Open Thread August 3, 2023 Climate v Economy
Survey (NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist) finds 53% of Americans think addressing climate crisis should be given priority and 72% of Republicans say the economy should be.
June and July were, by many measures, the hottest such months on record. Wildfires are raging across the world, in the US notably in California and Nevada. Smoke from fires in Canada has blotted out the sun on the US east coast this year. Much of the US is threatened by rising seas.
The percentage of Republicans who think the economy should be given priority regardless is up 13 points since 2018.
More than half of respondents (56%) said climate change was a major threat. More than two-thirds of Republicans (70%) said it was a minor threat or no threat at all. Among Republicans, 43% said climate change would have no serious impact on their communities.
How the Biggest Emitters Match Up on Climate Change, Angry Bear, Angry Bear blog
Republicans (72%), the economy should be given priority, at the risk of ignoring climate change, NPR, Domenico Montanaro
well, i guess the obvious question is how do we convince them?
my go-to is to stop alienating them with minor but emotional issues that drive them into the willing arms of Republicans.
i don’t have a lot of hope that “information” or “logic” will change voters minds. but surely we know experts at changing people’s minds who could do as good a job as the Republicans.
and if you don’t mind my harping on an issue I have invested some time in understanding, i really, really hate it when people who should know better, who call themselves defenders of Social Security start telling lies themselves to support their “make the rich pay” idea for “saving” Social Security…from itself, apparently.
White House, Protecting Biden’s Economic Message, Hits Back on Credit Downgrade
NY Times – August 3
The president’s team has mobilized to counter the downgrade of Treasury debt by the Fitch Ratings agency, rushing to defend the story of an improving economic outlook.
When the Fitch Ratings agency announced this week that it was downgrading its long-term credit rating of the United States from AAA to AA+, Biden administration officials were ready — and angry.
Administration officials had been lobbying Fitch against the downgrade, which bewildered many economists but became immediate fodder for congressional Republicans and nonpartisan budget hawks to criticize the nation’s current fiscal direction.
When the ratings agency went through with the move anyway, President Biden’s team mobilized a rapid response, with economic heavyweights inside and outside the administration criticizing the timing and substance of the announcement.
The swift pushback was an effort to keep the downgrade from tarnishing Mr. Biden’s economic record amid a run of good news in key measures of the health of the American economy. And its aggressiveness reflected the critical importance of an improving economic outlook to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign. …
… The downgrade came just after 5 p.m. on Tuesday. Fitch released a statement that attributed the move to “the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden and the erosion of governance” in the United States over the past two decades.
Most notably, Fitch officials cited a series of high-stakes showdowns over raising the nation’s borrowing limit. “The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management,” they wrote.
The agency also expressed concerns over the rising costs of Medicare and Social Security benefits as more Americans retire, which are predicted to be the largest drivers of rising federal debt in the decade to come. Fitch predicted that the nation was headed for a mild recession by the end of the year. It was the second credit downgrade in American history, both directly linked to debt limit fights.
Moments after the release, Biden administration officials hit back.
Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, said in a statement that she strongly disagreed with a ratings change that she called “arbitrary and based on outdated data.”
Soon after, administration officials organized a call with reporters to criticize the move in more detail. They questioned why Fitch had not downgraded the rating when Mr. Trump was president, based on Fitch’s own ratings models, and why it had done so now, soon after a compromise with Republicans in Congress that had averted a fiscal crisis. …
Please note that “Social Security and Medicare” are treated as a unit. The fact is that Social Security contributes NOTHING to the “general government debt burden” while Medicare is a victim of the high cost of medical care in this country
it is also true that about half of Medicare IS paid by general taxes and does contribute to the “debt burden.” Maybe “make the rich pay” wasn’t such a good idea.
i hate to harp on that aspect, but it was a lot easier to make the case that Social Security does not contribute to the Debt before the Left decided to turn the enemy’s lies into “truthies.”
If you decided to pay for all of Medicare, it would double your Medicare tax (about 3%, but cut your medical care (and private insurance) costs by at least as much. More if Congress allowed it to function honestly. And still more, if it became “Medicare for All.” Paying for your future medical care costs while you are still young and working saves money over waiting and paying for them when you are old, not working, and high risk.
This is not my field of study. I am waiting for someone who cares about it to do a thorough analysis and clear explanation that can give the activists at least something to work with.
Then we will have to tell the Congress in a way they can’t pretend not to hear.
The Budget & Economic Outlook: 2023-2033
CBO – Feb 15, 2023
Federal debt held by the public is projected to rise from 98 percent of … rising spending on Social Security and Medicare boosts mandatory …
(Social Security & Medicare ‘outlays’ are mentioned quite a bit in this document. The CBO seems to think there are serious issues.)
However, the CBO paper says this…
Gross debt consists of debt held by the public and Treasury securities held by government accounts (for example, the Social Security trust funds). The debt held by government accounts does not directly affect the economy and has no net effect on the budget. Although debt held by the public increases by $20.7 trillion from the end of 2023 to the end of 2033 in CBO’s baseline projections, debt held by government accounts falls by about $1.2 trillion, reflecting declines in the balances of many trust funds. As a result, gross federal debt is projected to rise by $19.6 trillion over that period and to total $52.0 trillion at the end of 2033. About 11 percent of that sum would be debt held by government accounts. …
There ARE serious issues. Social SEcurity still haas nothing to do withthe Debt.
When I first read CBO reports to the Congress about twenty years ago, I thought they failed to make this clear because they did not know. I have since concluded that they know full well, but they don’t want YOU to know.
Of course it has never been too hard to keep most people confused about anything important to SOME people.
‘Medicare is a victim of the high cost of medical care in this country’
The elderly require a disproportionate amount of medical care.
Shortly after I turned 65 & went on Medicare, I had my first ever major surgery, aortic valve-replacement which I believe costs about $150k.
I recently spent a week in hospital for a life-threatening blood infection (followed by antibiotic infusions at home for a further five weeks) and that cost about $50k. Medicare paid for this.
Medicare is a victim of old people requiring too much medical care.
well, THAT should be easy to fix. Just let them die. They should be glad to die to make it possible for their children to get rich…at least that’s what the Lt Gov o Texas said about Covid.
Or, of course, we coul recognize that most of us are going to old some day, maybe unable to work. So it might be smart to save something for our old age. Social SEcurity allows us to do that without risk from inflation or bad days on the market. Medicare does the same thing for speifically health care risk, but it has been semi privatized, and semi “make the rich pay”-ed. So it doesn’t work as well as it could. Now the funny thing is that the rich know how to destroy welfar (make the rich pay) and how to make big money off privatized government programs. But the Left can’t see it happening and keep crying for more. Nor helped by some people who look at their “fair share” of government insurance and think someone else is getting a better deal, so they cry “unfair” and call for their destroyer.
One would suppose that replacing the current system with ‘Medicare for All’ could eliminate (most?) notions that Medicare such as it is is too expensive. Perhaps leaving intact the notion that old people require too much of it. It would most likely be a step in the right direction anyway. Maybe make a rule that there would be no age-related analysis of who’s receiving the most care under such a system. After all, if you need medical care, you need medical care, and there should be no denying it whether you’re young or old.
‘Social Security does not contribute to the Debt’
An interesting aspect of this is that Soc Sec is funded out of its trust fund, which is financed by FICA, which is in a effect a non-progressive flat-rate income tax that disappears for individual taxpayers if they earn enough – quite a large salary currently ($160K I think).
(It’s further complicated in that both employees and employers pay FICA ‘taxes’, to benefit employees when they retire. Employers tend to consider this an ‘onerous burden’. If yer self employed, you have to pay both portions.)
So, in that sense Social Security is separate enough from ordinary guv’mint expenditures to not be considered a problem, perhaps.
Yet it often comes up as a ‘problem’, perhaps because the GOP would still like to privatize it, if not make it go away. They would like to do that, but seem to realize that this would get them into major difficulties with their aging base members.
The New-Collar Workforce
Harvard Business Review – March/April – behind a paywall
There’s a huge, capable, and diverse talent pool out there that companies aren’t paying nearly enough attention to: workers without college degrees. It’s time for a skills-first approach to hiring and people.
Earning a bachelor’s degree can expand one’s mind, widen horizons, and provide a pathway to a well-paying, satisfying career. Yet for those who don’t complete four years of college, the lack of a BA or BS looms as a barrier. Millions of people are locked out of promising job opportunities because too many companies default to hiring workers with four-year degrees, even for positions that don’t require that level of education. The trend began decades ago but spiked during the Great Recession: Research by Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance shows that from 2007 to 2010, job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree increased by 10%. That number dropped somewhat as the economy recovered, but scores of jobs remain inaccessible to people who have the skills and aptitude to succeed at them—but not a college diploma. …
Unnecessary degree requirements don’t just hurt workers. They also deprive companies of talent while yielding little to no benefit. Hiring managers may think that a bachelor’s degree serves as a good proxy for things like collaboration skills, a sense of initiative, and the ability to think critically, but there’s virtually no evidence to support that notion. In fact, when a team from Harvard Business School and Accenture recently analyzed “middle-skill” jobs (which require some education or training beyond high school but not a four-year degree), they found no boosts in productivity when those jobs were done by college graduates.
Companies that use the bachelor’s degree as a filter when filling positions that don’t require it are hiring inefficiently. They’re also overlooking workers they desperately need, particularly in growing fields such as tech, where the demand for people with specialized skills far outstrips the supply. At a time when many employers are struggling to fill vacancies and retain their current workforce, a gatekeeping mechanism with no proven benefit creates a competitive disadvantage.
Moreover, degree requirements undermine organizational commitments to improving racial diversity. Although U.S. Census data from 2021 shows that a majority (about 65%) of Americans who are 25 or older do not have a bachelor’s, the proportions are highest among Black Americans (72%), indigenous populations (80%), and those who identify as Hispanic or Latinx (79%). An unnecessary insistence on credentials is, in short, blocking employers’ access to a diverse, capable pool of talent, and the workers who are taking the biggest hit are those who are already marginalized.
It’s no secret that we’re living in a time of profound economic inequality. Workers and occupations are increasingly concentrated at the low and high ends of the economic ladder. The middle class in the United States is hollowing out, and a raft of research across multiple disciplines has found that this is perpetuating racial disparities, tearing the social fabric, and undermining democracy. It’s time to fix our broken approach to talent management, for the good of not just workers and companies but also society as a whole. …
When I was starting my career (such as it was) in the information systems space, back in the early ’70s, I found that most of my co-workers had only high-school educations, often with some college or jr college work. But they were smart, and able to the work, such as it was. This was not advanced computing, as taught in the computer science departments of academia. Which I hadn’t studied either. And it was irrelevant to ‘business computing’.
I had hardly even seen a computer at RPI, although there had been a new model IBM 360 displayed prominently in the newly refurbed Math building.
But I had been to night school, and had had some Fortran courses, and I was on my way.
It probably doesn’t work this way anymore in the information systems space.
But at that time, my BS in physics definitely worked as a ‘credential’. My main colleague in my first career-related job was a physics grad from Cambridge. Not the one down the road near Boston, The one over near the Thames in the UK. Those were the days.
Fun fact: Cambridge is nowhere near the Thames.
‘Cambridge is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately 55 miles north of London …’
FWIW, I did some work for my then new employer in Reading UK, staying in a perfectly awful ‘traveller’s hotel’ near the Caversham Bridge over the Thames, which seems to have been converted into a pretty fancy place in recent years. Reading is near Oxford, which is not near Cambridge.
A day bed for sleeping, bathtub down the hall, Fawlty Towers type management. It was a pretty awful experience. But it was on the Thames, and a rowing club used facilities in the basement to muster for their practices, so in that sense it was an interesting, if noisy experience.
(Concorde’s, flying out of Heathrow, would come over daily, a mile or so up at that point, and were they ever noisy!)
Clarence Thomas’s $267,230 RV and the Friend Who Financed It
NY Times – August 5
The vehicle is a key part of the justice’s just-folks persona. It’s also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else’s money.
… His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.
He provided Justice Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Justice Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.
In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “the loan was satisfied,” Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.
But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Mr. Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Justice Thomas. …
Why are Republicans so obsessed with Kamala Harris?
Boston Globe – August 6
The reenergized vice president is living rent-free in the minds of angry conservatives.
Republicans gleefully share every poll that claims Vice President Kamala Harris has the worst ratings of any person to hold the position she currently occupies. They can’t stop talking about her.
Fox News has YouTube “shorts” — a kind of bootleg TikTok — that list Harris’s so-called “cringeworthy” moments. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida tried unsuccessfully to goad Harris into a debate over his state’s latest ahistorical swing against Black history. Nikki Haley has been referring to her as “President Harris,” not only implying that President Biden is a puppet leader but also serving as as a scare tactic to remind voters that Harris is a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Why are Republicans so obsessed with Harris?
One would think that DeSantis and Haley, who, like their fellow Republican presidential candidates, are getting steamrolled by Donald Trump, would be spending more time attacking the former president. Instead, they’re fixated on Harris, whom the Biden administration is deploying as their rapid response person to fight Republican attacks on American history, abortion rights, and democracy.
(One might suppose that potential VP candidates would specialize on attacking the sitting Dem VP. Maybe that’s what’s going on with Haley & Desantis, but they have expressed disinterest in that job. Maybe they just mean ‘not under Trump’.)
After two years of harsh scrutiny about her role — something that has rarely dogged other vice presidents — Harris’s tenacity, passion for bedrock Democratic issues, and ability to connect with an audience is a reminder why Biden chose her as his running mate in 2020.
If the knock on Harris was that she was spending too much time in the Washington, D.C., bubble, she has flipped the script and is racking up miles on the road. That included a stop in Boston for a conversation with Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell at the NAACP’s recent national convention.
When Tennessee’s Republican-led state legislature expelled two Black lawmakers, both Democrats, for protesting their state’s refusal to discuss gun reform after a mass shooting at a Nashville school in March, Harris traveled there to voice her support.
“People were inspired by what they heard. They were motivated by what they heard. It brought some sense of revival,” Justin Jones, one of the expelled — and later reinstated — state representatives, told CNN. “It gave us some more flames to what was already burning here.”
That same strategy worked last fall when Harris made the conservative-led Supreme Court’s dismantling of nearly 50 years of settled law on abortion a centerpiece of the 2022 midterm elections.
While others claimed that voters were more focused on the economy, the erosion of abortion access had a major impact at the ballot box. Democrats lost the House by less than predicted and held onto the Senate and even picked up a seat.
If Harris were ineffective, she wouldn’t be drawing as much — in some cases even more — ire from Republican presidential candidates as Biden does.
Not that the smoke targeting Harris isn’t about her 80-year-old boss, the oldest president in American history. But concerns about Biden’s age have increased after scary recent episodes involving two high-profile senators. …
Given Biden’s age, attention to Harris is legitimate, But Haley has turned it into something more ghoulish by predicting that Biden is “not likely” to live through a second term.
Haley, herself a woman of color, is banking that in a nation that barely wants women of color to be seen and certainly doesn’t want them heard, Harris’s proximity to the presidency upsets what many falsely consider to be the natural order of things. Of Jamaican and South Asian descent, Harris is the first woman and woman of color to be vice president. As a first, it was never going to be easy for her, and every media-exaggerated blunder or staffing shake-up garnered negative traction among conservatives and even some Democrats.
Now her own party is embracing Harris’s role and her effectiveness in promoting the Biden agenda through her focus on racial justice, reproductive rights, gun reform, and democracy. Meanwhile, Haley and DeSantis are so desperate, they’re trying to provoke fights with her to help revive their fading presidential prospects.
Responding to DeSantis’s debate invitation, Harris tweeted, “There is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate the undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities to slavery.” She added, “Extremists attempt to divide our nation with unnecessary debates. But I have news for them: We will not be distracted — and we will not be deterred.”
On the road and in Washington D.C., a renewed Harris is doing what she can to make sure that won’t happen as the administration and the nation careens toward the perilous waters of 2024.
Could it be that the bottom of the pack GOP wannabees are just assuming that Trump will not be the nominee for 2024, that the GOP will either not run a candidate for Presdient next year, and only have a VP on the ticket, who would automatically assume the presidency in 2025. Or perhaps there will be a non-Trump dark-horse candidate like Tim Scott, who will be happy to share heavy-lifting with whoever is lucky enuf to become the GOP VP candidate.
Polling is indeed not great for Kamala Harris. Mrs Fred & were pleased that she was chosen back in 2020, just as I was pleased that McCain chose Sarah Palin because I was pretty sure it would cost him the win, and sure that Kamala Harris would help Joe Biden. (Not with GOP women maybe, just as with Sarah Palin,)
We will certainly vote for them again next year.
VP Harris been given some tough assignments by Joe Biden, and handled them reasonably well.
In 538 Polling,
Kamala Harris gets 40% approval, Ron DeSantis gets 35%, Nikki Haley gets 27.5%.
DeSantis campaign is hit by gloom as aides worry race is slipping away
Bloomberg via Boston Globe – Aug 6
Ron DeSantis promised a reset of his presidential campaign. Many of his campaign staffers are still waiting.
Several aides believe the Republican candidate’s bid lacks a coherent strategy and message, according to people familiar with the campaign. The operation is disorganized, with different teams pursuing their own agendas, and little communication between groups, said the people familiar, who requested anonymity to discuss the campaign’s inner workings. …
Some at the highest rungs of the campaign leadership consider the operation flawed and worry they are watching the Florida governor’s chances of winning the GOP nomination slip away. …
Nikki Haley Fights to Stay Competitive
NY Tines – August 6
Nikki Haley is campaigning at a grueling pace as she fights to stay competitive in the Republican presidential contest, crisscrossing Iowa and New Hampshire to find a clear lane forward in a race dominated by Donald J. Trump and his mountain of legal problems.
So far, that path is elusive.
By many measures, Ms. Haley is running a healthy campaign poised to capitalize on rivals’ mistakes. She has built a robust fund-raising operation and her team has cash to spare: A super PAC backing her this week announced a $13 million advertising effort in Iowa and New Hampshire. And at events, voters often like what she has to say.
Yet as Ms. Haley tries to occupy a lonely realm between the moderate and far-right wings of her party, her attempts to gain national traction — talking openly about her positions on abortion, taking a hard stance against transgender girls playing in girls’ sports, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris — appear to be falling flat with the Republican base at large. …
You might be surprised to learn that slavery is still practiced even today.
Wikipedia: Slavery in the 21st century
Contemporary slavery … continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million to 49.6 million …
(Mostly in Asia & Africa, but also in Mexico & Central/South America.
Including imprisoned people who are forced to work, estimated at 4 million.)
… According to American professor Kevin Bales, co-founder and former president of the non-governmental organization and advocacy group Free the Slaves, modern slavery occurs “when a person is under the control of another person who applies violence and force to maintain that control, and the goal of that control is exploitation” …
As right-wing politics returns to popularity in Europe and America, why not be open to re-establishing ‘modern slavery’ in the West, as a sort of ReAwakening.
As a part of doing away with ‘Wokeism’ of course.
violence not always required. fear of homelessness will do the trick.
of course any violence on the part of the evictee will be answered by the full force and violence of the law.
AS for the original title of this thread:
There is no economy without the environment.
the economy is only the rules by which we manage transactions between people whereby they can exchange what they have for what they need. enomies ALWAYS adapt to changes..until the changes are too deep to be adapted to. Desertification is a famous historica example.
Now that we have learned how to desertify the whole planet…well, there will be some sort of ecnomy while the process is under way. Maybe we’ll learn to value our lives and time more than plastic toys. (“strings of beats” in the Manhatten sense). But I doubt it. There is always someone who learns how to control a vital resource and price gouges everyone else into debt slavery. This is especially successful when they allow the slaves to buy plastic toys with their “earnings.”
As to the ‘original title of this thread’, if it was to be about ‘the GOP wanting less attention paid to Climate Change and more to the Economy’, that would presumably mean the GOP wants more tax breaks & corporate stock buy-backs. Fewer IRS agents! Less guv’mint regulation. Indeed, let the rest of this getting-older thread be devoted to that. Let’s suppose that it’s too late to do anything further to reduce Climate Change and try to enjoy what time we have left, worry free.
Bearing in mind, of course, that 53% of Americans is actually 53% of Americans, while 72% of the roughly 25% of Americans who are in the GOP is actually 18% of Americans, who want more tax breaks & less regulation.
Is that what you meant? What is that about?
The Beads that did not buy Manhattan Island
– Setting History Straight
Indiana Tests if the Heartland Can Transform Into a Chip Hub
NY Times – August 6
The state has little experience with semiconductors, but the Biden administration has promised to unleash opportunity in “the heartland of America” through the $52 billion CHIPS Act.
… Indiana’s moves are a test of the Biden administration’s efforts to stimulate regional economies through the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act, a landmark package of funding that is planned to begin going out the door in the next few months. The program is intended to bolster domestic manufacturing and research of semiconductors, which act as the brains of computers and other products and have become central to the U.S. battle with China for tech primacy. …
Schumer Wields Political Heft in Bid for New York Chips Funds
NY Times – August 6
The Senate majority leader helped deliver billions of dollars in federal funding for semiconductors. Now he’s pushing for his state to reap benefits.
… Mr. Schumer last year helped rally Congress to push through the biggest industrial policy programs the United States has seen in a generation. The Biden administration is now preparing to invest tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. semiconductor industry in an effort to boost chip manufacturing across the country and lessen U.S. reliance on foreign factories.
If Mr. Schumer gets his way, a substantial part of that funding will flow to New York.
In his encounters with chip executives, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and President Biden himself, Mr. Schumer has openly and aggressively drawn on his political capital as majority leader to try to channel investment to his home state. …
These libertarians want to take over New Hampshire. But first, a clothing-optional gun show.
Bosron Globe magazine – August 9