Saturday, May 17, 2025
Most Are More Likely To Have Neighbors Of Same Race And Education Than Political Views
The chart above is from a Pew Research Center survey -- done between July 17th (2023) to March 4th (2024) of a nationwide sample of 36,908 adults, with a 0.8 point margin of error. The same survey showed most people don't know most or all of their neighbors.
Medicaid Work Requirement Is A Solution For A Problem That Doesn't Exist
The following is part of a post by Matt Bruneig in The New York Times:
House Republicans have proposed adding work requirements to Medicaid, the health insurance program serving tens of millions of low-income Americans. Their plan, unveiled Sunday, would, with a few exceptions, strip coverage from childless adults who cannot document at least 80 hours of monthly employment. . . .
Imposing work requirements on Medicaid is a fundamentally misguided policy. In the debate over work requirements, it is easy to get sucked into abstract moral theorizing about what a society owes people who can work but refuse to do so. This sort of philosophizing is interesting, but it tends to elide the fact that it is employers, not workers, who make hiring, firing and scheduling decisions.
Last year, over 20 million workers were laid off or fired at some point from their jobs. Many of those workers ended up losing not just all of their income but also their employer-sponsored health care. Medicaid is supposed to provide a backstop for these workers, but if we tie eligibility to work, they will find themselves locked out of the health care system because of decisions their employers made, often for reasons beyond their control.
Even workers who are able to get and keep jobs do not decide how many hours they are scheduled for. Many low-wage employers assign shifts based on real-time estimates of consumer demand, resulting in unpredictable work hours for their employees. Through no fault of their own, these workers frequently see their schedules drop below 80 hours a month. The resulting income instability creates significant hardships for them. Eliminating their health insurance would only make things worse. . . .
There is not an epidemic of non-working able-bodied adults living high on Medicaid, despite such claims from the Trump administration. Medicaid work requirements are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. According to the Census Bureau’s current population survey, around 46 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries are children or people age 65 or older, age groups that are not expected to work.
Of the working-age beneficiaries, about half are working, and an additional quarter have a work-limiting disability. An additional one-fifth will work at some point in the next year or come off Medicaid sometime in the ensuing 15 months. This means that only 6 percent of working-age enrollees are not engaged in work long term, which is just 3 percent of the entire Medicaid population. . . .
For those fundamentally opposed to Medicaid and the welfare state more generally, the fact that these new requirements would create administrative barriers that disenroll eligible recipients may be seen as a feature, not a bug. I suspect that for many of the Republican policymakers who endorsed work requirements, the goal of such a policy isn’t genuinely to increase employment or remove support from only those who refuse to work. Rather, it is to redirect resources from lower-income Americans toward those at the top. And for that purpose, it is indeed well designed.
Friday, May 16, 2025
Most People Are Not Optimistic About U.S. Politics
The chart above is from the AP / NORC Poll -- done between May 1st and 5th of a nationwide sample of 1,175 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.
About 229,000 Workers Filed For Unemployment Last Week
The Labor Department released their weekly unemployment report on Thursday. It showed about 229,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits in the week ending on May 10th. Here is the official Labor Department statement:
In the week ending May 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 229,000, unchanged from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 1,000 from 228,000 to 229,000. The 4-week moving average was 230,500, an increase of 3,250 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 250 from 227,000 to 227,250.
How Does Trump Get Away With Trashing Our Democracy And Economy?
The following is a posting by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:
People keep asking: How can Trump do this?
It’s not just a legal question about how Congress and the courts can allow his outright corruption, open use of the Justice Department to target perceived enemies, explicit threats to universities and law firms if they don’t cede their independence to the regime, direct attacks on media that criticize him, and defiant trampling on constitutional rights.
It’s also a question about how a president of the United States can be so utterly and uninhibitedly greedy, vindictive, and desirous of monarchic power at the expense of America’s democratic institutions.
A common explanation is that the “guardrails” are now gone. In his second term, Trump has installed people around him who are more loyal to him than they are to the United States, such as Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who therefore approve everything he wants (such as a $400 million luxury aircraft from Qatar that clearly violates the Constitution’s emoluments clause).
Another explanation I hear, especially from historians, is that crazy rulers — mad kings, ruthless power-hungry strongmen, malignant narcissists who take over nations — tend to attract fanatics who are even crazier than they are. And those fanatics (think Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, RFK Jr., Russell Vought) incite and excite each other and goad the crazy ruler into ever more extreme measures.
I’m sure both go some way to explaining what’s happening to America under Trump 2. But I think they miss the biggest reason for Trump’s utter lack of inhibition this time around.
He believes nothing can stop him from doing whatever the hell he wants because nothing has.
He’s been impeached twice, indicted for trying to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, even convicted of criminal fraud. Not only has he gotten away scot-free, but the Supreme Court has given him presumptive immunity for whatever he does in office.
And a plurality of voters even reelected him president, with more votes than Kamala Harris.
He’s 78 years old, soon to be 79, and figures he won’t ever have to face voters again — either because the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution prohibits it or because by 2028 he’ll have turned the nation into a full dictatorship and can count on being reelected.
Hell, he’s survived an attempted assassination.
So, he truly believes nothing can stop him no matter what he does. This is the core reason that he’s utterly, shamelessly, blatantly uninhibited — feeling totally unconstrained in seeking money and power.
The only potential obstacles are forces that he can’t easily push around because they’re are too rich or powerful — Xi’s China, Vladimir Putin, global bond traders, possibly Harvard University and the U.S. Supreme Court.
So with them he issues stern warnings and big threats. But if they don’t do what he wants he ultimately caves and claims victory nonetheless (as he has with China and Harvard).
There’s one constraining force that in the long run will be the most important of all: the American public.
Like a huge sleeping giant, the American public is not easily stirred to action. Right now, some of the public is loudly opposing Trump — among them, many of you. (Thank you!) His net approval ratings have fallen by nearly 20 points since he took office.
But we’re still too few to credibly threaten congressional Republicans with electoral defeat unless they turn on Trump.
I assure you that the giant will awaken — especially if Trump openly defies the Supreme Court, or arrests American citizens for saying or writing things he dislikes, or takes foreign bribes that clearly compromise America’s national security (such as getting the Saudi’s to invest in his crypto exchange and coins, in exchange for which he gives them America’s most advanced AI chips, which they then give to China). We’re inches away from one or more of these scenarios.
And when the giant awakens, Trump and his regime will be toast.
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