Slow Boring: Weekend Update, March 27

Weekend Update, March 27

Quick hits to start your Saturday

By Matthew Yglesias

Mar 27

Have a nice weekend, folks.

Making corporate media more corporate

Domino’s Pizza has a job posting up for a data journalist which, naturally, a lot of people in journalism think is funny.

I’ll say that while I don’t have a particularly clear vision for a Domino’s-centric digital publication, I do think corporate loss-leader journalism is a potentially good idea. The basic story of how the internet changed journalism is that it’s made it a lot cheaper to produce and distribute content, but also harder to monetize. That should be an advantage to anyone — be that a pizza chain or a nonprofit — who wants to do journalism for reasons other than a desire to directly monetize journalism.

Like, imagine if Tesla ran a small newsroom covering the electricity and transportation industries from a basic editorial perspective of “solar power and electric cars are good.” It could delve into boring-but-important subjects about how electrical grid regulation works. Coverage of research into the harms of particulate air pollution. Investigations of mass transit and airport boondoggles. Stuff about the energy needs of the developing world and the flaws in the “limits to growth” model. It would be propaganda of course. But precisely because a Tesla News product would be greeted with suspicion, it would actually have a strong incentive to cultivate a reputation for scrupulous accuracy — which today’s ad-supported and SEO-driven news outlets don’t have.

I think that by conventional standards, the vast majority of journalists would condemn something like that as unethical, and people would worry about going to work there lest their reputations be compromised. But it seems to me that all business models have their downsides, shortfalls, and blindspots. And accuracy should be the real lodestar of journalistic ethics. And the great thing about accuracy is that it’s a totally achievable goal, even for a publication that has serious conflicts of interest.

Partisanship and whiteness

Black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans each rate their own ethnic group slightly more highly than the other three. Whites, by contrast, rate all four groups about the same on average.

What’s interesting is this decomposes into a stark partisan split, wherein white Republicans rate white people considerably higher than other ethnic groups, but white Democrats rate white people lower than non-white groups.

Twitter avatar for @drdesante

Christopher DeSante 

@drdesante

I've seen a chart showing that Whites in the 2020 ANES rate all groups equally while other racial groups show bias towards their own group. This first statement is accurate, but the post-racial narrative collapses when you disaggregate the data by partisanship. Image

March 25th 2021

40 Retweets160 Likes

The whole idea of giving a rating to an ethnic group is pretty odd (albeit a fairly standard line of social science inquiry), but this result, while not exactly shocking, does help explain some of the behavior you see on both sides. I guess the main thing I would say is that if you’re a white Democrat, then making public expressions of your dislike of white people may help make you feel better. But in a country where the electorate continues to be pretty overwhelmingly white, this is probably not a good way to win elections. So you should at least consider how this kind of talk is actually impacting the lives of non-white people who you ostensibly want to help.

Remember — intent isn’t what matters; it’s consequences that are the most important thing.

Helping poor kids is good

Will cash benefits for families that don’t include work requirements end up devastating adult labor force participation? It didn’t in Canada:

We investigate whether child tax benefits reduce child poverty and labor force participation among single mothers within the context of the 2015 expansion of the Canadian Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) and the 2016 introduction of the Canada Child Benefit (CCB). We compare single mothers to single childless women as single mothers have historically had the highest poverty rates. Our analysis indicates that both reforms reduced child poverty, although the Canada Child Benefit had the greater effect. We find no evidence of a labor supply response to either of the program reforms on either the extensive or intensive margins.

Taking the ARP refundable Child Tax Credit, making it permanent, and improving it is the thing Joe Biden could do to cement his legacy.

The antiracism of manners

Kurt Bardella, a Korean-American who used to be a prominent communicator for House Republicans, did an op-ed in the LA Times about “The question every Asian American hates to be asked: ‘Where are you from?’”

I am well aware of the complaints about this question, and thus would never express curiosity about a person’s ethnic background or family history with that phrase.

That being said, I personally get this question sometimes — typically with reference to my last name or to my son’s name, Jose. I remember once a semi-prominent conservative donor asked me “Yglesias with a ‘Y’ — where are you from?” and I reacted to him like I was being asked a racist question by a racist person and said “New York City.” But to be honest, the bulk of the time I get asked “where are you from?” the asker is a working-class Hispanic person who is curious about this white guy and his white son with their Spanish names. So I say “I’m from New York but my father’s family is Cuban” or “he was born in D.C., but he’s named after my Cuban grandfather.”

And based on my recollections of life in the 1990s, it seems this was just a pretty common way to talk in a diverse place like New York where ethnic identity was important to a lot of people. I’m not going to die on the hill of “where are you from?” being an acceptable way to ask “is your family Cuban or Mexican or what?” or “did your ancestors come from China or Korea?” I’ve read enough takes that I know it bothers people, so I don’t do it.

But I do think it behooves us all to recognize that this is kind of like how I know how to tie a bow tie and which fork is the salad fork at a fancy place setting — something you pick up by being acculturated in the right spaces. And I’m honestly very skeptical of this sort of “anti-racism of manners” where you demonstrate your superior moral cultivation by knowing which turns of phrase to use and which to avoid.

Vaccine prioritization revisited

America’s vaccination efforts have gone well in many ways — certainly better than Canada or most European countries. But after a lot of hand-wringing about equitable distribution of vaccines and the adoption of a lot of rules designed to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines, we seem to have largely failed on the equity front.

I find this frustrating, but not surprising. Back when I wrote “Give the Vaccine to the Elderly,” the stated reason for preferring a more elaborate series of criteria is that the elderly population is disproportionately white.

But as I wrote at the time, eligibility criteria that are simple, transparent, and easy to verify are the best thing for equality. I feel okay about having gotten my first Pfizer shot at the mass vaccination center in Baltimore — I am eligible under the stated rules and I don’t think being a vaccine martyr helps anyone. But I do feel terrible about a system that is serving to allocate shots to people with the time and energy to scope out eligibility in different cities, wait on long phone trees, etc.

We should have had a system where first, anyone over 80 could get the shot. Then you lower it to 75, then 70, then 65, then 60, then 55, etc., etc. The idea would be that the eligibility criteria are always tight enough that it’s easy for an eligible person to get an appointment. Age is easy to verify, everyone knows their age, and everyone could just wait their turn. Now it would be one thing if, having rejected this option, I was now hearing folks saying “this rollout has been an amazing triumph of racial and socioeconomic equity!” But nobody is saying that, because it isn’t. So somebody ought to say “we messed this up, we thought using blended health/age/occupational criteria would be fairer, but it turns out it created a system that was easy for privileged people to game.”

This exact crisis probably won’t repeat for a long time, but there’s a valuable general lesson in what happened.

Housing reform works

There are people out there who still think of YIMBYism as some kind of technocratic flight of fancy. But I promise you that California YIMBYs, in particular, have been getting stuff done. It took them a few bites at the apple to get a really rigorous law passed that stops cities from blocking Accessory Dwelling Unit construction.

But it’s done now, and the results are spectacular.

Twitter avatar for @kristoncapps

◥◤.@kristoncapps 

@kristoncapps

California's state preemption law deregulating backyard apartments has set off a solid ADU building boom. 

bloom.bg/3w1kCMn

Image

March 25th 2021

14 Retweets100 Likes

ADUs are not going to “solve housing,” but they can make a big difference. And what the California experience shows is that while people always bitch and moan to an extent about change, this is fundamentally a reform that homeowners can learn to love. And every state with high-cost inner-ring suburbs (looking at you Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Virginia) should copy this idea.

What will Trump loyalists’ sensed powerlessness mean for politics? | Democracy Corps

What will Trump loyalists’ sensed powerlessness mean for politics? | Democracy Corps

Home → Archives → What will Trump loyalists’ sensed powerlessness mean for politics?

Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party continues to shape America’s politics, even as the Democrats have taken control of the federal government and Congress. When polls accurately reflect the proportion of the white working class voters and their support for Trump in 2020, Democrats have only a 2-point lead in party identification and 43 percent still approve of his behavior — unchanged after the insurrection. Fully 58 percent are Trump Loyalists who strongly approve of Trump and another 12 percent Trump-aligned who “somewhat approve” of him but are very conservative or Evangelical

Trump’s base is angry about government restrictions on their freedom and believe they are fighting to save the “American way of life” from cancel culture and Black Lives Matter’s violent attacks on police and white people.

We conducted focus groups in March with Trump Loyalists in Georgia and Wisconsin and Trump-aligned, non-Trump conservatives and moderates in suburban and rural Georgia, Ohio, and Wisconsin. It took a long time to recruit these groups because Trump voters seemed particularly distrustful of outsiders right now, wary of being victimized, and avoided revealing their true position until in a Zoom room with all Trump voters — then, they let it all out. 

And here are the conclusions that emerged from this new research:

The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics;

Trump’s base saw Biden, as a white man, as not threatening, controlled by others, unlike Obama who represented everything Tea Party-Republicans were determined to fight;

Even Trump’s base is curious about the extent to which they benefit from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and Biden’s signature program, compared to Obamacare that they viewed as a new entitlement for Blacks and immigrants that must be stopped;

The Trump loyalists and the Trump aligned are animated about government taking away their freedom and a cancel culture that leaves no place for white Americans and the fear they’re losing “their” country to non-whites;

They were angered most of all by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa that were responsible for a full year of violence in Democratic cities that put white people on the defensive – and was ignored by the media;

The Trump loyalists and those who are aligned rooted for the anti-lockdown protestors in Michigan and saw the violence and disruption of the legislature as justified. Some pulled back when the guns threatened innocent civilians, and more when their methods seemed to be losing support for the Trump movement;

A handful of the Trump loyalists supported the January 6th insurrectionists, but most quickly concluded it was really Antifa or an inside job to make Trump supporters look bad. They normalized the insurrection, suggesting it was no different than the violence carried out by BLM and Antifa;   

They worry now that it is the government that has taken the initiative on the use of force, increasing their sense of powerlessness;    

The non-Trump conservatives and moderates bloc is marginally smaller but vocal in opposition to Trump’s direction and animated by his alienation of non-Republicans, the extremism, the 2nd Amendment and guns, and role of government and more.

Expanding voting is not simply the political inverse of limiting voting

Analysis | Expanding voting is not simply the political inverse of limiting voting

By Philip Bump. 

Image without a caption

People in Gwinnett County, Ga., stand in line to cast their votes in two Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

March 27, 2021 at 3:42 a.m. GMT+9

In many ways, the debate over access to casting a ballot in the United States is more complicated than it needs to be. It can be distilled at its most basic to one question: How much do you care about getting as many people as possible who are eligible to vote to actually do so?

Some people are straightforward, arguing that not everyone who can vote should. Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh (R) took that position when speaking to CNN earlier this month, saying that “everybody shouldn’t be voting.” It is fine not to encourage turnout from those who are “totally uninformed on the issues,” he said, though polling shows that it’s often Republicans who are uninformed or misinformed about key political issues.

Others express the same sentiment in other ways, from saying that only those who own property should vote to delineating more nuanced boundaries for participation. There are those who believe that every adult citizen should have the franchise and there are those who think that there are necessary boundaries, such as prohibitions for those with criminal convictions.

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These days, it’s rarely the case that discussions of voting access involve explicitly stated opposition to large demographic groups voting. They used to, of course. A century ago — well, 60 years ago — Black Americans were barred from voting through often-indirect mechanisms. The effort to tamp down on Black voting was rationalized and manifested in a variety of ways, but it is impossible to extricate race from those efforts. Whites were worried about Black Americans exercising their right as surely as they were worried about where Black people sat in theaters, and so the White establishment came up with ways to prevent them from voting because they were Black.

Such considerations now are not manifested so concretely when they exist. Part of that is a function of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legislation that forced race into the background of efforts to control who casts votes. Those seeking to limit Black power in the South began responding to more subtle cues offered by the Republican Party. The deepest divide in America these days is the partisan one, according to Pew Research Center polling — but that partisan divide is itself to some degree a representation of the country’s racial divide. If you were to want to limit the number of people who vote for Democrats, it’s often easier to target groups that vote heavily Democratic, such as Black Americans.

Now the original question — how much you care about getting as many people as possible who are eligible to vote to actually do so — takes on a new timbre. If you ostensibly want as many people (including Black people and Democrats) to vote as possible but you are concerned about the practical effect of having that happen, you need to figure out how to rationalize limiting their ability to vote while still publicly endorsing the idea that everyone who wants to vote can.

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All of which brings me, slowly but surely, to one of the most ridiculous sentence pairings I've read in years.

“Both parties are trying to game the election rules to their advantage,” the subheadline for an article at the National Journal reads. “But the Democratic effort in the House is being hailed as a reform, while GOP efforts are slammed as voter suppression.”

Consider that framing in the context of our original question: How many of those who are eligible should be encouraged to vote?

The Democratic effort at issue, a bill identified as H.R. 1, is predicated on the idea that the answer should be “as many as possible.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) describes the bill as being “about ensuring that Democrats remain in power and control for the next 100 years,” which is revealing. His concern, like the concerns of so many Republicans, is that expanding systems for people to vote will lead to more Democratic electoral victories. Cruz, again like many Republicans, frames his objections in the context of purported voter fraud, a claim bullhorned into the political conversation by President Donald Trump last year as he fretted (correctly, it turns out) about his reelection chances. But there has never been any evidence of widespread voter fraud and there remains no credible evidence of rampant fraud in last year’s election.

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Fraud is the primary assertion being used to rationalize the limits Republicans seek.

Purported fraud is also the focal point of much of the second part of that National Journal descriptor. The “GOP efforts” being “slammed” as suppression are the more than 250 pieces of legislation that have been introduced in recent months, most of which are aimed at scaling back voting time periods, systems and eligibility. They’re being “slammed” as suppressive because many are suppressive, definitionally. The laws will scale back early-voting hours, or introduce new mandates for submitting a ballot by mail, or change oversight of elections, or remove voting systems. Advocates have often positioned these changes as necessary for a variety of reasons that aren’t always centered on this idea that fraud is a rampant problem, which it isn’t. But the effect is the same: limiting the ways in which people can vote will unquestionably limit how many people vote.

That’s not a popular position to hold. That’s why the fraud claims are particularly useful, as they were for Cruz: He can object to an effort that will mean more people voting (which may mean more Democrats voting) by claiming that he’s mostly just worried about more people voting illegally, something that doesn’t happen to any significant degree even in places with liberal voting laws. It’s like objecting to your husband buying the house where he lived with his first girlfriend by insisting that you’re just worried that it’s haunted.

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Others take a different tack in trying to juxtapose the Republican efforts to constrain voting with the Democratic efforts to expand it. For the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove argued that Democrats should object to existing laws in blue states as ferociously as they do to proposed laws in red ones that would have the same effect, an argument that would likely generate a uniform response from many on the left: “Okay!”

And then there's the argument in that National Journal piece by Josh Kraushaar, that the parties are similarly trying to “game the election rules to their advantage.”

It is true that increases in turnout among low-propensity voters would aid Democrats in many places. It is also true that Democrats are aware of this. But there is nonetheless a distinction between “trying to get more people to vote” and “trying to get fewer people to vote” that intertwines with our original question. Maybe Democrats are only trying to encourage more voting because they think it will lead to their winning more elections. But isn’t having as many eligible people vote as possible a central tenet of democracy?

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Kraushaar does a lot of work to equate the Democratic bill with the suppressive Republican proposals. He amplifies arguments that were common among Republicans in October and November, such as the need to have elections resolved as close to Election Day as possible. He hand-waves other arguments, as when he asserts that “a month of early voting is excessive.” (One argument he offers to justify this position is that important news can break shortly before the election, as though it can’t similarly break shortly after and as though voters are incapable of judging the risks here themselves.)

Then there’s this, referring to the decision of Republican legislators before the 2020 election not to make the counting of absentee votes easier:

“Republicans in several swing states (namely, Pennsylvania) didn’t want an efficient count, the better to sow confusion on Trump’s behalf. Thus they blocked early counting of early votes. And Democrats generally opposed absentee ballots coming in on time because procrastinating voters have historically favored their side. It’s a bipartisan recipe for chaos.”

Whether these things are equivalent, much less a “bipartisan recipe for chaos,” you may judge for yourself. But he also frames Democratic support for counting ballots postmarked before Election Day that arrived after the election as being predicated on partisan scheming. If an older Republican put her ballot in the mail a week before the election but it arrived only the day after, that vote should simply be discarded even as votes cast on Election Day itself — six days after that Republican cast her vote — are counted? Thinking that’s bizarre marks me as a Democratic apologist?

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It’s critical that the ballot arrive by Election Day, Kraushaar claims, because it’s otherwise “difficult for even the most knowledgeable political observers to break down the election tallies on Election Night.”

Oh.

We again return to our original question. How much do you care about getting as many people as possible who are eligible to vote to actually do so? If your answer is that you care about your party’s voters being able to vote and no one else, we might praise your honesty, if not your commitment to democracy. If your answer is that rampant fraud necessitates tight controls on voting, we regret to inform you that you’ve been snookered by dishonest presentations of the risk such activity actually poses.

If your answer is that people who are eligible to vote should be given more opportunities to do so, opportunities that accommodate those who vote rarely or who work late hours or who move regularly, we have bad news for you: You are necessarily a rabid Democratic partisan.

Sorry. Those are the rules.

THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

by Brian Beutler

① Republican culture-war provocations are already cross-pressuring voters who like Joe Biden and the American Rescue Plan

② Those provocations will be central to their total war against democracy reform

③ The right response is to treat democracy reform not as a normal policy fight, but a make-or-break culture-war battle against Trumpism

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FRAUGHT POTATO

Let’s talk about the democracy-reform poll we just conducted with Change Research. I know there are bigger outstanding questions about the fate of democracy reform in Congress and the prospects for filibuster abolition, but it’s all related, and in any case we went over that stuff last week. 

The good news isn’t particularly surprising. Democracy reform is popular, even in a closely divided, polarized state like Arizona, and it’s particularly popular when characterized—as it should be!—in nonpartisan terms as a means of protecting American voters and popular sovereignty. 

There’s some bad news in there, too, about how Republican framing of the For the People Act (which is, of course, nakedly partisan) makes the initiative less popular, and how little voters in Arizona know about the GOP’s voter-suppression efforts in their own state. But, silly as it sounds, the most unsettling result in my mind was this one:

The Republican Cancel Culture strategy is breaking through in Arizona. 82 percent of voters have heard about the Fox News-generated controversy over Dr. Seuss and 67 percent have heard about the controversy over Mr. Potato Head—more than have heard about the For the People Act or the Arizona GOP’s voter-suppression bills.

Arizona voters are concerned about what’s happening to Dr. Seuss. 48 percent say that the controversy is a perfect example of liberal cancel culture run amok, while only 42 percent say it’s a fake controversy invented by conservatives to distract from Biden’s American Rescue Plan.

When the American Rescue Plan passed, the general consensus—and not just among liberals—was that Republicans had disengaged from the process to whine and lie about Dr. Suess and Mr. Potato Head because the bill was so popular, and their lockstep opposition left them nothing but culture-war straws to grasp at.

I argued at the time, and still believe, that this view misconstrued politics as if it were circumscribed by policy fights within and among the branches, rather than what it is: a multifront war where tribal rallying signals and cultural rhetoric matter just as much as policy and governance. And this is what I had in mind: The rescue plan is good, Biden is popular, it isn’t that policy doesn’t matter at all—but Republicans have already successfully cross-pressured supporters of both Biden and the rescue plan on the basis of total nonsense. It’s a mistake to wish away these kind of fights as if they’re immaterial to election outcomes, or to imagine they won't subsume coming fights over democracy reform and everything else. 

① CLOTURE V. CULTURE

It’s worth projecting ahead from here, to think about what a 2022 campaign would look like on the terms prevailing at the moment. In an optimistic scenario, Biden and Democrats will run as the authors of post-COVID prosperity, amid a new roaring ‘20s, replete with White Claw speakeasies, against Republicans arguing that Democrats inherited a boom but wrecked democracy to impose ideological conformity on a reluctant public via cancel culture (and elitist hard seltzer).

Once upon a time I would’ve been pretty sanguine about a formula that says leaders who govern well and don’t fuck up the economy can rest pretty easy and not sweat the bullshit. But if the events of the past several years haven’t at least scrambled your intuitions about that, I envy your serenity.

The irony is that many of the same liberals who admonish Dems to ignore GOP-style culture-war distractions, and train their focus on popular economic appeals, unwittingly embody the fact that culture-war stuff is more potent than they imply. For instance: Nearly all of the leading popularists are also openly contemptuous allyship culture (particularly, promiscuous use of the boycott method) in progressive spaces. That isn't meant as a knock; I actually tend to agree with them that certain aspects of that culture are censorious, easily caricatured, and (this is key) politically counterproductive. But that’s just another way of saying that cultural forces are extremely powerful. Powerful enough to elicit reactionary tendencies even in those who understand how dangerous the Republican Party is.

The upshot, then, can’t be to hope that with good enough governing they can sublimate cultural battles into substantive ones. It should be to engage the culture war on winning grounds, including ones that overlap with good policy.

② REFORMANCE ANXIETY

This is all relevant to the voting-rights context, because Democrats will have to adhere to a strategy drawn chiefly from one of these two political worldviews. They can treat democracy reform as as they might treat a kitchen-table issue, scouring polls to isolate popular components, sacrificing aspects of the reform agenda that lend themselves most easily to Republican culture-war incitement. Or they can embrace the fact that democracy reform is inextricable from culture war, and fight it to win. Grab the Potato Head by the gender-neutral horns, so to speak.

Right now they’re doing a bit of both. 

The bad news is there’s a subset of Senate Democrats (led by Joe Manchin, natch) wasting time pretending as though Republicans (who oppose democracy reform unanimously) might vote for a trimmed down version of S. 1.

The good news is I don’t think any of these machinations is incompatible with the picture I drew last week. Manchin and Dems can use the threat of filibuster reform to pressure Republicans to get on board with a kind of voting-rights detente, then pass a more robust set of reforms if (when) Republicans refuse to play ball. (Assuming no one in the Dem caucus falls gravely ill or dies or what have you.)

The better news is that Democrats’ main-stage message is much more confident than the jockeying-for-position we see peeking out from behind the scenes. Barack Obama’s description of the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” has taken hold both among Democrats and within the broader culture. Democratic leaders say failure to pass democracy reform is not an option. Here’s how Joe Biden described it at his first White House press conference Thursday 

What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick. Deciding in some states that you cannot bring water to people standing in line waiting to vote, deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work, deciding that there will be no absentee ballots under the most rigid circumstances…. The Republican voters I know find this despicable, Republican voters, the folks outside this White House. I’m not talking about the elected officials. I’m talking about voters. Voters. And so I’m convinced that we’ll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing. 

That’s pretty good! 

③ DON BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

To truly take up the culture-war side of the fight, though, I think it’d be hard to do better than making it about Donald Trump—not in the counterproductive, partisan sense of talking about what S.1 would mean for the next election, but as something necessitated by the horrible damage he did to democracy. We see some of this in the jousting over state-level voter-suppression bills, which Republicans justify with The Big Lie™. But simply explaining the bill as necessary to fix what Trump broke and exploited about America democracy would be 1) largely true, 2) simple, and 3) an advantageous way to win both the legislative fight and the broader culture war. Trump IS a culture-war flashpoint as much as anything else in America. He’s also a losing combatant in it, logging in at just a couple ticks above Xi Jinping in the favorability rankings. A veritable “sucker” of the culture war trenches.

I know the Dr. Suess stuff is based on rank dishonesty and in a better world, Republicans would pay a penalty for operating so nakedly in bad faith, rather than reap benefits from it. But it's truly Not Great that 82 percent of Arizonans have heard of the Suess thing and that a plurality of them think it has something to do with the America liberals want to create.

Know who polls just as badly in Arizona as “cancel culture,” though? Donald Trump. 

Finding ways to frame democracy reform in popular terms is fine—good even!—but it’s also susceptible to the tribal attacks Republicans are already leveling at reform from all directions: Democrats want to rig the game to gain more power so they can cancel everything we love about America. Those attacks need an answer. Hoping progressives across the country stop doing easily caricatured things, or scripting a bunch of Sister Souljah moments to distinguish Democrats from the San Francisco school board or Suess enterprises will not cut it. But there's also no reason to be defensive. Make people understand that it’s about Trump; that we need reform because of Trump and Republicans oppose it because of Trump. It isn’t possible to avoid this war, so once you’re in it, you might as well fight the whole thing.

I’m excited to watch this documentary based on James Fallows’s book Our Towns about the dichotomy between our polarized, soul-deadened national outlook, and the spirit of optimism and cooperation that prevails in so many quieter precincts in America. And not just because he uses our mutual hometown of Redlands, CA, as a case in point. 

Biden’s $3 trillion Build Back Better plan is shaping up to be pretty good and an interesting basis for a discussion of the legacy question. You can listen to me and Extremely Smart Person Mike Konczal discuss all of that here.

The dumbing down of the D.C. statehood debate

The dumbing down of the D.C. statehood debate

By 

Aaron Blake

March 23, 2021 at 4:15 a.m. GMT+9

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There are valid, philosophical reasons to argue that Washington, D.C., should not be a state or have voting rights in Congress — chief among them being that it was created as a federal district.

But as the House held a hearing on the topic Monday, much of the Republican pushback wasn’t about that. Instead it was about the idea that it would help Democrats and that D.C. should be deprived of statehood for various other circumstantial reasons.

It was a true commentary on the polarization of our current politics — the idea that anything can be best distilled to raw political power and should be opposed as such.

One of the biggest emerging arguments against D.C. statehood is a thoroughly partisan one. The idea isn’t so much that D.C. doesn’t necessarily deserve voting rights in the House and Senate, as much as that it would be a boon to Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has pushed this idea extensively in recent years, casting both the ideas of D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood as thinly veiled efforts to gain Democratic votes.

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Multiple Republican Congress members picked up on this at Monday’s hearing.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) suggestively asked D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) where she would place “the ideological makeup of D.C. relative to other cities in the country. Is it slightly Democratic, very Democratic, very Republican?” Foxx, as with virtually anyone with even a passing knowledge of our country’s politics, knows the answer. Bowser acknowledged that D.C. was “more than slightly Democratic,” understating things by a fair amount. (Washington gave each of the past four Democratic presidential nominees at least 90 percent of the vote.)

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) cast this as “a key part of the radical leftist agenda to reshape America,” likening it to the Green New Deal, among other things.

There is little doubt that Democrats’ interest in this owes in large part to the electoral advantage that would result. Given the party’s difficult math in keeping both the House and (especially) the Senate, having two additional senators from a reliably blue state would be big for them. This is also not an idea in which Democrats have always been in lockstep. The last time a D.C. statehood bill came up for a vote in the House before last year was in 1993, and more than 100 House Democrats voted against it.

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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has even cited the political benefit, telling The Washington Post recently that “there’s a national political logic for it, too, because the Senate has become the principal obstacle to social progress across a whole range of issues.”

But the idea that this is part of a “radical leftist agenda” doesn’t really match up with the history. There was a time relatively recently in which plenty of Republicans thought that “taxation without representation” in the District was a bad look. Both conservative icon Barry Goldwater and former president Richard M. Nixon favored D.C. statehood. The 1972 and 1976 Republican Party platforms endorsed voting rights for Washington in the House and Senate. And both chambers of Congress in 1978 passed a proposed constitutional amendment (i.e. with two-thirds majorities) to that effect, with half of GOP senators voting for it. The amendment was not ratified by enough states.

Even Republican Donald Trump, after launching his presidential campaign in 2015, suggested that he was open to D.C. statehood (albeit at a time when he was opening up a D.C. hotel and the seriousness of his campaign was debatable). “I would like to do whatever is good for the District of Columbia, because I love the people,” Trump said at the time. Trump later reversed course, aligning with his party.

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It’s fair to argue this is about partisan advantage, but that doesn’t mean it’s “radical,” and it doesn’t address the merits of the situation.

Other arguments advanced more novel ideas against statehood.

For example, Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who just announced a primary challenge to Trump antagonist Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), suggested that Washington doesn’t deserve voting rights because it doesn’t have some of the things actual states do.

“D.C. would be the only state — the only state — without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill, without even a name of its own, and we can go on and on and on,” Hice said.

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Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) also suggested D.C. doesn’t meet the qualifications of a state because of its lack of manufacturing, agriculture or mining -- “all three of which have to be very tiny compared to that what we get in a normal state.”

It would indeed be unusual for a city to be made a state, but D.C. does have car dealerships. It also has three airports in proximity with “Washington” in their names.

And none of the things Hice and Grothman mentioned are prerequisites for statehood. Indeed, there are literal countries without their own airports. In addition, Delaware, the home state of our current president, has gone for years until recently without regularly scheduled commercial flights. Washington also has a larger population than two states — Vermont and Wyoming — which some might argue is a better metric for voting rights than anything else.

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(None of these arguments, it bears noting, would fare nearly so well against Puerto Rican statehood.)

One of the witnesses Monday had perhaps the most interesting take on why Washington doesn’t need statehood. The Heritage Foundation’s Zack Smith argued that D.C. has plenty of say, given that members of Congress might see lawn signs that could influence their votes.

“There’s no question that D.C. residents already impact the national debate,” Smith said. “For the members here today, how many of you saw D.C. statehood yard signs or bumper stickers or banners on your way to this hearing today? I certainly did. Where else in the nation could such simple actions reach so many members of Congress?”

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The first problem is that many members of Congress aren’t really traveling through much of the residential neighborhoods of Washington — at least those filled with natives or longtime D.C. residents — to get to work. (Many live close to the Capitol, alongside lots of other federal government employees with less interest in the voting rights of the District’s residents.) The second is the idea that putting up a yard sign is hardly the same as having voting power. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted, D.C. residents have had “taxation without representation” on their license plates for years; it hasn’t yet convinced Congress to act.

Again there are reasons, philosophically, to think that Washington should remain a federal district. Even many Democrats used to feel this way, as little as a quarter-century ago (though there had been overwhelming support for congressional voting rights). At the national level, polling shows that the needle has moved toward statehood, but not in an overwhelming way. And you might even argue that such a change should require a constitutional amendment.

But that’s a tougher argument than pitching this as being about partisan politics, airports, landfills and yard signs.

Correction: This post has been updated to reflect that D.C. also has a larger population than Vermont.

Can a grand bargain empower Amazon’s workers and limit corporate power?

Can a grand bargain empower Amazon’s workers and limit corporate power?

By Nelson Lichtenstein

Nelson Lichtenstein is research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is writing a history of economic policy during the Clinton Administration.

March 25, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. GMT+9

If so, it could transform American capitalism

Union leaders are joined by community group representatives, elected officials and social activists for a rally in support of unionization efforts by Amazon workers in Alabama on March 21 in Los Angeles. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

The union certification vote at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., fulfillment center has received enormous attention, including from President Biden. Some 5,000 workers are likely to participate in the mail-in ballot before the end of this month. But Amazon itself employs nearly 1 million blue-collar workers at more than 110 U.S. distribution centers, so the stakes are enormous. A union victory might well spur other Amazon employees to organize. A defeat will undoubtedly be a large setback — not only for organized labor but for contemporary efforts to reduce economic inequality in the United States and limit the seemingly unfettered economic and cultural power that Silicon Valley corporations now hold.

The vote comes at a time in which critics across the political spectrum believe that Amazon is too big and holds too much power. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and others on the right oppose Silicon Valley’s cultural liberalism, while on the left, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is among the many voices proposing a break up of Big Tech. And of course, even if a majority of Bessemer employees vote for a union, success on a companywide basis will require both more organizing and more governmental pressure.

But the union certification vote could be a key step toward the sort of grand bargain that will shift the contours of American capitalism. A similar compact was struck during the New Deal in the battle over the legitimacy and power of chain retailers. That history shows that trade unionism itself may well be the most efficacious road to a reform of Silicon Valley capitalism.

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This is not the first time a giant retailer has been caught between unionizing pressures from below and antitrust agitation from the Washington corridors of power. During the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of multistate chain stores — Woolworth, J.C. Penney’s, A&P, Safeway and several others — generated every bit as much alarm as that evoked by Amazon and Facebook today.

Much opposition came from the South, where “the chain-store menace” was equated with Yankee imperialism, the destruction of local enterprise and the emasculation of White manhood as a generation of independent proprietors were transformed into an army of salaried clerks beholden to New York capitalists. Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana and later a U.S. senator, told his constituents, “I would rather have thieves and gangsters than chain stores in Louisiana.”

Rep. Wright Patman (D-Tex.) championed the anti-chain-store movement. A progressive populist — except on issues of race — Patman had partnered with Sen. Joseph Robinson (D-Ark.) to pass legislation in 1936 that sought to thwart the competitive advantage enjoyed by the chains. These stores used their scale to leverage kickbacks and discounts from suppliers and deployed “loss leaders” — popular items with deeply slashed prices — both to ruin competitors and entice customers into the store. Patman and Robinson wanted to mandate a national standard, “retail price maintenance,” to insure that stores both large and small sold toothpaste, canned soup and 1,000 other items for the same price. Patman saw “the huge chain stores sapping the civic life of local communities with an absentee overlordship … and reducing their independent business men to employees or to idleness.”

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The price maintenance law proved largely ineffective, so in 1937 and 1938, Patman stepped up the anti-chain-store pressure with a legislative proposal that would impose a heavy tax on retail corporations with more than 10 outlets in multiple states. Opponents rightly called it a “death sentence” law, because the tax burden rose in near-exponential fashion on the largest and most geographically pervasive chains. Fifteen states had already enacted a somewhat more modest set of escalating taxes, which the Supreme Court — still sharply conservative — had ruled constitutional.

No store was in Patman’s crosshairs more than “The Great A&P,” a grocery behemoth that had 15,000 stores in the early 1930s. It also had a vast array of captive food-processing enterprises that easily enabled the New York-based company to undercut its small-town competition and whipsaw grocery wholesalers. Nearly 1 in 7 grocery dollars spent by American consumers flowed across A&P counters. Like Amazon today, A&P used its massive purchasing power to squeeze and manipulate the business practices of tens of thousands of farmers, druggists, wholesalers and vendors of every sort.

Urban consumers generally liked A&P’s low prices, but trade unions certainly didn’t like the long hours required of workers and the low wages it paid them. As the writer Marc Levinson shows, brothers George and John Hartford, who had helped found the company in the 19th century, were paternalists who hated trade unionism. In 1934, when a coalition of unions struck at A&P stores in Cleveland, the Hartfords closed all 293 of their stores in the city and discharged 2,200 workers. White House intervention got the stores reopened and the workers rehired, but A&P signed no contract with organized labor.

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Worried about the consequence of chain-busting regulations like the one proposed by Patman, the Hartfords reluctantly reached out to the labor movement — not the radical Congress of Industrial Organizations, but the more moderate American Federation of Labor (AFL). Congress had passed the Wagner Act in 1935, providing a framework for collective bargaining and boosting the power of labor, as demonstrated by sit-down strikes among the clerks at Woolworth stores. Early in 1938, AFL President William Green met with A&P executives, where the makings of a deal became obvious: If A&P would sign contracts with unions representing meat cutters, retail clerks and truck drivers, organized labor would oppose the Patman bill, allowing the chain to survive.

The bargain worked. Instead of endorsing Patman’s initiative, the AFL declared that it would study “taxes of discriminatory and punitive character.” State labor federations in Texas and Louisiana came out against the federal chain-store tax, and Patrick Gorman of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters declared “mass production methods are here to stay as long as consumers demand them.”

For its part, A&P ceased to oppose labor organization in its stores, leading to rapid organization of grocery workers in the urban North — not only at A&P, but also at rivals Safeway, Kroger and many regionally important chains. With the rise of chain supermarkets in the postwar era, the locally owned independent grocer virtually ceased to exist, but grocery unions flourished. Wages were never particularly high in the sector, but stable employment (everyone has to buy food, even in recessions) and seniority guarantees ensured that unionized grocery workers could expect something close to a career at work, with health insurance, a pension and enough income to buy a house. Today 1.3 million workers are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

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Chains thrived — but so did workers.

Could such a deal be made today?

Amazon is adamantly hostile to unionization of its employees. As spokeswoman Heather Knox asserts, “We believe we already offer everything the unions are requesting and that we highly value direct communication with our employees.” But that attitude might fade if Amazon executives truly feared that the federal government was serious about regulating, fissuring and taxing the company, and that its core business model was in danger. Then, like the Hartfords, unionization of its several hundred thousand workers could seem the lesser evil. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

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Critics of such a deal might argue that Amazon and the other powerful Silicon Valley firms, where union organizing efforts are also stirring, constitute a far more genuine threat to economic and political democracy than A&P in its heyday. The effort to tame them can’t be traded away for a mess of union pottage.

Unions are weaker today than they were in the 1930s, but the idea that wages have to rise and democracy has to be revitalized, in the workplace and beyond, is returning in an echo of that era. During the heyday of postwar prosperity, when real income doubled and trade unionism stood at its 20th century apogee, General Motors, U.S. Steel and other high-wage, highly unionized firms were oligopolies paying uniform wages in a society where labor’s power enforced work rights on the shop floor and helped shape social policy, constrain market forces and limit corporate influence. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith famously called this “countervailing power.” It might be a grand bargain worth considering.

The coming Unemployment Insurance bottleneck

The coming Unemployment Insurance bottleneck

By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com. 

March 25, 2021. 

Man singing at a protest with a sign reading "MITCH BETTER HAVE MY MONEY; extend unemployment insurance; save the $600"

(Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

An acquaintance recently told me that he’d been offered his bartending job back now that things are opening up again, but he’s actually making more money thanks to bonus Unemployment Insurance. So what he’s going to do is just do some shifts unpaid and collect tips off the books.

This is not how the system is “supposed to work,” but in practical terms, it’s a win-win. I also heard a story of a restaurant owner who considered offering that deal to a former employee who doesn’t want his old job back, but the owner decided it’s not worth it given the risk of getting caught. So the guy is just going to continue collecting UI for a bit and see what happens.

Anecdotes are not data! And two examples aren’t even a proper trend.

But I do think there’s a real issue here, as a policy that was designed for a world of widespread restrictions on business activity is rapidly colliding with a reality that basically everything will be open all summer. No halfway decent person is going to say “Aha! We’ve got to stick it the unemployed by cutting benefits.” But bonus UI costs a bunch of money, and there are ways to restructure the program to be more helpful to people and to better fit the aid to the actual situation we face.

The weird Unemployment Insurance situation

Unemployment Insurance in the United States is, for bad historical reasons, run as a joint state-federal program for which the feds kick in some of the money, but all the administration and many of the rules are in the hands of the states.

The idea of UI is that if you qualify (which often isn’t the case), the UI system will replace some, but not all, of your wages. Due to decentralization, the replacement rate varies considerably, but it’s always pretty stingy — in part to keep taxes low and in part because conservatives tend to believe that generous UI replacement rates actually make unemployment higher by making people less desperate to accept new jobs.

Flash back to late-February and early-March of 2020 and it’s clear that a ton of people are going to lose their jobs due to the pandemic. Many countries adopt systems where, in effect, the government pays companies to not lay their workers off. American policymakers think it would be a better idea to simply let the UI system address this and make benefits more generous. Due to the nature of the crisis, the concern about the disemployment effect sort of went away, and Democrats (led, I believe, by Ron Wyden, who’s their top guy on the Senate finance committee) moved to both extend the duration of unemployment benefits and also increase the UI replacement rate.

But then state administrators start saying their systems can’t, technically speaking, just kick people up to a 95% or 100% replacement rate. So Democrats come up with the kludge of just adding $600 to everyone’s weekly benefit, calculating that this is both a round number and also creates an approximately 100% replacement rate for the average worker. Republicans briefly freak out that this is too generous; Bernie Sanders turns it into a thing on social media; and Steve Mnuchin basically tells congressional Republicans to shut up and pass the damn CARES Act before the economy collapses.

Doing it as a flat increase creates a weird situation where the people in the bottom half of the earnings distribution are better off losing their jobs than remaining employed. There are a lot of different ways to visualize this, but I like this chart by occupation — a lot of “lockdown” opponents painted themselves as friends to the retail and foodservice workers of America, but the fact is that with the CARES Act in place, these people were better off financially after losing their jobs, to say nothing of health risks.

Graph showing median replacement rate of wages for workers in different common occupations

Now interestingly, the best research available says this did not cause higher unemployment than you’d have seen otherwise. One reason is that the incredible generosity of the CARES Act helped bolster the demand side of the economy. Another reason is that there just wasn’t a lot of hiring of foodservice workers and receptionists during this time — if there aren’t any job openings, it doesn’t really matter if job-seekers are a little under-motivated. Last but by no means least, this CARES bonus UI was set to kind of randomly expire in the summer of 2020 with no clear plan to replace it. So many people still liked the security of a job.

Here we are a year later, and somehow none of the problems with state UI programs have been fixed. So the American Rescue Plan once again includes a UI bonus. This time it’s less generous — only $300/week — but now it’s set to run through early September. But unless something goes horribly awry, there should be plenty of hiring demand in May, June, July, and August. So the risk of a disemployment effect seems bigger than it was last year, even though the program is stingier.

The numbers on $300 a week

I asked Peter Ganong, the lead author of that paper I just referenced, about replacement rates under the new, less generous scheme. He observed that because the Rescue Plan also contains an increase in COBRA subsidies, in some cases it’s more appropriate to look at this as a $400/week bonus rather than $300/week.

This chart shows it both ways.

graph showing share of benefit eligibles in group based on a $300 or $400 supplement

The upshot here is that conservatively, 40% of the jobless are better off unemployed than back at their old jobs. That’s less because the bonus is so generous and more because of the way the pandemic shook out, where the unemployed are disproportionately low-wage workers.

Now I think the people who are getting a very-slightly-above 100% replacement rate would still rather have a job, since the bonus UI is going to expire.

But if you are currently unemployed and taking a job means a 20% or even 40% drop in income, then of course you’re going to hesitate. That’s especially true because working often comes with costs, especially things like childcare. If you’re young, it’s going to be extremely tempting to make this a Party Summer and then figure things out in September. If you’re not-so-young, then you can pocket your UI benefits and save yourself summer childcare burdens and then figure things out in September.

This is not the end of the world or anything, but it could be an undesirable roadblock to economic recovery.

The specter of inflation

To me, the biggest reason to worry about this is that we’re now living through a somewhat ridiculous surge of concern about inflation.

The basic fear here is that Biden and the Fed have done too much to stimulate the economy, and now we’re going to overheat. I don’t buy that. But I do buy that we will face some supply bottlenecks. One thing I’ve really missed during the pandemic is working in my neighborhood coffee shops. But three of those coffee shops have closed down over the past year. If everyone tries to resume our pre-pandemic coffee habits, there’s not going to be anyplace for us to go. If the owners reap extraordinary profits for a little while by charging a price premium, I say they deserve it.

But part of why it’s fine is that it should induce new coffee shops to open. One of the three closed places already has a new vape shop in the former space. But two are just empty, and there are other vacant storefronts around.

We want Jay Powell to say “it’s fine that coffee prices have gone up and nobody can get a seat because a bunch of new places are about to open.”

But if people don’t really want to take new jobs this summer, it will be hard for new businesses to open (and for existing ones to expand their hours), keeping some prices up, which could create a big overheating narrative that in turn slows the recovery and/or discredits expansionary policy.

It would be good to avoid that outcome, but especially good to avoid that outcome without being stingier to low-wage workers.

Some ideas for improvement

My favorite way to improve the current policy is pretty simple.

Right now, everyone is eligible for about 23 weeks of $300/week bonus Unemployment Insurance.

If you get a job tomorrow and don’t need those 23 weeks, you should get a $6,900 check.

If it takes a few months for you to and you only have 10 weeks of eligibility left by the time you get a job, you should then get a check for $3,000.

If you get a job two weeks before the bonus expires, you then get a check for $600.

This works for everyone. Since a job pays more than regular UI, you are always better-off financially saying yes to a job offer. Then, since taking the job triggers a big cash payment, it also works as fiscal stimulus. You could imagine doing this on a bipartisan basis or throwing it into a second reconciliation bill later in the year.

I see basically no downside to this idea and think it’s what Congress should do.

Another way to go would be to stretch the UI bonus out. You could say that starting in mid-June the bonus tapers down to only $200/week, but then instead of ending in September you get a $100/week bonus through the end of the year. That improves the work incentives while also doing more than the current plan to help the people who are most in need. I like the bonus idea more, but I hear from some people on the Hill that there is worry about the politics of such large checks going out to some people while essential workers who’ve been on the job this whole time get neither.

Either option would be a big improvement on the status quo. Also — Congress should fix Unemployment Insurance.

Let’s make this better

March 2020 was a crisis situation, and they did the best they could. There were a lot of administrative problems with people getting signed up, but they mostly ultimately did get signed up.

Still, more than a year later, we are left with fundamental flaws in our system:

The state administration doesn’t help achieve anything, and states seem to administer UI poorly. We should federalize it.

The actual underlying computer systems should not be so clunky and bad as to have made it impossible to simply increase the replacement rate.

Bonus UI as a recession-response is highly effective, but it should be made automatic and conditions-based rather than relying on arbitrary timetables.

To just discuss that last point, we often have a tradeoff in stimulus between targeting (which is good because you want effective stimulus) and universality (which is good for popularity and reaching more struggling people).

Bonus UI is both.

Giving money to the jobless is very good targeting because they have immediate financial needs. But Unemployment Insurance as a system is a universalistic program that everyone can use when they need it. The way this ought to work is that when the ratio of job-seekers to job-openings is high, the replacement rate gets more generous. That’s a time when the economy needs stimulus more than it needs to worry about search effort. Then when the ratio normalizes, it should become less generous (though probably still more generous than average benefits today) as we worry more about incentives and less about stimulus.

Democrats kept considering doing automatic stabilizers and then dropping the idea, worrying about the CBO score if you didn’t have programs arbitrarily phase out. But thanks to a fairly rapid pace of vaccination, it now looks like an automatic program probably would have been cheaper than a schedule-based one. Which is a reminder that while there’s room in life for cynical political calculation, when faced with genuine uncertainty, the fallback of doing the right thing is always a good option.