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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Democracy and the economy [1]

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Date: 2022-08-25

No one can argue with President Joe Biden’s job record—more than 9.5 million unemployed Americans found jobs over the past 18 months, and the unemployment rate fell from 6.4 to 3.5 percent. Whether Americans’ incomes are higher is more complicated, because the pandemic disrupted the economy in so many ways. First, GDP collapsed in 2020, and unemployment soared—followed by massive public spending that extended into Biden’s term in 2021 and helped us recover. But supply problems, especially energy, ignited inflation, and spending, worsened it. While the fast-rising employment has produced a record 14.9 percent surge in overall wage and salary income since Biden took office, how much has inflation eaten away at those unparalleled gains? For all of the “pain at the pump” stories, the answer is that wages and salaries have kept pace with inflation since Biden took office—and by this measure, most Americans are much better off than before the pandemic hit in 2020, and before he took office in 2021.

Nate Cohn of The New York Times points out (as does Markos) that Democrats have outperformed Republicans in every special election since the Dobbs ruling.

One special election would be easy to dismiss. But it’s not alone. There have been five special congressional elections since the court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe, and Democrats have outperformed Mr. Biden’s 2020 showing in four of them. In the fifth district, Alaska’s at-large House special, the ranked-choice voting count is not complete, but they appear poised to outperform him there as well. On average, Republicans carried the four completed districts by 3.7 percentage points, compared with Donald J. Trump’s 7.7-point edge in the same districts two years ago. The results aren’t merely worse than expected for Republicans; they’re straightforwardly poor. Republicans need to fare better than Mr. Trump, who lost the national vote by 4.5 points in 2020, to retake the House — let alone contemplate winning the Senate. [...] But strength among high-turnout white voters can get a party pretty far in low-turnout midterm elections, which tend to have a relatively whiter electorate. Perhaps in part for that reason, there is a decent historical relationship between special election results and midterm outcomes. And before Dobbs, Republicans were outrunning Mr. Trump in special congressional elections. Since then, the pattern has reversed.

Dahila Lithwick of Slate notes that even in the face of courting electoral disaster, anti-abortion activists are not content with the Dobbs ruling; they are prepared to go to even more extremes.

x Federal student loan debt has weighed heavily on our nation, preventing people from starting a family, buying a home, or starting a small business. Today, @POTUS announced our Administration will cancel $10,000 in federal student loan debt for millions of Americans. pic.twitter.com/GhQ0OzfftH — Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) August 24, 2022

The Conversation asked three experts, Terri Friedline, Dominique Baker, and John W. Diamond, about the potential impacts of President Joe Biden’s plan for student loan forgiveness.

Adam Harris of The Atlantic says that work still remains to overhaul a system that is reliant on student indebtedness.

According to a White House fact sheet, 90 percent of Biden’s debt relief will go to those who earn less than $75,000 a year—and the administration estimates that 20 million people will have their debt completely canceled. “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, for a college degree,” Biden said at a White House event. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided.” That Democrats arrived at this point at all, though, is a testament to how grim the student-loan crisis has become. A decade and a half ago, Democrats were advocating for small increases in the federal grant program to help low-income students afford college. Over successive presidential campaigns, Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for canceling most, or all, student debt issued by the government—effectively hitting reset on a broken system. And now the party is announcing one of the largest federal investments in higher education in recent memory. When he was running for president in 2007, Biden advocated for a tax credit for college students and a marginal increase in the size of individual Pell Grant awards—tinkering around the edges of solving a brewing mess as America lurched toward a deep recession. From 2006 to 2011, college enrollment grew by 3 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the same time, states began to cut back on their higher-education spending. On average, by 2018, states were spending 13 percent less per student than they were in 2008. Historically, when states look to cut their budgets, higher education is one of the first sectors to feel the blade. Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree that a college degree pays off. But college, unlike K–12 schooling, is not universal, and a majority of Republicans believe that investment in higher education benefits graduates more than anyone else. So lawmakers have been willing to make students shoulder a greater share of the burden. But this shift leaves those with the fewest resources to pay for college—and those whose families earn a little too much to qualify for Pell Grants—taking on significant debt.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post reviews how the soon-to-be retired Dr. Anthony Fauci became a cultural touchstone and not simply for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/25/2118531/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Democracy-and-the-economy

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