Waiting Game
Following Biden’s win, New York’s Budgetary Waiting Game Continues.
The wait-and-see approach has ruled the State Capitol since the spring, when members of the Democratic-controlled state Assembly and Senate enacted a budget that gave Gov. Andrew Cuomo unilateral power to hold back spending if additional federal aid didn’t materialize.
So far it hasn’t, although Mr. Cuomo and legislative leaders said the election of Joe Biden as president would make it more likely that a new federal package would include significant funding for state and local governments.
“We have a huge deficit and we need a lot of answers, and most of those good answers need to come from our federal government. But everything is on the table,” Ms. Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat from Yonkers, said at a press conference.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday that tens of thousands of layoffs are still possible next year. Other cities and counties are developing budgets for 2021 that raise taxes above the state’s 2% cap, a maneuver that requires a vote of 60% of legislators.
Some unions and progressive organizations in New York say state lawmakers should convene immediately and raise taxes, arguing that any federal aid won’t be enough to fix such a large deficit.
Blue Dog Coalition
There are 26 members of the Blue Dog Coalition in the House.
These are Democrats in favor of strong defense and fiscal responsibility.
House Makeup
Democrats were widely expected to win seats in the 117th Congress starting January 3. Instead they lost.
The House will be something like 218 Democrats, 210 Republicans, 4 independents and 3 vacant if expectations hold.
Guess what happens if 16 of 26 Blue Dogs hold firm.
The vote would be 226 to 209. That total would even allow for flips in other places from Republican to Democrat.
Biden’s Problems in the Senate
Democrats need to win both Georgia senate runoffs in January to stand a chance there.
Even then, Democrats will have to hold unanimous (or pick up a Republican Senate vote) for Harris to flip the tie.
Dead on Arrival
- State Bailouts
- Tax hikes
- Massive climate change proposals
- Single Payer Healthcare
Compromises Coming
It’s a certainty that budget deficits will rise on dubious compromises as noted in Here Come the Deficit Hawk Hypocrites.
Although compromises will lead to some gifts to corrupt states like Illinois, New York, and California, the handouts will far, far, short of what the states seek.
In general, the House and Senate makeup will stop the Progressive agenda and mass bailout attempts dead in their tracks.
Trump is out of the way but Biden will not be able to get much of anything done. Many will see both as good things.
Mish
Mish- You seem to think this is not all about the Great Reset and that republicans won’t go along with turning everyone into serfs
Of course Biden isn’t going to do those things. But the Fox story line is that Kamala Harris is an arch Maoist, and old Joe is going to pass on in his first year. Than Kamala is going to assume the presidency and implement communism on these freedom-loving United States. So, I guess the big question is: can the Senate and House somehow thwart the evil genius plan of Kamala and her Venezuelan handlers? I don’t see how, she will be the President. And Fox’s constitutional scholars probably know better than I do.
You got me interested finish the book!
Another Fed financing program coming…this time for state debt,
Biden had no intention of carrying out a progressive agenda anyway, and now an emboldened DNC feels vindicated after the election.
For scathing progressive critiques of Biden, just listen to people like Jimmy Dore, Kim Iversen, Matt Taibbi, Katie Halper, Krystal Ball, Glenn Greenwald, and others.
I truly hope so, the thought the rest of the country would bail out the massive social programs of NY, Cali and “Ill”-inois is preposterous.
$200,000,000,000 to Michael Madighanistan’s Illinois? You’ll never notice. Rammy Baby will slip it into the next Cares Act. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
I bet at some point the bailout of the those massive programs will happen. How can they not? Think about it. The Government bailed out all the big banks in 2009 that all said and done probably equated to Trillions of dollars. $400 billion that Illinois wants is chump change. I have a cousin who retired as a special needs teacher after 30 years is now pulling in a $96k pension. Good for her.
That being said, if such a bailout occurs, every other state better start giving out more generous pensions to their employees to also participate in future bailouts.
I do not think there will be a bailout….I just think…it will happen at some point. Since 2009 there has been $36 billion in stimulus / bailouts. That is enough for each U.S. family to have received $27k a year since 2009.
I meant 36 Trillion
New game in town. Central Planning on steroids.
The Fed/Treasury will bailout ALL too big to fail entities which are politically connected to it.
He who has the most debt wins. It’s an MMT kinda thing. New paradigm here. The old way of doing things is over.
Biden will need to rely more on executive action than he had planned earlier but if anyone can horse trade it will be Joe Biden. He’s worked in the Senate and has built relationships. Not sure how far that gets him but its an advantage
This guy invented Pay to Play.
If responsibility is allowed to reside with those making the bad decisions then just perhaps some good will come of it in the future. Biden is right about the dark winter but it will be a hell of a lot longer than 3 months.
Allowing states to file for bankruptcy would be the best for the country. It would hold those cities and states politically accountable. Surprisingly the nation’s credit rating could improve since more money could go toward repaying the national debt.
Absolutely
That would be some decent federal legislation that would die in committee when the financial institutions caught wind of it.
I had a 1 where there should have been a 0.
Corrected from 219 to 209
The vote would be 226 to “209”. That total would even allow for flips in other places from Republican to Democrat.
A word about Racism vs Bigotry.
I am certain Trump is guilty of both. One person in a previous thread defended Trump as follows ” In poor taste, bigoted perhaps, but not racist.” then went on to bash me multiple times.
Lovely defense. Your honor my client is not a racist, he is just a mean-spirited bigot.
Here are some good articles on the subject.
Are prejudice, bigotry, and racism the same thing?
Let’s Get It Right: Bigotry Is Not Racism
I admit my examples mixed the two. But here is one that is solid.
Trump says congresswomen of color should ‘go back’ and fix the places they ‘originally came from’
Go back where you came from
Trump usually manages to hide his racism so that fellow bigots can defend him.
Vox listed other examples in the link I gave. Here it is again.
“Black guys counting my money! I hate it. “
In congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
VOX accurately concludes …
For many people, none of these incidents, individually, may be damning .
But When you put all these events together, a clear pattern emerges. At the very least, Trump has a history of playing into people’s racism to bolster himself — and that likely says something about him, too.
The CIA FactBook says that Puerto Rico is about 76% white. I think it is bigotry to assume that all people from Puerto Rico or indeed, any former Spanish colony, are persons of color, and hence conclude that Mish is a bigot for stating that AOC is a person of color.
On Debby Irving and others like her…….including Peggy McIntosh and Robin Di’Angleo.
I don’t actually recognize these activists as legitimate social scientists….they do have a narrative they want to sell…..and it’s aimed at taking down the old white guys. They pretend to be scientists….but nothing could be less true.
McIntosh was a profoundly privileged white women…who came up with the ideas that anti-racist activists are promoting now….Irving and Di’Angleo are the current residents in the house she built….from her privileged position at Brown…she is a major reason we have these programs in black studies and women’s studies entrenched in our university system.
The biggest fault I find with them ( there are many faults to find) is that they have, at their core, the belief that ALL white people as a group have colluded to prevent persons of color from achieving the kinds of basic rights that whites get for free by virtue of inheriting less melanin.
They completely ignore some rather large elephants in the room……real cultural issues that have ZERO to do with whites, and everything to do with failures in the actual communities of color and families of color…something a lot of smart black people have no trouble recognizing, btw.
They also choose to completely ignore a long laundry list of social welfare experiments over the past 55 years that were were legislated by the government and supported by most well-meaning whites…..aimed at leveling the playing field…..ones that have a real mixed level of success and failure.
This idea that racism and bigotry differ by way of racism being the deliberate systemic of domination….a power differential…these ideas are actually right out of the playbook of the American communist Saul Alinsky and what is known as the Frankfurt School…..
All this is part and parcel of what goes by the general umbrella term Cultural Marxism….which is in ascendancy in our universities…This is why when you google Bigotry and Racism……you get the definitions you just chose to legitimize by repeating them online.
We now have a whole raft of “experts in diversity and inclusion” with university credentials they got in some dubious program..now writing a narrative around race that many people take for gospel….
My advice…..just look at the real history of the players here…..and at the reality of why a large group of black and brown people keep failing to thrive…even though many black and brown people do thrive if they can find the keys to the kingdom…which has to do with learning how to negotiate the white dominated world of written language, reading, writing, contracts and the like…..rather than running around emulating really bad role models (who are often ironically very successful themselves)…and rejecting education.
Trump’s open, vocal, enthusiastic and unsolicited advocacy of Confederate war memorials is as racist as it gets. No other proof that he’s racist is necessary.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be black in America and know that those who authored a treasonous war to keep black people enslaved are worshipped by millions of people including the President of the United States. In 2020.
Racism reaches its pinnacle when it is official policy. Trump’s official policy was preservation of racist memorials.
I think Trump is most definitely a racist and a bigot……and there are an awful lot of other racists and bigots who would apologize for him. I am not one of those….not by any stretch of the imagination.
But when a movement emerges that gets a lot of juice from tearing down old war monuments from a time long before any of us was born……we should be careful, because such movements are not surgical scalpels that will cut out the bad and preserve the good.
Today’s anti-racism activists…..are looking everywhere for targets….statues in the south, stained glass windows at Yale……a statue of an anti-slavery activist in Wisconsin (oops).
I can’t help but contrast the current movement with what I consider the real civil rights movement..which was so deliberately non-violent and marked by so many acts of great courage by both larger-than-life leaders like Martin Luther King…and so many courageous people whose names have been mostly forgotten now.
They are profoundly different.
But this modern movement does remind me of another movement…..and that movement was not an American movement at all ….it was a Chinese movement….the Cultural Revolution….a deliberately ant-intellectual movement that condoned murder of college professors by students (not unlike the who are now tearing down monuments with great gusto)……..and sent people to work camps to die by the tens of thousands.
The new anti-racists have more in common with the Red Guard than with the American civil rights movement of the 1950’s and ‘60s.
You have some good thought provoking comments. Well done.
“Trump says congresswomen of color should ‘go back’ and fix the places they ‘originally came from’”
Trump’s tweet did not say “women of color”. The left pays more attention to skin color than anyone else. Really, they are the racists.
Trump has a history of racism in his real estate career going back to 1973 when he was sanctioned by the courts for violating the Fair Housing Act.
In 2020, it is splitting hairs between a racist and a bigot. Trump is both. Equivocating Nazi white supremacists to anyone showed that. Trump will take anyone’s vote. Even a black person’s vote. He would take the vote of “women of color” from anywhere. He has no qualms about anything. But that doesn’t not make him a racist and bigot.
Thanks, fixed
Biden isn’t progressive, opposes most or all of the 4 policies you listed to point of promising veto’s, the 26 Blue Dogs you refer to were chosen by design by “progressives” to provide an excuse for Dems not to be progressive, and those Blue Dogs are often Republicans the Dems donors persuade to register as Dems and run as pretend Dems to kill any progressive agenda. In other words, Biden like Obama will get exactly what he wants – grid Lock.
I’d like to see healthcare reform……the corporate dominated healthcare system is rotten to the core. The biggest rip-off of all time.
Single payer looks to me like the best option. I have been a healthcare practitioner under a variety of systems, corporate and state run…and when we had single payer Medicaid in Texas during the middle part of my practice career, both doctors and patient benefited from it…..the only losers were insurance companies…and they fixed that by some seriously good lobbying and what amounted to a golden parachute for Rick Perry when he left office.
Now we have austerity for doctors and patients…and Medicaid insurance by companies that have enough profits to advertise daily on major media platforms and to pay huge bonuses to their fat cat CEO’s.
But I never expected to see single payer healthcare from Biden and our current batch of congresspersons…they know which side their bread is buttered on….what ordinary people need or even want doesn’t matter much today. And if single payer were to get much traction, Big Insurance will unleash another big round of fear-mongering from their highly effective merchants of doubt. Just like they did in 2008.
For every $1 we spend giving MedicareForAll to everyone, we save about $2. But fake news MSM constantly tell we can’t afford it. They are telling us we can’t afford to save money.
The ACA was awful and when it went into place, I remember the GOP screaming that this was just the foot in the door leading to single-payer and the Dems basically countering with “yes.”
Yeah, on the surface, single-payer would eliminate insurance and be better than the ACA’s system, but that doesn’t make it right.
I sure as hell wouldn’t trust its implementation to the same Party that ceded its legislative power to Big Pharma and the health insurance lobbyists and let them write the bill (remember the “we have to pass it to know what’s in it…” thousands of pages dumped to Congress just before the vote).
I have 0 faith in Dems to improve the broken mess that they created in 2009/2010. And now they’d be more focused that the bill was “equitable” than sane.
If they win the Senate, for 2 years we’ll see SJW equity nonsense, dumped on Congress in 3000-page Friday-night bills for Monday-morning votes.
“Yeah, on the surface, single-payer would eliminate insurance and be better than the ACA’s system, but that doesn’t make it right.”
No, single payer proposals bypass insurance as it serves not useful purpose. It just takes 20% off the top as a intermediary for no reason. It a nation insures itself for healthcare, it’s already doing the job of insurance companies so they become supurflous. That’s the point. Insurance companies are parasites that have been artificially placed inbetween us and healthcare for no reason but to jack up costs and deny us healthcare.
The would end…END the ACA.
Being an economics blog, would someone please explain how the US is ever going to have affordable healthcare? Six in 10 adults in the US have a chronic disease with 4 in 10 having 2 or more. Sixty-five million Americans are currently living with an incurable sexually transmitted disease. An additional 15 million people become infected with one or more STDs each year, roughly half of whom contract lifelong infections. Despite warnings about cigarette smoking, 18% of the population still smokes. We have 18 million alcoholics and 20 million illegal drug users. We don’t have a healthcare system but a sick (palliative) care system with doctors ensuring people are comfortable in their illnesses. How do you have health insurance spreading the risk of a few over the many when the many are sick? What exactly do you mean by “reform?” While the causes of this travesty of sickness are many, much is lifestyle related and chosen. Much like grifter businesses who privatize their profit and socialize their costs, some Americans want to their freedom to indulge their appetites and then dump their medical costs on the community at large. Freedom without responsibility is chaos and unless the root causes of our healthcare crisis are addressed, simply making it single payer does nothing but increase the number of wallets to be fleeced.
One way to reform is to reduce overhead The expanse of middle management and administrative staffing in healthcare (due to various reasons) has caused a big uptick in costs. https://fee.org/articles/the-chart-that-could-undo-the-us-healthcare-system/ *note the graph which has been published widely comparing the growth in HCW costs vs administrative costs. Another way is to discourage the corporate healthcare monopolies which are becoming managed by hedgies and so are mechanistically profit oriented imho. Prescription costs is a complicated issue; obviously more emphasis on preventing/treating diabetes, insulin resistance, addictions and other underlying comorbiidies could help as well. Public health efforts have put a big dent in smoking and could help with the obesity/diabetes epidemics as well.
Biden has no progressive agenda. That was done merely to win elections. Governing is a different matter. Biden and Blue Dog Dems are where most of the country is – socially moderate and fiscally moderate. The Dems should try to suppress the Trump vote in GA but I think sanity prevails for 2 years in America as things get back to normal by summer 2021.
A friend of mine pointed out the same thing. You both have a point. But if Democrats had a Blue Wave, Biden would have gone along for the ride, not resisted it.
As you said, even winning both seats in GA wouldn’t change that. But it would give Blue Dog Dems and moderate Republicans the power to pass a lot of legislation without being obstructed by McConnell wing of the party. I actually think Biden separated himself from Obama when he said in one of the debates that “he was only Vice President”. Biden also said to Trump in a debate that he won because he is not as fringe as the left wing of the party that Trump claims and this is why he won the primary. In my opinion, the DNC set it up so that he could win by running a lot of candidates that turned out to support him (Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Warren to a lesser extent. They didn’t want to repeat the mistake of 2016 when it was just Hillary vs Bernie and half the Bernie voters didn’t show up for the general and cost them the election. In the end, Biden won because people turned out to vote for him and against Trump. There is no way he would have won otherwise given Trump’s vote count. People chose sanity over insanity but it turns out that is where the country is.
Yup, the Swamp will now regroup. This time it will build impenetrable firewalls to see to it that it stays in power for generations.
Finally, our economic guru who now gives us politics has a comment I can agree with.
Thanks for sticking in then. Expect more political comments you will agree with.
I tend to bash the party holding the White House because they are more responsible.
But I always do so on principle, not party lines.
Maybe they can take out a mortgage on the land they just put into trust?