Coming To A Reckoning

The Colorado legislature will take up a proposal to alter the state's labor law in the new session - beginning Jan 8, 2025.

To me, the simple fact that The Chamber Of Commerce is against it, means it's a good idea - that it'll open the way for workers to regain some of the rights that corporations and coin-operated politicians have been stripping away from them for 45 years.

Opinion:

Democrats, don’t break Colorado’s 81-year-old labor ceasefire

A misguided proposal would unravel the Labor Peace Act

A coalition of Democratic legislators has announced plans to drop a political nuclear bomb the first week of Colorado’s legislative session, breaking an 81-year-old ceasefire between Colorado businesses and labor.

This move is bad for Colorado’s economy and the battle it starts may quickly spiral out of control.

Since 1943, Colorado has been a red state, purple state, and blue state, and during that time Colorado’s Labor Peace Act has held the middle ground, successfully governing workforce unionization in a harmonious way that may be the best such law in the country.

On one end of the political spectrum are so-called right-to-work states that prohibit mandatory union membership and the payment of union dues as a condition of employment. These laws, usually in red states, ensure employees’ rights to make their own choices regarding union affiliation. Right-to-work laws do not prevent workers from unionizing the shop floor, but the workers are not compelled to join the union or pay dues.

For many companies and site selectors looking for a new location, a right-to-work state is often among the top criteria. Today, roughly 26 states have right-to-work laws, with six of these states coming onboard within the last 14 years.

And, importantly, seven of Colorado’s top 10 competitor states are right-to-work states.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, are “union shop” states that do not have right-to-work laws in place. In these 23 states, employers and unions require workers, where applicable, to join the union or otherwise to pay union dues as a condition of employment, even if they were not union members when hired. In these states, workers may be compelled to become union members or contribute financially to the union, even if they do not want to join. These laws strengthen the union’s bargaining power and influence in the workplace.

Colorado is a unique outlier, a compromise state. It is neither a right-to-work nor union shop state. Under Colorado’s Labor Peace Act, workers can form a union with a simple majority vote, but to permit union security, which allows organized labor to deduct fees from their checks to fund the union work and bargaining activities, they must obtain a 75% vote of members.

Colorado’s balanced approach has promoted the state’s economy and brought us good jobs with good wages. While 75% is a higher bar, it seems appropriate that a higher threshold should be met before requiring all employees to pay union dues and belong to a union.

However, this coalition of politicians seeks to eliminate that second, higher-threshold vote, making it much easier for workers to unionize and fund union work and bargaining activities. Make no mistake, this is a pro-labor, anti-business bill, that will galvanize both sides and spill over to other issues with potentially adverse consequences for all.

While I was a Democrat in a Republican-controlled legislature in the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans came together to defeat right-to-work legislation. And, in 2007, when the legislature sent a union shop bill to former Democrat Gov. Bill Ritter’s desk, he vetoed it. The peace was maintained.

This is a dangerous time to tinker with Colorado’s economy. A recent 2024 CNBC analysis ranked Colorado 39th for its cost of doing business and 32nd for business friendliness. There is strong evidence from respective leaders and experts that becoming a union shop state will make it more difficult to recruit and retain Colorado businesses. Attracting companies to Colorado draws fierce competition amongst states.

Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce’s press release in response to this proposed legislation aptly noted that, Colorado “risks losing critical opportunities for job creation and economic growth” if this legislation passes. In fact, that was the primary reason why Governor Ritter vetoed it in 2007.

Between 2018 and 2023, Colorado’s average annual employment growth rate of 1.5% was more than three times that of union shop states and over 20 years was double that growth rate.

Bringing this issue forward now may also be a risky political miscalculation. In response, business leaders will likely decide to take their case directly to Colorado voters, launching an expensive and protracted right-to-work ballot measure that could succeed. It’s a real gamble that shouldn’t be ignored and would be on the ballot in 2026, a critical election year.

Rather than break this 81-year-old ceasefire, business and labor and our political leaders should sit down together, roll up their sleeves and find an appropriate off-ramp. Perhaps rather than eliminate the second vote altogether, they could simply agree to lower the threshold from 75% to 66.6% for the second vote.

Colorado law has long protected the right to organize as well as provided a path to strengthen unions through union security agreements. That’s the Colorado way and there’s no good reason to break the ceasefire here.

Told Ya

No tax on overtime pay!!!!!

(because we're gonna make overtime disappear - by making overtime eligibility disappear)

A Trump Judge Just Nixed Overtime Pay for Millions—and Media Yawned

Remember the right-wing frenzy over “Rich Men North of Richmond”? Well, this ruling exposes Trump-MAGA hypocrisy on the working class—and reveals a big media failure.

You probably missed it, because it created barely a ripple in the media, but last Friday, a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump struck down one of President Biden’s most pro-worker policies: his effort to ensure that far more Americans benefit from overtime pay. Around four million salaried workers with lower incomes are the losers in this decision, yet it generated startlingly few news stories and no outraged missives from leading columnists.

Watching this all unfold brings to mind a now-forgotten controversy. Remember when Oliver Anthony, the little-known folk singer, went viral in 2023 with his song lamenting the plight of working people imposed by the “Rich Men North of Richmond”? Donald Trump and Republicans claimed the bearded, red-haired Southerner as one of their own, a veritable bard of MAGA country who’d crafted the ultimate right-wing populist ballad of protest aimed directly at supercilious elites.

“This is the anthem of the forgotten Americans,” gushed Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Media commentary endlessly analyzed the song as a cry of anguish straight from the blue-collar heartland, one that elite liberals should take to heart as a sign of how badly they’d failed regular Americans.

Here’s another “forgotten” detail about Anthony’s song for you to contemplate: It was about overtime pay.

“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay,” Anthony croons, adding that this has led him to “drown my troubles away.” He laments that “young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground,” seemingly describing oft-diagnosed social crises like self-medication, the spiritual alienation of modern work, and “deaths of despair.” All this was apparently a reference to Anthony’s own stint in a North Carolina factory, and he blames it on the “Rich Men North of Richmond”—politicians and their corporate overlords rigging the system against people like him.

This type of rigging is exactly what Biden’s overtime policy would combat. His administrative rule, proposed last year, would raise the income threshold for many workers to qualify for extra pay for hours beyond the 40-hour week under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Right now, that threshold is only around $35,000 per year. The rule would raise it to around $58,000.

Around four million additional people would qualify for overtime protections under this change. These are people who make more than $35,000 but less than $58,000 per year, but don’t currently qualify for overtime; to oversimplify, bosses have reclassified many of these workers as managers, exempting them from federal overtime protections.

The Biden rule would make them eligible: According to Labor Department spokesman Jesse Lawder, this group includes hundreds of thousands of people who do many types of manufacturing work as well as those holding low-to-medium-level positions in everything from retail and fast-food franchises to construction. Many are overworked and underpaid due to the same elite rigging of our economy perpetrated by the “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

Guess who managed to block this rule that would have provided those people with relief? MAGA Republicans allied with business interests, that’s who.

The lawsuit that succeeded combined two suits—one launched by Trumpy Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the other by a consortium of business groups. While the business coalition appears broad, it includes big players. We’re talking about the National Federation of Independent Business, which gave over $500,000 to GOP candidates (and a pittance to Democrats) last cycle; the International Franchise Association, whose board includes executives from fast-food behemoths like McDonald’s; and the National Retail Federation, whose board boasts representatives from giants like Walmart and Target. Like the “Rich Men North of Richmond,” these are well-heeled special interests who employ high-priced lawyers and lobbyists to influence politicians in D.C.

A big question now looms: Will the Trump administration fight to make this Biden rule a reality? The Justice Department hasn’t said whether it will appeal the decision striking the rule down. It should, to compel Trump to either keep defending it or actively let it die.

It’s unlikely Trump will continue that fight. To be fair, Trump’s record on this is mixed. In 2016, when the eligibility threshold was around $23,000, President Barack Obama tried to raise it to around $47,000, but a court struck that down. As president, Trump did raise the threshold, but only to a meager $35,000 (the current level), which happened to be a level that business groups could accept. Biden would expand this to millions more workers, which is why business interests tried to thwart it—apparently succeeding.

During the “Rich Men North of Richmond” controversy, certain columnists pointed a finger at liberal elites, urging deep introspection about why they have lost touch with the anxieties of people like Oliver Anthony. Now that Trump has been reelected while winning more working-class voters, including Latinos, we’re mired in another such debate.

No one should deny the need for such introspection. It’s obviously not enough for Democrats and liberals to say, “Our policies are better for people like Oliver Anthony.” A reformed approach should include an agenda that’s substantially more economically populist; a clear-eyed look at why certain liberal policies alienate working-class voters; and a deep dive into why working people are skeptical that Democrats fight for their material interests these days.

But surely it’s a sign of another profound problem, one that deeply afflicts our discourse, that a genuine effort by Democrats to lift the fortunes of millions of people struggling with low overtime pay—one blocked by a Trump judge and business elites—garnered almost zero media attention. This, even as a working-class anthem partly about that very problem captivated the media for weeks.

That disconnect captures one of the cardinal facts about our times. While Trump has broken with pro–big business orthodoxy to some degree—on tariffs and trade, for example—broadly speaking, he will outsource much of his agenda to the GOP’s plutocratic wing. He is expected to deeply slash the safety net to pay for more tax cuts for the rich, and to roll back many Biden labor policies, ones that arguably constitute the most pro-worker agenda in decades, perhaps doing nothing on overtime as well.

The media obsesses over Oliver Anthony and treats MAGA’s fetishization of him as sincere—but for all of its dutiful coverage of our policy disputes, it can’t seem to convey the larger truth about which party’s policies are actually pro-worker, and which are not.

This deception runs deep in right-wing media too. Media Matters found that Fox News devoted hours of programming to hyping “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and the network also made it the topic of the first GOP presidential debate. At my request, Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for Fox coverage of the ruling striking down the overtime rule—and found zero such coverage.

Yes, Anthony’s song was about more than just overtime pay. It was about a broader set of social afflictions. That helps explain all the press attention to it. But after this extended media fixation, Trump and fellow populist JD Vance faced no media pressure at all during the campaign to say where they stood on Biden’s effort to expand overtime pay to millions, or whether they’ll continue it.

That’s absurd. It reflects its own form of elite dereliction—one that leaves people less informed about the larger forces shaping their lives, the very thing, we’re told, that makes so many people like Oliver Anthony feel powerless and adrift. This elite failure too deserves some serious introspection. Perhaps someone should write a song about it.

Today's Vic

For Labor Day

Equal Pay

Timing Is Everything

As de-globalization gets a foothold, and we start to repatriate the jobs companies have been sending overseas for 30 or 40 years, maybe unions really are on the rise in a way that will make a real difference.

🤞🏻

And Plenty More To Do

An awful lot of the jobs available aren't great jobs. And an awful lot of Americans aren't prepared to step into the really good jobs because we've spent better than 25 years allowing Republicans to fuck up our school systems.

So there's lots and lots we need to do yet. The article below points out some of the glitches.

But when the number of jobs overtakes the number of people available to fill those jobs, the labor market should tip in favor of paying people a better wage (eg). Plus, with a president who stands with unions and wage-earners in general, employers should start to feel some heat to bring back some of the benefits we used to be able to count on.

It's appalling to me when I remember my days as an hourly guy and compare it with what youngsters are going through now.

• It was a given that we'd work 40 hours a week
• We got overtime pay for anything over 40 hours
• We had 10 days paid vacation time
• We got 10 paid holidays a year
• We got paid 2½ times our regular rate for working a holiday
• Healthcare insurance
• The company matched dollar-for-dollar whatever you put into your retirement plan

Employers added 303,000 jobs in March, soaring past expectations
The unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent

Employers in the United States added 303,000 jobs in March, soaring past expectations and reflecting renewed strength in a labor market that continues to prop up the broader U.S. economy.

The unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, extending the longest stretch of unemployment below 4 percent in five decades.

The jobs market is charging ahead in 2024, churning out more jobs per month on average than before the pandemic. The March job growth was notably higher than the average monthly gain over the past year, which was around 231,000, according to the agency.

“This was a very strong jobs report across a variety of metrics,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director at the jobs site Indeed. “It gives really positive implications for the short-term of health of the labor market and labor market’s capacity to bounce back from the pandemic.”

President Biden has been making an election-year case that economic gains made during his administration help all voters, and he trumpeted Friday’s jobs report.

“Today’s report marks a milestone in America’s comeback,” Biden said in a statement about the job gains. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink. With today’s report of 303,000 new jobs in March, we have passed the milestone of 15 million jobs created since I took office.”

Recent data indicates that Americans’ gloomy mood about the economy, consumer sentiment in March was up 28 percent from a year earlier, but those better vibes have yet to translate into political enthusiasm. Biden is trailing former president Trump in six of the seven most competitive states in the 2024 election, according to a Wall Street Journal poll from late March, due in part to voter dissatisfaction with the economy.

Major stock indexes all edged up after markets opened Friday, as investors cheered on the good news.

Workers benefited in March from rising wages and more work hours. Average hourly earnings accelerated in March to $34.69 per hour, which is up 4.1 percent from the previous year. Wages have consistently beat inflation since last May 2023, after years of falling behind.

Service-related industries continue to prop up the greater economy and contribute to low unemployment that has benefited workers.

Health-care job growth accelerated, adding 72,000 jobs in March largely in hospitals and residential care facilities and nursing homes in a reflection of surging demand from the aging baby boomer population. Government payrolls expanded by 71,000, mostly in local and federal government, as the sector has remained flush with cash.

And leisure and hospitality also grew by 49,000 jobs, and in a major milestone, finally caught up to its February 2020 pre-pandemic levels, as demand for dining out and other experiences has continued to swell.

Job growth has also begun to spread into industries that had gone slack over the past year.

Construction added 39,000 jobs in March, more than double its monthly average gain of the past 12 months, surprising experts because that industry tends to be sensitive to higher interest rates. Nonresidential specialty trade contractors led gains. Retail added 18,000 jobs mostly in general merchandise employers, such as big box stores.

“There’s a pocket of strength in the U.S. labor market right now,” Bunker said. “Part of it could be some sectors have slowed down from 2022 to 2023 and are starting to grow again. They’re working through some of the constraints of higher interest rates.”

Still, many rate-sensitive industries appear to remain cautious about hiring as they wait for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates this year. Employers in manufacturing, wholesale trade, warehousing and transportation, information, professional and business services, which includes parts of tech, and financial services saw little or no growth in March.

The latest job figures will shape Federal Reserve’s review of how the economy is performing. For the past two years, the central bank’s overwhelming focus has been on fighting inflation, namely through an aggressive interest rate campaign that brought borrowing costs to the highest level in more than 20 years. But officials are also keeping close watch for any signs that their moves have put too much pressure on the economy, like if the job market starts to weaken, or employers pulling back fearing tougher times ahead.

Inflation has come in higher than expected since the start of the year. If that turns out to be a lasting trend, the Fed may end up changing their plans for three possible interest rate cuts this year, which markets expect could start in June.

Consistently, the message from Fed leaders is that they need more time to see how the data unfolds. Friday’s report was no exception.

“There is no weakness in the job market which would impel the Fed to quickly cut, but no tightness which would prohibit a cut either,” Preston Caldwell, chief U.S. economist at Morningstar, wrote in an analyst note. “Fed decisions in upcoming meetings will hinge mainly on the inflation data.”

Lately, Americans have been spending big on vacations, dining out and entertainment. And that demand is driving employers to hire in those sectors.

Hiring in the leisure and hospitality sector is vastly outpacing the overall labor market. Employers made the most hires on record in arts, entertainment and recreation in February, according to a separate report by the Labor Department released Tuesday.

The leisure and hospitality industry has added 458,000 jobs in the past year, accounting for nearly 1 in 6 new jobs across the country.

More than 53,000 restaurants opened last year, up 10 percent from 2022 and exceeding pre-pandemic levels, according to data from online review site Yelp. That has helped boost hiring across the board, in entry-level positions as well as managerial roles.

Restaurateurs say it is finally becoming easier to find employees, after years of worker shortages, relieving the pressure to raise wages. A major pickup in immigration has also helped fill many long-standing openings, with 3.3 million immigrants arriving in 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Brent Frederick, who owns five restaurants in Minneapolis and St. Paul, has hired 40 people in the past month.

“There have been pullbacks in tech and other industries, and we’re noticing that a lot of people are landing back in hospitality,” he said. “There’s been influx in the pool of people available to us.”

Franco Campilongo, a restaurateur in the Bay Area, has hired seven new workers, including servers, cooks and dishwashers, in the last few weeks. Recent layoffs at tech firms and downtown cafeterias rocked by work-from-home norms have made it easier to recruit employees, he said.

“When Google and Apple started laying off, we got more people,” he said. “We used to have to negotiate — people would say ‘Facebook gives me $35 an hour’ — but that’s changed. Now I have a stack of applications.”

The industry has also been changing, with restaurants following remote-work customers who moved to suburbs from cities.

That shift to the outskirts of town is expected to fuel brisk hiring in hospitality this year. Che Fico, one of San Francisco’s top restaurants, recently expanded to Menlo Park. Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille, which has 21 locations nationwide, is heading to Vernon Hills, outside Chicago. And Old Ebbitt Grill, a D.C. institution near the White House, is opening its first spinoff in Reston, Va.

“We’re calling it our ‘sexy sister in the suburbs,’” said Jeff Owens, chief financial officer at Clyde’s Restaurant Group, which operates 11 Washington area restaurants. (Clyde’s is owned by Graham Holdings, which owned The Washington Post until 2013.)

Last month, Jaime James of Minnesota picked up a second job as a bartender on top of her day job in health care. The single mother said she hadn’t worked in the service industry in a decade but that she needed the extra cash. She rents a $2,000-a-month apartment in a safer and cleaner building than her previous mice-infested one.

“As a single mom, it’s very tough to survive right now on one income for two people,” James said. “The service industry appealed to me because of the possibility of immediate cash after every shift with tips.”

But James struggled to find an employer that would schedule her around her day job, as well as child-care needs. She applied for 24 restaurant jobs between November and March and got only two callbacks before she landed her current position.

And in case you're one of those hard-ass jerks who loves to piss on anybody you think doesn't measure up to your phony standards:

If you want people to suffer

because you suffered,

and you turned out OK,

I've got news for you:

You did not turn out OK

Econ 201

Capital is free to go where the highest profit potential is.

Labor is chained to the country of its origin.

Opinion

If you want to know where the world economy is headed, look at the bottom of this toy car

What if I said you could read real world history on the underside of your kids’ Hot Wheels?

In my Philippine childhood in the 1970s, my brother Hector and I played with die-cast toy cars. I remember the first time I looked at the underside of these cars, soon after I had learned to read, and realized they had been made in different countries in different years. Some were made in the United Kingdom and the United States; the newer ones were made in Japan. Decades later, as my work as an economist brought my family to the United States, my two children got toy cars nearly identical to mine — first made in China and, later, Vietnam.

We now have a small collection of these cars, and occasionally I use them as a teaching tool. I ask students in my economics classes to inspect the cars’ undersides, and together we trace the gradual movement of toy car manufacturing: from England and the United States in the 1960s to Japan in the mid-1970s, from South Korea in the mid-1980s to China in the late 1990s and Vietnam after.

I tell them the process of making die-cast toy cars is nearly unchanged since the 1960s and has been steadily passed from one country to another, marking the beginning of the transformation of entire economies. We observe how toy-export data mirrors worldwide trends in industrial sector employment over the past 60 years: the gradual rise of toy manufacturing and toy exports in developing economies, the expansion of light manufacturing in those countries, followed by the growth of more complex production and the entire industrial sector, soon dwarfing the traditional agriculture sector and lifting people out of low-paid, low-productivity work.

And then we see, almost as rapidly, the decline of the industrial sector in a now-richer economy, as production at lower prices becomes available from the next industrializing country. In the graphical representation of this phenomenon, individual countries’ data looks like hills all over the world and over time; it is a beautiful, astonishing understatement of how countless lives have been changed in the process.

This much world history reflected in a handful of toy cars.

Several years ago, at the end of those class conversations on economic transformation, I would boldly tell my students: If you would like to know where the world economy is headed, go to a toy store and look at the underside of a die-cast car. I was confident they would find some from Vietnam, considering my children’s cars and the country’s rapid industrial transformation. Or maybe from fast-growing Bangladesh or Ethiopia.

I was wrong.

Then came the covid-19 pandemic, and the industrial world reeled from massive supply chain disruptions. In early 2022, Mattel — which makes Hot Wheels and Matchbox toy cars — made a move to “near-source” some production, bringing its supply chain closer to the United States and away from Asia and China: It announced an injection of $50 million to its factory in Mexico. So I expected to start seeing toy cars manufactured in Mexico.

Wrong again. In two years, sometimes things change, sometimes things remain the same.

This past holiday season, my children and I took turns visiting the toy section of a large store just outside Washington. It was like a game: find a random car, take a picture of the box and the car’s underside, send it to our group chat. We found none from Bangladesh, Ethiopia or Mexico. They came from Malaysia, Thailand and, surprisingly, China, still. In the journey toward the inevitable transformation of economies, it seemed the world had taken a few detours.

It turns out that near-sourcing is more complicated than expected, as recently documented in the case of Mexico. Part of the difficulty involves scaling and coordination: As more businesses seek nearby production facilities, the nearby economy, with its limited human and infrastructure resources, is quickly overwhelmed. And just as critical pieces in toy manufacturing are still imported from China, inputs from China more generally are integral parts of more sophisticated global supply chains.

In addition, toy manufacturing reflects not only the promise of industrialization but also its disappointments. In late 2022, Mattel commemorated its 40th year of manufacturing in Malaysia by announcing the growth of its Hot Wheels factory there, the world’s biggest. This was a positive development, but Malaysia’s economy reached middle-income status decades ago; in the familiar pattern, it would by now have progressed to manufacturing more complex, profitable products. Instead, the country has remained in what economists Indermit Gill and Homi Kharas defined as the “middle-income trap” — caught between developing and rich nations.

As my children and I inspected this generation of toy cars, I struggled to explain what we were seeing. Not because toy cars do not tell us something about the world but because they do. They reflect the world’s reality, including its surprises.

Live Long And Prosper (?)

Sweat work and raw output are all that matters to the plutocrats.

They don't give half a rat's ass about the labor force because they think they can always go back to the well and bucket up some more suckers to work themselves to death in order to get one more dime to drop to the bottom line on their Monthly Net Revenue Report.

But we are - at once - aging faster and dying sooner. That's a bad combination if you want workers who can show up and last long enough to get good at what you need them to do.

America has a life expectancy crisis. But it’s not a political priority.

The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration had an urgent message last winter for his colleagues, brandishing data that life expectancy in the United States had fallen again — the biggest two-year decline in a century.

Robert Califf’s warning, summarized by three people with knowledge of the conversations, boiled down to this:

Americans’ life expectancy is going the wrong way. We’re the top health officials in the country. If we don’t fix this, who will?

A year after Califf’s dire warnings, Americans’ life expectancy decline remains a pressing public health problem — but not a political priority.

President Biden has not mentioned it in his remarks, according to a review of public statements; his Republican challengers have scarcely invoked it, either. In a survey of all 100 sitting senators, fewer than half acknowledged it was a public health problem. While recent federal data suggests that life expectancy ticked up in 2022, a partial rebound from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, no national strategy exists to reverse a years-long slide that has left the United States trailing peers, such as Canada and Germany, and rivals, such as China.

“I wish that life expectancy or health span were a fundamental political issue in the 2024 presidential campaign,” said Dave A. Chokshi, a physician and public health professor who formerly served as health commissioner of New York. “We’re not living the healthiest lives that we possibly could.”

The Washington Post spoke with more than 100 public health experts, lawmakers and senior health officials, including 29 across the past three presidential administrations, who described the challenges of attempting to turn around the nation’s declining life expectancy. Those challenges include siloed operations that make it hard for public and private-sector officials to coordinate their efforts, a health-care payment system that does not reward preventive care and White House turnover that can interrupt national strategies.

Many suggested the nation needed an effort that would transcend political administrations and inspire decades of commitment, with some comparing the goal of improving life expectancy to the United States’ original moonshot.

“We’re no longer an America that talks about building a national highway system or sending a man to the moon, and yet it’s that kind of reach and ambition that we need to have to tackle the declining longevity problem,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Experts, officials and lawmakers acknowledged that a political pledge to reverse the nation’s life expectancy slide could quickly backfire, given the need to focus on long-term goals that might not be reflected in short-term progress reports. A politician attempting to improve life expectancy could be out of office by the time improvements were detected.

“Politicians, in general, haven’t wanted to engage on this because it feels kind of squishy and the solutions don’t seem clear,” said Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s public health school who this year stepped down as the White House’s coordinator of the national covid response.

In an interview, Califf confirmed he’d urged colleagues in “so many” meetings to take action on America’s eroding life expectancy.

The trend is “quite alarming,” the FDA commissioner said, sitting in his office in White Oak, Md., where he oversees the nearly $7 billion agency that regulates drugs, food and other common products used by Americans. “All of the leaders within the [Department of Health and Human Services] I’ve talked with about this.”

White House officials said the president and his team were focused on combating the “drivers” of life expectancy declines, pointing to efforts to reduce drug overdoses, create an office to prevent gun violence and other initiatives. A senior health official in the Biden administration said pledging to improve life expectancy itself “would have to be viewed as something for a legacy.”

“Maybe a second-term priority for Biden,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about internal White House operations.

No single reason explains why America’s life expectancy has declined, with chronic disease, poor nutrition, insufficient access to care and political decisions all linked to premature deaths. There also is no single strategy to turn it around — and no agreement on how to do it. Some public health leaders and policymakers have called for sweeping reforms to how the health-care system operates, while others home in on discrete factors such as lethal drug overdoses, which have spiked in recent years and received considerable attention but are not solely responsible for the decline in life expectancy.

The paralysis over how to address the nation’s declining life expectancy extends to Congress, where a handful of lawmakers — mostly Democrats — have repeatedly portrayed the slide as a crisis, but most other lawmakers have said little or nothing.

“We don’t talk about life expectancy, because it just makes it clear what kind of failed system we currently have,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has repeatedly warned about the rise in premature deaths, including organizing a July 2021 Senate hearing on the issue. Just 11 of the panel’s 18 senators attended, several only briefly; just five asked questions.

“I talk to other senators about life expectancy data and watch their eyes glaze over,” Warren said.

The Post submitted questions about life expectancy to all 100 sitting senators, sending emails, placing calls and making visits to their offices. Forty-eight senators — including 35 Democrats, 11 Republicans and two Independents — said they agreed that declining life expectancy was a problem. Many of those lawmakers pointed to their own legislation intended to combat opioid misuse and address conditions such as cancer and other factors linked to causes of premature death. All told, the 48 senators cited more than 130 separate bills focused on health-care issues.

Despite the flurry of legislation, the nation’s progress on life expectancy has stalled, with the United States increasingly falling behind other nations well before the pandemic. No senator has crafted a bill specifically intended to improve life expectancy or create goals for health leaders to reach.

Lawmakers have also worked at cross purposes, with Republicans fighting Democrats’ efforts to enact legislation linked to gains in life expectancy, including efforts to expand access to health coverage and curb access to guns. Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), whose state had the third-worst life expectancy in 2020, about 73 years, recently suggested that life expectancy would even go up for young Americans.

“I mean, the life expectancy of the average American right now is about 77 years old. For people who are in their 20s, their life expectancy will probably be 85 to 90,” Kennedy said on “Fox News Sunday” in March. His office did not respond to requests for comment.

Other Republican senators or their staff suggested they did not have a view on the issue because the senator did not sit on a relevant committee.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) has “no jurisdiction over this issue,” his office wrote in response to questions about whether Moran had views on declining life expectancy. Moran, who sits on the Senate panel that determines funding for health agencies, has cast votes on numerous health-care matters, including repeatedly voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

In the absence of national solutions, some officials pointed to local efforts such as a new initiative in New York, which has repeatedly pioneered public health improvements later copied across the country. City leaders in November pledged to raise New Yorkers’ life expectancy to a record 83 years, saying a coordinated approach could prevent premature deaths. Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner, testified in front of the city council, urging members to pass a law requiring the city’s health commissioner — including his successors — to work toward shared public health goals.

“This is a test for government. And I really am hopeful that New York City can pass that test,” Vasan said after his testimony, standing outside New York’s city hall.

‘Further and further behind’

Life expectancy in the United States was once a source of national pride — a reflection of civic improvements, medical advances and other investments that set the nation apart from other countries.

“The future of human longevity, especially for Americans, seems bright indeed,” then-Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) proclaimed at a 2003 congressional hearing, where expert witnesses listed scientific and technological breakthroughs that they expected would soon push U.S. life expectancy past 80 years.

But even the most optimistic expert at the panel warned that America’s prospects could dim. James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, urged federal officials to immediately prioritize a “real mystery”: the emerging international gap in life expectancy.

“The United States is doing so well on so many fronts, but it’s falling further and further behind on this critically important [measure], life itself,” Vaupel warned the Senate panel, imploring officials to “really start worrying about this.”

It would take about a decade before Vaupel’s warning was heeded. Policymakers instead were focused on a more urgent political priority related to life expectancy: the growing cost of having so many older Americans seeking services through programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

So when the Obama administration and congressional Democrats hammered out legislation that would become the Affordable Care Act — the sweeping 2010 law that expanded health coverage to millions of Americans and made other changes to the health system — there was little fear life expectancy would decline.

Bob Kocher, a venture capitalist who worked in the Obama White House as a health-care and economic aide, said one reason the crafters of the Affordable Care Act were so intent on “bending the curve” on health spending “was our belief that life expectancy was going to keep going up for the foreseeable future.”

By 2013, public health experts had begun issuing more prominent warnings about life expectancy, pointing to the rising number of opioid overdoses, suicides and other preventable deaths. Senior officials across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations said they were aware of those concerns but that their focus was on improving discrete factors linked to life expectancy, not on the overall number.

“Every meeting at the VA was about ‘life expectancy,’ but I can’t tell you we put charts on the wall of ‘what’s the life expectancy of a veteran,’” said Robert A. McDonald, secretary of veterans affairs under President Barack Obama.

The nation’s current top health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, told The Post he’s acutely aware of the life expectancy decline, calling it the “byproduct of some very serious problems” such as gun violence and drug overdoses. But he downplayed the need for a national strategy, saying there was no reason to declare a public health emergency as he has done with the coronavirus and opioid deaths, adding his agency lacked the power to reverse the trend.

“We are so disjointed as a health system in the country,” Becerra said, suggesting that the responsibility to address life expectancy fell on “many of us,” including state health directors.

While Biden hasn’t directly addressed declining life expectancy, some of his rivals have invoked it on the campaign trail.

“We used to think that life expectancy was just going to keep going up, and that’s just not been the case,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said in a CNBC interview in August, linking the decline to the pandemic, drug overdoses and other causes that began years ago. The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment about how the Florida governor would reverse the trend if elected president.

“If we had regulatory agencies that were actually interested in looking at data, we would be trying to figure out why the all-cause mortality [for Americans] has increased,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., running as an independent in the 2024 campaign, said in an interview with The Post this summer. “These aren’t covid deaths.”

Political commentator Matthew Yglesias says America’s life expectancy decline reveals systemic problems that leave the country at risk. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Political commentator Matthew Yglesias has repeatedly urged politicians to focus on life expectancy, saying that America’s decline reveals systemic problems that leave the country at risk. “Tackling America’s weirdly short life expectancy should be a priority,” Yglesias wrote in one 2022 post.

Although Yglesias has fans within the Biden administration who have sought his counsel after he has written about traffic safety and crime, his appeals on life expectancy haven’t led to similar invitations.

“I think it winds up being a harder topic for politicians to get their heads around,” he said, noting the array of factors that span agencies and administrations.

Califf said he’s keenly aware of his agency’s limits when confronting life expectancy.

FDA is one of the nation’s most powerful regulatory bodies — its staff often tout that they oversee about 20 cents of every dollar spent by U.S. consumers — and Califf is pursuing initiatives, such as banning menthol cigarettes and improving access to generic drugs, that fall in his agency’s purview. But FDA can’t control how hospitals and doctors get paid. It can’t craft legislation, such as curbing access to firearms.

“The highest cause of death in children is guns. That’s a fact,” Califf said. “That’s not something FDA can do something about.”

‘It’s a hard sell’

In Congress, a handful of members have insisted that lawmakers must focus on life expectancy, saying it’s a core responsibility.

“Sometimes, we may, in the midst of our work, lose sight of the big picture … to create a nation in which the people in the United States can live long, healthy, happy and productive life,” Sanders said at the 2021 Senate hearing he convened on lagging life expectancy.

There is a notable partisan split in how members of Congress view life expectancy and whether they say urgent action is needed. Just 11 of the Senate’s 49 Republicans told The Post they believed that declining life expectancy was a public health problem.

The lawmakers who portray the recent decline as a crisis are often Democrats from states with the highest life expectancy — such as Massachusetts (79 years in 2020, according to federal data) and Vermont (78.8 years). Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers representing some of the states with the lowest life expectancy — Mississippi (71.9 years), West Virginia (72.8 years) and Kentucky (73.5 years) — declined to comment or did not respond to repeated questions about whether the issue represents a public health problem.

“It’s a hard sell with senators who live in some of the lowest longevity states. And it breaks my heart,” Warren said.

A further complication: Senators concerned about declining life expectancy offer radically different prescriptions for fixing it.

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville — one of the few Republicans whose office said he was “deeply concerned about this trend” — linked America’s decline to drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism.

“The facts show clearly that this is being driven largely by an increase in deaths of despair, with fentanyl overdoses being the leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45,” Tuberville spokesman Steven Stafford said in a statement, pointing to legislation to improve mental health funding and secure the Southern border.

In comparison, Sanders has repeatedly called for sweeping reforms, insisting in an interview that “a failed health-care system is tied into a corrupt political system dominated by enormously powerful corporate interests.”

Even Democrats in neighboring states offered significantly different diagnoses. In the eyes of Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D), the No. 1 cause of America’s life expectancy problem is clear: broken payment incentives for doctors and hospitals.

But Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) traced the life expectancy decline to loneliness.

“Americans are just much less physically and spiritually healthy than they have been in a long time,” said Murphy, who has proposed a bill to create a White House office of social connection.

Ten senators singled out the burden of chronic disease, echoing The Post’s own review, which found that among people younger than 65, chronic illness erases more than twice as many years of life as all the overdoses, homicides, suicides and car accidents combined.

New York’s state of mind

In New York, officials are trying to put a framework around those often abstract challenges. Vasan urged the City Council in November to support HealthyNYC, his agency’s initiative backed by Mayor Eric Adams (D) that seeks to avert about 7,300 premature deaths by 2030.

“We want New Yorkers to experience more birthdays, weddings and graduations, more holidays and holy days, more life lived,” Vasan told the lawmakers, citing targets for reducing chronic diseases, cancers and other drivers of premature death. Council members are considering legislation to ensure that future leaders stick to the commitments — a suddenly urgent need with Adams embroiled in a fundraising scandal.

“We wanted this to be something that outlives us, that actually helps people,” said Lynn Schulman, chair of the City Council’s health committee.

Vasan and Schulman said HealthyNYC can be a template for other cities — the latest effort in New York’s long history of trying to tackle life expectancy. Under former mayor Mike Bloomberg, the city raised cigarette taxes, banned smoking in workplaces and attempted to limit sale of large sugary drinks. When Bloomberg left office in 2013, New Yorkers’ projected life expectancy was 81.1 years — more than two years longer than the national average — compared with 77.9 years when he took office in 2001.

“If you want to live longer, you could move to New York — or just vote for me,” Bloomberg said in a speech to Democratic voters during his short-lived 2020 presidential campaign. (Public health experts have cautioned that it may take decades to fully understand the link between Bloomberg’s initiatives and longer life expectancy.)

But Bloomberg’s efforts provoked backlash from food-makers, industry groups and some elected officials. Even as New York took steps a decade ago to limit salt and soda consumption, GOP lawmakers in other states crafted legislation to prevent their own local leaders from taking similar steps.

The Bloomberg legacy “is not a torch anyone has really wanted to carry,” said Yglesias, warning that the former mayor’s public heath agenda would be politically difficult to replicate elsewhere. “Conservatives really don’t like it. … I think it’s fallen out of style on the left as well.”

Sanders, who has spent years pushing for sweeping changes to America’s health system and economy, said Washington’s work to boost life expectancy could begin with a simple framing device.

“The administration, the Congress should have upon their wall, a chart which says … ‘What’s our life expectancy now [and] how do we get up to the rest of the world?’” Sanders said. He pointed to Norway’s life expectancy of more than 83 years. “That should be our goal.”

The Worst Of Them

If you're making your state more Business Friendly, but more People Hostile - you might be a Republican.

The bottom 10

Beau Of The Fifth Column

Today In Sportsball

The FIFA World Cup kicks off in Qatar on November 20. The biggest sporting event in the world has a dark side: Qatar won the tournament by buying a large number of votes and the construction of the stadiums has killed 6,500 people, according to research by The Guardian.

Every day, coffins arrive at Kathmandu airport with deceased workers who sought refuge in one of the Gulf states. Journalist Danny Ghosen investigates why Nepalese people knowingly choose to work abroad under terrible conditions and why they also went into debt for that job. With all the consequences for the next of kin. Yet new workers report to the airport every day in search of a better life.

 vpro documentaries

People are dying for a chance to work a decent job.

A Brief Passage

1894

Perhaps the highest praise an author can receive, John Steinbeck’s depiction of the harsh working conditions in Depression-era California was so brutal that it was banned in the county the Joad family moves to, despite historians confirming that Steinbeck’s portrayal was true-to-life. Local officials in Kern County convinced workers to burn the book in a number of photo opportunities, ironically further enforcing the manipulation experienced by migrant workers in the area that Steinbeck portrays so blisteringly well in The Grapes of Wrath.

Excerpt, Chapter 25:

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our successes. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And the children dying of hunger, must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - "died of malnutrition" - because the food must rot if not sold at a profit.

...and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy - growing heavy for the vintage.

The soliloquy:

Savage Inequality

Back when I was a complete Libertarian Asshole - not a Progressive Just-Partly-An-Asshole like I am now - I hated unions.

I was absolutely sure they'd outlived their usefulness, and that they were doing far more harm than good. And I was more right than wrong at the time.

That was then and this is now.

Here's Ari Melber being brilliant.

Today's Today

Axios:

Labor unions represent a larger percentage of U.S. workers than at any time in the past five years, as the pandemic took its biggest bite out of non-unionized jobs.

Why it matters:

America's labor movement isn't quite resurgent, but it is showing signs of life after decades of decline.

By the numbers:

In 2020, 10.8% of all wage and salaried workers were members of unions, up 0.5% from 2019, according to government statistics.

That's the highest mark since 2015 (11.%).

Men were more likely than women to be in a union (11% vs. 10.5%), and the highest age cohort was 45-64 years old.

Black workers (11.2%) were more likely to be union members than white (10.3%), Asian (8.8%) or Hispanic (8.5%) workers.

A huge gap remains between public sector (34.8%) and private sector (6.3%) workers.

Caveat:

The actual number of union members fell in 2020 by over 321,000, but the decline in nonunion jobs was much steeper.

What's next:

The big question is whether labor unions can successfully adjust to the changing face of American work, which is becoming much more about service work than manufacturing.

They still face a steep uphill climb, as evidenced by last fall's failure to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama and of a ballot referendum in California to change the legal status of gig economy workers like Uber drivers.

Labor may still win out in both cases, though, as the NLRB has recommended a revote by those Amazon workers and a California judge just struck down what was known as Prop 22. Plus, Starbucks is facing a rare unionization push in Upstate New York.

Historical reminder:

Labor Day celebrates all American workers, but it was the outgrowth of organized labor marches in the late 1800s that effectively doubled as one-day strikes. It became a federal holiday 12 years after the first such march, which took place in New York City.

Understand Something

It wasn't a buncha workin' slobs who got together to lobby congress in order to insert 60,000 pages of shelters, loopholes, write-downs and exceptions into the IRS Tax Code.

Rich people hold an out-sized share of power over government, and they use their wealth very effectively to feed us a steady stream of propaganda, convincing us that they're no different from the rest of us, that they're just being smart, and that everything they do comes from a place in their hearts that's the very essence of purity, love, and charity.

It's bullshit and we know it, but we walk around acting like it's god's own truth - we eat it up like it's one of Grandma's fresh-baked mulberry pies with homemade ice cream.

If any of it were true, then guys like Branson and Bezos and Musk wouldn't be in a race to space - they'd be trying to end the cycle of poverty ignorance and crime.

"Never be deceived that the rich will let you

vote away their wealth."

-- Lucy Parsons

Today's Today

A bit of weirdly true-ish history

Today's Today

105 years ago - April 14, 1914. Ludlow CO

National Guard troopers - reportedly being paid by John D Rockefeller - opened fire on a camp filled with striking coal miners and their families.

Results: 

• A large part of the Ludlow tent colony site was destroyed by fire
• UMWA organizer Louis Tikas was assaulted and then, along with two other men, executed by gunshot - Tikas was shot in the back
• five other men were killed by gunshot
• 2 women and 11 children were killed by suffocation and/or fires set by militiamen 

News of the events caused worldwide protest and condemnation.

A Little History

Mary G Harris-Jones (Mother Jones) was a badass in the best traditions of American Baddassery.

Union organizer, civil rights warrior, and all around champion of getting what you want by standing up and speaking truth to power - and being willing to take the hit because of it.

During the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Mary Jones arrived in June 1912, speaking and organizing despite a shooting war between United Mine Workers members and the private army of the mine owners. Martial law in the area was declared and rescinded twice before Jones was arrested on 13 February 1913 and brought before a military court. Accused of conspiring to commit murder among other charges, she refused to recognize the legitimacy of her court-martial. She was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary. During house arrest at Mrs. Carney's Boarding House, she acquired a dangerous case of pneumonia.

After 85 days of confinement, her release coincided with Indiana Senator John W. Kern's initiation of a Senate investigation into the conditions in the local coal mines. Mary Lee Settle describes Jones at this time in her 1978 novel The Scapegoat. Several months later, she helped organize coal miners in Colorado. Once again she was arrested, served some time in prison, and was escorted from the state in the months prior to the Ludlow Massacre. After the massacre, she was invited to meet face-to-face with the owner of the Ludlow mine, John D. Rockefeller Jr. The meeting prompted Rockefeller to visit the Colorado mines and introduce long-sought reforms.

Today's Today

Some true heroics at the Labor Day picnic:

Confirming Evidence

45* and the GOP lie. A lot. I keep thinking, eventually that's not going to come as any kind of news to anybody. And as soon as I think that, I remember the rubes will never hear anything but what The Ministry of Dis-Infotainment tells them.

WaPo:

• “The entire purpose of this is to lower middle class taxes.” — House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.)
• “Primarily, and priority number one, is middle-class Americans.” — White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders
• “The theme behind this bill is to get middle-class tax relief for most people in the middle class.” — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Fox News on Tuesday

President Trump was so excited about passing his first major piece of legislation Wednesday that he blurted out that the Republican Party had misrepresented the entire bill, handing Democrats some potentially troublesome talking points for the 2018 midterm elections.

Speaking at the White House just before the House prepared to sign off on the tax-cuts bill one last time, Trump reveled extensively in his win before turning things over to Vice President Pence to heap praise upon him continuously for a few minutes. It was a thoroughly unique spectacle, even as victory dances and Trump Cabinet meetings go.

But along the way, Trump basically admitted that the GOP's talking points on the bill weren't exactly honest in two major ways.

While talking about the corporate tax rate being cut from 35 percent to 21 percent, Trump said, “That's probably the biggest factor in our plan.”

President Trump says GOP tax plan will lower tax on businesses: “That’s probably the biggest factor in this plan.” pic.twitter.com/ntTtnnD55b

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) December 20, 2017

Oops

This one's worth tracking:
"these companies...will start pouring into the country..." (jobs jobs jobs - and raises for everybody - yeehaw)

Trump's second admission was about the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate being repealed in the bill. Apparently eager to argue that this constituted his having cut taxes and slain Obamacare in one fell swoop (after Congress came up short on Obamacare this year), he argued that repealing the individual mandate was basically the same as repealing Obamacare.
So we have enormous corporate powers being given more money to spend on Coin-Operated Politicians, who are increasingly obliged to strip out protections of the law in order to accommodate the avarice of the American Aristocracy - at the expense of everyone else.

(And BTW - wanna talk about what happens with expanded Corporate Power, together with no ACA, together with HR 1313, proposed in March 2017, that says companies can require DNA - and health info on all family members - from all of it's employees? Wait til you see what that one costs ya.)

In the First World of Industrialized Nations:
Every country except the US has some form of Single Payer
Every country except the US has a sizable Labor Faction in government
Every country except the US has Anti-Climate Change policies in place
Every country except the US has sensible Gun Safety laws
And on and on and on

American Exceptionalism just ain't what it used to be.