Stock Market Meltdown

This week’s stock market meltdown, explained

A warning that things are going to get worse.

By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com  Feb 28, 2020, 4:20pm EST

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21157689/coronavirus-stock-crash-dow-recession

Sidelining Scientists Can Only Make COVID-19 Worse...

Choosing Democracy: Sidelining Scientists Can Only Make COVID-19 Worse...: Sidelining Scientists Can Only Make COVID-19 Worse Michael Halpern February 28, 2020 Scientific American We need to hear about the r...

Mr. Trump Meets the Covid Virus

So, here’s the response of the Trump team and its allies to the coronavirus, at least so far: It’s actually good for America. Also, it’s a hoax perpetrated by the news media and the Democrats. Besides, it’s no big deal, and people should buy stocks. Anyway, we’ll get it all under control under the leadership of a man who doesn’t believe in science.

From the day Donald Trump was elected, some of us worried how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably, we’ve gone three years without finding out: Until now, every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self-created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test we’ve been fearing.

And the results aren’t looking good.

The story of the Trump pandemic response actually began several years ago. Almost as soon as he took office, Trump began cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading in turn to an 80 percent cut in the resources the agency devotes to global disease outbreaks. Trump also shut down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.

Experts warned that these moves were exposing America to severe risks. “We’ll leave the field open to microbes,” declared Tom Frieden, a much-admired former head of the C.D.C., more than two years ago. But the Trump administration has a preconceived notion about where national security threats come from — basically, scary brown people — and is hostile to science in general. So we entered the current crisis in an already weakened condition.

And the microbes came.

The first reaction of the Trumpers was to see the coronavirus as a Chinese problem — and to see whatever is bad for China as being good for us. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, cheered it on as a development that would “accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”

The story changed once it became clear that the virus was spreading well beyond China. At that point it became a hoax perpetrated by the news media. Rush Limbaugh weighed in: “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

Limbaugh was, you may not be surprised to hear, projecting. Back in 2014 right-wing politicians and media did indeed try to politically weaponize a disease outbreak, the Ebola virus, with Trump himself responsible for more than 100 tweets denouncing the Obama administration’s response (which was actually competent and effective).

And in case you’re wondering, no, the coronavirus isn’t like the common cold. In fact, early indications are that the virus may be as lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people.

Financial markets evidently don’t agree that the virus is a hoax; by Thursday afternoon the Dow was off more than 3,000 points since last week. Falling markets appear to worry the administration more than the prospect of, you know, people dying. So Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top economist, made a point of declaring that the virus was “contained” — contradicting the C.D.C. — and suggested that Americans buy stocks. The market continued to drop.

Inequality

Giridharadas packed more social analysis and history into 7+-minutes of TV than I've seen in a long time. 

More than simply interesting, I think:

http://www.msnbc.com/katy-tur/watch/income-inequality-growing-despite-strong-economy-76970565956

The Candidates and the Issues for Voting

Sacramento Bee's view of the candidates compared and the issues

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article240424231.html?

Medicare for All Would Save Billions

Opinion

Medicare For All Would Save Billions, Lives

Medicare for All would save $480b, save 68,000 lives, new study shows. Newsweek: "The Medicare For All plan proposed by Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year and would prevent tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, a new study shows. The analysis, conducted by researchers at Yale University, the University of Florida and the University of Maryland, found that transitioning the U.S. to a single-payer health care system would actually save an estimated $450 billion each year, with the average American family seeing about $2,400 in annual savings. The research, which was published Saturday in the medical journal The Lancet, also found that Medicare for all would prevent about 68,000 unnecessary deaths per year. 'Our study is actually conservative because it doesn't factor in the lives saved among underinsured Americans—which includes anyone who nominally has insurance but has postponed or foregone care because they couldn't afford the copays and deductibles,' Alison Galvani, an author of the study and researcher at the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at the Yale School of Public Health, told Newsweek."

Medicare for All: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Explains Medicare for all. Caution. Profanity. 

Michael Bloomberg and the Dangers of ‘Any Blue Will Do’ Politics

Michael Bloomberg and the Dangers of ‘Any Blue Will Do’ Politics: The presidential candidate is a mirror image of Trump.

Understanding the Real Economy

Beneath every sign of recovery breathlessly touted by political elites lies a long-term trend of grave concern to ordinary Americans.

By MAX B. SAWICKY
February 17, 2020Add to Pocket


One of my earliest memories of economic babble was President Gerald R. Ford, in 1976, boasting that there were more Americans working than ever before. I hadn’t yet taken up the study of economics (I obtained a bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1971), but I knew enough to be suspicious. After all, in a continuously growing economy, there will always be more Americans working than ever before, almost every year. The same can be said for the “stock market records” repeatedly touted by President Donald Trump. The lengthy market recovery after 2008, which is indeed remarkable, means there are opportunities to set “records” on a weekly basis. Even better, should the market turn down a tick today and rebound by two ticks tomorrow, bingo: There’s another new record to celebrate.


Economic boosters tend to play two basic angles. The first involves the question of responsibility: Who or what deserves credit for good news or the blame for bad? The second takes up the matter of just how good is good. That is to say, how seriously should we take the short-term fluctuations in the statistics that inspire breathless headlines, such as the gross domestic product, monthly increases in jobs, and the unemployment rate? Presidents are usually afforded more credit or blame than they actually deserve. The party holding the White House has a vested interest in magnifying the role of the president when it comes to good news, and the opposition has an incentive to emphasize the role the president played whenever bad news emerges.

Boosterism provides a crutch to the party in power but it creates a boomerang effect when that party goes into opposition. The same opportunism once used to exploit economic trends beyond your control in order to gain a narrow political advantage is subsequently deployed against you. This is happening now, to the benefit of Donald Trump. The broader trends may have something to do with longer-term Republican ascendance and the attenuation of traditional white working-class allegiance to the Democratic Party, or they may not. Regardless, Barack Obama’s share of the post-2008 recovery seems to have been insufficient to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Either way, from a longer-term perspective, there is less there than meets the eye. Obama deserves credit for his response to the 2008 meltdown, but the lengthy recovery that followed is no more his than it is Donald Trump’s. To get past partisan wrangling, we should call it the Obama-Trump Recovery. Everything bad about Trump’s economy applies equally to Obama’s, and everything good about Obama’s tenure applies to Trump’s. But even the perspective that a 10-year window provides often misses bigger changes in the economy. Others can grasp for trivial factoids that compare Trump to Obama. Our interest lies in the state of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

The basic problem with aggregates and averages is that they gloss over the underlying structural changes to the economy that pertain profoundly to the well-being of ordinary Americans.

The basic problem with aggregates and averages is that they gloss over the underlying structural changes to the economy that pertain profoundly to the well-being of ordinary Americans. Our principal sources of economic news derive from changes in the GDP, national employment, the unemployment rate, and the stock market. This is the real fake news: Each of these conceals a world of countervailing considerations. For example, from 2008 to 2019, the GDP, adjusted for inflation, grew by 25 percent. But in the case of GDP, a leading ancillary concern is not just total income growth, but its distribution. Among other things, the total obscures outliers—and in the United States, we have a lot of outliers: They’re called the superrich and the desperately poor.

At the high end, we could look at changes in the distribution of income. Since 2008, the share of income for most quintiles (20 percent slices) of U.S. households decreased. Only for the top quintile did it increase. Moreover, most of that increase went to the top 5 percent. What’s more, within the top 1 percent, income gains were disproportionately stacked to the top .01 percent. As Howard Gold noted in the Chicago Booth Review, “The 1 percent, it turns out, have their own 1 percent.”


The raw votes of the rich don’t add up to much: That top .01 percent only accounts for approximately 16,000 families. But the political clout their money can buy certainly makes up for their lack of numbers. Moreover, thanks to popular media and the self-promotion of the rich themselves, the unrich are acutely aware of the rich. Perceptions of just and unjust deserts could be presumed to affect voting behavior.

Meanwhile on the poor side of town, we can observe that during the Obama-Trump recovery, the poverty rate clearly decreased, as it ought to have. Once again, however, a longer view is pertinent. In 1980, the poverty rate was 13 percent. In the latest year reported, 2018, it is just a hair under 12 percent, notwithstanding 40 years of economic growth.

That was the top and bottom, but what about the middle? The median income level is unaffected by outliers and is thus a better gauge of where most people are found. Median household income has certainly increased since the depths of the recession, but from a longer perspective, it has only risen to approximately where it was in 1999. The rising tide did not lift all boats.

Another statistic regularly cited in the news is the change in national employment, reported at the beginning of the month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On those occasions, the media typically hypes a number that’s usually in the hundreds of thousands. As with GDP, there is less there than meets the eye.

The past decade, from 2010 to the present, brackets most of the administration of Barack Obama and all of Donald Trump. During that time, national employment increased by nearly 16 percent. The monthly increase in jobs reported in the BLS’s “Employment Situation” press release invariably makes the news, if only briefly. More jobs are always better, right? Sure, but this excludes a host of pertinent considerations that should be included in this snapshot.

For one thing, the net change masks the extent of “churning” in the labor market—the number of people who switch jobs—which is much greater than the net gain or loss in employment. For instance, in 2013 the “churn rate” was 68 percent. For some occupations, it exceeded 100 percent. A job switch can be either a gain or a loss for the worker involved, but the net aggregate change tells you nothing about that.

A more revealing gauge of job market health than the net change in total jobs is whether increases in employment are keeping pace with increases in population. To the extent they do not, jobs have become scarcer relative to the likely number of workers. The ratio of employment to population, or EPOP for short, has certainly risen since 2008, but it remains lower than it was before the past three recessions, going all the way back to 1990. One common explanation for this phenomenon is the aging of the population. An older population will have more retirees, giving rise to a decline in the ratio. The problem is, if one confines the measurement to those between the ages of 25 and 54, we also observe a deficit, compared to the business-cycle peak in June 2000.

The EPOP has a major advantage over its more popular cousin, the unemployment rate. The latter fails to include those who respond to surveys that they are no longer looking for work. There are some good reasons an individual may choose this response. She may be attending or returning to college. He may be going on disability or retiring. But there is no good reason why, over an extended period, the EPOP for the nonelderly should trend downward. And yet it does.Even if we grant that any increase in the number of jobs is a boon to the economy, we ought to inquire: Just how great are those jobs?

Even if we grant that any increase in the number of jobs is a boon to the economy, we ought to inquire: Just how great are those jobs? How well do they pay? Growth in pay, in the form of average hourly earnings, is positive for the entire spectrum since 2010, but that growth over the long run has fallen far short of the growth in productivity.

Pay is one thing, job quality is another. The benefits of hourly wages depend in part on the extent of work available and on the stability of work schedules. Some researchers have constructed a “Job Quality Index” or JQI, which we could also consider an “economic anxiety index.” In the JQI context, the benefits of employment growth are much more ambiguous. The biggest underlying change is the growth of the service sector over the past five decades. There has been some pickup in manufacturing in recent years, but it happens to be due to growth in food, the lowest-paid manufacturing component. For all the talk about the “gig economy,” multiple jobholding, and self-employment, the JQI research cited above does not find these to loom large in the overall trend in job quality. The new bosses are the same as the old bosses.

Finally, we have the stock market. Up is good, down is bad. Many have ownership of at least a little stock, through their stakes in retirement accounts. What is not controversial is the extent to which ownership of stock, or wealth in general, is concentrated—mostly in the hands of an elite few.

Does anyone care about the wealth of others, rather than just their own? We could hypothesize that what sets people off is not their absolute level of wealth or income but the gap between their own level and what they think it should be. The latter could have some basis in how others are doing, not least because some of them are inclined to flaunt their good fortune. This resentment would naturally be magnified to the extent a person’s own lack of wealth puts them at some risk of insolvency, possibly putting higher education or home ownership out of reach.

While news, punditry, and politics are preoccupied with the statistical analysis of short-term fluctuations in economic data, less consideration is lent to longer-term trends. It is possible to find ridiculous patterns within the blizzard of short-term data sets, such as the correlation between people who drown in swimming pools and Nicholas Cage movies. The problem is that there aren’t many long terms to rely on for an adequate sample. If you have a consistent 20-year trend, you don’t have 20 data points. You just have one.

Relating long-term trends is as much a literary exercise as a statistical one, a matter for historians and poets. The short-term fluctuations lend themselves to horse-race political punditry and suggest an illusory precision. In a nation grasping for answers, the preoccupation with short-run economic changes can fill a vacuum for a time and become a football for partisan interests. The long run remains a picture of burgeoning inequality of income and wealth, slow wage growth, declining job quality, and persistent poverty. When the bill comes due, the political economy cannot fail to be affected. It’s small wonder we are often so surprised at the turn of events. But then, we seldom look past our noses.


Max B. Sawicky is an economist and writer in Virginia who has worked for the Government Accountability Office and the Economic Policy Institute.@maxbsawicky

Trump's Greatest Vulnerability is the Economy- Just Ask the Poor

Rev. William Barber Yes, the Dow is at a record high and unemployment rates are lower than they have been in decades – but 140 million people are also poor or low wealth

‘Sixty per cent of African Americans are poor or low income, as are 64% of Hispanics, but the largest single racial group among America’s poor and low income – 66 million Americans – are white.’ , Justin Lane/EPA

Rather than offer a report on the State of the Union, Donald Trump used his annual primetime slot in the House of Representatives to host a re-election rally. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, summed up the sentiment of the House majority when she stood behind Trump and ripped the text of his speech in half. “I tore up a manifesto of mistruths,” she later said. But of all the lies he told, the president is proudest of the economy he claims is booming. Poor and low-income Americans know that the economy is, in fact, his greatest vulnerability. Yes, the Dow is at a record high and official unemployment rates are lower than they have been in decades. But measuring the health of the economy by these stats is like measuring the 19th-century’s plantation economy by the price of cotton. However much the slaveholders profited, enslaved people and the poor white farmers whose wages were stifled by free labor did not see the benefits of the boom. In America today, 140 million people are poor or low wealth. While three individuals own as much wealth as all of them put together, the real cost of living has soared as wages have stagnated. Since the 1970s, the number of people who are paying more than a third of their monthly income in rent has doubled, and there is not a single county in the nation where a person working full-time at minimum wage can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment. Sixty per cent of African Americans are poor or low-income, as are 64% of Hispanics, but the largest single racial group among America’s poor and low-income – 66 million Americans – are white. Every day in America roughly 700 people die from poverty While Trump stirs racial fears by attacking “sanctuary cities” and black political leaders, there are more white Americans who are unable to meet their basic needs than at any time in this nation’s history. Every day in America roughly 700 people die from poverty. When seven young people died from vaping, Trump called it a national emergency. But for the past four decades, Republicans have racialized poverty while Democrats have run from it, adopting euphemisms like “those who aspire to the middle class” to talk about poor people. By accepting the lie that everyone does better when the economy does better, both parties paved the way for the extremism of a plutocratic presidency. We know that elites whose stock portfolios and personal taxes have benefited from the Trump tax cuts are going to stand by this president. But those people are an extreme minority – a literal plutocracy – in this nation. The question in 2020 is not whether Trump’s most ardent supporters will stand by him, but whether Democrats will embrace an agenda that can inspire poor and marginalized people to engage in a political system that has simply overlooked them for decades.

How Misinformation Serves Trump

“Flood the zone with shit”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy

The impeachment trial didn’t change any minds. Here’s why.

By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com  Updated Feb 6, 2020, 9:27am EST

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On Wednesday, the Senate voted to acquit President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

Despite all the incontrovertible facts at the center of this story, it was always inevitable that this process would change very few minds. No matter how clear a case the Democrats made, it was always highly likely that no single version of the truth was ever going to be accepted. 

This fact underscores a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship — some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side. 

But there’s another, equally vexing problem. We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, “people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.” This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment did very little to move public opinion. 

The core challenge we’re facing today is information saturation and a hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process. 

One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out. After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances. There’s Team Liberal and Team Conservative, and pretty much everyone knows which side they’re on. So you stick to the places that feed you the information you most want to hear.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reading totals of a vote approving articles of impeachment. Robert Alexander/Getty Images

My Vox colleague Dave Roberts calls this an “epistemic crisis.” The foundation for shared truth, he argues, has collapsed. I don’t disagree with that, but I’d frame the problem a little differently. 

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism. 

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable. 

I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

This idea isn’t new, but Bannon articulated it about as well as anyone can. The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.

What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable. 

Bannon’s political objective is clear. As he explained in a 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference talk, he sees Trump as a stick of dynamite with which to blow up the status quo. So “flooding the zone” is a means to that end. But more generally, creating widespread cynicism about the truth and the institutions charged with unearthing it erodes the very foundation of liberal democracy. And the strategy is working. 

What flooding the zone actually means

For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories. 

Candidates Tax Plans Compared

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bloomberg-wealth-tax-compare-sanders-buttigieg-warren-biden/

Bloomberg Blames 2008 Economic Crisis on End of Redlining. Warren - Not so.

WASHINGTON (AP) — At the height of the 2008 economic collapse, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the elimination of a discriminatory housing practice known as “redlining” was responsible for instigating the meltdown.


“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg, now a Democratic presidential candidate, said at a forum that was hosted by Georgetown University in September 2008. “Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.’”


He continued: “And then Congress got involved ― local elected officials, as well ― and said, ‘Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit.’ And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”


Bloomberg, a billionaire who built a media and financial services empire before turning to electoral politics, was correct that the financial crisis was triggered in part by banks extending loans to borrowers who were ill-suited to repay them. But by attributing the meltdown to the elimination of redlining, a practice used by banks to discriminate against minority borrowers, Bloomberg appears to be blaming policies intended to bring equality to the housing market.


The term redlining comes from the “red lines” those in the financial industry would draw on a map to denote areas deemed ineligible for credit, frequently based on race.


“It’s been well documented that the 2008 crash was caused by unethical, predatory lending that deliberately targeted communities of color,” said Debra Gore-Mann, president and CEO of the Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit that works for racial and economic justice. “People of color were sold trick loans with exploding interest rates designed to push them into foreclosure. Our communities of color and low income communities were the victims of the crash, not the cause.”



Campaign spokesman Stu Loeser said that Bloomberg “attacked predatory lending” as mayor and, if elected president, has a plan to “help a million more Black families buy a house, and counteract the effects of redlining and the subprime mortgage crisis.”


The campaign also pointed to efforts by Bloomberg’s private philanthropy to help other cities craft policies that will help reduce evictions. He promised in a January speech to do a version of the very thing he criticized in 2008: Ask lenders to update their credit-scoring models, “because millions of black households don’t have a credit score which is needed to get a mortgage.”


After this story was published, Loeser added: “He’s saying that something bad - the financial crisis - followed something good, which is the fight against redlining that he was part of as Mayor.”


Bloomberg’s 2008 remarks stand in contrast with the decadeslong positions some of his rivals have held.


Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s work as a professor and attorney has been devoted to the study of bankruptcy and the disastrous impact it has on the financial well-being of families. As a young Delaware senator, Joe Biden held hearings on unfair lending practices and sponsored legislation to ban discrimination in lending and crack down on industry figures who did.



The remarks are the latest instance of past comments by Bloomberg that have resurfaced in recent days that make him appear racially insensitive.


On Tuesday, an audio recording ricocheted around social media of the then-mayor defending his police department’s use of the controversial “stop-and-frisk” tactic during a 2015 appearance at the Aspen

Institute.


Under the program, New York City police officers made it a routine practice to stop and search multitudes of mostly black and Hispanic men to see if they were carrying weapons.


Although he has since apologized for his support for the policy, in the recording Bloomberg said that “95%” of murders and murder victims are young male minorities and that “you can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops.” To combat crime, he said, “put a lot of cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.”


Bloomberg’s resurfaced comments about redlining come as he’s in the midst of a two-day tour of the South that in part is focused on building relationships with black voters who are the backbone of the Democratic Party. On Thursday, he plans to launch “Mike for Black America”


Speaking to reporters in Tennessee on Wednesday, he refused to directly apologize for the 2015 comments. In response to repeated questions, he said, “I don’t think those words reflect how I led the most diverse city in the nation.”


“I apologized for the practice and the pain that it caused,” he said Wednesday. “It was five years ago. And, you know, it’s just not the way that I think, and it doesn’t reflect what I do every day.”


Introducing Bloomberg at an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Dr. Elenora Woods, president of the city’s NAACP chapter, said he would be a tireless fighter for economic justice for black Americans.


“Look, I know what racism looks like. I know what it looks like, and that’s not Mike Bloomberg,” she said.

Warren Says Bloomberg Shouldn’t Be Nominee, Citing Redlining Remarks

Her comments about Michael Bloomberg, who has faced criticism over a statement he made 12 years ago about a discriminatory housing practice, came as she tries to reignite enthusiasm for her campaign.

Senator Elizabeth Warren at a town hall event on Thursday in Arlington, Va. She has generally tried to stay above attacks on rivals in the Democratic primary.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

By Reid J. Epstein and Lisa Lerer

• Feb. 13, 2020

ARLINGTON, Va. — Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said Thursday that Michael R. Bloomberg should not be the Democratic presidential nominee because of newly surfaced comments he made 12 years ago in which he said the end of a discriminatory housing practice had helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.

Ms. Warren’s comments, made at an event here in Northern Virginia, were a strikingly direct broadside against a rival as she tries to reignite enthusiasm for her campaign after her fourth-place finish in New Hampshire this week.

“A video just came out yesterday in which Michael Bloomberg is saying, in effect, that the 2008 financial crash was caused because the banks weren’t permitted to discriminate against black and brown people,” Ms. Warren told a crowd of supporters packed into a high school gymnasium. “That crisis would not have been averted if the banks had been able to be bigger racists. And anyone who thinks that should not be the leader of our party.”

___

















Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe in Washington and Kathleen Ronayne in Chattanooga, Tenn., contributed to this report.


___

Krugman, Sanders Isn't a Socialist, but he plays one on T.V.

Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist

But he plays one on TV. That’s a problem.

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opinion/bernie-sanders-socialism.html?

The Ins and Outs of Trump's Budget

The Ins and Outs of Trump's Budget

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/business/economy/trump-budget-explained-facts.html?

The Triumph of Fiscal Hypocrisy - Trump

Paul Krugman,
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign will be centered around claims that he has done great things for the economy. And let’s be honest: The U.S. economy is running pretty hot these days. Growth in G.D.P. and employment has been good, though not spectacular; the unemployment rate is near a historic low.

There are some shadows in the picture. Economic gains have been lopsided, with a large increase in corporate profits that mainly reflects giant tax breaks, while workers haven’t seen comparable gains (and gains for lower-wage workers have been driven in part by minimum-wage increases in blue states). The huge gains in health insurance coverage under President Barack Obama have stalled or gone into reverse, and there has been a sharp increase in the number of Americans who report delaying medical treatment because of costs.

Still, it is indeed a strong economy. But if we ask what lies behind that strength, the main answer is an explosion in the federal budget deficit, which exceeded $1 trillion last year. And the story of how that happened has deeply disturbing implications for the future of U.S. politics.

Let’s go back for a minute to early 2009, when the economy was imploding and desperately needed help in the form of deficit spending. The Obama administration did indeed propose a significant stimulus plan — but it was much too small relative to the size of the problem, largely because the administration wanted to win bipartisan support and wasn’t willing to use reconciliation to bypass the filibuster.



This isn’t hindsight. In January 2009 I was practically tearing my hair out over the inadequacy of the stimulus, and warned of a scenario in which “the plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says, ‘See, government spending doesn’t work.’” That is, of course, exactly what happened.

Then, in 2010, Republicans took control of the House and were in a position to force Obama into years of spending cuts that exerted a significant drag on economic growth. This drag wasn’t enough to prevent a sustained economic recovery, but the recovery could and should have been much faster. There was no economic reason we shouldn’t have returned to full employment by, say, 2013; instead, largely thanks to fiscal austerity, the average unemployment rate that year was still above 7 percent.