March 2, 2023

Thursday, March 2, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

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Joe is always busy.

Touch 👇to watch the President describe Eli Lilly’s decision to cap the cost of insulin for EVERYONE at $35/month. They and American Airlines (described in the 2nd tweet) are heeding the President’s call.

Biden could issue his first presidential veto.

The Senate passed a politically charged resolution on Wednesday to overturn a Biden administration retirement investment rule that allows managers of retirement funds to consider the impact of climate change and other environmental, social and governance factors when picking investments.

Republicans complain the rule is “woke” policy that pushes a liberal agenda on Americans and will hurt retirees’ bottom lines, while Democrats say it’s not about ideology and will help investors.

The measure, which would rescind a Department of Labor rule, will next go to President Joe Biden’s desk as it was passed by the House on Tuesday. The administration, however, has issued a veto threat. As a result, passage of the resolution could pave the way for Biden to issue the first veto of his presidency.

Opponents of the rule could try to override a veto, but at this point it appears unlikely they could get the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to do so.

The resolution, authored by GOP Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, only needed a simple majority to pass. It passed on a vote of 50 to 46 with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana voting with Republicans.

Republican lawmakers advanced it under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to roll back regulations from the executive branch without needing to clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate that is necessary for most legislation. (CNN).

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What ever happened to that recession?

The Reason the Recession Hasn’t Happened Yet.

What happened to that recession? The recession we were supposed to be in right now, I mean—the one that various forecasters assured us was a sure thing. The “writing is on the wall,” many economists believed in June. A downturn was “effectively certain” as of October. Maybe the dip was already here, some suspected, and we just had yet to notice it.

Or not. Unemployment is holding steady at its lowest rate in half a century. Layoffs are not increasing. The economy is growing at a decent clip. Wages are rising, and households are not reducing their spending. Corporate profits are near an all-time high. Consumers report feeling confident. So why were forecasters so certain about a recession last year, leading so many people to feel so pessimistic?

Perhaps the simplest explanation for why so many forecasters seem to have gotten it so wrong is that economic forecasting is hard.

Why not this time? In part because of long-simmering bottlenecks and shortfalls in the economy. Rising borrowing costs led to a drop in new housing starts, as economists expected. But construction activity did not slow down, because the backlog of projects was so substantial. Similarly, the jump in interest rates dampened consumers’ ability to buy cars. Yet years of shortages, particularly in the used-car market, helped to sustain sales.

More important, the American labor market turned out to be much stronger than economists had realized, and the American consumer far more irrepressible, thanks to the policy response to the coronavirus pandemic. When COVID hit, the federal government spent trillions on small-business support and cash payments to families, meaning that low-income households did not reduce their spending despite the jobless rate reaching nearly 15 percent. Indeed, they actually increased their spending. What’s more, the strong policy response had the (honestly, a bit weird) effect of boosting private-sector wages: Workers dislocated from their jobs scored significant raises when they went back to work. At the same time, because of widespread labor shortages, businesses have proved loath to let workers go.

Of course, these dynamics are part of the reason so many economists expect a recession. The economy is so good that the Federal Reserve is trying to put a damper on it, to avoid high rates of inflation triggering a more chaotic and worse recession in the future. That might mean a slowdown sooner rather than later: Consumers have started to run down the cash cushion they built up during the early phase of the pandemic. Wage growth is stagnating. Inflation remains stubbornly high, despite the Fed’s rate hikes, meaning the central bank is likely to make borrowing yet more expensive. “With a bit of luck and reasonably good policy making by the Fed, the economy should be able to skirt recession,” Zandi told me. “The widespread pessimism has served the purposes of the Fed, since it has weighed on consumer spending and business investment, which are critical to cooling off the economy and getting inflation back in its bottle.”

Or it might turn out that forecasts of a recession were not entirely wrong—just early. (Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic).

It’s O.K. to be confused about this economy.

The wisest course of action would be for Jerome Powell and the Fed to tread lightly and wait for more data before raising interest rates much further.

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Inflation is falling steadily, or is it? If over-all employment is growing strongly, why are tech giants laying off hundreds of thousands of workers? Is the economy heading for a “soft landing” rather than a “hard landing,” or will it be a “no landing” or a “rolling recession”? If the latest economic news has left you unsure about the true state of the economy, you aren’t alone.

On Monday, the National Association for Business Economics released its latest survey of forty-eight professional forecasters, and the results were all over the place. Though the median prediction showed the inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (the broadest measure of what the economy produces) eking out a modest expansion of 0.3 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2023, the projections ranged from negative 1.3 per cent—a significant slump—to positive 1.9 per cent, which would represent a relatively healthy growth rate. Moreover, that wasn’t the only thing that the forecasters disagreed on. Estimates of inflation, labor-market indicators, and interest rates “are all widely diffused, likely reflecting a variety of opinions on the fate of the economy—ranging from recession to soft landing to robust growth,” the association’s president, Julia Coronado, of MacroPolicy Perspectives, said.

The divided opinions among economists were also on display at a conference on monetary policy that the University of Chicago Booth School of Business hosted in New York, last Friday. A group of economists from academia and Wall Street, which included the former Federal Reserve governor Frederic Mishkin, presented a research paper that cast doubt on hopes the central bank will be able to bring inflation down to its target of two per cent without causing a recession of some kind. After examining prior periods of disinflation going back more than seventy years and running simulations on an economic model, the economists said their findings suggested that “the Fed will need to tighten policy significantly further to achieve its inflation objective by the end of 2025.” Virtually all economists agree on at least one thing: the further the Fed raises interest rates, the more likely it is that its inflation-fighting exercise will end in a full-on recession.

With the month-to-month figures bouncing around, and data revisions clouding the picture, the short answer is that we just don’t know. And, given that we don’t know, the wisest course of action would be for the Fed to tread lightly and wait for more data before raising interest rates much further. In the course of the past three years, the economy has been hit by three huge shocks: the coronavirus pandemic; an energy-price spike caused by the war in Ukraine; and, most recently, the sharpest rise in Fed interest rates in forty years. In the wake of these tumultuous events, it is hardly surprising that some long-standing economic relationships appear to have broken down, leaving even the experts confounded, and pointing to a cautious policy approach as the appropriate one.

What is the takeaway from all of this? First, beware anyone who claims to know exactly where the economy is heading. Second, have a bit of sympathy for Powell, Jefferson, and their colleagues at the Fed. Another speaker at Friday’s conference was Mervyn King, a former chair of the Bank of England. After delivering his own analysis of where the inflation surge came from and how it might be resolved, King conceded, “I wouldn’t want to give advice to any central banks about what we should do.” ♦ (John Cassidy. The New Yorker).

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Women’s History Month began March 1.

Michael Cardona is the Biden-Harris Secretary of Education.

Touch below 👇to watch the Vice President. Women’s Empowerment Month.

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What are the anti-abortion Catholics in the Thomas More Society doing now?

For decades, lawyers at the Thomas More Society have backed provocateurs and long shot causes in hopes of winning severe restrictions on abortion in the U.S.

As others in the anti-abortion movement distanced themselves from clinic protestors accused of trespassing, vandalism and sometimes violence, the Thomas More Society defended them in civil and criminal court. The legal nonprofit once sided with a Wisconsin pharmacist who refused to fill a birth control prescription on religious grounds.

Fact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever.

More recently, the Chicago-based organization has embraced a far different but equally divisive undertaking — relentlessly questioning the integrity of elections. Leaping into the 2020 “Stop the Steal” frenzy, which was consistently discredited, the Thomas More Society aggressively pursued scores of lawsuits and complaints across the country.

Yet for all the scrutiny given to election denialism and its champions — including Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn and Sidney Powell, former advisers to President Donald Trump — the significant role played by the Thomas More Society has received little attention. (ProPublica).

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Send this to your Banana Republican Friends! Or send the whole Roundup to them!

Jamie Raskin on the offense in Congress. (Touch the tweet below 👇 to watch Raskin in action).

Democrats are also on offense as the extremists now in the majority are exposing their lack of understanding of how the government works. Both Raskin and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called out Republicans today for basic errors in drafting legislation, and witness Colin Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy, embarrassed Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) in a hearing about aid to Ukraine after the congressman apparently thought he had found a “gotcha” story in the Global Times.

“I’m sorry, is this the Global Times from China?” Kahl asked. Gaetz said no, then checked and said yes, it was, asking if that made it untrustworthy. “As a general matter, I don’t take Beijing's propaganda at face value,” Kahl answered. Gaetz answered: “Fair enough.”

Raskin also called out Republicans for a “grammatical error”: their long-standing habit of using “Democrat” as an adjective as if it is an insult.

Noting Colorado Republican representative Lauren Boebert’s reference to a “Democrat solution,” Raskin pointed out that “Democrat” is a noun, and Republicans should, in such cases, be using the adjective: “Democratic.”

He said he was beginning to suspect that this word usage was intended to be “an act of incivility”—as of course it is—and he turned the tables. Their grammatical error was “as if every time we mentioned the other party, it just came out…like: ‘Oh, the Banana Republican Party,’ as if we were to say that every time we mentioned ‘the Banana Republican member’ or ‘the Banana Republican plan,’ or the ‘Banana Republican conference.’” (The term “banana republic” refers to a country that is corrupt and badly governed.)

“But we wouldn’t do that,” he said. “So, out of pure political courtesy, when it’s an adjective, refer to the ‘Democratic’ congresswoman or the ‘Democratic’ member.” (Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American).

‘Error 404: Journalism Not Found’

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts on his conservative news network promoted false narratives that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, court documents released on Monday showed.

“If there are any Fox viewers watching this — first off, I assume you’re looking for remote batteries. Try the junk drawer in the kitchen,” Stephen Colbert joked on Tuesday’s “Late Show.” “Second, you should know a few things about Fox that it isn’t telling you.”

“Fox News is being sued for defamation because their hosts endorsed lies about the 2020 election, while their text messages to each other prove that they knew Joe Biden won fair and square, and that their guests talking about stealing the election were all crazy liars. Also, no one can invent a pillow — they already existed!” — STEPHEN COLBERT

“Last month, Murdoch sat down for a deposition as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, and he admitted under oath that election lies were knowingly endorsed by Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, collectively known as dumb, dumber, dumbest and Sean Hannity.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

“The Dominion lawsuit is a massive story, which is why Fox News isn’t covering it. In fact, if you go to their website and search the past two months for the words ‘Dominion Voting Systems,’ you don’t get an article — not a single article. You just get a page that says ‘Error 404: Journalism Not Found.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT

(New York Times).

Touch below 👇 to watch Colbert in action.

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If your only complaint about Joe is his age, get ready to vote #Biden2024.

Joe Biden is pretty good at being president. He should run again.

My argument in this piece is simple: Joe Biden, the incumbent president of the United States, should run for reelection.

“Should someone with high odds of dying in office run for president?” is a fair question. “Should someone with elevated odds of undergoing cognitive decline during his term run for president?” is an even better question.

But I think in this case the answer is clearly yes.

Joe Biden has been a pretty good president

The most basic reason for a president to decline reelection is if they’re doing a bad job and are calamitously unpopular — if they’re overseeing a brutal war like Johnson and Truman were, or surging inflation or joblessness, or some other kind of disaster.

Biden is not in the strongest position you can imagine for a president seeking reelection; he’s less popular than the last three presidents to win reelection were at this point. But he’s more popular than Ronald Reagan was at this point, which — given that Reagan went on to win 49 states in 1984 on his way to reelection — tells you a bit about how poor an indicator approval ratings are this far from Election Day.

But Biden is not at all in the position that Johnson or Truman were in. He is not prosecuting a war with US troops; in fact, he ended the war in Afghanistan after 20 crushing years (a move that, somewhat ironically, marked the beginning of a prolonged dip in his approval ratings). And while the way that withdrawal happened left a lot to be desired, nothing like the sight of US troops being slaughtered during the Tet Offensive (as preceded Johnson’s decision not to seek election) is happening now.

Nor, contrary to much speculation, is the US economy in recession. The economy grew at a steady if unspectacular 2.7 percent last quarter; unemployment is the lowest it’s been since 1969 (LBJ’s war was bad for humans but great for jobs in defense industries); inflation is elevated but falling, or at least relatively stable. Wages are rising quickly, especially for less-educated workers in service and manual labor jobs. You have to go back to the dot-com boom of the late ’90s to get a better economic picture than the one Americans are enjoying right now, and this one is arguably more equitable.

Biden deserves a lot of credit for that state of affairs — more than the credit or blame that presidents usually deserve for the state of the economy.

Learning from the overly tepid fiscal stimulus enacted by the Obama administration in response to the 2007-2009 recession, at the start of his term Biden ushered through a massive $1.9 trillion package, the American Rescue Plan, that kept progress on jobs and wages from stalling out as Trump-era measures faded.

The package overshot significantly; he made the opposite mistake that Obama made in 2009. But his was the better direction in which to err: the inflation that resulted, while painful, was less painful than the many years of excess unemployment and depressed demand that resulted after 2009. In the meantime, the measure plunged child poverty to a record low by expanding the child tax credit.

Much has been made of the ways in which moderate Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Krysten Sinema (I-AZ) frustrated Biden’s grander ambitions. It’s certainly true that Sinema blocked his plans to tax high earners more heavily, and Manchin kept the child tax credit improvements from being made permanent.

But looking at what actually did pass during Biden’s first two years, one gets a different picture. Biden signed the largest investment in R&D and deployment of clean energy in US history into law; the head of the International Energy Agency termed it the world’s most important climate action since the Paris accords.

Separately, Biden signed into law hundreds of billions in new science funding, passed on a bipartisan basis as part of an effort to strengthen semiconductor manufacturing. After the Trump administration’s famous failure to pass an infrastructure bill, Biden did it.

Looking abroad, the administration’s handling of the Ukraine war has been outstanding. Choosing to release intelligence showing Russia’s invasion plans in the weeks leading up to the attack was a masterstroke, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin any ability to claim that Ukraine provoked him. Biden has kept his G7 counterparts aligned in imposing sanctions on Russia, denying it oil revenue, and supplying weapons to Ukraine.

The result is a war that is already vastly more costly than Putin bargained for, without US or NATO troops being dragged into the conflict, and backdoor progress on something US presidents had been fruitlessly pursuing for years: increased European military spending.

Biden does have some notable failures, most importantly the continuing massive death toll of Covid-19. In his first year, he mobilized the largest vaccination campaign in our history to face it, with shots going from coveted and hard-to-access to ubiquitous and available at any pharmacy in a matter of months.

But the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to allow a vaccine mandate for most employersslowed adoption, as did partisan resistance to the shots among conservatives. The emergence of the more transmissible delta and omicron variants meant the disease surgedeven as vaccines were readily available.

The risk of a Biden in decline

There’s another risk of a Biden run worth highlighting here: that he doesn’t die in office, but gradually undergoes cognitive decline serious enough to make him unable to serve.

The particular danger of this situation is that it’s not clear-cut. Biden is either alive or dead; he is not, in a binary way, either impaired or non-impaired. It’s a gradient and the change is gradual. We can agree that he seems fine now, and that if he were to start forgetting his own name or that he’s the president, that would be too far. It’s harder to agree at what point between those extremes he should step aside.

I don’t have an especially satisfying answer here, other than to say that his doctors see no signs of cognitive decline to date, that I subjectively agree, and that thankfully the 25th Amendment provides procedures for Harris to becoming acting president should Biden’s decline worsen dramatically. In an ideal world, this is why you run younger nominees for president. But Biden’s other advantages as a candidate, I think, outweigh the risk of cognitive decline.

Taking together all these factors, the case for Biden running again is simple. Joe Biden has been a pretty good president. He stands a better chance of winning the presidency in 2024 than any other Democrat. Those points alone should suffice. (Dylan Matthews, Vox).

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Many of us will live to be 100. How will you use your years?

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