Category: Domestic Policy

Monday Wake Up Call – September 26, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Arches NP, UT – September 2022 photo by Nathan Smith

It can now take longer than 10 years for a typical first-time US home buyer to afford the down payment on a modest house, so says S&P Global in a July report (registration required). From the report:

“By fourth-quarter 2022, it will take 11.3 years for a first-time homebuyer with median income to save for a 10% down payment. It will take this homeowner 22.6 years to save for a 20% down payment. Both are over twice their pre-pandemic rates of five and 10.6 years, respectively.”

S&P estimates that with house prices rising so quickly, down payments are now twice the amount that they were before the pandemic. They also estimate that 60% of households could be priced out of the housing market by Q4 2025.

The NYT also is looking at the US housing market. They say that the US has a deepening housing crisis, including an acute shortage of:

“small, no-frills homes that would give a family new to the country or a young couple with student debt a foothold to build equity…”

Factors include land costs, costs of construction materials and government fees. The typical new home has grown in median size over the past 60 years, while the average number of people living in each home has declined:

These long-term trends were accelerated by the pandemic, which drove up demand for homes and house prices as people scattered, worked from home, and snapped up second residences.

Local policies are also driving this new reality. The Times reports that communities nationwide:

“…are far more prescriptive today than decades ago….Some ban vinyl siding. Others require two-car garages. Nearly all make it difficult to build the kind of home that could sell for $200,000 today,”

So, high prices due to high demand. High mortgage rates due to the FED clamping down on inflation. And cities and towns making it more difficult to build low-end homes. On top of that, investors bought about a quarter of all single family houses sold last year.

Wrongo grew up when homes were affordable for a one-salary family. His 1,400 sq.ft. “starter home” in a tidy NJ suburb (walk to take the NYC train to Wall Street) cost $28,000 in 1970. We sold it for $38,000 in 1976. Zillow estimates that it would sell today for $647,000, 23 times what it did in 1969! It’s unbelievable how high home values in that neighborhood have risen.

Also, home buyer expectations are higher today. If a home doesn’t have an open floor plan, three bathrooms and granite countertops, most young buyers think they are settling for much less than they want.

Owning a home has been a part of the American Dream, but it’s one of the three legs of that dream that are currently being killed: (1) High housing costs (2) Stagnant wages and (3) High health-care costs. When you add college debt to the mix, you have the makings of a revolution against the 21st century’s form of capitalism.

Part of the American dream is for your kids to succeed. That starts with a good education in a school district that aligns with that goal. That can rule out most public schools in our larger cities. If young families can afford the costs of private schools in cities, they must be very well off.

The only way that most people can choose that kind of school is to look in the suburbs. Suburban school districts pay for their good schools with taxes on expensive homes. That means parents, and the local government all have a stake in keeping local property values as high as possible, thus the difficult zoning regulations that make houses larger.

But smaller homes are also desired by many retirees. People who are living out their golden years often want to “downsize” into an affordable small home, condo, or townhouse. Many of these developments are being built throughout America. They can be beautiful inside, but they are often attached or semi-attached boxes crammed together on land that was never supposed to be developed.

Time to wake up America! Today in most parts of the country there is hardly anything on the market for under $300,000. Not much that resembles the tidy starter home Wrongo purchased 52 years ago.

Affordable housing prices aren’t coming back without government intervention. America needs to look carefully at its housing policies along with how we have let financialization take over the housing market.

Financialization of housing refers to the increasing presence of corporations and organizations that are creating or using real estate management, mortgage processes, and financial instruments to profit-seek against individual homeowners.

To help you wake up listen to Buddy Guy perform “Gunsmoke Blues” along with Jason Isbell. The tune is highly relevant, and very powerful. It’s from Guy’s album ,“The Blues Don’t Lie” due out on September 30th:

Lyrics:

Trouble down at the high school
Somebody got the gunsmoke blues
Trouble down at the high school
Somebody got the gunsmoke blues
Read it in the morning paper
Watch it on the evening news

…

Some folks blame the shooter
Other folks blame the gun
But that don’t stop the bullets
And more bloodshed to come
A million thoughts and prayers
Won’t bring back anyone

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DeSantis Dickitude

The Daily Escape:

Cathedral Valley, Capitol Reef NP – September 2022 photo by Mary Warner

Pretty sure everyone saw the news about planes landing on Martha’s Vineyard full of Venezuelan immigrants. From the NYT:

“The migrant group, which included children, arrived on two planes around 3 p.m. without any warning, said State Senator Julian Cyr, a Massachusetts Democrat representing Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. Officials and volunteers from the island’s six towns “really moved heaven and earth to essentially set up the response that we would do in the event of a hurricane,”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) took credit for sending the planes with migrants. This is frat-boy behavior from a dick Republican governor. Not to be outdone in showing his big dickitude, Texas governor Greg Abbott (R) sent two busloads of migrants to the home of VP Kamala Harris in Washington DC.

DeSantis isn’t the first to do this. The JFK Library twitter account reminds us that in 1962:

“To embarrass Northern liberals and humiliate Black people, southern White Citizens Councils started their so-called “Reverse Freedom Rides,” giving Black people one-way tickets to northern cities with false promises of jobs, housing, and better lives.”

Maybe DeSantis and Abbott should have read a few history books before deciding to ban books.

DeSantis knows that Florida is home to 60% of the Cubans living in the US. These immigrants fled to the US to escape poverty, violence, and a Communist dictatorship. Many didn’t follow immigration laws at the time. More still try to reach Florida every week. Is DeSantis saying that he doesn’t want Venezuelan migrants but sure, more Cuban migrants are ok?

MA State Rep. Dylan Fernandes, whose district includes Martha’s Vineyard, tweeted: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The Governor of one of the biggest states in the nation has been spending time hatching a secret plot to round up & ship people—children, families-lying to them about where [they’re] going just to gain cheap political points on Tucker [Carlson] and MAGA twitter….These immigrants were not met with chaos, they were met with compassion. We are a community & nation that is stronger because of immigrants.”

Another thing: Have these plane/bus operators committed crimes? Airlines usually file manifests about who is onboard and where they’re going. Why would they, most likely private/charter operators, agree to be part of a political stunt?

The companies that transported the migrants should be told that while Abbot or DeSantis can hire them, the transport companies also have legal obligations to their passengers. If the charter companies are MAGA and won’t comply, they could have their permission to operate revoked.

And one more thing: Why are people who may not qualify for asylum being sent to other parts of the US rather than being sent back to their country of origin? And by self-professed law-and-order type governors?

DeSantis says he’s a Christian, but he’s not clothing the naked or feeding the hungry. He’s doing the opposite: Driving them from his state, not because it’s required legally, but because he can use them to advance his political ambitions. He’s using vulnerable human beings for his personal advancement. That’s evil personified.

Are we now a country of political gotcha? Should Chicago and NYC send their gang bangers to Florida and Texas? What do any of these stunts solve? From Digby about DeSantis:

“…his despicably cruel, racist worldview has been embraced by conservative Christians [for] as long as I can remember. Certainly in the years after 9/11 it was on display everywhere you looked. Their view of Christianity is that Jesus loves white people like them, period. Everyone else can literally go to hell.”

There is nothing Christian or Conservative about what DeSantis did. The folks in Martha’s Vineyard, who welcomed the immigrants, were the ones who acted as Christians. DeSantis is surely aware of the passage in Matthew:

“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.”

The requirement of that passage is what a Christian church on Martha’s Vineyard did to help these migrants. All that DeSantis and his friends do is complain that they can’t have their preferred prayers said in public schools.

Christian nationalism as it is practiced today in the US is becoming the worst and most destructive heresies to afflict American Christians. More about this tomorrow.

This incident on Martha’s Vineyard is another reminder that a central conceit of Republican politics is that everyone is secretly as cruel as they are. And because of that, no one would be genuinely willing to help the people Republicans pack into planes and buses and ship off to liberal land.

They’re wrong.

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Monday Wake Up Call – September 12, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Harvest Moon, Cape Cod National Seashore, MA – September photo by Tom Baratz

With all of the media’s coverage of the comings and goings of the British monarchy, Wrongo’s certain that you missed the reviews of a new book, “Slouching Towards Utopia” by Brad DeLong, an economist from UC Berkeley. Dylan Matthews in Vox quotes DeLong from the book:

“The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.”

Matthews thinks it’s a bold claim. After all, homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years; DeLong’s “long twentieth century” represents 0.05% of that history.

But DeLong says an incredible thing happened during that sliver of time that had eluded our species for the other 99.95% of our history: Before 1870, technological progress was glacial, but after 1870 it accelerated dramatically. More from Vox:

“DeLong reports that in 1870, an average unskilled male worker living in London could afford 5,000 calories for himself and his family on his daily wages. That was more than the 3,000 calories he could’ve afforded in 1600, a 66% increase….But by 2010, the same worker could afford 2.4 million calories a day, a nearly five hundred fold increase.”

DeLong is speaking of the nations of the rich north, not about all nations. He’s saying that food surplus was the key driver of progress. What’s implied is that the greatest difference between the wealthy and everyone else was that the poor were living on the verge of starvation. Those basic economic facts shifted once having enough to eat ceased being society’s most critical status distinction.

Another interesting statistic from the book:

“…the average number of years of a woman’s life spent either pregnant or breastfeeding…has gone down dramatically, from 20 years of a typical woman’s life in 1870 to four years today.”

Most historians present modern history as a long 19th century (from the French revolution in 1789) to the crisis of 1914. Which is then followed by a shorter 20th century ending with the fall of communism. DeLong, by contrast, argues that the period from 1870 to 2010 is best seen as a coherent whole: the first era, he argues, in which historical developments were overwhelmingly driven by economics.

From the Economist:

“…despite the Industrial Revolution…for millennia, technological improvements never yielded enough new production to outrun population growth. Incomes had stuck close to subsistence levels. Yet from around 1870, growth found a new gear, and incomes in leading economies rose to unprecedented levels, then kept climbing.”

DeLong says that economic policy in this period was a duel between the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, who extolled the power of the free market, and Karl Polanyi, who warned that the market should serve man, not man serving the market.

Before WWI, markets generated rapid growth along with soaring inequality. People pushed back, demanding greater political rights, which they used to pursue regulation of the economy and improved social insurance.

After WWII, a mix of a market economy and a generous safety-net made for a happy marriage of Hayek and Polanyi, improved by Keynes, who said that governments should act to prevent economic recessions. This led to a three-decade post-war period of growth unmatched before or since. DeLong calls them the Thirty Glorious Years; from 1945 to 1975, as the US and Europe recovered from World War II.

But when growth sagged and inflation rose in the 1970s, voters supported politicians promising market-friendly, or “neoliberal”, economic growth reforms, like lower taxes and reduced regulation. But those reforms didn’t keep economic growth high. And they also led to even worse inequality. Still, the US and other rich countries pressed on with them, right up to the 2008 global financial crisis, which marks the end of DeLong’s 20th century.

According to a paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distribution that America experienced in those thirty glorious years stayed constant, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in just the year 2018. That’s an amount equal to nearly 12% of GDP.

Price and Edwards say that the cumulative inequality cost for our 40-year experiment in government-supported income inequality added up to $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. And probably equaled $50 trillion by 2020.

That’s $50 trillion that would have made the vast majority of Americans far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.

So, the big unanswered question is: Can we again return to a period where we see both economic growth and equitable growth? It’s highly doubtful. As DeLong says in Time:

“Our current situation: in the rich countries there is enough by any reasonable standard, and yet we are all unhappy, all earnestly seeking to discover who the enemies are who have somehow stolen our rich birthright and fed us unappetizing lentil stew instead.”

The problem here is that our entire culture, economy and even our civilization is predicated around growth and people haven’t known anything else. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride.

Time to wake up America! We need to reimagine capitalism, our taxation policies and our welfare scheme if we are to survive. Expect a rough adjustment.  To help you wake up, listen, and watch Bruce Springsteen perform “Darlington County” live in London in 2013:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 11, 2022

It’s 21 years since the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As Michael de Adder says:

Twenty one years on, America is more at war with itself than with any foreign terrorists, despite having troops deployed in 80 countries. Our society and our democracy are threatened from within in a way that Osama bin Laden could never have managed. And where are we today? Cartoonist Mike Luckovich has a thought:

If ever so briefly after that fateful day. Today we face threats that might end our democracy:

  • We’ve nearly lost our social cohesion
  • We aren’t dealing with income inequality
  • We’re seeing racism grow
  • We see clear threats to the right to vote, or whether our votes will even count if we cast them

In these 21 years, Republicans have moved from being the Party of national security to the Party of grievance and anger. As Elliot Ackerman wrote last year in Foreign Affairs:

“From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The US today meets both conditions.”

MAGA asks the wrong question:

When you have no policies, this is what you get:

Let’s close today with a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter that she wrote back on the first anniversary of 9/11. Carpenter was inspired by an interview with Jim Horch, an ironworker who was among the early responders at the WTC site. Here’s part of what Horch said:

“My responsibility at the site was to try to remove big pieces of steel. The building fell so hard there wasn’t even concrete. It was dust
.I started to feel the presence of spirits
not very long after I was there. The energy that was there was absolutely incredible and
it was more than just the people that I was working with
it was energy left behind
.One day when I was working, I felt this energy and it felt lost and it wanted to go home but it didn’t know how to go home and it came to me to go to Grand Central Station. When I got off the subway, I walked into the Great Room. Into where the constellation is in the ceiling. And I walked around the perimeter and
out of the building. I didn’t feel the energy anymore. I could feel it leave.”

And here’s Carpenter’s “Grand Central Station”:

 

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More On Student Loan Forgiveness

The Daily Escape:

Death Valley dunes, CA – August 2022 photo by George Cannon

At a dinner party over the weekend, blog reader Marie S. said that she felt ambivalent about Biden’s loan forgiveness plan. Several others (some were Democrats) echoed her viewpoint.

Republicans have attacked it because they’re desperate to change the subject from the extremist abortion position that they’re now trying to rapidly back away from. They’re also desperate to keep Trump off of the front page. With the loan forgiveness, they see an opportunity to excite their base and divide the Dems.

Wrongo agrees that there are things to dislike and also things to like about the plan. The major thing not to like is something that the Biden administration isn’t in a position to control: The high cost of higher education. Many say that it will be business as usual for our colleges and universities, with loan forgiveness needing to happen every ten years or so.

The cost of higher education is out of hand when we look at the growth in the cost of college and fees compared to the US consumer price index (CPI):

The chart shows that the cost of college is up exponentially more than CPI over the past 40+ years. For any child not born to affluent parents (or getting a hefty scholarship), the choice is foregoing college or taking on a ton of student debt.

Dealing with the increase in college costs isn’t something that the US government can do easily, if at all. We’re talking about a broad spectrum of privately owned institutions and an array of institutions owned by individual states. Biden has got zero power to flatten the cost curve.

Also, nothing is being demanded of the banks who made questionable student loans or the schools who gave students unrealistic information about their future earnings prospects, inducing them to commit to school.

One change that Biden could have made would be to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, as they were before the 2005 bankruptcy “reform” that then-Senator Biden helped push through Congress.

Businesses that make bad decisions get to restructure their debts and carry on. Individuals who have a run of bad luck (big medical bills or job loss) can file for bankruptcy, but students cannot. Why should college debt be carved out as not dischargeable in bankruptcy?

The program’s means-testing could have been tighter. The $125k (individual) and $250k (for married couples) income caps do seem high considering those levels of earnings puts you in the 76th and 94th percentile of earners respectively. OTOH, it sounds worse than it truly is. See this chart:

Wrongo also doesn’t like the fact that the government is still charging high interest rates on student loan debt. The average interest rate for existing borrowers under the program is 5.8%. A 5.8% interest rate on the $1.6 trillion of outstanding student debt equates to $93 billion a year in interest payments if all of those people were paying back their loans. Much of that big number could stay in borrowers’ pockets at a lower interest rate.

Finally, the US government owns 92% of all student loan debt. Why does the government need to make so much money on this debt? Wouldn’t a lower rate be a good investment to make for future generations of workers?

Wrongo does like that younger people are finally being helped out by our government. Pundits complain young people don’t get out and vote. Maybe that’s because politicians don’t help young people enough.

It feels like the government has ignored people under 40 in favor of the Boomers and corporations. Today’s young people have much higher costs for essentials: Their student loans, daycare, healthcare, their cost of housing, all are much more than previous generations had to deal with.

Wrongo does like the possible psychological benefit this could give people who felt like they were stuck. The White House estimates that more than 43 million people will qualify for loan forgiveness. Wrongo thinks that the majority of these 40+ million people are overjoyed by this news. His narrow survey of college age grandchildren shows them to be deliriously happy.

And most borrowers will likely experience some psychological relief along with their financial relief. It may allow some people to buy a home sooner than expected. Or get married or start a business. Or just stress a little less about money.

On balance, given the good and the not-so-good, Wrongo thinks the program is a good idea.

In the meantime, the politics bear watching. Republicans are trying to stoke jealousy, and they might succeed. Republicans don’t agree that this relief should take place. But every complaint makes it clear why Biden was right to do this.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 28, 2022

A thought experiment about Trump’s collection of classified documents. Forget for a minute that we’re talking about Trump.

What does the US government (USG) do if it finds out a former employee took home dozens of boxes of sensitive/classified government information without authority? And then the USG finds out that the documents the former employee had taken included information on some of its foreign operations. And that the employee kept them in an unlocked closet for eighteen months?

The USG would assume that every one of those operations had been compromised, because it’s totally wrong to assume otherwise. So, the USG would move to close the affected operations down. It would pull its people and invent a cover story that the other side might buy as plausible. It would attempt to insulate its foreign operatives.

The agencies involved (CIA, DIA, AID, State Department, FBI) would lose some credibility for a blown operation, along with the budget for those operations. It would need to find the money to wind up and cover them up. They would have to lay the groundwork for replacement operations along with new budgets. That would take time. They would have to repair the damage to their networks: The foreign governments and recruited private actors, all because some shit for brains former USG employee stole classified records.

How do we estimate the costs Trump has imposed on this country, just from the activities implicated in his set of stolen secret documents? And what was his purpose? On to cartoons.

He can’t just take his sharpie and write DECLASSIFIED on it:

What the forgiveness means in real life:

Opinions differ about the value of the bailout:

How is it possible to get everything wrong?

Midterm voters now cite “threats to democracy” as their top issue:

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Saturday Soother – August 27, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Super moon over Lake Champlain, Burlington, VT – August 2022 photo by Adam Silverman Photography

Republicans are outraged this week about Biden’s cancellation of student loan debt! Americans now owe a total of more than $1.6 trillion for higher education. From the WaPo: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The result is one of the most significant changes to American higher education policy in decades — and a new cornerstone of the president’s economic legacy. Biden’s decision will dramatically change the financial circumstances of tens of millions of Americans, fully erasing the student loans of roughly 20 million people.”

Student debt played a minor role in American life through the 1960s when Wrongo accrued his $5k of college debt while attending Georgetown. But it increased during the Reagan administration. It then shot up after the 2007-2009 Great Recession as states made huge cuts to funding for their college systems.

But the argument that “tuition has gone up because public support for higher education has declined” isn’t the only one. While it’s valid for some institutions, it doesn’t explain the “arms race” among colleges and universities to add student amenities and layers of administrative staff over the past 10 years.

Over the last decade, revenue at independent (non-religious) private colleges and universities in the US has increased by 148% on an inflation-adjusted (real) per student basis. At religiously affiliated private colleges and universities revenue has increased by 87% in real per-student terms over the last 10 years.

Meanwhile, at public institutions, revenue has increased by just 23.4% on the same basis. However, this is still 36% greater than per capita GDP growth over the same 10 years.

The headline is that our elite educational institutions have gotten obscenely wealthy. And many of our second tier institutions chased after them, causing education budgets everywhere to explode.

It’s become another example of America’s new gilded age.

Opinions differ about the ethics of loan forgiveness for student debt, and that’s understandable. The general thrust of the Republican railing about the educational loan forgiveness is about how unfair it is when one group of Americans is getting a benefit at the cost of other Americans.

This tweet from former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is on point for most of the GOP:

“Joe Biden wants those who didn’t go to school, didn’t take out loans, or already paid off their loans to pay off $300 billion of other people’s debts…..It’s socialism, it’s un-American, and only makes his record-setting inflation worse.”

But it isn’t socialism when our government bails out one group at the expense of another; it happens all the time. No Republican complained about the Trump tax cuts which were directed at America’s wealthy and its corporations. No Republican complained about the bank bailout in 2008. No Republican objected when Trump gave $16 billion to farmers hurt by the Trump tariffs.

Second, despite what the GOP is saying, the $300 billion in loan forgiveness isn’t inflationary. It’s true that it’s money that student borrowers won’t be paying back. But because of the student debt moratorium, they had already stopped payments in 2020, so there’s no change going forward. They simply won’t have to restart making payments on that $10,000 of debt.

It isn’t clear that there will be much impact to inflation or the Consumer Price Index. Since they weren’t making payments, it’s likely they were already spending those funds that might have gone to loan repayments. So no new spending.

We can have a debate about how much higher education should cost per student. We live in a society that is a whole lot wealthier than it was 40 years ago, but many of our students do not come from those few wealthy families.

The political calculus of Biden’s decision will be seen in November. The WaPo reported that a majority of Americans support limited debt forgiveness. Biden’s pollster, John Anzalone said:

“This is a motivator for young people….It’s a huge issue for young people — the support levels for them are in the high 60s.”

Let’s hope they turn out to vote on November 8.

Now, it’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we decompress from another week of body blows to America and find a few moments to gather ourselves for the week to come.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, we had a day of very satisfying brush clearing although we’re still waiting for rain.

Go get a big mug of decaf cold brew coffee and grab a chair in the shade. Now listen to Schubert’s “Impromptu in G flat Op. 90 No. 3”, written in 1827, and played here in 2012 by Olga Jegunova at the Bishopsgate Institute in London:

Schubert really understood how to capture emotion in his music.

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Louisiana Denies Flood Control Funding to New Orleans

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, North Plains, OR – August 2022 photo by David Leahy Photography

Wrongo and Ms. Right are streaming “5 Days at Memorial” a dramatization of the tragedy at a downtown New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina. It’s adapted from the 2013 book “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital” by Sheri Fink. Ms. Right highly recommends the book.

It is difficult to watch something when you already know the outcome is a terrible loss of life. Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005, some 17 years ago. When we visited New Orleans three years ago, damage was still visible in parts of the city.

So imagine Wrongo’s surprise to read that the state of Louisiana is withholding nearly $40 million in funding for flood control in New Orleans: (brackets by Wrongo)

“[Louisiana] Attorney General Jeff Landry successfully pushed [the State Bond Commission] commissioners to withhold the funds as punishment, after the New Orleans City Council passed a resolution asking law enforcement officers not to enforce Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban…”

Yesterday, Wrongo quoted Dan Pfeiffer who said: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Democratic efforts to turn this midterm from a progress report on Democratic governance into a referendum on GOP extremism failed to connect until the Dobbs decision. That was when Republican extremism went from an abstract argument to lived reality.”

The Dem’s performance in Tuesday’s primaries showed that Pfeiffer may be right, as many Democrats outperformed in swing districts. And what’s happening in New Orleans is another example of Republican extremism around the Dobbs decision. From Salon:

“The New Orleans City Council on July 7 passed a resolution in which local policymakers proclaimed their support for reproductive healthcare access and asked police, sheriff’s deputies, and prosecutors not to… enforce Louisiana’s draconian prohibition on abortion…”

That led to the state’s Bond Commission voting 7-6 to defer a motion to approve flood prevention funding until next month. CNN reported that this was the second time in two months that the panel rejected financing for a $39 million project that is meant to pay for drainage pumps critical to protecting New Orleans from flooding.

The Louisiana AG Landry sent a letter urging the bond commission to:

“…defer any applications for the City of New Orleans, Orleans Parish, and any local governmental entity or political subdivision under its purview….Any other funding that will directly benefit the City of New Orleans…should also be paused until such time as the council, mayor, chief of police, sheriff, and district attorney have met with and affirmed that they will comply with and enforce the laws of this state and cooperate with any state officials who may be called upon to enforce them.”

New Orleans mayor, LaToya Cantrell told CNN that she is unwilling to budge on abortion and criticized Landry and other Republican members of the bond commission for endangering public health by holding flood mitigation funding hostage:

“We cannot afford to put politics over the rights of people, and particularly safeguarding people from hurricanes and other disasters, because we are on the front lines of climate change…”

Republicans used to favor local control. They always say federal policies shouldn’t apply unless the states agree. Now they’ll only say that if it’s politically convenient. This is political blackmail, not simply politics.

The sad part is how short sighted it is. This Landry guy and his Republican supporters who live outside of New Orleans think this can’t harm them. But, how long has it taken Louisiana to recoup all of its losses from Katrina?

And this bad behavior is becoming normalized. It happened in Texas’ Harris County when Houston was denied funds related to 2017’s Hurricane Harvey until recently. In Houston, the funds were not denied due to the abortion issue, but for other political reasons (including voting rights). Texas’s decision matrix favored more sparsely populated areas and areas with higher property values, which worked against Houston and Harris County, Harris County is a Democratic stronghold in a very Red State.

This kind of blackmail won’t go away unless fair-minded people win these important state offices, like attorney general and secretary of state.

Democrats need to hold the US House and Senate in November and retake the Presidency in 2024. If not, we will have failed to meet the moment. The defense of our previous political wins must be a constant goal in the game.

The 2022 and 2024 elections are America’s political endgame. And right now, it’s unclear how it’s going to play out.

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The Mid-Terms Landscape

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Grand Teton NP, MT – June 2022 photo by Charyn

On Monday, Robert Hubbell had a very useful column about how some of the anti-Trump narratives are already baked into the politics of the mid-terms (barring some huge unforeseen event): (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…it is likely that the political throughlines are set for the midterms. That is both good and bad for America and Democrats. The topics for debate have been identified and the rules of engagement have been set….Let the media do its job, which, in this instance, will consist of talking about the same half-dozen stories non-stop.”

Hubbell outlines that the narratives that will dominate the news from now until November 8 are unlikely to produce political earthquakes:

“It is unlikely that the DOJ will indict anyone in Trump’s inner circle (including Trump) before the midterms. For example, in a filing last week, the DOJ said its investigation regarding the improper removal and retention of defense secrets was in the “early stages.” Nearly every Trump administration witness appearing before a federal grand jury was examined by the J6 Committee six to eight months ago. And the only grand jury subpoenas published in the press indicate that the investigations were opened in 2022 and that the subpoenas were issued in June.”

Wrongo agrees. This is also true for the Georgia grand jury investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia. Few realize the grand jury that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is presenting evidence to cannot indict anyone. According to the Georgia Recorder: (emphasis and brackets by Wrongo)

“In contrast to a typical grand jury, the 23 members on the special grand jury do not have the power to indict anyone but can [only] make recommendations to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.”

So, when DA Willis has sufficient evidence to indict, she must then impanel a new grand jury, present evidence, and ask for an indictment. Not likely to happen before November.

While the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago (MAL) has Trump on every front page, the DOJ says its investigation regarding the Mar-a-Lago search is in the “early stages.” The way America’s legal back and forth works, it is doubtful that we will see any facts contained in the affidavit the FBI used to justify the application for the search warrant before November.

Trump made a court filing requesting a Special Master (instead of the DOJ) review the documents removed from MAL. However Trump’s new request is decided, it’s likely to be appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, if not the Supreme Court, which will take time. That means we can expect Trump and the GOP to continue undermining the DOJ and FBI right through the mid-terms.

And there will be few new facts to indict Trump in the court of public opinion.

It’s likely we will see a steady drip of information about the recovered documents, just like Tuesday’s NYT article saying that, including the FBI seizure, Trump took more than 300 classified documents when he left office. That seems to say it couldn’t have been an oversight.

Finally, the January 6th Committee returns to work in September, but as of today, there are no hearings scheduled. Mike Pence will never testify. Since he still has presidential ambitions, testifying would put him on the wrong side of Trump supporters, making a run in 2024 problematic.

While the January 6th hearings have moved the needle on US public opinion, it’s difficult to what they will add to what we know in the time remaining for this 117th Congress.

Of course, running against Trump is the Dem’s dream, but there are other issues out there, like abortion. In the new NBC News poll, abortion rights was only the seventh most important issue:

But it’s only one poll, and voter enthusiasm and turnout win races. The Morning Consult has the Democrats’ enthusiasm at 62%, up dramatically from 52% on July 31. That’s comparable to the GOP’s 65%.

Dan Pfeiffer believes the political environment has shifted in Democrats’ favor because of the abortion issue:

“Democratic efforts to turn this midterm from a progress report on Democratic governance into a referendum on GOP extremism failed to connect until the Dobbs decision. That was when Republican extremism went from an abstract argument to lived reality.”

Dems need to remind voters that unemployment is at record lows, that its Democrats who fight for economic progress, and to preserve women’s right to an abortion. Democrats can’t keep people from worrying about inflation, but they can influence whether it is the top issue to voters. They can keep the heat on Republicans for their extremist views on abortion and on Trump’s extremism and his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The hope is that these realities overtake concern about inflation as the main issue for a big swath of Independent voters.

That could be the difference.

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Companies Are Making Inflation Worse

The Daily Escape:

Grand Park, Mt. Rainier, WA – August 2022 photo by Edwin Buske Photography

As discussed yesterday, polls are showing that voters are still concerned about inflation. The good news over the past two days is that producer prices (prices at the wholesale level) and consumer prices both fell from June to July.

But these inflation concerns won’t be going away, and the Republicans hope to make the November midterms a  “gas and groceries” election, saying Biden is the cause of rising prices. In July’s Consumer Price Index, the price of groceries was a particular pain point, rising 1.3% for the month. Wolfstreet reports that the year-over-year rise in the “food at home” part of the CPI (food bought in stores and at markets) is now at 13.1%, the worst spike since 1979.

Food is a category where inflation hits consumers right in the face on a daily basis. And it hits people on the lower end of the income spectrum much harder because they spend a relatively larger portion of their income on food.

But the fall in gasoline prices over the last couple of months is also meaningful. After peaking in June at $5.03 per gallon, the average national price of gas fell below $4 this week, according to GasBuddy.

The Hill reports that Biden will go on offense against the Republicans’ drumbeat about inflation by traveling the country to tout job creation and the Inflation Reduction Act, once it is passed by the House on Friday. Biden plans to make the point that Congressional Republicans sided with the special interests every step of the way on delivering lower costs for working people.

That won’t hurt Dems chances in November, but will it be enough to offset what’s happening with retail prices? Here’s another striking set of facts from Bloomberg:

“The first sign that this wasn’t going to be a typical corporate earnings season came early on the morning of July 12, when PepsiCo Inc. unveiled an odd set of results. Growth in unit sales, it said, was essentially zero in North America. Revenue rose though, driven by the double-digit price increases Pepsi slapped on its snacks.”

They weren’t the only consumer product company to raise prices as sales fell: The purple dots show how unit sales fell (as much as 10% for Clorox) while prices (green dots) rose in most cases, more than 10%. And revenue (yellow dots) rose for all firms:

This is bad for the economy on many levels: Price-driven sales growth isn’t healthy; and it isn’t good for consumers who have lost purchasing power (and are angry about it). It isn’t good for our overall economy, or for the Federal Reserve that’s trying to bring down inflation.

Many CEOs are willing to raise prices because it’s no longer the taboo it has been for the past two decades, when annual inflation averaged a little more than 2%. Their thinking is that if volumes slip a little as a result of the price hikes, their share prices won’t take a beating. So no worries, just raise prices.

The bet that these consumer products CEOs are making is that once things settle down in the economy, people will come back. Bloomberg quotes  Neil Saunders, an analyst at GlobalData Plc, a consulting company:

“If they keep losing share next year, they’ll take more notice. It’s very hard at the moment to tell what’s temporary and what’s permanent.”

Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Kimberly-Clark, and Church & Dwight, the maker of Arm & Hammer baking soda and OxiClean, all reported quarterly numbers that fall into the weak-volumes-and-big-price-hikes category. More from Bloomberg: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“One of the best examples is Conagra Brands Inc., the…Chicago-based food conglomerate, which reported results on July 14. A core measure of its revenue jumped 6.8%, in the three months that ended on May 29, thanks to an increase of 13% in the average price it charged….The amount of goods it sold, though, fell 6.4%.”

We know that inflation is very high, among the highest rates in the past 40 years. It now seems clear that consumer products companies are a prime contributor to these price increases.

We know that unemployment is as low as it’s been in 50 years. The labor market is strong. We know that the growth rate of GDP was really high in 2021, and that it’s slowing in 2022.

What we don’t know is how voters are going to act in November.

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