Daily Archives: March 10, 2021

A Historic Day; A Corner, Possibly, Turned

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The covid bill passed in the House today, and just a few minutes later Merrick Garland was confirmed as attorney general. Finally. Earlier today, Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio) was confirmed as the new secretary of housing and urban development. We’re on a roll.

Polls, including a new CNN poll, have found that the covid bill is very popular with the U.S. public. I suspect it will become even more popular as its provisions go into effect and people learn what they all are..

It got not one Republican vote in either the Senate or the House.

Naturally, there are pundits saying that the Democrats are taking a big risk with this bill. At National Journal, for example, veteran pundit Charlie Cook says that by ramming through this huge bill with no input from Republicans, President Biden is killing the possibility of any other bills passing with Republican votes.

“Biden may have, in the early moments of his term, crippled his ability to do grand bargains,” Cook sniffs. “When the histories of the Biden presidency are written, there’s a fair chance that this will be looked upon as a serious error of judgement—one that may plague this administration for a good while.”

Yeah, I remember all the success President Obama had with “grand bargains.” I guess Charlie Cook has forgotten that.

Republicans also are calling the bill a “liberal wish list.” Like that’s a bad thing. Paul Waldman:

Another word for “wish list” is “agenda.” And yes, Democrats have used the American Rescue Plan to advance a good deal of their agenda. That’s what happens when a party gets power: It passes legislation, and that legislation reflects the preferences of its members and their constituents. That Republicans are treating that as somehow unusual or inappropriate is positively bizarre.

That goes along with Republicans’ deeply held belief that no Democratic official is ever legitimately elected.

What Republicans should worry about is that, after years of gridlock, at least some things are going to happen. Lots of people will benefit directly from the covid bill, with more money in their pockets. The rate of vaccination is picking up considerably, and I suspect most of us who are really eager to get vaccinated (I got mine already) will get that accomplished in the next couple of months. Barring further disasters, the economy should be heating up considerably soon.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be engaged in nothing else but gutting popular voting provisions in their states. They are not just passing bills that are blatantly aimed at suppressing minority votes; they are putting up obstacles to voting that will suppress their own voters.

Republicans are flogging culture war issues as hard as they can. But they are having a hard time connecting outrage about un-gendered plastic toys to Joe Biden.

Paul Waldman:

The difference between now and 12 years ago — when we were also in the midst of an economic crisis and had just passed a large stimulus bill — couldn’t be more stark. Back then, Republican culture-war rabble-rousing was focused directly on the president, with every one of Barack Obama’s policies shunted through a prism of resentment and White status anxiety. …

… But when the leader of the Democratic Party is Joe Biden, the whole enterprise of linking that cultural anxiety to policy arguments breaks down.

Further, I think a whole lot of people are just exhausted. They’re exhausted with the pandemic, and they’re exhausted after four years of perpetual acrimony blasting out of the White House. Joe Biden is the un-Trump.

Republicans clearly are hoping that 2022 is a rerun of 2010, when perpetual bashing of President Obama and incessant misinformation about the Affordable Care Act gave Republicans a big win in the midterms. It took people a few years to figure out that the Affordable Care Act is a good thing. In states that didn’t accept enhanced Medicaid, a lot of people still haven’t figured that out.

But next year, Republicans may find themselves challenged to explain why they didn’t vote for the American Rescue Plan.

Also today: I’m hearing on MSNBC that there’s a new audio tape of Trump pressuring another Georgia official to give him the election. There’s a real possibility Trump will face credible criminal charges about Georgia, IMO.

Help Is Coming, Like It or Not

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If you’ve lived in a red state during election season — and I advise you avoid doing so, if possible — you have witnessed how ferociously Republican candidates blame all the nation’s woes on liberals. This includes economic woes. To hear them talk, you’d think FDR-style liberals have been in charge of federal and state budgets for the past 75 years.

But in fact, especially since the late 1970s, conservatives have pretty much had a stanglehold on economic policy, both in many states and in Washington. Even presidents Clinton and Obama were able to put only a few cracks in the austerity-and-tax-cuts wall. And for a time congressional Democrats became deficit hawks, adopting paygo rules that stipulated any spending increase must be offset by a cut somewhere else.

States were and are even more extreme at times. In many red states, services have been cut to the bone to pay for tax cuts. Kansas got so broke it had to shorten the school year to close schools early. The tax cuts were supposed to create a flood of new businesses and jobs flowing into Kansas. They did not.

This will not surprise many of you, I’m sure. But there is new evidence that red states have been growing poorer and blue states richer, and the reason is … conservative economic policies don’t work. Imagine. Greg Sargent:

When every Senate Republican voted against President Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package over the weekend, it revived a question that analysts have asked about the modern GOP for decades: Why do so many conservative Americans vote against their own economic interests?

A new analysis by three leading political scientists theorizes this question in a fresh way: by comprehensively analyzing the political economy of red states, relative to that of blue ones. In so doing, they have captured some striking truths about this political moment.

Its key finding: We’re in the grip of a paradox. Even as areas that vote Republican continue falling behind blue America economically — helping widen those oft-discussed regional inequalities between cosmopolitan and outlying areas — GOP elites everywhere are growing more committed to an increasingly uniform and regressive agenda that does little to address the problem.

States whose economies are falling farthest behind are tagged “low road” states in the analysis. These states, mostly southern, are largely hampered by “lower minimum wages, anti-union policies, and underfunded education and infrastructure.”

You can offer industry all the tax incentives in the world; if your state has an undereducated workforce, poor schools, and crumbling infrastructure, the higher paying jobs-of-the-future companies will build elsewhere. That’s something Kansas didn’t figure out.

Blue states are more urban and tend to have a better educated workfoce. Blue states are following a “knowledge economy” model, a term I had to look up. This page says,

The knowledge economy is focused on the essential importance of human capital in the 21st-century economy. The rapid expansion of knowledge and the increasing reliance on computerization, big data analytics, and automation are changing the economy of the developed world to one that is more dependent on intellectual capital and skills, and less dependent on the production process. …

… The knowledge economy is characterized by the presence of a higher percentage of highly skilled employees whose jobs require special knowledge or skills. Unlike in the past, when the economy depended heavily on unskilled labor jobs and consisted primarily of producing physical goods, the modern economy is comprised more of services industries and jobs that require thinking and analysis of data.

In the old industrial economy, a company’s most valuable assets were plants and equipment. In a knowledge economy, a company’s most valuable assets are patents, copyrights, or proprietary software or processes. Obviously, to thrive in this knowledge economy, people need good schools and access to higher education. I would think a reliable electrical grid and reliable infrastructure generally would be essential. Red states much more than blue ones also are plagued by closing hospitals, especially in rural areas, and they have more unhealthy people with limited access to health care.

To address resulting regional disparities, the analysis argues, these states should want expanded federal cash transfers and bigger federal spending on health care, social insurance and infrastructure. But that’s not happening:

Why? Because GOP policy at the federal and state levels is largely set by “national business groups and organized wealthy backers.” This undercuts “the prospects for robust intergovernmental transfers, both to spur local economic development and to finance the social programs” on which poorer, nonurban voters “increasingly rely.”

The national business groups are stuck in the industrial age, I take it.

We’re still waiting for the House to pass the covid bill. The vote will be this afternoon, latest news stories say. A lot of that money — a lot more than the $1400 direct payments — is going to people in red states whose congresspeople voted against it. Economists expect the economy to be humming through the next couple of years.

Will their voters notice?