#ActInTimeDEADLINETime left to limit global warming to 1.5°C
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LIFELINEWomen in Parliaments Globally27.2% WOMENNature protection is part of fundamental law in Amazon countries | One lawyer's groundbreaking work in shaping climate law | California tribes rekindle ancient fire traditions to heal the land & themselves | EU expects to add record renewable capacity in 2025 | Lego opens solar-powered Vietnam factory to cut emissions & supply Asia | Africa is proof that investing in climate resilience works | New global fund for forests is a bold experiment in conservation finance | Clean power provided 40% of the world's electricity last year | Cape Cod pilot brings clean energy upgrades to low-income homes | Nations are considering to set the 1st global tax on emissions for shipping | Nature protection is part of fundamental law in Amazon countries | One lawyer's groundbreaking work in shaping climate law | California tribes rekindle ancient fire traditions to heal the land & themselves | EU expects to add record renewable capacity in 2025 | Lego opens solar-powered Vietnam factory to cut emissions & supply Asia | Africa is proof that investing in climate resilience works | New global fund for forests is a bold experiment in conservation finance | Clean power provided 40% of the world's electricity last year | Cape Cod pilot brings clean energy upgrades to low-income homes | Nations are considering to set the 1st global tax on emissions for shipping |
Meanwhile - markets are struggling to regain lost ground. The bargain hunters are out in force trying to shore things up.
With Trump in the White House, we spend the whole time trying to compensate for his fuckups, and then we get to spend years after he's gone cleaning up the mess he leaves behind.
Belle nails it. Republicans told us they weren't going to fuck us out of our Social Security. They said they wouldn't fuck with it at all.
Now they're saying they'll only fuck over our kids and grandkids.
I feel so much better.
My kids already don't have it as good as I had it when I was their age.
Because over the last 50 years, workin' people have lost unions, and a livable wage, and health insurance, and life insurance, 40-hour work weeks, and overtime, and disability/workers' comp, and pensions, and paid time off, and and and.
Productivity has gone up more than 60%, average CEO and Executive pay has gone up about 400%, while the average workin' guy's wages have gone up about 13%.
All kinds of shitty things have been done to beat down the ordinary everyday people.
We have to tax the rich now, so we don't have to eat them later
Double the Social Security cap, and the system is good for generations. Remove it, and the surplus takes care of practically everything seniors will ever need
Tell Elon to keep his grubby mitts off my stuff
Republicans aren't trying to eliminate waste fraud and abuse - they're trying to install it. If you're impressed with the way the Russian military is working, you're gonna love privatized schools and Social Security
Guest Contribution: “The Trade War Has Cost 175,000 Manufacturing Jobs and Counting”
Today, we are pleased to present a guest contribution written by Lydia Cox (Harvard University) and Kadee Russ (University of California, Davis), both formerly on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Some of the coverage noted the statistic in Footnote 10 on page 19 of the Flaaen and Pierce study: By mid-2019, manufacturing employment ended up 1.4 percent lower than would have been the case without the tariffs levied in 2018-2019, likely due to a combination of increased costs of production and retaliatory tariffs. Yet it was hard to find in the articles an articulation of how many jobs this represents in level terms.
Exactly how many jobs is 1.4 percent of pre-trade-war manufacturing employment? Take 1.4 percent of 12.5 million, the number of manufacturing jobs at the end of January 2017, the month before the trade war began. The answer is 175,000 manufacturing jobs missing by mid-2019. Flaaen and Pierce’s study suggests that increased costs for imported inputs account for about two thirds of the total reduction in manufacturing employment. Retaliatory tariffs account for the remaining third.
In fact, more than 175,000 jobs disappeared: this figure nets out the roughly 40,000 jobs that may have been added or protected in industries benefitting from tariff protection. Furthermore, the estimate captures the decline in manufacturing employment only through mid-2019, but the tariffs have remained in place for a year since that time, likely leading to additional losses.
Digging a little deeper, we see evidence in Figure B5a that within this number, about 75,000 of these missing manufacturing jobs (about 0.6 percent of manufacturing employment, once we weight by the average cost share of steel) are associated with the Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum that went into effect in March 2018. A potential positive impact on employment from import protection is much smaller and not significantly different from zero. The steel and aluminum tariffs plausibly may have led to an increase of 1,000 jobs in these industries and kept a few thousand more from disappearing. See our Econofact memo for more on this.
Flaaen and Pierce’s study design filters out effects of macroeconomic conditions like variation in the value of the dollar and changes in economic growth overseas. By doing so it can plausibly be seen as a conservative estimate if the escalating tariff war led to the dollar strengthening against some currencies or dampened global growth, as downward revisions in growth forecasts by the IMF and OECD have suggested. Moreover, the estimate of 175,000 missing manufacturing jobs does not include adverse effects on employment that may have occurred due to the way that trade policy uncertainty dampened investment and industrial production during that period across many countries, according to macroeconomists Dario Caldara, Matteo Iacoviello, Patrick Molligo, Andrea Prestipino, and Andrea Raffo.
In addition to job losses, tariffs create a burden on households in the form of higher prices on goods and the inconvenience of having to substitute away from goods targeted by tariffs. Estimates assess the costs of the trade war from January 2018 to June 2019 at about $800 per household. Considering the macroeconomic effects of the trade policy uncertainty more than doubles this figure. The study by Caldara, Iacoviello, Molligo, Prestipino, and Raffo captures the overall impact of the trade war during that period, including trade policy uncertainty and attendant effects on national output through its adverse impact on investment and industrial production. They estimate that the trade war caused the U.S. economy be 1 percent smaller in 2020 than it would have been without the tariffs, equating to an average cost of $1700 per household. See this Econofact memo for a comparison and discussion of overall costs of the trade war, or more on the macroeconomic impacts of unilateralism here.
So there won't be a honeymoon, and prices won't be coming down quickly, and the big-ass omnibus bill is a bit too complicated to get done before summer - if then - and the mass deportations will have wait a while, and at least some of Trump's cabinet picks are going to meet with resistance.
But hey - on the bright side, John Thune says he'll provide a little Congress 101 Tutorial for MAGA's mango-faced ape god so maybe he'll be a little less stupid about what it actually takes to get the whole governance thing done.
And it just so happens that the new rules require 9 votes for a Motion To Vacate.
Johnson probably can't get anything done without throwing large bones to the Tantrum Caucus, so we might see an awful lot of monkey-in-the-middle type negotiations as he tries to get the Democrats to help him - which of course will require throwing large bones to them as well.
Whether you're a politician, or an operative, or a pundit, or a reporter, or a casual observer, the main skill you need to develop is Vote-Counting - the ability to gauge where people are in the process of deciding which way they're most likely to go on any given issue.
Belle and Beau and the gang have been pretty good at it, but they always make it clear that anything can happen between the overhearing of whispers in the cloakroom, and when it's time to go on record and cast your vote in public.
My 2¢:
On the GOP side, this is a continuing fight between congress critters who at least want to make it all look like 'regular order', and the bomb-throwers who are champin' at the bit to create a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Monday, January 6th, is when Congress gets together to certify the electoral votes - and I'm not at all sure that anybody knows what happens if there's no Speaker by then.
