Category Archives: Politics

Two Issues of the Day

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Things are looking up. The U.S. is among the world leaders in the rate of vaccination. Democrats in Washington passed a big Covid relief bill that won’t just address the effects of the virus, it will also reduce poverty and improve access to healthcare for millions of people. The Senate’s current no-effort filibuster may be on its way out. And, following our coldest February in more than thirty years, spring is just around the corner.

Maybe this is why I haven’t posted anything in four days. There isn’t enough to complain about (complaining almost always feels more urgent than celebrating).

Still, two developments seem worth mentioning. One is that some in the reality-based news media have suggested that President Biden should give more credit to his predecessor for our progress on vaccinations. This is baloney. Biden gave credit to the other guy months ago, back when the first vaccinations were given. As part of the first Covid relief bill and the subsequent “Operation Warp Speed”, Congress and the previous administration gave billions of dollars to pharmaceutical companies in order to speed up the creation and manufacture of vaccines (although not to Pfizer, the company that produced the first one — the only cash they and their corporate partner got was from the German government).

So the former president gets credit for not standing in the way of a massive burst of government spending, even though he downplayed the seriousness of the virus for months — even after acknowledging in private how serious it was — and even though most of the credit goes to the scientists and others who quickly developed and tested the vaccines. 

As for the distribution of the vaccines, the 45th president doesn’t deserve any credit at all. That aspect of Operation Warp Speed was a bust. This is from Vox:

Vaccines don’t do much good if there’s no plan to get them into arms, and this is where [the previous president] really fell short. As was the case when the U.S. struggled to ramp up coronavirus testing infrastructure in the early days of the pandemic, the [prior] administration’s plan for vaccine distribution did little more than pass the buck to under-resourced states. . . . 

It’s true that [by mid-January], about 1 million vaccines were being administered each day. But Biden has nearly tripled that rate in less than two months. . . [He] has overseen the federal government purchasing hundreds of millions of vaccine doses, making possible the aggressive timeline he outlined on Thursday. And his administration has overseen the development and implementation of vaccine distribution plans that do more than just rely on the states.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo puts it succinctly (the whole article is worth reading):

On the distribution front, their record was close to catastrophic. As  [explained] here, they literally had no plan to do anything. The “plan” was not to have a plan. . . . 

The federal government would manage the relatively easy task of airlifting supplies in bulk to states at designated airports and then let the states figure out how to get them into people’s arms.

[Giving the shots] was an incredibly hard task and the best solution was to put it off on someone else, so the White House didn’t get the blame. It’s really that simple. 

The other thing I thought worth mentioning is what’s going on at our border with Mexico. The New Yorker has a fairly long article about the situation called “Biden Has Few Good Options for the Unaccompanied Children at the Border”. Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has a shorter summary:

When the administration reopened a warehouse-like facility for migrant children in Texas this week, it caused a huge controversy on all sides. . . . [Right-wingers] scoffed that Biden is being forced to resume [the unindicted co-conspirator’s] policies . . . All this is nonsense. . .

The reopening of the Texas facility does not constitute holding children at the border. It is using a warehouse-like facility to deal with overflow at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the waystation before kids hopefully get moved to a better life.

This isn’t “kids in cages” redux. That scandal arose when [the government] separated families to hold parents (rather than releasing them), creating a new class of unaccompanied children that didn’t exist before.

In this case, the overflow at ORR is being caused in part by the rise in migrant children arriving at the border alone, not after being separated from parents, [and] some of the increase is due to Biden allowing migrants to have due process after being trapped in Mexico due to [the last administration’s] policies. . . .  For now, there is no alternative to holding migrant children, because releasing them would put them in more danger. The question then becomes how to do this. . . .

“We can’t just release them,” says Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, . . . because they’re “incredibly vulnerable” in a “strange country.” Instead, Young said, “you have to provide them with appropriate care.” Indeed, Young noted, holding and processing children is necessary for their own long-term good, because it enables us to determine whether they’re eligible for asylum or other protections, and to place them on the correct legal path to get there.

Migration was suppressed last year during the pandemic, and arrivals are now rising due to many factors in Central America, Young said. “There continues to be a tremendous amount of violence, corruption and deprivation. Children leave because they’re forced out of their home countries.”

Thus, much of the spike is caused by “push” factors, just as previous spikes were. Biden is trying to address those factors with new policies sending aid to the region.

. . . This part of the debate has gotten badly confused. The problem is not the existence of the facility. . . The real issue is the conditions under which children are held, and for how long. And this points to the way we can genuinely hold the Biden administration accountable.

In the short term, we need to scrutinize whether the administration makes good on its promise to make the conditions under which ORR holds children, including at such warehouse facilities, genuinely more humane. Also crucial is whether the administration undertakes reforms to speed up the process of moving kids from ORR to guardians. [According to the New Yorker article, Biden is trying to expedite the process by having the government help pay the travel expenses involved in placing children. Previously, families were responsible for those costs themselves.]

. . . Comparing all this to “kids in cages” confuses the debate in a way that obscures what the Biden administration is genuinely trying to accomplish — and thus makes it harder to actually hold the administration accountable on it.

My considered opinion, given the evidence, is that the Biden administration is trying to repair the damage from the past four years in a number of ways. Dealing with the pandemic and the border are just two of them.

Congress and the President Do Something Big for a Change

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One congressman said he and other longtime Democratic lawmakers feared they’d never do anything consequential in Congress again. But the American Rescue Plan (aka the Covid relief bill) will be extremely consequential. There’s much more in it than $1,400 checks for most Americans and extended benefits for the unemployed.

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post describes some of the bill’s other features, the totality of which make this an historic bill (that, unlike the only major legislation of the past four years, isn’t designed to help corporations or the rich):

If anything, we’ve underplayed how significant this bill is.

Yes, those subsidy checks are important . . . A family of four with a household income under $150,000 will get $5,600, even before other measures, such as the boosted child tax credit, are accounted for. That . . . will provide a tremendous boost of economic activity that will accelerate the recovery; the American economy is now projected to grow this year at a pace we haven’t seen in decades.

But . . . the bill is full of provisions that could have significant or even transformative effects on the country, many of which have gotten little or no attention:

The child tax credit. For the next year, the bill increases the child tax credit and makes more of it “refundable,” which means that more people with very low incomes will be able to get that credit as a refund even if they’re paying little or nothing in taxes. It will also send the child tax credit to families on a monthly basis, rather than having it as something they might or might not get as a lump sum after filing their taxes. . . . 

The Earned Income Tax Credit. The bill expands the EITC for childless low-income workers; 17 million of them could see a boost in their after-tax income.

Pensions. The bill includes a provision championed by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) that bails out a group of 185 multi-employer union pension plans that are in danger of failing. As the New York Times put it, “without the rescue, more than a million retired truck drivers, retail clerks, builders and others could be forced to forgo retirement income.”

Student loan debt. Under current law, if you have outstanding student loan debt that is canceled, the IRS treats your forgiven debt as income, which can result in a huge tax bill. Millions of borrowers on repayment plans pay a set portion of their income every month, and after 20 years the remaining balance is forgiven. The ARP would make that kind of loan forgiveness tax-free, and it would also apply to future loan forgiveness the Biden administration might undertake.

Exploitation of veteran students. The ARP closes a loophole in student-loan rules that has provided an incentive for colleges, particularly for-profit operations, to heavily recruit veterans paying for college with the G.I. Bill; these veterans are often roped in with false promises and then left without a degree or a good education.

Farmers. The ARP provides billions of dollars in assistance to disadvantaged farmers, many of whom are Black. As The Post reports, the bill would benefit “Black farmers in a way that some experts say no legislation has since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Affordable Care Act subsidies. Under the ACA, only those earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, or $106,000 for a family of four, are eligible for any subsidies to help afford health insurance they buy on the private marketplaces. The ARP removes that limit, meaning those at higher incomes could get some help if their insurance costs more than 8.5 percent of their income. In addition to removing this “subsidy cliff,” it also enhances the subsidies for those at lower incomes, which will mean significant premium cuts for many people.

Medicaid expansion. Twelve states have still refused to accept the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, leaving huge numbers of poor citizens without health coverage. The ARP boosts the federal contribution to Medicaid so that holdout states will actually make money if they accept the expansion. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, if Texas accepted the expansion, it would [improve] its state budget [and provide] coverage to 878,000 uninsured, low-income Texans.

Mass transit. The bill includes $30 billion to shore up mass transit systems that were hit hard by the pandemic, forestalling service and maintenance cuts. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute says, “Where we’d normally see the recovery worse from cuts, and financial weakness used as a cynical excuse to slash, privatize, and never restore public functions, the ARP moves to stop that dead in its tracks.”

There’s plenty more, including funds for child care, rental assistance and food assistance, among other things. Some of these provisions, including the student loan forgiveness provision, the pension bailout and the “subsidy cliff” fix, will only be in effect until 2025. Democrats are hoping that they’ll prove popular and effective enough that they can be made permanent. It’s a good bet that at least some of them will.

There’s a lot more to say about this bill, especially how it represents a rethinking of fiscal policy and the incentives government provides citizens. . . . But the big picture of the American Rescue Plan is that, to paraphrase a former vice president, this is a seriously big deal. And the more we learn about it as it gets implemented, the bigger it will probably look.

The President and Congress Can Protect the Right to Vote

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Now that the American Rescue Plan is on the brink of becoming law, the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats are giving more attention to voting rights and the restoration of majority rule. In response, Republican politicians are producing attacks like this from Sen. Cassidy of Louisiana:

Democrats are selling out their own voters in a brazen attempt to permanently solidify their majority. States make their own voting laws, not the federal government. This power grab is shameful.

Maybe Cassidy isn’t familiar with the Constitution:

Article 1, Section 4: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

Amendment XVII: The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years . . . 

From CNBC:

President Joe Biden on Sunday signed an executive order aimed at helping to ensure all Americans have the right to vote by increasing access to voter registration services and information.

Biden’s executive order aims to take initial steps toward making the polls more accessible to Black and other minority voters, including Native Americans and people with disabilities.

It also calls for initiatives to improve access to voting for federal employees, active duty military and other voters overseas, and Americans in federal prison.

The executive order directs federal agencies to increase voters’ access to registration and information on elections online, as well as through more regular distribution of vote by mail and voter registration applications.

The executive order also calls for federal agencies to better coordinate with state governments on voter registration, as well as for updating the website Vote.gov.

Biden also called for Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law in 1965 following a violent protest in Selma, Alabama, that left some participants injured.

The late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who was one of the activists leading the march, suffered a fractured skull. Lewis passed away last year.

Biden’s executive order coincides with the 56th anniversary of that protest, known as Bloody Sunday.

“Today, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, I am signing an executive order to make it easier for eligible voters to register to vote and improve access to voting,” Biden said in prepared remarks.

“Every eligible voter should be able to vote and have that vote counted. If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote.”

Biden’s executive order is an “initial step,” according to the White House. The president plans to work with Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act, which eliminated discriminatory practices such as requiring literacy tests in order to vote.

“I also urge Congress to fully restore the Voting Rights Act, named in John Lewis’ honor,” Biden said.

In 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated a central plank of the act which required nine states with a history of discrimination, mostly in the south, to receive federal approval to change their election laws.

Biden also plans to work with lawmakers to pass the For the People Act that was passed by the House last week, which includes additional reforms to make voting “equitable and accessible.”

“This is a landmark piece of legislation that is urgently needed to protect the right to vote, the integrity of our elections, and to repair and strengthen our democracy,” Biden said.

Helping Children Thrive (and Giving Parents a Hand)

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From The New York Times:

Obscured by other parts of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package, which won Senate approval on Saturday, the child benefit has the makings of a policy revolution. Though framed in technocratic terms as an expansion of an existing tax credit, it is essentially a guaranteed income for families with children, akin to children’s allowances that are common in other rich countries.

The plan establishes the benefit for a single year. But if it becomes permanent, as Democrats intend, it will greatly enlarge the safety net for the poor and the middle class at a time when the volatile modern economy often leaves families moving between those groups. More than 93 percent of children — 69 million — would receive benefits under the plan, at a one-year cost of more than $100 billion.

The bill, which is likely to . . . be signed by Mr. Biden this week, raises the maximum benefit most families will receive by up to 80 percent per child and extends it to millions of families whose earnings are too low to fully qualify under existing law. Currently, a quarter of children get a partial benefit, and the poorest 10 percent get nothing.

While the current program distributes the money annually, as a tax reduction to families with income tax liability or a check to those too poor to owe income taxes, the new program would send both groups monthly checks to provide a more stable cash flow.

By the standards of previous aid debates, opposition has been surprisingly muted. While the bill has not won any Republican votes, critics have largely focused on other elements of the rescue package. . . . Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, has proposed a child benefit that is even larger, though it would be financed through other safety net cuts.

While the proposal took center stage in response to the pandemic, supporters have spent decades developing the case for a children’s income guarantee. Their arguments gained traction as science established the long-term consequences of deprivation in children’s early years, and as rising inequality undercut the idea that everyone had a fair shot at a better life. . . .

Mr. Biden’s embrace of the subsidies is a leftward shift for a Democratic Party that made deep cuts in cash aid in the 1990s under the theme of “ending welfare.” As a senator, Mr. Biden supported the 1996 welfare restrictions, and as recently as August his campaign was noncommittal about the child benefit.

The president now promotes projections that the monthly checks — up to $300 for young children and $250 for those over 5 — would cut child poverty by 45 percent, and by more than 50 percent among Black families.

“The moment has found us,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who has proposed a child allowance in 10 consecutive Congresses and describes it as a children’s version of Social Security. “The crystallization of the child tax credit and what it can do to lift children and families out of poverty is extraordinary. We’ve been talking about this for years.”

The campaign for child benefits is at least a half-century old and rests on a twofold idea: Children are expensive, and society shares an interest in seeing them thrive. At least 17 wealthy countries subsidize child-rearing for much of the population, with Canada offering up to $4,800 per child each year. But until recently, a broad allowance seemed unlikely in the United States, where policy was more likely to reflect a faith that opportunity was abundant and a belief that aid sapped initiative.

It was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who abolished the entitlement to cash aid for poor families with children. The landmark law he signed in 1996 created time limits and work requirements and caused an exodus from the rolls. Spending on the poor continued to grow but targeted low-wage workers, with little protection for those who failed to find or keep jobs.

In a 2018 analysis of federal spending on children, the economists Hilary W. Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach found that virtually all the increases since 1990 went to “families with earnings” and those “above the poverty line.”

But rising inequality and the focus on early childhood brought broader subsidies a new look. A landmark study in 2019 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine showed that even short stints in poverty could cause lasting harm, leaving children with less education, lower adult earnings and worse adult health. Though welfare critics said aid caused harm, the panel found that “poverty itself causes negative child outcomes” and that income subsidies “have been shown to improve child well-being”. . .

Under Mr. Biden’s plan, a nonworking mother with three young children could receive $10,800 a year, plus food stamps and Medicaid . . . Full benefits extend to single parents with incomes of $112,500 and couples with $150,000.

. . . Samuel Hammond, a proponent of child allowances at the center-right Niskanen Center, said the politics of aid had changed in ways that softened conservative resistance.

A quarter-century ago, debate focused on an urban underclass whose problems seemed to set them apart from a generally prospering society. They were disproportionately Black and Latino and mostly represented by Democrats. Now, insecurity has traveled up the economic ladder to a broader working class with similar problems, like underemployment, marital dissolution and drugs. Often white and rural, many are voters whom Republicans hope to court. . . .

Bottom Up, Not Top Down

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One party wants more people to vote, while the other party wants fewer. One party helps people at the economic bottom, while the other helps those at the top. It’s almost as if we should support one party, not the other!

From The New York Times, “Biden Bets on the Poor” (and the middle):

To jump-start the ailing economy, President Biden is turning to the lowest-paid workers in America, and to the people who are currently unable to work at all.

Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief package, which cleared the Senate on Saturday and [will] be headed for the president’s signature in a matter of days, would overwhelmingly help low earners and the middle class, with little direct aid for the high earners who have largely kept their jobs and padded their savings over the past year.

For the president, the plan is more than just a stimulus proposal. It is a declaration of his economic policy — one that captures the principle Democrats and liberal economists have espoused over the past decade: that the best way to stoke faster economic growth is from the bottom up.

Mr. Biden’s decision to take that approach in his first major economic legislation is in stark contrast to [the former occupant of the White House and unindicted co-conspirator], whose initial effort in Congress was a tax-cut package in 2017 that largely benefited corporations and wealthier Americans.

The “American Rescue Plan” advanced by Mr. Biden includes more generous direct benefits for low-income Americans than the rounds of stimulus passed last year . . . It is more focused on people than on businesses and is expected to help women and minorities in particular, because they have taken an outsize hit in the pandemic recession.

Researchers predict it could become one of the most effective laws to fight poverty in a generation. Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy estimates that the plan’s provisions, including a generous expansion of tax credits for low-income Americans with children, would reduce the poverty rate by more than a quarter for adults and cut the child poverty rate in half.

. . . The new legislation contains provisions intended to attack the virus itself, including money for Covid testing and vaccine distribution.

But it also includes elements of longstanding Democratic priorities that will apply widely to lower-income Americans whether they are hurting financially from the pandemic or not. In addition to the tax credits, the bill increases subsidies for child care, broadens eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, and expands food stamps, rental assistance and unemployment benefits, among other provisions. . . .

Mr. Biden’s economic team is betting that a mix of $1,400 checks to individuals, more generous jobless aid and other safety-net benefits in the plan will help power a rapid increase in economic growth by aiming money at people who need help right now to pay their bills, buy groceries and stave off eviction or foreclosure — as opposed to higher earners who would be more likely to save the money.

Many economists predict that the increase in consumer spending would spur more hiring and business production, helping to lift the economy to its fastest annual growth rate since the mid-1980s. . . .

What [some] call wasteful, untargeted or counterproductive spending in Mr. Biden’s bill are, in the eyes of Mr. Biden and his allies, the key ingredients for a roaring recovery once widespread vaccine distribution restores a sense of normalcy across the nation.

“Focusing on marginalized workers,” said Janelle Jones, the chief economist at the Labor Department, “is really the way to make sure we are lifting all boats” . . .

High earners and large companies show little sign of needing government help today. On the whole, the pandemic recession and recovery have made them richer. Workers earning higher wages and those able to work remotely are far less likely to have been thrown off the job, and they have stockpiled savings in the recovery. Companies like Amazon have gained market share as consumer habits have shifted.

But at the bottom end of the income spectrum — and in particular, among Black and Latino families — millions of Americans are still feeling the deep pain of the recession. The economy remains nearly 10 million jobs short of its prepandemic peak, with women of all races and men of color struggling the most to regain employment. The unemployment rate for Black men remains above 10 percent.

Data from the Census Household Pulse survey, . . . shows that the lingering economic distress of the crisis is concentrated among low earners and those who remain out of work. Nearly half of households earning below $35,000 a year reported falling behind on housing payments. One quarter reported not having enough food.

Mr. Biden’s plan would shower those households with government assistance. Elizabeth Pancotti, the policy director at Employ America, . . . has calculated the benefits for several different hypothetical hard-hit Americans under the bill.

For a working single mother of a 3-year-old who earns the federal minimum wage — just under $16,000 a year — the bill would provide as much as $4,775 in direct benefits, Ms. Pancotti estimates. For a family of four with one working parent and one who remains unemployed because of child care constraints, the benefits could total $12,460.

The Tax Policy Center in Washington estimates that the direct payments and expanded tax credits in the bill would, by themselves, increase after-tax income this year by more than 20 percent for an average household in the lowest quintile of income earners in the United States. It previously had forecast that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts would raise that same group’s income by less than 1 percent in the first year.

“It is as far away as you can get from regressive, supply-side economics,” said Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, a longtime champion of an expanded child tax credit to fight poverty. “This is progressive economics that puts money in the hands of working people who will spend that money” . . . .