• Here’s Why Recovery From the Pandemic Recession Should Be Pretty Strong

    Investors in the stock market are obviously pretty optimistic about the future state of the economy. But are they too optimistic? Why would anyone think that we’re going to recover from our current recession any faster than we recovered from the Great Recession of 2008-10?

    There are two reasons for optimism. Here’s the first:

    When the housing bubble collapsed in 2007 and took consumer demand with it, we were at the end of a long period in which personal saving had drifted down to a meager 3.3 percent. This made the aftermath of the recession especially bad since households had almost no savings to make up for loss of income. The next four years were spent on rebuilding those savings, which contributed to a slow recovery of consumer spending.

    The situation is just the opposite today. Household savings were high before the pandemic hit and that gives families a spending cushion. This is one reason that consumer spending has recovered so quickly even though we haven’t even exited the recession yet.

    But there’s a second reason for optimism that’s closely related to the first. In 2009, even though it was obvious that the Great Recession was, indeed, great, Congress was willing to pass a stimulus bill of only $800 billion over two years. That’s $400 billion per year.

    Compare that to the CARES Act, passed in March just as the pandemic recession was starting. It allocated $2.2 trillion, all of it designated for this year, and Congress seems likely to approve another trillion dollars during the lame duck session, most of it designated for the next six months or so. That comes to $3.2 trillion over 16 months, an annual rate of $2.4 trillion. That’s six times as much stimulus as Congress approved in 2009.

    This is what’s responsible for the huge spike in personal savings starting last summer. The CARES Act kept the economy afloat and put money in people’s pockets, much of which was put into savings. That savings is now being drawn down, which has kept consumer spending in reasonably good shape. There’s every reason to think that by next summer, when mass vaccine uptake should finally bring the pandemic to an end, the underlying economy will be in pretty good shape and can pick up where it left off rather than sputtering along because consumers are desperately trying to increase their savings instead of spending their paychecks.

    There are plenty of caveats to this, chief among them the possibility of employment never recovering to its pre-pandemic level. Nevertheless, there’s a pretty basic story here: unlike 2009, Congress was willing to pass a massive stimulus bill that kept both personal savings and consumer spending in decent shape. Combine that with the fact that most people believe the pandemic recession has a natural ending point (when the uptake rate for the vaccine becomes high enough to stop the spread of the coronavirus) and there’s good reason to think that we should recover fairly quickly in the second half of next year.

  • Here’s What I’d Do if I Could Wave a Magic Wand With Progressive Policies

    Image by Vectorportal.com, CC BY

    For no particular reason, it occurred to me the other day that one of the drawbacks of blogging is that readers never get a full sense of how I feel about various topics in the progressive firmament. If you’re a longtime reader you can probably put it all together from posts here and there, but not everyone is a longtime reader.

    So here’s a super brief rundown. I’ve limited this list to domestic policies that are primarily addressed at the federal level. There are no explanations here; this list solely represents what I would do if I could wave a magic wand and get whatever I wanted without stoking a revolution. In real life, of course, I believe that change happens only incrementally and I’m always open to compromises that get me part of the way to my goals. But these are the goals.

    If there’s anything I’ve left out, it’s not because I’m holding out on you. I just forgot. Feel free to ask about things in comments, but please make your asks fairly specific.

    • Climate change: Spend a truly vast amount of money on buildout and R&D. This should be funded partly by a large and growing upsteam tax on carbon emissions.
    • Social Security: Increase benefits for the bottom third by about 30 percent.
    • Health care: True national health care, including long-term nursing care, on something like the French model. Fund it with a combination of taxes on business, and modestly progressive income taxes.
    • Minimum wage: Raise the federal minimum wage to $12-13 and index it to inflation. States and cities, as always, would remain free to legislate higher minimums.
    • Forgiving student debt: Pretty regressive, pretty poor stimulus, and not well handled at the federal level anyway.
    • Prison sentencing: Reduce minimum sentences substantially. Encourage states to do the same.
    • Labor: I’m in favor of practically anything that revives private-sector unions.
    • Abortion: No regulation whatsoever, aside from normal medical regs that govern all outpatient procedures.
    • Guns: Ban everything except single-shot firearms.
    • National ID: Everyone gets a free national ID card.
    • Voting: Voting should be a right, similar to freedom of speech, that can be restricted only under circumstances where you might also restrict speech rights. Everyone is allowed to vote, no registration necessary. Voting rules are set at the federal, not state, level.
    • Filibuster: Abolish it. (This is a long-held view.)
    • Electoral college: Abolish it and replace with a popular vote. (This is also a long-held view.)
    • New states: Yes to Washington DC, no to Puerto Rico.
    • Supreme Court: Not sure. But if the new reality is that justices can be confirmed only when the same party controls the Senate and the White House, something has to give.
    • Taxes: Raise income taxes on the rich. Raise them a lot on the really rich.
    • Black-white educational gap: I don’t know what to do about this, but we can’t give up on it. It’s too important.
    • Paid maternity/paternity leave. This should be federally guaranteed. I’m open to various plans, but it should cover at least eight weeks of time off.
    • Government funded childcare: Yes, though the devil is in the details.
    • Wokeness: Like a lot of things, it’s a good idea that’s been taken too far. I support the underlying idea, but not the performative excesses that are so often part of it these days.
    • Gay and trans rights: As you’d expect, I have no reason in general to support any restriction whatsoever on either of these. Maybe somebody will come up with something, but I doubt it.
    • Death penalty: Abolish it.
    • Lead: You really need to ask? Clean it up. All of it.
    • Universal basic income: Nope. It wouldn’t work in our current economy. However, something along these lines will probably be necessary in ten or twenty years as labor becomes ever more automated.
    • Marijuana: Deschedule it and make it legal nationwide.
    • Public funding of campaigns: I’m not sure I favor this. I guess I’m on the fence.
    • Immigration: Borders are borders, and we should enforce them. Those who cross illegally should be given a quick hearing and then returned to their country of origin. Mandatory eVerify should be used to keep employers from hiring those without work documentation. To handle the current situation, we should pass some kind of compromise bill that’s similar in spirit to the 2013 bill that failed.
    • Reparations: No. It would do no good and has an excellent chance of making things worse.
    • Job guarantee plan: Absolutely not. This would almost certainly be a disaster.
    • Antitrust: Ditch the Borkian revolution and return to a simple enforcement based on size and market share only.
    • Early childhood education: I’m in favor, but recent research has made me a little more skeptical. I would need to study this more.
  • Lunchtime Photo

    This is a very austere, sort of Andrew Wyeth-ish photo of our local blimp hangar. I keep thinking I’ll find an appropriate hook to use it someday, but after a year and a half I still haven’t found anything and I figure it’s finally time to quit looking for some clever justification. Instead, I’ll just put it up and see if anyone likes it.

    May 26, 2019 — Tustin, California
  • How Did This Giving Tuesday Thing Get Started?

    Black Friday. Small Business Saturday. Cyber Monday. Giving Tuesday. I used to be a marketing guy myself so I get it. Everyone needs a spiel to call their own. In the end, though, it all makes me feel a little curmudgeonly.

    But Brian Hiatt, who leads MoJo’s online fundraising work, tells me he used to be a cynic too. In particular, Giving Tuesday always felt a little bit weird to him. Lately, though, as he looked into the day’s history, he’s come around on it…and maybe I have too. So I’m going to turn the keys to the blog over to him for a quickie one-day fundraising post, and I hope you’ll consider helping Brian do his job with a donation to support our work if you can right now. After all, he helps all of us here to do our jobs.  

    (Brian also says thanks a ton: You all pitched in a damn impressive $30,917 from my posts during our October fundraising campaign, and the average gift from the 456 of you who did was $68—a good bit higher than most. You’re too kind!)

    And now, here’s Brian.

    A cool thing about researching something is how learning new facts can change your mind.

    Hi. I’m Brian, and I lead the online membership work at Mother Jones, finding ways to connect with you all and asking you to support our journalism from time to time.

    Like right now, for Giving Tuesday, and I hope you’ll consider pitching in to help make our nonprofit reporting possible. But I have to admit, Giving Tuesday has always felt a bit weird to me.

    I’m not sure exactly how I became an online fundraiser. It’s not like I decided to in college or after getting a masterpiece in my inbox, like Barack Obama’s legendary “hey” email. But I did, and I’ve been doing online work for nonprofits since way before Giving Tuesday was a thing, before Twitter blew up at SXSW, and before Facebook opened up outside of college campuses.

    Oh look, I thought, another shiny object, probably meant for PR and big funders or corporate sponsors to latch onto, and that isn’t going to drive results in a big way. Every fundraiser knows that December is the most important month for online giving; that the lion’s share of donations come in during the final 10 days of the year; and that December 31st is the biggest day for online fundraising. It’s my field’s Super Bowl Sunday, and who does this Tuesday after Thanksgiving even think it is barging in like it owns the place? 

    I was a lot like this guy, who poo-pooed Giving Tuesday’s debut, and questioned it’s theory of change the next year. I was also wrong! 

    In 2018, after MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery spent Thanksgiving home alone with a nasty flu, watching people fight over flatscreens in the news, she started tweeting out DonorsChoose campaigns and raised $130,000 for public school teachers to meet their students’ needs across the country—they funded tables, washing machines, and drum kits. A few days later, on Giving Tuesday, she went on an epic 31-message twitter thread asking for donations to Mother Jones and holy sh*t people responded. I was getting lunch at a deli known for its fresh sourdough when I started seeing the donations pour in, and I remember that day every time I go back. 

    You can’t fight with results like Clara’s. And last week, I looked into Giving Tuesday’s genesis a bit more, and it’s a pretty great story.

    “The first Giving Tuesday started in 2012 to fight against Thanksgiving’s commercial corruption,” according to Fast Company‘s conversation with the day’s founder, Asha Curran, who was then with the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Sign me up for that! “The very basic premise of it was,” Curran asks, “could we turn people’s attention from two days of consuming to a day of giving?” That, it turns out, is exactly what Clara had done.  

    Curran intentionally didn’t brand Giving Tuesday as coming from the 92nd Street Y, as Vox writes in this great explainer, and made advice and resources available to any nonprofit that wanted in on the initiative. That was egoless and smart, and really helped smaller nonprofits that don’t have fundraisers in house or the ability to be seen by a critical mass of donors on their own. The day has spread globally to countries that don’t even do the whole Black Friday–Cyber Monday thing.

    One of the great things about working for Mother Jones is that there’s almost always something we’ve written on a topic at hand, and this feature from 2006 on how to avoid environmental catastrophe uses a study from the Max Planck Institute to show that, “clearly, we are inclined to behave as better citizens when we are educated and when our actions are visible.” Something, everything, about 2020 has me appreciating collective action like that right now.

    I love seeing results, too. Last year, in its eighth iteration, Giving Tuesday raised nearly $2 billion worldwide! That’s a fraction of the total—Americans alone gave $450 billion in 2019—in philanthropy, so Giving Tuesday is not a true gamechanger, but in my book, anything that boosts generosity and makes it visible (let’s not talk about why so many social services are forced to rely on charity today) is worth getting on board with.  

    The second half of December and the 31st itself will always have my fundraising heart (palpitations and all), but Giving Tuesday is pretty all right too—and I’d be delighted if you celebrated it with me by supporting Mother Jones with a Giving Tuesday donation today.    

  • Trump’s Crusade to Reverse the Election Is Just Another Big Con Job

    Kevin Dietsch/Pool//CNP via ZUMA

    Why is President Trump continuing to loudly claim that the election was a fraud? Why is he filing lawsuit after lawsuit, each more ridiculous than the last? One possibility, of course, is that he’s unhinged from reality and truly believes he was robbed. But then again, there’s also this:

    President Trump has raised about $170 million since Election Day as his campaign operation has continued to aggressively solicit donations with hyped-up appeals that have funded his fruitless attempts to overturn the election and that have seeded his post-presidential political ambitions, according to a person familiar with the matter….Instead of slowing down after the election, Mr. Trump’s campaign has ratcheted up its volume of email solicitations for cash, telling supporters that money was needed for an “Election Defense Fund.”

    Of this haul, about $130 million has gone into a new leadership PAC, Save America, that’s essentially a Trump slush fund. There are few restrictions on what he can do with it, and it’s a good bet that practically none of it is going into his efforts to challenge the election. Trump just wants a big pile of money for his future use.

    But what will he do with this stash? If he were anyone else, I’d guess that he’s planning to use it to keep himself in the public eye and possibly set the stage for a future run at the presidency. But Trump being Trump, it’s also possible that he’s just interested in a quasi-legal way of paying for his personal jet and his personal staff and the upkeep on Mar-a-Lago. In other words, it’s a pure grift.

    And the fact that he’s mostly taking this money from elderly pensioners who have been conned into believing that the country is facing Armageddon and only Donald Trump can save it? He doesn’t care. Sociopaths never do.

  • Coronavirus Growth in Western Countries: November 30 Update

    Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 30. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.