“April, who works at a pet shop in Minneapolis, makes $11.75 an hour. She loves her job, and it pays better than the federal minimum wage, but not by much. She and her partner get by. They still don’t make enough money to afford a car, but they can manage rent, their phones, and internet, and support their 12-year-old daughter.
Her partner lost his job as a body piercer when the pandemic hit. He went on unemployment insurance for a while, and he and April finally found health insurance through a public assistance program. It was more consistent income than they’d seen in quite some time. “We were able to get a little bit of extra money into our accounts for once. We weren’t going paycheck to paycheck for a while. That was wonderful,” April said. “I think a ton of people were finally out of the poverty level with that money.” Her partner has now found a different job that allows him to work from home.
Life is more or less fine, but April said it would be better if they made more. “We would be able to have a house like a normal family,” she added.
April and her family’s situation is quite normal: In 2019, about 39 million people made less than $15 an hour. When the pandemic hit, that number actually fell — not because people were making more but because low-wage workers became unemployed.”
“this problem of an overcomplicated system that makes it hard for people to access benefits isn’t limited to the stimulus checks. For many government benefits, lots of people who are eligible don’t get it — often because they have no idea how to sign up.”
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“the federal government needs to make its assistance programs simpler and more accessible. Some headway was actually made on this issue in the recent stimulus plan — Biden’s child allowance converted the existing child tax credit into a near-universal benefit sent to eligible recipients every month, making the program both more generous and accessible. But that’s a one-year fix, and there’s much more work to be done on this front.”
…
“it’s not enough to pass programs that help them in principle; the government actually has to build the infrastructure to get that help into their hands.
For example, the IRS was made responsible for sending out the stimulus checks and publicizing eligibility, but it doesn’t have a budget for public outreach or marketing. It could easily have been given one along with the responsibility of sending the checks out.”
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“Some policy thinkers favor giving every American a federal bank account, which would simultaneously solve the problem of underbanking — where poor people, who aren’t profitable for the banking system to seek out as customers, struggle with access to basic financial services — and the problem of sending out stimulus checks and benefits. In principle, the government could respond to recessions, pandemics, and disasters of every kind by just dropping some money in our Fed Accounts.”
““The fossil fuel industries were unionized in long struggles that were classic labor stories,” said University of Rhode Island labor historian Erik Loomis. “Now, they’re in decline and you have these new industries. But a green capitalist is still a capitalist, and they don’t want a union.”
About 4 percent of solar industry workers and 6 percent of wind workers are unionized, according to the 2020 US Energy and Employment Report. The percentage of unionized workers in natural gas, nuclear, and coal power plants is about double that, around 10 to 12 percent unionized (although still not a huge amount). In addition, transportation, distribution, and storage jobs — which exist largely in the fossil fuel sector — about 17 percent of the jobs are unionized. Still, the solar and wind unionization rates are in line with the albeit very low national rate of unionized workers in the private sector, which is about 6.3 percent.
This is one of the big reasons there’s a real hesitancy on the part of many unions and workers to transition from fossil fuel to renewable jobs: They are worried the jobs waiting for them in wind and solar won’t pay as well or have union protections. This has long been a tension point between environmental groups and labor”
“Biden health officials have quietly revoked the previous administration’s approval of Medicaid work rules in two states, as they move quickly to unwind one of former President Donald Trump’s signature health policies.
Federal Medicaid officials on Wednesday sent letters to Arkansas and New Hampshire officials, informing them that the administration had formally scrapped the federal government’s permission for the states to mandate that some enrollees work, volunteer or attend school as a condition of coverage.”
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“The Trump administration in 2018 issued guidance letting states, for the first time, to implement work rules in the Medicaid program, contending it would incentivize healthy people to find employment. Democrats argued the work rules were designed to shrink the safety net health program’s rolls, and courts have blocked the rules where they have been challenged.
The Biden administration last month began the process of eliminating work rules in the roughly dozen states where they had been approved. The states, which are predominantly Republican-led, were given until last Friday to submit information to CMS defending the work rules. In some states, Democratic governors inherited work rules from their GOP predecessors but sought to avoid enforcing them.”
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“The Supreme Court is still weighing whether to review lower court rulings against work rules in Arkansas and New Hampshire, and revoking the programs could make the case moot.”
“If every basic fact is disputed or called into doubt, we lack a common, agreed-upon reality. We become unable to deliberate or compromise or make informed decisions. Liberal democracy itself becomes an unsustainable enterprise.”
“the GOP has embraced many policy positions—and attitudes—that have little to do with advancing human liberty. Throughout my career, conservatives and libertarians have been allies on many issues and at odds on others, but now we’re like residents of different planets.
For instance, both groups agreed on the dangers of Soviet expansion. Libertarians, however, warned that giving American security agencies too much power would undermine liberties at home. Conservatives and libertarians worked together to fight progressive assaults on property rights, but libertarians wondered why conservatives couldn’t see how the drug war undermined those goals.
Still, we had many opportunities to work together. Whereas conservatives in Europe never had a problem using big-government to achieve their ends, American conservatives were about “conserving” America’s particular traditions. Our nation’s founding fathers were classical liberals, so conservatives often defended libertarian ideals.
The Trump era solidified long-brewing changes in the conservative movement, as it moved toward a more European-style approach that wasn’t concerned about limits on government power. Trump wasn’t a political thinker, but a marketing savant who tapped into popular and often-legitimate resentments of the increasingly “woke” Left.
Republican politicians mostly stood by Trump, even as he shattered democratic norms and reshaped conservative policy prescriptions, less out of fear of Trump himself and more out of fear of the conservative grassroots voter. What does it even mean to be a conservative these days?
In 2020, the GOP dispensed with its platform and passed a resolution stating its enthusiast support for the president’s agenda. Party platforms are unenforceable, but they provide the faithful with an opportunity to create a mission statement. Apparently, being a conservative now means supporting whatever the leader happens to believe.
Such an approach is temperamentally and philosophically non-conservative, as are many of the goals of the Trumpiest wannabes. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), best known for giving a fist pump to MAGA protesters before some of them stormed the Capitol, recently introduced a plan to boost the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.”
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“MAGA conservatives want libertarians to join their tribe, but their publications offer frequent attacks on the free market. The populist right wants to boost federal spending, impose draconian immigration controls, expand the power of police and spy agencies, step up the drug war and, well, stop when you see something of value to libertarians.
Since Reagan, conservatism has revolved around four concepts, explains Jonathan Last in The Bulwark, a right-leaning anti-Trump publication. There was “temperamental conservatism,” which worried about the consequences of progressive social engineering. There also was “foreign-affairs conservatism,” “fiscal conservatism” and “social conservatism.”
“‘Conservatism’ as it is now viewed by the majority of people who identify as conservatives—and who once believed in all or most of those four precepts—is now about one thing and one thing only: Revanchism,” Last wrote. Sure, I had to look it up, but “revanchism” means “a policy of seeking to retaliate, especially to recover lost territory.”
Yes, that “own the libs” approach has muscled out principled discussions about long-held conservative ideals and goals.”
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“slow change rather than dramatic progress, a focus on prudence, trust in human liberty and variety, respect for societal norms, love of virtue, and commitment to social peace—are at odds with the nihilistic bomb throwing of a conservative populist movement that seems as radical at times as its progressive enemy.”
“One of the most damning indictments of President Donald Trump’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential election was that he allegedly pressured Georgia’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud.” The Washington Post first reported this detail on January 9, and countless other mainstream media sites publicized it.
But that reporting was wrong. Trump never used the phrase “find the fraud” during his December phone call with Frances Watson, the chief investigator within the secretary of state’s office; moreover, he never promised Watson that she would be a “national hero” if she did discover evidence of fraud.”
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“Watson discovered an audio file during an effort to retrieve documents for a public records request. This file, which was published last week by The Wall Street Journal, makes clear that the quotes supplied by the anonymous source were erroneous.
During the call, Trump told Watson that she had “the most important job in the country” and that she would be praised “when the right answer comes out.” He also made several incorrect statements, and continuously asserted that he had actually won the state of Georgia.
“I won Georgia, I know that, by a lot, and the people know it,” said Trump. “Something happened. Something bad happened.”
Trump deserves criticism for repeatedly and loudly making this false claim, which eventually culminated in some of this more rabid and deluded supporters assaulting the U.S. Capitol. But the notion that he pressured Watson to specifically uncover evidence of fraud looks much weaker now that a recording of the call has been released.
Trump’s other call with Georgian election officials, a transcript of which has been available for months, continues to look quite bad for him: He repeatedly stated an exact number of votes that he would like the investigators to discover. It would not be wrong to conclude that Trump inappropriately exerted pressure on Georgian election officials. But he did not say precisely what the media alleged that he had said”
“Many Republican legislators at both the state and national level are profoundly misguided about Section 230. They seem to think it’s getting in the way of conservatives’ free speech rights when in reality it gives Big Tech additional legal cover for continuing to platform right-wing speech. Legislation aimed at hurting social media companies will ultimately end up hurting the kinds of speech that have flourished on Facebook and Twitter but would not have been published in mainstream media outlets.
If anything, that’s disproportionately likely to be right-wing speech.”
“group-egalitarians claim that, absent injustice, we should have equal representation of groups in every human enterprise. But how can that be? If groups matter, some people are going to bounce a basketball 100,000 times a month and other people are going to bounce it 10,000 times a month. If groups matter, their members will not do the same things, believe the same things, think the same things, or act and react in the same ways. Groups have their own integrity, expressing themselves in how they live their lives, raise their children, and spend their time. This will inevitably result in a different presence of groups across various human activities. They will not have similar occupational or professional profiles. They will not be present in the same proportions as members of the National Academy of Sciences, as tenured faculty members, as tech entrepreneurs, hedge-fund managers, small shopkeepers, single parents, or petty criminals.
It follows that respecting groups’ integrity while demanding group equality is simply a contradiction. Attempting to impose equality despite that contradiction will only lead to disappointment, tyranny, and more racism.”
“the committee has declined to list statues of Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet in the era of the #MeToo movement, it has become clear that his treatment of women was far from exemplary. His comments on North Vietnamese Communists reveal a blind spot toward the totalitarianism that continues to affect many Vietnamese and billions of others. Of course, these defects, like those of Washington and Lincoln, are no reason not to celebrate King’s great contributions with monuments—as Chicago has rightly done.”
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“Liberal societies allow people to pursue their own projects (and, increasingly, identities). And yet even a liberal society needs some shared ties of national memory to hold people together despite their differences. The Chicago committee suggests that monuments to such a memory should either be removed entirely or be transformed into screens on which we can project contemporary grievances. In attacking the best of our forebears, Lightfoot and her committee not only make our common past a casualty of our divided present. They also threaten the foundation on which our future would be built.”