“Young people are attending college, often in a different location from where they grew up. They’re working full-time or part-time while attending school, often at low-wage jobs that can have unstable work schedules. They don’t have access to transportation. They move around a lot, change schools, or study abroad. They don’t know where they’ll be living three months in the future.
“You think about the fact that most 40-year-olds … have a stable workweek where you kind of know when you’ll fit voting in on that first Tuesday in November,” said Sunshine Hillygus, a political science professor at Duke University who co-wrote a book on young voters, on the EdSurge podcast. “Whereas young people have a far more fluid and unstable schedule and lifestyle.”
Registering to vote — and figuring out where and how to vote — can look easy on paper. But for many young adults, getting clear instructions, along with all the variables that can change at the last minute, is more challenging than you might think. Hillygus suggests reforms that ease the process of voting, such as preregistering young people to vote in high school or when they get their driver’s license at 16, as well as better overall civic education in schools that connect government and politics with teens’ everyday lives.
Vox spoke to three young people who encountered logistical difficulties that prevented or nearly prevented them from voting. All of them wanted to make clear that they and their young peers do want to vote, but that the barriers to making it happen can feel daunting.”
“Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is a critic of Roberts’s decisions upholding most of Obamacare. In a book review published in 2017, for example, Barrett denounced Roberts’s opinions in both NFIB and King, claiming the chief justice “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute” in the first decision.
If Obamacare is struck down, roughly 20 million Americans will lose health coverage — a likely conservative estimate, as it does not count many people who have lost their employer-provided health insurance during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Questions over Obamacare have taken a starring role in Barrett’s confirmation hearing. Democratic senators have repeatedly brought up Barrett’s objections to the NFIB and King decisions and frequently referred to California v. Texas, a third case attacking Obamacare that the Supreme Court will hear in November.
Barrett didn’t deny criticizing the NFIB and King opinions, but suggested that perhaps she didn’t engage in particularly rigorous analysis when she attacked those two decisions.
After Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Barrett about a 2015 NPR interview in which the future judge claimed the dissenting justices had the “better of the legal argument” in King, Barrett said she was merely a law professor when she made that statement. “A professor professes and can opine,” Barrett claimed, adding that she did not go through the “judicial decision-making process” when she determined that King was wrongly decided.”
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“Barrett’s record..suggests she is a long-term threat to the viability of the ACA — even though the Court may very well still reject the unusually shaky legal arguments in Texas.”
“Of all the innumerable “horrors,” the diplomat said the worst aspect of Trump is the chaos he brings to the world arena: “The lack of being able to plan, the lack of being able to extrapolate from a normal set of facts and arguments what might be a course of action that the United States might take.
“Even if you don’t like it, it’s useful to have an idea of where they are going,” the diplomat said.
Radosław Sikorski, a former Polish defense minister and longtime foreign minister, called Trump’s first term “an extraordinary saga of bluster and incompetence.”
Now a member of the European Parliament and leader of its delegation for U.S. relations, Sikorski said he expected a second Trump term would feature more of the same, including when it comes to the president’s preference for courting authoritarian leaders over traditional, liberal democratic allies.”
“North and South Dakota have taken a laissez-faire approach to dealing with Covid-19 — never instituting stay-at-home orders or mask mandates as other states, including some of their neighbors, did.
South Dakota in particular took a very hands-off approach, with no restrictions even on large gatherings. The strongest action Republican Gov. Kristi Noem took was to push businesses to follow safety guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Otherwise, Noem has boasted about her state’s loose strategy: She argued in an ad that businesses struggling with restrictions in other states should “come grow [their] company” in South Dakota.
“Here in South Dakota, we trust our people,” Noem said. “We respect their rights. We won’t shut them down.”
Noem still defends her approach, arguing in a recent op-ed that she’ll continue to resist stricter measures. “I’m going to continue to trust South Dakotans to make wise and well-informed decisions for themselves and their families,” she wrote.
North Dakota has done a little more. While avoiding statewide restrictions and lockdowns, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum in October called for reduced business capacity in some counties as cases spiked in his state. But these are mere recommendations — it’s hard to know if any businesses are following them — and, even then, he stopped short of recommending closures.
North Dakota also has one of the most expansive testing regimes in the US — consistently reporting one of the highest rates of coronavirus testing in the country. This may partially explain its high case count, although its positivity rate indicates that it still doesn’t have enough testing. And that testing-and-tracing system can only do so much once the virus is completely out of control, which growing hospitalizations and death rates are evidence of.
“Our contact tracers are overwhelmed with a backlog of cases,” Carson said. “We have further heard from many of our contact tracers that they are meeting increasing resistance from people to give up their contacts or abide by quarantine rules. People have become fatigued with the restrictions.”
Similar to South Dakota’s governor, North Dakota’s Burgum has pushed a message of personal responsibility. “It’s not a job for government,” he said. “This is a job for everybody.””
https://www.politico.eu/article/china-gets-serious-about-kicking-its-export-addiction-trade-tariffs/
“The Secret Service and Labor Department have been warning states for months that criminal networks are trying to steal billions of dollars in federal pandemic unemployment aid. But the overburdened and antiquated state systems that send out the checks have been unable to stop a lot of the fraud.
Using huge databases of stolen personal information, cybercriminals based everywhere from Nigeria to London have pocketed an estimated $8 billion meant for people forced out of work due to the coronavirus so far, the Labor Department’s inspector general told states last month. The IG predicts that $26 billion in the federal aid programs alone eventually could be lost to fraud.”
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“state workforce agencies, stymied by decades-old IT systems and flooded with applications, have been ill-equipped to find and prevent the fraud, which appears to be far more extensive than the usual attempts to bilk government programs.”
“the U.S. trade gap is on track to exceed $600 billion this year. That would be the highest since 2008, just before the global financial crisis.
The monthly deficit in U.S. goods trade with all other countries set a record high in August at more than $83 billion.
Trump has blamed the trade deficit on bad trade deals negotiated by his predecessors and unfair trade practices by other countries, but most economists disagree with that explanation.”
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“A variety of factors contributed to Trump’s failure to eliminate the trade gap, which White House trade adviser Peter Navarro predicted in 2016 could be erased in one or two years.
Overall trade remains depressed compared to year-ago levels because of the coronavirus pandemic.
But the massive U.S. government stimulus payments to businesses and consumers have helped U.S. imports recover faster than U.S. exports. That explains why the monthly goods deficit has increased from the average level of $73.3 billion in 2019.
However, even without the pandemic, Trump’s practice of piling tariffs on China and selected other products like steel and aluminum was never going to turn around the deficit, most economists agree.”
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” The large U.S. trade deficit is fundamentally driven by larger economic factors — like the fact Americans spend more than they save and have to borrow from abroad to finance the difference”
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“Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut in 2017 contributed to that problem by running up the U.S. budget deficit.”
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“Looking at trade in 2019, the last full year of data, the overall U.S. trade deficit fell by less than 1 percent from the previous year to $577 billion. However, the bilateral trade deficit with China fell by a much more impressive 17 percent to $345 billion as importers turned to other countries such as Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and members of the EU.”
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““We would say one of the big failures of the Trump administration with respect to trade policy is the failure to address currency misalignment in any kind of meaningful way,” said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank aligned with union groups. “Putting a couple of sentences into the deal, but without a clear road map as to how it’s going to be instrumentalized, doesn’t really do very much.””
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“Trump’s revised NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada does include strong protections for workers rights, which helped the pact win overwhelming approval in the Democratic-controlled House. But the fact that labor concerns were not addressed in the China agreement “just shows that the Trump administration is not driven by any principles in this area, but simply by political expediency,” Lee said.
The administration hails China’s agreement as part of the phase one trade deal to purchase $200 billion more of U.S. goods and services in 2020 and 2021, compared with the record it set in 2017.
But the data released on Tuesday shows that China is well behind on that goal. During the first eight months of this year, it had imported just $69.5 billion worth of U.S. farm and manufactured goods, compared to $80.2 billion in the same period in 2017.
U.S. farmers were hit so hard by Trump’s tariff war with China that his administration doled out more than $20 billion in emergency aid payments to help cushion the blow.
U.S. farm exports to China had reached as high as $25 billion annually a few years before Trump was elected. But they plummeted to $6.8 billion in fiscal 2019 after Beijing retaliated against Trump’s tariffs by raising its own duties on U.S. farm exports.”
“With the presidential election now just over two weeks away, President Donald Trump has mounted a frantic effort to ensure America’s farmers, a key Trump voting bloc, will support his flagging re-election campaign. In short, he’s shoving piles of cash their way.
The New York Times details the “gush of funds” Trump has promised U.S. farmers—with more on the way. Some say total farm subsidies could top $40 billion this year. The Times says the figure may be as high as $46 billion. Either figure would be a record.”
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“Non-partisan observers have also labeled them political handouts. “The Government Accountability Office found last month that $14.5 billion of farm aid in 2019 had been handed out with politics in mind,” The Week reports. The Times, citing the same GAO report, also highlighted by some Democrats, shows farm subsidies last year appeared to be directed to “big farms in the Midwest and southern states,” mirroring at least some segments of Trump’s farm base.
That same base has been hit hard by tariffs championed by Trump. In 2018, I predicted (as did many others) that Trump’s international trade tariffs would spur retaliatory tariffs and harm U.S. farmers and consumers in the process. They did just that.
But because Trump’s tariffs hurt U.S. farmers, and because he wants them to vote for him again, he’s sending them cash. That cash even has a name. Last year, one farmer NPR food-policy writer Dan Charles spoke with says he and his fellow farmers have taken to referring to the tariff-induced subsidies as “Trump money.””
“This ad campaign, as dramatic as it is, is only the most recent instance of the executive branch blurring the line between informing the public and propagandizing it. It is a problem that our representative democracy has had a hard time dealing with for the past century. But since information is the lifeblood of democracy, it’s a problem we need to get a handle on if we’re going to have a chance of repairing our battered political system.”
“Arizona’s Supreme Court had five judges for 56 years. But on December 19, 2016, thanks to a GOP-authored bill that was opposed by every Democrat in the state Legislature, Republican Governor Doug Ducey held a ceremony in the Old Capitol building to swear in a sixth justice, and then a seventh.
In all, Ducey has appointed five of the seven justices on the state court, taking a personal interest in vetting candidates with questions designed to ferret out a fidelity to textualism and an inclination to uphold, rather than overturn or tinker with, the law. His appointments, including the addition of the two new justices, have eliminated the court’s progressive caucus and swung it from a more moderate conservative tilt to one that emphasizes libertarianism, populism, and law and order, in line with Ducey’s own views. And the ages of its younger members mean the court likely will stay that way for years.”
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“at least 10 states have attempted to change the size of their courts over the past decade, with Arizona and one other state—Georgia—succeeding. And most of these efforts were spearheaded by Republicans.”
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“GOP lawmakers pitched the idea of expanding the Arizona Supreme Court by arguing that businesses needed clarity on the law more quickly than five justices could provide, and that the growing state needed more voices on the bench to represent its diverse citizenry. While Ducey consistently has said he was not packing the court for political purposes, Republicans acknowledge they wouldn’t have proposed the change if it would have meant handing over two seats for a Democratic governor to fill.”