Tag Archives: Democrats

Where We’re Heading

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Ronald Reagan. They called him “the Great Communicator”, but he was a horrible president. When he was seeking a second term in 1984, one of his campaign ads began with the phrase: “It’s morning again in America”.

The idea was that after four years of his leadership, the US was in good shape again. The head of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker (a Democrat), had killed the high inflation of the late 70s by raising interest rates to stratospheric levels. And Republicans had juiced the economy by going on a tax-cutting and spending spree based on the ludicrous theory that massive tax cuts would pay for themselves (a doctrine famously labeled “Voodoo Economics” by a future, less dangerous Republican president).

But a poll taken two months ago showed only 29% of country think the US is on the right track.

Well, Democrats and the new media need to get the word out. Biden should reuse that famous phrase: “It’s morning again in America”.

In less than 10 months, the Democrats have have cut child poverty in half, added more than 5 million jobs, managed the most ambitious vaccine rollout in the nation’s history, and passed a $1.2 trillion investment in the water, roads, bridges and broadband. (The broadband provisions of the infrastructure bill will help some of the most conservative parts of America — rural areas that struggle with unreliable, expensive connectivity.)

1.44 million vaccinations were administered yesterday. 70% of adults are fully vaccinated.

Pfizer says its anti-viral pill reduces the risk of death or hospitalization by 89% in people who take it within three days of symptoms starting.

Progress:

  • January 2021: Unemployment rate is 6.3%.
  • February 2021: Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects we will get to 4.6% unemployment by the end of 2023.
  • March 2021: Democrats pass the American Rescue Plan with ZERO REPUBLICAN VOTES.
  • October 2021: Economy reaches 4.6% unemployment two years ahead of schedule, declining more this year than any other year on record.

The initial August jobs number of 235,000 started a wave of economic panic in the press. It was actually 483,000. September’s 194,000, which signaled malaise, has been revised to 312,000.

531,000 jobs were added in October, beating all expectations. Leisure and hospitality gained 164,000 jobs, as restaurants continued to staff up amid the decrease in coronavirus cases. Professional and business services added 100,000 jobs, manufacturing added 60,000, construction 44,000, health care 37,000, and transportation and warehousing 54,000. . . .

The US has now added 5.5 million jobs since President Biden took office. Approximately 80% of the jobs lost during the pandemic have been recovered. The labor market is recovering much faster than it did after the 2008 recession.

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell to a new pandemic low.

Average wages are up $2 an hour. Wages for production workers are up 5.8% and 12.4% for restaurant workers.

Home values are up. Family debt is down. The S&P 500 is up 23% since Biden took office, 32% since he was elected (we’re still waiting for the crash the previous president predicted).

In October, consumer confidence, “the engine of the U.S. economy”, rose after months of decline. Consumers were also the most optimistic since 2000 about their own prospects to find jobs. 

It’s true, the average price of gasoline has gone up. It always goes up and down, given the price of oil and how much people drive. It was almost $5.00 a gallon in 2008 (when a Republican was president) and $4.00 in 2014. It’s around $3.40 today.

fotw1199Since we’re coming out of a pandemic-infused recession, problems should be expected.

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What’s next?

Democrats, again with ZERO REPUBLICAN VOTES, will pass parts of Biden’s “Build Back Better” social policy bill, fulfilling some of the promises he ran on in 2020 (not because  Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has hypnotized him).

Biden describes it in two sentences, “The build back better framework lowers your bills for health care, child care, prescription drugs, and preschool. And families get a tax cut.”

Paul Krugman used one sentence: “Tax the rich, help America’s children”.

Democrats may — may — finally be about to agree on a revenue and spending plan. It will clearly be smaller than President Biden’s original proposal, and much smaller than what progressives wanted. It will, however, be infinitely bigger than what Republicans would have done, because if the G.O.P. controlled Congress, we would be doing nothing at all to invest in America’s future.

But what will the plan do? Far too much reporting has focused mainly on the headline spending number — $3.5 trillion, no, $1.5 trillion, whatever — without saying much about the policies this spending would support. . . 

So let me propose a one-liner: Tax the rich, help America’s children. This gets at much of what the legislation is likely to do: Reporting suggests that the final bill will include taxes on billionaires’ incomes and minimum taxes for corporations, along with a number of child-oriented programs. And action on climate change can, reasonably, be considered another way of helping future generations.

Republicans will, of course, denounce whatever Democrats come out with. But there are three things you should know about both taxing the rich and helping children: They’re very good ideas from an economic point of view. They’re extremely popular. And they’re very much in the American tradition.

I hope what comes soon after that is an all-out push to convince two or three misguided Democratic senators to reform the filibuster in order to protect voting rights, because, all around the country, Republicans are doing whatever they can to insure minority, right-wing rule.

Biden and his team are restoring reasonable regulations for business and trying to address the climate crisis. They’re reuniting immigrant families instead of tearing them apart. They had the guts to finally end our longest, stupidest war. They’re getting respect around the world, not losing it. They want women to control their bodies. They believe it should be easy for Americans to vote. 

Maybe him and other Democrats know what they’re doing. Maybe more of us will figure that out.

Changing Course

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After talking with someone about the constant stream of bad news assaulting us every day, I decided to do something different with this blog. I’m going to try to post about more positive topics. Given how things are, this will probably mean I’ll have less to say.

The same phenomenon is visible in a political newsletter I get. The section called “Is That Hope?” — which features encouraging news — is always the smallest by far.

My posting less shouldn’t be much of a loss, however, since there is too much to read on the internet anyway (as well as in out of the way places like “books”).

But there’s one qualification: I intend to insert something like the following in every post, as a reminder and because silence might be seen as acquiescence:

The American president is a disaster. He is almost certainly doing something horrendous right now. That’s why we should vote him and every other Republican out of office in November. If you’re willing and able to support Democratic candidates in addition to voting for them, please do.

For example, I might point out that Gary Larson, the cartoonist responsible for The Far Side, has a site now. It features a few of his old cartoons every day (and it’s free). They had one of my favorites yesterday:

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And by the way, the American president is a disaster. He is almost certainly doing something horrendous right now. That’s why we should vote him and every other Republican out of office in November. If you’re willing and able to support Democratic candidates in addition to voting for them, please do. 

You’ve Been Robbed

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From Paul Waldman of The Washington Post on Twitter:

Even if you’re lucky enough not to have lost anyone or gotten sick in the pandemic, you are the victim of a robbery.

Because of Txxxx’s malignant incompetence and the stupidity of his followers, we’ve all been robbed of time we can’t get back – maybe a year or more.

We’ve been robbed of time with loved ones, education for our kids, contact with others, at least a little freedom from this constant anxiety, just the mundane but precious parts of normal life. It is a theft, and it didn’t have to happen this way.

In many countries with competent leadership and a sane populace, the pandemic is under control. Here are new cases yesterday:

Spain: 389
Germany: 361
Canada: 306
Japan: 227
Italy: 191
Netherlands: 64
S. Korea: 53

USA: 50,934

Robbery victims often speak of a sense of violation, one that turns into rage that has nowhere to go. You may be feeling that now. And you should. We all should. We’ve been robbed of so much, even if we’ve escaped the worst.

Maybe you’re not an immigrant or a racial minority or a trans person or someone else Txxxx has attacked directly. Maybe you still have your job and haven’t lost a loved one or gotten sick. But we are all his victims now.

And he should never be forgiven.

[Neither should his accomplices, especially the politicians.

You can use the Search Directory at ActBlue to find Democrats to support.]

What He Does and Doesn’t Have Going For Him

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People who write headlines often do a crappy job. Here’s an example from The New York Times:

Even if presidents have less sway over the economy than is widely assumed, perception can be important.

The headline implies that the economy is just about perfect. It’s not. As Steven Rattner points out:

T—- promised growth of “4, 5, 6 percent”, a tax cut that would raise workers’ wages significantly [and pay for itself!] and new trade policies that would again make the United States a manufacturing powerhouse. None of those things has happened….

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut explains the situation:

One of T—-‘s favorite tactics is taking credit for Obama’s economy. Democrats need to stop letting him get away with it. A quick thread debunking some of his favorite lies:

Job Creation:

Obama created 227K jobs a month in his last three years in office. In T—-‘s first three years, it’s only been 191K per month.

Job creation numbers were 20% higher under Obama during that three-year span.

Deficits:

T—- DOUBLED the budget deficit, creating over $3 trillion in new debt.

Where did all this money go? Mostly to tax cuts for corporations and rich people. But instead of boosting the economy, business investment has actually fallen since the tax law passed.

Wages

Real wages aka what you can buy for the amount of money you take home, are actually doing worse under T—-.

They increased just 0.8% since T—- took office, compared with 1.3 percent over a similar period under Obama.

Trade War

Trump’s self-inflicted trade war contributed to outright job declines last year in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Indiana and New York.

Overall, the trade war with China cost America 450,000 jobs in 2019.

Obama inherited the worst financial crisis since the great depression and pulled America out of it.

T—- was handed a healthy economy and has made things harder for working families while juicing corporate profits.

Don’t let his lies try to tell you otherwise.

Paul Krugman provides needed context:

[It’s] worth talking about why the economy is growing. The answer is, it’s the deficit, stupid.

T—-‘s deficitpalooza is giving the economy as much stimulus now as it was getting in 2012, when the unemployment rate was 8%. Imagine what Obama’s economy would have looked like if [Republicans] and Very Serious People had let him run deficits that big.

And of course imagine if we were using that money to build infrastructure and help children, not give corporations more money to buy back their own stock.

[In 2009] some of us were tearing our hair out over the fact that the stimulus was obviously too small. But Obama and his inner circle insisted that it was inconceivable to [get around the filibuster by using] reconciliation to enact something bigger, because norms or something.

In the end Obama [and other Democrats] paid a heavy political price because recovery was too slow, thanks to inadequate stimulus; T—- is getting a dividend because nobody, including the bond market, actually cares about budget deficits. So many bad things have followed from Obama’s caution back then. The course of history could have been very different.

… Republicans hobbled the Obama economy in the name of fiscal responsibility, which they abandoned as soon as T—- came in. But how big a deal was that?

Absent [Republican] sabotage, we would have been down to 4% unemployment in 2014. Think how different everything would look if we’d done that.

Finally, a few words from Nancy Pelosi:

Under Obama…

  • Unemployment dropped from 10% to 5%
  • Stock market went from 6,000 to 18,000
  • Deficit was reduced by a trillion dollars
  • The US gained more than 14 million private sector jobs.

[T—-] did not inherit “a mess”, he inherited a momentum.

Her Dream Candidate Exists

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Quote:

If I was going to invent a dream candidate, she would be grounded in small-town, rural or heartland America but able to hold her own in the citadels of power on the coasts. She would comfort the afflicted with the same passion with which she afflicts the comfortable, and she would understand the causes of those afflictions and have good ideas about how to remedy them. She would be moved by compassion but wouldn’t ask us to rely on compassion; she would have tangible strategies for widening our distribution of income, healthcare, education and opportunity, and she would be smart about the intersections of race, gender, class and the rest.

She would have been around long enough to remember that since the 1980s the government has dismantled a lot of systems that made us more safe and more equal, and she’d be fresh enough to imagine new ways out of the consequences of that catastrophic dismantling. Also she would have to be funny and have big plans to address climate change. OK, she already exists, and I’m talking about Elizabeth Warren. She is, to me, a better candidate for president than I ever expected we’d have.

My … dreamiest dream candidate would be a woman of color with Medusa hair who could turn the entire Republican Senate to stone with a glance, but Warren is who’s left in the race, and she is magnificent, and superheroes from Megan Rapinoe to Roxane Gay agree. Also, she pretty much turned Wells Fargo’s CEO into stone in a 2016 Senate banking committee hearing, more than a decade after she became one of the most outspoken experts telling Wall Street why it’s vicious and half a decade after she endorsed Occupy Wall Street. The strength of her candidacy is shown by how she’s made it to the front of the race despite misogyny from across the political spectrum, the wrath of the billionaires pouring money – and themselves – into the race, and the smears and distortions of the mainstream media.

Really I see her as a combination of three superpowers: wonkiness, radicalness and what for lack of a better term I would call Big Structural Mom Energy. The wonkiness is how she set new standards in primary campaigns with those famous plans – far more detailed, with the costs accounted for, than was usual before she arrived. The depth with which she understands the economic system – taxes, banks, bankruptcies, credit cards, home and student loans, redlining – is the depth with which she can change it.

That wonkiness is how she got here, how she looked long and hard at the data around how things work and found her own path forward from where she started out. It’s true that she didn’t start out as a progressive, and she was registered as a Republican during some (not all) of her formative years, but she never voted for Reagan, and she did vote for McGovern in 1972 and Carter in 1980 and other Democrats while she was supposed to be a Republican.

I’m from the urban coastal immigrant-Jewish left myself, which does not actually make me virtuous, but lucky in that I didn’t have to travel far to land in progressive positions (and gives me a front-row seat on how much misogyny and meanness the left can include). The word radical comes from a word for roots; Warren has certainly been radical in her analysis of root causes since 1975, when her first law-review article savaged an anti-busing court ruling. Way back then, she was delving deep into how the law blocked equal educational opportunity, and she weighed in on the side of Detroit’s black families and the urban poor generally.

Her radicalness now includes, first of all, a willingness to make big changes, whether it means breaking up big tech or taxing billionaires or bringing healthcare coverage to everyone. Our first and most urgent priority must be addressing climate chaos, and the great obstacle to doing anything about it is corporations and the elites who profit from them. Warren has shown no fear of going after them and no fear of the kind of massive structural change we need to address the climate crisis. (In addition to supporting the Green New Deal and promising to ban fracking and stop fossil fuel extraction on public land and coastal waters, she just released a Blue New Deal for the oceans.)

At the heart of her campaign is kindness as an emotion, as a value – and as a basis for policy

What I call Big Structural Mom Energy could also be called radical compassion. It lies in the homey delivery and quality of attention she brings to, for example, the young queer woman in Iowa she encouraged and hugged earlier this month. Warren, who has said more about trans rights than any other candidate, has made her credo clear, over and over: that everyone matters, and matters equally, and that the systems that shape our lives should value, defend and give everyone opportunity equally. She got a lot of attention for her comic answer to the question about what she’d say to someone opposed to marriage equality, but after the laughter was over, she said something she’s said in many forms in her campaign: “To me, that is the heart of it. That was the basis of the faith that I grew up in, and it truly is about the preciousness of each and every life.”

It’s about equality, but not just economic equality: as understood from a deep engagement with where the dangers lie, where the suffering is, whether it’s black maternal mortality or the plight of refugees or the burden of student loan debt. At the heart of her campaign is kindness as an emotion, as a value – and as a basis for policy. As she put it in her call with Megan Rapinoe: “We really believe in equity. We believe in racial equity, we believe in gender equity, we believe in everybody gets a chance in this country.”

All this makes her, in my eyes, not just the best candidate to undo the damage of the Trump era but the best candidate to make this country live up to its promises, potential and ideals in ways it never has before.

Unquote.

That is Rebecca Solnit writing in The Guardian.

The bad news is that many of us don’t want this country to “live up to its promises, potential and ideals in ways it never has before”. Others don’t think a woman could or should do the job Warren is seeking.

As a result, we may get the candidate we deserve, not the one we need.