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      in US Politics

      Stock Market America is booming. So is Unemployment America | Lloyd Green

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      The chasm between the two Americas – “Unemployment America” and “Stock Market America” – made starkly visible this spring, has not disappeared. Instead, the divide has widened.America’s stock indexes have weathered the pandemic; the country’s job markets less so. On Thursday, the labor department reported nearly 900,000 new unemployment claims and Columbia University announced that 8 million Americans had fallen into poverty since May.Meanwhile, the number of Covid-19 cases continues to climb, the Affordable Care Act stands in legal jeopardy, and Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s latest pick for the supreme court, will not tell us if she believes that Medicare and social security pass constitutional muster. The New Deal may yet be undone.On that score, language that soothed the White House and Republicans may come back to haunt them at the ballot box. According to polls, older voters are prepared to vote for Joe Biden, a Democrat, in a marked departure from elections past.Donald Trump, not to mention many Republicans in Congress, do not seem to understand that for millions of older Americans, social security and Medicare are not nice-to-haves or cushy benefits handed out at the benevolent whims of the state. Rather, they are the earned benefits of a lifetime of work. According to US government data, social security benefits constitute about one-third of the income of the elderly, and for many even more.According to the New York Times, in February, at the same time that the Trump administration was declaring that the virus was not a big deal, the president’s top advisers tipped off the gods of the markets and the Republican donor base that the outbreak would be worse than the administration was saying publicly. Trump and his minions acted as if they believed the public could not handle the truth even as Wall Street dumped its holdings.Against that backdrop, preserving healthcare and retirement is the least they can do. But we know they won’t. Both the president and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, have spoken openly of cutting or “adjusting” entitlements. Then again, McConnell laughs about the failure of Congress to deliver Covid relief.On the campaign trail, the populist rhetoric of Trump’s 2016 campaign has given way, in 2020, to self-pity and personal resentments. The president wants us to feel his pain even as it appears that he is incapable of feeling ours. His relationship with his core supporters grows ever more asymmetric.When Trump’s refusal to wear a mask in public is taken as a sign of defiant courage, the body politic is certainly ailing. Half of Americans view their personal situations as better than they were four years ago. At the same time, however, nearly three in five voters see the country as being in worse shape than at the outset of the Trump presidency.When Trump’s refusal to wear a mask in public is taken as a sign of courage, the body politic is ailingWith nearly 220,000 people dead from the disease, the state of the Union is definitely hurting. The much touted “V”-shaped recovery is slow in coming, if it ever arrives.Don’t look to election day to bind the nation’s wounds. The realities that led to Trump’s electoral college upset are still with us.The gaps between the rural US, white evangelicals, white voters without college degrees and the rest of the country have not disappeared. Military suicides are up by a fifth and death by opioids has returned. Beyond that, the issue of immigration retains its potency.True, the president may have given his base a sense of calm but the causes of grievance have not gone away. What David Brooks once described as an idyllic urban existence, Bobos in Paradise, appears to have turned into a hell for everyone else. Expect Trumpism to live on, regardless of what happens on 3 November and the days that follow.A definitive Biden victory stands to provide the US with a president whose political legitimacy is less open to question or attack. Unlike George W Bush in 2004 or the incumbent, a Biden win would likely be accompanied by a majority of the popular vote.Beyond that, Biden does not carry Clinton-era baggage. The former vice-president is not a child of 1960. Likewise, no one has ever seriously accused the reflexively centrist “man from Scranton” of being a radical. Together, that would help lower the temperature for a bit, anyway, and that counts.The two Americas will not disappear any time soon. At most, we can at least hope for some civility, and God knows we can use it. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump has made fracking an election issue. Has he misjudged Pennsylvania?

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      In early August, Ginny Kerslake’s lush green yard in a middle-class Pennsylvania suburb turned into a muddy river, thanks to another spill at the pipeline drilling site opposite her house. A couple of days later, 10,000 gallons of drilling mud, or bentonite clay, contaminated a popular recreational lake that also provides drinking water for residents of Chester county.The spills are down to construction of the Mariner East (ME) pipelines – a beleaguered multibillion-dollar project to transport highly volatile liquids extracted by fracking gas shale fields in western Pennsylvania to an export facility in Delaware county in the east, ready to ship to Europe to manufacture plastics.In Pennsylvania, four years after Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 44,292 votes to win the state, the controversial pipeline project has helped make fracking a political flashpoint in the debate over energy, the climate crisis, environmental inequalities and the influence of big business.Fracking was a hot topic in this week’s vice-presidential debate, and the Republican party has blanketed the state with ads falsely claiming a Biden administration would ban the practice. Kerslake was unimpressed by the debate, but like many local anti-fracking voters she is hopeful that a Democratic administration might, at least, be persuadable on the issue.“The direct impact in our township has opened our eyes to how elected officials and government agencies we expect to protect us but don’t … Without fracking, there are no pipelines and vice versa,” said Kerslake, speaking in front of the noisy, unsightly drilling site, which can operate from 7am to 7pm six days a week.The ME horizontal directional drilling (HDD) project – which is subject to multiple criminal and regulatory investigations – has caused major disruption to dozens of suburban and rural communities, contaminated surface and groundwater sources in hundreds of mud spills, and created countless sinkholes in parks, roads and yards since construction began in early 2017.At least 105,000 people live within a half-mile blast radius of the ME pipeline system, which carries highly flammable, odourless and colourlessgases in liquified form; many more Pennsylvanians attend schools, libraries and workplaces in close proximity.Pennsylvanians suffer the country’s second-worst air quality, thanks to greenhouse-gas-emitting industries, and according to one recent poll, 83% of voters in the state think climate change is a serious problem and 58% look unfavourably at lawmakers who oppose strong action to combat it. More

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      in UK Politics

      Four million families face ‘significant decline’ in income under plans to scrap universal credit increase

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      Four million households face a “significant decline” in their income under government plans to scrap the £20 a week increase in universal credit, a report has warned.The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that millions would lose an average of 13 per cent of their benefits if the cut goes ahead in April as planned. The think tank said the UK’s welfare system is “ripe for reform” as it laid out the choices facing the government.  With unemployment already rising and forecast to spike over the winter, many more households are expected to be reliant on the UK’s benefits system, which is one of the least generous of any wealthy nation’s.
      Read moreThe government again this week resisted calls to keep the £20 uplift brought in at the start of the pandemic.
      Even with the increase, a single childless worker on average earnings who lost her job receives just 17 per cent of her usual income in benefits, the IFS calculated.  That compares with an average of 20 per cent in the members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
      However, the true gulf is much wider — 17 per cent versus 55 per cent — once contributory benefits are taken into account.These are benefits where the level of payment depends on your work history, and these benefits make up a far larger proportion of most other countries’ welfare systems.New research from the IFS lays out “tough choices” for the government. Ministers could choose to make the £20 per week increase permanent, which would add 10 per cent to the cost of universal credit, though that would “undo at most two-thirds of the benefit cuts made since 2015, let alone those made during the coalition”, the IFS said.
      If the government chose to make all of its temporary increases to benefits permanent, the overall costs of the system would increase by a quarter this year
      Read moreThat would mean as much as an extra £26bn added to the benefits bill this year, if unemployment rises and earnings fall in line with expectations, the IFS said.
      “Regardless of the decision made about the size of the [benefits] system, the government should certainly take the opportunity to improve aspects of the working-age welfare system that were already ripe for reform before the crisis,” the IFS said.
      During his winter economic statement, Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, made it clear the government was not extending the temporary uplift in payments, despite pressure from opposition parties and campaigners.  Tackled twice on the issue by the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Boris Johnson refused to commit to making the increase in universal credit permanent, simply telling MPs the government would “continue to support families across this country”.Pressed a third time by the Labour MP Stephen Timms, the prime minister added: “Of course, we keep all these things under constant review.”
      Liberal Democrat DWP spokesperson Wendy Chamberlain said the government would be guilty of “heartlessness at its worst” if it cuts benefits while millions of people are struggling.
      “With the furlough scheme due to end this month and more business lockdowns expected soon, unemployment is set to soar. If Ministers go ahead with their plan, millions will face financial ruin,” she said.
      “The boost to welfare payments must be extended beyond next April alongside the extension of furlough. Ultimately, this should only be the start of a fundamental re-think of our welfare system.”
      The IFS also recommends reforming housing benefit, which had “bizarrely” been linked to rents in each local area in 2011. This meant families in areas that have since become more expensive were eligible for less support than otherwise-equivalent families in low-rent ones.That was temporarily scrapped in March, with housing benefit linked to current rents, an improvement that should be made permanent, according to the IFS.Pascale Bourquin, a research economist at IFS and an author of the report, said: “There may well be a case for a more generous benefit system, but not necessarily in the way in which increases were implemented at speed this year.  “A more serious review of the treatment of, for example, housing costs and of the self-employed is required. Simply reverting to the pre-Covid system would mean going back to a world where self-employed UC claimants are penalised for having incomes that fluctuate within the year, and where housing benefits are based on local rents from a decade ago.”A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said: “This government is wholly committed to supporting the lowest-paid families and has already taken significant steps, including raising the living wage, ending the benefit freeze and increasing work incentives.
      “During this challenging time we have provided £9.3 billion extra welfare support to help those most in need, as well as introducing income protection schemes, mortgage holidays and additional support for renters, and constantly keep these measures under review.” More

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      in US Politics

      Demand surges for Regeneron drug that Trump claims ‘cures’ Covid-19

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      Doctors are reporting a spike in enquiries by patients for an experimental Covid-19 drug cocktail after Donald Trump called the Regeneron Pharmaceuticals drug “a blessing from God” that is a “cure” for the virus.Two doctors involved in the trial of the drug told Reuters that more patients are asking to participate in the drug’s trials, though medical experts have pointed out the drug, REGN-COV2, is still too early in its trial period to confirm that it can help treat Covid-19.On Wednesday, just hours after Trump praised the drug as the “cure” for the virus, Regeneron announced that it submitted an application to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) for an emergency use authorization of the drug, which is a cocktail mix of two antibodies meant to aid the immune system in fighting the virus.Regeneron’s stock, and the stock of Eli Lilly, another pharmaceutical company conducting drug trials for an anti-body treatment, soared Thursday after Trump touted the treatment.“The politics of the situation would suggest to me that the story could be Trump gets Covid … then American technology fostered by the Trump administration cures Covid,” said Dr Dirk Sostman, head of research network at Houston Methodist Hospital, a trial site for Regeneron’s antibody program, who told Reuters that more patients were seeking to take part in the trial. “I would think there would be pressure on regulators [to approve the drug],” he said.Though Trump said that “hundreds of thousands” of doses were ready for use, Regeneron said that it actually has enough doses for 50,000 patients and would have enough for 300,000 patients in the coming months. The company has said 275 patients participated in the first phase of the drug trial.The US has more than 7.5m confirmed cases of Covid-19 and over 212,000 people have died of the disease, according to Johns Hopkins University.Because the drug is in clinical trials, it is only available to patients who are accepted into the trial. With approval from the FDA, drug companies can offer a treatment to patients not participating in trials under “compassionate use” rules, which are meant to make treatments accessible to patients with a life-threatening condition that has no alternative therapies available. Regeneron said that under 10 people have been given its drug under the rules.Doctors on Twitter have been voicing their concerns about promises of a cure when the treatment is still nascent.“We don’t know if it works. We don’t know about patient outcomes because it hasn’t been studied enough. Frankly, [Trump] is an anecdote,” said Dr Rob Davidson, an emergency room physician in Michigan and executive director of the Committee to Protect Medicine, in a video on Twitter.Regeneron’s drug is just the latest treatment that Trump is touting as the cure to the virus without the evidence medical experts say is necessary to actual confirm a treatment is safe and effective. In the spring, Trump infamously announced he was taking anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine in an attempt to prevent Covid-19, though the FDA warned against using the drug for that reason. Just a month later, the FDA revoked its emergency authorization for the drug citing growing evidence that it did not work to prevent the virus and that it had serious side effects. More