On the Vaccine Roll-out, Janet Yellen and Evangelicals

 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

To combat widespread skepticism about the vaccine, Biden is highlighting trusted public health experts like Anthony Fauci, as well as other well-known figures who have agreed to be vaccinated on television. Biden’s team is also working with the Advertising Council, a nonprofit organization of advertising agencies that produces public service announcements, to launch a $50 million advertising campaign in the new year. This effort is late getting started and has been hampered by Trump’s politicization of the vaccine process, which led executives from both Pfizer and Moderna, the companies with the most promising vaccines so far, to skip Trump’s “vaccine summit” at the White House last week.

Aside from his aggressive action to combat the coronavirus, an evaluation of Biden’s nominees tells us a great deal about what we can expect of his administration. He has chosen institutionalists with a great deal of experience. For example, Dr. Janet L. Yellen, Biden’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, has served as chair of the Federal Reserve and chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and her hallmark was always her defense of wage workers at a time when leading Republican lawmakers insisted that building the economy meant cutting taxes for those at the top of the economy.

Yellen is known to support lower interest rates, which tend to boost borrowing and thus the economy, but also worries about the extraordinary debt under which the country now labors. The budget deficit in 2020 was $3.1 trillion, and the debt is more than $20 trillion, which means that more than $52 billion of our tax dollars every year go into paying interest on the debt. That amount is as much as the combined budgets of the Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, and State. Yellen has suggested that she sees a need to raise taxes—which heartens progressives—and to cut retirement programs, which horrifies them. She worries about the long-term effects of the rising debt as baby boomers age, doubling spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Last year, Yellen told the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care Fall Conference that she thinks our financial issues “will not be solved without some additional revenues on the table, but I also find it hard to believe that it won’t be solved without some changes to those programs…. So this is certainly something that people in this audience should have in their sights as something that will greatly affect the well-being of our cohort or, more likely, our children.”

This moderation is cheering former Republicans. Biden has always been famous for being in the middle of the Democratic pack, and will move to the left or the right according to what he hears from the public.

In an important move today, evangelical leader Beth Moore, the founder of Living Proof Ministries, a Bible-based women’s group from Houston, Texas, who has almost a million followers on Twitter, tweeted: “I do not believe these days are for mincing words. I’m 63 ½ years & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it…. Fellow leaders, we will be held responsible for remaining passive in this day of seduction to save our own skin while the saints we’ve been entrusted to serve are being seduced, manipulated, USED and stirred up into a lather of zeal devoid of the Holy Spirit for political gain….”

Moore follows this weekend's statement by evangelical Karen Swallow Prior, who said she was “now embarrassed and ashamed” for voting for local and state Republican candidates (although she had never voted for Trump). “What a bunch of money-grubbing, power-hungry, partisan cowards who care nothing about conservatism,” she tweeted. Conservative journalist David French also wrote this weekend that “the frenzy and fury of the post-election period has laid bare the sheer idolatry and fanaticism of Christian Trumpism.”

If evangelicals return to their traditional stance that politics corrupts religion, the modern-day Republican Party is in trouble. In this year’s election, about 80% of white evangelicals supported Trump. They make up 15% of the U.S. population, but because they turn out in huge numbers, they provided about 40% of Trump’s votes in 2020. Since the Reagan years, white evangelicals have been a crucial part of the Republican base. If they are starting to rethink their loyalties, it will be a game changer.

WHY HOUSE REBOOBLICANS AREN'T SWEATING THE SHUTDOWN AND WHAT ELSE IS NEWS

WALL ST JOURNAL MARKET WATCH

The public fingers Republicans for most of the blame over the government shutdown, but that doesn’t mean the GOP faces grave danger of losing power in the House come the 2014 midterm elections.
Two articles, one from the left-leaning New Republic and another from the right-leaning Weekly Standard, see slim to no chance that Democrats will capture the House in 2014. And by some accounts, Republicans face not-insurmountable odds of taking control of the Senate.
Can it really be possible? The latest Washington Post poll, for example, shows that 70% of Americans disapprove of Republican tactics in the budget impasse.

Yet as both the New Republic and Standard articles point out, Democrats face a number of tall hurdles to winning the House. First and foremost, they haven’t recruited enough good candidates to challenge the most susceptible Republicans, most of whom are entrenched incumbents with moderate voting records.
Americans also have notoriously short political memories. So the fiscal fights of 2013 are likely to have faded in the minds of most persuadable voters by November 2014 — unless the more dangerous stalemate over the debt ceiling triggers an economic calamity.
Consider what happened in 1996. Voters only threw out three Republican House members just a mere nine months after an extended government shutdown for which conservatives were widely blamed. The GOP even won two Senate seats to extend its majority in that chamber.



Another hurdle for Democrats is the once-a-decade redistricting process that took place in 2010. Republicans controlled more state governments than Democrats and they used their influence to solidify the GOP’s grip on the party’s more vulnerable districts. That helps explain why Republicans only lost eight seats in 2012 even though Democrats won 1.7 million more votes nationwide in congressional races.
By far the biggest obstacle is history: mid-term elections heavily favor the party not in the White House. The opposition party has picked up seats in 24 of the 28 midterm elections since 1900, in many cases making big gains. Read Stuart Rothenberg on why the House is not in play right now.
More crucially, the president’s party has never won control of the House after being in the minority ahead of the midterms. [Both of the above links are must-reads--Esco]

Put another way, Democrats are trying to do what’s never been done before. They need to win 17 seats to oust Republicans, but even in the four midterms when the president’s own party did well, the gains ranged from just five to 11 seats.
To make history in the midterms, Democrats probably have to emerge from the latest budget standoff smelling like roses. Yet the Washington Post poll also offers a warning to the White House and its allies.  A slight majority of Americans also disapprove of President Obama’s performance, while 61% disapprove of how Democrats in Congress are handling the dispute.
– Jeffry Bartash


What Else is New?


Amidst the chaos of a closed government, here comes another nomination process. President Obama is preparing to announce Janet Yellen as his pick to lead the Federal Reserve as soon as Wednesday. -



The off-duty undercover New York City police officer who rode with the biker gang that attacked a family in their Range Rover last month was arrested. Though he told investigators that he left the scene as soon as riders began attacking the vehicle, video of the incident showed the detective pounding his fists on the back of the vehicle. His arrest will mean automatic suspension from the Police Department. Four other men have been charged and police are actively searching for others.


One week after HealthCare.gov went live, the world hasn’t ended—but the website still has glitches. The White House insisted that it is working hard to fix the site where Americans can sign up for new coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The site has had an estimated 8.6 million unique visitors in the past week. But IT specialists told Reuters that the glitches could also be linked to flaws in the site’s architecture. White House spokesman Jay Carney insisted that although they are “increasingly moving more users through the system,” they are still “not satisfied with the performance.”

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Imagine a field of snow. A skier finds little resistance and glides easily across the snow.



A woman shuffles by on snowshoes and is slowed by the snow.




And a man in heavy boots plods along, slowed at every step.




While a bird flies over, untouched.




The Higgs field is like our field of snow.


Fan favorites win the Nobel. Britain’s Peter Higgs and Belgium’s François Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that explains why elementary matter has mass. In a statement, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave credit for Higgs and Englert for discovering the particle that “describes how the world is constructed.”
The theory, elucidated in 1964, sent physicists on a generation-long search for a telltale particle known as the Higgs boson, popularly known (though not among physicists) as the God particle. The chase culminated last year with the discovery of this particle, which confers mass on other particles, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland. Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert will split a prize of $1.2 million, to be awarded in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws — but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry.

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.

Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

SUMMERS WITHDRAWS; PUSH FOR YELLEN TO LEAD FED RESERVE GATHERS STEAM.

N.Y. TIMES

With as many as five Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee ready to vote “no” on Lawrence H. Summers for the position of chairman of the Federal Reserve, the White House’s favored candidate faced long odds in winning Senate confirmation. On Sunday, Mr. Summers pulled out of contention, citing a potentially “acrimonious” battle that could harm the economy and Mr. Obama’s presidency.

In its search for a new Fed chairman, the White House had for months centered on Mr. Summers, who smarted after being passed over for the position when Mr. Obama decided four years ago to name Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman. This time, with Mr. Obama determined to replace Mr. Bernanke after eight years in office, the administration considered Mr. Summers, who worked intimately with them during the financial crisis, by far the best candidate. Mr. Summers, a former Treasury secretary to President Clinton was Mr. Obama’s chief White House economic adviser through the height of the financial crisis and recession in 2009 and 2010. In those years he formed a bond with Mr. Obama and others in the White House despite a tendency toward arrogance.

But a number of Senate Democrats, rather than waiting for the nomination process to play itself out, raised concerns as soon as his name surfaced this summer: his reputation for being a divisive and abrasive colleague, his perceived role in coddling Wall Street and the lax regulation of derivatives, and complaints that he did not support smaller community banks as much as the nation’s giant financial institutions, among other issues.

The Senate Banking Committee consists of 12 Democrats and 10 Republicans. Every Democrat in the no column would have to be balanced with a yes vote from a Republican to win the support of the committee. By Mr. Merkley’s count, Mr. Summers might have needed as many as five Republican votes.




Ms. Janet Yellen, the Fed’s vice chairwoman, told friends in recent weeks that she did not expect to be nominated as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Although she had been the Fed’s vice chairman since 2010 and would make history as the first woman to hold the job, President Obama’s aides made clear throughout the summer that he wanted Lawrence H. Summers, his former chief economic adviser. Now, she has again become the presumptive front-runner, as she had been for much of the spring. Senate Democrats, for their part, have made their thoughts on her known. Despite lukewarm Republican support, she would almost certainly sail out of committee and clear a full Senate confirmation vote, too.

Supporters of Mr. Summers, including many of the president’s closest advisers, had raised some concerns about Ms. Yellen in recent months. Perhaps most potently, they said that institutions benefited from fresh leadership and argued that Ms. Yellen’s crucial role in creating the Fed’s current policies could inhibit her ability to make necessary changes.

Some presidential advisers also argued that Mr. Summers brought crisis management experience and a working knowledge of financial markets that Ms. Yellen lacks — although so did Ben S. Bernanke when President George W. Bush selected him as chairman.

 

Nonetheless, the president’s advisers insisted throughout the summer that Mr. Obama was not averse to Ms. Yellen but simply more comfortable with Mr. Summers. Administration officials and supporters acknowledged that the president would enrage his party’s base if he were now to reject Ms. Yellen and forfeit the chance to name the first woman to the most influential economic job in the world.She has long argued that markets benefit from regulation to prevent abuses and limit disruptions of economic growth. She also played a leading role in shaping what has become the conventional wisdom that central banks, for the sake of job growth, should seek to moderate rather than eliminate inflation.

 

Most important, she has led a committee devoted to improving the Fed’s communications with its primary audience, investors, and with the broader public, a goal she shared with Mr. Bernanke. Under Ms. Yellen, the committee built an internal consensus for changes, including Mr. Bernanke’s regular news conferences and the declaration that the Fed thinks 2 percent annual inflation is just right.

ECONOMIC RECOVERY SLOGS ALONG. KRUGMAN RECS YELLEN TO LEAD FED

A job fair in Emeryville, Calif.

The economic recovery continues to chug slowly along. The unemployment rate dropped to 7.4 percent, the lowest rate since December 2008, but only 162,000 new jobs were created in July, fewer than economists expected. The number of new jobs was revised down for both May and June as well, and the labor force participation rate—the share of people with jobs or actively looking for them—remained about the same. Most of the gains came in retail, food services, and the financial industry.

Read it at Bureau of Labor Statistics

August 2, 2013 7:58 AM

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PAUL KRUGMAN N.Y. TIMES

 

Can a woman effectively run the Federal Reserve? That shouldn’t even be a question. And Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Fed’s Board of Governors, isn’t just up to the job; by any objective standard, she’s the best-qualified person in America to take over when Ben Bernanke steps down as chairman.

 

Yet there are not one but two sexist campaigns under way against Ms. Yellen. One is a whisper campaign whose sexism is implicit, while the other involves raw misogyny. And both campaigns manage to combine sexism with very bad economic analysis.

Let’s start with the more extreme, open campaign. Last week, The New York Sun published an editorial attacking Ms. Yellen titled “The Female Dollar.” The editorial took it for granted that the Fed has been following disastrously inflationary monetary policies for years, even though actual inflation is at a 50-year low. And it warned that things would get even worse if the dollar were to become merely “gender-backed.” I am not making this up.

 

True, The Sun is a marginal publication, with strong gold-bug tendencies, and nobody would pay much attention if the rest of the right had ignored or distanced itself from that editorial. In fact, however, The Wall Street Journal immediately followed up with its own editorial along the same lines, in the course of which it approvingly quoted The Sun piece, female dollar and all.

The other campaign against Ms. Yellen has been subtler, involving repeated suggestions — almost always off the record — that she lacks the “gravitas” to lead the Fed. What does that mean? Well, suppose we were talking about a man with Ms. Yellen’s credentials: distinguished academic work, leader of the Council of Economic Advisers, six years as president of the San Francisco Fed, a record of working effectively with colleagues at the Board of Governors. Would anyone suggest that a man with those credentials was somehow unqualified for office?

Sorry, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that gravitas, in this context, mainly means possessing a Y chromosome.

Larry Summers
 

Both anti-Yellen campaigns, then, involve unmistakable sexism, and should be condemned for that reason. As it happens, however, both campaigns have another problem, too: They’re based on bad economic analysis.

In the case of the “female dollar” types, the wrongheadedness of the economics is as raw and obvious as the sexism. The people shouting that the Fed is “debasing the dollar” have been warning of runaway inflation any day now for almost five years, and they have been wrong every step of the way. Worse, they have shown no willingness to admit having been wrong, let alone to revise their views in the face of experience. They are, in short, the last people in the world you should listen to when it comes to monetary policy.

The wrongheadedness of the gravitas crowd, like its sexism, is subtler. But to the extent that having gravitas means something other than being male, it means being what I like to call a Very Serious Person — the kind of person who talks a lot about the need to make tough decisions, which somehow always involves demanding sacrifices on the part of ordinary families while treating the wealthy with kid gloves. And here’s the thing: The Very Serious People have been almost as consistently wrong, although not as spectacularly, as the inflation hysterics.

 

This has been obviously true in the case of budget policy, where the Serious People hijacked the national conversation, shifting it away from job creation to deficits, on the grounds that we were facing an imminent fiscal crisis — which somehow keeps not coming.

But it has also been true for monetary policy. The Wall Street Journal (news department, not editorial) recently surveyed the forecasting records of top policy makers at the Fed, whom it divided into “hawks” (officials who keep warning that the Fed is doing too much to fight unemployment) and “doves” (who warn that it’s doing too little). It found that the doves made consistently better forecasts, with the best forecaster of all being the most prominent of the doves — Janet Yellen.

The point is that while the gravitas types like to think of themselves as serious men (and I do mean men) who are willing to do what needs to be done, recent history suggests that they’re actually men who are eager to prove their seriousness by doing what doesn’t need to be done, at the public’s expense.

Also, there was a time not along ago when almost everyone in the gravitas crowd, if asked who possessed that mystical quality in its purest form, would surely have answered “Alan Greenspan.” How well did that turn out?

So is Janet Yellen the only possible candidate to be the next leader of the Fed? Of course not. But the case for someone else should be made on the merits — and, so far, that hasn’t been what’s happening.