Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,333]

32 minutes ago, Vesper said:

'swing' is the actual amount of votes that move between parties from one election to another

please explain how you would use that to make a future prediction (and introduce it into polling on a valid statistical basis)

I could see one way (albeit fraught with predictive dangers) would to be to ask poll respondents how they voted in 2020, 2016, and 2012 (some will not have voted in all 3 or even 2 or 1 of those, and then see the 'swing' they exhibit.

I can see some utility in that, and I would be interested in see such polls.

Do you know of state polls (mainly care about the 'swing states', ironically, lol) that employ this methodology?

I don't know.
I 'm not a pollster.
I imagine it's obvious in some cases.
Suppose the counting process for G.E. 2029 starts.
The first constituency reports 45% Labour and it's a Labour win but it used to be 50% Labour.
Immediately the BBC nerds will say "the swing is to the Tories".
Now that may be misleading though in relation to what we do now, pre-election polls (is your opinion rather).
How to model it using random numbers ?
I 'm not sure but I can give it a try.

(*) of course I know what psephology is - it's a Greek word !

Edited October 29 by cosmicway

[Vesper 29,017]

Just now, cosmicway said:

(*) of course I know what psehology is - it's a Greek word !

lolol

[Vesper 29,017]

Will Attacking Trump as a Dangerous Threat Enable Harris to Eke Out a Victory?

Rachel Bitecofer, Political Strategist and Election Whisperer, Gives Her Final Take

https://washingtonspectator.org/will-attacking-trump-as-a-dangerous-threat-enable-harris-to-eke-out-a-victory/

 

With the election little more than a week away, the political scientist and strategist Rachel Bitecofer, author of the tough-minded Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts, sees some grounds for optimism about Kamala Harris in a nail-biting race that is effectively tied and still too close to call.

As a confidential advisor to some campaigns in recent years, she’s not making the sorts of predictions that had earned her fame as “The Election Whisperer.” (She called nearly every Congressional race correctly in the 2018 mid-terms months before the vote.) But she notes in her Substack column The Cycle that the Republicans and their partisan polling firms are pushing what she and a few other analysts call the “Polls Narrowing Mirage.” At the same time, record-shattering early votes from Democratic areas in Georgia, North Carolina and the views of early voters cited in new polling suggest that the frightening anti-Trump, abortion-ban messaging she championed now coming from the Harris campaign and the DNC is having an impact.

“Negative partisanship,” as she calls it, does two things: “It’s driving the swing bucket and maybe, hopefully, some of these Republicans to not vote for Trump and to vote for Harris by default.” She adds, “At the same time, that messaging—Donald Trump is an extremist; Donald Trump wants a national abortion ban; Donald Trump has a thing called Project 2025 that’s really bad—those messages are also maximizing coalition turnout. Because who’s going to be the most freaked out about an abortion ban being national, Project 2025 and Donald Trump? It’s the Democratic base. It’s a superior strategy; that’s why Republicans use that strategy exclusively.” She adds, “That’s the beauty of negative partisanship strategy. It does double duty: it gets rid of the entire concept of separate pools of the electorate.”

Its main weapon is the “wedge issue”: your opponents’ biggest vulnerabilities targeted in a hyperbolic, scary way designed to fracture the candidates’ coalitions and force them to play defense. The Republicans’ main wedge messaging, as only half-caricatured in our interview with Bitecofer in March? “Democrats are pedophiles and are going to turn your male children into girls.”

Now that has become basically the Trump campaign’s closing message. Adding to messaging on inflation and especially immigration, it’s led to a $21 million ad buy on NFL games and in swing states, highlighting Harris’s 2020 support for gender-affirming care for detained migrants and prisoners, which notably is required by federal law and was also implemented by the Trump administration. All told, Republicans have spent over $65 million in ads in more than a dozen states focusing on government subsidized gender-affirming care in prisons, and trans boys and women participating in female sports, according to The New York Times, part of a strategy to win back suburban female voters repelled by the GOP’s abortion bans. (See more below on how Kamala Harris and Senate candidates have handled—or mishandled—this line of attack featured in blistering Trump ads, ending “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”)

***

Bitecofer praises the Harris campaign and the DNC: “They’re running a negative partisanship-style strategy this cycle focused on making the election a referendum on Donald Trump.” Unfortunately, she contends, “That’s not happening down ballot,” with most races running what she calls the “old model” that is putting incumbent Democratic Senators at risk. That strategy is aimed mostly at persuading undecided independent voters and moderate Republicans of the stellar qualities and policies of the Democratic candidates while also seeking to mobilize Democrats.

That approach—followed by the three-term Pennsylvania centrist Sen. Bob Casey, who boasts in ads of “siding with Trump” on trade and tariff issues while his lead has slipped into a toss-up contest—has also been deployed in the uphill Ohio and Montana races of Senators Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester. “The breakdown on one of these campaigns is going to be like 20 percent on turnout and 70 to 80 percent on the swing bucket persuasion,” she estimates. That latter argument is, essentially, “You hate Democrats and Jon Tester’s a Democrat, but he’s not one of those Democrats,” she observes. “And that will never ever work and it has never worked.” She chalks up Tester’s 2018 victory to the broader Democratic mid-term effect.

“The theory of the case on the old strategy is that you do that by distancing yourself from the national brand of the Democrats and reminding people of basically all the pork barrel and stuff you get done. And in Tester’s case, he’s a dirt farmer, and in Brown’s case, it’s the automotive union stuff, right? So, they’ve got their own personal brands. In the old model, what you hope is that you can carry enough of that [persuadable] vote. And in my model, it says no, no, no. What you have to do is convince that [persuadable] 10 percent that’s there’s a reason personal to them why it would be bad for this Republican to win.”

In sum, “The old strategy says: focus on how great you are. My strategy says: make sure you shit on the other guy so bad nobody can vote for him.”

On top of that, a central theme of her book and strategic advice is how few voters are genuinely independent and how stupefyingly ignorant most voters are about politics. She notes, for many, “The electorate does not know Donald Trump overturned abortion, women are dying—and they’ll never know that unless you tell them that in your paid ads. Because the campaigns are the only entity with large budgets to put messaging, forced messaging, into the eyes of consumers who are self-selecting to have no news.” And that electorate, she observes, is only “half of America’s adult population, because the other half won’t even bother to vote.”.

But it’s becoming even clearer that this pragmatic approach to demonizing opponents too often isn’t being applied in down-ballot races, as she noted in an astute recent Cycle article looking at a data-rich report from Ad Impact, a top-tier advertising intelligence firm. She pointed to abortion extremism messaging winning the day in the 2023 high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race, off-year Virginia legislature contests and the 2022 victory of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. But only a quarter of 2024 Democratic races are running abortion-related ads. Yet it is essentially Kryptonite for Republicans: “When we focus on abortion, we’re talking about freedom. It’s their wedge: freedom, abortion, Project 2025, all together.”

One of the underlying failures here is the shambolic structure of the Democratic Party. She says, “In our party, each campaign is part of a decentralized system so we are all over the place talking about 15 different things…It’s frustrating because I personally feel like I failed in my mission: My goal was to go into 2024 to have everyone humming on this theme and have it centralized,” going from state legislative races all the way up to federal elections.” But, as she points out, “People should understand that most people who need to read my book still have not read my book—even with Jaime Harrison, the DNC chair, pushing it hard.” Indeed, she says, “Did Jon Tester read my book? No, but his staff knows about it. I know I wanted to talk to them about how to transition to that [negative partisanship] strategy and that they chose not to do that.” ( In contrast, the long-shot candidacies of Colin Allred in Texas and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell facing off against Sen. Rick Scott—she’s hitting him hard on abortion and even blaming him for a hurricane insurance calamity—are increasingly adapting Bitecofer’s hard-line strategy, as modeled by the Kamala Harris campaign.)

The more conventional campaigns are shaped in part by the supposedly “savvy” inside-the-Beltway mentality of consultants and sophisticated political journalists that has over-emphasized the importance of issue appeals and defenses as critical to winning over voters—as opposed to the rawer emotions of rage and fear Democrats have only recently started to exploit.

Yet instead of following the Republican-style attack pathway to victory, Democratic candidates are moving to embrace a realpolitik approach in trimming their liberal positions, as outlined in an article by David Weigel in Semafor. He looked closely at their adjustment to the threat posed by a growing right-wing tilt in politics.

These Democratic candidates are not nearly as wily as they believe, however, because they’re falling into the defensive “I’m not one of those Democrats” trap Bitecofer has been shouting about from the rooftops for years. In a foolhardy effort to dispute the Republican framing, Weigel shows how some campaigns are scrambling to deny the ads and mollify enraged anti-trans Republican bigots on a losing issue for Democrats. He points to strategies adopted by everyone from Ted Cruz challenger Allred airing an ad denying he supports trans boys in girls’ sports to Sherrod Brown running a local spot during Sunday Night Football decrying the anti-trans ads as misleading and saying that transgender girls “have already been banned” from girls’ sports.

Even though most Democrats have ignored the barrage of anti-trans ads (according to the Advocate they haven’t worked in past elections anyway), Sherrod Brown is still trying to wriggle free from them.  Semafor reported in mid-October that earlier, at a stop in Steubenville, Ohio, Brown had told reporters, “I hope the media will help us by putting out there that they aren’t true, because fact checkers have said they aren’t true,” though he declined to discuss the substance of the transgender-focused ads in his race. Ask John Kerry how well enlisting the media’s fact-checkers helped him in his fight against the Swift Boat campaign during his 2004 presidential race.

In contrast to Brown, Kamala Harris’s deft side-stepping of the baiting questioning from Bret Baier of Fox News on her previous trans positions won high marks from Bitecofer. After playing an ominous Trump ad proclaiming, “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” Baier moved in for the kill shot.

“So are you still in support of using taxpayer dollars to help prison inmates or detained illegal aliens to transition to another gender?” he asked.

Harris, cooly unflappable, answered in part: “I will follow the law and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed. You’re probably familiar with now—it’s a public report—that under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available to, on a medical necessity basis, to people in the federal prison system. And I think frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house.”

Baier retorted, “The Trump aides say that he never advocated for that prison policy,” and, adding a lie, “No gender transition surgeries happened during his presidency.”

Harris responded, “Well, you got to take responsibility for what happened in your administration.” When Baier insisted no such surgeries took place, she cited again the report on Trump policies: “It’s in black and white.”

When Baier kept pressing her on her current stance, she said, “I would follow the law, just as I think Donald Trump would say he did.”

She then questioned the attack ads’ broader context and turned the tables on Baier and the MAGA Republicans. “He spent $20 million on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters because he actually has no plan in this election that is about focusing on the needs of the American people. Whereas $20 million on that ad, on an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, it’s really quite remote. And again, his policy was no different.”

Baier attempt to parry her, but then folded, “Let’s move on.”

Bitecofer says, “She did very good because she just basically refused to play ball and what they wanted was a clip from her that they could take and throw in these anti-trans ads.”  (In fact, though, Harris did briefly and effectively address the question and tied Trump to the same policies she had endorsed.) Bitecofer adds, “If it was me, I’d pivot and attack on everything. Oh, you want to talk about kids? Let’s talk about all the kids that you’re letting die in schools every day because of your gun control radicalism. I’m very trained to pivot as an attacker.”

The task of dodging smears and lies coming from the Trump campaign and the GOP faces Democrats at all levels, but her strategy seems to be the same in most cases: The best defense is a good offense. For example, while most polls show Sen. Tammy Baldwin ahead in Wisconsin even as the Cook Report calls it a toss-up, Baldwin’s race is tightening while attacks on the openly gay Baldwin’s support for health care for gay and trans youth is under fire.

Bitecofer admits she hasn’t been following the race closely and doesn’t even know the name of Baldwin’s opponent (Eric Hovde), but her prescription is the same. She says, “Let’s say I did know his name and it was Smith. Your closing message should be ‘John Smith is an extremist who’s going to pass a national abortion ban and kill your wife.’” She emphasizes that the attacked opponent has to represent a personal threat to you, the voter—not broader societal concerns. “It’s not kill brown people, not kill other people. It’s you, your wife, your family.”

Bret Baier and Fox News were openly hostile to Kamala Harris, but even supposedly more balanced and respected media outlets can throw up daunting roadblocks to the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party getting a fair shake in media coverage.

Take the “sanewashing” and “bothsideism” of The New York Times and other mainstream outlets that downplay or ignore the increasingly unhinged authoritarian, racist and vile comments from Donald Trump. All this underscores the urgency of Bitecofer’s plea that Democratic campaigns have to highlight the dangers of Trumpism directly to voters because the press won’t do so. “If democracy dies in two weeks,” Bitecofer says, “the cause of death will be the American media system.”

Respectable media coverage also prods Democrats into spending more time on the political issues that voters tell pollsters and reporters that concern them—rather than taking advantage of our polarized politics with messages that could actually propel Democrats to victories. As Bitecofer observes, “We should focus on Donald Trump as a unique threat. If democracy is to survive this cycle, it will be because a coalition of Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans choose to vote against Trump, especially for those right-leaning indies and those Republicans going against brand loyalty. We’re asking them to break brand loyalty from the Republican brand and vote for a Democratic candidate. And the worst thing you can do is propose all these unicorn policies that you’ll never get into law anyway.”

Speaking of Harris, Bitecofer observes, “This idea that she should be talking all about her policy and laying out details of her plans for this and that is absolutely the wrong take. It comes from a progressive bubble and it would actually be counterproductive when you’re trying to get people to do that, to break their brand loyalty and vote for this existential threat reason.”

“Every minute that you’re talking about policy, you’re normalizing that existential threat,” she declares. “And you’re likely to trigger partisan reactions from the target [you’re trying to reach], moderates. Reminding them through policy appeals why they hate Democrats is not the way to do that.”

***

The conventional emphasis on policy messaging—augmented with carefully tested ads—has been turbo-charged with the outsized role of Future Forward, the dominant Super Pac that’s now spending more on ads than the Trump and Harris campaigns combined. The Times headlined a story about it last week: “Inside the Secretive $700 Million Ad-Testing Factory for Kamala Harris.” It claims to have tested thousands of messages, social media posts and ads, boasting of somehow conducting nearly four million voter surveys since Harris entered the race. It produces, the Times notes, about 20 potential commercials for each one it airs.

The group has ranked 300 ads that it ran online and on television on their effectiveness, using online surveys to determine which potential ads have the greatest impact. Bitecofer is skeptical of most elements of its approach. She contends, “They said something about for each ad, they’ll have 20 ads submitted and then they pick the best one, right? I mean all I read into that is a massive, massive waste of resources.” She notes that the ads that test best are what are called “contrast ads”. “Voters will tell you they like something if it’s got some doom and inspiration,” but that doesn’t necessarily translate to an ad that motivates voters. She speculates: “All this shit that Tester’s got tested great with voters, but he’s going to lose on all of it.”

She cites the often powerfully emotional and enraging ads by Lincoln Project gurus Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens as counter-examples. “When the Lincoln Project wants to roll out an ad, they don’t test it. They don’t spend $700 million on testing.” Indeed, she points out that basing your ad campaign on individually scored ads can have unintended consequences. “What Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens and I would tell you is that it defeats the entire purpose of political advertising. What advertising should be doing is setting a top-of-mind narrative argument, something like ‘Trump is dangerous to you.’”

Most of Future Forward’s findings and highest-testing broadcast ads are at odds with Bitecofer’s real-world strategic gameplan. But Bitecofer and the secretive leaders of Future Forward do share some common ground on the value of broader “general population” ads, rather than niche ads targeting specific under-served ethnic minorities.

It looks like many of the Future Forward ads that tested well simply don’t fit in with the “negative partisanship” strategy that has allowed the GOP to dominate the political agenda for decades or garnered major victories for Democrats after the Dobbs decision. Instead, as the Times reported, “The results show the top-testing Harris ad through the end of September was a 60-second spot of her delivering a speech about her most popular economic proposals.” In addition, the Times found, “The group has also shared broad thematic findings with allies, including that purely negative ads against Mr. Trump barely make a difference.”

There are real-world rebuttals to all that, including all the Democratic victories curbing the much-touted Red Wave in 2022 with harsh attack ads labeling GOP candidates as abortion and MAGA extremists. Perhaps one of the best recent challenges to these testing wizardry claims comes from the Trump campaign itself, Bitecofer points out, although the final impact has yet to be seen. In a snarky tweet featuring the Trump anti-trans ad captured from a TV screen, she said, “This is the ad Trump is airing on college football. I can guarantee you if we tested this ad, people would say it was ridiculous. It wouldn’t make it out of OUR testing lab. Republicans know the point isn’t to test well, it’s to wedge well.”

Future Forward has come under fire from grass-roots groups claiming it drains donor funds from get-out-the-vote drives such as those catalyzed by the Movement Voter Project, led by journalist and social entrepreneur Billy Wimsatt, which funds local organizations that reach progressive young people and minorities. Wimsatt circulated a memo warning that GOTV efforts were “dangerously underfunded”—a view seemingly echoed by the Harris campaign itself, which publicly urged donors to also back groups devoted to getting out the vote. He told the Times, “It seems like a ton of money is going to paid media and not enough to the ground game.”

(The leaders of the Future Forward organization, including president Chauncey McClean, are so under the radar that at least one donor, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, who has given $50 million to the group since 2020, has never spoken to him. Presumably, Bill Gates, whose previously secret $50 million donation to the group was misleadingly headlined this week by some outlets as a direct donation to the Harris campaign, can figure out how to reach McClean by phone. The Washington Spectator, however, hasn’t been able to reach its leaders for comment about the critiques of their group.)

Ad campaigns can also energize voters, but Bitecofer sees a logistical problem with Future Forward that can undermine reaching voters and convincing them to vote. She says, “I’m on the side of less money on testing, more money on distribution.” She admits, “I do have a bias. And that bias is: Great, you guys have the best fucking analytics infrastructure in the history of campaigns—and it’s largely fucking useless.”

If Harris loses, expect plenty of blame to fall on Future Forward. Indeed, the Times article, noting some criticism that it has too much ad agenda-setting power, reports: “If we’re right, we’re all right,” said one person involved in the effort, granted anonymity to candidly discuss the group’s influence in Democratic politics. “If we’re wrong, we’re all wrong.”

In looking over the political landscape, as Bitecofer wrote recently in her Substack, “There is nothing I can do to give you absolution, this is (and always has been) a race that will come down to a few thousand votes in states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona and will be much tighter than in 2020.“ She clearly sees it can go either way. So she’s been reading deeply on Hitler’s rise to power and how quickly he turned the government into a dictatorship, as explained in a new piece, “What (Really) Happens if Trump Wins”—while also telling The Washington Spectator: “The Harris campaign has run as good of a campaign as I could have hoped for.”

 

Art Levine is a prize-winning investigative reporter and contributing editor of The Washington Monthly. He is the author of “Spaceship of Fools,” his investigation for The Washington Spectator last summer on unproven claims of alien visitations, the dissemination of false information to government agencies and the eagerness of mainstream media to embrace it. He has written for Newsweek, The American Prospect, Salon, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, Truthout, In These Times, AlterNet and numerous other publications. He is also the author of Mental Health, Inc: How Corruption, Lax Oversight, and Failed Reforms Endanger Our Most Vulnerable Citizens.

Edited October 29 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,920]

Dont worry short clip -20 seconds in....This really highlights what a thick cunt he is. But the deflection, to accuse the fact checker of being wrong is like an overblown toddler that has been denied ice cream. What it highlights is his very, very limited knowledge of economics, but even bigger mugs are the people that will vote for this

 

[Vesper 29,017]

How Europe should prepare for the return of Donald Trump

With the 2024 US election looming, Europe braces for a potential Trump return, preparing to safeguard stability and democracy.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/how-europe-should-prepare-for-the-return-of-donald-trump

 

The US presidential election is approaching fast, with much at stake. Opinion polls show a roller coaster race between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Concern is growing on both sides of the Atlantic that Donald Trump may soon return to the White House and rule with a vengeful wrath, further eroding America’s democratic institutions and engagement with the world.

There is no question that the Democratic and Republican candidates are offering two very different visions of America, indeed two different visions of the globalised world. Donald Trump and his vice presidential pick, the economic populist Senator JD Vance from Ohio, see the world in black-and-white, disturbingly tracking who their enemies and friends are in the US, Europe and around the world. In the Trump brand of “transactional politics,” friends can include dictators and war criminals. Economic policy, trade, NATO, transatlantic relations, climate change, Ukraine, the Middle East, China, Viktor Orban, and digital security, all of these major policy dimensions will be dramatically impacted by a Trump return.

Trump’s far-right populist vision

Trump has said that if he is elected in November 2024, he will negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours.” He says he will also demand that Europe reimburse the US for ammunition used in Ukraine and kill Ukraine’s bid for NATO admission. Foreign policy expert Anne Applebaum says Trump may well abandon NATO entirely, and “faith in collective defense could evaporate quickly.”

On the domestic front, Trump has said he will lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, withdraw from all climate agreements, and impose a 10 to 20 per cent tariff on all imports from Europe and other nations. That’s no small threat, since the EU’s $16 trillion economy is heavily reliant on trade with the US. The US is the EU’s biggest source of foreign direct investment, and the $1.3 trillion in trade between America and the EU is the largest bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world, 40 per cent greater than the EU’s trade with China.

In short, Trump threatens to further overturn the transatlantic relationship and the global order, even more than he did in his first administration. Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, says even Russian interference in American democracy didn’t stop Trump “from being less confrontational with Putin than with European leaders.” This time around, it will be the Donald 2.0 version. Rather than Trump having been chastened by the disaster of his first term, including a million dead from his administration’s poor handling of COVID, instead his recent speeches and social media messages show that he has become consumed by sociopathic fantasies of revenge and domination of anyone who does not genuflect to his authority – whether individuals or nations. He has said that in a second term, his alliances and appointments would be prized above all for their loyalty to his rule.

The Harris-Walz vision = Biden II

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, are on the other side of this battle royal. The Harris-Walz ticket offers a very different vision for America and its allies that can be summed up as Biden II, but with a few important differences.

Like the administration of President Joe Biden, a Kamala Harris presidency will be looking to uphold economic and national security alliances with Europe, NATO and other allies around the world, and to ensure US engagement on a global scale. She has espoused strong support for Ukraine in its defence against Putin’s invasion and seems to mostly adhere to the Biden foreign policy.

Harris’s views on trade policy and strategy are not exactly clear. She has been sceptical of so-called “free trade” agreements, including the Obama administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, and she was one of only ten senators to vote against the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Her objection to such trade deals has usually revolved around their projected impact on the environment, climate change and workers. Like many Democratic leaders, Harris seems to believe that free trade deals are a reason US companies have shipped many American jobs overseas.

And as vice president, Harris has been part of the administration’s push to lessen the dependence of supply chains on China. In negotiations with the EU, the Biden administration pushed for trade measures that would encourage makers of steel and aluminium to cut carbon emissions. Some trade analysts expect similar actions under a Harris administration that would seek to integrate trade with incentives for preferred climate and labour policies.

Domestically, with so many Americans concerned about the cost of living and their tenuous economic situations, Harris has been making campaign promises about lowering prices. Still, it’s not clear what a president can actually do. Harris is aiming her campaign at the middle class, proposing family-friendly policies such as up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance for first-time home buyers, paid parental leave, and more child care support. She also has focused a substantial part of her message on women voters. Harris has declared that she will reverse the Trump Supreme Court’s decision on abortion that overturned women’s federally protected reproductive rights, and has led to full abortion bans in 14 out of 50 states. But on this policy too, it’s not clear what a president can do, other than support ballot initiatives in states aimed at legalisation.

Where a Harris administration may differ most from Biden is its support for anti-monopoly enforcement. The Biden administration has been trying to rein in Big Tech, digital platforms and other large American companies, with one federal court declaring Google a “monopolist.”  Biden’s agencies have also taken action against price-fixing in the meat industry and filed a lawsuit to block the merger of supermarket giants and pressed grocery retailers to lower prices. Biden has revitalised antitrust enforcement and launched the biggest turnaround in competition regulation in three decades.

Harris has been known to be more accommodating toward corporations and Big Tech, with her brother-in-law being a top executive for Uber and now a close advisor to her campaign. Having a friend in the White House would be a huge asset to big business and Silicon Valley companies, just at a time when federal agencies, as well as states like California, are starting to crack down on their toxic “surveillance capitalism” business model.

How to Trump-proof Europe

If Kamala Harris is elected president, Europe can expect to have a solid ally in the White House. But what should the EU do if Trump gets elected?

Europe would have to “Trump-proof” itself by being more united than ever. It would have to fill the enormous American leadership void, helping Ukraine against Russia, promoting human rights, safeguarding its borders (including its digital borders), fighting climate change and championing democracy. Here are some key areas where the EU can prepare for the worst, even as they hope for the best:

Trade: The EU can shield itself from Trump’s protectionist policies by forging trade agreements with other nations and regional markets. It should also deepen its single market, particularly in the financial, digital, and service sectors. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde says a more robust single market that better ensures the free movement of goods, services, people and capital across 27 member states would make it easier for smaller companies to raise funding and “facilitate and encourage innovation.”

China:  Trump might well threaten sanctions on major telecom operators who use Chinese equipment, so the EU should anticipate that possibility by reducing any critical dependencies on Chinese telecommunications products. Failure to do so might result in fragmentation of the EU telecommunications market.

Energy:  While the share of EU pipeline gas imports from Russia declined from over 40 per cent to about 8 per cent in 2023, the imports of LNG gas from the US tripled to over 50 per cent of overall LNG gas imports. Might Trump pull a Putin on the EU? The EU must speed up its world-leading efforts at conservation and producing renewable energy.

Digital security:  EU member states manufacture relatively few cloud-computing systems and telecommunications infrastructure. They depend heavily on both American and Chinese products. Fortunately, France, Italy, and Spain are leading in accessing cloud-computing services provided by firms headquartered in the EU. This goal should be accelerated.

Effective governance:  Encouraged by Trump, Viktor Orban can be counted on to wield his frequent veto to undermine the EU. The EU needs to address institutional weaknesses that limit its ability to lead on the global stage, including requirements for unanimous vote approvals rather than majority votes. The EU will be hamstrung if its consensus requirements allow a single small country to block action by the whole.

Military and defence: This is a tricky one. A number of defence experts and strategists strongly recommend that Europeans “establish a level of military readiness it has not possessed since the Cold War” and become ”a strong actor, militarily.” However, the EU does not have a unitary federal government with a highly visible president who is viewed as the legitimate chief of the armed forces and whose military authority is recognised by all member states. So this sounds like wishful thinking. Nevertheless, Europe’s combined military and financial aid to Ukraine exceeds that of the US, and the EU’s role will be more effective if member states can unify the continent’s defence.

European values:  Perhaps the most significant threat that Trump represents to the EU is to its values: multilateralism, environmental responsiveness, the rule of law, and democracy itself. Trump tramples on these principles through his actions and rhetorical attacks and sways public opinion. The EU needs to think hard about how, in order to withstand that pressure, it is necessary to defend the rule of law both inside and outside its borders.

In short, the EU member states would have to act as unified as possible. Does it have that capability?

Past crises have unified Europe

Europe has often needed a crisis to mobilise and, to some extent, unify its fractious member states. The European debt crisis in 2009-10 motivated the EU toward greater levels of federalism and to more fully integrate its banking systems. The immigration crisis in 2015-16 forced Europe to deal with its border issues and confront issues of member state solidarity. In the COVID-19 pandemic, member states empowered the EU Commission to buy vaccines, and for the first time, the Commission borrowed on a large scale to fund Europe’s economic recovery.

In a counter-intuitive way, Trump 1.0 galvanised Europe, spurring efforts toward greater self-reliance. Trump’s previous tariffs on EU steel and aluminium not only mobilised the EU to respond with tariffs on $3 billion worth of US goods, but also strengthened the euro by further integrating EU banks and financial systems. It led to the signing of trade agreements with new partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 

Trump’s threats over Europe’s defence spending levels nudged the EU to help reinvigorate NATO under the Biden administration and led to institutional incentives for member states to spend more on defence. In response to Trump, the EU created the European Peace Facility (EPF) that supports the armies of partner countries and EU member states with infrastructure, training and equipment. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, the EPF was ready to provide military aid to Ukraine.

So, EU unity is the best remedy to any new round of Trump’s reckless brinksmanship. But what could incentivise more unity?

One possible unifying mechanism could be a mini version of the recently released Draghi plan for the EU to incur debt together as a way to build more defence capability. Most EU defence spending goes to the US, but member countries could favour the EU’s own arms industry when buying weapons. With money from shared European borrowing, the EU could afford its own defence and promote European cohesion through financial support for individual states in return for accepting conditions of fiscal responsibility. So, the potential election of Trump could become yet another incentive for greater European cohesion.

The US election is still some days away, so Europeans will have to wonder which president – and which America – will emerge this November. And what Europe will emerge in response.

[Vesper 29,017]

The Army of Pro-Trump Election Officials Ready to Reject the Vote

A movement driven by disinformation about Trump’s 2020 defeat has taken over many of the boards that certify elections. It could cause chaos in the weeks ahead.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/magazine/far-right-election-results.html

Jeanne Herman, a commissioner for Washoe County, Nev. She was one of the few local commission members nationwide to vote against certifying a Biden win in 2020. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

When Clara Andriola took her seat at the Washoe County, Nev., commission meeting room on July 9, she looked out at a sea of angry faces. The commission is Washoe’s main legislative body, and Andriola, a longtime local business executive, was appointed to fill a vacancy on the five-person board last year. She had just won a Republican primary that would almost certainly allow her to keep that seat in the November general election. The commission was required by law to certify elections at every level, from local primary to presidential election. What came next should have been a simple administrative procedure.

But the restless crowd had other ideas. For three hours, they told stories of a primary gone wrong. Some raised concerns about small bureaucratic errors, like improperly addressed ballots. Others shared more exotic allegations, including an unsubstantiated rumor circulating on X about a Serbian scheme to manipulate voting machines. The stories did not add up to any clear theory about what happened or why, but the community had come to believe that democracy was threatened and that there was only one way to save it: They wanted Andriola to vote with her two Republican colleagues to deny her own victory.

Andriola took her legal duty to certify elections seriously, and the stakes of her decision reached far beyond Nevada. Like thousands of administrators around the country, Washoe County commissioners are charged with certifying elections not just at the commission level but also as the first step in the process of formalizing the presidential results nationally. And Washoe wasn’t just any county. It was a swing district in a swing state.

For that reason, Andriola’s hyperlocal primary had taken on national importance. Washoe County’s longest-serving commissioner, Jeanne Herman, was one of the first and only local commission members in the country to vote against certifying Biden’s win in 2020, “because the election was improper,’’ she told me. She was outvoted at the time by the four other commissioners. But in 2022, a local cryptocurrency multimillionaire named Robert Beadles and a growing movement of election denialists helped elect a second commissioner who expressed doubt about the 2020 results, Mike Clark. With one more like-minded Republican commissioner, the doubters would have a three-vote majority.

Andriola had touted her support of Donald Trump in her campaign ads, but she also said that elections “should not be a partisan issue.” She won the primary by a comfortable margin against several election-denying challengers, and her victory was affirmed even after Beadles financed a recount. (Technically the July 9 meeting was for a second certification, of the recount.)

But now, at the hearing, Beadles himself presented an analysis of the ballot data that described the election outcome as a “13.4 sigma” event — so unlikely as to be virtually impossible without some kind of interference. The analysis came from a Long Island math enthusiast named Edward Solomon, who made a similar — and widely debunked — argument in 2020 to support claims that Biden stole the race. But to Beadles, it merited careful consideration. “I’ve given you guys enough evidence right there that you guys should hit pause,” Beadles said. “Do your duty.”

The commissioners’ duty to certify, though, was entirely “ministerial” — the certification was not an endorsement of the process or the outcome, merely another step in passing the results up through the system. They were legally obligated to certify even if they did see problems. They could note clerical errors — the rules vary from state to state — but once they noted them, they still had to pass the results up the line. This was just the basic administrative work of running a democracy.

The job of explaining these duties to the board fell to Nathan Edwards, a lawyer from the Washoe district attorney’s office. “You are canvassing the vote today,” he began, using the formal term for reviewing the election process. But then he began to interpret the statutory language in a way that surprised Andriola. “There’s been a lot of talk about whether this is ‘ministerial’ or ‘not ministerial,’” he said. But the state law contained elements of both: The board had a duty to review the information, but its members also had a duty to decide what the true results of the election were. He underlined this interpretation emphatically. “You don’t have to vote yes on that, you don’t have to vote no,” he said. “You vote your conscience.”

Now Andriola was uncertain. This didn’t seem right. Was Edwards saying that she did have an obligation to consider the evidence before her? Maybe this was different because it was a recount? She had questions. What would happen next if the motion didn’t carry?

Edwards gave a wry laugh. He had done some asking around, he said, but “it’s a little bit of uncharted water.” Probably the matter would end up in front of the secretary of state or a judge.

“I don’t have time to figure out if this is right or this is wrong,” Andriola remembers thinking at the time. Maybe it was best to “let it go to people who have the authority, jurisdiction and time to do it right.”

And so she voted no. As far as anyone could determine, it was the first time since Nevada became a state in 1864 that a county there had refused to certify an election.

Clara Andriola, a Washoe County commissioner. She effectively voted against her own primary victory by voting to not certify a recount. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Nicholas St Jon. He believes voting machines switched votes to steal the 2020 election for the chair of the Washoe County commission. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

The Washoe County case, with an official voting essentially to block her own election, is the most vivid example of an effort that has been unfolding across the country in the years since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Now, as voters and campaign professionals prepare for what promises to be a hard-fought election match, a smaller group of lawyers and longtime MAGA supporters is preparing the ground for an even harder-fought post-election rematch. And as they did in 2020, they are preparing to battle on the grounds of certification.

To better understand what this could mean for the country and for democracy in the months to come, I traveled to four battleground states and interviewed dozens of election officials, activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens, read through hundreds of pages of court transcripts and sat in on many hours of local meetings like the one in Washoe. What I found was that although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.

I also found a growing number of election officials who seemed willing to do exactly that. For them, going so far as to block certification wasn’t a partisan gambit; it was a patriotic duty. Though it might technically be illegal, it obeyed a higher law. Over months of reporting, this is what I heard again and again. For all the cynicism involved in the effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, and the groundwork being laid to challenge a possible defeat this year, many officials I spoke to were clearly motivated by a deeply held belief that a grand conspiracy was underway. In the face of that, how could they agree to certify?

For the better part of two centuries, American lawmakers and judges have said that they must, and for good reason: Giving administrators the power to deny certification would mean giving them the power to deny the franchise. One New York judge identified the mechanism in 1843. “It requires no great forecast,” he said, to see that if they have such authority, “the success of a candidate will not depend so much upon the number of votes received, as upon the ingenuity and skill” of the administrators.

Trump’s 2020 subversion bid put that ingenuity to the test. When two Republicans on the four-person election board in Wayne County, Mich., refused to certify the results, an uproar ensued, and they reversed course. Trump called them, urging them to fight on, and they tried to rescind their votes, but there was no legal basis for such a maneuver. Trump and his allies then tried to persuade Republican legislators in key swing states that they had the power to override certified results and send a slate of “alternative delegates” who would vote for Trump instead of Biden to the Electoral College. When that failed, they moved on to the congressional certification ceremony that was the target of the Jan. 6 attack.

Afterward, as the House impeached Trump and the major social media platforms shut down accounts that spread the stolen-election narrative (including Trump’s), it seemed as if the denialist movement would wither and die. Instead — fed by a stream of false content on “anti-censorship” platforms like Gab, Parler and Rumble as well as on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast — it not only survived but thrived. Tens of millions of dollars flooded into “election integrity” groups, and a new strategy came into view: Purge the party of those Republicans who resisted Trump’s 2020 scheme, find true believers who would do what needed to be done and put them in control of the administrative machinery well in advance of the next election.

Much of that work would be done by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who assisted Trump’s efforts in Georgia after the 2020 election and was on the phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump fruitlessly asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes.” Later that same year, Mitchell started a new group called the Election Integrity Network that encouraged like-minded “citizen patriots” to infiltrate local elections offices. A how-to guide suggested appearing at their regular board meetings, filing records requests to learn internal processes, running for positions or appointments. On her “Who’s Counting?” podcast, she said, “We are going to retake our election system one county at a time all over America.”

Efforts like Mitchell’s were pursued in the name of making elections run more smoothly and accurately, to, as the Election Integrity Network handbook has it, “restore trust.” But inevitably the initiatives they pushed threatened to have the opposite effect. For instance, since 2020, an expanding constellation of election-integrity groups has requested that ballots be hand counted. This is well known by elections experts to be a less reliable system than machine counting, but it inevitably comes up with results that are slightly different from the machine count, which seems to justify the distrust that led to the hand count. The endless stream of information requests and voter challenges takes up valuable staff time, creating bottlenecks and greater distrust.

All of this fed into a barrage of increasingly complex conspiracy theories, and so the movement grew. Before 2020, there had only ever been a handful of instances in which election commissioners declined to certify an election; in the years since, board or commission members have voted against certifying results in at least 20 counties across eight states. As Election Day approaches, it is clear that there will be more to come. “They’ve been working hard over the past four years to tee up this strategy,” says Jessica Marsden, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a group that monitors threats against fair elections. “It seems almost certain that they would try it.”

The legal system does not make it easy to nullify the popular will, and in 2022 Congress passed a bill — the Electoral Count Reform Act — that would make it even harder, in part by setting an unambiguous deadline for states to submit their final certified results: this year, Dec. 11.

But there is a path. The bill did not state the consequences for missing the certification deadline. A determined administrator could try to in effect run out the clock, creating a chain reaction of legal maneuvers that would culminate in the election’s being decided by simple majorities of the House and the Senate — each of which could by Jan. 6 be controlled by Republicans. The odds are small, but any administrator willing to face the consequences has a shot at overturning the election. “The whole system is dependent upon, one, everyone doing what they’re supposed to do, and two, doing what a judge has told them they have to do,” Bradley Schrager, a Democratic election lawyer in Nevada, told me. “After that, we’re into something else.”

For election officials around the country, the challenge presented by the new election-integrity movement could be daunting. Conspiracy theories were often difficult to debunk, and efforts to put baseless concerns to rest often led to more questions. In few places was this more true than Maricopa County in Arizona. When Stephen Richer, a Republican, ran in 2020 to become the county recorder, he offered a twist on Trump’s slogan: “Make the Maricopa recorder’s office boring again.” Like others in his party who knew and accepted that Biden won the presidential election, he was confident that the anger would subside after Jan. 6. As soon as he took office, he realized he was wrong.

Maricopa had been a spawning ground for election denialism. On election night of 2020, some Trump voters became convinced that an effort by Maricopa election workers to have them fill their ballots with Sharpie pens was a conspiracy to invalidate their votes. Sharpie pens were previously a problem, because they bled through the ballots, making a mark on both sides. But for the 2020 election, Maricopa had redesigned the ballots so the bleed through didn’t matter, which is why election workers were instructed to tell voters to use Sharpie pens. The rumor that the Sharpies were part of an anti-Trump ploy took flight on Facebook and Twitter nonetheless, sending a mob of angry protesters to the main Maricopa vote-count center, some with military gear and long guns.

Sharpiegate, as it became known, melded into other conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines and corrupt election workers. Some adherents of these theories made up a sizable bloc of the Arizona Legislature, and in his second week on the job — a week after the Jan. 6 riot — Richer found himself answering a subpoena to provide them with all information about the county’s Dominion machines and ballot records. By the end of the month, Arizona State Senate Republicans were moving to conduct their own “forensic audit.”

Even if Richer thought the Senate audit was excessive — judges and two county-run reviews had determined that there was no evidence of wrongdoing in 2020 — he was ready to go along with it, he told me. Maybe, he thought, it would answer some of the deniers’ questions and cool things down.

But then he found out who would be running the audit. It wasn’t going to be KPMG or Deloitte or some other established public accounting firm — it was going to be Cyber Ninjas, a tiny shop from Sarasota, Fla. Richer still remembers being shocked at the choice.

Cyber Ninjas, run by a software analyst named Doug Logan, had no experience with elections or auditing. In the fall of 2020, Logan worked up theories about Dominion voting machines with Trump-world figures like the Overstock founder Patrick Byrne and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who, that December, suggested that Trump seize voting machines and use “military capabilities” to rerun the election in swing states. “They just don’t intend to do this seriously,” Richer says he realized.

Then there was the money. The Arizona Senate leadership had budgeted $150,000 for the audit. But more than $7 million flooded in from outside donors. The progressive investigative group Documented reported that Trump’s Save America PAC had kicked in $1 million, by way of an escrow account created by Cleta Mitchell. And open-records lawsuits by The Arizona Republic and the nonprofit investigative group American Oversight found other donors, including Byrne’s America Project; Flynn’s group, America’s Future; and a group called Voices and Votes. It was co-founded by a host on the One America News Network, Christina Bobb, who was indicted this year on conspiracy and forgery charges related to the attempt to subvert Biden’s win in Arizona. (Bobb, who pleaded not guilty, is now working as the head of the Republican National Committee’s election-monitoring effort.)

Even with the funding rolling in, the audit did not go smoothly. Workers broke protocols for handling ballots as they scanned them for bamboo fibers that might indicate a Chinese plot and watermarks that, according to a viral QAnon conspiracy theory, Trump left on a collection of fake ballots to help catch election thieves. As deadlines passed and Cyber Ninjas came under increasing scrutiny, it closed out its audit. In its report, released that September, it said there “were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official election canvass results for Maricopa County.”

Stephen Richer, the county recorder of Maricopa County, Ariz. His criticism of a 2020-election vote audit attracted death threats. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Peggy Judd, a county supervisor in Cochise County, Ariz. She was indicted after she voted not to certify the results of the 2022 election. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

But it also went on to raise questions about the legitimacy of thousands of what it called “questionable ballots” — a number that well exceeded Biden’s margin of victory — and urged further investigation. Trump and his allies seized on the auditors’ ambiguous claims. “It is clear in Arizona that they must decertify the election — you heard the numbers — and those responsible for wrongdoing must be held accountable,’’ Trump told a rally crowd in Georgia that same month.

Richer issued his own post-audit report laying out its flaws. “We can’t indulge these lies any longer,’’ he wrote on Twitter the following May. “As a party. As a state. As a country.” His statements drew a stream of death threats and sent Richer in a different direction from his party’s voters. Denialism was the route to their support, which was why, in 2022, state Republicans nominated for governor a woman who was emerging as one of the most vocal denialists in the country, Kari Lake. A former television anchor and first-time candidate, she claimed the Cyber Ninja audit showed Trump won. If she lost, she said, it would only be because her election was stolen, too.

Unfortunately for Richer, widespread problems with Maricopa’s on-site ballot printers and scanners gave Lake something to seize upon when she did lose in 2022. Some of those problems stemmed directly from the county’s attempts to allay doubts whipped up by the audit and conspiracy theories like Sharpiegate. Though bleed through from markers didn’t cause any problems, it tended to alarm voters nonetheless. So for the 2022 elections, the county had switched to a thicker ballot paper stock. But the heavier paper created its own problems: Some ballots now printed too lightly, and that made them harder to scan. The cascade of problems created long lines, and many voters were asked to use drop boxes that would be transported to the main tabulation center for counting on election night.

Though Lake’s lawyers couldn’t produce hard evidence that these issues caused people not to vote, she said that it cost her the election and that Richer did it on purpose. “Tens of thousands of Maricopa County voters were disenfranchised,” she would assert, and that was because election officials had “sabotaged” the election. (Lake declined to contest a 2023 defamation suit by Richer, but the dispute continues over damages.)

Lake had support from Trump, who wrote on Truth Social, the social media platform he started in late 2021, “They are trying to steal the election with bad Machines and DELAY.” On “War Room,” Bannon declared that she was the true winner.

None of this was going to get Lake elected, just as the audit wasn’t going to get Biden’s victory decertified. But all of it, the audit, the real problems in Maricopa and the false portrayal of their effects, was feeding into the running narrative about stolen elections. That narrative had taken hold of people in Arizona’s Cochise County, on the Mexican border, including the two Republicans on the three-member board of supervisors, Peggy Judd and Thomas Crosby.

When it came time to certify the 2022 election, and even though Lake won by 18 percentage points in Cochise, Judd and Crosby voted not to certify. There were serious consequences. Last year, Attorney General Kris Mayes of Arizona, a Democrat, indicted them on charges of “interference with an election officer” and conspiracy.

Despite such potential consequences, local elections-board members sought to delay or outright voted against certification in counties across the country in 2022. In New Mexico, the State Supreme Court ordered the board of commissioners of Otero County to reverse its vote against certifying primary results; one of the no votes came from Couy Griffin, who had been convicted on trespassing charges in the Jan. 6 attack. In North Carolina, the state board of elections removed a Surry County election board member who voted against certifying the 2022 results, along with another member who joined him in signing a letter saying the North Carolina election laws were unconstitutional. Pennsylvania had to delay certification of its primary for three months as three Republican-controlled counties refused to certify full results in a standoff over mail ballots, which ended with a judge’s order. After the general election in Pennsylvania that November, Luzerne County missed the state deadline after deadlocking on certification. The swing voter was a Democrat who changed his mind after pursuing his own inquiry.

The movement was succeeding in persuading administrators around the country that there were serious problems with the election system, but the rules remained an obstacle to denying certification. Now some commissioners asked the next obvious question: Could they change the rules? One of those administrators was Bridget Thorne, a first-time elected official who took her seat on the Fulton County, Ga., board of commissioners in January 2023.

Like a lot of people in the new movement, Thorne’s conversion experience came in 2020. A part-time software designer, she regularly volunteered to help manage elections in her suburban Atlanta voting precinct. But that year, she told me, she was appalled by a woeful lack of security and protocol she found in the downtown Atlanta convention center where she was helping Fulton County test its new Dominion machines ahead of Election Day.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a bête noire to the denialist movement for his refusal to lend credence to their claims, agreed that there were some procedural problems, which were readily apparent in various reviews and investigations. But none of those investigations found widespread fraud or anything that would have affected the outcome, which is why Raffensperger declared his confidence that Georgia’s votes were “counted accurately, fairly, reliably.” Thorne wasn’t convinced. She was particularly worried that the dummy ballots used by workers to test tabulation machines might somehow get mixed in with real ballots on Election Day.

Increasingly agitated that she could not get a hearing for her complaints from Fulton County elections officials, she started reaching out to politicians in her area, and within a couple of weeks, she was testifying before a panel of Georgia State Senate Republicans considering Trump’s demand that they overturn their state’s results.

Now Thorne was connected with a lawyer named Robert Cheeley, who had joined Trump’s 2020 election scheme in Georgia, which involved organizing a slate of so-called alternate electors that Trump and his congressional allies could use to make him the winner on Jan. 6 — a plot that would lead to Cheeley’s eventual indictment by District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County (he pleaded not guilty in September 2023; some charges were dropped this year). Thorne helped Cheeley prepare a case seeking to inspect 147,000 Fulton ballots for suspected problems. Working with Cheeley on the suit was eye-opening, she said. “I started studying election law that summer at Cheeley’s,” she told me, “and I realized, Wow, Fulton County breaks a lot of laws.’’

Thorne made her complaints public at regular county commission and election board meetings, where she met like-minded citizens who were convinced that something went wrong with the 2020 election, including Janice Johnston, a recently retired OB-GYN, and Julie Adams, a career human resources executive. The three women would move into positions of authority and influence over state and local elections on roughly parallel tracks.

In 2022, Johnston was appointed to a seat on the state board of elections, which helps oversee how counties apply election law. That appointment was made by the state Republican Party, which, at that point, was under the leadership of David Shafer, who would step down the following year as he came under investigation, too, for helping to organize Trump’s “alternate” election slate in 2020. Adams became a regional coordinator for Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Thorne, who showed a natural proclivity for politics, won her seat on the Fulton commission on the Republican line, with donations from two family friends who were also prominent donors to Trump — Lisa and Kenny Troutt of Texas. (Kenny Troutt was also an investor in Truth Social.)

Initially, there was only so much Thorne could do as one of two Republicans on the seven-member commission. At commission meetings, she would grill the election supervisor on procedures and budget, which the commission controlled, presenting errors as evidence of vulnerabilities that could wrongfully change election outcomes. “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’’ says Dana Barrett, a Democrat on the commission. “She believes elections are suspect, so anything she sees that looks in any way off to her is proof that elections are suspect.”

Bridget Thorne, a commissioner in Fulton County, Ga. She proposed a new rule to the state election board that would require election certifiers to conduct more extensive investigations. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Matt Mashburn, former acting chair of Georgia’s state election board. A moderate Republican, he was removed this year by the state’s lieutenant governor. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Things would start changing fast in 2024. At the turn of the year, a new lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, who had personally sought to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to throw out the 2020 results, exercised his appointment power to remove a moderate Republican on the state board, Matt Mashburn, who helped block Johnston when she sought to investigate Raffensperger. In Mashburn’s place would be a former state senator, Rick Jeffares, who promoted false claims about “dead voters” ’ casting ballots in 2020. Now Johnston had an ally on the board. A few weeks later, in February, Thorne gained an ally, too, when the Fulton County Republican Party appointed Julie Adams to the Fulton election board, which the commission oversees.

In March, when it came time to certify the results of the Georgia Republican and Democratic primaries, Adams was ready. She asked the county election office for reams of data — a list of qualified voters, voter check-in lists and a record of all ballots cast. When the office responded that it could not fulfill the entire request ahead of the certification deadline, Adams said she wouldn’t be able to support certification and voted no.

In April, Thorne submitted a new rule to the state board. This one would require all Georgia elections certifiers to conduct more extensive investigations before certifying and require elections supervisors to provide board members with all records related to the election upon request. She developed the rule, she said, in consultation with Johnston and Adams, as well as a prominent conservative “election integrity” investigator from Pennsylvania who was also close to Cleta Mitchell, Heather Honey.

The sole Democrat on the state board, Sarah Tindall Ghazal, was aghast at the proposal. Thorne told me later that her main goal was to make board members more confident in the results they were certifying. But the rule would require administrators to skip certifying the results in any individual precincts that they determined to have discrepancies until completing investigations — which meant certifying only some results. Ghazal didn’t believe that was legal. “The risk is using pretextual reasons to fail to certify when folks are not pleased with the results,’’ Ghazal told Thorne at a hearing for the rule. Thorne shot back, “So you’re saying we’re dishonest by requiring this.” A moderate Republican on the board, Ed Lindsey, moved to table the rule, suggesting that Thorne rework it so it definitely comported with Georgia law.

Days later, Adams, on the Fulton election board, sued for the right to conduct her own audit, with full access to local voter data, before certifying elections. She was represented by the America First Policy Institute, founded by four former Trump-administration officials. Her lawyer on the suit, Alex Kaufman, had assisted in Trump’s 2020 Georgia election-subversion bid and sat in along with Mitchell on Trump’s call asking Raffensperger to find him votes that didn’t exist.

Soon after Adams filed her suit, state Republicans made another change on the state board, replacing Ed Lindsey, the moderate who tabled Thorne’s proposal, with a conservative talk-show host, Janelle King, who immediately made it clear that she intended to find out whether “something happened” in Georgia’s 2020 election — and that she would vote in tandem with Jeffares and Johnston. Johnston had control of the board.

In August, Thorne brought her rule back before the newly composed panel. This time, she had supportive testimony from Hans von Spakovsky, a towering figure in the election-integrity movement. Von Spakovsky was among the first in the modern era to raise the specter of voter fraud to push restrictive election rules, starting in the 1990s. When board members do not have “full confidence” that elections are “error free,” he told the board, “they should not certify.” Thorne’s rule passed easily, along with a related provision requiring board members to conduct “reasonable inquiries” ahead of certification.

On Oct. 1, a state judge, Robert C.I. McBurney, heard a challenge to those rules and also the merits of Adams’s lawsuit. Thorne, Adams and Johnston were all in attendance as he pressed the lawyers representing the state board to agree that certification was mandatory and had to happen by the state deadline, Nov. 12, ahead of the federal deadline, Dec. 11. They did. But later in the hearing, Adams’s lawyers agreed that commissioners had to certify results by the state-mandated deadline but argued it wasn’t clear that they had to certify all results from all precincts. They could reject those they determined to be problematic. In Georgia, certification was beginning to look discretionary.

As the movement to challenge the certification system has gained momentum over the past four years, elected officials and outside groups have also worked to cool the temperature, especially in districts where disinformation is doing the most damage. The approaches have been varied. North Carolina simply removed the recalcitrant board members in Surry County. In Pennsylvania, officials from the office of the secretary of state, Al Schmidt, have been holding informational sessions with judges throughout the state. The goal is to make sure they understand the legal requirements of the Electoral Count Reform Act and the importance of the state’s meeting the Dec. 11 deadline this year. In Arizona, the guidance was more forceful. Thomas Crosby, the Arizona Republican, is still facing charges in connection to his refusal to certify the results of the 2022 midterms in Cochise County. He has pleaded not guilty. But in late October, Peggy Judd, his colleague on the board of supervisors, pleaded guilty to the crime of “failure or refusal to perform duty by an election officer.” She was sentenced to 90 days of unsupervised probation and fined $500. “I will certify,” she says now, though she still has qualms. “I have to.”

One of the outside groups working to cool things down, called Pillars of the Community, was founded by two veteran partisan election lawyers, Bob Bauer, an outside lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and Ben Ginsberg, the lead counsel for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign and George W. Bush’s 2004 and 2000 campaigns. They make a striking pair: In 2000, they were on opposite sides of the recount battle in Florida, which in its final phase before the Supreme Court became a fight over what Florida was going to submit as its certified result and whether it would do so on time. Ginsberg moved away from his party in 2020, after 18 Republican attorneys general asked the Supreme Court to throw out swing-state vote results over flimsy fraud allegations. “That was the case that epitomized to me the complete abandonment of principle for the ends of political power,’’ he says.

For the past few months, they have been traveling through major swing states convening discussions between election administrators and the “pillars” — Bauer and Ginsberg’s word for carefully recruited community members across the political spectrum. The idea was that if they could show those with concerns about the election system how it really worked, and let them hear from administrators about their own challenges and how they did their jobs, the pillars would vouch for the administrators if and when things went awry. In October, they invited me to observe a Zoom session with election administrators from Georgia and several of their community pillars.

At the start of the meeting, the election administrators aired deep concern over a late procedural change handed down by Georgia’s state election board, requiring live hand-count reviews of machine counts. There was consensus that if the rule survived a court challenge, it would strain budgets — “a lot of unplanned pay,’’ as one administrator put it — while adding more stressful work to overburdened staffs, for a process that was redundant; various checks were built into the system already. Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both Republicans, had repeatedly said the state’s elections were secure. In the name of efficiency, the state board was actually working to make the local election offices less efficient.

It was certification, though, that was now the main concern for clerks in the Zoom meeting. They feared that Thorne’s certification rules and Julie Adams’s lawsuit could make it easier to cast that vote. Raffensperger’s chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, said his office had plans in place should that occur — in particular, they would quickly seek a writ of mandamus, a judicial order that would compel board members to certify by a certain date or face contempt-of-court charges. The threat of prosecution could be a powerful deterrent.

But another pillar on the call, Scot Turner, a former Republican state legislator, was far less certain. “I wish I shared your optimism, Gabe,’’ he said. Turner ran a group called Eternal Vigilance Action that was bringing its own suit against the state board for a number of its recent moves, including Thorne’s rule and the one requiring the Election Day hand audits, arguing that the board was overstepping its legal authority. No matter what the courts decided, he said, the state board had now created “the illusion of discretion’’ that angry citizens will expect them to exercise should Trump claim fraud caused him to lose. “You will have locals under extraordinary pressure, peer pressure, from people that they live near telling them, ‘How could you possibly certify this election?’”

Ginsberg was most worried about a scenario like one he shared with the writers of “Succession,’’ for which he served as a script consultant. It envisioned an arson attack on a ballot-counting center on election night, leaving the county in question unable to certify complete results. What then? Bauer noted another eventuality: Administrators could try to drag things out with prolonged court fights, pushing the certification process past the Dec. 11 Electoral College deadline, but he thought it was unlikely. In his view, even if it took court intervention, the deadlines would be met, and all states would ultimately have their certifications done in time for the Electoral College vote on Dec. 17.

Georgia’s administrators began to get clarity in mid-October, when Judge McBurney, who was considering Adams’s suit and the new board rules around certification, ruled that board members did have to certify on time, the entire result, and that voting no was not an option. A day later, the judge in the Eternal Vigilance Action lawsuit ruled that the board had indeed overstepped its authority in approving Thorne’s rule on certification and hand-count reviews. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the state’s Supreme Court denied it on Oct. 22.

Yet the Republicans weren’t done trying. After the McBurney ruling, Kaufman contacted Raffensperger’s office with an odd request, according to communications I obtained through an open-records request: Would the state change the official certification form? Two people with knowledge of the request said Kaufman was seeking the addition of a space where individual commissioners could register doubts about the accuracy of the results they had just certified. The request was denied, but it was a clear attempt to inject doubt into official certification, for purposes that hadn’t yet been articulated.

“Chaos is the strategy,’’ says Joanna Lydgate, the former chief deputy attorney general of Massachusetts who founded States United Democracy Center, a watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. “The strategy is ultimately about eroding public trust, priming the electorate for an attempted subversion of the election.”

On the day she voted no, Clara Andriola stayed at her office in Washoe County until 11 p.m., researching. She learned that her certification was absolutely mandatory, in all cases. She also learned that failure to certify could result in Class E felony charges and real jail time. She submitted a request for a reconsideration the following day, but the soonest the committee could meet was a week later, so Washoe would miss the state deadline. Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar — a Democrat who had quietly helped raise money for Andriola’s campaign — concluded that he had no choice but to bring a lawsuit compelling the board to act. “When that D.A. said what he said in a meeting,” Aguilar told me, “he put Clara in a very, very, very bad spot.”

Aguilar hoped to get a clear court determination for November and beyond. The certification finally went through on a 4-1 vote on July 16. One of the Republican commissioners, Mike Clark, said he was voting yes, but “under extreme duress.” Jeanne Herman, who voted against Trump’s loss in 2020, held out yet again. “There are hills to climb on and there’s hills to die on,’’ she said, “and this might be one of those.”

The Nevada authorities had in fact thus far declined to file any criminal charges. And weeks later, the Nevada Supreme Court declared the civil matter now moot, because certification had taken place, and declined to rule. “This is not moot,’’ Andriola told me in September. “Election workers are having to deal with this question every single day now, and it makes their job even harder.”

Indeed, many of the state’s election clerks — the people whose work the board was refusing to certify — were quitting. Washoe was on its third registrar in two years, Cari-Ann Burgess, and she was feeling the pressure. “I was holding the door for somebody, for a lady, and as she walked out the door she said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, you’re a disgrace, and you should just die,’’’ Burgess told me at her office in September. “I just have to detach myself from it, otherwise it’s going to eat at me.” (A few days later, the county announced that Burgess had experienced medical issues due to stress and was taking an indefinite leave of absence. In late October, Burgess told The Associated Press that she had in fact been pressured to go on leave after a dispute with the county manager’s office and was considering legal options.)

Just down the hall from Burgess’ office was the Washoe County commission’s meeting space. When I walked in a few minutes after the public session started on Sept. 17, the room was already in chaos. A man was standing at the lectern in a camo hat that read, “Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President.’’ He was using a projector to present a mathematical analysis that claimed to prove that voting machines switched votes to steal the 2020 election for the Democratic chair of the commission, Alexis Hill. “Guys, this is what election fraud looks like,’’ said the man, Nicholas St Jon.

Hill was facing a rematch in the upcoming general election from a Republican named Marsha Berkbigler. Hill had taken Berkbigler’s seat in 2020 without election denial being an issue; Berkbigler herself dutifully certified her own defeat. But now, she said at a forum with Hill, she wasn’t so sure that she would have certified elections that had taken place since. If Berkbigler regains her seat in November, it will give the board a three-member majority of people who have openly expressed doubts about certification. Aguilar told me he considered Hill’s race to now be “the most important in the state.” It wasn’t about 2024; it was about what could happen in the years after.

As St Jon continued to make his case against Hill at the commission’s public meeting, he became agitated when Hill turned down his request to make his presentation more visible for the meeting’s livestream. (There was no way to do so, she later explained.) When his three minutes of allotted speaking time were over, he walked up to a small barrier dividing the public seating area from the dais, leaned his arms across it and looked directly at Hill. “You don’t get to try to intimidate this board,” Hill told him. “Please sit down.”

When he refused, the meeting came to a halt as both sides called the sheriff’s office — St Jon to demand a “citizen’s arrest” of Hill for denying his First Amendment rights; Hill to have St Jon removed. For nearly an hour, St Jon and officers from the sheriff’s office went back and forth over his First Amendment rights and the board’s right to eject him. St Jon left after being warned it was that or arrest. After he left, complaints about elections continued, as other attendees presented the board with a resolution they wanted the board to sign agreeing to extra ballot security and other measures. They said they were affiliated with a national group, United Sovereign Americans, which was promoting similar resolutions around the country. One of the organization’s lawyers, Bruce Castor, a former Pennsylvania solicitor general, defended Trump during his second impeachment, after Jan. 6.

Al Schmidt, secretary of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. His office has been holding sessions with judges to make sure they understand new legal requirements for vote certification. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Bruce Castor, a lawyer for the “election validity” advocacy group United Sovereign Americans. He defended Donald Trump during his second impeachment, after Jan. 6. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Later, Herman told me she didn’t always agree with St Jon’s approach, but she understood his frustration. “It’s building,’’ she said. “People are aggravated, and they want to get some results and clean up something before the election because we’ve already proven we can’t have decent, fair, earnest, transparent elections under any circumstances.”

Herman told me that she was certain Trump won in 2020 in Washoe and that outside forces, not the voters, were controlling local elections. “I mean, if I sat there and just certified everything, I’d be lying to myself and to the rest of the world, right?” she said. “I wouldn’t be representing the people.” If it was between what county lawyers told her and what she saw as her oath, her oath would win out.

A couple of days after St Jon’s standoff with the sheriffs, I had coffee with him at a cafe in Reno. He said that it was clear to him that there were real problems. As far as he was concerned, he had the math, in the 2020 analysis he tried to present at the meeting. It tracked 2020 vote-count patterns, he said, and found that they could only have been set by algorithms, a sure sign of manipulation. Aguilar’s office reviewed it, he said, and after nine or 10 months he received an email. They told him he had not provided significant enough information for them to conclude anything. St Jon was matter of fact. “At what point does something become significant, right?” To him, it was just more evidence of a rigged system. They were saying, “‘You will never reach significance because we’re the ones who define what significant is.’”

I asked him about the election. What would he do if the courts forced the board to certify a result he didn’t trust? He would try to maintain the peace, he said, but it wouldn’t be easy. A lot of people “are going: You know what, we own guns for a reason, and it’s not because we want to go hunting. It’s because there’s a tyrannical government, and we’re done, we’re done.”

Things could get much worse after the election. “Is it Revolutionary War 2.0? I would not be surprised.”

Edited October 30 by Vesper

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A majority of Americans anticipate post-Election Day violence: Poll

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/24/americans-election-day-violence-poll

Oct 24, 2024 -
Politics & Policy

A majority of Americans anticipate that there will be violence in the aftermath of the November election, according to a new Scripps News/Ipsos poll out Thursday.

Why it matters: The findings reflect the country's growing fears of political violence, fueled in part by a boom in misinformation and increased political polarization across the country.

• The specter of political violence has hung over much of the 2024 campaign due to the assassination attempts of former President Trump as well as his alleged role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
• Vice President Kamala Harris has sought to cast herself potential presidency as a fresh start from the rhetoric of violence that has shadowed the 2020 and 2024 election cycles.

The big picture: The poll found that 62% of Americans believe the likelihood of post-Election Day violence is "somewhat "or "very likely."

• That conviction was bipartisan — with 70% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans agreeing on the likelihood of violence.
• About half of Americans (51%) said they would support using the U.S. military to prevent Election Day unrest, though this view was more popular among Republicans (61%) than Democrats (51%).

Zoom in: Still Americans' belief in the election system is intact.

• Overall, 63% of Americans said they were "very confident" or "somewhat confident" that all votes would be accurately counted in the election.
• 77% of Americans said they are willing to accept the election results even if their preferred candidate loses.

State of play: Rising threats against lawmakers in the years since the Capitol riot have heightened fears about how such rhetoric can be actualized.

• Support for political violence has also been on the rise.
• Security measures have ramped up in Washington, D.C. in anticipation of possible unrest between Election Day and Inauguration Day.

Methodology: The poll surveyed 1,028 U.S. adult residents between Oct. 18-20, 2024, and has a margin of error of ±3.3 points.

Go deeper: Behind the Curtain: America plays with fire

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Congress gripped by fears of post-election violence

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/30/house-democrats-violence-capitol-trump-jan-6

3 hours ago -
Politics & Policy

Lawmakers in both parties are bracing themselves for a tumultuous period after the Nov. 5 election, with many openly expressing fears of political violence.

Why it matters: Democrats, in particular, see it as virtually inevitable that Trump will challenge the election results if he loses, raising the specter of nationwide civil unrest or even a repeat of the Jan. 6 attack.

• One House Democrat told Axios they are "extremely" concerned about violence and hired half a dozen state troopers to provide security at their election night event — a significant boost over past years.
• Republicans, on the other hand, claim the real threat will be from the political left being unable to accept another Trump term.

State of play: Federal and local law enforcement are already ramping up security across D.C. ahead of the election, Axios' Cuneyt Dil reported.

• The Secret Service confirmed to Axios that security enhancements have been made to the Capitol in the run-up to the certification of presidential electors on Jan. 6 — including fencing erected around the Capitol complex.
• Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) told Axios that, when Congress left for recess in September, "What I saw in terms of security was unprecedented."
• The Capitol Police turned heads Monday night by performing a "casualty evacuation exercise" that involved landing three helicopters on the East Front of the Capitol.

What they're saying: In discussions with more than a dozen House Democrats, virtually all expressed some degree of fear about the possibility of post-election violence.

• "Members are talking amongst ourselves about making sure people are safe, making sure their families are safe ... and what the protocols and procedures are," said Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.).
• "We're certainly in a heightened threat environment here. There's no doubt about it ... so we're going to have to be vigilant about it and make sure we're taking precautions," said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.).
• Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said she fears violence regardless of the presidential result: "If [Trump] wins, he and his violent supporters will be emboldened, and if he loses, I worry they will be worse than four years ago. I think about it a lot."

The other side: Republicans voiced similar concerns, but predicted Democrats will be the perpetrators of the violence, particularly around a potential Trump inauguration.

• Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) said governors should have their national guard units "ready to go on a moment's notice to quell any type of civil unrest," and that "they better have [the Capitol] locked down" on inauguration day.
• Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) cited rioting during Trump's inauguration in 2017, telling Axios, "I think there's a very good chance they will do it again."
• Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said he suspects the likelihood of violence "is higher if Trump wins. Like we saw on Jan. 20, 2017."

The intrigue: While most members' fears were focused on Jan. 6, some also expressed worry about the days after Nov. 5 — when some key presidential swing states are likely to remain uncalled as votes are counted.

• "It's going to take some time to process ballots. So there's a lot of concern about those several days that follow the election ... about security, but also just about the ramped up rhetoric that we all expect," said Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.).
• Lawmakers said they haven't yet been briefed on post-election security measures, with some expressing eagerness to receive such a briefing.

Zoom in: Several Democrats described recent experiences that gave them chills about the highly charge political atmosphere of the country leading up to the election.

• Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) shared how she was in New York the night of Trump's Madison Square Garden rally and found herself "in a sea of angry Trump voters," adding, "The mood was quite dark."
• Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said he "had two women verbally assault me and rudely interfere with my dinner" while in a GOP-held congressional district neighboring his own, telling Axios, "The mood out there is harsh."

Between the lines: The fears come up against a backdrop of a dramatic rise in threats against lawmakers in recent years.

• Violent attacks such as the Capitol riot and the Good Friday vehicle attack in 2021 — as well as several more recent disturbing incidents — have added a graphic element to those fears.
• A handful of ballot box fires in the Pacific Northwest also has lawmakers concerned about efforts to interfere with states' election procedures.

Edited October 30 by Vesper

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Elections of division: Can unity still win?

With 2024’s elections stoking deep divides, societies worldwide are asking if we can still bridge our differences—or if polarisation has become the new norm.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/elections-of-division-can-unity-still-win

 

When examining the ideological divisions in Europe, general attitudes towards specific policy directions tend to converge towards the centre. While the diversity of opinions is greater in the United States, a common ground still exists among citizens concerning practical solutions to some acute and divisive issues. Nevertheless, polarisation is on the rise in our societies. This paradox is exacerbated by partisan conflicts aimed at electoral gain. Affective polarisation acts as a powerful tool for voter mobilisation and cultivates a fertile ground for political activism. However, this emotional divide leads to increasing distances, biases, and even political violence against opponents. Partisan polarisation generates a vicious cycle of emotional warfare, stifling constructive policy debates. Most critically, it benefits populist and fringe parties. During a presidential debate, Kamala Harris remarked that it is time to “turn the page” and introduce a new, unifying quality to political competition. Is there a way out of this impasse, or has the opportunity already passed us by.

So close, yet so far

The year 2024 is set to be a super election year. In 72 countries worldwide, 3.7 billion voters are eligible to cast their ballots. We have already conducted European elections in 27 member states and are still preparing for the federal and presidential elections in the United States. Elections are often referred to as a festival of democracy, yet in the last decade, they have increasingly become a celebration of differences and divisions.

Research indicates that Europeans agree on many issues and can find common ground, either for or against contentious policy topics. Regarding generational conflict, there is no evidence that young and older generations in Europe are becoming more ideologically divergent. While there are differences in how younger people perceive specific social issues compared to older cohorts, overall, majorities support similar policies. The existing age divides may be more accurately described as cohort effects or influenced by particular events, rather than a comprehensive recalibration of ideological positions. Furthermore, gaps between the young and old have remained relatively constant over time. In addition, Europeans have adopted a more liberal stance on certain cultural issues, including women’s rights, gay rights, and diversity.

The situation in the United States presents a different picture. Age is a significant factor influencing ideological orientation. Younger people tend to be more liberal, while seniors, on average, are disproportionately more conservative. Interestingly, however, previous generations—the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X—exhibit greater divisions on political issues compared to Millennials and Generation Z. Both Democrats and Republicans can find common ground on certain policies, such as restricting access to assault-style weapons; however, they differ in their perceptions of the importance and urgency of specific issues. Some Republicans are gradually adopting more progressive views on certain matters, such as LGBTQ rights, but the leftward shift of the Democratic Party has maintained a considerable gap. Additionally, political beliefs typically associated with Republicans or Democrats are not always consistent: individuals can hold economically progressive views while being culturally conservative, a phenomenon that is not uncommon in European contexts.

Polarisation as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Paradoxically, polarisation is on the rise in both Europe and the United States. Data from V-Dem shows that while there are differing opinions on the general trajectory of societal development in these regions, political polarisation—in terms of how political differences affect social relationships beyond mere political discussions—is increasing even more sharply. Political polarisation has also emerged as a powerful yet dangerous tool in campaigning. This trend is associated with a shift in focus within political campaigns.

Spatial polarisation refers to placing political preferences along various policy dimensions. Political parties refine their profiles by diversifying their platforms, offering either centrist or more extreme positions. Campaigns attract voters through manifestos that advocate for specific policies. In contrast, affective polarisation relies on emotions, which are crucial drivers of political behaviour. This approach centres on categorical thinking, identity and belonging, appealing to fundamental instincts. A successful campaign effectively employs both strategies. Unfortunately, parties on both sides of the political spectrum increasingly resort to creating a sense of ‘false polarisation‘, which boosts voter turnout but continuously divides our societies into hostile factions.

I have observed this phenomenon escalating dangerously in the countries where I have lived. In Germany, political polarisation is relatively low and asymmetric; the political mainstream, comprising the centre-left and centre-right, stands in contrast to the far right. Voters from the CDU, CSU, SPD, Green, and FDP parties generally hold neutral to positive sentiments towards one another, with the notable exception of a strongly negative view of the AfD. 

Conversely, Poland’s political landscape has been dominated for more than a decade by two opposing camps: the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) and the liberal-conservative Civic Platform (PO). Particularly during the time Law and Justice was in power, the negative emotions expressed by supporters of the opposition were stronger towards PiS than vice versa. But during those eight years, Law and Justice was constantly excluding the opposition from the national community, calling them „traitors“ and „pure evil“.

In the United States, pernicious polarisation prevails, with both Republicans and Democrats viewing members of the opposing party as closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent. Intense political competition drives parties across the left, right, and centre to emphasise differences rather than commonalities, resulting in increased emotional messaging. Consequently, we find ourselves in separate media bubbles characterised by partisan bias and fragmented societies.

Voters are fatigued; can politics deliver?

Political polarisation has emerged as a powerful tool for mobilising voters and encouraging political engagement. Recent voter turnout figures are historically high: 66.8 per cent in the United States in 2020, 74.38 per cent in Poland in 2023, and over 70 per cent in the regional elections of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in Germany in 2024. While political polarisation undoubtedly drives voter turnout, it also carries side effects, including widening social distances, partisan bias, and even incidents of politically motivated violence.

Policy issues quickly escalate into highly emotional debates. In the lead-up to elections, abortion rights are frequently challenged—or promised; climate change is questioned, and climate action is alarmingly politicised; migration is framed solely in negative terms, focusing on national security, labour market challenges, and cultural conflicts. All three countries have also witnessed incidents of political violence, including attacks on government buildings in Berlin and Washington DC, as well as assaults on individual politicians, such as the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump during his campaign trail and the earlier tragic deaths of CDU politician Walter Lübcke and the mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz.

Meanwhile, Americans are weary of ongoing polarisation, perceiving politics as “divisive” and “corrupt.” Approximately 74 per cent of Germans view societal division as potentially threatening to democracy. In Poland, nearly 80 per cent of the public believes the country is more divided than united, with 57 per cent avoiding political discussions to prevent arguments among family and friends.

In Germany, politicians from all mainstream parties are contemplating a “firewall” to isolate the far-right AfD. While this approach may be morally justifiable, applying cancel culture only reinforces the victim-playing strategy of the party and does not appear to assist in reclaiming supporters for the political centre. During the 2023 parliamentary campaign, Donald Tusk promised to end “the Polish-Polish war.” To date, he has not achieved this goal. In the U.S. presidential campaign, Kamala Harris is advocating for “turning the page”: uniting the country and seeking common ground. This will be challenging after years of politics conducted on a knife’s edge. There is a pressing need for a new quality in politics that goes beyond electoral arithmetic and considers the long-term effects of strong language and imagery in election campaigns. Perhaps the Democrats will be the first to demonstrate how it can be done.

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Trumponomics

What kind of economic policy could we expect from a second Trump term?

https://jacobin.com/2024/10/trumponomics

It’s not easy to say what Donald Trump’s economic policy would look like should he win a second presidential term, since he often just fires off whatever notion pops into his head. In the economic realm, there’s the “no taxes on tips” idea (which Kamala Harris quickly plagiarized), but of more consequence there’s his about-face on cryptocurrency. Six months after he left office in 2021, he denounced Bitcoin as “a scam . . . another currency competing against the dollar,” which he disclosed he wanted to be “the currency of the world.” A couple years earlier, he had noted that crypto was a crime-ridden realm “based on thin air.” Things changed. At a July 2024 Bitcoin rally in Nashville, Tennessee, he flattered the attendees as “high-IQ individuals” and the currency as a “miracle of humanity.” He promised he’d make it “skyrocket like never before, even beyond your expectations.” He even fantasized about paying off the national debt, now $35 trillion, with Bitcoin, whose total value is around $1.1 trillion.

No doubt he saw votes in the high-IQ crowd and, perhaps more important, potential campaign contributions among its beneficiaries, who’ve been throwing large sums into politics. But what really turned him around was “flattering images of himself,” according to a Bloomberg article. “Simply put, he fell in love with Trump-themed nonfungible-tokens [sic] — and the supporters who bought them — and that passion has turned into a broader appreciation for the industry, according to insiders who have watched Trump’s crypto evolution.”

An End to the Income Tax

At the core of Trump’s economic agenda, which is what allows many capitalists to overlook his volatility and vulgarity, are tax cuts and deregulation. A second Trump term would mean more of both, though details, as is usually the case with Trump, are elusive.

His tax proposals have been otherworldly. Last spring, he proposed a 10% across-the-board tariff and a 60% tariff on Chinese imports (paired with income tax cuts, but not yet full abolition). According to a paper published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, that package would reduce after-tax incomes by about 3.5% for households in the bottom half of the income distribution and would cost the average household somewhat less: 2.7%, or $1,700.

But that wasn’t radical enough. In a meeting with congressional Republicans in June, Trump proposed scrapping the income tax altogether and replacing it with sharply increased tariffs. This would take the structure of federal revenue back to the nineteenth century, when tariffs accounted for 80% to 90% of total collections and there was no income tax. But aside from the occasional war, the federal government was small then and didn’t need much revenue. That hasn’t been true for almost a century.

What would federal revenues look like with the full Trump swap? They’d be a lot sparser. Personal income taxes account for almost half of total federal receipts. (Corporate taxes, which Trump wants to cut further, account for another 9%.) Existing customs duties, which are technically different from tariffs, account for less than 2%.

Rough calculations show that the 60% levy on Chinese imports and the 10% on all other imports wouldn’t even come close to replacing the lost income-tax revenues; a simulation suggests the package would yield revenues equal to just 28% of the current take. That would reduce federal receipts by one-third and double the deficit. It is very hard to imagine it ever being politically possible to offset spending cuts of that magnitude.

These revenue simulations assume that imports would remain unchanged in the face of higher tariffs, which of course they wouldn’t. Nor do they address the distributional consequences of a shift from a progressive income tax to a regressive consumption tax, which is what tariffs are, at least in part. Peterson Institute’s simulation of this proposal found that it would knock 9% off the income of the poorest fifth of the population, 5% off for the middle fifth, and add 14% to the income of the top 1%.

A New Era of Tariffs

Trump has a history with tariffs. He’d agitated for them for years, and he finally got to impose them on imports of steel and aluminum from most countries in March 2018 and on imports from China in four stages in 2018 and 2019. He also imposed stiff tariffs on solar panels and washing machines. The metals tariffs were greeted happily by American steelworkers, but the outcome was nothing like Trump and his supporters hoped for. Employment and production didn’t thrive, and the moves against China in particular provoked retaliatory actions that hammered American farm exports.

The chief economist of Moody’s Analytics estimated in 2019 that, a year in, Trump’s tariffs had cost the United States $88 billion and 340,000 jobs.

It’s not self-evident who pays tariffs. Trump fans say they come out of the hide of exporting firms and countries, but that view isn’t widely held. Most studies show that they hit buyers of imported goods, though there’s some disagreement over exactly how much of the increased costs are passed along in higher prices. A 2020 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found, as did earlier studies, that “U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers.” The authors, Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David E. Weinstein, note that non-Chinese producers lowered their prices to gain market share, calling it “good news for U.S. firms that demand steel, but bad news for workers hoping that steel tariffs will bring back jobs. . . .  U.S. steel production only rose by 2 percent per year between the third quarter of 2017 and the third quarter of 2019 despite 25 percent steel tariffs.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, estimated in 2019 that, a year in, the tariffs had cost the United States $88 billion and 340,000 jobs. These sorts of estimates often sound suspiciously precise, but almost everyone who’s studied the issue has come up with similar ones, and few have concluded the opposite. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration, led by economist Larry Kudlow — someone who is almost always wrong — claimed economic gains but refused to show its work.

The response from China hurt. A December 2019 Bloomberg article on the fallout of the trade war with China cited, as an example of collateral damage, the case of Northwest Hardwoods, a timber exporter that suffered a 40% decline in orders as a result of China’s retaliation. The company closed plants and laid off workers. Farmers were especially hard hit. A year after Trump opened the agricultural front of the trade war in July 2018, a representative of the American Farm Bureau Federation told the Hill they’d “lost the vast majority of what was once a $24 billion market in China.”

The tariffs failed to balance trade with China or to stimulate employment. From 2016, the year before the trade wars began, through 2019 (just before COVID-19 broke everything), US imports from China fell 3%, but exports fell by 8%. And while increased prices of imports from China did discourage sales modestly, they also shifted demand to other exporters like Vietnam. Overall, from the beginning of 2017 through the end of 2019 (from the onset of Trump to just before the onset of COVID), real exports rose 4.8%, real imports rose 5.3%, and the trade deficit rose 7.6%.

Employment in basic metals accounts for a very small share of US employment, and the tariffs had no visible effect on it. Both steel and aluminum experienced steep job losses in the 1990s and 2000s (steel was down 55% and aluminum 50%, while overall employment rose 19%), but they stabilized at very low levels after that. In February 2010, as employment bottomed out after the Great Recession, iron and steel accounted for 0.06% of total employment. In March 2018, the month the tariffs were announced, the sector still accounted for just 0.06% of total employment. In February 2020, the eve of the pandemic, that number was 0.06% yet again. And in June 2024, it was still at 0.06%. Employment numbers in aluminum are very similar. Nor did the tariffs stimulate domestic production. Between March 2018 and December 2019, steel production fell by 6.1% and aluminum by 3.7%.

Trump would like to try some more tariffs, though.

Project 2025

What else could we expect? Delving into the chamber of horrors known as Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a new right-wing presidential administration — of which Trump professes to know nothing, even though many of its authors worked for him — we find an ambitious reactionary agenda, seasoned with piety and nineteenth-century values. It’s full of words fiscal conservatives love, like “streamline” and “flexibility” (each appears 43 times), which are polite terms for letting businesses do whatever the hell they want.

The chapter on the Department of Labor and related regulatory agencies opens with “the resolve to reclaim the role of each American worker as the protagonist in his or her own life and to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life” and, just a few lines later, pivots to recommending the “Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis.” That means repealing the “assertive left-wing social-engineering agenda” the US Labor Department currently embodies — and reducing regulation. The first of the specific action items listed are “revers[ing] the DEI revolution” and “eliminat[ing] . . . critical race theory trainings.” No social engineering here. The plan would lift antidiscrimination regulations and loosen regulations on the payment of overtime — especially in the “southeast,” the former Confederacy. It would deregulate child labor and encourage “alternatives to labor unions whose politicking and adversarial approach appeals to few.” But there are exceptions to the deregulatory thrust: Project 2025 would tighten rules for immigrant workers and move toward requiring that 95% of federal contractors’ employees be US citizens.

Subsequent chapters propose a more aggressive trade policy, meaning tariffs and other trade barriers, especially against China, apparently assuming Trump didn’t try hard enough last time. Peter Navarro’s chapter on trade is strenuously bellicose in urging us to fight the “existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its quest for global dominance.” (The abbreviation “CCP” appears 41 times.) Curiously, however, Navarro’s manifesto is followed by a dissent — a defense of free trade by Kent Lassman, president of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. Lassman pronounces the tariff experiment a costly failure that angered US allies and extracted no concessions from China; instead of repeating it, he argues, policy should be reformed to assure it never happens again. Evidently there are some tensions within the Trump coalition.

Project 2025’s authors would also break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), because it’s the core of the “climate change alarm industry,” privatize the National Weather Service (an agency within NOAA), and “align the Census Bureau’s mission with conservative principles,” reversing the federal statistical agencies’ long-standing insulation from politics. They’d purge the Treasury of its “woke” agenda. (An animating passion of the document looks to be the war on woke.) They’d promote “tax competition” rather than an “international tax cartel,” which means nixing international efforts to avoid tax evasion and crack down on tax shelters. They’d reduce the progressivity of the income tax and cut corporate and capital gains rates. Raising taxes would hereafter require a three-fifths congressional supermajority. They’d also withdraw the United States from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — not because they’ve been agents of punishing austerity for decades, but because they’re “inimical to American free market and limited government principles” and promote “higher taxes and big centralized government.” Countries that lived through the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and the euro crisis of the 2010s would be surprised by these characterizations.

Project 2025 is full of words fiscal conservatives love, like ‘streamline’ and ‘flexibility,’ which are polite terms for letting businesses do whatever the hell they want.

Digging deeper, we find proposals to overhaul the financial system, namely via a radical deregulation — basically letting banks do as they wish — at the same time as radically downsizing the Federal Reserve. The chapter on the Fed is surreal. It points out that since the Fed was created in 1913, there’s been a recession every five years, which is roughly correct. What it doesn’t mention is that, between 1854 (when the official statistics begin) and 1913, there was one every two years, and the expansions lasted only slightly longer than the downturns, unlike the post-1913 period, when the expansions have been four times longer than the recessions. Since 1945, they’ve been six times longer. Yes, the Fed (along with the rest of the government) has been absurdly indulgent about bailing out financiers when they get in trouble, but the answer to that problem is to regulate and supervise them tightly, not to bring back the regime of panics and slumps that prevailed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1929 crash, during which the young Fed did next to nothing, is not an inspiring model almost a century later.

Creative Destruction

Another source for what Trump’s second term might look like is the America First Policy Institute, described by the Financial Times as “Trump’s ‘White House in waiting’” (where Larry Kudlow serves as vice chair, surrounded by alumni of Trump’s first administration). The material on the website is rather thin, however, and includes op-eds on economics from such rigorous sources as the Daily Mail and the Daily Caller. Its prescriptions can be easily summarized: drill, deregulate, cut taxes, cut spending, promote sound money (and not climate politics and DEI), stop subsidizing federal unions, and raise tariffs. The site is full of complaints about how federal debt has risen under Joe Biden — it has, but it rose much faster under Trump, thanks in no small part to his 2017 tax cuts, which added almost $2 trillion to the deficit. And since Trump would like to extend and deepen those tax cuts, it’s hard to see how the debt wouldn’t rise again. The only alternative would be profound spending cuts that have proved politically impossible in the past. But since these deficits would go to fund high-end tax cuts rather than child allowances, they’re okay.

A wild card in all this is would-be vice president J. D. Vance and his populist posturing. A vice president doesn’t have much power, but Trump is 78 years old and not, at least to the naked eye, in the best physical shape, so it’s not outlandish that Vance could ascend. Vance — whose rise was lubricated by funding from Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who thinks democracy is over — has made a lot of pro-worker noises and even walked a picket line, but it’s hard to see much more than affectation here. (The picket line visit took place during last fall’s United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three; Vance’s appearance prompted Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to ask, “First time here?” “Yeah,” he responded.) Despite the picket line cosplay, Vance doesn’t seem very pro-union, and his idea of boosting working-class power seems to revolve around endorsing Trump’s plan to seal the borders and deport ten million undocumented workers.

But this is all informed speculation. Trump’s résumé as a manager makes you wonder how much he could get done. His first administration was chaotic. He wasn’t prepared to win, and he improvised his way through his term. There was immense churn in his cabinet: turnover, according to a Brookings Institution tally, was seven times Biden’s and five times the average from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. A second term could be more stable, with an agenda drawn from the likes of Project 2025 and a staff assembled from seasoned right-wing technocrats and agitators. On the other hand, Trump would still be at the top, so we could have an extravagant drama of imperial decay.

Edited October 30 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

Greek socialist income tax is hideous,
More hideous than China.
The biggest percentage is applied to the poor, then the percentage graph flattens out, then goes up again for the very rich.
But percentagewise it is the poor who pay more and the percentage graph looks like a convex parabola where the x-axis goes from poor to rich.
What I say to them is "littlle money - little tax, more money - make me join the national industrialists union".
The left hate me for this - maybe they will send me a letter bomb one day. Also Mitsotakis who has sided with them.
 

[Vesper 29,017]

Why Trump Has an Edge With These 11 Michigan Voters — Even Though They Don’t Like Him

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/29/opinion/focus-group-michigan-voters.html

As the votes were counted on election night 2016, the first big sign of trouble for Hillary Clinton came from Michigan, arguably the most Democratic of the presidential swing states. In 2020, Joe Biden flipped it back to the Democrats. Now, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump appear to be in a dead heat in Michigan, and it’s once again crucial for winning the presidency. For our latest Times Opinion focus group, we gathered a cross-section of Michigan voters to assess the race in the home stretch.

The takeaway isn’t especially positive for Ms. Harris.

Our five independents, four Democrats and two Republicans were clear on a few points: Most want significant change in America under the next president, and the bulk of them cite the economy as their top issue and care more about the candidates’ policies than their values. One voter was troubled by Ms. Harris’s support for arms to Israel and is leaning toward Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. Others thought Mr. Trump didn’t understand what it meant to struggle financially.

Perhaps most worrisome for Ms. Harris, nine of our 11 participants thought she would pursue policies similar to Mr. Biden’s. Muhammad, a 25-year-old software engineer and registered independent who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, said he was struck by a recent TV ad showing Ms. Harris on “The View” saying she could not think of a thing she would have done differently from Mr. Biden during their administration. For him and others, Harris's problems boil down to two words: "Change" and "Biden."

“I understand not pushing Biden under the bus, but she needs to be more authentic and actually take responsibility for the failures of her administration. She was the border czar, and that is a failure. All she needed to do was be authentic about that,” Muhammad said.

Some participants were enthusiastic about Ms. Harris’s energy and ideas and thought that as a woman, she represented change. But as for who will win Michigan and the presidency, these voters thought the race was trending toward Trump, even though several of them saw him as dangerous and unhinged.

 

Transcript

Moderator, Kristen Soltis Anderson

In one word, how would you say you feel about the November election?

 

Moderator, Kristen Soltis Anderson

Kyle, you said “exhausted.”

Kyle, 35, white, Republican, manager

It’s a nonstop barrage of political ads, political mailers. I just can’t wait for the election to be over.

 

Michael W., 30, Black, Democrat, fast-food employee

The political ads are abrasive, and they kind of put you in a “What do you believe?” type of place. It’s hard to decide.

Moderator, Kristen Soltis Anderson

What is this election about?

 

Raise your hand if this issue is going to play a major role in deciding who to vote for.

 

 

 

[Vesper 29,017]

41 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Greek socialist income tax is hideous,
More hideous than China.
The biggest percentage is applied to the poor, then the percentage graph flattens out, then goes up again for the very rich.
But percentagewise it is the poor who pay more and the percentage graph looks like a convex parabola where the x-axis goes from poor to rich.

The lowest 40 to 45 per cent of the US population pays no federal income tax.

Many get rebates back (Eearned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credits, etc)

The Republicans blocked the re-upping of the Expanded Child Tax Credit when it ran out recently.

The Republicans are the champions of regressive (meaning it hits the poor the most as a percentage of their income) tax schemes.

They always try (and often succeed, see the massive Trump tax cuts that went overwhelming to the richest Americans and the massive corporations at the expense of the core middle class and the poor) and to enact 'reverse-Robinhood' initiatives (steal form the poor and give to the rich).

Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio

Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.

Report
Mar 27, 2023

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-responsible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/

Introduction and summary

The need to increase the debt limit¹ has focused attention on the size and trajectory of the federal debt. Long-term projections show² that federal debt as a percentage of the U.S. economy is on a path to grow indefinitely, with increased noninterest spending due to demographic changes such as increasing life expectancy, declining fertility, and decreased immigration and rising health care costs permanently outstripping revenues under projections based on current law. House Republican leaders have used this fact to call for spending cuts,³ but it does not address the true cause of rising debt: Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues. In fact, relative to earlier projections, spending is down, not up. But revenues are down significantly more. If not for the Bush tax cuts⁴ and their extensions⁵—as well as the Trump tax cuts⁶—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100 percent of the increase.

•  

Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues.

 

Fiscal policy in the postwar era

In the 34 years after 1946, the federal debt declined from 106 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to just 25 percent, despite the federal government’s running deficits in 26 of those years. The debt ratio declined for two reasons. First, the government ran a “primary,” or noninterest, surplus in a large majority of those years. This means that, not counting interest payments, the budget was in surplus. Second, the economic growth rate exceeded the Treasury interest rate in a large majority of those years. These two factors—along with the starting debt ratio—are the levers that control debt ratio sustainability.⁷ With a primary balance, the growth rate need only match the Treasury interest rate for the debt ratio to be stable. The presence of both primary surpluses and growth rates that exceeded the Treasury interest rate created significant downward pressure on the debt ratio.⁸

The nation’s fiscal pictured changed in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan enacted the largest tax cut in U.S. history,⁹ reducing revenues by the equivalent of $19 trillion over a decade in today’s terms. Although Congress raised taxes¹⁰ in many of the subsequent years of the Reagan administration to claw back close to half the revenue loss,¹¹ the equivalent of $10 trillion of the president’s 1981 tax cut remained.

These massive tax cuts set off more than a decade of bipartisan efforts to reduce spending and increase revenues, which, along with a booming economy, resulted in budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration.

Debt ratio stabilization and its drivers

In the past few decades,¹² there has been considerable discussion and rethinking of what constitutes an appropriate level of national debt. At this point, many experts argue¹³ that the focus should be on whether debt as a percentage of the economy is increasing or is stable over the long run, not on the amount of debt per se. Understanding the drivers of the increase in the debt as a percentage of the economy is critical to this analysis. While one-time costs, such as those made in response to an economic or public health emergency, increase the level of debt, sometimes by large amounts, they do not increase the rate of growth in the debt ratio over the long run. Debt ratio stability is driven by four components: 1) the size of the primary deficit—the deficit exclusive of interest costs—as a percentage of GDP; 2) the starting ratio of debt to GDP (the debt ratio); 3) the rate of economic growth; and 4) the prevailing interest rate on new Treasury securities.¹⁴ The cause of the upward trajectory of the debt ratio—a series of massive tax cuts that have been extended with bipartisan support—are largely responsible for recent budget shortfalls.

The underlying fiscal result of Clinton-era policy—having, at the very least, a primary surplus and a declining debt ratio—was projected to persist indefinitely until the Bush tax cuts were made permanent. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) last long-term budget outlook before those tax cuts were largely permanently extended¹⁵ projected that revenues would be higher than noninterest spending for each of the 65 years that its extended baseline covered.¹⁶ In other words, right up until before the Bush tax cuts were made permanent, the CBO was projecting that, even with an aging population and ever-growing health care costs, revenues were nonetheless expected to keep up with program costs. However, in the next year, that was no longer the case.¹⁷ As a result of the massive tax cut, the CBO projected that revenues would no longer keep up due to being cut so drastically and, as a result, the debt ratio would rise indefinitely.

Tax cuts changed the fiscal outlook

As shown in recent analysis, this new change has further cemented itself;¹⁸ revenues are now projected to lag significantly behind noninterest spending.¹⁹ Of particular interest is that projected levels of both revenues and noninterest spending have decreased: Both are projected to be lower than in the CBO’s projections issued before the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts. This decrease in noninterest spending is the equivalent of more than $4.5 trillion in lower spending over a decade. But the drop in revenue was three-and-a-half times as large, the equivalent of more than $16 trillion in lower revenues over a decade. Despite the rhetoric of runaway spending, projections of long-term primary spending have decreased, but projections of long-term revenues have decreased vastly more. The United States does not have a high-spending problem; it has a low-tax problem.

The United States is a low-tax country

Compared with other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks 32^nd out of 38 in revenue as a percentage of GDP.²⁰ But it’s not just that the United States is near the bottom end of revenue; it is nowhere close even to the average. Over the CBO’s 10-year budget window, the United States will collect $26 trillion less in revenues than it would if its revenue as a percentage of GDP were as high as the average OECD nation. When compared to EU nations, that number rises to $36 trillion. (see Figure 2) In contrast, the $289 billion projected revenue increase in the Inflation Reduction Act²¹ still leaves the United States ranking 32nd out of 38 OECD countries.

• 
•  

Recent large tax cuts

Analytically, the best way to measure why current projections show what they do is to assess what changed relative to older projections. This means looking at what new laws have been enacted. Increases above current levels that were already on track to happen under current law (and thus were already assumed in the baseline) are, by definition, not responsible for the CBO changing its estimate of long-term projections. This means that rising health care and Social Security costs are not responsible for the increased federal debt; the CBO already assumed them, but the CBO also projected sufficient revenue to keep up with rising health care and Social Security costs.²² In fact, the CBO has dramatically lowered the expected growth in health care costs. As this report has already shown, projections of long-term spending, relative to older projections, have significantly decreased and thus have been responsible for decreased, not increased, debt in the CBO’s outlook. It is tax cuts that have caused the dramatic increase in primary deficit projections.

The Bush tax cuts

The George W. Bush administration, empowered by a trifecta in 2001, enacted sweeping tax cuts that will have cost more than $8 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. The tax cuts lowered personal income tax rates across the board, both for labor income and for capital gains, and they significantly increased the untaxed portion of estates and lowered the estate tax rate. These changes were enormously tilted toward the rich and wealthy.²³ While these increases were paired with an expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, the total package gave significantly greater savings to the wealthy and also made the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.²⁴ In 2013, a significant majority of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent with bipartisan support, locking in lower tax rates and deep cuts to the estate tax.²⁵ These changes led to a significantly more regressive tax code than existed before the Bush tax cuts were enacted, and one that brought in vastly less revenue.

The Trump tax cuts

President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill,²⁶ enacted when Republicans gained control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2017, will have cost roughly $1.7 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. These tax cuts reduced personal income tax rates and permanently lowered the corporate tax rate, among other changes. Despite being paired with a further expansion of the child tax credit, the 2017 changes also largely benefited the wealthy, once again making the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.²⁷

Taken together, the Bush tax cuts, their bipartisan extensions, and the Trump tax cuts, have cost $10 trillion since their creation and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since then. They are responsible for more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if you exclude the one-time costs for responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession. While these one-time costs increased the level of debt, they did nothing to affect the trajectory of the debt ratio. With or without them, the United States would currently have stable debt, albeit potentially at a higher level, despite rising spending.²⁸ In other words, these legislative changes—the Bush and Trump tax cuts—are responsible for more than 90 percent of the change in the trajectory of the debt ratio to date (see Figure 3) and will grow to be responsible for more than 100 percent of the debt ratio increase in the future. They are thus entirely responsible for the fiscal gap—the magnitude of the reduction in the primary deficit needed to stabilize the debt ratio over the long run.²⁹ The current fiscal gap is roughly 2.4 percent of GDP. Thus, maintaining a stable debt-to-GDP ratio over the long run would require the primary deficit as a percentage of GDP to average 2.4 percent less over the period. Because the costs of the Bush tax cuts, their extensions, and the Trump tax cuts—on average, roughly 3.8 percent of GDP over the period³⁰—exceeds the fiscal gap, without them, all else being equal, debt as a percentage of the economy would decline indefinitely.³¹

Republican plans for future tax cuts

Recent proposals by some Republicans, whose party now controls the House majority, would further reduce revenues. In fact, the first bill passed in the 118th Congress, which was introduced by Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) and passed with only Republican votes,³² would rescind all unobligated portions of the $80 billion in funding for the IRS that was provided in the Inflation Reduction Act.³³ The Inflation Reduction Act funding for the IRS is projected to pay for itself several times over through increased enforcement of taxes already owed by the wealthy and by large corporations; the Office of Management and Budget estimated that this funding would raise more than $440 billion over the decade.³⁴

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) has also introduced legislation to make permanent President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts,³⁵ at a cost of roughly $2.6 trillion over the next decade.

Conclusion

A series of massive, permanent tax cuts have created large federal budget primary shortfalls and continue to exert upward pressure on the debt ratio. In other words, the current fiscal gap—the growing debt as a percentage of the economy—stems from legislation that cut taxes, disproportionately for the very rich. While it is true that the Great Recession and legislation to fight it, along with the costs of responding to the health and economic effects of COVID-19, pushed the level of debt higher, these costs were temporary and did not change the trajectory of the debt ratio. If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

[Vesper 29,017]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-30-what-will-you-do-trump-wins/

Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign event at Nassau Coliseum, September 18, 2024, in Uniondale, New York.

 

 

What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?

Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?

What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?

Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.

What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?

LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.

They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.

Do you let them in or do you refuse? Do you tell them they can arrest you if they want?

What if you work in the North Carolina legislature, and your boss hands you a document to shred? It shows him to have broken the law. Given that the same budget provision lets any legislator unilaterally decide whether to “retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of” any public record, what is your choice?

A BREWPUB IN A WISCONSIN NORTHWOODS TOWN falls afoul of the local right-wing power structure. The owner is an outspoken progressive with a political action committee committed to electing Democrats. He called the publisher of the town newspaper names, so the publisher sues him, in a state without a statute to protect the innocent against nuisance lawsuits, because the far-right-controlled state legislature values such suits as a weapon to preserve the state’s authoritarian power structure.

An elected judge, a member of that Republican power structure, refuses to dismiss the case, even though it is plainly meritless. A slick out-of-town lawyer being groomed by that power structure for higher office deposes the restaurateur, asking him to name the mother of his child born 15 years ago out of wedlock, a question he has no legal option but to answer. They are upping the stakes, forcing him to reveal embarrassing information about his private life that the newspaper can use to humiliate him, because their first tactic, bleeding him dry financially with frivolous lawsuits, is thwarted when they learn his insurance company is paying for his defense.

Also, in apparent coordination with this legal harassment campaign, county zoning officials demand the man pave his driveway before the opening weekend of the tourist season, though there is no time to get a permit, and no law requiring paved driveways. They ban his beer garden from allowing outdoor seating. They are determined to make him understand that they will never give up until their ideological enemy is drummed out of town.

That’s what is happening in Oneida County, Wisconsin. If something like it happens in the town where your family’s weekend cabin is: What would you do?

WHAT IF YOU ARE IN THE ARMY, and are ordered to the border to transport children to deportation camps? Or shoot peaceful protesters?

What if you are a law enforcement officer ordered to arrest more Black people by a city administration that fears federal intervention should the police fall below a certain quota of minority arrests? After all, Project 2025 recommends that local officials face “legal action” if they “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions,” and refuse to arrest “those who … actually commit crimes.”

What will you do if you are a federal prison guard shipped from Texas to police a protest in some faraway city, and are ordered not to identify yourself, nor wear any identifying badge?

Or if you are a federal bureaucrat, and ordered not to authorize spending for a highway that Congress requires by law that you spend, because the president wants to punish the local congressman, the better to “crush the deep state”?

Or if you are a university administrator, ordered to bulldoze a religious structure: What will you do?

HOW ABOUT IF YOU’RE A WORKER BEE in the office of a Republican prosecutor who follows the call of Stephen Miller after Donald Trump’s criminal conviction to use “[e]very facet of Republican Party politics and power” to “go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat those Communists”? Your boss presents you his draft of a frivolous indictment of a Democratic officeholder, say for some fantastical accusation of supposed “electoral fraud.” He asks you to draft the indictment. What do you do?

Or maybe you are an IRS auditor, ordered to pick through the tax returns of a White House critic; a State Department bureaucrat ordered to cancel the passport of a White House critic; an NSA technician ordered to listen in on the conversations of a White House critic; a CIA officer harboring suspicions that evidence smearing a family member of a prominent Democrat may be the product of a foreign disinformation campaign that has not been investigated for political reasons.

In all of these cases, your civil service job classification has been moved to “Schedule F.” You serve at the pleasure of the president now.

What will you do?

DONALD TRUMP SAID, BEFORE A JEWISH AUDIENCE this past September 19, that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with his loss, if he loses. Let’s say Donald Trump loses. You are a rabbi leading a congregation with prominent Trump supporters among its members. Now, for the Sabbath after the election, you have a sermon to write, which some of those members will be present to hear. Meanwhile, strange, scary men have been seen lurking about the grounds.

What do you say?

You work in the National Security Agency and hear the president offer a quid pro quo to a foreign leader in exchange for crushing a political rival. Do you go public with what you know? And if you do, and the death threats get hairy, do you accede to the pleading of your spouse to leave the country for your family’s safety, or do you defiantly stay put?

You are walking down the street when people assault a trans person only hours after the president of the United States explains matter-of-factly that “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” Or you see attacks on a couple speaking Spanish, or on a passerby who calls out someone’s MAGA hat. In each case, there are more of them than there are of you, and no cops in sight—or the cops are on the side of the thugs. What do you do?

You are a magazine publisher, and federal agents raid your office. Acting on the orders of CIA director Kash Patel, who has promised, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” and that “we will go out and find the conspirator not just in government, but in the media” who abetted the crime of letting Biden be inaugurated. What do you do?

You are a columnist at a newspaper owned by a billionaire with many government contracts who chooses not to endorse the candidate for president who is not a fascist. You have made your reputation, ever since the 1970s, as a scourge against “tyranny” and “appeasement.” What do you do?

Your professor, on a temporary work visa, is seized for deportation as a “Marxist.” What do you do?

Your kid’s high school history teacher is fired for teaching students about slavery. What do you do?

Your pacifist son is forced to take the military entrance exam. What do you do?

You see someone set fire to a ballot drop box. You have just enough time, maybe, to pull out the contents, though perhaps at the risk of third-degree burns. What do you do?

You’re in the National Guard, and you hear someone in your unit fantasize about gunning down kids at the Jewish religious school where he works as a security guard, and another reply that he’d like to pilot a plane into the factory where they make the beer that featured a trans spokesperson. Do you drop the dime?

By the way, your unit is about to be federalized to move in on a New Jersey sanctuary city and bust down doors in Baghdad-style house-to-house raids because the migrants living there are “not civilians.” Do you follow orders, or do you risk the stockade?

Or you are a National Guardsman in Texas, and breathe a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, draws the line against your governor’s interpretation of Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, claiming that because refugees from Venezuela “actually invaded” that state, literal war can be waged against these poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But your heart sinks when the governor acts anyway, replying with a piece of apocrypha credited to President Andrew Jackson: The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it. What’s your decision?

Or the Supreme Court goes a different way: You are a clerk for a right-wing federal judge, an uncontroversial stepping stone for young lawyers on the make whatever their own ideology. You’re asked to draft an opinion that generals can no more be disallowed from mowing down women and children wading across the Rio Grande with machine guns than they could prevent a baby’s testicles being crushed, should the president of the United States wish it so. Do you write it?

Your wife is a teacher, and her heart sinks too when the governor says the same thing in the face of a Supreme Court ruling upholding a 1982 precedent that states cannot deny students free public education on account of immigration status. Let migrants in her kindergarten classroom, she’s told, and she’ll be fired. How do you advise her?

Or, hell, you just drive a bus for a living, and your company has been hired to fill a bus with those selfsame “invaders,” drive them across the country, then dump them out in a parking lot—right next to the contents of the vehicle’s septic tank. Do you start the engine?

Or consider the scenario related to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent by a senior Department of Labor official: evaluating a proposed regulation for a federal safety standard protecting workers in outdoor jobs from the increasingly prevalent risk of fatalities from heatstroke; “loyalists installed in key positions could easily ensure that quality science on the impact of heat on workers is ignored or downplayed during later stages of the rulemaking process. Meanwhile, career government officials—suddenly more vulnerable to firing—would surely hesitate to challenge or expose political appointees who are manipulating the process.”

Say that career official is you. Do you risk your job? Or do you choose complicity?

Donald Trump is elected president.

What are you prepared to do?

[cosmicway 1,333]

47 minutes ago, Vesper said:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-30-what-will-you-do-trump-wins/

Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign event at Nassau Coliseum, September 18, 2024, in Uniondale, New York.

 

 

What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?

Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?

What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?

Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.

What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?

LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.

They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.

Do you let them in or do you refuse? Do you tell them they can arrest you if they want?

What if you work in the North Carolina legislature, and your boss hands you a document to shred? It shows him to have broken the law. Given that the same budget provision lets any legislator unilaterally decide whether to “retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of” any public record, what is your choice?

A BREWPUB IN A WISCONSIN NORTHWOODS TOWN falls afoul of the local right-wing power structure. The owner is an outspoken progressive with a political action committee committed to electing Democrats. He called the publisher of the town newspaper names, so the publisher sues him, in a state without a statute to protect the innocent against nuisance lawsuits, because the far-right-controlled state legislature values such suits as a weapon to preserve the state’s authoritarian power structure.

An elected judge, a member of that Republican power structure, refuses to dismiss the case, even though it is plainly meritless. A slick out-of-town lawyer being groomed by that power structure for higher office deposes the restaurateur, asking him to name the mother of his child born 15 years ago out of wedlock, a question he has no legal option but to answer. They are upping the stakes, forcing him to reveal embarrassing information about his private life that the newspaper can use to humiliate him, because their first tactic, bleeding him dry financially with frivolous lawsuits, is thwarted when they learn his insurance company is paying for his defense.

Also, in apparent coordination with this legal harassment campaign, county zoning officials demand the man pave his driveway before the opening weekend of the tourist season, though there is no time to get a permit, and no law requiring paved driveways. They ban his beer garden from allowing outdoor seating. They are determined to make him understand that they will never give up until their ideological enemy is drummed out of town.

That’s what is happening in Oneida County, Wisconsin. If something like it happens in the town where your family’s weekend cabin is: What would you do?

WHAT IF YOU ARE IN THE ARMY, and are ordered to the border to transport children to deportation camps? Or shoot peaceful protesters?

What if you are a law enforcement officer ordered to arrest more Black people by a city administration that fears federal intervention should the police fall below a certain quota of minority arrests? After all, Project 2025 recommends that local officials face “legal action” if they “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions,” and refuse to arrest “those who … actually commit crimes.”

What will you do if you are a federal prison guard shipped from Texas to police a protest in some faraway city, and are ordered not to identify yourself, nor wear any identifying badge?

Or if you are a federal bureaucrat, and ordered not to authorize spending for a highway that Congress requires by law that you spend, because the president wants to punish the local congressman, the better to “crush the deep state”?

Or if you are a university administrator, ordered to bulldoze a religious structure: What will you do?

HOW ABOUT IF YOU’RE A WORKER BEE in the office of a Republican prosecutor who follows the call of Stephen Miller after Donald Trump’s criminal conviction to use “[e]very facet of Republican Party politics and power” to “go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat those Communists”? Your boss presents you his draft of a frivolous indictment of a Democratic officeholder, say for some fantastical accusation of supposed “electoral fraud.” He asks you to draft the indictment. What do you do?

Or maybe you are an IRS auditor, ordered to pick through the tax returns of a White House critic; a State Department bureaucrat ordered to cancel the passport of a White House critic; an NSA technician ordered to listen in on the conversations of a White House critic; a CIA officer harboring suspicions that evidence smearing a family member of a prominent Democrat may be the product of a foreign disinformation campaign that has not been investigated for political reasons.

In all of these cases, your civil service job classification has been moved to “Schedule F.” You serve at the pleasure of the president now.

What will you do?

DONALD TRUMP SAID, BEFORE A JEWISH AUDIENCE this past September 19, that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with his loss, if he loses. Let’s say Donald Trump loses. You are a rabbi leading a congregation with prominent Trump supporters among its members. Now, for the Sabbath after the election, you have a sermon to write, which some of those members will be present to hear. Meanwhile, strange, scary men have been seen lurking about the grounds.

What do you say?

You work in the National Security Agency and hear the president offer a quid pro quo to a foreign leader in exchange for crushing a political rival. Do you go public with what you know? And if you do, and the death threats get hairy, do you accede to the pleading of your spouse to leave the country for your family’s safety, or do you defiantly stay put?

You are walking down the street when people assault a trans person only hours after the president of the United States explains matter-of-factly that “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” Or you see attacks on a couple speaking Spanish, or on a passerby who calls out someone’s MAGA hat. In each case, there are more of them than there are of you, and no cops in sight—or the cops are on the side of the thugs. What do you do?

You are a magazine publisher, and federal agents raid your office. Acting on the orders of CIA director Kash Patel, who has promised, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” and that “we will go out and find the conspirator not just in government, but in the media” who abetted the crime of letting Biden be inaugurated. What do you do?

You are a columnist at a newspaper owned by a billionaire with many government contracts who chooses not to endorse the candidate for president who is not a fascist. You have made your reputation, ever since the 1970s, as a scourge against “tyranny” and “appeasement.” What do you do?

Your professor, on a temporary work visa, is seized for deportation as a “Marxist.” What do you do?

Your kid’s high school history teacher is fired for teaching students about slavery. What do you do?

Your pacifist son is forced to take the military entrance exam. What do you do?

You see someone set fire to a ballot drop box. You have just enough time, maybe, to pull out the contents, though perhaps at the risk of third-degree burns. What do you do?

You’re in the National Guard, and you hear someone in your unit fantasize about gunning down kids at the Jewish religious school where he works as a security guard, and another reply that he’d like to pilot a plane into the factory where they make the beer that featured a trans spokesperson. Do you drop the dime?

By the way, your unit is about to be federalized to move in on a New Jersey sanctuary city and bust down doors in Baghdad-style house-to-house raids because the migrants living there are “not civilians.” Do you follow orders, or do you risk the stockade?

Or you are a National Guardsman in Texas, and breathe a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, draws the line against your governor’s interpretation of Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, claiming that because refugees from Venezuela “actually invaded” that state, literal war can be waged against these poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But your heart sinks when the governor acts anyway, replying with a piece of apocrypha credited to President Andrew Jackson: The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it. What’s your decision?

Or the Supreme Court goes a different way: You are a clerk for a right-wing federal judge, an uncontroversial stepping stone for young lawyers on the make whatever their own ideology. You’re asked to draft an opinion that generals can no more be disallowed from mowing down women and children wading across the Rio Grande with machine guns than they could prevent a baby’s testicles being crushed, should the president of the United States wish it so. Do you write it?

Your wife is a teacher, and her heart sinks too when the governor says the same thing in the face of a Supreme Court ruling upholding a 1982 precedent that states cannot deny students free public education on account of immigration status. Let migrants in her kindergarten classroom, she’s told, and she’ll be fired. How do you advise her?

Or, hell, you just drive a bus for a living, and your company has been hired to fill a bus with those selfsame “invaders,” drive them across the country, then dump them out in a parking lot—right next to the contents of the vehicle’s septic tank. Do you start the engine?

Or consider the scenario related to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent by a senior Department of Labor official: evaluating a proposed regulation for a federal safety standard protecting workers in outdoor jobs from the increasingly prevalent risk of fatalities from heatstroke; “loyalists installed in key positions could easily ensure that quality science on the impact of heat on workers is ignored or downplayed during later stages of the rulemaking process. Meanwhile, career government officials—suddenly more vulnerable to firing—would surely hesitate to challenge or expose political appointees who are manipulating the process.”

Say that career official is you. Do you risk your job? Or do you choose complicity?

Donald Trump is elected president.

What are you prepared to do?

USA has never been that socialist.

 

56 minutes ago, Vesper said:

The lowest 40 to 45 per cent of the US population pays no federal income tax.

Many get rebates back (Eearned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credits, etc)

The Republicans blocked the re-upping of the Expanded Child Tax Credit when it ran out recently.

The Republicans are the champions of regressive (meaning it hits the poor the most as a percentage of their income) tax schemes.

They always try (and often succeed, see the massive Trump tax cuts that went overwhelming to the richest Americans and the massive corporations at the expense of the core middle class and the poor) and to enact 'reverse-Robinhood' initiatives (steal form the poor and give to the rich).

Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio

Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.

Report
Mar 27, 2023

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-responsible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/

Introduction and summary

The need to increase the debt limit¹ has focused attention on the size and trajectory of the federal debt. Long-term projections show² that federal debt as a percentage of the U.S. economy is on a path to grow indefinitely, with increased noninterest spending due to demographic changes such as increasing life expectancy, declining fertility, and decreased immigration and rising health care costs permanently outstripping revenues under projections based on current law. House Republican leaders have used this fact to call for spending cuts,³ but it does not address the true cause of rising debt: Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues. In fact, relative to earlier projections, spending is down, not up. But revenues are down significantly more. If not for the Bush tax cuts⁴ and their extensions⁵—as well as the Trump tax cuts⁶—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100 percent of the increase.

•  

Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues.

 

Fiscal policy in the postwar era

In the 34 years after 1946, the federal debt declined from 106 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to just 25 percent, despite the federal government’s running deficits in 26 of those years. The debt ratio declined for two reasons. First, the government ran a “primary,” or noninterest, surplus in a large majority of those years. This means that, not counting interest payments, the budget was in surplus. Second, the economic growth rate exceeded the Treasury interest rate in a large majority of those years. These two factors—along with the starting debt ratio—are the levers that control debt ratio sustainability.⁷ With a primary balance, the growth rate need only match the Treasury interest rate for the debt ratio to be stable. The presence of both primary surpluses and growth rates that exceeded the Treasury interest rate created significant downward pressure on the debt ratio.⁸

The nation’s fiscal pictured changed in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan enacted the largest tax cut in U.S. history,⁹ reducing revenues by the equivalent of $19 trillion over a decade in today’s terms. Although Congress raised taxes¹⁰ in many of the subsequent years of the Reagan administration to claw back close to half the revenue loss,¹¹ the equivalent of $10 trillion of the president’s 1981 tax cut remained.

These massive tax cuts set off more than a decade of bipartisan efforts to reduce spending and increase revenues, which, along with a booming economy, resulted in budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration.

Debt ratio stabilization and its drivers

In the past few decades,¹² there has been considerable discussion and rethinking of what constitutes an appropriate level of national debt. At this point, many experts argue¹³ that the focus should be on whether debt as a percentage of the economy is increasing or is stable over the long run, not on the amount of debt per se. Understanding the drivers of the increase in the debt as a percentage of the economy is critical to this analysis. While one-time costs, such as those made in response to an economic or public health emergency, increase the level of debt, sometimes by large amounts, they do not increase the rate of growth in the debt ratio over the long run. Debt ratio stability is driven by four components: 1) the size of the primary deficit—the deficit exclusive of interest costs—as a percentage of GDP; 2) the starting ratio of debt to GDP (the debt ratio); 3) the rate of economic growth; and 4) the prevailing interest rate on new Treasury securities.¹⁴ The cause of the upward trajectory of the debt ratio—a series of massive tax cuts that have been extended with bipartisan support—are largely responsible for recent budget shortfalls.

The underlying fiscal result of Clinton-era policy—having, at the very least, a primary surplus and a declining debt ratio—was projected to persist indefinitely until the Bush tax cuts were made permanent. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) last long-term budget outlook before those tax cuts were largely permanently extended¹⁵ projected that revenues would be higher than noninterest spending for each of the 65 years that its extended baseline covered.¹⁶ In other words, right up until before the Bush tax cuts were made permanent, the CBO was projecting that, even with an aging population and ever-growing health care costs, revenues were nonetheless expected to keep up with program costs. However, in the next year, that was no longer the case.¹⁷ As a result of the massive tax cut, the CBO projected that revenues would no longer keep up due to being cut so drastically and, as a result, the debt ratio would rise indefinitely.

Tax cuts changed the fiscal outlook

As shown in recent analysis, this new change has further cemented itself;¹⁸ revenues are now projected to lag significantly behind noninterest spending.¹⁹ Of particular interest is that projected levels of both revenues and noninterest spending have decreased: Both are projected to be lower than in the CBO’s projections issued before the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts. This decrease in noninterest spending is the equivalent of more than $4.5 trillion in lower spending over a decade. But the drop in revenue was three-and-a-half times as large, the equivalent of more than $16 trillion in lower revenues over a decade. Despite the rhetoric of runaway spending, projections of long-term primary spending have decreased, but projections of long-term revenues have decreased vastly more. The United States does not have a high-spending problem; it has a low-tax problem.

The United States is a low-tax country

Compared with other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks 32^nd out of 38 in revenue as a percentage of GDP.²⁰ But it’s not just that the United States is near the bottom end of revenue; it is nowhere close even to the average. Over the CBO’s 10-year budget window, the United States will collect $26 trillion less in revenues than it would if its revenue as a percentage of GDP were as high as the average OECD nation. When compared to EU nations, that number rises to $36 trillion. (see Figure 2) In contrast, the $289 billion projected revenue increase in the Inflation Reduction Act²¹ still leaves the United States ranking 32nd out of 38 OECD countries.

• 
•  

Recent large tax cuts

Analytically, the best way to measure why current projections show what they do is to assess what changed relative to older projections. This means looking at what new laws have been enacted. Increases above current levels that were already on track to happen under current law (and thus were already assumed in the baseline) are, by definition, not responsible for the CBO changing its estimate of long-term projections. This means that rising health care and Social Security costs are not responsible for the increased federal debt; the CBO already assumed them, but the CBO also projected sufficient revenue to keep up with rising health care and Social Security costs.²² In fact, the CBO has dramatically lowered the expected growth in health care costs. As this report has already shown, projections of long-term spending, relative to older projections, have significantly decreased and thus have been responsible for decreased, not increased, debt in the CBO’s outlook. It is tax cuts that have caused the dramatic increase in primary deficit projections.

The Bush tax cuts

The George W. Bush administration, empowered by a trifecta in 2001, enacted sweeping tax cuts that will have cost more than $8 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. The tax cuts lowered personal income tax rates across the board, both for labor income and for capital gains, and they significantly increased the untaxed portion of estates and lowered the estate tax rate. These changes were enormously tilted toward the rich and wealthy.²³ While these increases were paired with an expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, the total package gave significantly greater savings to the wealthy and also made the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.²⁴ In 2013, a significant majority of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent with bipartisan support, locking in lower tax rates and deep cuts to the estate tax.²⁵ These changes led to a significantly more regressive tax code than existed before the Bush tax cuts were enacted, and one that brought in vastly less revenue.

The Trump tax cuts

President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill,²⁶ enacted when Republicans gained control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2017, will have cost roughly $1.7 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. These tax cuts reduced personal income tax rates and permanently lowered the corporate tax rate, among other changes. Despite being paired with a further expansion of the child tax credit, the 2017 changes also largely benefited the wealthy, once again making the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.²⁷

Taken together, the Bush tax cuts, their bipartisan extensions, and the Trump tax cuts, have cost $10 trillion since their creation and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since then. They are responsible for more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if you exclude the one-time costs for responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession. While these one-time costs increased the level of debt, they did nothing to affect the trajectory of the debt ratio. With or without them, the United States would currently have stable debt, albeit potentially at a higher level, despite rising spending.²⁸ In other words, these legislative changes—the Bush and Trump tax cuts—are responsible for more than 90 percent of the change in the trajectory of the debt ratio to date (see Figure 3) and will grow to be responsible for more than 100 percent of the debt ratio increase in the future. They are thus entirely responsible for the fiscal gap—the magnitude of the reduction in the primary deficit needed to stabilize the debt ratio over the long run.²⁹ The current fiscal gap is roughly 2.4 percent of GDP. Thus, maintaining a stable debt-to-GDP ratio over the long run would require the primary deficit as a percentage of GDP to average 2.4 percent less over the period. Because the costs of the Bush tax cuts, their extensions, and the Trump tax cuts—on average, roughly 3.8 percent of GDP over the period³⁰—exceeds the fiscal gap, without them, all else being equal, debt as a percentage of the economy would decline indefinitely.³¹

Republican plans for future tax cuts

Recent proposals by some Republicans, whose party now controls the House majority, would further reduce revenues. In fact, the first bill passed in the 118th Congress, which was introduced by Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) and passed with only Republican votes,³² would rescind all unobligated portions of the $80 billion in funding for the IRS that was provided in the Inflation Reduction Act.³³ The Inflation Reduction Act funding for the IRS is projected to pay for itself several times over through increased enforcement of taxes already owed by the wealthy and by large corporations; the Office of Management and Budget estimated that this funding would raise more than $440 billion over the decade.³⁴

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) has also introduced legislation to make permanent President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts,³⁵ at a cost of roughly $2.6 trillion over the next decade.

Conclusion

A series of massive, permanent tax cuts have created large federal budget primary shortfalls and continue to exert upward pressure on the debt ratio. In other words, the current fiscal gap—the growing debt as a percentage of the economy—stems from legislation that cut taxes, disproportionately for the very rich. While it is true that the Great Recession and legislation to fight it, along with the costs of responding to the health and economic effects of COVID-19, pushed the level of debt higher, these costs were temporary and did not change the trajectory of the debt ratio. If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

USA has never been that socialist.

[Vesper 29,017]

19 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

USA has never been that socialist.

 

USA has never been that socialist.

that?

it has never been socialist

it has some social democratic programmes (always under attack by the Republicans)

but it is hyper-capitalist

the wealth transfers, are on balance, ( especially starting in the 60s and 70s, and then exploding 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s), taken from the broad base of low net wealth citizens and pushed up to a a very small number of ultra rich people.

 

the minimum net worth (so what it takes to qualify) of the top 1% of US households is roughly $13.7 million (from data released over a year ago by the US Federal Reserve, it is very likely higher now)

in the top 0.1 percent, the average household had wealth of more than $1.52 billion (as of 18 months ago, Q2 2023, so it is higher now, likely close to or even over $2 billion)

 

[robsblubot 3,529]

🤦‍♂️Biden had one job: shut the fuck up. And then he goes and repeats the disastrous remark from Hilary Clinton.

BTW, "reluctant Trump voters" for me were always Trump voters, however article or polls want to paint them.

[cosmicway 1,333]

19 minutes ago, Vesper said:

that?

it has never been socialist

it has some social democratic programmes (always under attack by the Republicans)

but it is hyper-capitalist

the wealth transfers, are on balance, ( especially starting in the 60s and 70s, and then exploding 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s), taken from the broad base of low net wealth citizens and pushed up to a a very small number of ultra rich people.

 

the minimum net worth (so what it takes to qualify) of the top 1% of US households is roughly $13.7 million (from data released over a year ago by the US Federal Reserve, it is very likely higher now)

in the top 0.1 percent, the average household had wealth of more than $1.52 billion (as of 18 months ago, Q2 2023, so it is higher now, likely close to or even over $2 billion)

 

Anyway.
Greek socialism is represented by Eva Kailis (the crib girl).
I went to a private hospital few years ago. Looked like a three star hotel. The doctor while taking my blood sample noticed I was wearing a Chelsea covidmask so to make me feel happy he asked about Chelsea's prospects to win the CL under Tuchel.
I said "we may just snatch it".
Last year in state hospital half of them stuff were rude and suspicious the other half were suspicious and rude.
They did n't even tell me what to do for the blood testing to be conducted properly.
That's why Americans don't like.