#now biden is almost reaching obama's levels
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It is a measure of Krugman’s increasing despair that by 2013 his jaundiced view of American class society converged with his worries about the intellectual framing of economics. As Republican and Democratic centrists struggled to fashion a bipartisan majority around a programme to slash the deficit, it dawned on Krugman that the entirety of what he had once confidently described as ‘responsible’ economic policy was shot through with class interest. Talk of fiscal sustainability wasn’t just bad economics; it was, Krugman now believed, class war by stealth. In End This Depression Now (2012), Krugman broke one of the taboos that separate mainstream New Keynesians from their left-wing heterodox counterparts. He invoked the Polish economist Michał Kalecki, whose work is commonly cited as having bridged Keynesianism and Marxism. In 1943, in wartime exile in Oxford, Kalecki had explained why delivering stabilisation policy in a sustained way, as Keynes envisioned, might not be possible in a class-divided society. At the depths of the crisis, Keynesians would be summoned by the powers that be to do the minimum that was necessary, but as soon as the worst had passed, well before the economy reached full employment, the same policies would be anathematised as undermining ‘confidence’. The balance of what was ‘sensible’ would be set by the interests of the wealthiest and most secure. Their principal concern wasn’t full employment, but profit, which dictated stimulus in a slump and restraint whenever profits were squeezed by increased wages in a tightening labour market. Five years before Samuelson, in his classic textbook of 1948, laid out his vision of the complementarity of macroeconomic management and market-based microeconomics, Kalecki had already shown why it would end in failure.
As Krugman remarked, when he first read Kalecki’s essay he ‘thought it was over the top. Kalecki was, after all, a declared Marxist ... But, if you haven’t been radicalised by recent events, you haven’t been paying attention; and policy discourse since 2008 has run exactly along the lines Kalecki predicted.’ After a short burst of emergency Keynesianism, by 2010 deficits not unemployment were the problem. And any effort to push for better conditions was immediately countered with the insistence that it would induce ‘economic policy uncertainty’ and hold the economy back. It wasn’t unemployed Americans, Krugman raged, but imaginary ‘confidence fairies’ that were dictating policy.
Krugman reassured himself by adding that Kalecki was far more of a Keynesian than he was a Marxist, but quibbles aside, Krugman’s own transformation could hardly be denied. The members of the American left he had savaged in the 1990s were now his friends. He was talking about power in the starkest terms. But the question was unavoidable: once you lost your faith in the state as a tool of reformist intervention, once you truly reckoned with the omnipresence of class power, what choices remained but fatalism or a demand for a revolutionary politics? Between those alternatives, respectively unappetising and unrealistic, there was perhaps a third option. America had, after all, been here before. FDR’s New Deal too had been hemmed in. It had delivered far less than promised, until the floodgates were finally opened by the Second World War. The Great Depression, Krugman wrote, ‘ended largely thanks to a guy named Adolf Hitler. He created a human catastrophe, which also led to a lot of government spending.’ ‘Economics,’ he wrote in another essay, ‘is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished.’
‘If it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves,’ Krugman said in 2012, ‘we’d have full employment in a year and a half.’ If 21st-century America needed an enemy, China was one candidate. On foreign policy, Krugman is perhaps best described as a left patriot. Where he had once downplayed the impact of Chinese imports on the US economy, he now declared that China’s currency policy was America’s enemy: by manipulating its exchange rate Beijing was dumping exports on America. But to Krugman’s frustration Obama never turned the pivot towards Asia into a concerted economic strategy.
You might argue that in Covid we have found an enemy of precisely the kind Krugman was imagining. As far as Europe is concerned, an alien space invasion isn’t an implausible model for Covid. This novel threat broke down inhibitions in Berlin, and the Eurozone’s response was far more ambitious than it was after 2008. But America isn’t the Eurozone. For all Krugman’s gloom, it didn’t take a new world war to flip the economic policy switch. All it took was an election. Almost immediately after Trump’s victory in November 2016, the fiscal taps were opened. As under Reagan in the 1980s and Bush in the 2000s, all fear of deficits disappeared.
Compelling as Krugman may have found the Kaleckian vision, it does not describe the United States in the 21st century. The balance of class forces Kalecki had assumed in the 1940s no longer exists. In America in 2017 big business did not object to running the economy hot. There was no real threat of wage pressure: a flutter of strikes perhaps, but nothing serious. No chance of inflationary expectations becoming embedded in adjustments to the cost of living. No wage-price spiral. Everything to gain from tax cuts for corporations and the rich. The Kaleckian scenario, from today’s point of view, presumed too much countervailing force from the left and by the same token too many constraints on active economic policy.
Trump opened a new era of voluntarism in economic policy. You really could do what you liked. Neither external threats in the form of bond market vigilantes, nor domestic counterpressure in the form of contending social classes, were any longer effective constraints. American conservatives had never been as keen on the slogan There Is No Alternative as Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel. Under Trump there was simply no limit to the GOP’s opportunism. Typically, the centre and left did more intellectual work to come to terms with the new situation. The IMF’s former chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, had painstakingly demonstrated the sustainability of much higher levels of debt in a world of low interest rates. Meanwhile, Modern Monetary Theory had its moment in the sun. Blending state theories of money, radical Keynesianism of 1940s vintage and inside knowledge of the plumbing of the modern financial markets, MMT argued that debt wasn’t a problem at all. The only limit on an expansionary economic policy should be the inflation rate; otherwise the overriding priority should be full employment.
It’s telling that despite the apparent political affinity between Krugman and the proponents of MMT, its heresies revived his impulse to play policeman. After long and fruitless exchanges, Krugman declared that MMT was either silly or merely old-fashioned Keynesianism warmed over. In 2020 these doctrinal debates were overtaken by the reality of the Covid shock. In March 2020, as more than twenty million Americans lost their jobs in a matter of weeks, Congress united around a gigantic fiscal stimulus. At the Fed, the centrist Republican Jerome Powell embarked on a programme of intervention that dwarfed anything contemplated by Bernanke. And with a Democratic majority in Congress the impetus has carried through to 2021. The mantra on everyone’s lips is a blunt statement of Krugman’s position. Do not repeat the mistakes of the early Obama administration. Go large. If the Republicans have now decided to be fiscal conservatives, ignore them. There has been no opposition from big business. What the Chamber of Commerce did not like was the $15 minimum wage. Once that was dropped, it did not oppose the $1.9 trillion plan; it seems that business fears legislative intervention more than it does Kalecki-style pressure in the labour market.
The Krugmanification of the Democrats wasn’t won without a fight. There are fiscal hawks in Biden’s entourage. At one point he even counted Larry Summers as an adviser. That didn’t last: the empowered left wing of the Dems wouldn’t stand for it. But although he is no longer in the inner circle, Summers hasn’t surrendered. Opposing untargeted stimulus checks, calling for more focus on investment, he recently declared the Biden administration’s fiscal policy the most irresponsible in forty years – the result, he remarked bitterly, of the leverage handed to the left of the Democratic Party by the absolute refusal of the GOP to co-operate.
The first instinct of the wonks inside the Biden administration is to counter Summers’s arguments on his own terms. Their models show, they insist, that the risks of overheating and inflation are slight. What they don’t say is that being credibly committed to running the economy hot is precisely the point. This is what Krugman meant in 1998 when he called on the Bank of Japan to make a credible commitment to irresponsibility. To avoid the risk of a liquidity trap what you want to encourage is precisely a general belief that inflation is set to pick up. In the late 1990s Krugman, like a good New Keynesian, envisioned monetary and fiscal policy as substitutes for each other. In 2021 America is getting a massive dose of both. As the Fed announced in August last year, the plan is to get inflation above 2 per cent and to dry out the labour market. The bond markets may flinch, but if the sell-off gets too bad, the Fed can always buy more bonds.
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Israel’s Second Struggle for Independence
The USA has been Israel’s greatest friend and supporter in recent years.
It is also Israel’s biggest problem.
Our dependence on American military aid has sharply limited our freedom of action, distorted our decisions about procurement of weapons, crippled the development of our own military industries, corrupted our decision-makers, and damaged our standing as a sovereign state.
It is true that on some occasions Israel has acted against America’s wishes, such as the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. It is also true that far more frequently, Israel has been forced to bow to US demands, even when they are not in her best interests. In several wars and smaller operations, cease-fires have been dictated by American pressure, although Israel would have preferred to continue fighting longer in order to achieve a decisive victory. During the Gulf War, the US prevented Israel from retaliating for Iraqi Scud attacks. In peacetime, US pressure has prevented Israel from building in Judea and Samaria, and forced Israel to accept Palestinian demands for the release of prisoners. American opposition was a major factor in the decision not to attack Iranian nuclear facilities in the 2010-2012 period.
Israel’s relationship with the US has been better or worse depending on the direction of political winds there, but pressure to reverse the outcome of the 1967 war has been a constant ever since – with the notable exception of the Trump administration, which for the first time recognized Israeli rights to Jerusalem and the Golan heights. But now it seems that the US is taking a turn in the other direction; and this time – thanks to Israel’s conclusive loss of the cognitive war for the consciousness of American elites, the partisan division of attitudes toward Israel, and the new strength of the radical Left in American politics – our time in the wilderness may turn out to be much longer than before.
The inroads being made by elements hostile to Israel into the American educational system, previously limited to higher education, but now reaching into high school and even grade school levels, are troubling. The “intersectional” connections being made between every progressive cause, and the politicization of almost every field of endeavor, have injected the issue of Israel vs. the Palestinians into places where it was not found before.
This is a problem, because our enemies – particularly Iran – are taking advantage of the less pro-Israel climate in the US. The Biden Administration, which has already significantly released the pressure on Iran, appears to be galloping toward a full removal of sanctions, whether or not it will gain significant leverage over their nuclear weapons program. Trump’s sanctions had sent the Iranian economy into a tailspin, which helped energize the Iranian opposition to the repressive and backward regime of the Ayatollahs. Even today, Iranians are in the streets protesting against the regime. But the removal of sanctions will not help them; the regime will funnel cash into its nuclear program, into the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, and to build up Israel’s most dangerous enemy, Hezbollah.
At the same time, the Biden Administration, which has staffed its echelons dealing with the Middle East with people less than friendly to Israel – including some with a history of anti-Israel activism (see here, here, and here) – has already restored funding to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, plans to re-open the Jerusalem consulate, the unofficial “US Embassy to the State of Palestine” in Jerusalem, and to allow the PLO to restore its embassy in Washington.
A recent poll shows that the Democratic Party, which now controls the House, Senate and the Presidency, has moved significantly away from its formerly solid support for Israel in recent years, with sympathy for Israel among Democrats maintaining a slight edge of only 3 percentage points over sympathy for the Palestinians. The “liberal” wing of the party is far worse, with the Palestinians holding a 15% margin over Israel. Younger respondents also were more likely to favor the Palestinians, which argues for a continuation of the trend. And there is a very vocal contingent in the US Congress that is strongly anti-Israel, and not at all constrained from giving voice to the most extreme anti-Israel propaganda.
The Israeli leadership must come to understand that the continued expectation that Israel will receive military and diplomatic support from the US is unrealistic and dangerous. Israel needs to take action now, to reduce its dependence on the US, to increase its freedom of action, and to build up its own resources in important areas.
There is only one way for a small country in a strategic area to obtain independence from the various empires that wish to make it a satellite, and it is difficult and precarious. That is to play the empires off against one another, and to make alliances with other unaligned nations. I believe that Binyamin Netanyahu understood this, and made small but steady progress in this direction. It remains to be seen if the present government, whose foreign policy appears to be in the hands of the obsequious Yair Lapid, can pull this off.
From the military standpoint, Israel needs to be its own main source of supply. That has implications for the kind of military forces it can field. For example, it may be unrealistic to try to maintain a large fleet of the most sophisticated manned combat aircraft. Drones and precision-guided missiles are far less expensive than F-35s, and while they can’t entirely replace conventional aircraft, a small country will find it more practical to produce and maintain them.
There are also economic considerations. Iron Dome is a wonderful thing, but if it costs $100,000 to intercept a $500 rocket, then massive-scale use of it will bankrupt us. It is much less expensive to deter rocket attacks with the threat of forceful reprisals than to depend on antimissile systems to ward them off. The former strategy is more appropriate for a smaller country whose defense budget is not bottomless. I don’t suggest doing away with antimissile systems entirely, just changing our strategy so that we will not need so many of them.
I recommend that we start moving in this direction now, by agreeing with the US to a gradual phase-out of military aid. At the same time, we will have to revitalize our domestic military industries. Barack Obama very cleverly did not decrease the level of military aid we received, to maintain the maximum leverage over our actions. But the percentage of that aid that could be spent outside of the US was set to gradually drop to zero over the next few years. This had the effect of increasing the subsidy that aid to Israel provided to US defense contractors, and weakening Israel’s home-grown industry. This made us more dependent and at the same time reduced the competition to American weapons suppliers in the world market. A win-win-win for the US, but a loss for us.
America is changing in ways that are not good for America, and not good for us. I hope that the political/cultural pendulum in the US will swing the other way. Probably it will, if the nation survives the present storm intact. But here on the other side of the world, Israel’s enemies are not waiting with their hands folded. She will either adapt to the new situation or find herself in deep trouble.
Abu Yehuda
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It’s Satan
By Daymond Duck Published on: August 1, 2021
The writer of this article was recently asked, “Why do the globalists who are supposed to be very intelligent make decisions that are so clearly wrong?”
Most don’t realize it, but Satan is behind their evil.
He has blinded them to the extent that they don’t believe the Bible is the Word of God.
They push a godless world government, world religion, same-sex marriage, tracking everyone, etc., because they are not Christians (even though some falsely claim to be good Catholics, etc.).
Many were appointed by like-minded people, not elected by voters or nations.
They wouldn’t dare have an election because they don’t believe they can get elected.
The globalists overlook what the Clintons and Bidens have done because they share similar views on the issues listed above.
Their puppets impeached Trump twice because he opposed their views.
Their prosecution of Trump supporters for what happened at the capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while ignoring the rioting, looting, destruction of property, etc. by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and others, should concern every conservative and Christian because when the globalists get the upper hand (and they will), they will destroy the U.S. Constitution, and persecute and destroy those that disagree with them.
When they give their Antichrist power, he will go forth conquering and to conquer (Rev. 6:1-2; 13:4-7).
The following events indicate that the latter years and latter days, globalism, global pandemics, food shortages, persecution, etc., are on the horizon.
One, concerning the Battle of Gog and Magog in the latter years and latter days: on July 20, 2021, Sen. Lindsey Graham said, “The Iranians are progressing (on their development of nuclear weapons) at a dangerous pace.”
“Israel may need to take pre-emptive military action against Iran.”
“I’ve never been more worried about Israel having to use military force to stop the program than I am right now.”
Two, also concerning the Battle of Gog and Magog: it was reported on July 21, 2021, that Israel’s military and foreign intelligence agency said Israel needs a variety of plans to sabotage, disrupt and delay Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, and they will probably be asking for the money and resources to do that.
Three, also concerning the Battle of Gog and Magog: Israeli Prime Min. Netanyahu and Russian Pres. Putin agreed that Israel would give Russia advance notice of Israeli attacks in some areas of Syria, and Russia would not intervene.
Israel jets recently fired several missiles at Iranian targets near Aleppo, Syria, and a Russian official said Syria used Russian-made anti-missile systems to shoot down all of Israel’s missiles.
On July 24, 2021, DEBKAfile, an Israeli intelligence and security news source group, reported that a Russian official confirmed that Russia has changed its policy on not intervening in Israeli attacks in some areas of Syria because Russia has received confirmation from the Biden White House that the U.S. does not condone the continuous Israeli raids.
Thus, while the Biden administration is publicly saying Israel has a right to defend itself, it is telling Russia that some of Israel’s efforts to do that are unacceptable.
The Bible clearly teaches that the merchants of Tarshish and all the young lions (perhaps includes the U.S.) will not help Israel during the Battle of Gog and Magog (Ezek. 38:13).
Corrupt world leaders, deceit, and lying are also signs of the end of the age.
Four, on July 27, 2021, i24NEWS reported that Israel has notified the Biden administration that Iran is on the verge of crossing the nuclear threshold, and it could happen at any moment.
Because Pres. Obama sent Iran a planeload of money during his administration and seems to be influencing events in the Biden administration, notifying Biden might be a waste of time.
This may help explain the belief that the U.S. will not help Israel during the Battle of Gog and Magog (Ezek. 38:13).
Five, concerning famine: it is common knowledge that the Covid-19 lockdowns disrupted the world’s food chains (farmers and farmhands were quarantined; stores ran out of toilet paper, some foods, etc.; food processors closed or cut back; some trucks stopped rolling, etc.).
On July 23, 2023, it was reported that there are still bare shelves in some food stores in the U.K., the food supply chains are “at risk of collapse,” millions of workers have been ordered to self-quarantine, the food industry is running out of workers to keep the stores supplied, and the U.K. could be just a few months away from a major crisis.
Under the guise of stopping the spread of Covid, the U.K. government may be creating “food shortages and mass famine.”
Note: It was recently reported that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that there will be another lockdown in the U.S. if American citizens “don’t wise up and get vaccinated against Covid-19.”
Note: On July 28, 2021, in an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Stuart Varney said an important business group is predicting that supply shortages will last until 2023.
Some prophecy teachers believe that Covid-19 is a created crisis (a pretext, a set-up, perhaps an engineered cluster of catastrophes) that globalists are using to prepare the world for a world government.
According to the pro-liberty group, Brighteon, on July 22, 2021, “very few people are prepared to survive a multi-layered, engineered cluster of catastrophes that are unleashed on top of each other.”
God’s Seal, Trumpet, and Bowl judgments during the Tribulation Period will be multi-layered catastrophes (pandemics, famine, economic collapse, etc.) on top of each other, and very few will survive.
Note: This writer believes we could be watching the development (early stages) of those multi-layered judgments.
Six, concerning deceit: on July 20, 2021, Sen. Rand Paul said on Sean Hannity’s T.V. program, “I will be sending a letter to the Department of Justice asking for a criminal referral (of Dr. Anthony Fauci) because he has lied to Congress” (about the involvement of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology).
Note: This writer does not know how to verify it but has seen reports that Fauci owns stock in one or more of the companies that have been approved to sell the Covid-19 vaccine (If true, he is likely profiting off forcing people to be vaccinated and opposing the use of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin).
Second Note: It has been reported that Fauci could spend up to 5 years in prison, but it is the opinion of this writer that the globalists (also called the Shadow Government, Deep State, super-wealthy elitists, etc.) will protect him because they are pro-vaccination. They want him to keep using his ever-changing fake science.
Seven, concerning world government and open borders: on July 21, 2021, it was reported that keeping the U.S. border with Mexico open is costing about 3 million dollars a day in suspension and termination payments to contractors to guard steel, concrete, and other materials they have in the desert.
Eight, militant Muslims say Jews should not be allowed on the Temple Mount because the entire Temple Mount is an Islamic site and none of it belongs to Israel.
For this reason, Jewish officials have allowed Jews to visit the Temple Mount at certain times, but they have not been allowed to pray on the Temple Mount.
On July 17, 2021, the eve of Tisha B’ Av (a holiday for remembering the destruction of the first 2 Jewish Temples; July 17-18 in 2021), it was reported that Jews were praying (and some were teaching Torah, a name for the Scriptures in the first 5 books of the Bible) on the Temple Mount.
On July 20, 2021, Prime Min. Bennett came out in support of freedom of worship for Jews on the Temple Mount.
This may lead to more violence, but it is worth noting that the Jews have gone from not being allowed to pray on the Temple Mount to praying and teaching on the Temple Mount, and Israel’s new Prime Min. supports it.
According to the Bible, the Jews will eventually get permission to rebuild the Temple.
Update: On July 25, 2021, it was reported that the temporary truce between Israel and the Palestinians is fragile, may be coming unraveled, and another war could be on the horizon.
Nine, concerning pestilence: on July 22, 2021, Israeli Prime Min. Bennett said as of Aug. 8, 2021, Israeli citizens will not be allowed to enter synagogues and other facilities without a vaccine certificate or proof of a negative Covid-19 test.
U.S. citizens are not having to prove that they have been vaccinated to attend places of worship, but some companies are requiring it.
Ten, concerning natural disasters: on July 26, 2021, it was reported that June in North America was “the hottest in recorded history.”
Record high temperatures were broken in several western states.
On June 28, 2021, the temperature was 117 degrees in Salem, OR; 110 in Redmond OR; 110 in Quillayute, WA; 110 in Olympia, WA etc.
The southwest U.S. is experiencing the worst drought in 122 years.
It covers almost 90% of the southwest, and much of that is classified as severe to exceptional drought.
Reservoirs and rivers are drying up, fish are dying, wildlife is suffering, farmers and ranchers are hurting, crop and cattle production is down, some ranchers and dairy farmers are going out of business, water rationing is beginning to kick in, and more than 60 million people are impacted.
Lake Mead, a 112-mile-long water reservoir, is at its lowest level since it was built 85 years ago (It is now only 35% full).
Utah’s Great Salt Lake has reached a record low.
86 wildfires are burning in 12 states, drought conditions have made them worse, two major wildfires have merged, and more than 10,000 houses are in danger.
The long-range forecast is for the high temperatures to continue through the fall.
Call it what you want; some officials are already blaming it on global warming because it fits their globalist agenda. But natural disasters will be like birth pains (increase in frequency and intensity) at the end of the age, and this record-breaking event seems to qualify.
As I close, understand that as bad as things are right now, Satan and the Antichrist are limited or partly restrained (II Thess. 2:7-9).
But the time will come (the Tribulation Period) when Satan and the Antichrist will no longer be restrained, and the events will be worse than anything that has ever happened or ever will happen (Matt. 24:22).
Finally, are you Rapture Ready?
If you want to be rapture ready and go to heaven, you must be born again (John 3:3). God loves you, and if you have not done so, sincerely admit that you are a sinner; believe that Jesus is the virgin-born, sinless Son of God who died for the sins of the world, was buried, and raised from the dead; ask Him to forgive your sins, cleanse you, come into your heart and be your Saviour; then tell someone that you have done this.
#tumblr#tic tok#facebook#anime#memes#twitter#water#wildfires#farmers#ranchers#famine#drought#crops#cattle#forecast#news#lockdown#the#great#reset#NWO#globalist#evil#agenda
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A Democratic president just entered the White House, so it’s time for Republican state officials to start discussing secession once again. After Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, disaffected conservatives flooded the White House petition site with calls to leave the Union. (They were predictably denied.) Now a smattering of state party leaders and lawmakers are once again raising the question: Should we stay or should we go?
“We need to focus on the fundamentals,” Wyoming GOP chairman Frank Eathorne said in an interview with Steve Bannon last week, according to The Casper Star-Tribune. “We are straight talking, focused on the global scene, but we’re also focused at home. Many of these Western states have the ability to be self-reliant, and we’re keeping eyes on Texas too, and their consideration of possible secession. They have a different state constitution than we do as far as wording, but it’s something we’re all paying attention to.”
Kyle Biedermann, a Republican state lawmaker in Texas, recently claimed that he plans to introduce a bill to hold a referendum on leaving the United States. “The federal government is out of control & doesn’t represent the values of Texans,” he wrote on Twitter last month. “That is why I am committing to file legislation that will allow a referendum to give Texans a vote for the State of Texas to reassert its status as an independent nation.” Allen West, the Texas GOP chair, said after the Supreme Court refused to overturn Biden’s lawful victory that “law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.” Many took this as a reference to secession.
I’ve previously tried to make a moral and democratic case for the Union. Balkanizing ourselves over transitory political differences is short-sighted and anti-democratic. But as this feeble specter rears its head once more, it’s also worth also considering the practical and economic case for the Union. And to truly understand that, we need look no further than those responsible for the Union’s existence in the first place: the British.
Four and a half years ago, Britons narrowly voted to leave the European Union, the economic and political bloc that tore down borders and barriers across the continent. Brexiteers sold the country’s departure as a way for the U.K. to take back control of those borders and build new trade relationships outside Europe. It was a fantastical exercise in populism that spent little time grappling with the hard reality of how Britain would extract itself from a 40-year governance relationship, let alone with the rocky roads that a United Kingdom would traverse once it was disunited from the continent. Four years of bargaining and two toppled governments later, Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally signed an exit deal with EU leaders last month.
How have Britain’s first few weeks of “independence” gone? Not great. Goods and services used to flow nearly frictionlessly across British soil and the rest of the continent. Now they’re ensnared in a complex system of border controls and customs checks. Perishable goods are hardest hit. Scottish seafood is struggling to get into continental Europe; Northern Ireland is experiencing food shortages because goods can’t easily cross over from the south. The Bank of England warned that the country’s gross domestic product could drop by 2 to 4 percent because of Britain’s withdrawal, largely as a result of the added paperwork and regulation.
And then there’s the long-term damage. Nostalgic Brexiteers sold the referendum as a potential boon for Britain’s once-dominant manufacturing sector. But roughly four-fifths of the modern British economy is actually driven by its service industries, which were largely left uncovered by the exit agreement with the EU. London is unlikely to lose its status as a world financial hub any time soon, but firms are already relocating jobs and accounts to Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, and other European capitals—the better to retain smooth access to the EU financial sector. Britain is also forsaking its role in the EU’s Erasmus program, cutting off British students from study opportunities across Europe—and blocking European students from easily studying at British universities. That sort of lost potential is hard to quantify but easy to mourn.
But in many ways, the U.K. leaving the European Union is easy compared to Texas Texiting the U.S. Britain was already an independent country, despite what the pro-Brexit enthusiasts liked to suggest, with a highly skilled civil service and a world-class diplomatic corps. It already possessed all the trappings and organs of a modern developed country. The economic tumult it’s experienced over the past few weeks—and negotiated over the past four years—largely comes down to a mismatch of paperwork between two different regulatory systems.
Extracting oneself from the U.S. would be far more complicated. For starters, Texas would have to fund and staff something resembling a modern regulatory state. Some of this framework already exists at the state level, but not all of it. There would need to be a Texas Food and Drug Administration, a Texas Environmental Protection Agency, a Texas Securities and Exchange Commission, and much more. Texas would have to buy property to build embassies in foreign capitals and hire diplomats to staff them. It would have to build its own army, navy, air force, intelligence service, and postal system. That costs a lot of money. Texas doesn’t even have a state income tax; one-third of its budget comes from the federal government.
Would Texas use its own currency? It would have to create its own central bank and monetary policy if it did. Since Britain never adopted the euro, this is one major complication of leaving the EU that never came up. When Scotland weighed leaving the rest of the U.K. in 2014, Scottish independence leaders proposed that they would keep the pound sterling and maintain some sort of currency union with the rest of their former country. But London itself wasn’t keen on the idea, and the Scottish National Party now favors adopting the euro in a post-Brexit world. Texas could always take the route adopted by El Salvador and adopt the U.S. dollar outright as its currency. So much for national sovereignty if it did, though.
Free movement would be another issue. It’s virtually impossible to denaturalize a U.S. citizen against their will, so most Texans would retain their American citizenship unless they voluntarily renounce it. And even though birthright citizenship would obviously not apply within a foreign country, the children of those U.S. citizens could still be eligible for citizenship under existing federal laws. Texas’s Republican leaders often brag about how its growth is fueled by businesses and residents leaving other states for lower taxes and lighter regulations. But that formula would invert itself after independence: Most of Texas’s population would easily be able to decamp back to the U.S., while residents of the other 49 states would have to go through some sort of immigration process to live in Texas.
And then there’s the problem of trade barriers. The Constitution forbids one state from imposing tariffs or taxes on goods from another state. It’s also virtually impossible for states to lawfully block Americans from entering or exiting them. (The current system of “travel restrictions” due to the pandemic is one of the only exceptions to that rule.) Indeed, the entire American economy is built around the free flow of goods and most services between California, Texas, New York, Florida, and everywhere in between. Without that freedom, Texas would have to negotiate some sort of Nafta-like deal between itself and the rest of the U.S. to carry out basic economic functions without significant difficulty.
That’s where the #Texit dreams really fall apart. Why would Texas and the U.S. need to create some sort of trade deal? Again, look no further than Brexit. If Britain had not reached an accord with the EU before the legal deadline of December 31, 2020, it would have crashed out of the union in what was called a hard, no-deal Brexit. Trade between the U.K. and the EU would have defaulted to World Trade Organization rules, raising all manner of tariffs and duties on everyday goods. The resulting economic fallout spurred leaders on both sides to strike a bargain. While Europe is not as dependent on British trade as Britain is on EU trade, enough of its businesses would have been affected that few leaders truly wanted to see a no-deal break happen.
So, in addition to funding and creating all of the features of modern nationhood, Texas would have to negotiate some sort of trade agreement with the U.S. to actually survive. Like Britain, it would be somewhat at the mercy of the much larger trading partner. But the U.S. also has no interest in making it easier for states to leave the Union, so it would have no incentive to play as nicely as the Europeans did with the British. At minimum, Texas would almost certainly have to compensate the U.S. for the loss of all sorts of federal property: Fort Hood and other military bases, Johnson Space Center and other NASA facilities, various post offices, courthouses, prisons, and so on. It would likely also have to play by rules set by U.S. regulatory agencies and conduct most of its business on terms set by U.S. trade negotiators. Texas, like Britain, could easily end up in a much worse position than the status quo it enjoys now.
All of this assumes that Texas peacefully leaves the Union with Congress’s assent. That’s the only constitutionally valid scenario suggested by the Supreme Court’s ruling in, ironically, Texas v. White in 1869, in which the justices held that states can’t unilaterally secede and the so-called Confederacy never lawfully existed. We’ll set aside the unlikelihood of a peaceful departure for now, and instead ponder its alternative. Secession was a gambit at best in 1860 when almost a dozen rebel-led states tried to withdraw by force. It took the U.S. five years and 600,000 dead to force the Confederate armies to surrender in the Civil War. The asymmetry between the modern U.S. military and whatever state militia Texas could muster is so great that putting down a rebellion this time might only take five weeks.
But let’s go back to the peaceful option once again. If the Texas legislature voted to secede tomorrow, there is zero chance that a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president would support its departure. And if a Republican president and a Republican Congress held power—as they did not but two years ago—Texas, Wyoming, or any other Republican-led state wouldn’t want to secede in the first place. Why would Donald Trump or any future Republican president want to let their biggest batch of electoral votes walk out the door? Secession’s greatest challenge isn’t that it’s a bad idea but that the incentives make it all but impossible to carry out.
Finally, notice that I used Texas as the example here instead of Wyoming. That’s because Texas stands a better chance of actually surviving as an independent country than any other state, except perhaps California. It would be among the largest economies in the world if it became a sovereign country tomorrow—and it would immediately struggle to maintain anything resembling its current standard of living. Wyoming, despite the dreams of its state GOP chair, would be doomed to failure if it seceded. That’s one reason why the Union is so great in the first place, of course. Everything may be bigger in Texas, but everything is ultimately better in the U.S.
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Final election prediction map:
Explanation time. Going from left to right.
Nevada: this state is known for overestimating republican support in the polls. Even republican-biased pollsters like Trafalgar(R) think Biden is going to win here. Regular polls tend to give Biden about a six point lead. So I think 4-8% is the most likely margin for this state.
Arizona: A very close state. It voted for Trump last time by a margin of three percent, and Biden generally leads in the polls here from 2% or 4% depending on which polling group most recently posted. Discounting obviously biased polls like Trafalgar, CNN, and Rasmussen, it is most likely that Biden will narrowly win Arizona. FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics agree on this and so do I.
Alaska and Montana: States that would normally be more decisively red but aren't this time around. Still, trump is leading in these two by enough that it won't matter. Just something to keep in mind, that Biden has moved republican states more towards the democrats.
Colorado: Used to be a swing state, but now is about at the same level of closeness as in Montana. RealClearPolitics says Biden is leading by ten percent, FiveThirtyEight says by fourteen percent, predicting that they will vote within a 7-11% range is a modest estimate not Democrat bias. Not only that but like Nevada and Texas, it voted more blue than expected in 2016.
New Mexico: Republicans have been trying to get this state but it's just not happening. They have a 15% poll lead for Biden on my most recent map. Even if the polls are off some, in Trump's favor, Biden still wins by double digits.
Nebraska: Both the main state and the first district are going to Trump, no real question there. But the second district has held some polls and they all lean towards Joe Biden winning. It's just one extra electoral vote though.
Texas: A state that has been all over the place lately with large amounts of early voting (which favors dems) and a court that denied throwing out a hundred thousand ballots. It's not out of reach that democrats could win Texas, but if I'm being wholly honest with myself, what I want to happen is not necessarily what will happen. The polls do lean in Trump's favor. And Republican support is still large in Texas. Worst of all, there is only one early voting drop off box per county in Texas. I think it's going to the reds this time around, although at a narrower margin than 2016.
Minnesota: This one I can't be too sure about to be honest. On one hand, the police brutality there and protests (mainly the government's response to the protests) will likely mean more dem turnout. But at the same time, people protesting racism and the authoritarian gov? Also means more Republican turnout for Trump. But Republicans already turn out to vote regularly, so it's not so much that they can expand from here and more than they can try and use the protests as a means to convince people to not vote got Biden. Still, Biden's campaign has generally brought in more support to the democrats than Hillary's across the nation and Minnesota went to her last time. And 4-8% does match up pretty well with polling data which ranges around a 6% to 7% lead for Biden.
Iowa: Sometimes leans Biden, other times it leans Trump, but in general it's a pretty close state. But Trump had a 9% margin of victory in 2016 and I think that is going to be very hard to overcome. Of course Biden has moved the country towards the democrats, but probably not by the ten percent margin it would take to win Iowa. It just has a lot of conservative support, and unless something is drastically off in my analysis, Trump is going to win Iowa by a few percentage points.
Missouri: Like a couple other states already mentioned, it's strange that it isn't automatically safe. RealClearPolitics even considered Missouri a toss up state at one point. Based on the polling data involving this state and how it's voted previously, I think it's going to Republicans by a margin of 6-10%.
Wisconsin: Oh boy. The one state who's polling data was well outside the margin of error in 2016. It was seven percent off. And current polls for the state range from a slight one or two point win for trump to a seventeen point landslide for Biden. It's a bit absurd how hard this state is to predict. But, I think it is landing on the Biden side of the aisle and will vote Democrat by about the same amount as Iowa votes Republican. Biden is more liked there than Hillary Clinton, and that is true for the whole Midwest. Not only that but most Midwestern states including Wisconsin voted more democratic in the 2018 midterms. Less biased polls put Biden at a six percent lead in Wisconsin. Which is roughly the same as Clinton's state. In most states Biden is doing better than Clinton was, but I suppose some really biased towards dems polls came out for Clinton in Wisconsin right before the election as it's the only logical explanation. Several polls also have shown Biden winning in double digits in Wisconsin, hopefully these are the ones that are exaggerating democratic support and not the more average polls. Assuming the more biased polls are the ones that could be seven points off in Republicans favor, Biden wins by a few percent.
Michigan: Without Trafalgar(R) and Rasmussen, Michigan looks as decisive for Biden as South Carolina is for Trump. It's polling average on RCP had Biden nine points up. In a state that just barely went to Trump in 2016. Michigan is almost certainly going to Biden if everyone who prefers Biden actually turns out to vote for him. Many polls show Biden up in double digits there. Trump has personally hurt his reputation in Michigan. Largely due to personally refusing them covid aid while the state run by democrats was handling the pandemic better than any other state according to a covid response study. Which is bound to increase their approval of democrats and decrease it of Trump. His supporters even tried to kidnap the governor to do god knows what to her, and Biden won Michigan in the primaries over Sanders, who beat Clinton there in the 2016 primaries. It's very likely that Biden will see a win in Michigan, and by fairly strong margins assuming all the votes get counted in time. Whether you look at the polls, how they voted in the midterms, the margin at which Trump won in 2016, other factors that could effect the vote, Biden is set to win the state of Michigan. A voting margin of 4-8% is a rather modest prediction all things considered. Even some conservative biased polls have shown Biden winning by a percent or two. Polling groups like Trafalgar(R) voted about two points to the right of the final results in the rust belt states.
Indiana: Not a whole lot to say here. Much like Missouri and Montana, it's closer than it should be and that's a bad sign for Republicans in neighboring swing states.
Ohio: This state has voted 8 points in favor of the Republicans in 2016, and the polls have gone back and forth between the candidates recently. But they are very close. I think Trump will take the state by at least one point though. And no more than five. Going to be as close as Iowa at least, maybe a little closer, but Biden will be hard pressed to flip the state completely.
Virginia: Polling shows Biden possibly leading in double digits and Clinton won fairly decisively here. Even the most narrow recent Virginia polls show Biden eight points ahead. It's barely competitive, luckily for Biden.
North Carolina: Like Arizona, this state is a hard call because of how close it is. I wouldnt be surprised if either won. But Biden does have the overall edge and is more likely to take the state by a close margin.
South Carolina: Usually a solid red state. But this time around, it got fairly close in the polls. Closer than some traditional blue leaning swing states. Still almost definitely going to Trump, but, it did vote in a new Democrat in 2018 and if this momentum keeps up who knows, South Carolina could end up more like Iowa. A red leaning swing state. Probably not tomorrow though. It's going to have a pretty solid margin of victory for Trump.
Georgia: Very similar story as Texas but a little more towards dems. Biden does narrowly lead in the polls, but republican support in this state is historically usually strong and racial voter surpression could unfortunately have an effect by a percent or two. It's certainly possible for Democrats to win here, but it's probably not going to happen this election. Trump will likely have a pretty close lead of two to six percent. Like Texas, it's sort of a "What if dems get a landslide" scenario. It would certainly be closer if there wasn't so much concern about voter surpression and gerrymandered voting districts. I would say Biden has about as much chance of winning in Georgia as Trump does of winning Pennsylvania.
Florida: It is very close in every election. The best and least biased polls put it at a Biden win though. A narrow one, but with strong turnout it's more likely dems take this state. If GOP does take Florida it will be by a hair margin. Less than one percent. But I think it will land on Biden's side of the aisle due to factors such as the Coronavirus mainly effecting the elderly the worst and Florida being an older state, Florida voting more blue in 2018 like several other states, and the only polls showing Trump winning there are the ones with biased weights and faulty methods of polling. Biden is also a favorite in Florida, as they elected him decisively during the primary. And he was on the twice winning Obama/Biden ticket.
Pennsylvania: Like Wisconsin, I estimated a 2-6% margin of victory and this state has been fairly consistently showing a five point lead for Biden in the FiveThirtyEight model. It has overall moved to the left since 2016 and the administration there has been fighting Trump's attempts of rigging its vote count. I think this state is going to Biden, RealClearPolitics thinks this state is going to Biden, FiveThirtyEight thinks this state is going to Biden, but it all relies on Pennsylvanians actually going out and making those poll averages come true. But unlike last time, they actually know Trump can win and won't just assume it's over simply because of the polls. Even Rasmussen, a conservative biased polling group republicans love to tout, shows Biden winning by three percent. It's going to be pretty close though, so it comes down to the turnout.
New Hampshire: You're probably tired of having me say things are going to be close. Well, New Hampshire was close last time but I don't think it will be this time. The polls for this state are quite decisive (11% lead for Biden on average!) and Clinton did win last time in this state although narrowly. Estimating it to be a 5-9% margin of victory for Biden is not unreasonable, even though Biden didn't do well in the New Hampshire primary, he is bound to win this small swing state by a similar margin as Trump will win South Carolina, which is not known to be a swing state.
Maine: Biden is bound to get at least 3/4 of the electoral votes here, but I think it's likely that his campaign has won back enough support here that he can get all four. A recent poll by an A+ rated pollster puts him three points ahead in the remaining district. But I wouldn't be surprised if Trump picks up one district. One electoral point likely won't matter to the overall election though.
National:
Biden has been consistently leading over trump since before the primary voting started. His national lead on trump is the main factor why he won the primary in the first place. Biden will get the popular vote, as the popular vote was barely off in the 2016 polls and this time around Biden consistently has at least double, sometimes TRIPLE, the poll lead Clinton had by the day before the election. The lowest I've seen it was four points ahead of Trump. The highest was ten points ahead. He will most likely get around a seven point lead in the popular vote, which indirectly increases his likelihood of winning the electoral college as well. Even though winning one does not necessarily mean winning the other, it is VERY unlikely that someone could get a seven percent popular vote lead and not win the election. Remember, Clinton had less than a three percent popular vote lead and trump only won key states she was expected to win by a sliver.
Third parties probably won't make a whole lot of difference. In 2016, it was a big year for them although it may not look like it. Lots of people assumed Clinton would win, and it made it easy to justify using one's vote on a third party candidate. Nowadays people can see how close it will be and how it is anyone's game, and some will choose to vote either Trump or Biden instead of their preferred candidate like in 2016. Third party polling is not looking good. And it always tightens up on election day. If any do split the vote enough, it's probably not something that said party not running would help anyway. If you're voting green party still, you're probably not willing to vote for Biden even IF the greens didn't run in your state. And if you're voting Libertarian, you're probably not going to vote for Trump even IF Libertarians didn't run in your state.
In conclusion, I think Biden will win both in terms of having the most actual votes, and in terms of having the most electoral votes which are the real deciding factor. But the election could still be contested by the Supreme Court if it's close enough which it likely could be. And the vote count could be stopped prematurely to erase tens of thousands of dem-majority mail-in ballots.
What constitutes a correct prediction?
I will consider it correct if all of these are true:
1: Biden wins overall
2: I get at least 95% of the state colors correct
3: I get at least 90% of the state margins correct
4: I'm right about Biden's popular vote lead within a margin of a percent in one direction or another.
This prediction also assumes that all of the legitimate votes cast are counted. We may not see the end result until a couple of days after election day. If the election is halted with tens of thousands of mail-in votes unaccounted for, I will consider it inconclusive.
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13 Keys to the White House
Political historian Allan Lichtman developed a method which has allowed to correctly predict every presidential election since 1984, and working backwards this same method retroactively accounts for every single election since 1860. The only hiccup was in 2000, when he predicted Gore would win, which he technically did.
Every election comes down to 13 keys, 13 yes or no questions on the state of the union during the previous presidential term. Lichtman claims that voters are smarter than we give them credit for, and won’t just blindly follow one party or the other, but will consciously reward whichever party maintains some semblance of order during their time in office. He claims that campaigning and advertisements are irrelevant, because people have usually already made up their minds, and the only thing that matters is election day itself.
Each election, Lichtman asks 13 questions directed towards the incumbent party, to determine how they’ve done over the past few years. If 8 or more of the questions are true, then the incumbent party is predicted to win. If 6 or more are false, the challenging party is predicted to win.
Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections. FALSE (Democrats won more in 2018 than Republicans won in 2014)
Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. TRUE (Donald Trump faces no real challengers)
Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president. TRUE (barring the coronavirus, or a heart attack brought on by all the fast food he eats, Donald Trump will be the nominee this November)
Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign. True, as of right now (Justin Amash is running as a Libertarian, but it’s unclear if he’ll reach Gary Johnson/Jill Stein levels, certainly not Ross Perot levels. Frankly, he’s only running for president to save face because he doesn’t stand a chance of winning his House seat back; he left the Republican party, so all of his constituents hate him, and he’s too conservative for the Democrats. We’ll see how this goes)
Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. FALSE (The Great Shutdown, the second once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse in less than 15 years. We’re only four months into it right now; things are going to get so much worse before they get better.)
Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. Unclear (Obama’s first time saw only 3.9% growth due to the end of the Great Recession, but his second term saw dramatic improvement with 8.8%. This averages to 6.35% growth per term. As of 2019, Donald Trump’s first term has seen 7.6% growth, but taking into account the recession, it is almost certain that our 2020 GDP will drop because of this. It only needs to drop 1.25% to be below Obama’s average, so maybe)
Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. Maybe (this is incredibly subjective, now more than ever. What constitutes “major” change? The McConnell controlled Senate has been blocking all major legislature since 2015, and Trump still hasn’t managed to meet any of his campaign promises; he didn’t build the wall, he didn’t lock her up, he didn’t get rid of Obamacare. Then again, he has greatly expanded the executive branch, giving the president total power to just ignore Congress is he so desires, so it could go either way)
Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term. Probably false? (again, this is subjective; what constitutes “unrest?” There are regular protests, but they’re all organized and civil. Some nut jobs stormed the Michigan state capitol with guns to “take back the state,” and nobody was arrested, which seems like unrest to me, except they were on the president’s side. I don’t think it will get to civil war levels, or martial law declarations, but rest assured the country is not happy with him)
Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. Almost certainly false. (indictments galore; so many of his associates are in jail, almost all of his original cabinet secretaries quit or were fired, and he admitted to trying to blackmail Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, was impeached for it, and got away with it. This man is a walking scandal. The question is, what does “untainted” mean? Yes, there have been endless scandals, one after another, but have any of them really stuck around?)
Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. Maybe true? (on the one hand, Iran didn’t retaliate when we killed their general, but on the other hand we retreated out of Syria, let thousands of ISIS fighters go, and aided the Turks in a Kurdish genocide. The tit-for-tat sanctions against China threatened to crash the global economy, but then the coronavirus came in and did that all by itself, so it’s unclear whether we’ve “failed” or simply “not succeeded”)
Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. Maybe false? (for the same reason as above, it is hard to judge what is or isn’t a success. USMCA is unpopular and small potatoes. The North Korean talks are all show with no substance; Kim will never get rid of his nukes. We’re still caught up in W’s endless wars, and I don’t see an end in sight, so I’d say this is definitely not a success).
Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. FALSE (Trump is a hero among Republicans, but reviled among everyone else. He has never had majority approval, and will not go down as one of the universally beloved presidents like Washington, Lincoln, or the Roosevelts)
Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. TRUE (Joe Biden is the Walter Mondale of Al Gores. Republicans hate him, and only half of Democrats really like him. He’s old and senile, he keeps making gaffe after gaffe after gaffe, and doesn’t seem to know how the game is played anymore. Someone needs to find Grampa a nice home so he can retire and talk to his nurse about how he used to get into fist fights with ne’er-do-wells, “buncha malarkey, I tell ya”)
Lets review the scores, from Best to Worst
FALSE
FALSE
FALSE
Almost certainly false
Probably false
Maybe false
Unclear
Maybe
Maybe true
True as of right now
TRUE
TRUE
TRUE
Incumbent Trumps needs 8 true to win. Challenger Biden needs 6 false to win.
Biden definitely has 3, with 3 teetering towards him, which is a good sign. He could even flip the unclear key in his favor if the economy continues to tank.
As it stands, both parties seem to have 6 keys each, which predicts that the challenging party will win the election. The scandal key is tentatively in Biden’s favor, as are the social unrest and military success keys. This could change in the coming months if Trump does something erratic like assassinating the Ayatollah and declaring that a victory (which would lead to an endless oil war with Iran; it’d be 2003 all over again). Trumps needs to flip more keys than Biden does, so he’s going into it with as disadvantage, perhaps the only time in his life he has ever not had an advantage.
But then again, there’s always the possibility that it could be a 2000/2016 repeat, where Biden wins the popular vote but Trump ekes by with the electoral college victory yet again. This model doesn’t take that into account because the popular vote winner almost always wins the EC too.
Trump is not more popular today than he was 4 years ago. He’s never had majority approval. While his base loves him more now than ever, they represent a minority of voters, and pretty much everyone else hates him. Anyone who was on the fence in 2016 is definitively over the fence in 2020. If he “wins,” it’s not going to be a 1972/1984 blowout, that’s just not gonna happen, too many states hate him too much. It will be very close; I will not rule out the possibility of a 269-269 tie in the electoral college, triggering a contingent election where the House of Representatives has to pick the president. Democrats have a majority in the House right now, but in contingent elections they don’t vote as 435 individuals, they vote as 50 state blocs; even though there are more Democrats than Republicans, they’re packed together into as few states as possible, giving Republicans over 26 stateside majorities, enough to ensure they would pick Trump in a contingent election.
It’s a bullshit system, and I pray it doesn’t come to that.
#allan lichtman#lichtman#13 keys to the white house#13 keys#politics#political#2020 election#election prediction#prediction#2020 predictions#election#electoral college#popular vote#joe biden#donald trump#biden#trump#fuck trump#fuck republicans#fuck conservatives#civil war#1972#1984#2000#2016#2020#true or false
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Democratic debate analysis
I’ve read the transcripts. I read the fact-checkers’ analysis. I have ranked them.
Due to the size of the field, I’ll be splitting my analysis into four groups. This first one will be the Please Do Not Make Me Vote For Them group:
Ryan, Hickenlooper, Williamson, Bennet, Delaney, O’Rourke, and Biden.
Under the break, I’ll be analyzing their debate performance, how effectively they represented themselves on the issues, and how much I hate them, in reverse order of preference. Let’s begin.
20) Biden
Biden is so… so out of touch. Even the moderators asked if he was out of touch, and when the moderators of a debate you’re participating in think you don’t know what you’re talking about? For a career politician, that has got to hurt. Frankly, they were right. Biden thinks that the reason people can’t pay their student loans without sacrificing everything else they want to do with their lives is because we’re not earning more than $25k a year, that freezing payments and interest until the graduated student crosses that threshold would magically make everything ok. If he were right, there’d be no Fight for 15. A $15 minimum wage, assuming full time hours, is more than $30k per year.
His response to accusations of racism was to point to his “black friend,” former President Obama, which… dude. You’ve got to know better than that by now. Please tell me you know having been the first and only black President’s VP does not immediately absolve you of being an old white guy who worked with Southern Segregationists against integrating schools.
His entire platform seems to be “remember when I was a senator/the vice president? Wasn’t I great, back when I had ideas and did things?” and I gotta say, No. No, you weren’t that great, Joe. Even his closing comments were lackluster, talking about “restoring the soul of America,” and “restoring the dignity of the middle class,” and “building national unity.” His answers to simple questions were, frankly, terrible.
Joe, what would you do, day one, if you knew you’d only be able to accomplish one thing with your Presidency? Thanks for asking, I’d BEAT DONALD TRUMP! Joe. Joe, that’s how you get to Day One. Unless you mean “grab him by the collar, haul him out on the White House lawn, and bludgeon him with heavy objects,” you’re not answering the question.
Joe, which one country do you think we need to repair diplomatic ties with most? NATO! Joe. Joe, NATO is more than one country. I just… *sigh*
To his credit, Biden trotted out many of the same old campaign promises Democrats have been making for as long as I can remember. Closing tax loopholes, universal pre-K and increased educational funding, let Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. These are tried and true campaign promises because they’re things we can all generally agree we want. But they’re old, a lot like Biden. They’re not the bold solutions we need. His newer ideas all sound pretty moderate and old, too: free community college (not 4 year public university), creating a public option for healthcare so people can choose between insurance companies and Medicare, rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, and instituting national gun buybacks. His suggestion of requiring all guns to have a biometric safety is also a vague gesture in the direction of a solution.
Biden is too old, too timid, and too arrogant to understand that he’s got nothing to offer in an election where Millenials and Gen Z are going to be the largest portion of the electorate.
19) O’Rourke
Beto, or as I like to call him, Captain Wrongerpants, got off to a roaring start by giving a non-answer in two languages. This incredible display of pandering, and wasting precious time, made him seem pretentious and obnoxious in twice the number of languages most politicians aspire to.
Possibly more than any other candidate, O’Rourke completely failed to answer any question he was asked. He presented a few good ideas, saying that he sees climate change as the most pressing threat to America and calling for an end to fossil fuel use. He supports universal background checks and reinstating the assault weapons ban. He wants comprehensive immigration reform, to reunite families separated by the Trump administration, and to increase the corporate tax rate.
Unfortunately, he wants to increase the tax rate from the new-for-2019 level of 21% to a lower-than-2018 28%. He wants immigration reform to protect asylum seekers, but thinks other immigrants should “follow our laws” and makes no guarantee to decriminalize undocumented border crossings. Like Biden, he supports healthcare “choice,” meaning that for-profit healthcare would continue in this country until everyone, in every city, state, county, and cave, can be convinced that insurance companies don’t care about them.
In short, O’Rourke reaches for relevance and relatability, and lands in pretension and centrism.
18) Delaney
John Delaney is the first candidate on my list to have been caught in a bald-faced lie by Politifact. Good job, John. His lie, by the way, was about Medicare for All. He claimed that the bill currently before Congress required that Medicare pay rates stay at the current levels, and that if every hospital in America had been paid at Medicare levels for all services, every hospital would have to close. The truth? The Medicare for All bill does not require that pay rates stay at current levels, and even if it did no one knows what effect that would have on the country’s hospitals. There is no data to support his assertion, even if he was right about the terms of the legislation being considered.
Unsurprisingly, John is another healthcare “choice” advocate. I think I’ve said enough about why this position doesn’t fly for me, so I won’t rehash it again.
In a discussion of family separation, he interjected that his grandfather was also a victim of family separation, which must make him feel so relevant. He also referred to company owners as “job creators,” a lovely little conservative talking point, and claimed that America “saved the world,” in some vague appeal to American Exceptionalism. He also agrees with Nancy Pelosi about not pursuing impeachment proceedings.
On the “I don’t hate him quite as much as Beto and Biden” front, he’s in favor of tax breaks for the middle class, increasing the minimum wage, funding education, family leave policies, a carbon tax (which he imagines would fund a tax dividend paid to individual citizens, rather than, I don’t know, paying for green infrastructure development?), thinks China is our biggest geopolitical threat, and is scared of nuclear weapons (a very sane, reasonable position, really).
If you want to pick a candidate based on who your moderately conservative uncle will yell about least if they win the White House, Delaney might be your guy. If you want to pick a candidate based on issues like student loan debt and healthcare, keep looking.
17) Bennet
I had never heard of Michael Bennet before the debates. In fact, I just Googled him to find out his first name. After the debates, though? You guessed it: I hate him.
His closing statement was an appeal to the American Dream. He thinks there are too many people in America to make a single payer healthcare system work. Asked to identify one country to prioritize diplomatic repairs with, he named two continents. And he believes the world is looking to America for leadership.
However, he did rate higher than three whole candidates, and here’s why:
He supports a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. He wants to end gerrymandering and overturn Citizens United. He wants to expand voting rights and electoral accessibility. He considers climate change and Russia to be the biggest threats to America, and he didn’t use any obvious racist dogwhistles. He’s from Colorado, so he’s kinda proud of the state’s marijuana legalization and reproductive health policies, but he’s way too quick to see partnership with private businesses as the ideal path forward.
16) Williamson
Oh man. Marianne Williamson. I almost threw something every time she opened her mouth. She is like a walking, talking, uninformed Tumblr guilt trip post. At a nationally televised debate, she asked why no one was talking about… something. I didn’t write it down in my notes because I would have had to gouge out my own eyes if I had. According to Google, she is a self-help speaker and that explains So Much.
In her closing statement, Williamson claimed that she would be the candidate to beat Trump, not because she has any plans, but because she will harness love to counter the fear that fuels Trump’s campaign. I am not making this up and I wish I was.
She claimed that Americans have more chronic health issues than anywhere else in the world, and attributed this to all sorts of factors, starting with diet and chemical contamination and extending, I assume, to solar activity and Bigfoot. According to Politifact, the only American demographic with a higher incidence of chronic illness than other countries is senior citizens, and I’m going to guess that has a lot more to do with our crappy healthcare system than it does a lack of detox teas.
When asked what policy she would enact if she could only get one, she said that on her first day in the White House she’d call the Prime Minister of New Zealand and tell her that New Zealand is not the best place in the world to raise a child, America is.
When asked which one country she’d make a diplomatic priority, she said “European leaders.”
By now you must be wondering how she rated higher than the bottom four, and I can sum it up in eight words: She supports reparations and the Green New Deal.
Please, please do not make me vote for Marianne Williamson.
15) Hickenlooper
John Hickenlooper is the former Governor of Colorado, and proudly takes credit for everything good that has ever happened in the state. He is also proud of being a small business owner, a statement that makes me immediately suspicious of any politician.
To his credit, he supports “police diversity,” a charmingly non-specific term that could mean one gay Latine nonbinary single parent in an otherwise entirely white male department, or could mean he wants the demographics of the police force to match the demographics of the population being policed. He also considers climate change a serious threat, and China. The best thing he said all night? He supports civilian oversight of police, a policy which has improved police relations with citizens.
Sounds pretty good, right? Wrong.
He also supports ICE “reform,” as if there is anything redeemable about that agency, and thinks that the worst thing the eventual Democratic candidate could do is allow their name to be connected to anything socialist. He said it twice, it wasn’t an accident.
14) Ryan
That brings us to the last of the worst, Tim Ryan. Tim here cannot stop using conservative dogwhistles, like talking about “coastal elites,” and saying that acknowledging differences between people is divisive. He is a basic ass white boy in the worst, most boring sense.
He wants to bring about a green tech boom, supports decriminalizing border crossing, supports gun reform, and thinks China is a serious threat to America. He also thinks that, in addition to dealing with the issues that allow school shootings to happen, we need to address the trauma kids are growing up with as a result. Unfortunately, he thinks that school shooters are misunderstood victims of bullying.
His confrontation with Tulsi Gabbard was very instructive and possibly the most damning exchange all night. He mis-identified the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center as being “the Taliban” (they were Al-Qaeda) and said that our military forces have to “stay engaged” for… stability? I guess? As a veteran, I’m with Tulsi on this one: that’s not acceptable.
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The early signs are not auspicious. Almost lost in the welter of top economic jobs leaked to the Times, Post, and Wall Street Journal by the transition staff on Sunday (the Prospect reported most of these earlier in the week) was an unfamiliar name, Adewale Adeyemo, known as Wally. He is to be Yellen’s deputy Treasury secretary.
Who is Wally Adeyemo? If he is typical of what’s coming, we can expect that what the Biden team gives progressives with one hand, they may take away with the other.
Adeyemo, 39, came to the U.S. as a child from Nigeria with his parents. He excelled in school, graduating from the University of California and then Yale Law School. While at Yale, he worked in the Obama campaign. He joined the administration while still in his late twenties, working for then–Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
Among the red flags for progressives is the fact that after leaving government, Adeyemo followed a well-worn path of Obama alums seeking to cash in, and went to Wall Street. And not just anywhere on Wall Street—he went to BlackRock, the world’s largest financial firm with $7 trillion under management, where he served as a political adviser and for a time as chief of staff to CEO Larry Fink.
So Adeyemo begins with a conflict of interest, since Fink’s top priority is to prevent BlackRock from being designated as a systemically important financial institution (SIFI), which would subject it to a higher level of regulatory scrutiny. The Treasury is the key player on this decision, and scores of others that affect BlackRock’s business model.
And there are more red flags. Before joining the Obama administration, Adeyemo worked at the Hamilton Project. That’s the outfit housed at Brookings and created and underwritten by Robert Rubin to promote a very centrist and Wall Street–friendly brand of watered-down liberalism.
Adeyemo subsequently worked for Treasury Secretary Jack Lew as his deputy chief of staff in 2015. Lew is another Rubin protégé. In between Lew’s two stints in government (Clinton, then Obama), Lew was chief operating officer at Citigroup, where Rubin was a top executive.
(Why does Rubin turn up just about everywhere in launching and promoting the careers of the wrong kind of Democrat? That’s not just a rhetorical question but a deeply structural one, if you want to understand the corruption and political failures of the Democratic Party.)
Following his post at Treasury, Adeyemo took a version of the key international economics post once held by Rubin protégé Mike Froman, serving on both the NSC and the NEC as the international economics chief. He was a key negotiator on the late and little lamented Trans-Pacific Partnership, the brainchild of Froman, and the quintessence of the corporate brand of “free trade” deal.
From there he went to BlackRock. After two years at Black Rock, Adeyemo became the first president of the Obama Foundation.
His trajectory offers a perfect rendition of the Washington–Wall Street revolving door. Can we imagine Adeyemo urging tougher regulation of BlackRock?
But here the plot thickens, for there is one anomalous green flag in Adeyemo’s career: his cordial relationship with Elizabeth Warren.
After the Dodd-Frank Act passed in 2010, it included Warren’s creation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren was designated as the interim chair. Geithner assigned Adeyemo to work with Warren as the bureau’s executive director.
Warren and Adeyemo have maintained a good relationship, and I have confirmed with Warren’s staff that she will support his nomination to Treasury. So we will likely get a number two at Treasury on close terms with two opposites—Larry Fink and Elizabeth Warren.
as the american prospect already pointed out, this is going to be the blackrock administration - so much so that the people who actually gave up their own political capital to bring biden his victory are complaining that he’s not giving their choices enough consideration. meanwhile “progressives” are nowhere in the picture
If investors were once wary of the single-family rental business, they aren’t any longer. The share price of American Homes 4 Rent was up 40 percent between August of 2013 and August of 2018. Investors such as Morgan Stanley and BlackRock increased their holdings in Invitation Homes in the third quarter of 2018. By December, the eight ratings firms covering the company had each given Invitation a “buy” rating, indicating that they believe it’s undervalued.
Single-family rental companies are now “darlings” of the real-estate sector, according to Haendel St. Juste, an analyst at Mizuho Securities who covers the industry. “You have this proof of concept now,” he told me. “They’ve exceeded expectations.” When I reached out to Sam Zell, the Chicago real-estate investor who had been skeptical of single-family rentals in the past, he, too, had changed his tune. “Technology has disrupted the real estate industry,” he said in a statement, “and the single-family rental sector may be a case in which resulting efficiencies have a big impact.”
Single-family rental companies are continuing to expand, suggesting that, rather than a temporary response to a generational crisis in the housing market, institutional ownership of single-family rentals may be a new fixture of the real-estate industry. Invitation Homes spent more than $200 million on new homes in the first nine months of 2018. As the supply of cheap homes for sale evaporates, American Homes 4 Rent has started building new homes to add to its stock.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mounting-evidence-buttresses-the-facts-laid-out-in-whistleblower-complaint/2019/10/05/c752843e-e6b5-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html#click=https://t.co/cPD6IRZoXL
I helped classify calls for two presidents. The White House abuse of the system is alarming.
By Kelly Magsamen | Published
September 29 at 1:01 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 6, 2019 10:45 AM ET |
The whistleblower at the heart of the Ukraine controversy said White House officials ordered information about President Trump’s phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky to be removed from the classified server typically used to store such information and placed on a hyper-secure “code word” server. Such special protections are typically reserved for material of the gravest sensitivity: detailed information about covert operations, for example, where exposure can get people killed.
The move was highly suspicious, the whistleblower said several White House officials told him, because “the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.” On Friday, the White House confirmed that National Security Council lawyers directed that the call records be placed on that server.
I served under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and worked for four advisers on the National Security Council’s staff. I have staffed presidential meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders and spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in the White House Situation Room. It is difficult to overstate just how abnormal and suspicious treating the call in that manner would be. It strongly suggests White House staff knew of serious wrongdoing by the president and attempted to bury it — a profound abuse of classified systems for political, and possibly criminal, purposes.
(The records of Trump’s conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi officials also were restricted to an unusually small group of officials, it now appears, though it’s unclear whether the memos were placed on the special server.)
In my almost six years on the NSC staff, I never personally saw or heard of the records of a presidential call being moved to the “code word” system. Such a move would be justified only if a president and foreign leader were discussing material so sensitive that intelligence officials with top-secret clearance had to be “read into” to access to it — an unlikely prospect, even with our closest allies. Presidents tend to discuss general foreign policy issues, not the fine details of covert actions.
Moving the memo to the code word server suggests Trump officials really did know the call was as bad as the president’s critics say it is. The argument some Trump officials are making — that they protected Trump’s conversations to avoid leaks — is scarcely less damning, if the point was to avoid leaks of conversations in which the president leveraged U.S. power for his own political advantage (or endorsed foreign interference in U.S. elections).
If the code word server was used to prevent leaks as a general matter — the most charitable interpretation — does that mean all of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders are stored there? That, in itself, would represent a remarkable departure from the intended use of the classification system.
People outside national security circles might well wonder whether a president’s calls to foreign leaders are, by their nature, sensitive enough to be placed on the special server. They are not. To be sure, presidential calls are extraordinarily well-protected, befitting their importance. Those calls are the coin of the foreign policy realm. They are carefully prepared, well-staffed by professionals and (ordinarily) used only to advance America’s national interests. They focus on peace deals, trade agreements and matters of war and peace.
The memorandums of these conversations — like the one released to Congress last week — are generated by national security professionals in the Situation Room, including career employees of the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the military. These people produce rough transcripts, which are then reviewed for accuracy by relevant experts on the NSC staff who were listening to the call and finally by people in what is known as “the Suite” — the small West Wing offices that house the NSC chief of staff, the deputy national security adviser and the national security adviser.
Once such memos are produced, very few members of the NSC staff are privy to them — usually only those working directly on issues discussed on the call. Members of the Cabinet, especially the secretary of state, may receive copies. The memos can be classified at various levels, with the classification level varying paragraph by paragraph.
Most of these memos are classified as “secret,” by default. To reach “top secret” classification, they’d have to involve information the unauthorized disclosure of which would cause the United States “exceptionally grave” national security harm. “Code word” status is reserved for the absolutely most sensitive subset of information within the top-secret category. These classifications are made purely to protect national security, never for political reasons.
Material up to “top secret” is stored on a highly secure classified computer system used by NSC staff — not the code word server. I have classified many such documents myself. Based on my experience, the standard system is where the Ukraine memo should have ended up.
Nothing in Trump’s call with Zelensky rises even to the level of “top secret.” The two leaders exchanged compliments, and Trump stressed how important an ally the United States is to Ukraine. He dismissed the efforts of the European Union to help the country, lamented the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor and criticized a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
What stands out in the call, of course, is what caught the attention of the whistleblower and his sources — namely the request that Zelensky work with Attorney General William P. Barr and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, to find negative information about former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. That is politically embarrassing, and potentially illegal and impeachable, but has nothing to do with state secrets.
If the president had only been asking Zelensky to root out corruption, as a general matter, as he has claimed, that would be standard fare for a presidential phone call, meriting a “secret” designation.
The apparent abuse of the classification system offers reason enough for congressional review of the Ukraine conversation and the events surrounding it. The questions at hand are straightforward: What national security reason was offered for moving the record of the July 25 conversation (and possibly others) to the code word system? Which NSC lawyers made that decision? Was the national security adviser involved?
One reason to pin down the decision-makers is to reestablish the public’s faith in the civil servants who work on intelligence matters. The NSC staff is made up mostly of patriotic and nonpolitical public servants who labor 18-hour days without glory or any interest in public attention. They walk through$yah the gates of the White House every morning with one goal in mind: the protection of American national security. They deserve answers about what happened in this case. Most importantly, the American people deserve to have confidence in the integrity of a national security process that is designed to serve them.
#trumpism#trump scandals#trump administration#president donald trump#news today trump#president trump#trump news#trump cult#trump crime syndicate#trump corruption#trump crime family#impeach trump#impeachment inquiry now#impeachthemf#impeachtrump#intelligence agency#national intelligence agency#house intelligence committee#national intelligence#us politics#politics#republican politics#politics and government#republican congress#republican party#republicans
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The economic framework is not comprehensive
# framework
The White House is preparing to launch a "comprehensive" Indo-Pacific economic framework in 2022. While details on the framework are scarce, it does not appear to be very comprehensive. For months, Gina Raimondo, the Commerce secretary, has joked that the Biden administration plans to lay out a framework that encompasses all of America's common interests. That basically means anything under the sun. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently added that the framework would include technology, supply chains, infrastructure, climate change and other issues. But one ingredient is still missing: American trade policy. While officials may pander to the criticism that customs standardisation is trade policy (yes, it matters), it is not the deep trade liberalization that critics of the framework and Asian Allies have focused on. The fact that the Secretaries of Commerce and State led the development of the framework, while the U.S. Trade Representative took a back seat, speaks to much that was left out. Outside the framework, Mr Biden is wrong not to take a leadership role in pursuing more progressive trade policies; Otherwise, the framework risks becoming just another glorified development assistance program similar to that of past governments. Of course, many questions remain unanswered about the Biden administration's trade policy, so it's easy to see why trade has been left out of this comprehensive framework. The administration wants to pursue fairer trade, better workers' rights, and so on, but what in these efforts really offers an alternative to the Trans-Pacific Partnership? For that matter, what other competitors are there than economic opportunities in China? What does the Obama administration plan to do now that the U.S.-China trade deal is nearly two years old? What about the unfinished U.S. -Japan trade agreement? Will the Biden administration sit on the sidelines and hope the deals are forgotten, just as it watched Trade Promotion Authority expire this summer? Our Allies in Asia and people in Washington want to know. The Biden administration has done a good job of repairing some of the trade and diplomatic disputes stirred up by the Trump administration. But what comes next? The Biden administration, for example, has been adept at reaching out to Taiwan -- whether through low-level trade and investment talks or the relatively new economic prosperity dialogue -- to help fend off China's coercive actions. But inaction on building larger deals, such as a free trade agreement with Taiwan, almost set back economic ties after a controversial vote in Taiwan on whether to re-restrict U.S. pork and beef imports. Thankfully, the people of Taiwan voted against these restrictions. Perhaps the Biden administration does not want to push any new trade deals because it knows it will have a hard time persuading Congress to agree to it -- and political capital can be scarce when trying to pass a budget. Meanwhile, members of Congress won't act as they await instructions from White House trade negotiators. This is passing the buck! Washington's trade policy has become a quandary. That's why leadership on trade is more important than ever.
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How Many Seats Did Republicans Lose In The House
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How Many Seats Did Republicans Lose In The House
Results Summary And Analysis
Democrats take House, Republicans keep Senate in historic midterms
The Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. The Democrats gained a net total of 41 seats from the total number of seats they had won in the 2016 elections. This was their largest gain of House seats in an election since the 1974 elections, when the Democrats gained 49 House seats. Democrats won the popular vote by more than 9.7Â;million votes or 8.6%, the largest midterm margin for any party and the largest margin on record for a minority party.
According to the Associated Press‘ statistical analysis, gerrymandering cost the Democrats an additional sixteen House seats from Republicans.
Voter turnout in this election was 50.3%, the highest turnout in a U.S. midterm election since 1914.
Note that the results summary does not include blank and over/under votes which were included in the official results or votes cast in the voided election in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.
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Source: Election Statistics â Office of the Clerk
State
Meg Whitman’s $142million Loss
Former eBay boss Meg Whitman paid a heavy price for her losing bid to become California’s governor -; $142million.
That’s how much billionaire Whitman, pictured below in tears after her loss last night, spent on her unsuccessful bid to succeed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the governor’s mansion in; Sacramento.
It was the moist any self-funded candidate has even spent on a U.S. election campaign.
But it counted for nothing as she was beaten by Democrat former California Governor Jerry Brown, who succeeded in his attempt to take charge of the cash-challenged state again.
Whitman’s big budget bid was hampered by a scandal over her hiring of an illegal immigrant housekeeper and her admission that she didn’t vote for 28 years.
Brown, 72, will now be returning to the office he last held 28 years ago. The state attorney general was California’s 34th governor during his previous tenure between 1975 to 1983 and now becomes its 39th.
Asked by Mr Seacrest if he was getting much sleep, President Obama admitted: Not much lately.
IN DELAWARE:
Democrat Chris Coons easily won Delaware’s Senate race over Republican Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party backed candidate who struggled to shake old television footage in which she spoke out against masturbation and talked about dabbling in witchcraft.
Last night O’Donnell vowed she will not stop fighting.
‘The outcome isn’t what we worked so hard for but our voice was heard,’ she told a party of supporters.
IN KENTUCKY:
IN CALIFORNIA:
Why Did House Democrats Underperform Compared To Joe Biden
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The results of the 2020 elections pose several puzzles, one of which is the gap between Joe Bidens handsome victory in the presidential race and the Democrats disappointing performance in the House of Representatives. Biden enjoyed an edge of 7.1 million votes over President Trump, while the Democrats suffered a loss of 13 seats in the House, reducing their margin from 36 to just 10.
Turnout in the 2018 mid-term election reached its highest level in more than a century. Democrats were fervently opposed to the Trump administration and turned out in droves. Compared to its performance in 2016, the partys total House vote fell by only 2%. Without Donald Trump at the head of the ticket, Republican voters were much less enthusiastic, and the total House vote for Republican candidates fell by nearly 20% from 2016. Democratic candidates received almost 10 million more votes than Republican candidates, a margin of 8.6%, the highest ever for a party that was previously in the minority. It was, in short, a spectacular year for House Democrats.
To understand the difference this Democratic disadvantage can make, compare the 2020 presidential and House results in five critical swing states.
Table 1: Presidential versus House results
Arizona
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New Redistricting Commissions In Several States Add To Uncertainty
The announcement that California and six other states, mostly in the Midwest and Northeast, will lose House seats in the next Congress set off a wave of fundraising appeals from incumbent Democrats concerned about their efforts to hold on to their chamber majority in 2022.;
Democrats outnumber Republicans by almost 2-to-1 in the congressional delegations that will be reduced because of census data released Monday.;
But the lost seats do not automatically mean that fewer Democrats will come to Washington from the Rust Belt and Northeast.;
The bottom line is, of these seven states that are losing seats, it is entirely possible that will all be self-canceling, and there will be no net change, said Sam Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.;
Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, California and West Virginia are each slated to lose a seat because their populations did not grow as fast as states in the South and Mountain West.
Democrats control the redistricting process in several of the states losing seats, and independent or bipartisan commissions will draw new boundaries in some of the others.;
But its hard to predict with certainty which party will come out ahead, partly because the details about where the population grew within the states will not be released until late summer or early fall. Also, efforts to redraw lines for a partisan advantage in one district could inadvertently make a neighboring district more competitive.;
Republicans Score Big Gains In House Pelosi Barely Hanging On
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Democrats expected and eagerly anticipated a blue wave that would sweep them into power in the White House, House, Senate, and state legislatures.; It didnt happen, not by a long shot.
In fact, not only did they do poorly across the board, but, as a Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee spokeswoman astutely noted, President Trump acted not as the Democrat-expected anchor but as a buoy for Republican legislative candidates.
That Democrats vastly misjudged the appeal of their radical agenda is crystal clear , and perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the House races.; Nancy Pelosi truly expected her party to pick up seats, yet it appears its the Republicans who are on track to accomplish the 10-15 seat gains the Democrats expected in their column.
Pelosi on Election Day: “Democrats are poised to further strengthen our majority.”
Pelosi today: “I never said that we were going to pick up” seats.
Kevin McCarthy
Despite AOCs declaration that Democrats lost the House, they have so far managed to win 219 seats .
Powerline notes that Republicans have flipped 12 House seats: RealClearPolitics notes that Republicans have picked up a net of 9 House seats. RCP projects that Republicans will pick up a net 10-13 seats when the counting is done.
12 FLIPS in the House for the GOP!
CA39 Young Kim
Students For Trump
Of the House races yet to be called as of Friday, Republicans are leading in 11 of the 14 races.
Newsweek reports:
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United States House Of Representatives Elections
2018 United States House of Representatives elections
The 2018 United States House of Representatives elections were held on November 6, 2018, with early voting taking place in some states in the weeks preceding that date. Voters chose representatives from all 435 congressional districts across each of the 50 U.S. states. Non-voting delegates from the District of Columbia and four of the five inhabited U.S. territories were also elected. These midterm elections took place halfway through the term of Republican President Donald Trump. On Election Day, Republicans had held a House majority since .
In the 2018 elections, the Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, won control of the House. The Democrats gained a net total of 41 seats from the total number of seats they had won in the 2016 elections. The 41-seat gain was the Democrats largest gain of House seats since the post-Watergate 1974 elections, when they picked up 49 seats.
Upon the opening of the 116th United States Congress, Pelosi was elected as Speaker of the House. Incumbent Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan chose not to run for another term. In November 2018, House Republicans elected Kevin McCarthy as House Minority Leader.
Gop Women Made Big Gains
While the majority of the Republican caucus will still be men come 2021, there will be far more Republican women in Congress than there were this year. So far, it looks like at least 26 GOP women will be in the House next year, surpassing the record of 25 from the 109th Congress. Thats thanks in part to the record number of non-incumbent Republican women 15 whove won House contests. And its also because of how well Republican women did in tight races. The table below shows the Republican women who ran in Democratic-held House districts that were at least potentially competitive,1 according to FiveThirtyEights forecast. As of this writing, seven of them have won.
GOP women have flipped several Democratic seats
Republican women running for potentially competitive Democratic-held House seats and the status of their race as of 4:30 p.m Eastern on Nov. 11
District D+22.1
Results are unofficial. Races are counted as projected only if the projection comes from ABC News. Excludes races in which the Republican candidate has either a less than 1 in 100 chance or greater than 99 in 100 chance of winning.
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Rep. Ami Bera of California, the fundraising chair for the moderate NewDem Action Fund, said in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he was disappointed by the election results.
I described the election a little bit different than Speaker Pelosi, Bera said. I think our goal for many of us as Democrats is not to have any of our colleagues lose. So by that metric, you know, we lost some really valuable members of Congress, and for that I’m sad, and that bothers me.
Still, Bera said he didnt see what Democrats could have done differently in several races they lost, pointing to Rep. Joe Cunninghams loss in South Carolina.
There’s nothing about his campaign that we could have improved on raised resources to get his message out and at the end of the day, he lost by one percentage point in a district that I bet Trump is gonna win by 10 to 13 points, Bera said. So, you know, that’s just tough terrain.
But the party clearly needs to better understand some voters of color, Bera said, who broke in higher numbers for Trump this cycle than they did four years ago.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also been open about discussing Democrats communication failures this cycle.
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In the weeks since Election Day, she has argued that moderates were not digitally strategic enough during their campaigns.
And Bera said he and his caucus members arent just brushing off Ocasio-Cortezs advice.
There may not be an answer. It may be that theyre screwed.
Its Not All Bad News For Democrats
Representative Kevin McCarthy discusses if Republicans can take back the House in 2020
While it was unquestionably a good night for Republicans, Democrats still held onto most of the seats they won in 2018 and will continue to be the majority party in the House. Thats in part because they retained most of the suburban districts they picked up in 2018.
Of the 233 seats that Democrats held coming into the election,2 186 of them were in districts that were predominantly or partly suburban in nature, according to density categorizations by Bloombergs CityLab. Thus far, Democrats have lost seven of those seats, but they captured one GOP-held suburban seat around Atlanta. And thanks to redistricting, theyve also won two formerly Republican seats around Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina, which reflect the partys strength in more populous areas.
Because of their relative success in the suburbs, Democrats kept many seats in places President Trump won in 2016. Coming into the election, Democrats held 30 seats in districts Trump carried in 2016, and they wouldve lost their majority if theyd lost more than half of them . But theyve won 18 of them so far and picked up one from the GOP . In fact, more than half of Republicans gains have come in seats representing places that Trump won by a pretty sizable margin in 2016. Well have to wait a bit before data can tell us how congressional districts voted in 2020,3 but for now it seems many Republican gains were made by picking off the lowest-hanging fruit.
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House Democrats May Well Have To Contend With A Republican Senate
House Democrats have spent the past two years passing bills at a rapid clip, on everything from sweeping anti-corruption reforms to lowering the cost of prescription drugs to a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. But the vast majority of these bills were dead on arrival in the US Senate. It seems likely this ambitious agenda could continue to be on ice, unless Democrats flip two Georgia Senate runoff races that will be decided in January.
One of the few bipartisan pieces of legislation Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and President Trump were able to agree on was the $2.2 trillion CARES Act at the beginning of the pandemic; a second stimulus package has been held up by partisan bickering. McConnell recently signaled willingness to pass another stimulus package before the end of the year. He for the Senates lame-duck session but was vague on concrete details.
Even on infrastructure one of the few places where there seemed to be bipartisan agreement getting a bill through could be elusive. Should Democrats flip the Senate, Pelosi has provided them a road map.
But its too early to say if they will get to use it.
Update: This piece was updated with recent Decision Desk calls in several key House races.
A White House In Disorder
The tweet came without warning, on the day of the South Carolina primary. Watching television aboard Air Force One, on a flight back from his summit in Singapore with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean despot, Mr. Trump decreed that Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina must be defeated.
Mr. Sanford, an idiosyncratic conservative who routinely criticized the president, was in a tough primary battle with Katie Arrington, a state legislator running as a Trump loyalist. Hours after Mr. Trumps message, Mr. Sanford conceded defeat.
If Mr. Sanford suffered in June for his apostasy, Mr. Trumps party paid another price Tuesday: Ms. Arrington lost the general election in a heavily Republican district to Joe Cunningham, a Democrat.
Mr. Trumps capricious approach to politics was destabilizing for Republicans up and down the ballot, leaving candidates exposed to the presidents whims and grievances and the machinations of White House advisers. Rather than approaching the midterm campaign as a task of holding together a political coalition and steering it to victory, Mr. Trump focused chiefly on rewarding perceived friends and punishing those who crossed him.
The endorsement was off. The day after Idahos primary, Mr. Trump phoned the triumphant Mr. Little and, unaware of the tapes genesis, asked: Did you see that video?
Recommended Reading: Should Republicans Vote In Democratic Primary
How Did State Populations Change From 2010 To 2020
The U.S. population has increased by 7.4% since the last Census, to a total of;331,449,281 people.
California is the most populous state with 39,538,223 people, while Wyoming is the smallest state at 576,851 people.
Utah was the state with the fastest growing population over the last decade, increasing by 18.4%, while West Virginia had the most population loss, dipping 3.2%.;
What Was The Outlook Prior To The Election
Republicans needed to get to 218 seats to win back the majority they lost in 2018. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, in early 2019 identified dozens of Democratic-held districts to target. They included;30 Democrats;who were elected or re-elected in 2018 in districts that voted for President Donald Trump in 2016. All but one Dave Loebsack of Iowa sought re-election. Most were first-term members who defeated or succeeded Republicans in the 2018 election. Republicans won some of these Trump Democrat districts but needed to unseat most to win back control of the House.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of House Democrats, identified more than 40 Frontline Democrats it expected to have very competitive re-election campaigns. Many of these members represented;suburban districts;that have diversified their populations in recent years. In most of these districts, Democrats were running for re-election for the first time. The Frontline Democrats amassed large campaign funds.
Democrats also identified more than three dozen Republican-held districts they intended to target, including seven in Texas.
Democrats also made a play for the suburban Texas districts of retiring Republican Reps.;Pete Olson;of the 22nd District and Kenny Marchant of the 24th District. They lost the 22nd District, but the 24th is currently too close to call, with Republican Beth Van Duyne leading.
Also Check: Who Is Correct Democrats Or Republicans
New Yorks Congressional Seats Over Time
Gained seats
W.Va.
Calif.
And several key states with changes coming to their maps California, Colorado, Michigan and Montana have independent commissions tasked with determining new legislative boundaries on a nonpartisan or bipartisan basis.
The parties have this natural inclination to go for broke, say, Weve got a new seat, lets grab it and take the opportunity we have, said Bernard Grofman, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has served as a special master for court-ordered redistricting in multiple states. For Republicans, he said, picking up new seats and stopping Joe Biden is going to have a high, high priority, even though they may pay a big political price down the road.
The 2021 redistricting process will also be the first time since 1961 that a raft of mostly Southern states will not have their maps subject to a preclearance process from the Justice Department, following the Supreme Courts 2013 decision to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The court last month heard arguments that could undo more elements of the act that would impede the ability to sue to block new maps.
Without having to seek preclearance, Republicans in states where they control all levers of government Florida, Georgia and Texas, to name three will have far more influence on the new maps than they have had in past reapportionment cycles.
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The End of Friedmanomics
The famed economist’s theories were embraced by Beltway power brokers in both parties. Finally, a Democratic president is turning the page on a legacy of ruin.
Zachary D. Carter/June 17, 2021
When he arrived in South Africa on March 20, 1976, Milton Friedman was a bona fide celebrity. He had been invited by the University of Cape Town to deliver a series of lectures on economic policy, but his itinerary was jammed with interviews, fetes, and gaudy extravagances fit for a senator or Hollywood royalty. Newspaper reporters harangued him, the crowded pre-cable TV spectrum reserved room for his insights, and he spent so much of the ensuing three weeks being whirlwinded by the local elite that he barely carved out time to enjoy the wildlife.
A 42-page travelogue recorded by Friedman recounts the experience. Milton and his wife, Rose, slept late after their arrival, savoring an afternoon walk along the glittering Sea Point Promenade in the shadow of Lion’s Head mountain before dinner with the chairmen of a burgeoning fashion chain and a prominent investment house. Two newspaper interviews the next day were followed by an evening at the Dutch country estate of tobacco magnate Anton Rupert. Cocktails at the U.S. Embassy, lunch with the chairman of Mobil Oil South Africa, and a black-tie dinner with the head of the De Beers diamond monopoly would ensue.
After two decades on the intellectual front lines of American politics, Friedman was a bestselling author and no stranger to fine living. But he was astonished by both “the extraordinary affluence of the White community” and the “extraordinary inequality of wealth” in South Africa. Friedman was not a man to scold opulence, and yet he found the tension permeating apartheid South Africa palpable in both taxicabs and hotel ballrooms. The “hardboiled attitudes” of Mobil chairman Bill Beck and his friends were difficult for him to endure. The “complete segregation” of the population was “striking.”
All of which makes a contemporary reading of Friedman’s Cape Town lectures a harrowing experience. His first speech was an unremitting diatribe against political democracy—an explicit rejection of, in Friedman’s words, “one person, one vote,” delivered to a nation in which more than half of the population was disenfranchised by race. Voting, Friedman declared, was inescapably corrupt, a distorted “market” in which “special interests” inevitably dictated the course of public life. Most voters were “ill-informed.” Voting was a “highly weighted” process that created the illusion of social cooperation that whitewashed a reality of “coercion and force.” True democracy, Friedman insisted, was to be found not through the franchise, but the free market, where consumers could express their preferences with their unencumbered wallets. South Africa, he warned, should avoid the example of the United States, which since 1929 had allowed political democracy to steadily encroach on the domain of the “economic market,” resulting in “a drastic restriction in economic, personal, and political freedom.”
The idea that America experienced an erosion of political liberty amid the destruction of Jim Crow is simply impossible to take seriously. Between 1929 and 1976, in addition to the advances in civil rights, explicitly racist immigration quotas were eliminated, prohibition was repealed, and legal barriers to birth control were abolished, as poverty rates plunged across demographic groups and American income inequality reached the lowest levels on record. And yet, as he toured South Africa, Friedman did not retreat from his conviction that the state had dealt a perilous blow to American freedom. In a conversation with the courageous anti-apartheid politician Helen Suzman, Friedman expressed his belief that “a laissez-faire economic policy” was “the only way in which you could get a multiracial community going” in South Africa. And the free market had to be insulated from democratic pressure. The burgeoning activist movement to “urge all foreign enterprises to boycott investment in South Africa,” Friedman believed, would ultimately serve to “hurt the Blacks, not to help them.”
Friedman did not subscribe to biological theories of racial inferiority. His time in South Africa does not instruct us on his moral character or any unique failures of political judgment. It offers instead a window into the deepest currents of his intellectual contributions. The program Friedman prescribed for apartheid South Africa in 1976 was essentially the same agenda he called for in America over his entire career as a public intellectual—unrestrained commerce as a cure-all for inequality and unrest.
That this prescription found political purchase with the American right in the 1960s is not a surprise. Friedman’s opposition to state power during an era of liberal reform offered conservatives an intellectual justification to defend the old order. What remains remarkable is the extent to which the Democratic Party—Friedman’s lifelong political adversary—came to embrace core tenets of Friedmanism. When Friedman passed away in 2006, Larry Summers, who had advised Bill Clinton and would soon do the same for Barack Obama, acknowledged the success of Friedman’s attack on the very legitimacy of public power within his own party. “Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites,” he declared in The New York Times.
No longer. In the early months of his presidency, Joe Biden has pursued policy ambitions unseen from American leaders since the 1960s. If implemented, the agenda he described in an April 28 address to Congress would transform the country—slashing poverty, assuaging inequality, reviving the infrastructure that supports daily economic life, and relieving the financial strains that childcare and medical care put on families everywhere. It will cost a lot of money, and so far at least, Biden isn’t letting the price tag intimidate him. “I want to change the paradigm,” he repeated three times at a press conference in March.
But the real turn is not about deficits or spending levels. It is the relationship between economic policy and democracy itself. For Friedman, liberty lived in the marketplace, rendering government a necessary evil under the best of circumstances. Today’s Democrats, by contrast, have reclaimed state power as an essential component of self-government. When he laid out his agenda in April, Biden declared “it’s time to remember that ‘We the People’ are the government—you and I. Not some force in a distant capital. Not some powerful force that we have no control over. It’s us.”
The new consensus on Friedman’s work among economists has essentially reversed Summers’s verdict from 2006. “Almost nothing remains of his intellectual legacy,” according to Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs. “It has proven to be a disastrous misdirection for the world’s economies.”
In 2021, 15 years after his body gave out, Milton Friedman is finally dead.
Act I: His Rise to Fame
Friedman was born in 1912 to Hungarian Jewish immigrants who ran a dry goods store in Rahway, New Jersey. Recognized as brilliant from an early age, he graduated from high school at 16 and earned a degree from Rutgers before his twentieth birthday. Though he would pursue graduate studies in economics on an on-again, off-again basis for the next 14 years, Friedman spent most of the Great Depression and World War II in the employ of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s federal government, moving between influential positions at the National Resources Planning Board and the Treasury Department, where he helped establish the modern income tax withholding system to help finance the war effort.
On paper, Friedman was a gifted New Dealer with sterling credentials. He had opposed the right-wing America First isolationism and supported the U.S. entry into the war, and he then devoted himself to the statistical efficiency of the war program. But intellectually he had fallen under the sway of conservative University of Chicago economists Frank Knight and Henry Simons, who had helped him earn a master’s degree in the early 1930s. When he at last won his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1946, Friedman shipped out to Chicago to join a fringe right-wing intellectual movement calling itself “neoliberalism.” Despite their chosen moniker, the neoliberals loathed the politics of the New Deal, seeking instead to revive the most conservative strands of Enlightenment-era economic thought, so-called classical liberalism, for the twenty-first century.
Friedman made quite a splash. His dissertation, based on research he co-conducted with future Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets, suggested that professional licensing regulations raised the cost of important expert services—including medical services. But it was a 1946 pamphlet on housing policy co-written with fellow Chicagoan George Stigler that transformed Friedman from an obscure ex-bureaucrat into an academic sensation. Titled “Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem,” Friedman and Stigler’s paper argued that California’s rent regulations ultimately ended up raising the price of housing, hurting the very low-income people politicians sought to help. The argument was simple: By artificially depressing the price of housing, regulators deprived potential homebuilders of an incentive—higher profits—to build more homes, which would in time bring down housing costs.
The blunt unsophistication of the pamphlet was an intellectual call to arms. Friedman and Stigler weren’t really writing about housing at all—they were writing about economics itself, calling for a return to the simple nineteenth-century analyses that Friedman would later credit for producing the “free market” and “the greatest expansion of human freedom the world had ever seen.” The reaction was furious. Writing in The Washington Post, economist Robert Bangs decried the “drivel” in Friedman’s “insidious little pamphlet,” and denounced him for publishing it through a “propaganda front for reactionary interests” (which was true—“Roofs or Ceilings?” was released by the Foundation for Economic Education, one of a handful of specialty right-wing organizations that sprang up in the postwar world aiming to unwind the New Deal).
Friedman had thus cultivated a very particular brand. Academically he was a succès de scandale—not many economists in 1946 were being written up in The Washington Post. Politically, though, the pamphlet was a dead letter. Whatever people thought about Friedman himself, arguing that government regulation simply couldn’t work had been losing at the ballot box for 14 years. The country did not recall the Hoover years with fondness; Harry Truman’s biggest electoral problem was the fact that he wasn’t FDR. Friedman had made a name for himself, but in doing so he had yoked himself to a far fringe of American politics that exercised almost no influence over public discourse—yet.
There were some very wealthy people on that fringe, however. In 1947, a Kansas City home furnishing heir named Harold Luhnow paid for Friedman to travel to Switzerland for a meeting of leading neoliberals that would become known as the Mont Pèlerin Society. Friedman was young and relatively unaccomplished for the group, which included titans of the European intellectual right like Ludwig von Mises and Lionel Robbins, but the organization proved to be a forum that would help foster his professional ambitions and those of his new allies. Though it began as an obscure elite salon, the Mont Pèlerin Society would grow into one of the most influential intellectual bodies in the world, with the University of Chicago serving as its principal American outpost. Luhnow underwrote a position at the University of Chicago Law School for Friedman’s brother-in-law Aaron Director, who soon went to work attacking New Deal antitrust rules as counterproductive. Luhnow also financed a job at Chicago for Friedrich Hayek, whose 1944 political tract The Road to Serfdom had transformed him into a hero for American businessmen by arguing that Roosevelt’s New Deal had turned the United States away from Western individualism and risked sending the country headlong into Soviet-style domestic butchery.
Friedman spent most of the 1950s trying to shore up his reputation as an academic, which had taken a hit for his associations with the hard right. In 1953, he published one of his most influential works of theory, “The Methodology of Positive Economics”—a sweeping statement on the power of economics to break down barriers between people and resolve political disagreements. It was a declaration of principles from a man who recognized he lived on the political outskirts. Liberals might disagree with his ideas, Friedman suggested, but their complaints were really superficial—ultimately, he argued, he was engaged in the same intellectual project and motivated by the same values as his opponents: building a fair and prosperous society.
It was a brilliant essay that captured the imaginations of people far to Friedman’s political left in the profession. It also wasn’t true. The chief political disputes of the 1950s and 1960s, as today, really were about moral values, not technical predictions. And by 1954, that conflict erupted spectacularly with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that prohibited segregation in public schools.
Act II: The Entry Into Politics—and Race
Friedman responded to Brown in 1955 with “The Role of Government in Education,” an essay that called for the ostensibly race-neutral program of privatizing the school system by providing families with education vouchers that could be spent where parents wished. As in his essay on housing nine years before, Friedman appealed to the simple nineteenth-century logic of market competition and equilibrium to make his case. Public schools were a “monopoly” that put private schools at an unfair “disadvantage.” By transitioning from public schools to vouchers, families would enjoy a diversity of education options, and market competition over the quality of education would in time enhance the lot of students everywhere.
It was every bit as neat and tidy as Friedman’s case against rent regulations. But as Leo Casey has detailed for Dissent magazine, Friedman gave away the political game in a lengthy footnote. Though he insisted, “I deplore segregation and racial prejudice,” Friedman nevertheless believed in the right of the private market to develop “exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools.” If multiracial education was really so good, it would get better results, and segregated schools would wither away.
Though Friedman claimed to be striking a middle ground between “forced nonsegregation” and “forced segregation,” he was in practice taking the side of the segregationists.
His voucher proposal wasn’t original—Southern segregationists had already suggested it to get around Brown and allow white families to maintain a separate, publicly financed all-white educational system. Friedman lamely acknowledged this in an infamous footnote, “This fact came to my attention after this paper was essentially in its present form.” When the state of Virginia went on to implement a voucher system to resist school integration, Friedman defended the program in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, arguing that the law would backfire on its authors.*
Much of Friedman’s political relevance within the Republican Party derived from his willingness to defend conservative policies on race during the 1950s and 1960s. “Missing from most analyses of Friedman’s economic thought is the inseparable role of race,” said Darrick Hamilton, the director of the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy. “The racialization of poverty and ideas about those who are deserving and undeserving allows us to have a system without empathy where those in despair are treated as surplus populations.”
“The Role of Government in Education” marks the earliest appearance of what remains Friedman’s most damaging belief—the idea that bigotry and violence could be forced out of public life by the magic of the market. Friedman would insist on this basic proposition again and again throughout his career. In 1972, he would go so far as to suggest that the free market could have put a stop to the war in Vietnam if people had really wanted it to end. Enough chemists would have refused to make napalm that the cost of producing the explosive would have become prohibitively high. This was the appropriate way to stop a war—not the crude “voting mechanism” of “the political system.”
Such arguments are difficult to take seriously today, but they worked with a substantial slice of the political spectrum in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly liberals. Where most hard-nosed conservatives were content to espouse white supremacy or pro-war attitudes, Friedman instead appealed to the liberal faith in the basic decency of humanity. Surely government intervention would not be necessary if people were the generally kind and caring sort that liberals imagined them to be. His appeal to liberal sensibilities was more than accidental. Throughout his life, Friedman preferred to be identified as either a “neoliberal” or a “classical liberal,” invoking the prestige of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists—while conveniently gliding past their often profound differences with his political project. (John Stuart Mill, for instance, identified as a “socialist,” while Adam Smith supported a variety of incursions against laissez-faire in the name of the public interest.) While many of his friends embraced the label of “conservative,” Friedman resisted. “Good God, don’t call me that,” he told an interviewer in 1978. “The conservatives are the New Dealers like [John Kenneth] Galbraith who want to keep things the way they are. They want to conserve the programs of the New Deal.”
But whatever the semantics, the political alliance was unmistakable. Friedman began contributing to William F. Buckley’s National Review and turned down an offer to join Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluding that the moderate Eisenhower would demand too many intellectual concessions of him: “I think society needs a few kooks, a few extremists.” (Friedman’s quote is recorded by historian Angus Burgin in his wonderful 2012 book, The Great Persuasion.) But being a professional kook was a lonely crusade. In 1962, Friedman’s neoliberal colleague Friedrich Hayek left the University of Chicago and decamped to the political wilderness of the University of Freiburg in West Germany. Friedman’s longtime benefactor Harold Luhnow had gone insane, financing Holocaust-deniers and claiming the supernatural ability to connect his mind with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev before shuttering his philanthropy outright.
But before he did so, Luhnow had paid Friedman to develop a series of lectures that the two men hoped could be collected into a Cold War–era update on Hayek’s aging publishing smash, The Road to Serfdom. The product of that effort, 1962’s Capitalism and Freedom, became the bestselling work of Friedman’s career and a rallying cry for young American free marketeers. Capitalism and Freedom argued that the market was the true realm of democratic expression. People voiced their preferences for the way society ought to be ordered with their pocketbooks, and industry responded by providing what was profitable. The political system, by contrast, inherently functioned as a restriction on individual liberty by limiting the kinds of preferences people could demand from the market. Democracies could choose between “laissez-faire” freedom or state socialism, but they could not have both—and in Friedman’s telling, the style of government the United States had been pursuing since the New Deal was on the wrong side of that line.
In 1964, Friedman tried to put these ideas into practice by advising the presidential campaign of far-right Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. As the Republican nominee toured the country insisting that he agreed personally with the goals of the Civil Rights Act and the Brown decision, Goldwater voiced an objection in principle to the use of federal power to “impose that judgment … on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina.” Segregation was “their business, not mine.” Advising Goldwater, Friedman called this attack on the legal foundation of the civil rights movement an “excellent” expression of the principle of “equal treatment of all, regardless of race.”
Friedman wrote: “The man who objects to buying from or working alongside a Negro, for example, thereby limits his range of choice. He will generally have to pay a higher price for what he buys or receive a lower return for his work. Or, put the other way, those of us who regard color of skin or religion as irrelevant can buy some things more cheaply as a result.” The relentless logic of the market would drive such inefficiency from public life.
Of course, the voters who backed Goldwater in 1964 didn’t believe a word of that. They supported Goldwater because they believed he would maintain the Jim Crow order, not because they expected economic freedom to unleash a wave of radical egalitarian social change across the South. This was clear to conservative political commentators during the campaign. As Robert Novak wrote (with his partner Rowland Evans) for The Washington Post in June 1963, “These Republicans want to unmistakably establish the Party of Lincoln as the white man’s party.”
From the twenty-first century, it is hard to believe Friedman was merely naïve and not breathtakingly cynical about these political judgments, particularly given the extreme rhetoric he used to attack anti-discrimination efforts. In Capitalism and Freedom, he even compared the Fair Employment Practices Commission that FDR established to prohibit discrimination in the defense industry to “the Hitler Nuremberg laws,” arguing that prohibiting discrimination and promoting discrimination both “involve a kind of state action that ought not to be permitted.” And yet he appears to have genuinely believed what he said about markets eliminating racism. Friedman’s travelogue from South Africa was a private recording he created to help him remember his trip. It contains the same basic political ideas Friedman presented in the Goldwater campaign, alongside clear discomfort with the racist attitudes of the South African business elite. Friedman knew that he was entering a political coalition with violent racists by joining the Goldwater effort, but, as he had stated in Capitalism and Freedom, he believed politics to be an inherently dirty business. There had been a paranoid catastrophism to much of the right since The Road to Serfdom. The belief that America was on the verge of full-blown communism could make ugly compromises appear necessary.
It is worth noting, however, that not everyone made the same compromises. Hayek, for instance, supported the Civil Rights Act. Backing Goldwater was an all-in career gamble that isolated Friedman from nearly every mainstream Republican leader, from Nelson Rockefeller to George Romney. But it paid off in one key respect: Goldwater’s landslide loss accelerated the purge of moderates from the party. The future of the party would belong to men like Milton Friedman. Though Republicans emerged from the 1964 election in a state of historic political weakness, Friedman had leaped to the top of the heap. In just a few years, his gamble would bear fruit.
Act III: Taking on Keynes
This open association with the radical right would have destroyed Friedman’s professional reputation had he not continued to publish top-tier economic research. In 1963, he at last delivered on the empirical promises he made to the field in 1953, publishing the work that made him the most famous economic thinker of his era, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Co-written with Anna Jacobson Schwartz, the book offered a sweeping, meticulous account of changes in the quantity of money across the American economy over the course of nearly a century, with detailed explanations for the various forms of currency creation and destruction that occurred along the way. Friedman had never published anything nearly so ambitious, and would never do so again.
Constructing a 93-year account of fluctuations in the money supply is a curious endeavor to assume for its own sake. But of course Friedman had an intellectual motivation, which he detailed in a famous 1967 speech before the American Economic Association: He hoped to dethrone the ghost of John Maynard Keynes.
Ever since the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, Keynes and his theory of effective demand had dominated policymaking around the world. In Keynesian theory, the price of credit and the quantity of money were sideshows to the real drivers of economic activity: the purchasing power of the consumer and the investment decisions of the state. In the Keynesian framework, if the economy was in recession, it was because somebody, somewhere wasn’t spending enough. If people were being laid off, that meant somebody, somewhere couldn’t afford to buy whatever it was that person might have produced. The political corollary was straightforward: If people were out of work, the government should spend money—preferably at a deficit—to create employment. If you wanted to fix unemployment, you paid people to work.
The Keynesian aura of authority, Friedman recognized, resulted from the consensus opinion that Keynes had cured the Depression with his appeal to deficits and public works spending. And so Friedman’s book took direct aim at the Keynesian account of the Great Depression, hoping to show that the entire Keynesian project of the subsequent quarter-century was based on a mistake. He called his alternative macroeconomic framework “monetarism.” The problem in the 1920s and 1930s, Friedman argued, was not a collapse in consumer demand—it was a collapse in the quantity of money. The Federal Reserve had botched the job—where it should have maintained a healthy amount of money in the economy, it had instead allowed the money supply to fall by failing to rescue the banking system when it fell apart in the early years of the Depression. There was truth to this. The Fed really did botch the Great Depression. Letting the banks fail in multiple waves between 1929 and 1932 was a disastrous policy choice that subsequent central bankers have strenuously avoided.
Friedman elevated this account to a comprehensive theory of money and the economy. Everything important in the economy—inflation, deflation, unemployment—was a product of changes in the money supply, or expectations about changes in the money supply. And if you allowed a little inflation to take hold by letting too much money into the economy, a catastrophic spiral could set in, as consumers and businesses bid up prices inexorably without regard to how much money was really in circulation.
Friedman’s book did make many scholars revisit the Depression years. But it did not make an immediate dent in the Keynesian consensus. The history of inflation in the postwar period just didn’t fit his narrative. Outbreaks of inflation had occurred, but they had been brief and quickly contained—not some irrepressible spiral of chaos.
Act IV: The Age of Friedman Dawns…
All of that would change in the 1970s. The name given to the economic dilemma of that era reflects the assumptions of the Keynesian economists who interpreted it. “Stagflation”—persistent high inflation and high unemployment at the same time, producing stagnant demand—became a concept because, under the existing doctrine, it should have been impossible.
Keynes himself never said anything about stagflation. But in the early 1960s, his most influential American interpreter, Paul Samuelson, had identified a remarkable statistical trend in U.S. inflation and unemployment data. There seemed to be a very clear trade-off between the two. More inflation meant lower unemployment. Higher unemployment indicated lower inflation. Policymakers, it seemed, could pick and choose how much of either evil they wanted. It worked for most of the 1960s. But during the 1970s the correlation fell apart. Unemployment and inflation rose together, and the era of “stagflation” was on. It wasn’t just an embarrassment for Samuelson and his Keynesian academic allies. It presented a genuine policy crisis.
Just why unemployment and inflation soared together in the 1970s remains in dispute to this day. Multiple oil crises were obviously part of the problem. When OPEC cut off the supply of fuel, the price of fuel increased, along with the price of everything that needed fuel to be shipped—in other words, everything. But the Johnson and Nixon administrations also spent an enormous amount of money on just about everything—from welfare to war to long-term investments in research, development, and infrastructure. Some of these investments were simply sunk costs—higher napalm output did not increase the productivity of any society. But there were almost certainly some time lags involved in the grander infrastructure upgrades. Faster trains, more efficient electrical grids, and early research into the internet elevated the long-run productive power of the economy. But in the short-term, they produced a lot of paychecks while the economy waited for its big boost.
Whatever the cocktail, stagflation arrived. And it gave Friedman the opportunity he had been waiting for. He was ready. In 1966, he had accepted a position with Newsweek that would allow him to maintain the public profile he craved without the weird right-wing associations that besmirched his academic reputation. His columns expressed essentially the same worldview he had espoused in National Review in the 1950s, but now it reached a far wider and politically diverse middle-class audience. By the Carter years, Friedman’s ideas had been reaching households for a decade. Free-market evangelism was no longer the domain of kooks—it was on the coffee tables in the homes of die-hard Democrats. When Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, it bestowed a new aura of prestige on the simple story Friedman offered to explain the economic frustrations of the era: All of this Keynesian meddling had pushed the economy beyond its natural constraints, creating unnecessary economic pain. The very interventions that had been intended to help the most vulnerable had, in the long run, hurt them. Roofs, ceilings, vouchers, and votes.
Friedman was inspiring enormous changes not only to the politics of inflation, but also on another key front where long-held presumptions were suddenly under attack: the idea of corporate responsibility. In 1970, he had published what may be his single most influential piece of writing, this time for The New York Times Magazine, and it formed the core of what the magazine called the “Friedman doctrine.” Titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” the essay was a simple, powerful distillation of his beliefs about the power of the free market—and the horrors that lay outside it.
“Businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable ‘social’ ends; that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers,” Friedman wrote. “In fact they are—or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously— preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.”
Markets, Friedman claimed, established arenas for individual choice, allowing consumers to express themselves with their wallets. To pursue profit was to seek a legitimate reward from satisfied customers. Any activity that interfered with profits—however noble in appearance—thus undermined the ability of a business to do what the consuming public wanted it to do. Worse, Friedman claimed, by “spending someone else’s money for a general social interest,” socially conscious businessmen were in effect levying taxes on their shareholders and then deciding how to spend that tax revenue.
Friedman’s paean to greed continued themes that he had been presenting for years. When Friedman warned that socially conscious businessmen were the “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades,” he was trafficking in familiar Cold War paranoia. There were, as ever in Friedman’s writing, only two choices facing society—freedom or socialism. The New Dealers and their Keynesian accomplices had cast their lot with socialism, and it was essential that corporate executives not fall into the trap.
The Friedman doctrine is an embarrassment borne of overconfidence. If profit maximization is really the sole responsibility of each business, then why are there so many different kinds of business? Why settle for the meager profits of, say, automobile manufacturing when the blockbuster returns of high-leveraged financial speculation are available? And if profit is proof of true social value, then on what grounds could a society ever outlaw anything a profitable business does? And yet by the late 1970s, the intellectual alternatives to Friedmanism weren’t looking so hot. Friedman’s simple stories about how the economy worked—inflation and profit, freedom and competition—filled an intellectual void in a world where Keynesian economists struggled to explain stagflation.
What’s more, Friedman in the 1970s took care to highlight the areas in which he agreed with the cultural left. His repeatedly stated opposition to the draft was no small matter in the era of the Vietnam War, and his support for the legalization of recreational drugs created a bridge between hippies and neoliberals that remains intact today. Nouveau-hippies and conventional libertarians both love jam bands. It is astonishing to see so many different ideological adherents to music that is, let us not mince words, terrible.
Fundamentally however, Friedman won by losing. America in the late 1970s was a frustrated and angry place, and however weird some of Friedman’s ideas might have been, nobody in their right mind would have held him responsible for the condition of the country. He hadn’t been in power. Goldwater lost. The Civil Rights Act passed. Even Richard Nixon had declared himself a “Keynesian,” prompting Friedman to denounce the man he’d advised as a “socialist.”
All of that finally changed in August 1979, when a new Federal Reserve chairman named Paul Volcker began putting Friedman’s monetary ideas into practice.
Act V: …and Conquers
Monetarism gave Friedman a unique policy flexibility that many of his neoliberal allies lacked. Friedrich Hayek, for instance, had maintained in the 1930s that recessions were an inevitable price to be paid for prior periods of economic excess. But Friedman recognized that telling the public “you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world” wasn’t a politically viable option, and his emphasis on the money supply gave him a policy lever to pull when the going got rough.
Manipulating the money supply had, however, never been attempted. Instead of doing that, the Fed regulated the price of credit, buying and selling securities to move interest rates up or down. But interest rates, Friedman insisted, were ultimately controlled by financial markets, not the government. The failure to cure inflation over the previous decade was a result of this persistent tactical error. When Volcker took office, inflation had eclipsed double digits for the second time in five years.
“My condolences to you on your ‘promotion,’” Friedman wrote sardonically to Volcker. “As you know, I do not believe that the System can rise to that challenge without major changes in its method of operation.” Volcker’s success or failure, Friedman argued in Newsweek, would rest on whether or not he would “renounce” the Fed’s “love affair with controlling interest rates” and switch to targeting the money supply.
Volcker did it almost immediately. That fall, he gave a press conference stating that he would curb growth in the money supply no matter what the implications might be for interest rates. The results were horrific. When Volcker ascended to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, the unemployment rate had been slowly but steadily declining for more than four years, from a peak of 9.0 percent in May 1975 to a more respectable 6.0 percent. Under Volcker’s new monetary management, interest rates skyrocketed, slamming the economy into recession and driving unemployment to 10.8 percent in 1982, a level it would not match again for more than 37 years.
With even Friedman himself on the run from Volcker, the punishing recession of the early 1980s should have afforded Keynesian economists and the Democratic Party with opportunities to reassert the value and utility of political democracy. The program Friedman had pursued for decades was proving to be a disaster.
But by 1981, Friedman’s 35 years of laissez-faire evangelism had established a new rhetorical reality. The ascension of Ronald Reagan had moved Barry Goldwater’s fringe ideas about small government to the seat of American power. In 1980, PBS aired a show written and narrated by Friedman called Free to Choose, about the virtues of free markets and the inevitable failures of government intervention. This was an extraordinary level of visibility for an economist, something that had only been achieved previously by John Kenneth Galbraith, a member of the Kennedy-Camelot royalty. Friedman’s ideas not only dominated the bully pulpit, they had taken over the liberal redoubt of public television.
And his political opposition had collapsed. It was a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, who had nominated Volcker to the Fed to pursue Friedman’s monetarism. Ted Kennedy’s failed primary challenge to Carter was the last gasp of the old-line New Deal, Great Society–oriented Democratic Party (and even Kennedy backed deregulation of the airlines and trucking industry). When Jesse Jackson attempted to revive the old vision in 1984, the rank and file were no longer interested, and Jackson was able to secure only 18 percent of the popular vote. Without political patrons in Washington, the once-dominant Keynesian economists were reduced to oddball status in academia, writing for obscure left-wing journals or overhauling their intellectual framework to embrace core tenets of Friedmanism while attempting to make room for the occasional embarrassing budget deficit.
Friedman didn’t achieve this intellectual conquest alone. He had an entire academic and political movement behind him, replete with deep-pocketed funders. But he was the most prominent voice of that movement around the world, having advised not only American presidents but a military dictator in Chile, the communist government in China, and leaders of three political parties in apartheid South Africa. Friedman never warmed to the Democratic Party, but when Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over,” pursuing a policy of balanced budgets, free trade, and financial deregulation, he was, with a few exceptions, attempting to out-Friedman the Republicans. There was a fight within the Clinton administration over this turn, and many of Clinton’s oldest political allies felt betrayed—but the Friedman wing, represented by Robert Rubin and his protégé Larry Summers, emerged victorious.
Despite this comprehensive intellectual victory, Friedman could claim few policy achievements when he died in 2006. Volcker eventually abandoned his efforts to directly target the money supply, and no Fed chair has tried doing so since. Even under Ronald Reagan, the overall size of the government did not really decrease—government spending as a percentage of GDP was about where it had been in the 1960s and 1970s; its targets had simply shifted from social welfare to defense contracting.
But the intellectual assumptions of the entire political class had become Friedmanesque. This is what Larry Summers meant by his claim from the eve of the financial crisis that “we are now all Friedmanites”—everyone took the social benefits of laissez-faire for granted; political conflict was largely waged over which edges to sand off.
The financial crisis of 2008 should have demolished this thinking. Markets, the crash made clear, often simply don’t serve the public interest. But the Democratic leaders who ascended to power in the Obama administration had been educated at the height of Friedman’s intellectual hegemony. There simply weren’t many New Deal–style thinkers in the top echelons of the Democratic Party anymore. Obama was as intellectually serious as American presidents get, but his coterie of intellectuals had been working under Friedmanesque assumptions for so long that they could not adapt to the reality that events had discredited those assumptions. Obama ultimately devoted more political energy to reducing the long-term federal budget deficit than to combating economic inequality. A unique historical moment to reclaim political democracy became, instead, the era of bending the cost curve.
If Obama’s presidency revealed the durability of Friedman’s legacy within the Democratic Party, Donald Trump’s presidency revealed its fragility among Republicans. On an almost weekly basis, Trump subjected sacred tenets of Friedman’s worldview—from free trade to monetary policy to fiscal stimulus—to overt rhetorical abuse. And the party faithful loved it. But some of Trump’s most consequential policies—a massive tax cut for the rich and a big bank deregulation bill—were perfectly aligned with 1980s-era Friedmanism. For today’s GOP, Friedman’s ideas seem to be valuable only insofar as they can be used to persecute undesirable elements in a political milieu constructed almost entirely of identitarian grievance—Keynes for me, Friedman for thee.
Epilogue: What’s Next?
Predicting the future course of Republican ideas is like estimating the blast radius of a bag of unlit fireworks. But whatever the GOP chooses to do with Friedman’s ghost, the future of his legacy—or lack thereof—lies with the Democratic Party. Friedman may have devoted his life to the American right, but the political magic of his persona was always on the left. His insistence that market mechanisms could be used to promote essentially progressive social values was the key to popularizing a worldview that ultimately amounted to little more than the celebration of political rule by the rich. In 2021, it is extremely difficult to imagine a Republican leader persuading Democrats that the QAnon brigade is really on board with Black Lives Matter, if you could just see it from the perspective of consumer choice.
Whatever the GOP chooses to do with Friedman’s ghost, the future of his legacy— or lack thereof—lies with the Democratic Party.
Friedman’s major theoretical contribution to economics—the belief that prices rose or fell depending on the money supply—simply fell apart during the crash of 2008. “Whether people openly admit it or not, his monetary views are no longer included in serious analysis and forecasting,” said Skanda Amarnath, research director at Employ America, a think tank focused on economic policy. “The Fed’s balance sheet swelled enormously during and after the financial crisis, and it did not matter a lick for inflation. There was a huge role for fiscal policy that Friedman just ignored.”
And few serious economists today accept Friedman’s hard divide between economic fact and political reality. “Friedman developed a fantasy land of theory that ignored the way economic power can be used to capture elements of the political system to generate additional economic gains for those at the top,” said the New School’s Hamilton.
This vicious cycle has been degrading American democracy for decades. Joe Biden is the first president to desecrate not only the tenets of Friedman’s economic ideas, but the anti-democratic implications of his entire philosophy. He is also the first Democratic president since the 1960s who has formulated and publicly endorsed a coherent defense of American government as an expression of democratic energy. It is a powerful vision that enjoys the support of a large majority of American citizens. He has nothing to fear but Friedman himself.
* A previous version of this article misstated when the voucher system was implemented.
Zachary D. Carter @zachdcarter
Zachary D. Carter is a writer in residence with the Omidyar Network and the Hewlett Foundation, and the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.
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Wednesday, July 14, 2021
Governments Worldwide Gorge on Record Debt
(WSJ) The pandemic has pushed global government debt to the highest level since World War II, surpassing the world’s annual economic output. Governments, especially in rich countries, are borrowing still more, partly to erase the damage of Covid-19. Advocates say the spending, also encouraged by new economic thinking about debt, could usher in a period of robust global growth, reversing the malaise many wealthy countries have felt this century. But if those theories are off-base, the world could be saddled with debts that can be absorbed only via inflation, high taxes or even default. Either way, the combination of huge debt and markets’ lack of concern is unprecedented. The U.S. government is on course for a budget deficit of $3 trillion for the second year in a row. The U.S. has led the world with aggressive government borrowing to power recovery from the pandemic. Even before this year’s stimulus measures, the Congressional Budget Office projected that federal debt held by the public would reach 102% of GDP by the end of 2021, the highest level since just after World War II.
Pandemic-driven hunger is making the world more unequal
(Washington Post) Worsening inequality, as poorer people and nations lose years of gains in the battle against hunger and poverty, is likely to be one of the lasting legacies of the pandemic. New data released by the United Nations on Monday illustrates the unequal impact as measured by access to a basic human necessity: Food. Global hunger shot up by an estimated 118 million people worldwide in 2020, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, jumping to 768 million people—the most going at least as far back as 2006. The number of people living with food insecurity—or those forced to compromise on food quantity or quality—surged by 318 million, to 2.38 billion. In North America and Europe, formal employment, social safety nets and the widespread availability of remote work cushioned the blow. In those parts of the world, the percentage of people living with food insecurity edged up from 7.7 percent to 8.8 percent. But the developing world, home to billions of informal workers and gaps in government assistance, fared far worse. Asia and Africa are home to the majority of people in the world who are food insecure. But the region hit hardest by the coronavirus—Latin America and the Caribbean—saw the biggest one-year spike in food insecurity: a jump of nine percentage points, to 40.9 percent. “The developed world had the advantage of being formal economies, where if you do a lockdown, people have access to unemployment insurance or social aid,” said Máximo Torero Cullen, chief economist of the U.N. food agency. “That did not happen in much of the developing world. You saw a middle class move into poverty and the poor move into severe food insecurity.”
The kids are all right
(New York mag) The kids are safe. They always have been. It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same. This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic—indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease. The preliminary mortality data from China was very clear: To children, COVID-19 represented only a vanishingly tiny threat of death, hospitalization, or severe disease. Yet for a year and a half we have been largely unwilling to fully believe it. Children now wear masks at little-league games, and at the swimming pool, and when school reopens in the fall they will likely wear masks there, too. But the kids are not at risk themselves, and never were. Over the course of the pandemic, 49,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died of all causes, according to the CDC. Only 331 of those deaths have been from COVID—less than half as many as have died of pneumonia.
Western wildfires
(USA Today) More than 300,000 acres are burning across six states across the western United States on Sunday as the region battled yet another brutal heat wave that shattered records and strained power grids. The largest, the so-called Bootleg Fire, burned across 143,607 acres in Oregon and was 0% contained. Officials in neighboring state California asked all residents to reduce power consumption quickly after the fire knocked out interstate power lines, preventing up to 4,000 megawatts of electricity from flowing into the state. Further south, the equally formidable Beckwourth Complex Fire measured 83,926 acres and was 8% contained in California, edging along the border with Nevada. It’s the largest wildfire of the year in the state. NV Energy, Nevada’s largest power provider, also urged customers to conserve electricity Saturday and Sunday evenings.
California to Pay Sterilization Victims
(NYT) Leonard Bisel was 15 when the state of California decided that he should not have children, threatening to lock him up and force him to do hard labor if he did not submit to sterilization. In the middle of his operation, recalled Bisel, now 88, he woke up. “It was really painful,” he said, “and the doctor told me to shut up.” Under the influence of a movement known as eugenics, whose supporters believed that those with physical disabilities, psychiatric disorders and other conditions were “genetically defective,” more than 60,000 people across the United States were forcibly sterilized by state-run programs throughout the 20th century. They included more than 20,000 people over seven decades in California, under a eugenics law enacted in 1909. Almost all of the state’s procedures were performed through institutions, like the one where Bisel lived, and none were legally required to have the patient’s consent. Some of those sterilized were as young as 11. Even after California repealed its eugenics law in 1979, it continued to sterilize women in prison, sometimes without ensuring that their consent was lawfully obtained, according to a 2014 state report. Now California is prepared to spend $7.5 million to find and pay an estimated 600 surviving victims of coerced sterilization, both under the eugenics law and in prison, an estimated $25,000 each.
Red tides on Florida’s Gulf Coast
(Washington Post) “Harmful algal blooms,” better known as red tides, occur as a result of a rapid increase in the population of algae in freshwater or marine water systems. Algal blooms are the result of a nutrient, like nitrogen or phosphorus from fertilizer runoff, entering the aquatic system and causing excessive growth of algae. Toxic red tides produce harmful effects on people, fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and birds. Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota are all on Florida’s western coast, abutting the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. In 2018, a long-lasting red tide afflicted residents of Sarasota County, causing sharp drops in tourism and hitting its economy hard. The event killed at least 19 dolphins and 239 sea turtles in Sarasota and Manatee counties, and about 2,000 tons of dead marine life in five counties were hit by the red tide. 100 manatees died statewide. This year, Florida’s Gulf Coast is suffering through an even worse toxic red tide. Dead fish were washing up on the shores of Tampa Bay before Tropical Storm Elsa swept through the state last week. Elsa’s strong winds pushed dead eels, dead baby sea turtles, and tons more lifeless fish onto the shores of St. Petersburg, surrounding residents and visitors in a cloud of rotting death. By Friday, St. Petersburg cleaning crews had collected 15 tons of dead fish, and still dead fish were everywhere—out in the water, on the shores, and in the mangroves. A lifelong fisherman looked out over Tampa Bay, but all he could see was endless death. “Never, ever, have I seen it this bad,” he said.
Biden, domestic politics, and Cuba
(Washington Post) The anti-regime protests taking place throughout Cuba delivered yet another jolt to the White House. Just as the Biden administration was grappling with the near-unprecedented events in Haiti following the assassination of the country’s president, it now has to reckon with what could be a historic uprising taking place in nearby Cuba. Power outages and food shortages led to outpourings of anger in various cities in the island country. The question for the White House is what should be done next. In March, 80 Democratic lawmakers sent Biden a letter urging that he revoke some of Trump’s “cruel” sanctions, including ending restrictions on travel and the payment of remittances. “With the stroke of a pen, you can assist struggling Cuban families and promote a more constructive approach,” they wrote. But the Biden camp is wary of restarting the Obama-era thaw that saw new trade contacts develop between the countries and the glimmer of a detente. Domestic politics and the electoral significance of Florida make such overtures now a non-starter. Instead, Biden presides over a Cold War status quo that leaves the asphyxiating U.S. embargo on Cuba in place—a decades-long blockade that has for years hobbled the country’s economy and given the regime an external excuse for its travails. Last month, the United States found itself once more virtually alone at the United Nations, as the General Assembly voted almost unanimously—as it does annually—against the continuation of the economic embargo. “The truth is that if one wanted to help Cuba, the first thing that should be done is to suspend the blockade of Cuba as the majority of countries in the world are asking,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Monday. “No country in the world should be fenced in, blockaded.”
France rushes to get vaccinated after president’s warning
(AP) Nearly 1 million people in France made vaccine appointments in a single day, after the president cranked up pressure on everyone to get vaccinated to save summer vacation and the French economy. President Emmanuel Macron announced Monday that vaccination would be obligatory for all health care workers by Sept. 15, and held out the possibility of extending the requirement to other parts of the population. With infections on the rise again around France, expectations had mounted in recent days that Macron would announce some kind of vaccination requirement, driving new demand for appointments.
Heavy rain floods Zurich streets, causes travel chaos
(Reuters) Switzerland suffered one of its heaviest rainfalls on record during a thunderstorm that caused flooding and travel chaos on Tuesday in its financial capital, Zurich. Sections of Zurich’s bus and tram network were halted because fallen trees blocked lines, and some streets were flooded. The Meteo service at SRF said further rain was forecast and that flooding was likely to worsen, especially around lakes and rivers. It also warned of landslides.
Taliban surge in north Afghanistan sends thousands fleeing
(AP) Sakina, who is 11, maybe 12, walked with her family for 10 days after the Taliban seized her village in northern Afghanistan and burned down the local school. As the Taliban surge through northern Afghanistan—a traditional stronghold of U.S.-allied warlords and an area dominated by the country’s ethnic minorities—thousands of families like Sakina’s are fleeing their homes, fearful of living under the insurgents’ rule. In the last 15 days, Taliban advances have driven more than 5,600 families from their homes, most of them in the northern reaches of the country, according to the government’s Refugee and Repatriations Ministry. In Camp Istiqlal, family after family, all from the Hazara ethnic minority, told of Taliban commanders using heavy-handed tactics as they overran their towns and villages—raising doubts among many over their persistent promises amid negotiations that they will not repeat their harsh rule of the past.
Iraqi health officials: 64 dead in fire at coronavirus ward
(AP) The death toll from a catastrophic blaze that erupted at a coronavirus hospital ward in southern Iraq the previous day rose to 64 on Tuesday, Iraqi medical officials said. Two health officials said more than 100 people were also injured in the fire that torched the coronavirus ward of al-Hussein Teaching Hospital in the city of Nasiriyah on Monday. Earlier, officials had said the fire was caused by an electric short circuit, but provided no more details. Another official said the blaze erupted when an oxygen cylinder exploded. It was the second time a large fire killed coronavirus patients in an Iraqi hospital this year. At least 82 people died at Ibn al-Khateeb hospital in Baghdad in April, when an oxygen tank exploded, sparking the blaze. That incident brought to light widespread negligence and systemic mismanagement in Iraq’s hospitals. Doctors have decried lax safety rules, especially around the oxygen cylinders.
Japan warns of crisis over Taiwan, growing risks from U.S.-China rivalry
(Reuters) Growing military tension around Taiwan as well as economic and technological rivalry between China and the United States raises the prospect of crisis in the region as the power balance shifts in China’s favour, Japan said in its annual defence white paper. The Japanese defence review, which was approved by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s government on Tuesday, points to China as Japan’s main national security concern. China’s recent increase in military activity around Taiwan has Japan worried since the island lies close to the Okinawa chain at the western end of the Japanese archipelago. But there was an angry reaction in Beijing which said Japan has “for some time now” been making baseless accusations about China’s normal defence buildup and military activities. Chinese President Xi Jinping this month pledged to complete the “reunification” with Taiwan and in June criticised the United States as a “risk creator” after it sent a warship through the Taiwan Straits separating the island from the mainland.
Worst violence in years spreads in South Africa as grievances boil over
(Reuters) Crowds clashed with police and ransacked or burned shopping malls in South Africa on Tuesday, with dozens reported killed as grievances unleashed by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma boiled over into the worst violence in years. Protests that followed Zuma's arrest last week have widened into looting and an outpouring of generalised anger over inequality that persists 27 years after the fall of apartheid. Poverty has been exacerbated by severe social and economic restrictions aimed at blocking the spread of COVID-19. The South African Police Service (SAPS) said late Tuesday that as many as 72 people have lost their lives and 1,234 people have been arrested in the last few days of protests which have now turned into rampant looting and riots. Hundreds of looters raided warehouses and supermarkets in Durban, one of the busiest shipping terminals on the African continent and a major import-export hub. Aerial footage from local channel eNCA showed black smoke rising from several warehouses, while debris lay strewn. Troops were moving into flashpoints on Tuesday as outnumbered police seemed helpless to stop the unrest. Columns of armoured personnel carriers rolled down highways.
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