Tag Archives: U.S. politics

we won’t be building back better

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Bernie Sanders reminds us what we lost when the “build back better” plan collapsed.

Build Back Better would have tackled several progressive priorities including implementing universal prekindergarten, creating a federal paid family leave program, expanding Medicaid coverage and lowering prescription drug costs.

The Hill

These aren’t far left policies, they are just ones that improve lives in nearly all other developed country economies. These were policies that would have helped get the U.S. back to average, mediocre level among its peers on many objectives metrics. Instead, the vast majority will continue to slip behind as a small upper class continues to suck in a greater share of the enormous wealth our country has built up over two centuries of relative peace, growth, and innovation (for many people, much of the time, obviously not for everyone all the time).

I think Biden’s first term legislative agenda is done. The Democrats would have lost seats in Congress in 2022 no matter what, and with minimal public credit for pulling the country out of its Covid tailspin and the inflation situation pinned on the administration, it might be a landslide. His priorities now should be dealing with the Ukraine situation and doing what he can to reduce international nuclear and climate risks. These issues could leave a positive legacy whether or not he ends up getting reelected in 2024. A lot can still happen between now and then.

Is the U.S. Supreme Court Corrupt? (alternate title considered: Clarence Thomas, You Stink!)

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There has been a lot of focus on voting rights lately, but maybe our democracy is already gone if the Supreme Court has become corrupt. Consider:

  • Bush v. Gore. After 22 years, I still don’t know what to make of Bush v. Gore. The decision ultimately turned on arcane legal arguments that ordinary people are unable to follow, and that is obviously not a case of the people of our nation selecting a leader democratically. I still mostly blame the state of Florida for not having effective procedures in place for people to vote, then to count the vote, then to recount the vote if needed. And I thought at the time that even if the Supreme Court flipped a coin, it was best for them to have the last word on a question of the utmost and obvious national importance. However, Al Gore would have won that election if the votes had been counted accurately, and we would be living in a different world today.

In 2001, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major United States news organizations, conducted the Florida Ballot Project, a comprehensive review of 175,010 ballots that vote-counting machines had rejected from the entire state, not just the disputed counties that were recounted.[3] The project’s goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes. The study was conducted over a period of 10 months. Based on the review, the media group concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 60 to 171 votes.

Wikipedia

So blame Florida. Yet, also according to Wikipedia, a majority of legal scholars who have studied the case disagree with the Supreme Court decision. So why did these five particular people (it was a 5-4 vote) have the right to decide our country’s future?

  • Citizens United. This is the worst. The single biggest reason the United States is not a true democracy is not our imperfect voting system. It’s the capture of our government by big business interests, so that money ends up deciding elections rather than votes. This is legalized corruption, and the Supreme Court legalized it. We tend to think they did this for ideological reasons, but what if big business lobbyists are getting to them? It would be hard to say we live in a democracy in that case. I had not considered this possibility until recently.
  • Pollution and Climate Change. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren make this case fairly well in a brief filed in advance of a case where the Supreme Court may throw away our nation’s air quality to line the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

The industry-funded and industry-promoted arguments made here have been repeatedly rejected by the Court, and would empower and enrich polluting corporations at the expense of public health, welfare, and the environment. The Court should refuse to participate in this industry-driven project. Reversals of precedent that reek of politics, and are advanced by thinly-disguised but highly motivated industry front groups, create a “stench” that is likely to undermine the public’s remaining faith in the Court.

Brief of U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents
  • Which brings me to Clarence Thomas. There have been a number of news stories recently suggesting that his wife is acting as an unpaid lobbyist for various industry groups, and that he is in regular contact with conservative governors representing special interests. If this is what is determining the outcome of court cases, the court is corrupt and the United States is not a democracy.

There is no higher legal authority in the judicial system that can accuse and find a justice guilty of a crime. That would have to be done by Congress. Impeaching a justice every once in a while might be a good idea to keep the court on notice that there are checks and balances in our country, and Clarence Thomas would be an outstanding candidate. Of course, it is almost impossible to imagine our even more corrupt Congress actually doing this.

Term limits for justices would also obviously be a good idea. The proposal for an 18-year term limit, so that each 4-year presidential term would come with two retirements and two new appointments, seems completely reasonable.

I’m going to agree with Bernie Sanders, as I often do. There is a reek and a stench wafting from the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is undermining the public’s remaining faith in the institution. If Bush v. Gore happened today, I personally would not be able to accept their decision as having any legitimacy, as I grudgingly did in 2000 even though I hated the outcome.

the midterm curse

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2022 will be a midterm election year in the U.S. The incumbent political party usually loses seats in the midterm election, and since the Democrats have a majority of 1 in the Senate, losing any seats will mean losing what little control they have. Here are the historical facts according to Alternet:

  • The party that controls the White House has lost seats in 19 of the 22 midterm elections since 1932.
  • The first exception was 1934, when FDR was in office. His New Deal was popular and seemed to offer hope during the pain of the Great Depression.
  • The second exception was 1998, when Bill Clinton was in office. The economy was growing quickly and the Clinton impeachment had just happened.
  • The third exception was 2002, when George W. Bush was in office. 9/11 had happened about a year earlier, and the response to 9/11 including the Afghanistan invasion was popular.

So what will probably happen is the Democrats will lose seats in 2022, because that happens 86% of the time. The Republicans will say the Democrats did everything wrong and that explains the result. The Democrats will say they did everything right and it still just happens 86% of the time. The media will more or less side with the Republicans because they like to give explanations, like when they give an “explanation” every day for why the stock market went up or down when it is clearly much more than 86% random.

To have a shot at bucking the trend, the Democrats would need (1) a big, popular, perceived to be successful policy agenda, (2) a war or other major acute crisis perceived to be handled well, and/or (3) fast economic growth.

On (1), I just don’t buy the idea that policy success is going to get Biden very far. He has done objectively well on pandemic rescue and direct payments to taxpayers, and he seems to be getting little or no credit for it. I don’t think people are even aware of these successes. The pandemic is grinding on and people are in a generally sour mood. They do not judge politicians on how much worse things could be if actions hadn’t been taken, or how much less sour the mood could be. It is just the sour mood that counts. I do think there was one mis-step, which was giving people enormous amounts of money without making sure they appreciated it. Doing this as electronic tax refunds, even on a monthly basis, does not seem to have worked well politically. I saw one poll where many people said they had not received the payments, even though most of them demonstrably, factually had! This is the flip side of the phenomenon companies are well aware of, where charges that show up in our bank accounts or credit card statements after the fact and with minimal fanfare “feel” less painful than when we open our wallets and fork over cash or write a check. Payroll deductions also take advantage of this psychology. So I think the optimal political strategy would have been for the Democrats to mail people paper checks, even if that would have been less efficient economically than the way it was done. Some sort of debit card, as is typically done for food stamps, could also have worked. Imagine if it had Biden’s face on it, like a Roman emperor stamping their face on a gold coin. And the big infrastructure and social “spending bills”, even if they pass, do not seem to be scoring the Democrats any points. People don’t understand the long-term benefits of these critical investments and the Republicans are just winning the narrative by screaming incoherently about debt and inflation and socialism. It’s a meme, not a rational argument, and it’s resonating with where our heads are as a society right now.

On (2), it seems like Covid has become too much of a long-term, grinding, slow-burn crisis for Biden to get much credit for managing it reasonably well. Like I said, things are going moderately badly, and there is no credit given because things could be going much more badly. That said, it seems entirely plausible that Covid could largely burn itself out in 2022, as almost every (surviving) human on Earth will have some immunity from vaccination, infection, or both. This is in the absence of a major new killer variant, of course. Things could also improve to near-normal over the summer, and then a new fall wave could hit just at the wrong time (politically speaking, for the party in power.) A major terrorist attack or a war over Taiwan, Ukraine, or Iran could be good timing for the mid-term elections, and disastrous for life on Earth. I’m not sure anyone knows what a major meltdown of the communication, financial, and/or electrical systems would mean politically. Please no on all of these.

On (3) it seems entirely plausible that the economy could pick up and inflation could moderate throughout 2022. Things are definitely getting off to a rocky start, and if they steadily improve and seem to be going really well in the late summer and fall, the public will give the party in power credit for that whether they deserve it or not. If inflation seems to be spiraling out of control, it will be the political kiss of death and could lead to a landslide against the party in power.

I’ll go out on a limb and give a prediction of what I think is most likely: Economic growth will pick up, inflation will moderate, and Covid will recede into the background by late summer into fall. The world will avoid major geopolitical turmoil and nuclear war. The public will be in a pretty good mood and the President’s approval ratings will be relatively high. The Democrats will still lose a handful of seats in the Congress because that just happens 86% of the time. This will be the end of Biden’s big, bold legislative policy agenda. In the second half of his term, he will focus on unglamorous administrative policy and foreign policy because those will be the options left to him. The Republicans will say their gaining a handful of seats spells certain doom for Biden in 2024, and they will be wrong, because Presidential elections seem to be tossups lately no matter what else is happening.

“paying for” infrastructure and social spending

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Overall, I like the way this article in The Week explains how the government spending since the start of the Covid recession, followed by the infrastructure and social spending being proposed now, is likely to be inflationary.

It’s likely, though, that the massive COVID relief bills were the primary culprit. While a supply shock should lead to price spikes, it should also lead to a fall-off in demand as people adjust their overall budgets to higher prices. When people have to spend more on gas and groceries, they should spend less on other goods. That’s not what we’re seeing though: demand remains extremely robust. People are complaining about price increases, but they aren’t cutting back. This is precisely what you would expect if household balance sheets were in generally excellent shape, as in fact they are; if there were lots of pent-up demand due to the pandemic, as in fact there is; and if people were beginning to assume that higher prices were becoming normal — which, if they are, is precisely how you get a self-reinforcing inflationary spiral as opposed to something more “transitory.”

That doesn’t mean those bills were a mistake. The risk really was higher in under-shooting than in over-shooting, and so the government erred on the side of over-shooting and over-shot. It just means that policy going forward has to respond to the new economic situation. Stimulative spending now has a downside of further boosting inflation, and therefore encouraging the Federal Reserve to hike rates faster. Inasmuch as the reconciliation bill’s spending will be stimulative — and its major components like the expanded child tax credit certainly will be — that’s a problem.

The Week

Put another way (not the way this article puts it), the new government spending being proposed is necessary, but right now, with the private economy suddenly heating up, might not be the best time for it. The political system is hopeless about getting the timing right. By the time politicians react to a situation, go through an election cycle, and negotiate a new deal (pun somewhat intended?), conditions have already changed. While I am not an economic historian, this is my limited understanding of how the Kennedy administration managed to ramp up spending in an overheated economy in the 1960s, leading to the inflation crisis of the 1970s.

Monetary policy clearly helps, but “automatic fiscal stabilizers” are another way this problem could be tackled from the government spending end. Congress could pass its “big spending bills”, but tie distribution of the money to economic indicators like the unemployment rate. The Sahm index, which is basically a ratio of the current unemployment rate to its average over the last year. is one metric that has been proposed for this. Using this rule would have turned on the taps in March 2020, then started to throttle back in January 2021 – this sounds about right, given that inflation started to ramp up suddenly in the second quarter of 2021! Congress could take this “set it and forget it” approach, and a future Congress could always undo it if they want, but it might just stabilize our economy and society to the point where it becomes the new normal.

I’ll try not to be cynical. Maybe our politicians are capable of understanding this, communicating it effectively to the public and business community to build support, and doing the right thing.

Okay, I can’t help being cynical – the Democrats will probably push ahead with their enormously beneficial but poorly timed spending bills, the public will benefit enormously from these bills but not give any credit to the Democrats, inflation will continue to ramp up, and the Republicans will fiddle while the economy burns going into the next election cycle.

cold hard cash

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Axios has a short primer on the idea of giving out cash to alleviate poverty. Conceptually, I am more attracted to the idea that the government should provide services the private market is failing to provide, employ people at market/living wages to provide those services, and provide people with the education and lifelong training to succeed in the private marketplace. Along with that, it should provide generous unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits to those who have a good reason for not working. Also, child care and health care so people can work part time, start a business or study without one spouse being chained to a full time large employer to get those benefits for the family. Of course, we do have unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and these do amount to giving cash to people. We also have tax credits, which are mathematically indistinguishable from giving out cash but psychologically very different. Because we have a tax system that is intentionally designed to be hated so nobody will support it.

the U.S. health care system is not just below average, it is the worst

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This is getting tiresome. Do we need any more evidence that the U.S. has slipped below average and is now bringing up the rear in many categories among developed countries? This is the 2021 Mirror, Mirror report from The Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit generally considered to be competent and non-partisan.

The U.S. ranks last out of the 11 countries included. But the ranking understates the case, because the other countries are somewhat clustered in terms of cost and outcomes, and then the U.S. is a point far away from the cloud with much higher cost and much worse outcomes. It’s not an Anglo-American failure, because the UK, Australia, and New Zealand all do well. Canada is ranked second worst, but again it is on the lower right edge of the cloud and the U.S. is way out on its own.

I do think they picked a group of very high performing countries here. There have to be other developed countries, particularly in Asia, that could have been included. But somehow, I doubt including Japan, Taiwan, etc. would make the U.S. look any better.

I wonder though what would happen if they tried to compare just the over-65 U.S. population served by Medicare to the over-65 population in the other countries. If Medicare does much better than the U.S. health care “system” (i.e., cluster-you-know-what) as a whole, it would be an even stronger argument for Medicare for All. Should the U.S. maybe try to establish a health care system before the next pandemic arrives?

the Nordic welfare model

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This article explains that the Nordic welfare model succeeds by targeting the middle class, not just the poor. They provide services of high enough quality (child care, health care, education, unemployment, disability, retirement) that the private sector can’t compete. Then the middle class voters support the politicians who support the policies, and are willing to pay the taxes necessary to receive the benefits.

Seems simple, but it’s easy for anti-tax corporate and wealthy interests in the United States to prevent this feedback loop from getting established. They just spew propaganda and buy off politicians who are anti-tax and anti-deficit spending, so the government only has resources for limited programs targeting the poor, the middle class resents paying taxes and receiving little in return while having to pay for sub-par private benefits at the same time, and they continue to vote against policies to expand benefits. Breaking this loop would require a gamble on massive deficit spending (kinda sorta being tried now, legitimately during a crisis in my view) and/or constitutional changes/reinterpretation that stop the legalized propaganda and bribery (which would have to be enacted by the politicians who are being bribed, unless judges were to take the lead which seems unlikely).

poverty, race, and math

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Here’s some math on U.S. poverty.

  • from Census.gov: estimated U.S. population on July 1, 2019: 328,240,000
    • “Black or African American alone, percent”: 13.4% (this works out to 43,984,000, rounding all numbers to the nearest 1,000)
    • “White alone, percent”: 76.3% (this works out to 250,447,000)
  • from Urban Institute: U.S. poverty rate in 2021, all races: 13.7% (44,969,000)
    • Black poverty rate: 18.1% (7,961,000)
    • White poverty rate: 9.6% (24,043,000)

A few points/opinions, which I hope will not be too controversial.

  • A long history of legal and institutional racism in the U.S. is an obvious fact, a moral outrage, and needs to be corrected, particularly in housing and education.
  • A greater fraction of the black population is poor compared to the white population.
  • There are more poor white people than poor black people in the country.
  • You have to be careful comparing averages between groups of very different sizes.
  • From a moral perspective, if you want to help the most people, you would not only help black people. You would try to help people who need help in both groups, while trying to even out the disparities.
  • From a political perspective, an incessant focus on race, and rhetoric equating race and poverty, is going to turn off a lot of poor white voters. This ends up electing politicians who are not going to help poor people of either race.
  • There are other races, there are many mixes of races, and there are many confusing census questions about whether people consider themselves hispanic instead of or in addition to the other races. I am not a professional demographer, and do not know the absolute best way to handle these issues.

June 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.

Most hopeful story: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.

checking in with Noam Chomsky

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In this Alternet article, Noam Chomsky describes the business class as Marxists waging a class struggle. They never give up and working class is always on the defensive. So if the working class is less aggressive, which he says they have been since the “centrist Carter administration”, big business will get the upper hand as it has in the U.S. He sees some hope in the movement started by Bernie Sanders.