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President Donald Trump signed a government funding bill Wednesday night, ending a record 43-day shutdown that caused financial stress for federal workers who went without paychecks, stranded scores of travelers at airports and generated long lines at some food banks.The shutdown magnified partisan divisions in Washington as Trump took unprecedented unilateral actions including canceling projects and trying to fire federal workers to pressure Democrats into relenting on their demands.The Republican president blamed the situation on Democrats and suggested voters shouldn’t reward the party during next year’s midterm elections.“So I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this,” Trump said. “When we come up to midterms and other things, don’t forget what they’ve done to our country.”The signing ceremony came just hours after the House passed the measure on a mostly party-line vote of 222-209. The Senate had already passed the measure Monday.Democrats wanted to extend an enhanced tax credit expiring at the end of the year that lowers the cost of health coverage obtained through Affordable Care Act marketplaces. They refused to go along with a short-term spending bill that did not include that priority. But Republicans said that was a separate policy fight to be held at another time.“We told you 43 days ago from bitter experience that government shutdowns don’t work,” said Rep. Tom Cole, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. “They never achieve the objective that you announce. And guess what? You haven’t achieved that objective yet, and you’re not going to.” A bitter end after a long stalemate The frustration and pressures generated by the shutdown was reflected when lawmakers debated the spending measure on the House floor.Republicans said Democrats sought to use the pain generated by the shutdown to prevail in a policy dispute.“They knew it would cause pain and they did it anyway,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.Democrats said Republicans raced to pass tax breaks earlier this year that they say mostly will benefit the wealthy. But the bill before the House Wednesday “leaves families twisting in the wind with zero guarantee there will ever, ever be a vote to extend tax credits to help everyday people pay for their health care,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats would not give up on the subsidy extension even if the vote did not go their way.“This fight is not over,” Jeffries said. “We’re just getting started.”The House had not been in legislative session since Sept. 19, when it passed a short-term measure to keep the government open when the new budget year began in October. Johnson sent lawmakers home after that vote and put the onus on the Senate to act, saying House Republicans had done their job. What’s in the bill to end the shutdown The legislation is the result of a deal reached by eight senators who broke ranks with the Democrats after reaching the conclusion that Republicans would not bend on using a government funding to bill to extend the health care tax credits.The compromise funds three annual spending bills and extends the rest of government funding through Jan. 30. Republicans promised to hold a vote by mid-December to extend the health care subsidies, but there is no guarantee of success.The bill includes a reversal of the firing of federal workers by the Trump administration since the shutdown began. It also protects federal workers against further layoffs through January and guarantees they are paid once the shutdown is over. The bill for the Agriculture Department means people who rely on key food assistance programs will see those benefits funded without threat of interruption through the rest of the budget year.The package includes $203.5 million to boost security for lawmakers and an additional $28 million for the security of Supreme Court justices.Democrats also decried language in the bill that would give senators the opportunity to sue when a federal agency or employee searches their electronic records without notifying them, allowing for up to $500,000 in potential damages for each violation.The language seems aimed at helping Republican senators pursue damages if their phone records were analyzed by the FBI as part of an investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. The provisions drew criticism from Republicans as well. Johnson said he was “very angry about it.”“That was dropped in at the last minute, and I did not appreciate that, nor did most of the House members,” Johnson said, promising a vote on the matter as early as next week.The biggest point of contention, though, was the fate of the expiring enhanced tax credit that makes health insurance more affordable through Affordable Care Act marketplaces.“It’s a subsidy on top of a subsidy. Our friends added it during COVID,” Cole said. “COVID is over. They set a date certain that the subsidies would run out. They chose the date.”Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the enhanced tax credit was designed to give more people access to health care and no Republican voted for it.“All they have done is try to eliminate access to health care in our country. The country is catching on to them,” Pelosi said.Without the enhanced tax credit, premiums on average will more than double for millions of Americans. More than 2 million people would lose health insurance coverage altogether next year, the Congressional Budget Office projected. Health care debate ahead It’s unclear whether the parties will find any common ground on health care before the December vote in the Senate. Johnson has said he will not commit to bringing it up in his chamber.Some Republicans have said they are open to extending the COVID-19 pandemic-era tax credits as premiums will soar for millions of people, but they also want new limits on who can receive the subsidies. Some argue that the tax dollars for the plans should be routed through individuals rather than go directly to insurance companies.Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Monday that she was supportive of extending the tax credits with changes, such as new income caps. Some Democrats have signaled they could be open to that idea.House Democrats expressed great skepticism that the Senate effort would lead to a breakthrough.Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said Republicans have wanted to repeal the health overhaul for the past 15 years. “That’s where they’re trying to go,” she said. Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report. Follow the AP’s coverage of the federal government shutdown at https://apnews.com/hub/overnment-shutdown. Kevin Freking, Joey Cappelletti and Matt Brown, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Your pennies are now collector’s items. The last penny was minted Wednesday at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, spelling the end of America’s longest-running coin design. More than Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe or Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, it’s sculptor and medalist Victor David Brenner’s profile of Abraham Lincoln on the humble penny that’s actually believed to be the most-reproduced piece of art in the history of the world: the U.S. Mint estimates some 300 billion pennies remain in circulation. And even though no new pennies will be minted, the coin will remain legal tendergood news for those inclined to give a penny, take a penny at their local gas station. The penny’s rise to government-issued pop art status begins in 1793 when the Mint’s first one-cent coin went into circulation. That first copper coin showed an image of a long-haired woman representing liberty, a design element that was mandated by law. The Coinage Act of 1792 required coins have an “impression emblematic of liberty,” though it was later changed, paving the way for Lincoln to be featured. [Photo: National Museum of American History] The design of the reverse side of the first one-cent coins in 1793 showed a chain of 15 links representing the 15 states in the Union at the time, but the links were swapped out for a wreath in later coins because the chains were misinterpreted for symbolizing slavery, according to the Mint. The Mint says early coins from before 1909 showed personifications of liberty in the form of a woman rather than showing U.S. presidents in part because some lawmakers thought putting the head of state on a coin was too similar to the U.K. where the monarch is pictured on currency. [Photo: Lost Dutchman Rare Coins/Wiki Commons] In 1909, then-President Teddy Roosevelt marked the occasion of Lincoln’s 100th birthday by putting his likeness on the penny. Roosevelt selected the rendering by Brenner, a Jewish, Lithuanian immigrant who was then considered one of the best relief artists in the country, and who had designed a bas-relief of Lincoln based on a photo by Mathew Brady. It was the first time a President’s likeness appeared on a U.S. coin. Since Lincoln took over, the reverse or “tails” side of the penny has rotated through different designs, including an image of the Lincoln Memorial by Frank Gasparro from 1959 to 2008. After that, the Mint introduced four designs representing Lincoln’s life in 2009 for his 200th birthday, like a log cabin, followed by the Union Shield to symbolize Lincoln preserving the Union in 2010. [Photo: US Mint] The Mint says the cost of producing a single penny has risen from 1.42 cents in 2015 to 3.69 cents in 2025, and President Donald Trump said in February he asked the Treasury Department to stop producing new pennies. With the billions of pennies still in circulation, it will be some time before Brenner’s famed Lincoln portrait will completely be history. Even if you melted down every penny on Earth, you couldn’t get rid of it, because in 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover took one to Mars.
Category:
E-Commerce
Denying reality is one of the most persistent, successful strategies in Donald Trumps playbook. It helped him inject ambiguity into an electoral defeat in 2020, dismiss his surging unpopularity more broadly, and contend he never said things he actually said on live television. Some aspects of reality, however, are simply undeniable, such as the amount of money in ones bank account and how far it will go at the supermarket. Nevertheless, since Democratic politicians like Zohran Mamdani won big on November 4 with a message of affordability, Trump has been falsely insisting America has seldom been more affordable than it is right now. Its a messaging strategy that may prove an even bigger miscalculation than Trumps galactically fuzzy tariff math. The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden, Trump said on November 7 during a summit with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The president has also insisted recently that every price is down, gas is nearly $2, and energy and inflation are both way down. It should go without saying, of course, that none of this is true. And even some of the presidents historically reality-challenged supporters are taking notice. High prices are getting harder to hide Grocery prices are up, with record costs for beef and coffee. Gas prices are hovering around $3, having not come close to $2 since March 2020. Electricity bills are up 11%, and inflation in October 2025 was at 3%up from 2.6% a year prior. Also, while Trump keeps touting Walmarts reduced price on its Thanksgiving dinner this year, he refuses to acknowledge the sale is due to the company including less food in this years meal and a higher proportion of products from its Great Value private brand compared to name brands. (When an NBC reporter asked Trump about this discrepancy, he dismissed her question as fake news.) As the high-spending holiday season approaches, and as people prepare to watch their health insurance premiums rise, its only going to get harder for Trump to maintain his sunny economic forecast without his supporters noticing the thunderstorms just outside their own financial window. It might temporarily help Trumps case that due to the government shutdown the U.S. will have to wait a while to get fresh economic data. Still, plenty of other economic indicators abound. The labor market appears to be weakening amid slow job growth and massive layoffs. Consumer sentiment has slumped to its lowest levels since mid-2022around the time inflation hit a 40-year high under Biden. The share of first-time homebuyers has fallen to a record low of 21% this year. Even Trumps Treasury secretary, billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, conceded There are sectors of the economy that are in recession, which may or may not have earned him a private tongue-lashing for the ages. And one economic indicator that should especially concern the president is the uncharacteristically adversarial interview he faced on Fox News this week. A new angle from Ingraham Laura Ingraham is typically one of Trumps staunchest defenders on the network, where there is steep competition for the title. On November 10, though, she pushed back against the presidents claim that the economy is as strong as its ever been, asking why people are anxious about it if thats the case. Elsewhere, she questioned the wisdom of his recent move to raise the 30-year mortgage to a 50-year one, and threw shade at the constellation of chintzy gold nonsense now festooning the Oval Office, asking whether it came from Home Depot. Before getting too carried away with the significance of this interview, it should be noted that Ingraham went right back to vehemently defending Trump hours later. Not all Trump supporters will likely have their concerns as easily assuaged, though. It would be one thing if Trump simply deflected blame for high costs in 2025. He could trot out any flavor of low-effort spin pinning high electricity bills and persistent inflation on those dastardly Democrats, whose unfair and possibly illegal shutdown wrecked an otherwise perfect economy. But doing so would mean acknowledging that his vast and sundry collection of campaign promises about bringing down prices have gone largely unfulfilled. Faced with the prospect of accountability, he is instead once again denying reality. As of November 11, for instance, the White House was boasting about positive economic data cherry-picked from the inaugural DoorDash State of Local Commerce Report, citing its four-item Breakfast Basics Index with the mic-drop confidence of total vindication. People of all political stripes will occasionally swallow lies from their leaders like bitter pills, but sticker shock tends to be spin-proof. Although the economic outlook was indeed rosy for Biden in 2024, the former president had a hard time conveying as much to people hit hard by inflation. The reality in grocery stores looked a lot different than what some economic forecasters were reading in the tea leaves, giving plenty of single-issue voters a case of cognitive dissonance. But if Biden faced a vibecession, Trump could be fomenting a real one. The gulf has widened between what the administration is saying and what people are experiencingand Trumps cratering approval ratings suggest that those feelings are bipartisan. Whenever Trump finally switches gears from denying reality to casting blame, some of his cash-strapped supporters wont buy it. Believing the president might be something they literally cant afford to do.
Category:
E-Commerce
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