#somewhat similar reasons as to why elizabeth warren is better in the senate

[dora-winifred]

mayor pete's value is in administration, i don't think he should be president. keep him working hard in the cabinet

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Elizabeth Warren gained support in national polls for much of 2019. By October, she had nearly caught the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. She topped him in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire. Warren seemed positioned to seriously contend for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Once voting started, however, the delegates never really materialized. Warren, who will reportedly announce that she is suspending her campaign on Thursday, never finished higher than third in any primary or caucus, including in Massachusetts, the state she has represented in the Senate since 2013.

So what went wrong for Warren, who was perhaps the most credible threat to prevent a two-person race between Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders? I think there are four main explanations for her lack of support, and they are all connected.

The party was wary of a “too liberal” nominee

Warren took positions similar to those Sanders has embraced, such as supporting a wealth tax and, most notably, calling for Medicare for All. Some more centrist Democrats simply oppose those policies. Others worried that Medicare for All, and the winding down of private insurance, would be too disruptive and the idea would scare away too many voters.

So Warren’s ascent to the top of the polls was met with resistance from a big chunk of the Democratic Party establishment. News articles began to proliferate quoting party donors and leaders fretting about the Democratic 2020 field. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick launched late bids for the nomination that almost amounted to “Stop Warren” candidacies. The anti-Warren movement was essentially a preview of the more aggressive anti-Sanders campaign orchestrated by party establishment figures between the Vermont senator’s victory in the Nevada caucuses and Super Tuesday.

So whatever her campaign tactics, Warren likely would have struggled to win the nomination for the same reason that Sanders is now an underdog to Biden: Her leftism didn’t appeal to party elites, who signaled to voters that Warren lacked “electability,” the credential many Democratic voters are obsessed with this election cycle.

Of course, Warren could have taken different policy positions, or tried spinning the same ones in different ways, except …

She tried to win very liberal voters from Sanders

Sanders urged Warren to run for president as the liberal alternative to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election cycle. Warren declined, the Vermont senator jumped in himself, and Sanders became the informal leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party after his surprisingly successful 2016 presidential run. With both of them running in 2020, Sanders and Warren spent much of last year basically battling over who could release the most liberal plans, such as making college free, increasing taxes on the rich, and so on.

A big part of that battle revolved around health care. Warren, before the 2020 campaign, had not made health policy a major part of her brand or focused a lot on Medicare for All. But with Sanders leaning into that stance, she opted to adopt a similar position. And in the fall of 2019, she doubled down, releasing a detailed proposal to fund Medicare for All. When Sanders had a heart attack in early October, many people, including me, anticipated that he would gradually drop in the polls, and Warren’s advisers might have assumed so as well. In that context, Sanders’s voters would be up for grabs, and supporting Medicare for All would help Warren inherit those supporters. Or the Warren campaign may have simply hoped to win over the Sanders bloc, heart attack or no; remember, she had been climbing in the polls for months at that point.

Instead, Sanders recovered, both healthwise and in the polls. Once voting started, Warren performed best among Democrats who described their views as “very liberal,” but she still trailed Sanders among those voters. And she had terrible numbers among self-described moderates. She had failed to outflank Sanders on the left, but she failed to win over those voters while also convincing a lot of centrist Democrats that she was too liberal and perhaps a risky bet in the general election.

Of course, the assumption that she’d be a general-election risk was likely related to another factor …

Democrats seem to think men are more electable

Several of the women who ran for president — Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, in particular — have said that they faced constant gender-based questions from Democratic voters about their electability. Democrats nominated a woman to take on Trump once, lost, and may have been unwilling to do it again. I don’t want to downplay the strengths of Biden or Sanders or ignore the weaknesses of the women and people of color who ran in 2020, but the primary process coming down to two white male candidates1 probably reflected this view of electability. Biden and Sanders were consistently rated as the most likely to defeat Trump in a general election.

This electability challenge was arguably the biggest problem for Warren. While rank-and-file voters talked about her gender, more elite Democrats and the media cast her as a bad candidate to face Trump for other reasons (how much these reasons were also simply cover for concerns about nominating a woman, I can’t say). First, she had fairly weak numbers against Trump (compared to Biden and Sanders) in hypothetical general-election polls. Second, considering the liberal tilt of Massachusetts, she notched somewhat underwhelming margins of victory in her 2012 and 2018 Senate runs. Third, she took decidedly liberal positions on policy questions. And finally, Warren’s background, as a Harvard Law professor and Massachusetts senator, made some party officials worried that she would not connect with Democratic voters in the Midwest. I’m not sure how valid these concerns actually are, but party elites and the press considered them barriers to Warren winning.

She was the “wine track” candidate

There is a long tradition of lefty candidates running in the Democratic primary and getting a lot of traction, buzz and campaign donations from party activists but not really catching on with rank-and-file voters. Think Sen. Bill Bradley in the 2000 presidential cycle or Gov. Howard Dean in 2004. This kind of candidate is sometimes referred to the “wine track” candidate, who appeals mainly to elites, as opposed to candidates who are on more “beer track,” who are thought of as being better at connecting with the working class.

Warren was perhaps the 2020 wine track candidate. In her campaigning and policy plans, Warren tried hard to counter this weakness by courting working class and nonwhite voters. She was well-liked by black academics, figures associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and a hard-to-qualify bloc of black figures who are vocal on Twitter and influential in non-electoral ways.

But she just never caught on with a broad swath of voters — polls suggest that she had little support outside of white college graduates. The New York Times described Warren as the candidate who often had the support of the “grass tops” rather than the grassroots — meaning that the leaders of activist groups often really liked Warren, but it’s not clear that the lower ranks did. For example, Warren won the personal endorsement of the president of the American Federation of Teachers, but the union itself wouldn’t endorse her because many of its members were with Biden or Sanders.

So Warren lost. In fact, she didn’t really come particularly close to winning. That said, her campaign mattered in a way that a lot of other failed 2020 candidacies didn’t.

Her strategy of rolling out a ton of left-leaning policy plans arguably forced Sanders to match her, and she pushed the other candidates leftward even if they didn’t wind up quite where Warren was. Her plans also created public conversations about ideas that had not previously been in the mainstream, such as the idea that Facebook should be broken up. And I expect future Democratic candidates for president and other offices will tout ideas similar to the wealth tax that she proposed.

In other words, no matter whether the nomination goes to Sanders or Biden, many of Warren’s ideas may end up “winning,” even if she couldn’t.

[fullspectrum-cbd-oil]

Liberal Presidential Hopefuls Sanders, Warren Face 2020 Showdown in New Hampshire

The simmering rivalry between progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, presidential contenders with similar policies but sharply different styles, is headed for a showdown in New Hampshire.

The state’s Feb. 11 Democratic primary election is likely to decide which of the two neighboring U.S. senators, Sanders from Vermont or Warren from Massachusetts, emerges as the top liberal challenger to establishment front-runner Joe Biden in the 2020 race to pick a nominee to take on Republican President Donald Trump.

The two progressives, who campaigned in New Hampshire over the Labor Day holiday weekend and will return again later this week, are increasing their staffing and visits in the New England state that holds the second nominating contest in the Democratic race.

Recent opinion polls show Sanders running second and the steadily rising Warren third behind Biden in New Hampshire, where they are known quantities to the state’s big bloc of liberal voters. Exit polls in 2016 found 68% of those who cast a ballot in the Democratic primary considered themselves very or somewhat liberal.

That makes New Hampshire, a traditional proving ground that can make or break presidential contenders, ground zero for the inevitable Sanders vs. Warren conflict.

“It will be a real challenge moving forward for the one who doesn’t win, or finishes behind the other. It will have a damaging effect,” said Jim Demers, co-chairman of Barack Obama’s 2008 New Hampshire campaign, who has endorsed U.S. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey in the race.

In 2016, Sanders won 60% of the primary vote in beating Hillary Clinton in the state during an unsuccessful run for the White House.

Given his strong performance, Sanders faces more pressure and bigger expectations than Warren this time around, said Kathy Sullivan, a former chairwoman of the state party who has not backed a candidate.

“Bernie needs to win here,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it’s over if he doesn’t, but it’s going to be much harder for him.”

The two candidates share similarities in ideology and have promised not to criticize each other, but they showed plenty of stylistic differences during their weekend visits to New Hampshire.

At a town hall meeting and a rally on Sunday, Sanders soberly reminded crowds he was attacked during the 2016 campaign for his “radical” ideas such as Medicare for All, free public college tuition and a higher federal minimum wage, all issues that have now moved into the Democratic mainstream.

“These are no longer radical ideas,” said Sanders, whose speeches were almost devoid of personal references.

At an outdoor house party in Hampton Falls on Monday, Warren laced her talk with personal details and jokes, drawing a link between the financial uncertainty of her childhood in Oklahoma and the impact it had on her populist economic policies.

“That’s why I’m in this fight,” she said, before taking selfies with members of the crowd in a driving rain.

‘BERNIE BEATS TRUMP’

Both Sanders, 77, and Warren, 70, addressed one of the biggest voter concerns about their candidacies: their ability to win over enough moderate and independent voters to beat Trump in November 2020 and recapture the White House.

Sanders repeatedly touted polls showing him beating Trump in a head-to-head matchup. Ben Cohen, a Sanders supporter and co-founder of the Vermont ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s, led the crowd in a chant of “Bernie Beats Trump!”

Warren was asked in Hampton Falls about concerns over her electability.

“I think what is going to carry us as Democrats is not playing it safe,” she said. “You have got to give people a reason to show up and vote, and that’s what I’m doing.”

There are differences in the two senators’ appeal. Some polls show Sanders doing better among young people, lower-income earners and people without a college degree. Those without a degree were 40% of the Democratic electorate in the state in 2016.

Dean Merchant, a writer from Stratham, said he backed Sanders in 2016 but thought it was time for a woman in the White House. He is considering Warren, as well as U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California.

“I like Bernie, but he’s like Biden – he’s older now,” Merchant said. “At this stage I would like to see someone more vibrant, strong and forceful.”

Kevin Daley, an acupuncturist in Raymond, said he was backing Sanders but would be happy with Warren.

“She’s a brilliant person and she has been a good progressive. I just hope they don’t end up splitting the vote and we end up with Biden – that’s the danger,” said Daley.

Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders, said the campaign has about 50 paid staff in the state and will hire more. New Hampshire is an important step toward the nomination, he said, “but I don’t think there is any one state that will make or break this campaign.”

The Warren campaign has five field offices in New Hampshire, with a sixth opening this week. It did not provide a number of paid staff in the state. Biden has 45 paid staff here, said Terry Shumaker, a Biden supporter who co-chaired Bill Clinton’s state campaigns.

Sanders and Warren will both be back this weekend at the state Democratic convention. Warren has been in the state on 17 days since January, and Sanders on 12, according to a candidate tracker at the NBC10 television station in Boston.

New Hampshire has a history of being kind to its neighbors, particularly those from Massachusetts, with past winners from the state including Republican Mitt Romney and Democrats John Kerry, Paul Tsongas and Michael Dukakis.

Arnie Arnesen, a liberal radio host and former New Hampshire state legislator, said she was like many voters in the state who have not chosen a candidate yet.

“I’m not feeling pressured to make a choice,” she said. “It is going to be very close with Elizabeth and Bernie coming out of here. Why choose now?”

(Reporting by John Whitesides; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jonathan Oatis)

from IJR https://ift.tt/2PGk4KT via IFTTT

[thisdaynews]

America, the Gerontocracy

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/america-the-gerontocracy/

America, the Gerontocracy

Hate crime is rising, the Arctic is burning, and the Dow is bobbing like a cork on an angry sea. If the nation seems intolerant, reckless and more than a little cranky, perhaps that’s because the American republic is showing its age. Somewhere along the way, a once-new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (not men and women; that came later) became a wheezy gerontocracy. Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are extremely old.

Let me stipulate at the outset that I harbor no prejudice toward the elderly. As a sexagenarian myself, not to mention as POLITICO’s labor policy editor, I’m fully mindful of the scourge of ageism. (I’ve had the misfortune on occasion to experience it firsthand.) But to affirm that America must work harder to include the elderly within its vibrant multicultural quilt is not to say it must be governed almost entirely by duffers. The cause of greater diversity would be advanced, not thwarted, if a few more younger people penetrated the ranks of American voters and American political leaders.

Story Continued Below

Let’s start with the leaders.

Remember the Soviet Politburo? In the waning years of the Cold War, a frequent criticism of the USSR was that its ruling body was preposterously old and out of touch. Every May Day these geezers would show up on a Moscow reviewing stand, looking stuffed and fix their rheumy gaze on a procession of jackbooted Red Army troops, missiles and tanks. For Americans, the sight was always good for a horselaugh. In 1982, when Leonid Brezhnev, the last of that generation to hold power for any significant length of time, went to his reward, the median age of a Politburo member was 71. No wonder the Evil Empire was crumbling!

You see where this is going. The U.S. doesn’t have a Politburo, but if you calculate the median age of the president, the speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, and the three Democrats leading in the presidential polls for 2020, the median age is … uh … 77.

It doesn’t stop there. We heard a lot last November about the fresh new blood entering Congress, but when the current session began in January, the average ages of House and Senate members were 58 and 63, respectively. That’s slightlyolderthan the previous Congress (58 and 62), which was already among the oldest in history. The average age in Congress declined through the 1970s but it’s mostly increased since the 1980s.

The Deep State is no spring chicken, either. POLITICO’s Danny Vinik reported two years ago that nearly 30 percent of the civilian federal workforce was over 55; two decades earlier, it was closer to 15 percent. Of course, the entire U.S. workforce is getting older, thanks to the aging of the Baby Boom—that giant Hula-Hoop-shaking cohort born during the prosperous post-World War II years from 1946 to 1964. But the federal bureaucracy is even older, apparently because civil-servant Boomers, despite their defined-benefit pensions, are less inclined than their private-sector counterparts to retire.

America’s ruling class is of course more nimble than the Politburo ever was. And indeed, the two Democratic presidential candidates proposing the most dramatic departure from the status quo are Bernie Sanders, who’ll turn 78 on September 8, and Elizabeth Warren, who’s 70. Still, there’s something to be said for youth and vigor. John F. Kennedy (then 43) tapped into that feeling in his 1960 bid to succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower (then 70) when he campaigned on the slogan, “Let’s get America moving again.”

Why should we care how old our leaders are? As the journalist Michael Tortorello reported three years ago in POLITICO Magazine, cognitive functioning declines dramatically on average after age 70, and the types of intelligence that decline most sharply on average are “the capacity to absorb large amounts of new information and data in a short time span and apply it to solve problems in unaccustomed fashion.” It would seem advisable to have at least afewmore people in the higher reaches of government on whom we can rely still to possess this skill in youthful abundance.

The cognitive-function issue is not a theoretical one, if political commentators are to be believed. The past month has brought near-daily speculation about our 73 year-old president’s state of mind. “He’s getting worse,” CNN’s Brian Stelter said earlier this month. “We can all see it. It’s happening in public.” In recent weeks, Trump has canceled a meeting with the Danish prime minister because she wouldn’t discuss selling Greenland; suggested that his own Florida resort be the site of the next G-7 conference; and been quoted suggesting that hurricanes be deterred from reaching landfall in the U.S. through the detonation of nuclear weapons. “If Donald Trump were your father, you would run, not walk, to a neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health,” John Gartner, a psychologist, wrote in an AprilUSA Todayop-ed.

Whether Trump’s cognition is declining is a question muddied by a wealth of evidence that his speech and behavior were always at least somewhat erratic. (This is a man, recall, who more than 30 years ago confessed to giving his second-grade music teacher a black eye, which may not even be true.) A similar ambiguity surrounds Joe Biden, 76, whose well-documented history of verbal gaffes helped sink two previous presidential candidacies, one of them (similarly) more than 30 years ago. “Biden has always made gaffes by the bushel,” Fox News commentator Brit Hume (who’s also 76) tweeted earlier this month after Biden appeared to think he was in Vermont when he was really in New Hampshire (a state of no small significance in the primary race). “But some of his recent ones suggest the kind of memory loss associated with senility.” (Trump and Biden’s physicians, I should note, have vouched emphatically for their mental fitness.)

Even if the speculation that Trump and/or Biden might be a little bit gaga is unfounded and terribly unfair, isn’t it strange that we’re talking about the 2020 front-runners in the same worried tone we might adopt discussing with our siblings whether Mom and Pop should still be driving? It isn’t the first time. The 2016 election occasioned more muted speculation along the same lines about Trump, and even a little bit about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who’s only slightly younger.

None of this means a septuagenarian can’t function effectively as a political leader. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are 79 and 77, respectively, and by all reports they’re operating at peak mental capacity. But to affirm that not all elderly people are impaired cognitively is very different from affirming that none is.

Even the healthy older brain is, well, different from the healthy younger brain, and if you care about politics that’s worth making some effort to understand. Certain tasks are just harder as you get older, even if you’re very smart. Your mental reflexes are slower. (How do I know? None of your damn business.) It takes you longer to remember someone’s name. Multitasking is more challenging. Learning foreign languages is more difficult, and adjusting to unfamiliar cultures is perhaps a bit harder. You can overcome these obstacles if you make some effort, but not everybody—not even all American leaders—makes the effort.

The most important compensating benefit to old age is greater wisdom, which comes from experience. When you’re making decisions that affect others, it’s much better to have a deep well of experience to draw on than to maintain the mental reflexes of an auctioneer. Wisdom may be more valuable in the digital age than ever before, because the velocity of information and normative judgments on social media, cable news and elsewhere constantly threatens to make glib idiots of us all.

But here’s the rub: The aging of America’s ruling class does not automatically increase its experience level. In presidential politics, notes Brookings Institution senior fellow Jonathan Rauch, political experience, which “used to be a selling point,” has “become a liability. Voters and the public have come to see experience as inauthenticity.”

In a November 2015Atlanticarticle, Rauch plotted experience level for presidential candidates from 1960 to 2012. His graph showed a clear increase in experience level among the losers and a corresponding decrease among the winners. Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. George H.W. Bush won with more political experience than Michael Dukakis, but four years later lost to Bill Clinton, who had less. John McCain lost to Barack Obama, who’d been in national politics a mere four years.

Donald Trump, who is 73, entered the Oval Office with no political experience at all. The single greatest mental compensation that age provides was therefore unavailable to the oldest president in American history.

***

Why is America governed by old people?Maybe because it has so many elderly voters.

The American electorate is older than it’s been for at least half a century. One reason is aging Boomers. The other is the greater tendency (despite a rising mortality rate) of people who make it into old age to go on living. By 2030, every living Boomer will be elderly (that is, age 65 or older), and by 2035, the Census Bureau projects, the elderly will outnumber minors for the first time in U.S. history.

This demographic trend has an exaggerated effect on politics. According to the Pew Research Center, in the 2020 election nearly one-quarter of the electorate (23 percent) will be elderly, “the highest such share since at least 1970.” But that understates the size of the elderly vote because the elderly are much likelier than any other age group to show up on Election Day. Old peoplereallylike to vote. In 2016, for instance, 71 percent of eligible elderly voters reported to the Census that they voted. For other age cohorts, the turnout percentages were 67 percent (aged 45-64), 59 percent (aged 30-44) and 46 percent (aged 18-29).

The electorate is even older in primaries, and older still in local elections. In 2016 Phil Keisling, chairman of the National Vote at Home Institute, led a Portland State University survey of 50 cities that found the median voter age in municipal elections was 57, “nearly a generation older than the median age of eligible voters.”

The broad outlines of this trend are widely understood, which explains why, for instance, Donald Trump said in 2015 that “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican.” (He nonetheless proposed in this year’s budget to cut more than $500 billion from Social Security and Medicare, which he’d also pledged to protect, but that’s another story.)It helps explain why the federal government spends more on Medicare, which provides medical coverage to elderly people, than it does on Medicaid, which provides medical coverage to poor people. (Another reason for the difference is that the elderly require more health care.)

It also may help explain why racial tolerance seems in some respects to be in decline, as measured, for instance, by the unnerving quasi-respectability afforded white nationalism by some mainstream players in national politics (including Trump). The elderly, polls show, are in the aggregate less concerned about racial prejudice than the young. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found a 21-point spread between the elderly and young adults (18-29) when they were asked whether racial discrimination was the “main reason many blacks can’t get ahead,” with 54 percent of young adults answering in the affirmative but only 33 percent of the elderly. The age divide on this question was almost as wide as the 24-point divide between black respondents and white.

Similarly, political support for immigration restrictions may reflect an aging electorate. Pew found a majority in all age categories agreed that “immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents,” but the spread between the elderly and young adults was 31 points, with 51 percent of the elderly answering in the affirmative but 82 percent of young adults.

It’s often claimed that the elderly care less about the future than the young, but that’s a canard. The elderly care quite a bit about what will happen to a world they spent a lifetime building and populating with their children and grandchildren. (Their lives wouldn’t have much meaning if they didn’t.) Recent polls show the elderly care, if anything, slightlymore about the budget deficit than other age groups (despite not wanting to give up Medicare and Social Security benefits), and are slightlylessinclined to complain they pay too much in taxes.

That said, the young care a lot more than the old about climate change. Polls aggregated by Gallup from 2015 to 2018 show that concern about it drops with age. Fully 70 percent of respondents age 18-34 worried “a great deal” or “a fair amount” about global warming, compared with 63 percent age 35-54 and 56 percent age 55 and up. That’s a 14-point generation gap between the young and the elderly and near-elderly.

You often hear older Americans complain that the younger generation, with its fixation on social media, can’t distinguish between fact and opinion, making it difficult for them to apply the critical thinking necessary to consume news and be responsible citizens. A 2018 Pew survey found that Americans do indeed experience great difficulty telling these two things apart: Given five factual statements and five statements of opinion, a majority of Americans couldn’t identify them properly.

But younger Americans actually scoredbetteron this test than older ones. Thirty-two percent of 18-49 year-olds were able to identify all five factual statements, and 44 percent were able to identify all five statements of opinion. Among the over-50 cohort, only 20 percent identified all five factual statements correctly, and only 26 percent did the same with the statements of opinion.

***

The final leg of America’s gerontocratic triadis its system of government. That, too, is old and a bit creaky.

We think of ourselves as a young country, and in many respects we are. But we are also, as Paul Ryan famously noted in 2016, “the oldest democracy,” provided you exclude older ones that didn’t last (Athens, Rome) and ignore various undemocratic restrictions to the franchise that persisted into the 20th century. No nation in the world has a written Constitution older than ours. And it shows.

The list of the Constitution’s anachronisms and ambiguities is long.

Article One says Congress may “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,” phrasing that strictly limited the regulation of private business at the federal level until the New Deal, when the Supreme Court reversed itself and concluded the federal government’s power to regulate private business was pretty vast. Had the Founders grasped that the modern economy would all but eliminate purely local commerce—and that it could, unchecked, alter the very climate of planet earth—they might have had more to say on the subject. As things stand, the powers of the regulatory state are the subject of endless legal combat.

Article Two says you must be a “natural born Citizen” to be president, which excludes for no apparent reason Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm, who previously governed two of the nation’s most populous states. The racist “birther” movement that challenged the legality of Barack Obama’s presidency (and that ushered Donald Trump onto the national political stage) wouldn’t have been possible without Article Two.

Article Two also established that presidents be elected through the Electoral College, an antique mechanism borrowed from the Holy Roman Empire that twice during the past two decades delivered the presidency to the popular-vote loser.Some people have a problem with that.

The Second Amendment frames the right to bear arms within the context of “well-regulated” state militias that no longer exist, an ambiguity that the Supreme Court interpreted in 2008 to mean the Constitution protected the right to bear arms, after holding for the preceding seven decades that it did not. Had the Founders known the extent to which the nation would tear itself apart over the regulation of firearms more deadly than they ever imagined, they might have laid down a few broad parameters.

And so on.None of this would matter much if our government were more amenable to reconsidering first principles, but that’s getting harder, too. The Constitution can be amended, and it has been, 27 times. But growing political polarization in recent years has made that difficult. Only two constitutional amendments were ratified during the past half-century (one giving 18-year-olds the right to vote and another, more anodyne amendment that makes it a little harder for Congress to give itself a raise).

Congress could perhaps pick up some of the slack, but it’s slowed down, too. According to the Pew Research Center, Congress passes fewer substantive laws today than it did 30 years ago.Increased use of the filibuster (which isnotmentioned in the Constitution, but has been around almost as long) almost certainly played a role, and a fed-up Senate has during the past decade started phasing out its use. In a provocative June 2018 essay inCommentary, the political scientist Yuval Levin posited that 231 years on, Congress had acquired a problem James Madison never anticipated: a reluctance to compete with the other two branches of government in the exercise of power. Partisanship, he concluded, had displaced ambition to legislate. Senators and representatives, he wrote, now “see themselves as players in a larger political ecosystem the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather engaging in a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience.” Levin didn’t put it this way, but he seemed to be suggesting that Congress had grown decadent, likefin de siècleVienna, but without the solace of Sacher tortes.

A more modest theory of governmental decadence was set forward by Rauch in his 1994 bookDemosclerosis. The idea was that democracy had developed arteriosclerosis, not because its system of government was creaky, but rather because the accumulating power of interest groups over time was choking it like a weed. Demosclerosis differs from gridlock, Rauch argued, because gridlock implies that nothing gets done. In a demosclerotic government, plenty gets done. Rather, Rauch wrote, the government’s ability to solve problems is compromised because it can’t easily reassign a finite set of resources. Old allocations must continue, and therefore new allocations can’t be experimented with.

Think of it, Rauch says, like leaving a bicycle in the rain. The bicycle may be perfectly fine, but if you leave it outside long enough rust will corrode it. All things considered, Rauch says, the Constitution is in excellent working condition. But its machinery has been left out too long in the rain.

Bringing a bicycle in from the rain should be within the ability of America’s somewhat doddering polity. Our gerontocracy is a bit rheumatic, but it isn’t hopeless. Still, the task will likely be easier and go much faster if a few more young hands pitch in.

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[theconservativebrief]

Likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are in the midst of a kind of big-idea arms race, with each one attempting to pivot left by endorsing bigger and bigger plans to expand the safety net.

First, Bernie Sanders unveils his Medicare-for-all bill; then Kirsten Gillibrand comes out for a job guarantee (and Sanders follows suit). Elizabeth Warren announces a plan to give workers seats on corporate boards, and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker propose new tax credits to help with rising rents.

The latest volley in the competition is the LIFT the Middle Class Act from Harris. As the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey explains, the bill would offer a sizable cash payment to most middle-class households. Single people would get $250 per month or $3,000 a year, married couples would get $500 per month or $6,000 a year, and it would phase out for singles without kids making $50,000 or more, and for married couples or single people with kids making $100,000 or more. It costs about $200 billion in the first year or $2 trillion over 10, roughly in the range of the price tag for the 2017 tax cuts.

Like a somewhat similar bill from Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Sherrod Brown last year, you can think of Harris’s plan as a particularly massive expansion of the earned income tax credit, so that the solidly middle-class benefit too, not just the working poor. And instead of loading up benefits at tax time, people could get them as a monthly check in the mail.

It’s a big expansion of the safety net. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that it would lift 9 million people out of poverty. And, not for nothing, but it’s arguably the closest thing that any 2020 contender has proposed to a universal basic income, an idea that is exactly what it sounds like: a guaranteed cash benefit to every American. Harris’s office claims 80 million total Americans would benefit in some way. That’s not everyone, as under a true UBI, but it’s a big step.

And it’s a good step, I think. The US spends a lot less on anti-poverty programs than most rich countries, and the LIFT Act would substantially remedy that. If I were a senator and there were a vote on it, I’d vote yes.

But the bill has some significant shortcomings. Its biggest weakness, which limits its effectiveness as an anti-poverty tool, is that recipients must be working and earning at least $3,000 (or $6,000 for couples) a year to get the full benefit. If you make $0, you get $0 in benefits. But a rising number of Americans, particularly single moms, report having no cash earnings from welfare or work. Millions more can’t or don’t work and rely on support from family, or programs like Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income for disabled individuals; the LIFT Act cuts them out.

The bill is also oriented toward adults. But poverty in the US is concentrated disproportionately among children; the child poverty rate is higher than the overall population’s poverty rate. So it stands to reason that a cost-effective way to reduce poverty would be to direct transfers to families with children.

To be a maximally effective anti-poverty plan, the LIFT Act would give full benefits to poor beneficiaries even if they’re not working, and it would be combined with a child benefit like Sens. Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown’s American Family Act, which would give $250 to $300 per month per child to all but the richest families in America, with no phase-in.

The LIFT Act is structured like a trapezoid, as the following diagram from the Tax Policy Center’s Elaine Maag shows:

How much families of different incomes get from Sen. Kamala Harris’s LIFT Act. Tax Policy Center/Elaine Maag

If you earn $0, you get $0 in benefit. But then it phases in very rapidly, dollar for dollar. If you’re a single person and make $1,000 a year, you get an additional $1,000 from the LIFT Act. If you make $2,000, you get another $2,000. It then caps out at $3,000 for individuals and $6,000 for couples.

The phaseout is much milder, with middle- and upper-middle-class families and individuals losing only 15 cents for every $1 their income grows after the phaseout starts (at $30,000 for individuals without kids, $60,000 for married couples, and $80,000 for single people with kids).

America’s two existing refundable tax credit programs for poor families, the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the child tax credit, also have this kind of trapezoidal structure: They phase in as families earn more money, then max out, then slowly phase out as they earn even more money than that. With the refundable child tax credit, families earning under $2,500 a year don’t get anything, and it doesn’t fully phase in until families are earning nearly $12,000 a year. That substantially limits its usefulness to the very poor.

The LIFT Act would solve a couple of big problems with our existing system. One, it would extend the value of the EITC, which phases out entirely for families after they reach $39,000 to $49,000 in earnings (it depends on how many kids they have), to higher-income middle-class families. That makes it less of a pure anti-poverty program, but it helps non-poor but still struggling families who could use some assistance, and whose support helps ensure the program’s political survival in the future.

Second, neither the EITC nor (obviously) the child tax credit does much of anything for workers without kids. The maximum EITC for single people is $519 in 2018, compared to $5,716 for families with two kids. The LIFT Act would bring childless people up to $3,000 in benefits.

That’s perhaps the least controversial aspect of the bill. For years, policymakers have issued proposals to expand the EITC to childless adults, or to adults who aren’t their kid’s custodial parent. A recent randomized trial conducted in New York City found that increasing the EITC to $2,000 for single people substantially reduced deep poverty and encouraged employment.

That last point — increased employment — is one reason even Republicans have sometimes supported the EITC, and why some lefties are critical of the program. The phase-in to the EITC and CTC functions as the opposite of a tax: It directly incentivizes people to work more. If you support work for its own sake, that’s great! But it runs a risk of depressing wages by pushing more people into the labor market.

Another reason for the phase-in is political, and unsavory: It prevents the EITC from being a benefit for the non-working poor. America (like Britain, and many other countries) has a long and storied history of stigmatizing non-working poor people, and that has hampered anti-poverty policy on more than a few occasions. Hillary Clinton famously floated and then dropped a plan for unconditional “baby bond” grants to newborn babies in 2007, in part due to backlash against the idea of helping families whose heads of household weren’t working.

The LIFT Act doesn’t challenge this aspect of the tax code. Instead, it introduces a third phased-in tax benefit, continuing the exclusion of people at the very bottom end of the income scale.

This also excludes, for what it’s worth, people with some non-wage income who are struggling, like retirees or disabled people reliant on Social Security. Senior poverty and poverty among severely disabled people are both extremely common, which suggests that a big new cash program like this might want to give them a boost as well. But the phase-in of the LIFT Act benefit is based on “earned income,” which excludes cash benefits like those. It’s strictly a plan for people with jobs and earnings, who only make up about a quarter of people in poverty in the United States. Those people’s children would benefit, but children with non-working parents wouldn’t.

There’s a relatively simple fix to this problem: The LIFT Act could give its $250 to $500 per month benefit to every household under the phaseout limit, without phasing in at all. That would make it less of a work incentive and would increase its price tag. But it would help more extremely poor families, more seniors, and more disabled people.

About a third of people in poverty in America (according to our very imperfect poverty measure) are children, despite children being less than a quarter of the US population. That’s a grim fact, but it makes some structural sense. Parents tend to be in their 20s and 30s, toward the beginning of their careers when their salaries are lower. Children impose heavy costs in terms of food, housing, child care, clothing, and medical bills. So households with children tend to find themselves economically struggling disproportionately often.

Most rich countries have adopted a policy called a child allowance to address this phenomenon. Child allowances are straightforward cash grants to families with kids, and they’re an incredibly effective way of reducing poverty. In 1999, Tony Blair and the Labour Party introduced a universal child benefit in the UK, as part of a broader set of proposals meant to tackle child poverty, and cut the absolute child poverty rate in half from 1999 to 2009.

Programs that give families cash, UC Irvine economist Greg Duncan has found, result in better learning outcomes and higher earnings for their kids. One study found a $3,000 annual income increase for poor parents is associated with 19 percent higher earnings for their child once he or she grows up, a pretty massive effect size.

That’s why I think the most important, and most cost-effective, anti-poverty bill in the Senate right now is Bennet and Brown’s American Family Act. It would cost about half as much as Harris’s bill ($108 billion a year versus $200 billion) and send out:

$3,000 per year, or $250 per month, per child ages 6 to 18

$3,600 per year, or $300 per month, per child ages 0 to 5

And despite having half the cost of Harris’s bill, it would lift slightly more people (9.5 million versus 9 million) out of poverty, 5.3 million of whom would be children, compared to under 3 million for Harris’s bill. (Caveat: Those estimates are by two different analysts, which limits their direct comparability a bit.)

My intent here isn’t to pit these two bills against each other. The US can, and I think should, pass both. Lily Adams, Sen. Harris’s communications director, told me that while Harris is not a co-sponsor on the Bennet/Brown bill, “she would be supportive of a bill like that. It’s not that she doesn’t support a benefit for children.” That’s, I think, the right position.

My point, rather, is that all else being equal, it’s more cost-effective for anti-poverty programs to target children, in terms of poverty reduction per dollar spent, and that a better package would include both a universal $3,000-per-adult cash grant and universal $3,000- or $3,600-per-year grants to children.

That kind of blend of Harris’s and Bennet/Brown’s ideas would, in effect, be a very small version of a basic income, albeit one that phases out for upper-income people and falls short of universality. And unlike some popular versions of the basic income idea, this variant would raise spending by hundreds of billions a year rather than trillions, a more reasonable target if you wanted to pay for the spending with tax increases.

Passing either of these proposals, let alone both, would be a massive political lift. Democrats in Congress would spend months sparring over the particulars should they ever retake both chambers and the presidency, and choose to use their time in power to pursue an anti-poverty bill. My main hope is if and when that does come to pass, the bill they produce doesn’t forget either children or non-working adults.

Original Source -> The LIFT Act, Kamala Harris’s newest big idea for 2020, explained

via The Conservative Brief

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Yesterday, I wrote about the middle and upper echelons of the Democratic field: those candidates who are polling in the mid-single-digits or higher. You can certainly posit a rough order of which of these candidates are more likely to win the nomination. I’d much rather wager a few shekels on Joe Biden than Pete Buttigieg, for instance. But I don’t think there’s any hard-and-fast distinction between the top tier and the next-runners-up.

For candidates outside of that group — those polling in the low single digits, or worse — I have less welcome news. I don’t really care which order you place them in, because unless they turn it around soon, they’re probably toast.

In this article, I’m mostly referring to Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro and Amy Klobuchar, who I’ll refer to as the BOCK candidates (Booker/O’Rourke/Castro/Klobuchar) for short. Some of this also applies to candidates (e.g. Michael Bennet) who didn’t make this week’s debate at all, although they’re in even worse shape. I’m not counting Andew Yang as part of this group, however. He’s actually polling slightly better than the BOCKs, despite lower name recognition, and is more of a sui generis case.

Subjectively speaking, the BOCK group is a reasonably interesting and well-qualified set of candidates. At times, I’ve thought various members of this group were poised for a breakout. (I also thought some of them, such as Klobuchar, would come out of the gate stronger when they initially launched their campaigns.) If you fast forwarded to next July and one of these candidates — Booker, say — was accepting the Democatic nomination in Milwaukee, it wouldn’t be that surprising on some level. They have the sort of profile that resembles those of past presidential nominees.

But the BOCK candidates don’t have the polling of those past nominees. And empirically, that’s a pretty enormous problem for them. As my colleague Geoffrey Skelley discovered in his series on the predictive accuracy of early primary polls, only one candidate has come back from averaging less than 5 percent in national polls in the second half of the year before the primary to win the nomination. That was Jimmy Carter, who did so in 1976. Given the number of candidates who failed to make it, that would make their chances of winning the nomination very low — somewhere on the order of 1 or 2 percent.

Now, you might look at someone like a Booker or a Klobuchar and assume that they’re better qualified than the candidates who were polling in the low single digits in past nomination races. But that’s not necessarily true. Sure, those races included plenty of Alan Keyeses and Dennis Kuchinches, but there were also plenty of other senators and governors who were highly plausible nominees but whose campaigns just never really gained traction.

Of course, there are a few caveats and qualifications. Geoffrey’s research covers polling across the entire second half of the pre-election year — that is, from July through December. If Booker or Klobuchar began surging in the polls now, they could finish above that 5 percent threshold over the six-month period. Also, these candidates are running full-fledged campaigns, whereas some of the low-polling names from past nomination cycles spent a lot more time flirting with whether to run or not.1 Meanwhile, Booker and Klobuchar (more so than O’Rourke or Castro) have decent numbers of endorsements, which are historically a fairly predictive indicator, although most of thoss endorsements are from their home states.

So, if you want to go to the mat and argue that Booker or one of the other BOCK candidates has, I don’t know, a 5 percent chance of winning the nomination, I’m not really going to argue with you. (And collectively, they have a better chance than they do individually, of course. Keep that in mind if you’re hate-reading this column a year from now because O’Rourke won the nomination or something.)

But a lot of this smacks of special pleading, and ignores that the empirical evidence is fairly robust in this case: Lots of candidates have hoped to come back from polling in the low single digits to win their nominations, and almost none of them have done it. A somewhat larger group have emerged as factors in races that they ultimately didn’t win — Rick Santorum in 2012, for example — but elections aren’t something where close really counts. Nor are any of these candidates polling especially well in Iowa or New Hampshire, which is the path that dark-horse candidates (such as Carter or Santorum) usually take to enter the top tier.

It’s also pretty hard to know what type of event might trigger a sudden surge in support for one of the BOCKs. Castro and Booker had strong nights in the first and second debates, respectively, and it barely moved the numbers for them. O’Rourke saw a spike in media attention following the mass shooting in his home town of El Paso, Texas, and his support in polls didn’t move much after that, either.

Moreover, Democrats are fairly satisfied with their field, and they’re paying a relatively large amount of attention to the campaign as compared with similar stages in past nomination races. That’s also a bearish indicator for the BOCKs. Democrats aren’t necessarily shopping around for fresh alternatives, in the way that Republicans were in 2011 and 2012, when Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and others surged and declined in the polls.

That may be because the top three to five candidates do a relatively good job of covering the various corners of the Democratic primary. College educated voters tend to like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Buttigieg; non-college voters have Biden and Bernie Sanders. Older voters tend to like Biden, whereas Sanders’s and Warren’s supporters are younger. Moderates have Biden, while liberals have lots of alternatives. Biden is well-liked among black voters, and if they sour on him, there’s Harris. Hispanic voters don’t have an obvious first choice, and maybe there’s a niche for a moderate candidate who isn’t Biden for voters who think Biden is too old. But overall, the Democatic electorate is pretty well picked over.

Put another way, if you’re wondering why candidates such as Castro and Booker aren’t gaining more traction despite seemingly having run competent campaigns, the answer may have less to do with them and more to do with the fact that the field has a lot of heavyweights. Biden is a former two-term vice president; Sanders was the runner-up last time and basically built an entire political movement, and Warren and Harris have been regarded as potential frontrunners since virtually the moment that Donald Trump won the White House. The years that produce volatile, topsy-turvy nomination races, such as the 1992 Democratic primary, tend to be those where a lot of top candidates sit out, perhaps because they’re fearful of running against an incumbent with high approval ratings. Trump looks beatable, however, and almost all of the highly plausible Democratic nominees save Sherrod Brown ran. There isn’t much oxygen for those at the top of the field, let alone for the candidates a few rungs down.