Author: ProfJerry

E. J. Dionne writing in the Washington Post points out:

…those who regularly pretend that polarization affects both parties equally need to reckon with a GOP so committed to obstruction that a majority of its House members and senators insist that party loyalty demands opposing new highways in their own districts or states.

The Representative of the district in which I now live and the Representative of the district in which I formerly lived both voted against the infrastructure bill which will fund some desperately needed infrastructure in both districts. And both are Republicans.

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As Garrett M. Graff so carefully points out:

After 9/11

• As a society, we succumbed to fear.
• We chose the wrong way to seek justice.
• At home, we reorganized the government the wrong way.
• Abroad, we squandered the world’s goodwill.
• We picked the wrong enemies.

As we remember that day and grieve for all who lost their life, I fervently believe we must also remember and confront what came afterwards.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/after-911-everything-wrong-war-terror/620008/

One thing you can’t accuse GOP leaders of is consistency.

When the Trump administration announced its Taliban agreement in February of last year, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called it a “positive step.” Now, McCarthy is criticizing the Biden administration for adhering to the agreement and has suggested that the United States should have kept troops in Afghanistan indefinitely.

In July 2020, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said there was “[never] a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.” Thirteen months later, Gaetz admonished President Biden for doing just that.

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Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson in the New York Times report on some potential mass shootings that were recently and fortunately averted. For the article they interviewed Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dr. Peterson offered the suggestion that

…mass shooters, they have this grievance with the world where they feel like they haven’t been given what they were due and everybody else has these things that they wanted to have. And then they find a specific thing to blame for that anger.

During the pandemic the shared suffering perhaps mitigated the sense of individual suffering and grievance, but now:

This sense of shared suffering has already begun to dissipate, and psychologists are concerned about what awaits. So many of the known risk factors for mass shootings -economic hardship, exposure to family violence, isolation, time spent online, a surge in weapons sales – were exacerbated over the course of the pandemic.

All these things have been increasing, but we just haven’t had the opportunity there,” Dr. Peterson said. “I’m worried that once we create the opportunity, we’ve got all these people kind of ready to boil over.”

This suggests that perhaps we should shift our focus from “gun control” to “gun violence” and its causes. Perhaps we need greater attention to the economic and social causes of the suffering and grievance that lead some to lash out — with guns — at others.

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The Republicans and Voting Rights

Andrew Cohen, in Washington Monthly identifies what’s driving the Republican Party’s efforts to restrict and suppress voting (emphasis added):

Republican officials repeatedly concede that, in the words of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.”

Republican state legislators justify the latest versions of their restrictive voting laws on the fantasy that the 2020 presidential election turned on voter fraud. They either cannot or will not concede, to themselves or their constituents, that Democrats can lawfully win elections without the kind of systemic voter fraud that has never occurred or been proven. And they’ve evidently given up on trying to woo voters with popular policies.

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In the New York Times David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez point out that the U.S. economy has historically done better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.

Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans, according to a Times analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch.

The article goes on to try to answer why the economy is strong under Democratic administrations. One over-riding and plausible explanation is:

Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe – like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.

After reviewing some other possibilities and examining what happened under various Presidents, the article turns to recent history.

The past year has offered another case study. Mr. Trump repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, and the country suffered. The economy would have experienced a downturn no matter who was president, but his scattered response aggravated the pandemic and the recession. In some other countries, life is much closer to normal. In the United States, Mr. Trump became the first president since Hoover to preside over a decline in employment.

The whole article is worth a read, but I’d say the moral of the story is this: If you want a strong economy, elect a Democrat as President.

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Annie Lowrey, writing in The Atlantic reports that what many people believe would be the effects of raising the minimum wage turns out to be mistaken.

…minimum wages have a way of screwing with economic intuition, and complicating the simple logic of supply and demand. The benefits of a $15 minimum would greatly outweigh the costs. More than that, new economic evidence suggests that those costs might be small ones anyway: Even in low-wage, low-density, low-cost-of-living parts of the country, a $15 minimum might not be a death knell for small businesses or a job killer for low-wage workers.

I’m shocked! Shocked!

The Counterintuitive Workings of the Minimum Wage – The Atlantic

From the Washington Post: a report that we need to be even more careful and consistent in the use of masks.

Wear your mask is becoming wear your masks.

The discovery of highly transmissible coronavirus variants in the United States has public health experts urging Americans to upgrade the simple cloth masks that have become a staple shield during the pandemic.

The change can be as simple as slapping a second mask over the one you already wear, or better yet, donning a fabric mask on top of a surgical mask. Some experts say it is time to buy the highest-quality KN95 or N95 masks that officials hoping to reserve supplies for health-care workers have long discouraged Americans from purchasing.

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Come on, people. We can do this.