Biden’s road show to sell the $1.9T stimulus kicks off outside Philly
PHILADELPHIA — President Joe Biden launched his campaign to sell voters on the benefits of his sweeping economic relief plan Tuesday from a Blackowned flooring company just outside Philadelphia.
Biden toured Smith Flooring in Chester Township before holding a news conference with Democratic elected officials from Pennsylvania, where he lauded the $1.9 trillion legislation as a way forward for a country reeling from a year of health and economic suffering.
“People hardest hit are in minority communities,” Biden said. “The rate at which they get COVID is higher, death rate is higher.” He said his administration is working to get coronavirus vaccines distributed through a range of locations, including pharmacies, community centers and schools, to better reach Black and brown communities.
Biden’s road show aims to lay out how the expansive package will help families, schools, health departments and local businesses, and to highlight the achievements of the president’s 50 days.
Tuesday was Biden’s first time hitting the road since signing the legislation last week, kicking off what’s expected to be a blitz of travel. First lady Jill Biden was in Burlington County, in South Jersey, on Monday, while Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff were in Nevada. President Biden and Harris will travel to Georgia later this week.
The visits have so far focused on states with competitive Senate races in the 2022 midterm elections, which
will help decide which party controls the upper chamber for the rest of Biden’s term — and the fate of his ongoing legislative ambitions.
The measure includes $1,400 stimulus checks for nearly all Americans and their children; a massive expansion of tax credits for parents and low-income workers without children; an extension of $300 per week federal unemployment aid through September; $130 billion for schools; $350 billion for state and local governments; $25 billion for restaurants; money to help more people buy health insurance and food and pay rent; and an array of liberal priorities such as expanding internet access in urban and rural areas, rescuing
pension plans and paying debts of minority farmers.
The White House said earlier Tuesday ahead of Biden’s appearance that the legislation would provide $7.4 billion for Pennsylvania state government, $4.9 billion for local governments in the state, and more than $5.1 billion for K-12 schools.
Biden’s first trip back to Pennsylvania as president brought him to Delaware County, one of the Philadelphia’s four populous and increasingly Democratic collar counties. In Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, Biden grew his total margin of victory by nearly 105,000 votes compared to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.
Chester Township, where Smith Flooring is located,
is a majority-black town of about 4,000 people. It’s about five miles from Chester city, the largest city in Delaware County, the average annual family incoming is about $30,00, and about 32% of people were living below the poverty line in 2019, according to Census data.
James and Kristin Smith, who grew Smith Flooring from their basement to a warehouse in Chester that employs about a dozen people, thanked Biden for coming.
“Thank you for helping small business and small minority businesses,” Kristin Smith said. ”It means a lot that you came to see our business . ... Not many people come out and stop here in Chester.”
The legal marijuana industry’s struggle to find banks willing to offer loans and account services was widely reported when states legalized the drug for recreational and medicinal purposes in recent years.
Marijuana’s opaque legal status — it remains prohibited under federal law — means most financial institutions won’t touch it.
But those troubles also extend to hemp, which also comes from the cannabis plant and found itself in similarly murky legal terrain until the 2018 Farm Bill fully legalized the crop. Ohio lifted its hemp prohibition in 2019.
Even so, hemp farmers and processors say they have to call dozens of banks before they find one willing to loan money or let them open an account. The few financial institutions willing to serve hemp growers and entrepreneurs generally charge higher fees.
“I called probably 20 different companies and got denied 19 different times before I found someone, and it’s probably 10 times the cost of what it would be if we weren’t dealing with hemp,” said Erik Bogard, president of the Columbus, Ohio hemp processing company Columbus Naturals.
Bogard said the company’s overhead costs are relatively low, so he can pay high banking fees without passing exorbitant costs to his customers, but it’s still a headache.
Members of the hemp industry like Bogard attribute the problem to lingering fear of anything associated with marijuana.
“It’s still a new industry, and there’s still that stigma with cannabis,” he said.
Banks, however, consider the hemp industry fraught with risk.
The line between hemp and marijuana is exceedingly thin. Under the 2018 Farm Bill, any cannabis crop exceeding 0.3% THC — marijuana’s intoxicating compound — is legally considered marijuana.
Most states with hemp programs, including Ohio, adopted the 0.3% threshold when they legalized the crop.
Growers and scientists who study hemp largely consider the limit arbitrary and constricting, but state officials said they had to adopt the standard laid out under federal law.
The low threshold makes banks nervous.
“From a lending perspective, this slim margin of error presents risk that may make some banks hesitant to serve these businesses, particularly banks that lack the resources to ensure a business is complying with that threshold,” an American Bankers Association spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
In a 2019 letter to financial regulators, Virginia O’neill, vice president for regulatory compliance and policy for the American Bankers Association, said banks don’t have a reliable mechanism for distinguishing hemp from marijuana.
The letter asked regulators to clarify rules surrounding hemp businesses.
Banks can lose their license if they are found to offer services to an illegal business.
Brian Samuels, senior vice president for research and development for the Cleveland-based wellness company Buoyant Brands, said finding a bank “was one of the major hurdles” to getting started.
His company sells products infused with CBD, a hemp extract said to have a calming effect on users. Samuels was fortunate enough to find the Middlefield Banking Co., which has criteria the business had to meet to ensure it was making a legal product, he said.
Samuels said he found the company through his industry connections. But others weren’t so fortunate.
“The cooperative has had four bank accounts closed on us because we are a hemp business,” said Julie Doran, founder and president of the Ohio Hemp Farmers Cooperative.