Less Talkie, More Stimmy
What A Day
What A Day
4.6 • 12.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2021
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
A group of Republican Senators are sending Biden a counter-proposal on Covid relief. They want to slash the bill by over a trillion dollars, and limit the size and scope of stimulus checks. They’re framing it as a bipartisan solution, but Democrats are reportedly planning to move forward with their own plan using budget reconciliation.
The average number of new cases in the US has dropped off significantly since peaking three weeks ago, but January was still an awful month in the pandemic, and the presence of new variants has the potential to disrupt progress. Johnson & Johnson released data for their one-shot vaccine candidate last Friday. We explain what to make of it.
And in headlines: several members of Myanmar’s ruling party were detained in a possible military coup, Hong Kong residents can now apply to become permanent British citizens, and Trump hires two new attorneys for his Senate impeachment trial.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Monday, February 1st. I'm Achila Hughes. |
| 0:08.7 | And I'm Gideon Rezlik and this is what a day we are kicking off Black History Month by giving |
| 0:12.4 | ourselves one day to forget one racist-founding father. |
| 0:15.2 | Honestly, we should forget all of them. I mean, how am I supposed to explain to my kids that America has |
| 0:19.6 | several racist dads? Too much, too much for their speed and little heads. |
| 0:23.9 | They won't understand. On today's show, COVID-19 cases in the U.S. decline, but experts are worried |
| 0:38.8 | about variants than some headlines. But first, the latest. This is a moment of crisis. And in moments |
| 0:44.4 | of crisis, we've heard from the top economic advisors from President Bush, President Trump, |
| 0:50.1 | economists across the board saying the cost of doing too little right now, far outweighs the cost |
| 0:54.9 | of doing too much. That's the theory behind the President's plan. |
| 0:58.7 | That was Brian Deese, the Director of Biden's National Economic Council, making the case yesterday |
| 1:03.9 | on CNN for the White House's COVID Relief Bill. It's now February and we're still trying to get |
| 1:08.4 | those relief stimmies. That's right. Where are the stimmies? We do have an update on where the |
| 1:13.6 | stimmies are and all of this from over the weekend. Yesterday, 10 Republican senators wrote to President |
| 1:18.0 | Biden outlining their counter-proposal for COVID relief and asking for bipartisanship. The group |
| 1:23.0 | is led by oft-quote disturbed or, quote, disappointed, main senators, who's in Collins, but also include |
| 1:28.8 | senators Romney and Murkowski among others. So Akula, let's walk through what we know about their |
| 1:34.0 | plan and how it differs from Biden's proposal. Yeah, well, there aren't that many specifics yet, |
| 1:38.8 | but we're expecting them to release more details today. So here's kind of what we know from reporting |
| 1:43.3 | and from interviews that some of those Republican senators have given over the weekend. |
| 1:46.7 | To start, they want a cheaper bill with the total closer to $600 billion rather than |
| 1:50.7 | Biden's 1.9 trillion. So what are those cuts? Well, they don't want stimulus checks to go to anyone |
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