“The President will call on Congress to extend this commonsense, life-saving protection to all Americans,” the fact sheet said.
Democrats had originally planned to pass a universal insulin price cap last year as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed along party lines last August. But the policy was scaled back after Republicans successfully challenged its inclusion. Democrats since then have vowed to continue to push for its passage, arguing that it’s broadly popular and crucial to ensuring that people can afford essential medicines.
Still, Biden’s fresh support for expanding the price cap is unlikely to result in much concrete progress. Republicans remain opposed to the measure, and are unlikely to even allow a vote on it in the House now that they control the chamber.
Biden during his State of the Union speech is also expected to highlight a handful of other health care accomplishments, including landmark legislation granting Medicare the right to negotiate drug prices and cap certain out-of-pocket pharmacy costs. He will celebrate the three latest states to expand their Medicaid programs, while urging Congress to pass legislation that would close coverage gaps in the 11 holdout states that have yet to expand Medicaid.
The president also plans to call for continuing to lower health insurance costs, pointing to expanded Obamacare subsidies that the administration estimates lowered customers’ premiums by an average of $800 per year and pushed the nation’s uninsured rate to an all-time low.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hyderabad: Tollywood star Prabhas and his luxurious car collection has always been the topic of interest among his fans. His swanky Lamborghini Aventador Roadster which he bought in 2021 is one of the most expensive cars parked in his garage.
The actor’s high-end car is back in the news once again. Prabhas’ upcoming film director Maruthi was recently seen taking the star’s Lamborghini for a ride in Hyderabad. The filmmaker posted the video of the same on his social media and wrote, “We don’t pray for love, we just pray for cars”. Fans are missing Prabhas in the frame and are wondering if the video was shot by the actor himself from the passenger seat.
Pictures and videos of the swanky car and super luxurious Lamborghini Aventador took the internet by storm when he purchased it in 2021. It is reportedly priced at close to Rs 6 crore.
What’s more in Prabhas’ garage?
It looks like Prabhas is a huge fan of royal and luxurious cars. In 2015, the actor joined the league of Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar and more, and brought home a swanky Rolls Royce Phantom worth Rs 8 crores. The actor is often spotted driving the car on the Hyderabad streets.
Apart from the above, he is also a proud owner of Ritzy BMW X3 and a Luxurious Jaguar XJR.
On the workfront, this pan-India star is gearing up for his upcoming films Adipurush, Saalar, Raja Delux and Project K.
Adani Enterprises has decided not to proceed with its fully subscribed Follow-on Public Offer (FPO), the conglomerate said in a statement late on Wednesday, hours after the shares of the firm nosedived 28.45% to close at ₹2,128.70 on the BSE. Adani Greens too witnessed over 30% price fall in its share price.
Sources suggest that in order to be transparent with its shareholder, Adani Group has decided to rename Adani Greens to Adani Red. “This will be morally incorrect to keep the name Adani Greens when it is all red. Once we are back in green we will rename it back to Adani Greens” said the CEO of Adani Greens (now Adani Red), Vineet Jain.
Finance Expert, Yogendra Yadav has suggested Gautam Adani to start fund raising activity with him and the collection can be shared equally as Yogendra Yadav can help him raising funds. Yogendra Yadav isn’t the first one to offer help to Gautam Adani, Saket Gokhale too has offered financial tips to Gautam Adani. Reportedly, Saket Gokhale has suggested Future and Options to Gautam Adani in Adani Group companies.
[ Disclaimer: With inputs from The Fauxy, an entertainment portal. The content is purely for entertainment purpose and readers are advised not to confuse the articles as genuine and true, these Articles are Fictitious meant only for entertainment purposes. ]
Yet that progress could be in jeopardy: As Federal Reserve officials prepare to meet next week to raise interest rates again, their inflation-fighting crusade — which Fed Chair Jerome Powell has vowed to continue — has sparked fears of a recession, meaning that workers could be forced to give up those hard-fought gains.
The economy added 4.5 million jobs in 2022, and data to be released on Thursday is expected to show that GDP increased by an annualized 2.8 percent in the last three months of the year, defying downturn worries for the time being. But that may change since the impact of the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes has not yet been fully felt in the economy.
Bernstein acknowledged the difficulty ahead. “A key part of our message is we’ve got more work to do,” he said.
Prices have been cooling for the past six months. The consumer price index rose 6.5 percent across all of last year, down from 9.1 percent for the 12 months ending in June. Average hourly earnings grew more slowly — 4.6 percent — over that time period. But a steady drop in inflation in the second half of the year helped income surpass price increases, bringing real worker pay roughly to the same level it was prior to the pandemic.
With unemployment still at modern lows, some in Washington and on Wall Street have held out hope that price spikes can cool further. Indeed, Wall Street investors expect the Fed to scale back the size of the rate hikes at its Feb. 1 meeting and beyond, partly because of the progress on inflation.
Prices have come down in many areas, but it’s the cost of gas that has drawn the most attention. That’s partly because White House officials have driven home the price declines for months by touting them on Twitter and in speeches — though the price is driven by global factors that are mostly outside of Biden’s control.
“When we did start to see gas prices go down, it did correspond to a period of increasing support for Biden,” Democratic pollster Carly Cooperman said, pointing to the party’s better-than-expected results in the midterm elections.
Still, she said, inflation has to recede a lot more for Biden to reap the full political benefit. “As long as voters find that their cost of living is expensive, it’s going to be hard to convince [them] there’s real improvement,” she said.
Workers will bear the brunt of any miscalculation by the Fed — whether it’s the central bank failing to sufficiently tame prices or hitting the brakes on the economy too hard. There’s also a danger that stronger wages themselves will stoke broader inflation, leading to even higher interest rates and perhaps a deeper economic slump in the coming years.
Income gains have been fed by a labor market with a shortage of workers, giving people more leverage to seek higher pay, particularly when switching jobs. Powell is closely watching inflation in core services industries where paychecks are often businesses’ largest expense.
“Inflation is coming down faster than we may have expected based on wage growth alone, but that’s unsurprising, given that inflation was driven up by factors that weren’t driven by wage growth,” said Daniel Zhao, lead economist on Glassdoor’s economic research team.
New research that has garnered attention within the administration as well as among top commentators in the field suggests there’s still a way this could end well.
In a draft paper, economists Guido Lorenzoni and Iván Werning found that, in the wake of an economic shock, inflation-adjusted wages might drop at first but then begin to rise as part of a normal recovery. That is, there’s room for workers to increase their take-home pay without it being worrisome to the Fed.
“You get a shock that makes the price of, say, energy inputs or microchips or lumber more expensive,” said Lorenzoni, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Firms are faster to move, so they start raising prices. Workers catch up a little slower, so at the beginning, the [inflation-adjusted] wage goes down. But then workers keep catching up. At some point, firms are happy because the shock goes away. Then workers catch up.”
“If that’s the story, it kind of fits the data because it looks like real wages originally fell, now they’re recovering,” he said. “The important thing is, that is not a signal that things are completely out of whack.”
Fed officials aren’t yet convinced, worrying that the rapid increase in wages will keep inflation from going all the way back down to their 2 percent target, though wage growth has already showed signs of deceleration.
“It seems likely that returning inflation to 2 percent will require wage growth to slow substantially,” Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan said in a speech last week.
For the time being, Biden is touting the income gains. Non-supervisory workers have slightly higher incomes than they had before the pandemic, and people with low-paying jobs have fared better than their higher-earning counterparts, as restaurants, hotels, and warehouses compete for a finite pool of employees.
“It all adds up to a real break for consumers,” Biden said earlier this month.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Some claim that the first day in the third week of January is the most depressing one in the calendar. This year, Blue Monday arrived with added cruelty – for those of us who happen to be single, at least. A financial services firm chose just that miserable moment to reveal how much more expensive it is to live on your own than in a couple.
If you’re currently alone, and the post-holiday slump already has you feeling down about it, you may want to look away now. According to the brokers Hargreaves Lansdown, the cost of living premium for being single comes in at an average £860 a month, factoring in typical expenses from rent and energy bills to groceries, wifi and TV subscriptions.
That’s a whopping figure in isolation – an additional £10,000 a year in outgoings – and it wounds even deeper when you compare it with what your partnered friends are paying. The average couple spend £991 per person, so if you’re living alone you’re spending nearly twice the amount they are on the exact same goods and services. For those who didn’t choose their solo state, it’s adding impecuniousness to injury.
As a long-term single, I’ve become inured to the injustice of the single supplement – the one that demands I pay extra for eating less breakfast and soiling fewer towels. I scoff at the misleadingly titled “discount” I receive from the council, which taxes me 75% of the married rate for using only 50% of the services (and arguably less, because I’m childless).
Still, I’ve rarely wasted much time wondering how life without a partner affects my finances. That’s not because I’m comfortably cushioned by personal wealth (which would be nice) but because I have always assumed these things even out overall.Since I don’t share my worldly goods with another person, I have never watched my bank account being depleted by someone making purchases I neither want nor need. Nor have I copped the eye-watering expense of raising children or had to stump up the galling legal fees and potentially lifelong financial commitments of a divorce.
There is another reason I’ve resisted contemplating the economic disadvantages of living alone. Women are already conditioned to perceive the unpartnered life as one of lack or absence, if not downright misery. Challenging that Bridget Jones default can be hard work and a poor-me mindset doesn’t help. As someone who always pictured herself married, I have learned the hard way not to fixate on the negatives of singlehood.
Today’s climate of uncertainty, inequality and inflation is making the issue impossible to ignore. Much as I’ve loved Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters, I can’t watch Sharon Horgan’s Eva living alone in an enormous family home without wondering how she affords to heat it. Seeing last week’s figures in stone cold print has finally shaken me out of my state of denial. An extra 10 grand a year? The comparative financial benefits of singledom and coupledom aren’t swings and roundabouts at all, they’re snakes and ladders.
More noteworthy than the vast disparity itself, one that the majority of single people have long intuited, is how we respond to it. Whatever sympathy the news may elicit for ourselves or our single friends is soon followed by a sense of impotence or even outright ambivalence. This isn’t the kind of inequality we feel compelled to challenge or change. Maybe it’s because we see singleness as a temporary status. Or maybe because we can’t shift the suspicion that a solo life is a self-indulgent one.
In the 18th century, social commentators in Britain argued for a tax on bachelors and spinsters, who were considered to contribute nothing concrete to the productivity of the nation. Frances Brooke, writing a series of articles as “Mary Singleton”, proposed that unmarried men over the age of 30 pay a shilling in the pound and unmarried women sixpence. “The very circumstance of having no burden upon their fortunes, but what merely concerns themselves, makes them of all others, the fittest to be assessed extraordinarily,” she wrote, adding that she would herself pay such a due “with the greatest pleasure”.
Living alone is a privilege, but it can also be a burden. In her brilliant book about spinsterhood, She I Dare Not Name, Donna Ward argues that “the crucial conversation to have is about the reality of this life – the social, psychological and financial implications of it and the way legislators, friends, family and neighbours can support those living it”. Most single people are living on one income in a dual-income economy – and one whose lawmakers make the fallacious assumption that they have more disposable income than their coupled counterparts.
The American social psychologist Bella DePaulo has long campaigned for more awareness of the way that society invisibly discriminates against those without partners – expecting more of them in the workplace, for instance, then robbing them through a tax system that prioritises married and family units. Maybe it is time to make a fuss about that single supplement.
Emma John is a freelance author and writer. Her book Self Contained: Scenes from a Single Life is published by Octopus
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
High up in Mallorca’s spectacular Tramuntana mountain range, the picturesque village of Deià is a Mediterranean idyll that has been a magnet for artists and bohemians for more than a century.
There is no beach to speak of nearby, which has served to keep the crowds at bay. Its problem now is that only millionaires and billionaires can afford to live there.
“It’s still attracting creative people but now they have to have money,” says the Chicago-born ceramicist Joanna Kuhne, who has lived in Deià since 1980. “They come here to relax and they don’t want to integrate or they don’t know how to. Their life is somewhere else.”
Ceramicist Joanna Kuhne in her studio. Photograph: Stephen Burgen
Local people have been priced out. It’s not that there’s nowhere to live – the two estate agents in the village have plenty of homes on offer for upwards of €2m (£1.75m) – it’s rather that people in the Balearic Islands, where the average monthly salary is €1,598, have been thoroughly priced out.
As such, while poverty is driving the depopulation of rural areas on the Spanish mainland, Deià and dozens of villages like it in the Balearics are being depopulated by wealth.
The regional government is fighting back, with a request for European approval for a law that would ban anyone not resident in the islands from buying property.
This has been interpreted as a ban on foreigners’ buying property but that is not the case in Deià, where foreigners, mostly from the UK and US, make up around 37% of the population.
“It’s not about people’s nationality, everyone is welcome. It’s how they plan to use the houses,” says Deià’s mayor, Lluís Apesteguia. “What we want is people who plan to live here. We don’t want people buying second homes, nor do we want speculators.”
It was the English poet and novelist Robert Graves, who settled in Deià in 1929, who put it on the map as a place of pilgrimage for artists and writers.
Robert Graves with his second wife, Beryl, and children outside their home in Deià. Photograph: Daniel Farson/Getty Images
“Even when my father arrived there was already an artists’ colony of German and Catalan painters,” his son Tomás says. “In fact, he initially rented from an American woman.”
The charcoal industry had gone into decline, leading to massive emigration. As a result, houses were cheap to buy or rent.
When mass tourism arrived in the 1960s, the colony of foreign residents opposed any sort of tourist development.
“That was the first rift between the locals and the foreigners,” says Graves. “The foreigners didn’t want any more building and the locals saw what was happening elsewhere and wanted some for themselves.”
“Back then Mallorca was paradise,” says Carmen Domènech, who moved to Deià from Barcelona in 1974. “It was a refuge for artists, poets and intellectuals.
“There was a good relationship between the locals and the foreigners. You could sit in a bar and Julio Cortázar [an Argentinian novelist] would be at the next table. It was all very natural and it was a proper village with a butcher and a fishmonger.”
Things began to change in 1987 when the Virgin Group boss Richard Branson obtained planning permission to build la Residencia, originally conceived as an artists’ retreat but in reality a luxury hotel.
La Residencia in Deià. Photograph: Tyson Sadlo
“The rot set in with the arrival of Branson and that’s when I became an activist,” Domènech says. “The argument went that, thanks to Branson, lots of money would come to the area and everyone would have a job. Nearly all the village was against me because I opposed it.”
Graves says house prices rocketed “once the Residencia started to attract art consumers rather than art producers”.
Prices also rose when, under a bylaw passed in the 1980s, any new houses in Deià had to be built of stone, thus making them much more expensive.
Branson sold the hotel in 2002. It is now owned by Bernard Arnault, the boss of the luxury goods firm LVMH, and currently the world’s wealthiest man.
Francesca Deià, 63, has lived in the village for most of her life. She recalls what it was like growing up with such a cosmopolitan crowd in what was a very conservative and Catholic place.
A street in Deià. Photograph: Alex/Getty Images/iStockphoto
“To the older generation, the people who came here were like aliens and our parents wanted to protect us from the all the sex and drugs and rock’n’roll,” Deià says.
“I feel enriched that I was able to grow up with all these different nationalities and learn to speak English – and Welsh. The people I grew up with and their children are still here and they all speak Mallorquin. But nowadays I don’t see that happening much. There is less integration.”
Her Welsh partner, Dai Griffiths, says: “It’s curious that often artistic and bohemian types say they feel freer in rural, conservative places than in the city. It’s as though the linguistic and cultural barriers are a plus because they don’t feel a need to engage with the people around them. The village is just a backdrop.”
Apesteguia, who describes himself as “pathologically optimistic”, says the EU needs to be flexible and recognise that the islands are a special case, “otherwise villages such as Deià will cease to exist”.
“The Mallorca population is increasing while here in Deià it’s falling,” he says. “A village without a stable community isn’t a village, it’s just a group of houses or a tourist resort.”
Aside from a small supermarket, nearly all the shops have gone and GP services have shrunk from four days a week to two hours.
“It’s a ghost town and a theme park,” says Domènech.
Apesteguia is inclined to agree. “Tourists came here because it’s authentic,” he says. “But now it’s not.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
