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For climate experts and policymakers, $1 trillion is just a start. As the U.S. seeks to prove it’s serious about its international climate commitments, the focus now is on whether the Biden administration can pass its $2 trillion spending bill, which includes $555 billion to fight climate change and could be the new cornerstone of federal climate policy. The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress this month already commits historic levels of funding for climate projects. But experts say the U.S. won’t reach its climate goals or restore its international credibility unless the administration can pass its Build...

House Democrats acknowledge they weren't very effective at selling their $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan to the general public. Now, they're hoping to improve on those mistakes with their mammoth climate and social spending package. While President Biden's Build Back Better Act still has a tough road in the Senate, House Democrats have already begun holding a series of roundtable discussions, site visits, in-person and virtual town halls and news conferences across the country highlighting individual pieces of the roughly $2 trillion package. The idea is to break it up into smaller bite-size chunks - things like child care, climate...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is gearing up for a vote this week on President Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar social welfare legislation, but strong divisions remain among Democrats over the size and scope of the final bill. Mrs. Pelosi told reporters Monday that she was eager to push through the legislation during an event at the White House commemorating Mr. Biden’s signing of the bipartisan infrastructure package. “I’m so happy that hopefully this week we will be passing Build Back Better [legislation] to get tax cuts to America’s working families, to create millions of more jobs, to lower health care costs, and all...

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said Wednesday that D.C. “can no longer ignore” inflation as Democrats remain poised to pass the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act. Manchin released a statement after the Department of Labor revealed the Consumer Price Index rose at the fastest pace in decades in October.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some politicians think they’ve found a silver bullet for the impasse over the debt limit, except the bullet is made of platinum: Mint a $1 trillion coin, token of all tokens, and use it to flood the treasury with cash and drive Republicans crazy. Even its serious proponents — who are not that many — call it a gimmick. They say it is an oddball way out of an oddball accounting problem that will have severe consequences to average people’s pocketbooks and the economy if it is not worked out in coming days.

The House Budget Committee voted Saturday to pass the $3.5 trillion spending bill out of committee and send it to the House floor. The vote was 20 to 17 with Democratic Rep. Scott Peters of California joining Republicans to vote against the bill. It came as a necessary step for the bill to reach the full House floor, where it can be amended. Democrats have been struggling to pass President Joe Biden's economic agenda, including the massive tax and spending bill that would expand education, health care and childcare support, address the climate crisis and make further investments in infrastructure....

President Joe Biden was reportedly “very frustrated” during a meeting Wednesday with Democrat leaders over party infighting on the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. “The president really wanted a top line and was clearly getting frustrated,” a source told Politico Playbook about the president’s summit with Democrats.

House Democrats want to raise the corporate rate to 26.5 percent as part of nearly $3 trillion in tax increases to defray the cost of their next big spending package, while boosting to top rate for individuals to 39.6 percent. The Ways and Means Committee is also planning to call for a new 3 percent surtax on people making more than $5 million, sources familiar with Chair Richard Neal’s still-unreleased plan say, as well as increasing the top capital gains rate to 28.8 percent from 23.8 percent . Neal also wants to raise taxes on multinational corporations’ overseas profits, tighten...

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said late Wednesday that $3.5 trillion may not be needed to achieve President Biden’s priorities, as Democrats continue to debate the price tag of their reconciliation spending plan. “I think that there is a lot of room for people to sit down and negotiate. It may be, when you're sitting around the table, you may not need 3.5 trillion to do what the president wants done and what the current country needs done,” Clyburn told guest host Jim Acosta on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” Clyburn’s comments come as Democrats have been engaged in an...

The battle over the Democrats' proposed $3.5 trillion infrastructure plan is just beginning, but the House Ways and Means Committee has already started to outline measures that will be included in the package. One measure that's in the panel's markup of the Build Back Better Act: 12 weeks of universal paid family and medical leave. It's a measure intended to guarantee workers with time off to raise newborn children or deal with a medical emergency. "Later this week, the Ways and Means Committee will put an end to the idea that only some workers are worthy of 'perks' like paid...

Pi has been calculated to an astonishing 62.8 trillion figures by a team of Swiss scientists who spent 108 days working it up - 3.5 times as fast as the previous record. The previous record was calculated to 50 trillion figures, and was set in 2020, said experts from Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences in Chur, Switzerland. Researchers haven't revealed the exact numbers involved in the extra 12.8 trillion digits, as they are waiting on the Guinness Book of Records to certify their achievement, but say the final 10 digits they discovered are '7817924262'. The number π (pi) is a...

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Work on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in Congress has ground to a halt as nobody there is sure what number comes after trillion. "I'm so glad we have been able to reach across the aisle on this bill," said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. "This should give us enough to dig a hole to the center of the earth and throw all the rest of our money in it, and then paint BLM murals on every road, and also fund the construction of 38 billion new Planned Parenthood locations. The most important part of this deal is that Mr....

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) announced Wednesday that she would not support the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget bill after Senate Republicans and Democrats secured a deal for her bipartisan infrastructure bill. Sinema told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that she does not support such an expensive infrastructure bill. In comparison, her and Republicans’ infrastructure bill costs $1.2 trillion. “I have also made clear that while I will support beginning this process, I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion — and in the coming months, I will work in good faith to develop this legislation with my colleagues...

Facebook has hit $1 trillion in market capitalization. Facebook stock spiked nearly 5% in late-day trading aided by a favorable legal ruling that dismissed an antitrust complaint brought by the FTC. The social media company is the fifth U.S. company to hit the milestone, joining Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google-parent company Alphabet.

As restaurants around the United States open up after more than a year of lockdown, owners are finding it difficult to hire people and some CEOs in the industry believe President Joe Biden’s coronavirus relief plan is adding to the problem by paying people to stay home.

President Joe Biden and his administration have already outlined their next big spending bill, The American Families Plan. A basic outline of the second bill was revealed by the Washington Post on Tuesday citing “two people aware of internal discussions.” The bill will likely include $225 billion for child-care, $200 billion for universal preschool, and hundreds of billions for tuition-free community colleges, according to the Post.

A pair of proposals would invest in infrastructure, education, work force development and fighting climate change, with the aim of making the economy more productive. President Biden’s economic advisers are preparing to recommend spending as much as $3 trillion on a sweeping set of efforts aimed at boosting the economy, reducing carbon emissions and narrowing economic inequality, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan that may be financed in part through tax increases on corporations and the rich. After months of internal debate, Mr. Biden’s advisers are expected to present a proposal to the president this week that recommends carving his...

Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that cleared the Senate on Saturday is an $86 billion aid package that has nothing to do with the pandemic. Rather, the $86 billion is a taxpayer bailout for about 185 union pension plans that are so close to collapse that without the rescue, more than a million retired truck drivers, retail clerks, builders and others could be forced to forgo retirement income. The bailout targets multiemployer pension plans, which bring groups of companies together with a union to provide guaranteed benefits. All told, about 1,400 of the plans cover about 10.7 million...

The federal deficit exceeded $1 trillion in the first five months of fiscal 2021, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office released Monday. The deficit through February spiked to $1.048 trillion, a $423 billion increase over the same period last year. Spending this year is up 25 percent and revenues climbed 5 percent compared with the previous year.

President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda is morphing into an even bigger spending plan of action, as his administration seeks to spend $3 trillion more on Green New Deal-like policies after Congress finalizes his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief legislation.