By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
The jury is still out on whether President Biden’s American Jobs Plan will turn out to be underpowered, or not. My guess is that it will be; the Obama Alumni Association, for all its protestations, has form. Further, looking at the plan, you notice headlines with goals like “Rebuild clean drinking water infrastructure,” to be achieved by eliminating all lead pipes and service lines. That’s good, but not the same thing as providing a clean drinking water infrastructure as such; that would require cleaning ground water polluted by nutrients, for example. (I also attempted to penetrate the wildly prolix and entirely evidence-free “Fact Sheet,” but it’s even worse.) Of course, the real test, I would suppose, is not whether the Jobs Plan fulfills whatever promises it has made, if any, but whether the funding doled out to the local “gentry” in this instance, the contractors has a sufficiently sweetening effect, and whether enough jobs
Bird Song of the Day
At reader request, Birds of Australia. Duet with an insect.
#COVID19
At reader request, I’ve added this daily chart from 91-DIVOC. The data is the Johns Hopkins CSSE data. Here is the site.
I feel I’m engaging in a macabre form of tape-watching.
That’s the stuff to give the troops. • Early in February, I said a simple way to compare Biden’s performance to Trump’s on vaccination would be to compare the curves. If Biden accelerated vaccine administration, the rate of vaccination post-Inaugural would kink upward, as the policies of a more effective administration took hold. They have not. The fragmented, Federalized, and profit-driven lumbering monstrosity that we laughingly call our “health care” “system” has not responded to “energy in the executive,” but has continued on its inertial path, albeit in an upward direction.
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Thank you, Federal Reserve.
A signed rookie card of Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic sold for $4.6 million on Sunday, according to the Dallas Morning News.
It is reportedly the highest price ever paid for a basketball card.
Prices have been exploding but this one-of-a-kind card takes things to a new level.
A signed Giannis Antetokounmpo rookie card sold for $1.812 million in September, and a LeBron James signed rookie card sold for $1.8 million in July. Tom Brady had a rookie card sold for almost $600,000 in January, and Los Angeles Angels star Mike Trout had one go for almost $4 million. Michael Jordan had a signed card from the 1992 All-Star Game go for $1.4 million earlier this month.