US$1.9 trillion Covid plan clears US House, heads to Senate
The US House passed an enormous, US$1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package early Saturday, hailed by Democrats as a critical step in funneling new funding toward vaccinations, overburdened local governments, and millions of families devastated by the pandemic.
Four days after the Covid-19 death toll surpassed 500,000 in the United States, the sprawling measure backed by President Joe Biden and seen as a moral imperative by many now heads to the Senate for consideration next week.
“After 12 months of death and despair, the American recovery begins tonight,” congressman Brendan Boyle told the House chamber shortly before lawmakers approved the package on an rare post-midnight vote of 219 to 212.
No Republicans voted for the bill.
The sharply partisan result comes weeks after Biden’s January 20 inauguration, when he called for unity in the face of a once-ina-century health crisis.
The package cleared the House despite a major setback for Democrats, when a key Senate official ruled Thursday that the final version of the bill cannot include a minimum wage hike.
Biden had campaigned extensively on raising the national minimum wage to US$15 an hour, from a rate of US$7.25 that has stood since 2009.
He aimed to include it in the rescue plan, which directly provides US$1,400 checks to most Americans and allots billions of dollars to boost vaccine delivery, help schools re-open and fund state and local governments.
It extends unemployment benefits, set to expire mid-March, by about six months, as well as a moratorium on evictions for millions of people struggling to pay rent. The bill is on track to be the second largest US stimulus ever, after the $2 trillion package Donald Trump signed last March to fight the pandemic’s devastating spread.
Even as the Senate parliamentarian ruled against including the minimum wage language in the bill as written under budget reconciliation rules, Democrats kept the provision, highlighting their “fight for 15” as a top party priority. “We will not rest until we pass the US$15 minimum wage,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said.
Even without the wage hike, she said the bill was critical and it would be “catastrophic” if it does not become law.
“The American people need to know that their government is there for them,” she told the chamber.
“As President Biden has said, help is on the way.”
SEOUL: Two self-made South Korean billionaires have pledged in as many weeks to give away half their fortunes – a rarity in a country where business is dominated by family-controlled conglomerates and charity often begins and ends at home.
Kim Beom-su, the founder of South Korea’s biggest messaging app KakaoTalk, announced this month he will donate more than half his estimated US$9.6 billion assets to try to “solve social issues”.
Shortly afterwards, Kim Bongjin of food-delivery app Woowa Brothers and his wife, Bomi Sul, became the first South Koreans to sign the Giving Pledge. The philanthropic initiative was set up by Bill and Melinda Gates, alongside Warren Buffett, for billionaires to give away at least half their wealth.
Both Kims contrast with most of South Korea’s ultra-wealthy, who are largely descendants of the founders of the chaebol, the sprawling, usually family-run conglomerates that powered the country’s post-war boom and still dominate the economy.
Unlike the chaebol heirs who inherited their wealth, power and connections, the two Kims were born to working-class families. In his Giving Pledge statement, Kim of Woowa Brothers described his “humble beginning” on a small island.
His parents ran a small restaurant, where he slept at night, and as a teenager he gave up his dream of attending an art high school, enrolling instead in a cheaper vocational school.
Wealth, he said, had value when it was used for “the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society”.
Rather than keeping the entirety of their fortune, Kim and his wife said in their statement: “We are certain that this pledge is the greatest inheritance that we could provide for our children.”
Neither of the billionaire Kims has so far provided a precise timeline for their pledged donations, or detailed the recipient organisations.
More than 200 super-wealthy from around the world have signed the Giving Pledge, according to its website.
But it has previously been criticised for not being legally binding, and it acknowledges it is only a “moral commitment”.
It has struggled to make headway in East Asia, listing only a handful of donors from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and none from Japan.
Like many East Asian societies, South Korea remains largely family-oriented, with financial ties extending well into adulthood as parents help finance higher education and housing, and little sense of obligation to give to non-relatives.
South Korea ranks 57th in the Charities Aid Foundation’s most recent World Giving Index – with Japan at 107 and China at 126.
Public philanthropy has a limited history among superwealthy South Koreans, while the chaebols’ founding families often maintain their grip through complex webs of cross-holdings between subsidiaries.
“When the country was just reeling from the war, the priority was survival, not philanthropy, and working with your own family members was seen as the most efficient way of running a business,” Jangwoo Lee, a business administration professor at Kyungpook National University, told AFP.
But both Kim Beom-su and Kim Bong-jin have been at the forefront of South Korea’s social media and mobile tech industries boom, each founding their company in 2010 and rapidly accumulating a fortune.
Kakao’s flagship messaging application is installed on more than 90 per cent of phones in the country.
Woowa owns South Korea’s biggest food delivery app, with more than 10 million monthly users – around 20 per cent of the population.
The children of Kakao’s Kim have been appointed to positions in his holding company, but professor Lee said chaebolstyle succession was effectively obsolete for such firms.
“Family-oriented management strategies may have worked for manufacturing businesses, but we have now entered an era where newly emerging enterprises do not really benefit from such ways,” he said.
“These are creative and unpredictable industries, and they need specialists, not family members, in leadership in order to thrive.”
That could give their owners more flexibility with their assets.
According to the Washingtonbased Institute for Policy Studies, most donations under the Giving Pledge have gone to private foundations controlled by donors’ relatives, or donoradvised funds, enabling the givers to “retain significant managerial control over millions of philanthropic dollars” while generating “hefty tax reductions”.
South Korean law also offers donors some tax benefits, depending on the beneficiaries and how giving is structured. Some chaebol families have engaged in high-profile philanthropy.
Hyundai Motor’s honorary chairman Chung Mong-Koo endowed an eponymous foundation with his personal assets and the Samsung group – South Korea’s biggest conglomerate – founded the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, home to an extensive collection of antiquities and modern works. But critics say South Korea is becoming an increasingly unequal society.
Kakao’s Kim was among those who grew up poor. Neither of his parents attended high school, and they took multiple blue-collar jobs to make ends meet, leaving him to be cared for mostly by his grandmother.
All eight members of the family shared a single room, and later he sometimes could not afford to buy lunch as a student at the prestigious Seoul National University.
Vladimir Tikhonov, professor of Korean Studies at the University of Oslo, said the South Koreans’ moves were a “display of public-mindedness on the part of the self-made rich men”.
“Meritocratic billionaires have something that rich heirs do not.”