Friday, April 30, 2021

Tim Scott’s weak rebuttal shows a GOP badly on the defensive

Tim Scott’s weak rebuttal shows a GOP badly on the defensive

Washington Post

Opinion by 
Greg Sargent
Columnist
April 30, 2021 at 12:14 a.m. GMT+9

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) delivers the Republican response to President Biden's speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday (AP)

It would be wonderful if the Republican Party that Sen. Tim Scott conjured up in his rebuttal speech on Wednesday night actually existed.


In his response to President Biden’s address to Congress, the South Carolina Republican portrayed a party profoundly devoted to racial progress, grounding public health responses in science, spending generously to help Americans through hard times, and making it easier to vote for people of all races.


In so doing, Scott revealed a party badly on the defensive in some of our biggest arguments. Rebuttal speeches are often useless, but this one is instructive: It hints at how the GOP hopes to recapture power despite their defensive posture, with a waiting game.


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Biden laid out an expansive vision for transformative government. He renewed his pitch for trillions of dollars in new spending, on everything from infrastructure to a widened social safety net to a dramatically expanded caregiving infrastructure shoring up the human potential of children and families.


This would be partly paid for by tax hikes on corporations, top earners and ultrarich investors, as well as by the recapture of revenue shielded by the accounting trickery of the wealthy and multinational corporations.


In short, Biden is offering a vision of a rebalanced political economy. It would tax back some of the rents that have resulted from badly skewed market rules that have distributed income and wealth upward for decades and channel it into a big boost to the life prospects of those relegated to the bottom and those struggling in the middle.


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Scott’s rebuttal is notable for having nothing to say as an answer to this vision of a rebalanced political economy, let alone its underlying assessment of what’s gone wrong.


Scott’s two-step

Instead, Scott employed a two-step. He portrayed the GOP as favoring government spending amid crisis by citing spending Republicans supported under President Donald Trump, while falling back on bromides about big government to dismiss spending proposed by Biden.


Scott hailed the packages of 2020, including the $2 trillion bill last spring and the $900 billion bill in December. But then he pivoted. The $ 2 trillion covid-19 relief bill that Biden signed was nothing but a “partisan” exercise. Biden’s current proposals are a “liberal wish list” funded by the “biggest tax hikes in a generation.”


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This hints at how badly on the defensive Republicans are. Scott needs to portray the GOP as committed to using government to help people, at a time when large majorities favor Biden’s plans.


But this GOP simply doesn’t exist. GOP support for big packages under Trump was just the usual opportunistic Keynesianism, in which Republicans favor stimulus and deficits under GOP presidents and rail at them under Democratic ones.


Under Biden, not a single congressional Republican voted for his first relief bill. Republicans now claim to want negotiations on infrastructure, but their offer is an absurdly tiny fraction of Biden’s plans, not an effort to start a negotiation.


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Republicans won’t entertain any tax hikes at all to pay for their minuscule infrastructure ideas, except for regressive ones on user fees. And they won’t support any of Biden’s plans on caregiving, which Scott dismisses with old slogans about “Washington” controlling your life.


Nothing to say

Even more tellingly, Scott hailed the wonders of the pre-coronavirus economy. But what about the current economy? The big story of the moment is that the covid-19 crisis has stripped bare stark economic inequities and injustices. We rely heavily on essential workers, yet it can no longer be denied how woefully underpaid and deeply vulnerable many are.


We’ve learned about huge gaps in our caregiving economy and the deep human toll that’s taking. Indeed, as Jordan Weissmann writes, what Biden is really doing now is taking the opportunity created by these revelations to turn the United States into “a normal country for mothers and fathers by providing benefits that much of the developed world already takes for granted.”


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But what do Republicans have to say about these newly exposed realities?


Scott’s fallback on decades-old big government bromides suggests Republicans don’t think they need any response to them at all. The GOP portrayed by Scott — one that favors an expansive government role amid crisis — doesn’t really exist. But at a time when Republicans have failed to rally a tea party-type backlash to Biden’s policies, it’s telling he needs to claim it does.


Similarly, Scott says Republicans favor inclusive democracy. But he dissembles badly to cover up how the new Georgia law actually does make it harder to vote in ways obviously aimed at African Americans.


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Scott cites various things Republicans support on racial injustice. But then he offers the silly formulation that America is “not a racist country” and trots out the usual vague warnings about responding to racism with reverse racism, an effort to close down discussion of lingering systemic racial inequities.


And Scott hypes the GOP’s great respect for science, but largely while arguing that schools should reopen faster, airbrushing away the party’s support for Trump as he gave the middle finger to science for a year, producing catastrophe.


The speech reads like it was written by strategists who know the GOP is perceived as the party of white grievance, hostility to inclusive democracy, continuing thralldom to the Trumpist refusal to take covid-19 seriously, and absolute opposition to acting amid widespread economic pain, and sought to paper over it all.


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What’s the GOP’s answer? To wait. Republicans are betting on the public eventually turning on this spending, helped along by extreme gerrymanders and other anti-majoritarian tactics (dressed up as respect for democracy) as the route back to power.


It could work, of course. But don’t mistake that for a sign of GOP confidence.


Read more:


From Democrats, a credible ideology. From Republicans, a dangerous mess.

From Democrats, a credible ideology. From Republicans, a dangerous mess.

Washington Post

Opinion by 
Michael Gerson
Columnist
April 30, 2021 at 4:24 a.m. GMT+9

President Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, with Vice President Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on the dais behind him, on Wednesday. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

Addressing Congress for the first time as president, Joe Biden had the thinnest of political mandates. Republicans need to flip fewer than 10 seats to gain control of both houses. But Biden spoke like a leader with ideological momentum on his side.


The federal government is fresh from a series of major accomplishments. It has delivered shots in arms and money to bank accounts, both essential to the operation of the country. The reach of government action has been close to universal, including lockdowns, mask mandates, income redistribution, rental assistance, small-business assistance, the coordination of rapid scientific innovation and unprecedented logistical endeavors.


Not only has activist government proved itself essential, the ideological alternative has proved itself wacky and dangerous. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the conservative embrace of federalism turned into a patchwork response by states that spread and deepened the crisis. The conservative tradition of individualism and self-reliance became the selfish, reckless refusal to wear a mask that could save the life of an elderly neighbor. The conservative belief in limited government was transformed into armed marches in state capitals and a terrorist attack on Capitol Hill. For more than a year, Republicans have displayed their deepest beliefs in the worst possible light.


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Although Biden lacks a political mandate, there is no serious ideological alternative on the table. Biden proposes clean water, a better electrical grid, electric charging stations along highways, cancer research, four additional years of public school, paid family leave, child care and refundable child credits. Republicans propose timidity, obstructionism, conspiracy thinking, cultural warfare and sedition — or at least the tolerance of sedition.


In this contest of visions, two things should concern us. First, it is appalling that the Republican Party — after rallying around a failed and racist president, tragically mishandling a health crisis, and cynically betraying its fiscal conservatism, constitutional conservatism and moral conservatism — should be within striking distance of congressional control. Extreme polarization has led many Republicans to side with anyone carrying their partisan flag — even if it’s a Q or Confederate flag. This gives elected Republicans little reason to change course. And as long as one of America’s two major political parties is dominated by authoritarian thinking, American democracy is at risk.


Second, Biden should be encouraging the reform of government as well as its expansion. The tasks at which the federal government has excelled — particularly writing checks and helping distribute vaccines — are largely technical, requiring competence and scale, but not the construction or expansion of working public institutions. This is why conservatives should have sympathy for Biden’s extension of the child credit. It provides money directly to the most basic, nongovernmental institution: the family. It achieves income redistribution (in this case, from old to young) without social engineering.


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But a proposal such as adding four years and vast sums of money to the existing educational system should give us pause. Educating children is not the equivalent of vaccine distribution. Public education is a complex, organic system that in many places does not serve children well. Increasing the funding at a failing school by 20 percent does not improve its outcome by 20 percent. Providing federal and state money to the public education system for two years of preschool, even with a minor bump in teacher pay, does not guarantee children will reap the benefits.


Biden’s education approach, as eventually filled out in a bill, may well allow parental choice, include rigorous performance standards and promote innovative approaches such as social and emotional learning. But in his address, Biden positioned himself as a spender, not a reformer. He needs to be both.


One other item was notable for its absence. Biden talked about the threat of China, but not the unfolding tragedy in India and Brazil, where health systems are unraveling under pressure from covid-19 and hundreds of thousands more may die. He mentioned that the United States will become “an arsenal for vaccines for other countries,” but only after “every American will have access.”


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If strictly applied, this is an absurd, destructive standard. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, it may be only two weeks before the U.S. vaccine supply exceeds current demand. Then a surplus will begin accumulating, as we wait for the hesitant to cease hesitating. The United States has an urgent, humanitarian duty to start sharing vaccine doses with countries in crisis. Biden should have used his speech to announce a major effort, in the tradition of the Marshall Plan and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, to provide medical supplies and vaccine doses to countries in the shadow of death. This wasn’t his last opportunity to do so, but it was a lost opportunity.


That said, Biden owned the evening. And for a specific reason. Unlike his opponents, he has a credible ideology to offer.


Read more:


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Remote work is underrated

Remote work is underrated

By Matthew Yglesias. SlowBoring.com

April 29, 2021.

It'll be better when you're not stuck in the house

For over a year, most white-collar workers have been doing our jobs primarily remotely as a response to the pandemic. We’ve been doing so mostly with off-the-shelf tools that have existed for a while — phones and email augmented by chat apps (Slack and Microsoft Teams) and videoconferencing (famously Zoom, but there are many others) and the fact that general modern office software has a lot of collaborative tools.


One school of thought is that since these tools existed before the pandemic but people mostly worked in offices, that shows the tools are not that good. Another school of thought is that the pandemic forced individuals and institutions to get over a learning curve with regard to the tools, and their use won’t be sticky.


I don’t particularly think I can solve that debate — it’s clearly some of both. Many currently remote office workers will go back to the office. But I think many others will not. Will the ratio be 80:20 or 20:80, or something in between? I’m not really sure I have a solid argument. But what I do think I’ve seen based on talking to people involved in management is that institutions are seeing a bit less demand for a return to office work than they anticipated. And I think the underrating of office work will continue for a little while because remote work is so firmly associated in most people’s minds with the specific conditions of 2020 which were so very terrible. But remote work in fall 2021 won’t be the same as remote work in fall 2020 — it’s going to be different and more appealing.


The hardware of collaboration


Apple marketing image

A really simple example of why is that the set of iMacs that Apple just announced at their mid-April event have high-quality webcams — that’s one of the highlighted marketing features of the product.


Apple has been making high-end expensive computer hardware for a long time. And in their iPhones and iPads, they make really great cameras. But the webcams they include in their iMacs have been notoriously obsolete for years. That’s because Tim Cook didn’t get those incredibly fat profit margins by being a sucker. Upgrading the camera on Mac laptops would have raised component prices across the board in exchange for a small increase in sales. What he learned in 2020 is maybe that sales increase won't be so small after all, and suddenly a quality camera appears. Next year, you’ll probably start to see the same thing in his laptops. And PC makers will intensify their own efforts.


And that’s the point. Remote work went remarkably well in 2020 even though relatively few people were really equipped for it. With a larger, permanent base of remote workers, the tools available will improve and so will the experience.


Great built-in cameras on laptops in particular are important because they’ll let people be mobile while being remote.


The return of hanging out

I was full-time remote back for a while back in the pre-Zoom, pre-Slack era, and despite the worse tools, it was a lot more fun than the pandemic year. That’s because in 2020, “remote work” meant “sitting alone in my basement at a makeshift desk.”


That was way worse than hanging out at the Vox office which featured some good friends, lots of smart people, and the ability to get a change of scenery or take a break without getting distracted by some household issue.


But in my previous remote era, I mostly worked at the no-longer-existent U Street coffee shop Mocha Hut. I had two other friends who showed up there almost every day. And two to three more who didn’t like the Mocha Hut hangout scene as much but who dropped by occasionally. It was fun and social (and there was coffee I didn’t have to make myself and dishes I didn’t have to wash), but it was also informal and flexible. Adam Ozimek has a new paper out for Upwork making the point that these kinds of arrangements are fairly typical for remote freelancers.


A few bullets stolen from his writeup:


Among Upwork freelancers who were remote prior to the pandemic, 37.1% worked somewhere outside the home sometimes.


22% of those planning on working remotely permanently will work outside the home (like a coffee shop, co-working space, or public park) in a post-pandemic world.


Remote professionals, on average, would have an additional 4 hours and 15 minutes per week, without a commute, to spend with family or friends.


What was cool for me about the Mocha Hut era is that I happened to have a group of friends I really liked who also all had non-office jobs.


This is a network effect. If you’re the only person you know who’s working remotely then there’s nobody to hang out with and you’re just a guy who’s not invited to any office happy hours. But if more people work remotely, then there’s a thicker “market” for hanging out, which makes it more appealing to extroverts.


And then the hardware point and the socializing point work together.


Bring back WeWork

WeWork was, as structured, valued way out of proportion to other real estate plays.


But the basic idea of trying to create a national chain of coworking spaces that’s cooler and more sociable than the Regus offerings makes a lot of sense. And it really is kind of a scale play. It would be cool to not only have a fun, well-equipped office to work from in your city but also in every other significant destination around the world so you could engage in digital nomadism, “bleisure,” or even just extended seasonal travel.


Even if you’re talking about just a fraction of a fraction of the white-collar workforce, it’s still a significant national market. And the key ingredients would be a footprint not just in major central business districts but also in leisure destinations and nice smaller towns around the country. Some company that’s not run by a charlatan (maybe Regus itself!) will do it and, again, you’ll see network effects.


Again, I don’t have a super-strong prediction about how far remote will go.


But the basic formula is this:


More than zero percent of the newly remote workers will stay fully remote.


A larger remote working population will mean more opportunities for remote workers to connect with each other.


A larger remote working population will mean a larger investment in supportive hardware.


At the intersection of hardware and socialization is real estate — whether in the form of coworking spaces or wifi-enabled coffee shops or whatever else is designed to be used by remote workers.


The larger the remote pool gets, the more ancillary services there are for it, and the more attractive it becomes. At the same time, the larger the remote labor pool, the more advantageous it is for employers to tap into it. But there’s always the question of how much the built environment will be allowed to change.


Zoning, zoning everywhere

I’ve often written about the role of bad land use regulation in driving scarcity of housing.


But a larger problem is just that land use in the United States is excessively prescriptive. If there’s a place where planners anticipate people will want to own one car per adult, they make it mandatory to have one off-street parking space per adult. If there’s a place where planners anticipate that you wouldn’t want to put an office building, they forbid office buildings.


This is never a great idea. But when technologies change — whether that’s scooters or Uber or electric cars or remote work — it becomes especially costly. People are going to want different stuff. If only one member of your household has a daily commute, maybe you only need one car and want to turn the garage into home office space. If “the office” is, for many people, more of a hangout opportunity, then maybe you want much more decentralized neighborhood-based places to work. If there’s less need to be within commuting range of a huge downtown but some people still like walkable urbanism, maybe there’s a structural surge in demand for living in cutesy small towns. Who knows?


But I mean it genuinely: Who knows? That’s the problem with prescriptive regulation. It’s not clear where housing demand is going, or how people will respond to increased demand for home offices, or where there will be demand for coworking and coffee shops and other “third spaces.” That’s the kind of thing that markets are good for. When fashions and preferences for consumer goods change, supplier behavior just shifts. But the real estate exception to that trend is a huge share of the economy, and while remote work alleviates some specific problems associated with specific housing shortages, the general lack of flexibility remains a big problem.


Thursday, April 29, 2021

If you want to talk about racism, talk about racism



If you want to talk about racism, talk about racism
But don't go out of your way to inject race into race-neutral policy arguments

Matthew Yglesias
 Apr 29 

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Yale political scientists Micah English and Joshua Kalla have a new pre-print paper out that helpfully explores a question we’ve addressed a couple times at Slow Boring — how does it impact public opinion when you frame arguments for race-neutral economic policies in terms of closing racial gaps?

Specifically, they look at raising the minimum wage to $15/hour, forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt, upzoning housing regulations, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and a House bill to implement marijuana reforms including federal decriminalization. They find that pooling all issues and respondents, an argument grounded in economic class is mildly persuasive and moves people toward the progressive position. Conversely, arguments grounded in racial issues (or that blend racial and class arguments) are mildly counterproductive.


The paper has a bunch of other charts, but I think the most important one is the racial breakdown. It shows that Black respondents find the racial equity arguments more convincing than white or Hispanic respondents do. But the Black respondents also find the class arguments more persuasive than the racial ones. The only ethnic subgroup for whom race-forward arguments are more persuasive is “Other”, which is a small group with large errors, and in most cases, I think not the target audience of elected officials strategic calculus.


This all seems clearly correct to me, but it has obviously annoyed certain segments of academic Twitter. But I think it’s very important, so rather than reading the room and not making trouble on this front, I want to emphasize both the limited scope of this controversy and also the importance of digesting the point.

Twitter avatar for @TrevonDLogan
Dr. Trevon D Logan 
@TrevonDLogan
Are we really back on this "race, class, or race-class" messaging question? Fixmylife GIF by Iyanla: Fix My Life
April 25th 2021

28 Likes
Twitter avatar for @cmMcConnaughy
Corrine McConnaughy 
@cmMcConnaughy
@TrevonDLogan Well, you know, a single paper has all the answers, so we need to "follow the science" here.
April 25th 2021

3 Likes
But here’s the key thing — English and Kalla aren’t testing whether it’s a good idea to talk about racism. And I’m not saying politicians should shy away from tackling race-specific issues when they arise or seem important. The narrow — but important — question here is should you take an issue like the minimum wage that is not on its face about race and go out of your way to inject race into it? And the answer, I think, is no.

Not everything is about class
There is plenty of evidence of racial discrimination in the United States.

The Stanford Open Policing Project finds strong evidence of racial discrimination in police stops.

There is evidence across multiple audit studies of discrimination against job applicants with stereotypically Black names (though there are also suggestions that this may be intertwined with issues about parental educational attainment).

Abigail Wozniak finds that when employers are encouraged to impose mandatory drug testing on their employees, they hire more Black workers, suggesting that in the absence of tests they are simply assuming Black people are likely to be drug addicts. Jennifer Doleac and Benjamin Hansen similarly find that policies which prohibit employers from asking applicants’ criminal records actually “decrease the probability of employment by 3.4 percentage points (5.1%) for young, low-skilled black men.”

There’s evidence that teachers are racially biased in their expectations for school kids, and that this contributes to poor educational outcomes for Black kids.

If you care to Google around, you can find more studies on different subjects. The main idea here is that these are topics where we don’t just observe racial “gaps” in outcomes, but rather actual evidence of discrimination. Oftentimes it’s what economists call “statistical discrimination,”¹ or what when I was a kid we were taught to call “stereotyping” — people draw strong, often inaccurate, inferences about other people based on incomplete information. And that pattern of behavior can be a significant source of disadvantage.

Hillary Clinton famously took a shot at Bernie Sanders by asking “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?” At some level, there’s a real element of truth in that² — there is more to life than economic policy, and a politics focused solely on class issues is going to have significant blind spots. But the unfairness given the specific context of the primary was the idea that hesitancy to address specifically racial issues was somehow peculiar to Bernie Sanders when it actually represented the pre-2015 status quo in the Democratic establishment.

Obama and the “beer summit”
From the 2007 launch of his presidential campaign through to his successful re-election in 2012, I think the best way to characterize Obama’s treatment of racial issues in his rhetoric was massive, largely justified paranoia about white backlash.

Of course, racial issues stalked his campaign from the beginning, with his primary candidacy both attracting enthusiasms grounded in his identity and also racialized opposition. But in his public rhetoric, all Obama ever did was push back on racial polarization, at times in disingenuous ways. In his famous Philadelphia race speech, he scolded the media, complaining that “the press has scoured every single exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.”

Obama was on the defensive in the speech over things the minister at his Black church in Chicago had said. And a key part of Obama’s strategy of distancing himself from Wright while still being loyal to the Black church was to talk about his grandma:

I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

He’s trying to assure white America that not only is Barack Obama not an alarming angry Black man, he’s actually so chill that even if you do legitimately racist stuff, he won’t mind too much. Joe Biden ends up on the ticket not despite but partially because of his history of racial gaffes — like Obama’s white grandma, he is there to reassure nervous white voters that Obama isn’t here to give you a hard time about being racist.

It all came crashing down soon after Obama’s election when a neighbor called the police on Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for allegedly trying to break into his own house. A confrontation between Gates and the officer on the scene, James Crowley, ensued — the exact details of which are still disputed — but that ended with Crowley arresting Gates on a disorderly conduct charge.

Obama was asked about it and said:

I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.

In his memoir, Obama recounts that White House internal polling registered the biggest drop in his approval rating of the whole presidency during the ensuing days as law enforcement organizations condemned the president. Obama backtracked on his remarks and wound up hosting a “beer summit” with Gates and Crowley, with Joe Biden also there in his reassuring white guy role.

The political lesson Obama took away from this was that race was indeed politically radioactive, especially for him and he should stay away from it.

The Great Awokening
I wrote a piece in April of 2019 arguing that American public opinion had undergone a “Great Awokening” of white racial attitudes.

And thanks to that shift, I think it’s now much more viable to actually raise the kinds of issues that Obama shied away from. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, for example, polls pretty well even as “defunding” police is toxic. Three-quarters of the public, including 70% of whites, say the Chauvin verdict was correct.


I think one could actually make the case that traditional civil rights issues have become somewhat underrated in contemporary politics.

Why not bolster funding for the Department of Justice and HUD to do more audit studies and stings to detect and prosecute illegal discrimination? I don’t hear anyone talking about that kind of idea. And unlike in 2009, it’s not because everyone is terrified to talk about racism. I think it seems a little too basic and small-minded in some quarters to commit yourself to vigorously combatting illegal discrimination. But it seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Now to be clear, the basic Obama worry is always going to be with us. As long as the electorate is majority-white, making a big deal about your desire to help non-white people is a strategy that carries some risks. But it’s also true that sometimes you just have to do the right thing. The exact calculus of what it’s best to do quietly vs. loudly, and by whom, and in exactly which circumstances, is complicated. But there’s a strong case on the merits for pursuing antiracist policies and I think oftentimes a viable politics.

But what we are talking about with this new paper is something different — taking class politics and injecting race into it.

Doing racial politics backward
Back to the Obama years.

Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates blogging in December of 2010:

Moreover, there is no demonstrable movement in the Obama administration, among black legislators, or even among black people to push for damages for slavery. On the contrary, “reparations” is something white populists yell when they want to rally their race-addled base. So for Rush Limbaugh, the way to understand food stamps, unemployment benefits are to “think forced reparations.” For Glenn Beck health care reform is not something that can be debated with facts and figures, but “the beginning of reparations.” And so it is with Steve King, that a suit brought to remedy actions taken within the last couple decades, are actually revealed as “slavery reparations.”

Some further thoughts: First, Beck and Limbaugh are employing a formula that has proven remarkably successful throughout American history — rallying against social investment because it might actually help a despised minority of the population. The cause of public education in the South, for instance, was long hampered by the notion that, however it might help poor and working whites, it might also help blacks too. 

This is the classic racial politics of the American welfare state. Du Bois wrote of the psychological wage of whiteness that prevented the white worker from extending solidarity to the Black worker, with both ending up worse off as a result. In Heather McGhee’s metaphor (but also a real thing that happened), you drain the swimming pool rather than have integrated public goods:

In Montgomery, Alabama, I saw how racism destroyed a public good and the public will to support it. In 1959, the town drained their public swimming pool rather than integrate it. It was never rebuilt.

Coates famously does think there should be an explicit racial reparations program.

I also think he has no illusions about the difficult politics of that enterprise, which is one reason he’s withdrawn from the takes game — pop culture is almost certainly a more effective lever for shaping mass opinion.³

But when Coates says reparations, he means reparations. He absolutely does not mean expand public sector health care provision and call it reparations. That, he thought, was “something white populists yell when they want to rally their race-addled base.”

Recall that in English and Kalla, neither white nor non-white respondents prefer the racial framing, I think because it’s really weird. If you’re low-paid and also worried about discrimination in the job market and someone tells you they’re going to raise the minimum wage, that probably sounds pretty good. But if someone tells you the minimum wage increase is about fighting racism, then either you’re alienating someone with relatively conservative views on racial issues or you’re disappointing someone who might want to see racism tackled more directly.

Universal programs do a lot to help the disadvantaged
One of the works I always return to is William Julius Wilson’s 1987 book, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy,” which (among other things) contains the observation that “race-specific policies are often not designed to address fundamental problems of the truly disadvantaged.”

He has in mind things like affirmative action in higher education, which does not really help poor people regardless of race. By contrast, he says universal programs do a lot to help the truly disadvantaged and that he is “reminded of Bayard Rustin’s plea during the early 1960s that blacks ought to recognize the importance of fundamental economic reform (including a system of national economic planning along with new education, manpower, and public works programs to help reach full employment).” More so than from targeted, race-specific programs, Wilson argues that the truly disadvantaged reap “disproportionate benefits from a child support enforcement program, child allowance program, and child care strategy” and “they would also benefit disproportionately from a program of balanced economic growth and tight-labor market policies because of their greater vulnerability to swings in the business cycle of changes in economic organization.”

This Wilson/Rustin logic is, I think, the most defensible version of the racial framing.

Rustin is a civil rights leader urging other civil rights leaders to pay more attention to general questions of economics. Wilson is a Black intellectual urging other Black intellectuals to pay more attention to general questions of economics.

“In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle, yes,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told my grandfather days before he was shot dead. “It will be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls for a redistribution of economic power.” 

In my previous piece, I put forward a kind of narrow thesis about progressive foundations creating incentives for activists to frame their ideas in racial terms. After getting feedback from a bunch of readers, I want to broaden that out. I heard from one policy entrepreneur that he feels racial framing has helped her idea gain traction with Black members of Congress. I heard from a former staffer for a Black member of Congress that she feels racial framings helped her boss get media attention. One activist told me racial framings help build enthusiasm among other activists, which is important in practical coalitional terms.

A pet theory that I developed in the past but didn’t put into my previous piece is that we’re seeing carryover from college campus dynamics. If you convince an RA that a fellow student is doing something racist, the RA will probably put a stop to it, whereas simply observing that something is bad for poor people probably won’t get you anywhere. Connecting something to racism, in other words, can be a very powerful argument in certain contexts. But not in electoral politics.

Democrats really do this
The last pushback I’ve gotten in some quarters is that I’m going after a strawman. Activists or advocates may talk in this form, but real-world politicians don’t behave in the caricatured way that I’m suggesting.

But they do! Here, an example from the paper is the original White House fact sheet outlining Biden’s infrastructure plan:

President Biden is calling on Congress to make a historic and overdue investment in our roads, bridges, rail, ports, airports, and transit systems. The President’s plan will ensure that these investments produce good-quality jobs with strong labor standards, prevailing wages, and a free and fair choice to join a union and bargain collectively. These investments will advance racial equity by providing better jobs and better transportation options to underserved communities.

Biden personally is not a big practitioner of this sort of talk, so it tends to show up in either staff documents like that (or his executive order on Medicaid) or else to be exceptionally clumsy as when he said “our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild” with reference to a small business initiative that had no such provisions.

The Title I education funding formula, similarly, makes no reference at all to race, but the Education Secretary is going out of his way here to make it seem like targeted assistance for non-white kids, tweeting “Across the nation, schools with the most students of color received, on average, dramatically less funding than majority-white schools. The new investment in Title I represents a major step towards correcting this injustice.”

Here’s Ro Khanna talking about universal healthcare (he does the same with minimum wage): “Fixing our broken healthcare system is critical to addressing racial and economic inequality. We need Medicare for All.”

Mondaire Jones talking about student debt relief says “as you heard earlier, this is an issue of racial justice, Black and Hispanic people disproportionately bear the brunt of the student debt crisis that I described. But I would also add if this is an issue of LGBTQ+ justice. Members of the LGBTQ community, largely because their families tend to disown them, disproportionately have higher student debt.” Chuck Schumer at that same press conference says “the wealth gap in America between Black and White is one of our greatest problems. And one of the amazingly enough, one of the greatest ways, quickest ways to cure a good chunk of it is get rid of that $50,000 in debt.”

And Elizabeth Warren: “We must keep up the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It's one of the cores of our fight for racial justice.”

The original instance of a politician doing this that struck me was Cory Booker’s insistence on framing baby bonds as a racial issue because back in the spring of 2018, it seemed to me that he was teeing up a presidential campaign based on Obama-esque efforts to downplay racial divisions.

I don’t want to be a tedious bore on this subject, but I really do think it’s important to try to drill down to ideas that make sense and not just go along to get along.

Framing race-neutral issues as racial ones is not the same thing as tackling racial issues head-on.

Framing race-neutral issues as racial ones is not politically effective, as racial justice advocates have traditionally understood the risks of white racial backlash are high.

Framing race-neutral issues as racial ones is not something non-white voters are demanding; Black and Latino people have economic interests and in the aggregate prefer seeing them discussed in economic terms.

Democratic Party politicians really do this a lot even though voters don’t like it, and broadly aligned groups in the nonprofit and media worlds do it even more.

I would like to see politicians simply stop doing it. But I also think that people whose job is not strictly electioneering need to take a deep breath and think about what it is they are trying to accomplish. The intention, I think, is on some level to help people. And the news that the currently fashionable tactics are ineffective is discomforting. But it’s much more important to actually help people than to avoid discomfort.

1
My recollection of pre-Great Awokening takes is that it used to be commonplace to argue that statistical discrimination is not bad or else not “really racist” as long as the underlying statistics are sound. So if a cabbie refuses to pick up a Black passenger on the grounds that Black people are more likely to live in peripheral neighborhoods, that’s okay because it’s not motivated by negative sentiments or an intent to harm. I think a useful Awokening contribution has been to reframe this around objective harms rather than subjective intentions and say that it’s bad when people are subject to discriminatory treatment, regardless of the precise reasoning that led to it.

2
An interesting, separate question is whether it was politically effective. She did very well with Black voters in 2016, which led many to conclude that this message was highly effective. I think the 2020 results in which Biden dominated the Black vote suggest another interpretation, namely that African American Democrats are simply more moderate and that the main impact of this message was to push moderate white Democrats to support Sanders in 2016 — supporters who he then lost with his more intersectional 2020 message.

3
“Ellen” and “Will & Grace” almost certainly did more to shape public opinion on LGBT issues than anything any columnist did.


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What's in Biden's American Families Plan



What's in Biden's American Families Plan
I tell you what senior administration officials told me

Matthew Yglesias
 Apr 28 

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Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images
Today in line with Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address¹, he’s going to be announcing the details of what his administration is calling the American Families Plan — a sweep of enhancements to the welfare state mostly focused on children and education.

The plan, as described to me last night by senior administration officials, is really not what I’d call a unitary plan at all. It’s more like a grab-bag of ideas, loosely related by by theme of helping parents and children, and all lumped together because that’s how the budget reconciliation process works. The best way to take you through it, I think, is roughly chronologically in terms of a person’s life cycle.

Paid Leave: Biden wants to establish a program that will guarantee twelve weeks of paid leave to new parents and for other purposes.² The program will replace 80 percent of the wages of low-wage workers, phasing down to a 67 percent replacement rate and then maxing out at $4,000 a month (i.e., 2/3rds of a ~$71,500 salary). In other words it’s not a means-tested program but I think in the real world you’d anticipate that high-paid workers are still bargaining for their own more generous leave packages from their employers.

Cash assistance: Biden’s American Rescue Plan included enhancements to the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit and he wants to extend those enhancements. Those credits all work a bit differently, but the upshot is extra money for non-rich parents.

Child care subsidy: Biden will provide sliding-scale subsidies to cap family child care expenses at 7 percent of household income, if you earn less than 150% percent of your state’s median income. I have never liked this 7 percent structure that Democrats seem to love because to me it makes the total amount of subsidy you get weirdly dependent on the exact timing of your kids’ births. I’ll also say the idea of a targeted subsidy for child care doesn’t make that much sense to me as a concept. Either give families cash (knowing that in most cases it will go to child care) or else directly invest money in trying to increase the supply of quality child care programs.

Free preschool: When your kid is 3 or 4, Biden switches philosophy and instead of giving you a voucher he wants to invest $200 billion in establishing and expanding universal PreK-3 and PreK-4 programs. We have Prek-4 for everyone in DC Public Schools and PreK-3 for some families (we got into ours) and I think it’s great. Obviously “build a high-quality preschool” is a much higher degree of difficulty task than simply handing out a check so there’s plenty of room for questions here but I like it conceptually.

Lunch in the summertime: The school lunch program currently performs the vital service of providing meals to low-income children. But there is no school in the summer! Nonetheless, children still need to eat. The White House is piloting a Summer EBT program as part of Covid-related changes to the school meal program, and Biden is proposing to create a permanent version of that.

Expanded community eligibility: Verifying a child’s eligibility for free school lunch can be a bureaucratic nightmare (see Slow Boring’s previous work on administrative burdens) so there’s an Obama-era initiative called Community Eligibility whereby if enough kids in your school are already enrolled in certain means-tested welfare programs you can just give all the kids free lunch. My son attends a Community Eligibity school, so in the interests of full disclosure this is an aspect of the welfare state that benefits me directly. Biden wants to make the funding for Community Eligibility more generous so that more schools opt into it and also expand the set of schools who qualify. Obviously, my family does not “need the money” and there is some waste involved in giving my son free lunch. But I think it is great that (a) nobody falls through the cracks, and (b) it mutes class distinctions among the kids in his school. Three cheers for expanding this.

Community College and Pell Grants: Biden rejects the idea of free college, which I have mixed feelings about³ Biden opts instead for the cheaper and more popular idea of free community college. Whenever this comes up someone says “what about vocational training?” Well, community colleges are the institutions that do that. Yeah but how about apprenticeships? Again, community colleges are the institutions that do that. He also wants to increase the maximum Pell Grant allowance by $1,400. We ran out of time before I could ask the senior administration officials where they came up with that number or what it corresponds to. So I cannot explain it to you.

After you graduate from community college it’s time to get married, start having kids, and start the cycle all over again! No but wait — they also want to extend the provision of the Rescue Plan that made ACA subsidies more generous. There are honestly not many people using the ACA exchanges these days, but it is an important niche issue to the Substack community.

Some other stuff: Sprinkled hither and yon throughout the plan are things like grants to HBCUs, scholarships for college students who want to be teachers, mid-career teacher training money, and “calling on Congress to invest $2 billion to support programs that leverage teachers as leaders, such as high-quality mentorship programs for new teachers and teachers of color.” I would need to know more about what those programs are exactly to express a view.

In summary: The problem with getting embargoed briefings about things is you don’t have a lot of time to ask around about the ideas. I am very enthusiastic about cash assistance to families, the preschool stuff, and the nutrition stuff. The community college and Pell Grant ideas seem like they are probably on the right track but I’d like to know more. I want to hear from people who’ve researched family leave programs about the implications of a 2/3rds replacement rate since I’m just sitting here wondering what kind of takeup rate that actually gets you. The child care subsidies for kids under three seem mildly misguided to me, and if we’re working with a quasi-fixed pool of money here I’d cut that and put more money into some of the other stuff.

Note to subscribers: There will also be a regular article today, but I wanted to fill everyone in on this breaking story as well.

1
For reasons I never understand the first one each new president does isn’t called a State of the Union address but it’s the same damn thing.

2
The specifics they name are to “care for a seriously ill loved one, deal with a loved one's military deployment, find safety from sexual assault, stalking, or domestic violence, heal from their own serious illness, or take time to deal with the death of a loved one.“

3
This should be its own post, but long story short I think free college is the right goal but the existing free college bills in congress are actually pretty bad


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Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Mayor of Crazytown

Mayor of Crazytown

April 27, 2021

Mischiefs of Faction

By Matthew Green


With the exception of Paul Ryan, every Speaker of the House since Carl Albert has written a memoir. That includes John Boehner, whose newly published autobiography On the House is decidedly different from its predecessors.



For one thing, it is by far the most profanity-laden memoir ever written by a former Speaker. (By my count, Boehner uses curse words – usually an f-bomb, s-bomb, or some version thereof – 63 times. And that doesn’t include Easter Egg profanities hiding in his audiobook.) It is also unusually bitter, as Boehner repeatedly disparages media outlets, advocacy groups, and “knucklehead” House Republicans for undermining his speakership.



Looking past the name-calling and salty language, however, Boehner’s autobiography contains some valuable insights into a major theme of his speakership: the struggle to exercise legislative leadership over a congressional party that includes members who disdain compromise.



Boehner clearly views himself as a legislator first and foremost. He recalls with pride his role in passing the education reform law No Child Left Behind when he was chairman of the House Education Committee. Boehner also conveys frustration at the failure of Congress to enact critical legislation during the Obama Administration. Immigration reform fell by the wayside, weeks were wasted on a government shutdown in 2013 that accomplished nothing, and a “grand bargain” to balance the federal budget was never reached.



The former Speaker argues that Obama’s arrogance and poor negotiating skills contributed to many of these failures. But he also blames members of his own party who eschewed all bipartisan compromise, made dangerously unrealistic demands, and mindlessly attacked the nation’s political institutions. They were, in his words, “total moron[s],” “cranks,” “screwballs,” “kooks,” “crazies,” and “knuckleheads” (his favorite term of disparagement). The GOP was turning into "Crazytown," he laments, and "when I took the Speaker's gavel in 2011...I became its mayor."



Far-right Republicans who were first elected to the House in 2010 are a particular target of Boehner’s ire. “They didn’t really want legislative victories,” he opines. “They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.” Furthermore, “some of them had me in their sights from day one” as a “liberal collaborator” because he was open to reaching deals with Democrats in order to enact legislation. They quickly gravitated to lawmakers like Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), the “head lunatic,” whom Boehner especially deplores.



Boehner believes that these lawmakers were incentivized by two outside sources: the conservative media, which gave them a platform to espouse their absolutist rhetoric, and hyper-partisan donors and interest groups who were eager to contribute campaign money to ideological purists. "By 2013," he writes, “the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash.”



He is hardly alone in making this claim. One rank and file Republican grumbled in 2014 that “Jesus himself couldn’t be the Speaker and get 218 Republicans behind something.” More recently, Jonathan Rauch remarked at a panel at the Catholic University of America (where I teach) that a major threat facing the country is “the tendency of politicians and others to denigrate our institutions for fun and profit and as a way of self-promotion.”



There is also empirical evidence that Boehner’s own party in Congress has indeed radicalized, and that conservative activist news outlets have proliferated in recent years. In my own research, I have found a relationship between lawmaker support for Boehner on key votes and their faith in party loyalty in general (though campaign spending by ideological groups did not seem to matter).



But while outside forces may have created a challenging environment for Boehner to govern, On the House unintentionally suggests another reason for Boehner’s difficulties: his personal aversion to the exercise of power.



Boehner opens the book with this tell-tale sentence: “Nancy Pelosi has a killer instinct—something I never had (well, not much of one anyway).” He later admits that “I’m not about power and never had been,” adding that “I couldn’t care less about conveying an image of power.” From Boehner’s perspective, political power corrupts. It was a lesson he learned from seeing colleagues transform into arrogant despots when they became committee chairs.



This disdain for power, odd for someone who served in the third-highest post in American government, may explain some of the more damaging errors Boehner made as Speaker. For instance, early in his speakership, Boehner decided to eliminate earmarks in spending bills in the name of reducing corruption. This proved costly, as it robbed him of a valuable means of influencing his fellow partisans to stay loyal on difficult votes.



Boehner’s dislike of political power may also explain key moments when he mistakenly let other lawmakers overrule his own preferences. Immigration reform legislation failed to pass the House, he writes, because the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), didn’t want it to. “Nothing would get him to move an inch toward compromise,” he laments. In 2012 he let the Republican Steering Committee remove four disloyal Republicans from their committees despite thinking it was a bad idea. And it was: those four Republicans voted against him in the upcoming election for Speaker, which he only narrowly won.



This hands-off approach to governing is somewhat reminiscent of how Speakers of the past like Sam Rayburn governed the House, deferring to committee chairs and following a more institutionalist model of leadership. But even Rayburn understood the importance of amassing influence, exercising it, and cultivating a reputation for power, which helped him serve longer as Speaker than anyone else in history.



Boehner most clearly demonstrated his lack of understanding of power – and how the perception of power creates more power – when he resigned suddenly from Congress in October 2015. Boehner credits the visit of Pope Francis with his decision to resign early, but he also did soon after key members of the House Freedom Caucus threatened to vote him out. The threat was empty – Boehner had the votes to remain Speaker – but the timing of Boehner’s departure fostered the impression that the Freedom Caucus had brought him down. It burnished the Caucus' influence over the House Republican Party that has continued to this day.



Whether or not Boehner’s speakership inadvertently helped the “knuckleheads” he so frequently disparages, his memoir should be read as a testament to the difficulties of being a Rayburn Speaker in a Gingrich House. It also underscores the dangers of treating political power in Congress as something to be avoided rather than nurtured.

Original link here: https://www.mischiefsoffaction.com/post/mayor-of-crazytown

Republicans decide that for them to win, everything has to be a crisis

Republicans decide that for them to win, everything has to be a crisis

Washington Post

Opinion by 
Paul Waldman
Columnist
April 27, 2021 at 2:03 a.m. GMT+9

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden. (Al Drago for The Washington Post)

As President Biden reaches his 100th day in the White House, this is the shape of American political conflict: He wants to reassure the country that everything is under control, our problems are significant but solvable and things are getting better. The Republican Party, on the other hand, wants the country to believe that we are in a spiraling crisis, a nightmare of chaos and oppression that threatens to drag us to hell — if we aren’t already there.


There are hamburgers involved (seriously), but for his part, the president has so far implemented a strategy that seems almost designed to stay out of the news. Biden isn’t just refusing to be drawn into silly media controversies; he’s almost acting as though the national conversation is of minimal concern to him.


The contrast with the Donald Trump years couldn’t be stronger. Trump believed not only that he had to monopolize our attention for every waking moment, but also that conflict that had him at its center was inevitably good for him. Where Biden tries to tamp down disagreement and create the perception of stability — even if it means you can go for days without thinking about him — Trump wanted chaos, believing that he could ride it to success.


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This is in many ways a natural extension of the events that brought Biden here. He did not capture the Democratic nomination in 2020 so much as he was gifted it by a primary electorate in the grip of sober calculation and lowered expectations, and his early successes in office (emphasis on early) suggest the value of underpromising and overdelivering.


There’s only so much Biden’s reassuring style can do to defuse partisan conflict, however. A round of just-released polls shows him in solid if unspectacular shape, averaging approval in the mid-50s. Though things have run smoothly since he came into office — no scandals, steady progress on the pandemic, an economy revving up — overall his approval is lower than that of most presidents at this stage (except Trump).


That demonstrates just how hardened partisanship has become. Just 12 years ago, significant numbers of Republicans joined in the honeymoon for Barack Obama (though they soon turned against him), just as many Democrats had eight years earlier for George W. Bush. Those days are over.


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But the question for Republicans is not whether they can persuade their own partisans to disapprove of Biden. That’s not enough. They need to create an intensity of opposition, full of anger and motivation. For that, those voters need to be convinced that what they’re seeing isn’t stability at all. It’s crisis.


You see it in ways large and small, such as the argument over whether an increase in migrants coming to the southern border is or is not a “crisis.” Border “crises” come with regularity, yet never produce the societal collapse that Republicans predict (remember the caravans of 2018 that were going to rampage through the country?). The WiFi password at the House Republican retreat in Orlando is reportedly “Biden Border Crisis.”


The message is and will continue to be that the United States is falling apart because of Biden’s inaction, but also because of his actions. It isn’t enough to say that a Biden policy initiative is a bad idea; it must be turned into a crisis reaching right into every American’s home. Or mouth.


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Which brings us to the hamburgers.


While discussing this kind of story risks spreading the lunacy, this one is such a revealing case study in the spread of misinformation that it’s worth noting. It starts with a ludicrous article in Britain’s Daily Mail that found a university study exploring how various changes in habits, including drastic reductions in meat consumption, might affect greenhouse gas emissions.


The Daily Mail article, produced as it was by people for whom integrity and honesty are utterly foreign concepts, made this leap: Biden wants to cut greenhouse emissions; some researchers said reducing meat consumption would cut greenhouse emissions; therefore “Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH.” That is in the actual headline.


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Naturally, Fox News picked up this preposterous lie and ran with it, and before long, Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Brad Little of Idaho were bravely announcing their intention to stand up to the imaginary jackbooted federal burger police, as were Internet nincompoops such as Donald Trump Jr.


All these well-known Republicans — all of them — know full well that there is no Biden burger-grabbing plan. But they also think their supporters are dumb enough to believe it, and they’re right. The insanity of the idea that there would be a legal limit on how much meat you can eat — the very thing that should make any sentient person say “That can’t possibly be true” — is what makes Republicans say “This is perfect.”


So these are the two competing narratives of the moment: One is about stability and progress, and the other is about madness and collapse. Either Americans will believe what they see in their own lives and their own communities, or they’ll believe that everything is spinning out of control and the crisis is everywhere, because that’s what they heard on Fox News. It’s hard to know yet which narrative will prevail.


A dumb attack on Biden’s plan actually reveals the weakness of GOP arguments

A dumb attack on Biden’s plan actually reveals the weakness of GOP arguments

Washington Post

Opinion by 
Greg Sargent
Columnist
April 26, 2021 at 11:08 p.m. GMT+9

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). (Andrew Harnik/AP)

Republicans have settled on an attack against President Biden’s jobs plans: Raising taxes on ultra-rich Americans constitutes socialism.


The most buffoonish expression of this yet comes courtesy of former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who said Sunday on ABC News that raising the capital gains tax, of all things, is “socialism” because it constitutes “redistribution of income.”


But this absurdity is actually useful. It points to a deeper intellectual scam employed by opponents of higher taxes, one that should be exposed as the debate over Biden’s plans gets underway.


It’s the idea that higher taxes represent a departure from a purportedly natural baseline of free-market capitalism that is getting distorted by those higher taxes in a way that offends pristine free-market principles.


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This was also voiced by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on “Fox News Sunday,” who suggested new taxes to fund spending on infrastructure and social programs are “socialist.”


The same old scam

This week, Biden will introduce new proposals for higher taxes on the wealthy, including an increase in the capital gains tax on those with income over $1 million, and a hike in the rate paid by earners in the top income bracket.


Those would pay for the next phase of Biden’s economic plans, which include investments in child-care funding, paid medical leave and free community college. It comes after Biden proposed higher corporate taxes to fund the first phase of his infrastructure package.


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Christie’s denunciation of a capital gains tax hike as “socialism” vividly illustrates the scam that opponents will pull. The fact that we tax capital gains (which come from sales of capital assets and overwhelmingly go to the wealthy) at a lower rate than wage income (the main income of everyone else) is a policy choice.


The Biden plan would tax the capital gains of millionaire investors at roughly the same level as income. The idea that this constitutes “redistribution” (let alone “socialism”) presumes that the current tax structure is the natural order of things.


But in reality, it is one of countless ways our economic order has been structured by rules created by the government, via policy choices. There cannot be a magically “natural” economic order that is not structured by policy choices. This is precisely what people like Christie want to obscure.


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Why? Because it helps obscure a larger truth: Many who would see these higher taxes have gotten rich in part due to various policy choices in recent decades, ones the wealthy have helped engineer. Higher taxes would simply be another such choice to undo a fraction of the benefits those choices helped lavish on them.


It’s the economic rents, stupid

In a pair of useful papers, Berkeley professor of political economy Steven Vogel explains this well. Government rules enable markets to exist in the first place, Vogel notes, so the choice is how to structure markets, in whose interests and for what purpose.


These market rules, Vogel explains, structure power relationships between various players and factors in the economy. The “neoliberal” turn is often described as moving toward “free” markets, but in many cases, “free-market ideology camouflaged policies that did not actually reduce government regulation but rather redirected it in favor of those with wealth and power.”


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Changes in labor market law weakened worker power relative to employers. Changes in corporate governance channeled higher salaries to executives and prioritized shareholder gains over other stakeholders’ interests. Changes in financial regulation helped the financial sector seize a larger share of the economy. A retreat on antitrust enforcement, and more generous government protection for intellectual property rights, have granted more market power (and profits) to dominant firms, such as in Big Tech and Big Pharma.


The big story: The top has benefited partly from economic rents, or extractive gains rooted in deliberate changes in market rules. Tax policy, too, has helped channel more after-tax income upward, including taxing capital gains at a lower rate, as scholar Gabriel Zucman illustrates well:


Economist Dean Baker notes that Biden’s tax hikes would target many who profited in part from these economic rents. The top tax bracket includes many in the top 1 percent of earners, who are often tech, pharma and Wall Street executives and wealthy investors (who would also face a capital gains tax hike), Baker notes. Higher corporate taxes would hit many wealthy shareholders.


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“We structured the market to redistribute tens of trillions in income and wealth upward,” Baker told me. “Biden’s tax hikes would take back a small portion of this money. This is taxing back rents we’ve given those at the top.”


Indeed, another feature of Biden’s proposals — reining in multinational tax avoidance — also targets a type of rent. As Ryan Cooper notes, rules that facilitate this avoidance via profit-shifting also emerged from policy choices, meaning we can choose to undo them and bring back more revenue to fund public investments.


All these insights are longtime features of progressive economics, but they need centralizing right now. Indeed, the Biden brain trust appears to believe rising rents help justify higher taxes.


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“The share of profits ... from rents have been ... increasing over time,” top Biden economic adviser David Kamin told me, adding that taxing those rents would help rebalance long-running imbalances.


“The system is broken,” Kamin said. “There are multiple reasons why we should be trying to fix it.”


This is what Republicans want to portray as “socialism,” precisely because they don’t want you to understand what tax hikes on the wealthy would even begin to rectify.


Read more:


In his address to Congress, Biden will advance his agenda. He’ll also have to defend democracy.

In his address to Congress, Biden will advance his agenda. He’ll also have to defend democracy.

Washington Post

Opinion by 
Michael Gerson
Columnist
April 27, 2021 at 3:50 a.m. GMT+9

President Biden. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

It is the predominant advice to the new president that he focus his budget address to Congress on jobs, jobs, jobs. This reflects a consensus that the Republican Party’s culture war can be defeated by serving the economic interests of average Americans — that blood-and-iron appeals can be overcome by bread-and-butter issues.


This sets up a type of political conflict that is difficult for social science to describe. How do you poll a contest in which one side offers a child-care proposal and the other side alleges a nationwide conspiracy to steal a presidential election? Or in which some set out an infrastructure plan and others warn of a satanic conspiracy to rape children? It’s like comparing apples to existentialism.


Democrats are in a constructive and ambitious mood, trying to squeeze a vast heap of pent-up liberalism through a legislative aperture the size of a mouse hole. The few establishment Republicans who remain are going through the motions of an ideological response, defending fiscal responsibility, limited government and a spirit of inclusion. This will be the substance of South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s response to President Biden’s address on Wednesday.


Scott can credibly claim these traditional Republican themes for himself. But if he attributes those values to his party, he will be lying. Trumpism in power cared nothing about the level of government spending; Donald Trump’s main fiscal concern was getting his name printed on the stimulus checks. Trumpism in power constantly probed the limits of executive authority and sought to turn institutions such as the FBI and the Pentagon into extensions of the president’s political will. Trumpism in power employed exclusion as its organizing principle and invited white supremacists to sit at the GOP table.


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Biden’s return to normalcy and basic humanity has led to a great unclenching in our public life. It is a pleasure to be occasionally bored by politics again. But it would be a mistake for Biden to assume that our political system has returned to its previous state, à la memory foam. The Republican Party remains dominated by an apocalyptic politics that accuses liberals of dismantling Western civilization and authorizes undemocratic means to save civilization. Many conservatives — parroting media outlets that profit from incitement — have become reactionary and authoritarian. Their return to power in a second Trump term would be a threat to the republic.


I am fully aware that my description of this apocalyptic movement is itself apocalyptic. But it’s absurd to deny that the American right is infected by a strain of authoritarian thinking that has turned other democracies into repressive shadows of their former selves. One piece of evidence is dispositive: On Jan. 6, Trump introduced the federal government to intimidation by mob violence. And many Republicans — including many elected Republicans — seem pleased by the memory.


We remain a democracy at risk. But how can Biden confront this development without further polarizing the country? It would certainly not be helpful to call out these trends in the GOP directly, as I have done.


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Biden’s challenge in his first speech to Congress — apart from inspiring confidence in his pandemic response and creating momentum for his economic proposals — is to make a compelling, even poetic, case for procedural democracy.


This is not an easy rhetorical task. Fanatics can easily appeal to rage, envy or fear. Capturing the romance of self-government requires more craft and thought. The democratic virtues of civility, tolerance, decency, fairness and empathy announce themselves quietly. The social bonds created by these virtues — respect for the rule of law, respect for the rights of political minorities, a sense of shared destiny despite large differences — are inherently vulnerable. A democracy is held together by millions of invisible ties — ties of memory and mutual regard — that are easier to cut than to repair.


In the shadow of Jan. 6, the case for democracy needs bold restatement. A government of divided and balanced powers, created by the consent of the governed and dedicated to the rights and dignity of the individual, is a tremendous moral achievement. The historical exclusion of many people from the protection of this ideal does not discredit it; it demands that ideal’s more rigorous application. Our shared commitment to these democratic principles is what makes a nation out of nations. And we can’t be bystanders while bullies and would-be autocrats squander an inheritance they do not understand or value.


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In his address to Congress, Biden will have an opportunity, like every president, to advance his agenda. He will also face the need — as few presidents have before him — to defend democracy in a time of peril.


Read more:


Free trade with benefits

Free trade with benefits

Washington Post

By 
Daniel W. Drezner
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.
April 26, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

Never send an economist to do a political scientist’s job.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador looks on as Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Mexican Deputy Foreign Minister for North America Jesus Seade, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer sign documents at the Presidential Palace in Mexico City on Dec. 10, 2019. (Henry Romero/Reuters)

If there is a last redoubt for this idea inside the Beltway, then it is surely the Peterson Institute for International Economics. PIIE has made the best case for the economic merits of U.S. economic openness for some time now. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, PIIE President Adam Posen makes a provocative case for continued openness, arguing, among other things, that “populist anger is the result not of economic anxiety but of perceived declines in relative status. The U.S. government has not been pursuing openness and integration over the last two decades. To the contrary, it has increasingly insulated the economy from foreign competition, while the rest of the world has continued to open up and integrate.”


Posen’s essay “The Price of Nostalgia” is well worth reading for two reasons. The first is the evisceration he provides on more populist takes on what trade liberalization did to the U.S. economy. The second is the unintentional revelation for why neoliberalism faces such stark political head winds.


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The good parts first. Posen makes a persuasive case that all of the things that critics of neoliberalism rage against — such as rampant inequality and declining manufacturing employment — actually strengthened at the same time the United States became a more closed economy. Even during the heyday of the 1990s, the United States was less integrated with the global economy because of its size compared to other countries. Posen deftly explains how the raising of trade barriers has accomplished nothing but harm for the U.S. economy, and that the trends many decry — such as declining manufacturing employment — are a global phenomenon.


Posen’s best example is the decline of foreign greenfield investment. As he explains, “Foreign greenfield investment is generally associated with increases in higher-paying jobs and R & D spending. But since 2000, the inflow of greenfield investment to the United States has been trending down sharply, from $13 billion annually in 2000 to $4 billion annually in 2019. Blame goes to a succession of nationalist policies that have increased the threat of arbitrary restrictions on technology transfers and foreign ownership.” The idea that protectionism would trigger productive foreign direct investment is foolhardy.


Posen also proffers useful suggestions for policies that can ameliorate some of the more pernicious effects of untrammeled globalization — including the need to address corporate tax havens, carbon pricing and labor standards.


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Where Posen falls short is his discussion of communities ailing from acknowledged negatives such as the “China shock.” He writes:


Accordingly, much of the writing from policy wonks in recent years has called for plans to recognize the importance of local communities and build them back up. Elected officials, for their part, make a pilgrimage to these places of suffering to show their concern and empathy and then follow up with targeted government assistance.

The problem is that there are precious few examples of a government successfully reviving a community suffering from industrial decline. Geography is not destiny, but it is the embodiment of economic history in many ways, and accumulated history is difficult to overcome....

No one should be abandoned simply because of where they live, and no community deserves to decline. But governments should not lie to their citizens, either. There simply is no reliable method of saving local communities when they lose their dominant employer or industry, even with a massive amount of resources devoted to the effort. Any promises made to revive particular communities through government action are likely to lead to disappointment, frustration, and outright anger when they fail.

Now on the one hand there is a refreshing candor to Posen’s argument. I have read enough economic geography about trying to replicate places such as Silicon Valley to know that he is probably correct. State interventions to rebuild ailing communities after a dominant employer has left the scene face long odds of success.


The problem is that the message of “there is nothing the government can do, so best to just let it happen” is a dead-bang loser argument that no politician can sell. Between hearing that message and hearing some shyster say they will fight like hell to preserve what once was, the politics of nostalgia will win every day of the week and twice on Sundays.


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This is not just about economics, either. For all the talk about footloose and mobile Americans, the bulk of the country does not live this way. According to one moving company, more than 70 percent of Americans live in or close to the city where they grew up. In 2015, the New York Times reported that “the typical adult lives only 18 miles from his or her mother.” Simply telling families that they should move to where the jobs are significantly understates the transaction costs of doing so.


There are policy responses that would be appropriate here. Matthew Yglesias’s idea of relocating federal agencies outside of the Beltway retains its appeal. The pandemic realization that perhaps folks can work far away from their places of employment might also improve the chances of de-clustering employment. It is worth considering how governments can enact policies to turn fading communities into “Zoom towns.”


The point is, neoliberals have a valid critique of the populist critique of globalization. But to push back against populists, they need a better response for struggling communities than a shrug of the shoulders.


The next Republican attack on Biden will boomerang on the GOP

The next Republican attack on Biden will boomerang on the GOP

Washington Post

Opinion by 
Paul Waldman and 
Greg Sargent
April 28, 2021 at 5:42 a.m. GMT+9

The IRS building in Washington, D.C. (Bill O'Leary/WASHINGTON POST)

In 2010, private equity magnate Steven Schwartzman attracted great derision when he greeted an Obama administration proposal to raise taxes on his kind of profits with a World War II analogy: “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”


Schwartzman managed to survive the blitzkrieg. Today his fortune stands at a healthy $27 billion.


But now that President Biden is set to introduce a new proposal that would beef up IRS enforcement, making it harder for such wealthy investors to cheat and shield their incomes, the Nazi comparisons may start up again. The ultrarich are already reportedly in a panic about other Biden plans to raise their taxes, and more IRS enforcement will only make things worse.


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This, combined with the particulars of Biden’s new proposal, will make it hard for Republicans to register their inevitable opposition without it boomeranging back on them.


The Post reports that when Biden announces the next phase of his jobs plan on Wednesday, it will include a proposal to add $80 billion in funding for the IRS that will make plutocrats choke on their wagyu tartare:


Probably the single biggest source of new revenue in the plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency. It seeks to beef up the number of agents and give the IRS new tools and technology to execute collections and crack down on avoidance, the people said.

White House officials have eyed raising as much as $700 billion from toughening IRS enforcement and auditing over 10 years, two of the people said, although the precise amount in the plan remained unclear. Enforcement will be focused on the wealthy, the people said.

Enforcing tax collection tends to get less attention than other Biden tax proposals do. We’ve been debating whether to raise taxes on corporations, capital gains, and top level incomes, and crack down on tax avoidance by multinational companies.


But the sorry state of tax enforcement may also make a huge difference to the tax bills of the ultrawealthy, and therefore to the rest of us.


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The Internal Revenue Service lacks the resources to enforce tax laws. The tax gap — between what is owed and what is paid — amounts to an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars a year. IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig even suggested recently that this might “exceed $1 trillion per year.”


Two things in Biden’s proposal will make the political debate over it interesting. First, it will seek additional revenue reporting requirements. Though details remain vague, it appears these will be applied to people who hide money in “opaque structures,” as Jim Tankersly dryly notes.


Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chair of the Finance Committee, points out that this will help ensure that the targets are very wealthy investors. Wage earners are already less likely to misreport income, Wyden notes, which means such requirements will target unreported revenue from holders of capital that employ creative bookkeeping to hide them.


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“The reason people who earn wages generally don’t cheat on their taxes is because their employers also report their income to the government,” Wyden told us in a statement. “That’s not the case for the highfliers, whose income from wealth often goes unreported. Plugging this hole in the system is critical.”


Second, the Biden proposal will also seek dedicated funding from Congress, meaning it would be insulated from future budget cuts.


Wyden pointed out that this is essential, because Republicans might seek to undo that funding if they take back the House next year, and wealthy tax avoiders could continue scheming in anticipation of that.


“Wealthy tax cheats are savvy enough to understand that a one-year budget increase isn’t going to rebuild the agency after a decade of neglect,” Wyden said.


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History confirms that this might happen. After the GOP House takeover in 2010, Republicans successfully won deep cuts to IRS enforcement, even though Barack Obama was in the White House.


“We all saw what happened when Republicans took back the House and went to war against the agency,” Wyden told us. “They were able to slash IRS funding and hobble enforcement efforts.”


That had an impact. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, the audit rate for those with incomes over $1 million a year “fell by 71 percent between 2010 and 2019, from 8.4 percent to just 2.4 percent.”


All this should also make it harder for Republicans to oppose the plan. They will try to rehash old attacks by arguing that the jackbooted IRS will be coming for ordinary Americans. But the proposals are geared toward rich investors, so that will be a harder case to make without Republicans appearing to protect their interests.


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Second, Republicans may have a tougher time arguing that this IRS funding shouldn’t be protected, given recent history and their own role in authoring that history.


By now, this history has established for the public that with a decimated IRS, it’s harder to audit wealthy individuals, since they can employ high-priced accountants and lawyers. We’ve heard horror stories long these lines for years.


At a time when we’re mired in crises not seen in many decades, it will be harder to defend anything that might make it easier for the very rich to skate when so many ordinary Americans are enduring such hardship.


Back in 2019, Biden told a group of wealthy donors that he didn’t want to “demonize” them, but something had to be done about inequality. Under his proposals, he said, “no one’s standard of living will change.”


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For better or worse, even if Biden gets everything he wants on taxes, that will still be basically true. If someone who makes $50 million a year from investments has to pay a few million more in taxes, their lives will be pretty much the same. There are only so many yachts one person can own.


But, given the large public investments this could help fund at a time of such deep public need, the country could be much better off. Let’s see Republicans argue against that.


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Elite conservatives want you to be a terrible person

Elite conservatives want you to be a terrible person

Washington Post

Opinion by 
Paul Waldman
Columnist
April 28, 2021 at 1:37 a.m. GMT+9

Supporters of then-President Donald Trump protest the ballot count outside TFC Center in Detroit on Nov. 5, 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Every political movement contains within it a critique of the present and a vision of the future, an agenda of problems to be solved and a series of solutions that would bring us to a better existence. But political movements also say something about people, both who they think we are and who they’d like us to be.


Keep that in mind as we look at where elite conservatives are putting their attention and energy, to understand what they think of Americans and how they think we ought to be living our lives.


A rant that Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the chief propagandist of today’s right, delivered this week was shocking even for him. The subject was the evolving thinking on mask-wearing outdoors; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just released new guidance on the subject, which, as expected, reflects the understanding that transmission of the coronavirus in outdoor settings is extremely rare, particularly as more people are vaccinated.


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But that’s not good enough for Carlson. He urged his viewers to start fights and turn on their neighbors:


As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal. Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately. Contact Child Protective Services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it. If it’s your own children being abused, then act accordingly.

The truth is that in most cases it is indeed unnecessary for people to wear masks outside — though not in every case, and not for everyone. But the more important question is, why in heaven’s name does Carlson want people to call Child Protective Services on their neighbors for something so unimportant? So that a parent who has their kid wear a mask in the park gets plunged into a bureaucratic nightmare that could result in their child being taken away?


What kind of person would do that? The kind of person Carlson wants his audience to be. Or perhaps the kind of person he already thinks they are.


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What else do you learn on Fox, the central hub of the conservative media universe, about what’s going on in the world? You learn that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, of course, but also that President Biden wants to limit the number of burgers you’re allowed to eat (he doesn’t) and that government officials are handing out copies of a children’s book Vice President Harris wrote in 2019 to immigrant kids (they aren’t).


The conservative media figures and Republican politicians who spread those lies know that they’re false. But they use them to keep their supporters in a state of perpetual outrage precisely because they hold those supporters in such boundless contempt.


You have to think — no, you have to know — that your audience is pretty darn stupid if you think they’ll believe that the president is going to ban hamburgers. But that’s exactly how elite conservatives like their supporters: dumb, gullible and easily enraged.


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The ideology Carlson is developing takes it to another, more repellent level. This isn’t just get-off-my-lawn conservatism (protective of individual liberty, alienated by cultural change, generally grumpy); it takes itself out into the world, building its identity on confrontation.


This version of conservatism doesn’t just want you to hole up in your house feeling fear and anger. It wants you to become a “Karen” (or whatever the male equivalent is), feeling entitled not just to impose your ideas on others but to do so aggressively, unpleasantly, invasively wherever you go, turning every trip to the supermarket into a shouting match with strangers.


Who in their right mind would want to live that way?


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I’m reminded of a Web ad that President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign released to great attention in 2012. Called “The Life of Julia,” it showed how a woman is helped by government programs — she goes to school, then college, then starts a business, has her own children, and eventually retires, with a helping hand from Pell Grants, Obamacare and Social Security.


That was one version of the future Democrats wanted to create, where people lead productive, fulfilling lives with support from the government. Republicans saw it and were horrified, not only because they read “support” as “dependence” but also because Julia didn’t seem to have a husband.


For many on the right, the ad became representative of everything they hated about the liberal agenda and what kind of people it would turn us into — though they also were obsessed for a time with another Obama ad featuring a young man wearing pajamas, which conservatives spun into a tale of Democrats wanting to rob men of their masculinity.


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Some of this is a familiar divergence of visions: In one, people are interconnected and use government to enable human flourishing, while in the other, people are self-reliant and rise or fall on their own hard work. And there are plenty of conservatives who are happy people who treat those they encounter with respect and consideration. But more than ever, elite Republicans want their supporters to build their identity on anger and confrontation.


So “We don’t need to wear masks outside” becomes “Call the police on people who have their kids wear masks outside.” “I can make my own choices” becomes “I won’t take the vaccine because it makes liberals mad” (the actual title of an article on the pro-Trump site American Greatness). The answer to the question “Who are you?” begins and ends with “I hate liberals.”


That might turn out to be politically effective, at least for a while. But it’s no way to live.


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