another job lined up. It didn’t take long for her to land on her feet, however.

Just a few weeks after she quit, a recruiter reached out to her on LinkedIn about a position at Robert Half, a San Ramon, Calif.-based consulting company. The job allowed her to work remotely, and she said she felt that the company had a very employee-centric culture that made the switch easy from afar. She started the new position in August.

“Everything that I had read about the jobs market being hot and opportunities being out there was absolutely 100 percent correct,” she said.

Now she says she has a job she likes, but with more balance at home and time to take care of herself with no commute.

“I’ve been able to get back to a regular workout and exercise routine — time to run in the morning and do yoga,” she said. “All the time I used to spend sitting on the Beltway I can spend outside, so I’m excited about that.”

Ramon Soto, 28, took advantage of the hot jobs market to look for a new position over the summer. He had been working in person at a law firm and said he got tired of the commute and constant negotiation about sick time amid persistent covid-19 risks.

By the end of August, he had dueling job offers — one at a company in Texas and another as an intake specialist at another law firm, near his home in Long Branch, N.J., that would allow him to work remotely.

He started the intake specialist job the next month, and it came with a raise to boot.

“Working from home removes a lot of the stress of regular day-to-day office work,” Soto said. “You prioritize what the most essential part of your job is and get stuff done quicker so you can take full advantage of your day.”

He said it was clear to him looking through job listings online that he had a lot of options to work remotely, as companies have increasingly begun offering the option to attract talent and widen applicant pools.

He said that he felt he had some leverage in his job search but that the process was still extremely competitive — he interviewed three to four times at each of the companies that eventually made offers and had applied to many others.

“I knew I had an advantage,” he said. “People are realizing their worth. Many of the jobs you look at now, especially in Jersey — people can’t afford the cost of living working 40 hours. So you have people working two jobs, possibly three. But the pandemic actually flipped the coin, and employees have more power when it comes it to their pay now.”

Chris Blanton, 34, who does clinical-trial work for companies that work with pharmaceutical firms, said he was bombarded with messages from recruiters on LinkedIn over the summer.

He finally started responding to them in early August, to see if there were better opportunities out there.

Within six weeks, he had a job offer from another company, one that would allow him to continue working remotely from his home in Orlando. It came with a raise and a substantial hiring bonus — the first bonus he had ever received, he said. Another company was interested in him, too, but was operating on a longer time frame.

So he quit the position he had and started the new job in late September.

“Usually I will ignore them all,” he said of recruiters. “But I figured it was a time to see what’s out there. That’s when I found out there are other jobs that might be a better fit for me.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Wages and salaries jumped in the three months ending in September by the most on records that date back 20 years as companies are forced to offer higher pay to fill a near-record number of available jobs.

Pay increased 1.5% in the third quarter, the Labor Department said Friday. That’s up sharply from 0.9% in the previous quarter. The value of benefits rose 0.9% in the July-September quarter, more than double the preceding three months.

The figures demonstrate that workers are gaining greater leverage in the job market and are able to command higher pay, more benefits, and other perks like flexible work hours. With more jobs available than there are unemployed people, government data shows, businesses have been forced to work harder to attract staff.

Millions of Americans are responding to rising wages by quitting their jobs for better-paying positions. In August, nearly 3% of American workers quit their jobs, a record high. A higher number of quits also means companies have to raise pay to keep their employees.

In the year ending in September, wages and salaries soared 4.2%, also a record gain.

The wage increases are partly being fueled by an increasing willingness by workers to seek out higher-paying jobs. Workers who switch jobs are seeing some of the sharpest income gains in decades. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, in September job-switchers saw their pay jump 5.4% compared with a year earlier. That’s up from just 3.4% in May and the biggest increase in nearly 20 years. For those who stayed in their jobs, pay rose 3.5%.

Inflation, however, is offsetting the purchasing power of these pay gains. In the third quarter, prices rose at an annual rate of 5.3%, outpacing the boost in incomes. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, prices rose 4.5%.

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ATLANTA (AP) — The political organization led by prominent Democrat Stacey Abrams is branching out into paying off medical debts.

The Fair Fight Political Action Committee on Wednesday told The Associated Press it has donated $1.34 million from its political action committee to the nonprofit organization RIP Medical Debt to wipe out debt with a face value of $212 million that is owed by 108,000 people in Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Lauren Groh-Wargo CEO of allied group Fair Fight Action and senior adviser to the PAC said paying off medical debt is another facet of the group’s advocacy seeking expansion of Medicaid coverage in the 12 states that have refused to expand the health insurance to all poorer adults.

“What is so important about this is the tie between Medicaid expansion and just crushing medical debt,” Groh-Wargo said.

Of the states targeted, Arizona and Louisiana have expanded Medicaid.

Fair Fight said letters will be sent to those whose debts have been absolved to notify them. The purchase will forgive the debt of nearly 69,000 people in Georgia, more than 27,000 people in Arizona, more than 8,000 people in Louisiana, and about 2,000 people apiece in Mississippi and Alabama.

The group has raised more than $100 million since Abrams founded it after her 2018 loss in the Georgia governor’s race. Fair Fight has been most noted for its advocacy of voting rights, but has also been pushing for broader health care. The group launched ads last week demanding that Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp add Medicaid expansion to the list of topics that Georgia lawmakers will consider in a special session starting next week to redraw electoral districts. Democrats are hoping Abrams will run against Kemp again in 2022. A narrow loss to Kemp in 2018 launched Abrams into political stardom.

“I know firsthand how medical costs and a broken healthcare system put families further and further in debt,” Abrams said in a statement. “Across the sunbelt and in the South, this problem is exacerbated in states like Georgia where failed leaders have callously refused to expand Medicaid, even during a pandemic.”

RIP Medical Debt said Fair Fight is giving the third-largest donation in its history. Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave the group $50 million last year. The group has aided more than 3 million people since it was founded in 2014, typically buying bundles of medical debt at steep discounts from the face value. The bills often are purchased from collection agencies that have been trying to get debtors to pay for years. The group has wiped out debt with a face value of more than $5.3 billion.

Allison Sesso, executive director of RIP Medical Debt, said such liabilities often drive people into bankruptcy, can deter people from seeking needed medical care, and can lead to wages being garnished or liens filed on property.

“I wouldn’t underestimate the mental anguish that people have from medical debt,” Sesso said.

Sesso said her group is not just pursuing debt abolishment “but thinking about how we can improve the system nationwide,” trying to advocate that hospitals should do more to make charity care available. She also said research shows states that expanded Medicaid have lower rates of medical debt.

“We are not the permanent solution,” Sesso said. “There does need to be a larger solution around what we do about medical debt.”

Groh-Wargo said the money was given by donors for political action, but said the money represents “only a small percentage” of what Fair Fight has raised.

“I think of this as politically tithing to help the community we are advocating for and with,” Groh-Wargo said, saying the group has done smaller scale charitable efforts.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s employers stepped up their hiring last month, adding a solid 531,000 jobs, the most since July and a sign that the recovery from the pandemic recession is overcoming a virus-induced slowdown.

Friday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the unemployment rate fell to 4.6% last month from 4.8% in September. That is a comparatively low level though still well above the pre-pandemic jobless rate of 3.5%. And the report showed that the job gains in August and September weren’t as weak as initially reported. The government revised its estimate of hiring for those two months by a hefty combined 235,000 jobs.

All told, the figures in the jobs report point to an economy that is steadily recovering from the pandemic recession, with healthy consumer spending causing companies in nearly every industry to step up hiring. Though the effects of COVID-19 are still causing severe supply shortages, heightening inflation and keeping many people out of the workforce, employers are finding gradually more success in filling near record-high job postings.

“This is the kind of recovery we can get when we are not sidelined by a surge in COVID cases,” said Nick Bunker, director of economic research at the employment website Indeed. “The speed of employment gains has faltered at times this year, but the underlying momentum of the US labor market is quite clear.”

By nearly every barometer, the economic recovery appears solidly on track. Services companies in such areas as retail, banking and warehousing have reported a sharp jump in sales. More Americans bought new homes last month. And consumer confidence rose in October.

At the same time, though, the nation remains 4.7 million jobs short of the number it had before the pandemic flattened the economy in March 2020. The effects of the virus are still discouraging some people from traveling, shopping, eating out and attending entertainment venues.

In October, the pickup in hiring was spread across nearly every major industry, with only government employers reporting a job loss. Shipping and warehousing companies posted a gain of 54,000 jobs. Retailers added 35,000. The battered leisure and hospitality sector, which includes, restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment venues, gained 164,000 jobs. Manufacturers, despite their struggles with supply shortages, added 60,000 jobs, the most since June 2020.

And employers, who have been competing to fill jobs from a diminished pool of applicants, raised wages at a solid clip: Average hourly pay jumped 4.9% in October compared with a year earlier, up from 4.6% the previous month. Even a gain that strong, though, is barely keeping pace with recent surges in consumer inflation.

The number of long-term unemployed — people out of work for six months or more — has fallen sharply in recent months, to 2.3 million in October from 4.2 million in April. That is still double the pre-recession total. But it’s an encouraging sign because employers are typically wary of hiring people who haven’t held jobs for an extended period.

One disappointing note in Friday’s report is that the workforce — the number of people either working or looking for a job — was unchanged in October. That suggested that the reopening of schools in September, the waning of the virus, and the expiration of a $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement have yet to coax many people off the sidelines of the job market in large numbers.

Drawing many people back into the workforce after recessions is typically a prolonged process. There are now 7.4 million people officially out of work — just 1.7 million more than in February 2020, before the pandemic struck the economy. Yet millions more who lost jobs during the recession have given up on their job hunts, and employers might have to raise pay and benefits to draw them back in.

During the first half of the year, the economy grew at a healthy 6.5% annual rate as vaccinations spread and Americans showed themselves more willing to travel, shop, eat out and attend entertainment events. Yet the delta variant held economic growth in the July-September quarter to just a 2% annual rate.

More recent economic gauges have cast a brightening picture. And after several rounds of stimulus checks and other government support payments, Americans as a whole have amassed about $2.5 trillion more in savings than they had before the pandemic. As that money is spent, it will likely fuel further economic activity.



The Conference Board, a business research group, said that in its October consumer confidence survey, the proportion of Americans who said they planned to buy cars, homes or major appliances all rose. And nearly half the survey respondents said they planned to vacation in the next six months — the highest such proportion since February 2020, before COVID-19 ripped through the economy.

Even so, some companies still can’t find enough workers to fill jobs. Many parents, particularly mothers, haven’t returned to the workforce after having left jobs during the pandemic to care for children or other relatives. Yet there was evidence of a small rebound last month: The proportion of women who were either working or looking for work rose in October after two months of declines.

Surging inflation has cast a dark cloud over the economy since this spring. Higher costs for food, heating oil, rents and furniture have burdened millions of families. Prices rose 4.4% in September compared with 12 months earlier, the sharpest such increase in three decades.

That inflation surge was a key reason why the Federal Reserve announced this week that it would begin winding down the stimulus it has given the economy since the pandemic recession struck last year. The Fed will do so by reducing its monthly bond purchases, which have been intended to hold down long-term interest rates to spur borrowing and spending.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The House approved a $1 trillion package of road and other infrastructure projects after Democrats resolved a months-long standoff between progressives and moderates, notching a victory that President Joe Biden and his party had become increasingly anxious to claim.

The House passed the measure 228-206 late Friday, prompting prolonged cheers from the relieved Democratic side of the chamber. Thirteen Republicans, mostly moderates, supported the legislation while six of Democrats’ farthest left members — including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri — opposed it.

Approval of the bill, which would create legions of jobs and improve broadband, water supplies and other public works, whisked it to the desk of a president whose approval ratings have dropped and whose nervous party got a cold shoulder from voters in this week’s off-year elections.

Democratic gubernatorial candidates were defeated in Virginia and squeaked through in New Jersey, two blue-leaning states. Those setbacks made party leaders — and moderates and progressives alike — impatient to produce impactful legislation and demonstrate they know how to govern. Democrats can ill afford to seem in disarray a year before midterm elections that could result in Republicans regaining congressional control.

Simply freeing up the infrastructure measure for final congressional approval was a like a burst of adrenaline for Democrats. Yet despite the win, Democrats endured a setback when they postponed a vote on a second, even larger bill until later this month.

That 10-year, $1.85 trillion measure bolstering health, family and climate change programs was sidetracked after moderates demanded a cost estimate on the sprawling measure from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The postponement dashed hopes that the day would produce a double-barreled win for Biden with passage of both bills.

But in an evening breakthrough brokered by Biden and House leaders, five moderates later agreed to back that bill if CBO’s estimates are consistent with preliminary numbers that White House and congressional tax analysts have provided. The agreement, in which lawmakers promised to vote on the social and environment bill by the week of Nov. 15, stood as a significant step toward a House vote that could ultimately ship it to the Senate.

“Generations from now, people will look back and know this is when America won the economic competition for the 21st Century,” Biden said in a written statement early Saturday.

The president and first lady Jill Biden delayed plans to travel Friday evening to their house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Instead, Biden spoke to House leaders, moderates and progressives, said a White House official who described the conversations on condition of anonymity.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Biden even called her mother in India, though it was unclear why.

“This was not to bribe me, this is when it was all done,” Jayapal told reporters. The lawmaker said her mother told her she “just kept screaming like a little girl.”

In a two-sentence statement, the five moderates said that if the fiscal estimates on the social and environment bill raise problems, “we remain committed to working to resolve any discrepancies” to pass it. The five included Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., leader of a group of centrists who this summer repeatedly pressured House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to schedule earlier votes on the infrastructure bill.

In exchange, progressives agreed to back the infrastructure measure, which they’d spent months holding hostage in an effort to pressure moderates to back the larger bill.

The day marked a rare detente between Democrats’ moderate and progressive wings that party leaders hope will continue this fall. The rival factions have spent recent weeks accusing each other of jeopardizing Biden’s and the party’s success by overplaying their hands and expressed a deep distrust of each other.

But Friday night, Jayapal suggested they would work together moving forward.

“Let me tell you, we’re going to trust each other because the Democratic Party is together on this. We are united that it is important for us to get both bills done,” she said.

The agreement came together after the White House issued a statement from Biden explicitly urging Democrats to support both bills. “I am confident that during the week of November 15, the House will pass the Build Back Better Act,” he said.

When party leaders announced early in the day that the social and environment measure would be delayed, the scrambled plans cast a fresh pall over the party.

Democrats have struggled for months to take advantage of their control of the White House and Congress by advancing their top priorities. That’s been hard, in part because of Democrats’ slender majorities, with bitter internal divisions forcing House leaders to miss several self-imposed deadlines for votes.

“Welcome to my world,” Pelosi told reporters, adding, “We are not a lockstep party.”

Progressives had long demanded that the two massive bills be voted on together to pressure moderates to support the larger, more expansive social measure.

Democrats’ day turned tumultuous early after a half-dozen moderates demanded the CBO cost estimate of the sprawling package of health, education, family and climate change initiatives before they would vote for it.

Party leaders said that would take days or more. But with Friday’s delayed vote and lawmakers leaving town for a week’s break, those budget estimates should be ready by the time a vote is held.

The infrastructure measure cleared the Senate in August with bipartisan support. The package would provide huge sums for highway, mass transit, broadband, airport, drinking and waste water, power grids and other projects.

But it became a pawn in the long struggle for power between progressives and moderates. Early Friday, Jayapal said the White House and Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation had provided all the fiscal information lawmakers needed for the broad bill. She suggested that progressives would oppose the infrastructure bill unless the two measures were voted on together.

But that changed after the two Democratic factions reached their agreement.

House passage of the social and environment package would send it to the Senate, where it faces certain changes and more Democratic drama. That’s chiefly because of demands by Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to contain the measure’s costs and curb or drop some of its initiatives.

Moderates have forced leaders to slash the roughly 2,100-page measure to around half its original $3.5 trillion size. Republicans oppose it as too expensive and damaging to the economy.

The package would provide large numbers of Americans with assistance to pay for health care, raising children and caring for elderly people at home. The package would provide $555 billion in tax breaks encouraging cleaner energy and electric vehicles. Democrats added provisions in recent days restoring a new paid family leave program and work permits for millions of immigrants.

Much of the package’s cost would be covered with higher taxes on wealthier Americans and large corporations.

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The story of the American labor market is less murky than it seemed just a few weeks ago. The new jobs numbers Friday present a straightforward, sunny view: Despite it all — the virus variants, the reopening struggles — Americans are going back to work at a rapid clip.

It may not be the kind of off-the-charts job growth experienced in the initial reopening surge last spring and summer. But the new numbers undermine stories that the jobs recovery has petered out, or that the inflationary surge of the last several months is giving way to a period of “stagflation” — stagnant growth paired with higher prices.

Stagnant economies don’t add 531,000 jobs in a month, and they don’t exhibit a low and rapidly falling unemployment rate — 4.6 percent in October, down from 4.8 percent in September and 6.3 percent at the start of the year.

But perhaps more important is what the new numbers tell us about the dynamics of the job market going back a couple of months.

The Labor Department’s revisions to the August and September reports added 235,000 jobs to those months’ numbers. The three-month average for job growth now stands at 442,000. That is a substantial fade from the recent peak of 889,000 jobs added per month from May through July. But it is still a robust pace that implies the labor market is gradually healing from the scars of the pandemic.

The same basic trend is evident in the data from the survey of households that generates the unemployment rate and related data.
The drop of two-tenths of a percentage point in the October jobless rate might not sound like much, but consider this: In the last expansion, the United States achieved 4.8 percent unemployment in January 2016 — but didn’t reach 4.6 percent until more than a year later, in February 2017.

There are lots of signs that this is a hyper-speed recovery compared with the last one. The share of workers 25 to 54 who are employed jumped 0.3 percentage points in October.

In the last year, that share has risen to 78.3 percent from 76 percent. That same shift took about four and a half years in the last expansion, from September 2012 to February 2017.

Put simply, for all the discussion of labor shortages, and the fact that the share of adults who are part of the labor force has remained well below prepandemic levels, employers keep managing to find people to take jobs. The latest numbers undermine any narrative that the pandemic has caused large masses of people to leave the work force permanently, whether because of government stimulus benefits or personal factors.

Employers are paying more to get those workers, it’s worth noting. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers were up 0.4 percent in October, and are up 4.9 percent over the last year. That is high by recent standards, but probably a bit below the inflation rate in that span. (October inflation numbers are not out yet, but for the 12 months ended in September the Consumer Price Index was up 5.4 percent.)

The wage story looks better for rank-and-file American workers. Average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees have risen 5.8 percent over the last year, which is likely to be higher than inflation was over that span. That is the steepest one-year gain since 1982, other than a couple of months early in the pandemic that featured statistical aberrations.




In short, in order to achieve these gains in employment, companies are being forced to pay significantly higher wages, especially for people at the lower end of the pay scale. To what degree those pay raises turn out to be enough to overcome elevated inflation is an open question that depends on inflation trends in the months ahead.

It seems clear that the era of high inflation and supply shortages is causing public discontent with the state of the economy, with a possible role in President Biden’s low approval rating and election results in Virginia and New Jersey this week.

There’s no doubt inflation is causing real pain, especially for people whose wages have not kept up with rising prices. But the central problem of the 2010s — a glacial recovery that put people back to work too slowly — is not the reality of the 2020s recovery.

The new numbers point to a one-sided economic problem — high inflation and its attendant problems — not a two-sided one in which high inflation and stagnant growth are both causing people pain.

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