Hey everyone we kevin here. One of the three major hurdles in congress has just been closed. It is the smallest of the three hurdles and it is keeping the government funded through december via a stop gap measure. The vote in the senate today was 65 to 35 and it is widely expected to pass the house very quickly and joe biden is expected to sign it today is september 30th, so we do expect to literally avert a government shutdown just hours before the government.

Shutdown would take place which would immediately lead to thousands of government workers being furloughed. The bill also included 28.6 billion in emergency disaster aid and 6.3 billion dollars to help resettle afghan evacuees here in the united states, obviously to help them transition and get situated and get them taken care of a lot of these. Of course, contractors are people who had helped the us government, while we were in afghanistan now. This was just one out of three issues and again, like i said, keeping the government funded by our budget is the smallest of the three issues.

We have a very big next issue coming up. It is the october 18th x date. It's called x date, because october 18th is a little fluid. It is literally the date that we will officially no longer be able to afford paying for things like social security payments payments for child tax credits, payments on our treasury bonds.

That is the day the government would default on its obligations if we do not extend the debt ceiling. Obviously, the debt ceiling is a huge political, hot button. With republicans saying, there's no way we are going to vote for increasing the debt ceiling. Democrats can do that via budget reconciliation, which they can do.

However, democrats only have one punch left with a budget reconciliation tool and they really want to use this for the three and a half trillion dollar infrastructure plan. Now those are the leftover two issues. The problem with this, though, is joe manchin, it was just discovered, has a whole set of very specific lists or demands so to speak. That was just discovered from july 28 in an apparent and potential agreement between chuck schumer and joe manchin, joe manchin outlined what his demands were july 28th.

This document was just discovered today. Politico got a leaked copy of this and joe manchin demands that the three and a half trillion dollar infrastructure package actually have a top line of 1.5 trillion dollars. Now. Remember, we've got three things here and i just want to show you how we check these boxes.

Okay, so right here, this is gov funded all right. This is what expires on september 30th. This is pretty much all but complete. Then we have the debt ceiling.

This is what i said about no social security payments, child tax care credits, uh. What stimulus payments government payments things that are important to the functioning of our government right? This is not done yet. So this is like crisis mode, because this needs to be done by october 18th. Then we have that 3.5 trillion dollar infrastructure package and joe manchin has been a notorious opponent of this.

In fact, yesterday we went through a very long statement from joe manchin explaining how he thinks there are vengeful tax increases in this bill on wealthy people to pay for handouts that people don't particularly need. So he has he's, had some pretty choice, words about this uh package, and now we have a little bit more of an interesting uh insight into what joe manchin's priorities are. This all comes as at the same time joe biden and jen sackey say they will do whatever is possible to make sure that this 3.5 trillion dollar package gets complete, because, ultimately, this right here sorry i'm highlighting the debt ceiling. This right here is one of the core tenets of joe biden's economic plan, his buildback better plan.

He doesn't get really far without the three and a half trillion dollar package. In fact, without the 3.5 trillion dollar package he risks losing the one trillion dollar hard infrastructure package. So here are some of the demands that joe manchin has. He says he wants to begin talk on this particular three and a half trillion dollar bill no earlier than october.

First, because he wants enough economic data to get to sort of make up his mind on this. He also wants funds in the legislation not to start going into the economy until coveted money has been spent now. This is very interesting because this bill already will begin to tax people day, one, but won't actually start benefiting the economy, probably for two to ten years out solely because when you have an infrastructure spending bill, it takes time for projects to actually get approved planned and To get some money into the economy, so that might not be an issue either way, then he wants the federal reserve to end quantitative easing. Now i don't think this is him saying like let's pressure, the fed to end uh quantitative easing which they're doing anyway via the taper.

I think this is more kind of like as a condition or like in order for me to even be okay with this, the fed needs to stop pumping money into the economy, because he's worried about inflation. The fed has already talked about starting this taper process to eliminate the money printing that they're doing the bond buying they're doing 120 billion dollars per month, and they expect to complete that taper by the middle of 2022. So i expect this is probably not something. That's super high on joe manchin's priority list, because they've already announced that they're going to begin tapering spending conditions.

He says he wants things to be means tested and have guardrails and new spending. I expect this is probably so that couples making two hundred thousand dollars a year or three hundred thousand dollars a year, don't get tr like free preschool or the child tax credit which they might otherwise get. I expect this is kind of where his priorities lay it's kind of like well, do they do they really need that extra money right, like let's test that and evaluate - and this is the same thing as sort of saying like hey - let's make sure with programs that We have we have caps on where we contribute to help people, so, for example, this could be rent relief like hey. Are we good with where the cap is on? How much money you can have to get rent relief right, no handouts or transfer payments now? This is very interesting.

This is basically a way of saying no stimulus checks, but the child tax credit could also fall under this, which is very interesting that a child tax credit is a form of a transfer payment and it's possible that joe manchin could take beef with this. Particularly here today, uh then we've got the inclusion of the uh senate bill 1783 budgeting for opioid addiction act. The lifeboat act i'll break that down as along with the seoul enr uh this uh jurisdiction here as part of this there's the lifeboat act. This is one of joe manchin's demands.

It's basically to provide and expand access to substance use treatment. It would establish a fee on certain prescription, pain pills, so that way they can pay for this treatment and pay for helping babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome as well. Babies affected essentially by uh opioid addictions because perhaps their their mother was uh addicted. While they were in the womb uh.

There would be some reports required. Joe manchin wants seoul enr jurisdiction. So just so you know, the enr is the united states committee on energy and natural resources, and mansion is the chairperson for this, and basically he he wants to be the boss when it comes to these sorts of issues in the senate. He's also looking for ccus, which stands for carbon capture and storage and wants to make sure that coal and natural gas companies can get a tax credit to capture some of their carbon.

So basically incentivize uh. You know oil or natural gas developers or fossil fuel burners to uh clean up their energy by giving them an opportunity for tax credits rather than just punishing and and saying that's it. You guys need to you know we're shutting down all oil and natural gas. Basically he's what he's trying to create is the opportunity for natural gas to become a transition fuel, because this is something i've talked a lot about on.

The channel, too, is that you can't really expect to go from natural gas and coal and oil immediately to evs, like electric vehicles and all you know everything, wind and solar, without having some kind of cleaner, fossil fuel or as clean as possible fossil fuel to transition. You to get there just like what they do in california, they're like oh yeah, we're not going to allow you to update your natural gas fossil. You know fossil fuel burning facility because it's not 100 green. Well.

How do you expect to get to 100 green when we can't go 100 green tomorrow, but we need more energy like what are we going to do just the energy grid and cause more fires in california it in in some cases, and i've spoken to the natural Gas industry about this quite at length - and there are some instances where the natural gas industry today could make burning natural gas eight times more efficient today. All they need is the permit to be able to do it, but the government says nah if we authorize that permit. That means we're supporting natural gas and we don't want to do that. It's like it means we burn less natural gas nah.

It's not 100 clean, like there's some things that are so straight up dumb in our government, and i think we can all agree on that. One, but anyway, uh vehicle fuel tax credits shall not be limited to. Electric vehicles must include hydrogen. This is an interesting argument by joe manchin that he's trying to include hydrogen.

Is i don't mind that? Because hydrogen vehicles generally are battery electric uh, they are just uh. The batteries are just regenerated with uh with hydrogen fuel cells that you could fill up kind of like gas, and then, when that hydrogen is converted into water, uh and releases energy, you charge your battery and then you drive a battery electric vehicle. It just has a hydrogen fuel cell built in it it's kind of cool. If tax credits are included for wind and solar, then fossil tax credits should not be repealed.

This is a big issue right here, because joe biden really wants to end tax credits for fossil fuels. That's a big deal for him, other uh conditions. Any revenue exceeding 1.5 trillion shall be used for deficit reduction. So, basically, if they make more money from increasing taxes, we should be paying off our debt.

I think a lot of people would actually agree with paying off the debt anyway uh then we've got a corporate tax rate of 25 corporate domestic minimum tax of 15 uh. So a minimum tax on corporations he's actually okay with corporate tax is okay with bumping this not to the full like 28 or 26.9 percent, but 25 uh he's okay, with the increase on the top tier income tax rate to 39.6 percent about a 1.6 bump and He's: okay, with raising the capital gains tax rate to 28. All in this is less than taxing it as ordinary income, which obviously could be as high as 40 percent. Here he's got some other items in here, but uh basically says joe manchin or does not guarantee that he will vote for the final reconciliation legislation if it exceeds the conditions outlined in this agreement and uh chuck schumer.

Here it looks like it's signed between joe manchin and chuck schumer. What uh? What apparently it says under there is we'll try to dissuade joe on some of these. It's uh written in kind of funny handwriting down here, but uh yeah kind of odd that that it's signed, i thought maybe when i first saw that that that would be some kind of like out like hey. You know sure i'll do my best but uh.

Maybe it's just sort of like an agreement. Uh, oh well! I guess he's saying an agreement to start talking right. So it's not like a contract. It's just like yeah.

Look. We agreed to start talking around some of these parameters and and working out uh. Some of these things, so it's interesting, we'll see how that goes, but remember our pillars here: folks, okay, so government's now funded, we've got the debt ceiling, the three and a half trillion dollar bill. This is what this is about.

The other box is the bipartisan infrastructure bill. This one is the one trillion dollars. We kind of expect this to get passed, though it might even get past today we'll see, but this is not such a big deal. The real two big deals are right here and right here, so we'll see how it goes.

If you found this helpful, get yourself life insurance in as little as five minutes. By going to mechanic.com live and folks, we will see you in the next one thanks. So much goodbye you.