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A mock 10 baht banknote bearing an illustration of a yellow duck instead of the Thai king or his predecessor is pictured in Bangkok on Nov. 25, 2020.
Hard Numbers: Thai royal canard, Biden’s deficit plan, Japan’s gender pay gap, golden Odin, Greek walkout
2: Prepare to read the next sentence twice. A man in Thailand is facing two years in jail for selling calendars of … rubber ducks. The squeaky fowl has long been a symbol of the country’s pro-democracy movement, and since these birds were dressed in royal regalia, authorities say they insulted the monarchy. The country’s defamation laws have been used to convict 200 people since 2020.
2 trillion: With a partisan battle over the debt ceiling looming, President Joe Biden on Thursday is set to unveil a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit by $2 trillion over the next 10 years. Don’t expect Republicans to jump for joy though – the plan is expected to call for tax increases for the wealthy and corporations but won’t satisfy the GOP’s demands for spending cuts.
75: PM Fumio Kishida vowed yesterday to “work even harder” to tackle the massive gender pay gap in Japan, where women earn 75% of what men do for full-time work. The Land of the Rising Sun has ranked abysmally on the World Economic Forum’s gender parity report despite efforts by successive governments to tackle the issue.
1,500: Historians shouldn’t be too Thor about this. Scientists have uncovered the oldest-known reference to the Norse god Odin on a gold disc dating back 1,500 years. The ornamental pendant is part of a trove of gold found in Denmark in 2020, and its inscription, “He’s Odin’s man,” likely refers to an unknown lord or king.
60,000: At least 60,000 Greeks joined anti-government protests Wednesday, a week after a deadly train crash — blamed on years of underinvestment in infrastructure — killed 57 people. Most protesters were in Athens, where they marched to parliament chanting "murderers” in the biggest challenge to date to PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Senate's bipartisan $1T infrastructure bill could double US spending
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
The Senate passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill this week. What do we know about that?
Infrastructure week is finally here, after many years of fits and starts on pressing a bipartisan infrastructure bill. The Senate moved one out of the chamber this week, as well as making progress on President Biden's $3.5 trillion follow-up spending plan. What's in the infrastructure bill? While it's a whole bunch of money for roads, bridges, tunnels, water projects, broadband deployment, airports, ports, all types of physical infrastructure, and it was done on a bipartisan basis.
How did they get it done? They finally figured out a way to pay for these things without actually having to raise taxes, partially by repurposing unused COVID-19 relief funds, but also through a series of budget gimmicks, which includes extending taxes that were set to expire, extending some fees that were set to expire, and changing around some Medicare rules. The end result is going to be probably a doubling of US infrastructure spending along with increase in deficits of between $200 and $300 billion over the next five to 10 years.
Is this a bipartisan victory for Biden? What will come next?
Well, this is a reasonably large bipartisan win for him. He thought it can get done. He insisted on getting it done, and it was probably necessary to get this done, so that moderate Democrats in the Senate would also vote for the much larger spending plan that's going to come next. Infrastructure's not done yet. We probably have months ahead of us in negotiation among the Democrats on the much larger $3.5 trillion bill. And then in the fall, perhaps as late as December, both bills are likely to pass the House, potentially with changes. You could see up to $2.5 or $3.5 trillion in new spending over the next 10 years, including a host of tax increases, designed to finance the second follow-on bill. President Biden's not gotten a big boost out of this so far, but he does check a box with moderate members of his conference who wanted to show that they can work with Republicans. Republicans also won from this because they showed the Senate still works, taking away some of the argument Democrats have for eliminating the Senate's supermajority rules known as the filibuster.
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