Biden sends $1B in economic grants coast to coast
President Joe Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo are announcing $1 billion in federal grants for manufacturing, clean energy, farming, biotech and more.
President Joe Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo are announcing $1 billion in federal grants for manufacturing, clean energy, farming, biotech and more.
The grants announced Friday go to 21 regional partnerships across the nation.
The government chose the winners from 529 applicants that vied for grants that were part of the already-approved $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.
The grants include $65 million in California to improve farm production and $25 million for a robotics cluster in Nebraska.
Georgia gets $65 million for artificial intelligence. There’s $64 million for lithium-based battery development in New York. West Virginia coal counties receive $63 million to help with the shift to solar power and find new uses for abandoned mines.
The program is designed thinking about “jobs and opportunity for people in places where they live and where they’ve worked their entire careers so they don’t have to leave,” Biden said at a White House event. “This is about jobs in their communities for them, not having to leave or not having to go on unemployment. “
Meanwhile, America’s employers slowed their hiring in August in the face of rising interest rates, high inflation and sluggish consumer spending but still added 315,000 jobs.
The government reported Friday that last month’s job gain was down from 526,000 in July and below the average gain of the previous three months.
The unemployment rate rose to 3.7%, from a half-century low of 3.5% in July, as more Americans came off the sidelines to look for jobs.
Even though the job gain declined from July, the report still pointed to a resilient labor market and an economy that is not near recession.
“Bottom line is, jobs are up, wages are up, people are back to work and we’re seeing some signs that inflation may be, maybe, I’m not over-promising, may be beginning to ease, ” Biden said.
The number of people looking for work jumped last month, which boosted the unemployment rate because not all of them found jobs immediately. The influx of job seekers should help employers fill a near-record number of openings in the coming months.
The smaller August gain will likely be welcomed by the Federal Reserve.
The Fed is rapidly raising interest rates to try to cool hiring and wage growth, which have been consistently strong. Businesses typically pass the cost of higher wages on to their customers through higher prices, thereby fueling inflation.
Fed officials hope that by raising borrowing costs across the economy, they can reduce inflation from a near-40-year high. Some economists fear, though, that the Fed is tightening credit so aggressively that it will eventually tip the economy into recession.
In other matters, Biden is sounding an alarm about what he views as extremist threats to the nation’s democracy from what he views as the evil force of Trumpism.
In a newly confrontational speech Thursday night, he framed the November elections as part of an ongoing battle for the “soul of the nation.”
In the speech from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Biden declared that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans “fan the flames of political violence” and subvert American democracy.
Biden pointed to the large number of Trump adherents who still deny the nation’s 2020 election results and sow doubt about future contests.
The explicit effort by Biden to marginalize Trump and his followers marks a sharp recent turn for the president, who preached his desire to bring about national unity in his Inaugural address.
Asked on Friday if he considered all Trump supporters a threat to the country, Biden said, “I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.”
He added: “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge when an election has been won, insists on changing the way in which the rules to count votes, that is a threat to democracy.”
He added that when people voted for Trump, “they weren’t voting for attacking the capitol. They weren’t voting for overruling the election. They were voting for a philosophy he put forward.”
Biden, who largely avoided even referring to “the former guy” by name during his first year in office, has grown increasingly vocal in calling out Trump personally. Now, emboldened by his party’s summertime legislative wins and wary of Trump’s return to the headlines, he has sharpened his attacks, last week likening the “MAGA philosophy” to “semi-fascism.”
Wading into risky political terrain, Biden strained to balance his criticism with an appeal to more traditional Republicans to make their voices heard. Meanwhile, GOP leaders swiftly accused him of only furthering political divisions.
