The fastest and easiest way out of the COVID-19 pandemic -- and back to a fully-functioning economy -- is to get as many people as possible vaccinated. That was Joe Biden's message today, in a speech he gave promoting support for vaccine mandates. It was his strongest statement on the subject to date, and he tied it at every step to getting both daily life and the economy fully back to normal.

Biden's timing is pretty good, because many vaccine mandates which had been announced a month or so ago (back at the height of the Delta spike) are finally taking effect. People are getting fired because of their continuing refusal to get vaccinated. But, as Biden pointed out, while most of the news stories center around the few hundred who get fired, they mostly ignore the tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of people who not only keep their jobs, but can now do so more safely. Which was Biden's core message: vaccine mandates work. They save lives, in the end.

He didn't come right out and say it (although I wish he had, since it'd be a word nobody would be surprised to hear Joe Biden utter), but it's true nonetheless -- the time for mollycoddling the unvaccinated is now over. Now it's time to pay attention to the rest of us -- the ones who have been forced back into preventative measures because of the stubborn refusal of the few. We have rights too, and the right to a safe workplace is one of them.

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It's rare that I engage in "both-sides-ism," but I have to admit being disgusted by the games being played by both parties over the needed debt ceiling rise. Nobody's hands are really clean on this one, sad to say, even though the sides aren't exactly equal in their culpability -- Democrats really should have taken care of this long before now, but Republicans are nihilistically cheering for the destruction of the American economy (while giving lip service to the idea that "of course that shouldn't happen -- perish the thought!").

In fact, I'm not even going to get into deconstructing the ins and outs of the various machinations under discussion right now in the Senate, because I trust that we are just not going to hit the deadline. Unlike shutting down the government for a few days (or even a few weeks), defaulting on the national debt and not being able to pay our bills would have much wider and much more dire consequences, and it would not be an easy thing to recover from. So I trust it isn't going to come to that, and thus refuse to get lost in the weeds of what Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Joe Biden are currently trying to work out.

Instead, I am going to beat the drum (once again) for not just raising the debt ceiling but abolishing it forever. It is the only way out of this mess -- both right now and for all the future times this staredown will happen. Because it will happen, over and over again.

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President Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party have so far not had much notable success in getting their real message out on the "Build Back Better" budget reconciliation bill. This isn't entirely Biden's fault, of course, since a lot of the blame falls on the media as well. And the Democrats who truly want to see this historic legislation pass are also hamstrung by two realities -- the bill doesn't really exist yet, and the media has kept a singular focus on the overall amount of new spending the bill will contain.

That last one is the toughest one to overcome, but thankfully it should disappear once some sort of compromise figure is actually agreed to by the two Senate holdouts. The negotiation over this number is currently all the political press wants to focus on, and so we hear updates about Biden's bid of a range from $1.9 trillion to either $2.2 or $2.3 trillion (reports differ). Progressives, who already came down from their original $6 trillion to only $3.5 trillion, have counteroffered between $2.5 trillion and $2.9 trillion. The only safe bet at this point is that the final number will likely begin with a two.

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Far too often, I find myself getting irate with the mainstream political press for being intentionally obtuse and refusing to remember what happened only a short time ago. This weekend was one of those times. The chattering classes on the Sunday political shows tried to frame what had just happened at the Capitol as some sort of plot twist -- some unforeseen development that was simply unprecedented and shocking. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. When President Joe Biden went to the Capitol and informed Democrats not only that he wanted to see the budget reconciliation bill pass but also that he would be willing to wait -- and that he didn't care that the infrastructure bill would be delayed -- you would have thought by the reaction that he had somehow changed his mind or "thrown his lot in with the progressives." This was the refrain I heard all Sunday morning, in fact. Biden had surprisingly sided with the progressives, when many people had expected him to join the moderates in their demand that the infrastructure bill be passed before any action was taken on the reconciliation bill. But this is narrative is completely false.

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Reconciliation is a truly warm and forgiving word. It means coming back together after a period of being apart or at odds. Couples reconcile after time spent apart (for whatever reason). Friends achieve reconciliation by burying hatchets and shrugging off long-carried grudges. It means coming back together, no matter what the circumstances.

The fact that it means something more technical in the parliamentarian terminology of the U.S. Senate is mere coincidence. A budget reconciliation bill is one that amends the original budget for that year with new realities. The two bills are reconciled to each other, merged into becoming the actual budget for that year.

But if the current budget reconciliation bill under negotiation is ever written and passed into law, it will come about because of the reconciliation of two factions of the Democratic Party with each other. The first faction consists of Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and a very small handful of House Democrats. They are often misleadingly called "centrists" or (even worse) "moderates," but they are in fact corporatists, plain and simple. They used to be called a few other misleading labels back in the Clinton era (as we discussed earlier this week, and as Paul Krugman also later pointed out), but at heart they are just pro-big-business -- especially big business that they personally profit from (either directly or indirectly in the form of mountains of campaign cash). The second faction in the Democratic Party is, essentially, the entire rest of the party. This consists of all the progressives and moderates and centrists (the real ones, not the bought-and-paid-for corporate shills). Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are all in this group, as are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The second group consists of 95-plus percent of the party. This is not an equal reconciliation; it will be the reconciliation of a tiny handful of corporatists with all the other Democrats. But, due to the almost-non-existent majority in the Senate, this reconciliation must happen if Joe Biden is going to get anything at all done as president.

Which leaves us where we've been all week: waiting for something to happen -- perpetually checking our watches during a performance of Waiting For Godot, wondering when the whole thing is going to be over. Political journalists have been essentially writing the same story all week: "Negotiations Continue, No Breakthrough Yet."

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[Before I begin today, a program note is in order. I am currently so frustrated with watching the "What are Manchin and Sinema thinking?" show that I really needed a break. So today, I am eschewing politics altogether to opine upon a subject I admittedly know next to nothing about. In the first place, I do not regularly talk to schoolchildren (although I do talk to some parents, so I get secondhand information, at the very least). I don't even know what to call the subject today -- sociology, maybe? (The fact that I'm not even sure of the right term to use should be a good indication of my ignorance.) Branding and marketing? Some combination of these, most likely. In any case, consider yourselves duly warned.]

I recently read an article which defined and explained a not-so-impressive neologism for the current generation of American children:

In 2005, social researcher Mark McCrindle coined the term "Generation Alpha" to identify the group born after Generation Z. He defines the generation as those born from 2010 to 2024, while Gen Z spans 1995 to 2009 and Gen Y spans 1980 to 1994 (though many push the millennial birth years back a bit later).

This is taking silliness to an entirely new level. This entire sequence of "let's just give generations letters" began a long time ago, mostly pushed by Baby Boomers who (perhaps) didn't want any other generation to have a label cooler than theirs. After all, for a good decade or so, the Baby Boomers themselves were referred to (disparagingly) as "the Me Generation." Everything always had to be about them, in other words, so the following generations would just have to make do with "X," "Y," and "Z."

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All week long, we've been playing a big waiting game on what is going to happen to President Joe Biden's domestic economic agenda in Congress. His promised "Build Back Better" plan initially had three parts. First, there was the immediate relief needed for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Next, physical infrastructure projects. And finally, human infrastructure investments. The pandemic relief passed soon after Biden took office (back when most Americans hadn't even had the opportunity to get their first vaccine shot). The other two remain undone. The negotiations to get both of them on Biden's desk for his signature are what we've all been seeing play out -- not just this week, but for the past three or four months. We're (hopefully, at least) now in the endgame of the waiting game, to mix a few metaphors with abandon.

Biden had his own metaphor he would use to describe his tripartite legislative strategy. He called it a "three-legged stool." This is a useful image, since if you take any one of those three legs away, the stool does not stand. It collapses. That is precisely how Biden has seen this effort from the beginning.

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Sadly, the public debate over the budget reconciliation bill in Congress has so far usually been reduced to a single number. I say "sadly" because what this means is that while the media (and, also sadly, too many Democratic politicians) obsess over that one number, it means they seldom (if ever) talk about what is actually contained within the bill itself. Perhaps Democrats can pivot to having this discussion if the bill ever actually passes. But for now, I'd like to put that big, scary $3.5 trillion number into some necessary context.

The first thing Democrats should do when asked the question (over and over again) by journalists is to insist on always pointing out "...over ten years." This is actually happening with more and more frequency, and should be encouraged. Talk about "$350 billion per year" rather than the ten-year figure. Because that is a much more relevant number to any discussion about annual budgets.

I have also heard some Democrats make the following contrast: "We're talking about investing in $350 billion per year on human infrastructure. The annual military budget is over $700 billion per year. All we're saying is it would be worth spending less than half of what we spend each year on the military on things like free preschool education, tuition-free community college, expanding Medicare to include dental and vision and hearing aid coverage, caring for the elderly, and finally doing something about climate change. I think it's worth it to make those investments -- again, which would only cost half as much as we spend each year on the Pentagon." This sounds much more reasonable to most people.

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The mainstream media, as usual, is mostly presenting the power struggle taking place right now within the Democratic Party in a rather slanted way. The fight, we are told, is a fairly equal one between "moderates" or (as is becoming more in vogue recently) "centrists" and the progressives. The progressives are usually painted as the radicals, while the "centrists" are seen as those cautioning moderation and compromise. Virtually none of this is true, however. What is really going on is the old-guard "New Democrats" are being forced to confront the reality that it is no longer the 1990s, and their particular brand of "Wall Street-friendly" Democratic politics is not only seriously on the wane but has now been almost totally eclipsed. Senator Bernie Sanders was at the vanguard of effecting this drastic shift, but it is almost complete. And the old guard is none too happy about it, as they cling to the remaining leverage they still have.

Almost all the conversations about what the progressives are trying to accomplish start out by framing progressives as "far left" or "lefties," or other similar terms. They are painted as the fringe, either explicitly or implicitly. But the reality is that the things progressives are fighting for (in the "Build Back Better" legislation at the heart of this fight) are actually quite popular with the general public (to say nothing of Democratic voters, where these proposals are actually wildly popular). Three progressives wrote a recent opinion piece for CNN where they made this point plain:

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It's one of those rare weeks in Washington, where Congress is actually forced into doing its job -- legislating, holding hearings... you know, the things the taxpayers actually pay them to do. As usual, they are facing multiple deadlines. They deserve zero pity, though, since they just returned from their annual month-long summer vacation. If they had stayed and worked instead of gone and played, then they wouldn't be facing all these time crunches simultaneously. Which is why we say: zero pity.

Right now, there are two enormous legislative efforts underway. One is to raise the debt ceiling as well as keep the government functioning past the first of October (when a new fiscal year begins). It's a double-whammy, both a fiscal cliff and a government shutdown rolled into one. The second is to finalize the huge budget reconciliation bill, which has a laughably impossible deadline of next Monday attached to it. As a quick glance at a calendar shows, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for an enormous amount of work. Right now the media is mostly spotlighting the fight to raise the debt ceiling, but next week the reconciliation bill will also deserve some attention in one way or another.

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