On Sunday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went on television and mixed up Iran and Israel. “We passed the support for Iran many months ago,” he told Meet the Press, erroneously referring to an aid package for the Jewish state. Last night, the Fox News prime-time host Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as hailing from South Carolina. I once joined a cable-news panel where one of the participants kept confusing then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions with Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. I don’t hold these errors against anyone, as they are some of the most common miscues made by people who talk for a living—and I’m sure my time will come.
Yesterday, President Joe Biden added another example to this list. In response to a question about Gaza, he referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the president of Mexico. The substance of Biden’s answer was perfectly cogent. The off-the-cuff response included geographic and policy details not just about Egypt, but about multiple Middle Eastern players that most Americans probably couldn’t even name. The president clearly knew whom and what he was talking about; he just slipped up the same way Johnson and so many others have. But the flub could not have come at a worse time. Because the press conference had been called to respond to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, which dubbed the president an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the Mexico gaffe was immediately cast by critics as confirmation of Biden’s cognitive collapse.
But the truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slatelaconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading. This is why Biden’s signature moments as a politician have been not set-piece speeches, but off-the-cuff encounters, such as when he kneltto engage elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel so they would not have to stand, and when he befriended a security guard in an elevator at The New York Times on his way to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board, which declined to endorse him. And it’s why Biden’s key accomplishments—such as the landmark climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first gun-control bill in decades, and the expected expansion of the child tax credit—have come through Congress. The president’s strength is not orating, but legislating; not inspiring a crowd, but connecting with individuals…
As Slate observed in 2008, the frequency of Biden’s rhetorical miscues helped neutralize them in the eyes of the public. In 2024, Biden will have an assist from another source: Donald Trump. Among other recent lapses, the former president has called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey,” confused Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly expressed the strange belief that he won the 2020 election. With an opponent prone to vastly worse feats of viscous verbosity, Biden can’t help but look better by comparison, especially if he starts playing offense instead of defense…
Garry Rayno has been covering New Hampshire politics for decades. He writes in InDepthNH with a sense of astonishment about the Legislature’s eagerness to remove the income limits on the state’s recently enacted vouchers, noting that vouchers (called “Education Freedom Accounts”) are claimed mostly by families whose kids never attended public schools and that vouchers are likely to bust the state’s budget. The state’s education commissioner Frank Edelblut homeschooled his children, and he seems to view public schools with contempt. He was appointed by Governor Chris Sununu.
He writes:
…Two of the three bills would either remove any income cap or have a list of situations that automatically would qualify a student for the program, making both bills about universal vouchers with no limits on parents’ income.
The first year of New Hampshire’s EFA program, the income limit was 300 percent of federal poverty, and that was increased last session to 350 percent.
House Bill 1665 would increase the income cap to 500 percent of poverty or over $150,000 for a family of four, which is just over the state’s median income, which means slightly more than half the families in the state would qualify.
And yes the greatest use of the EFA program money continues to be for tuition at private and religious schools and homeschool programs for kids who were not in public schools when the EFA program began in 2021.
House Bill 1634 would remove any income cap from the program and House Bill 1561 has nine categories with automatic eligibility, which together, provide parents with an opportunity to successfully find a reason to have their student or students qualify.
Reaching Higher NH estimates if all the students in private or religious schools or homeschools qualify for an EFA, it would cost the state about $105 million, which is a far cry from the $300,000 Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut claimed would be the first year cost of the program.
But his estimate was much less than the real cost — $8 million — the first year, and $15 million the second year and as estimated $25 million this school year.
That is money that comes from the Education Trust Fund which is used for the adequacy grants to all school districts and charter schools, special education costs, building aid and transportation.
The fund currently has a $200 million surplus but that won’t last long if the program balloons to over $100 million a year…
To date about half the states have a voucher program of some kind, most not universal or as expansive as New Hampshire’s. A handful of states have universal programs.
If you wonder what can happen with these programs when they become universal, look at Arizona.
The state’s first school voucher plan using money that would have gone to public schools — like New Hampshire’s does — began in 2011.
A proposition for a universal plan was defeated by voters in 2018, but the Republican controlled Legislature approved a universal plan in 2022 and it was signed by then outgoing Gov. Doug Doucey.
Newly elected Democratic Gov. and former Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, tried to do away with the universal plan her first year in office, but was blocked by the Republican legislature. This year she wants some guardrails and transparency for the program, but the legislature is not likely to agree.
The Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program costs the state $1 billion annually and is the biggest driver in the state’s growing budget deficit of $400 million.
Criticism of the program includes using the state money for ski passes, piano purchases and other “luxuries.”
When the program expanded, about 75 percent of the new students were never public school students, much like New Hampshire’s experience.
Another universal program is in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed through expanding their voucher program to universal last year as he prepared to run for the GOP nomination for president.
Among the complaints after the universal program began, ironically, was state money was used for tickets to Disney World.
Idaho and Utah also have universal programs and Indiana’s covers 97 percent of the state’s students.
Most states limit eligibility for the program to less than 300 percent so currently New Hampshire is more generous than any state that does not have universal voucher programs.
For example, Maryland limits participants to185 percent, North Carolina 133 percent, Ohio 200 percent, and South Carolina to Medicaid recipients.
There are several other bills dealing with the EFA program that will come before the Legislature this year including two that would allow any student turned down for a hardship placement in another school district would automatically qualify for the EFA program the next year.
Another bill takes aim at the organization that administers the EFA program. It would require the Children’s Scholarship Fund to establish an affiliate in New Hampshire as it has in every other state where it runs their voucher programs.
This push to move money out of public education and into private entities is not unique to New Hampshire.
The last several years, many states have had bills similar to the one that made it through New Hampshire in the 2021-2022 biennial budget, as it had trouble standing on its own.
There is a great deal of dark money behind this push coming from familiar places like the Devos and the Koch Foundation and it is not all about the quality of education as they would like you to believe.
One of the last healthy bastions of unionized labor is teacher unions and many involved in the push for school choice want to see that change.
There is one bill in the Senate and one in the House that would establish the position of part-time teacher, someone who works less than 30 hours a week and does not need Department of Education credentials.
The war on public institutions is not always what it appears to be, but you can be assured at the heart of it is big money, taxes and small government.
The New York Times speculates that the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to forge a “grand bargain” in dealing with the legal travails of Trump: a win in the Colorado case, a loss in Trump’s claim of sbsolute immunity. That would be a good outcome, on balance, as there might be time for Trump to be tried in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s court before the election. That is, if the high court renders a speedy decision in the immunity case.
There’s every reason to expect or hope that the Supreme Court will refuse to hear the immunity case, the one where Trump claims that he is immune from any liability, civil or criminal, for actions that he took as president.
The District Court—Judge Chutkan—ruled against him. The Appeals Court wrote a unanimous, stinging critique of his claim.
The Times wrote that his victory in the Colorado case would be balanced by his loss in the immunity case.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his colleagues seemed ready on Thursday to start to rebuild the court’s reputation by presenting themselves as unified and apolitical.
He has had a bumpy ride of late, what with the leak of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, an inconclusive investigation into that breach, a lonely concurrence in the decision itself and ethics scandals followed by a toothless code meant to address them.
All of this has contributed to dips in the Supreme Court’s approval ratings, as large segments of the public have increasingly viewed it as swayed by politics rather than committed to neutral principles and the rule of law.
Judging by the justices’ questions in arguments on Thursday over former President Donald J. Trump’s eligibility to hold office again, they will rule that Mr. Trump can remain on the primary ballot in Colorado and on other ballots around the nation — and by a lopsided, if not unanimous, vote.
But if the chief justice’s project of evenhanded nonpartisanship is to prevail, the court will have to rule against Mr. Trump in a separate case heading to the court, the one in which he claims absolute immunity from prosecution for his conduct leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021.
Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in Slate that the outline of a “grand bargain” was coming into view.
“The Supreme Court unanimously, or nearly so, holds that Colorado does not have the power to remove Donald Trump from the ballot, but in a separate case it rejects his immunity argument and makes Trump go on trial this spring or summer on federal election subversion charges,” he wrote.
Will the Trump trial happen before the election? That’s the question.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert K. Hur as Special Counsel to investigate the documents that President Biden retained after he left office in early 2017.
Hur released his report, and he exonerated Biden of any criminal behavior.
But his report included scathing comments about Biden, disparaging his mental acuity.
Consider the disparate treatment of Biden and Trump. Biden promptly returned any documents; Trump resisted the government’s demand for his top secret, highly classified documents. Biden sat for a five-hour interview; Trump, to our knowledge, never submitted to an interview. So far as we know, Biden did not retain highly classified documents as Trump did.
So why the ad hominem comments that damage Biden politically?
Hur, a Republican, served as U.S. attorney of Maryland from 2018 to 2021, after being appointed by former President Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions. He previously clerked for two well-known conservative judges, including archconservative Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.
Hur left his U.S. attorney post in 2021 to become a partner at the D.C.-based law firm Gibson Dunn. He was there until last January, when Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped him to oversee the department’s probe into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified materials.
“Mr. Hur has a long and distinguished career as a prosecutor,” Garland said when announcing Hur as his pick for special counsel. “I am confident that Mr. Hur will carry out his responsibility in an even-handed and urgent manner, and in accordance with the highest traditions of this Department.”
As Hur’s investigation of Biden began, he vowed to carry it out “with fair, impartial, and dispassionate judgment.”
“I intend to follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly, without fear or favor, and will honor the trust placed in me to perform this service,” he said at the time.
While Hur ultimately cleared Biden of any wrongdoing, he knocked the president’s mental acuity ― a detail that some Democrats said was extraneous, strange and unfair…
Hur’s mandate “was to judge whether a crime was committed… not speculate on what the jury would do, not to speculate on how full or sharp Joe Biden’s mind is,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) similarly said.
Prior to being U.S. attorney, Hur was an assistant U.S. attorney for Maryland for seven years. He also clerked for Rehnquist and for former Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Kozinski is perhaps best known for stepping down in disgrace in 2017 after more than a dozen former female law clerks and staffers accused him of sexual harassment and abuse.
Garland’s belief that Hur would carry out his assignment in an “even-handed” way “in accordance with the highest traditions” of the Justice Department was misplaced. Hur’s pledge that he would deliver a report that was “fair, impartial, and dispassionate” was untrue.
Garland wanted to demonstrate his integrity by choosing an investigator with sterling conservative credentials.
He would have been far wiser to have chosen a career prosecutor known for integrity and a nonpolitical history, never having been appointed by a Democrat or a Republican.
Sometimes bending over backwards to prove your own fairness can go to extremes.
Twenty-five of the nation’s leading historians submitted an amici curiae brief in support of the decision by Colorado’s Supreme Court to disqualify Donald Trump as a candidate for the Presidency. The signers are scholars of the Reconstruction era, when the Fourteenth Amendment was written. They address with admirable clarity the issues in the case.
The issue they did not address is the one the Supreme Court justices focused on: can one state remove a candidate from its ballot? Would this create incentive for Trump states to remove Biden? Would this lead to chaos, a Trump specialty?
This is the language at the center of the case:
Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Other Rights
Section 3 Disqualification from Holding OfficeNo person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The lower court in Colorado ruled against disqualification on the grounds that the President of the United States is not “an officer” of the federal government. As it happens, the issue was discussed by members of Congress when they wrote Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Some of Trump’s defenders claim that Congress never passed any enabling legislation. This issue was debated by Congress at the time.
Imagine this scenario: the hard-right president of the country warns that his upcoming re-election campaign will be rigged against him. He loses the election. He refuses to concede. He rallies his followers against the election, insisting it was stolen. His followers storm government offices in protest. His attempted coup fails. He was just arrested along with his top aides.
But it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Jair Bolsonaro, who looked up to Trump as his model.
Former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil oversaw a broad conspiracy to hold on to power regardless of the results of the 2022 election, including personally editing a proposed order to arrest a Supreme Court justice and call new elections after he lost, according to new accusations by Brazilian federal police unveiled on Thursday.
Mr. Bolsonaro and dozens of top aides, ministers and military leaders coordinated to undermine the Brazilian public’s faith in the election and set the stage for a potential coup, the federal police said.
Their efforts included spreading information about voter fraud, drafting legal arguments for new elections, recruiting military personnel to support a coup, surveilling judges and encouraging and guiding protesters who eventually raided government buildings, police said.
Apparently justice is swifter in Brazil than in the United States.
I received a fundraising letter for a teacher who is running for the Legislature. It was forwarded to me by a friend who lives in the district. I read his letter and immediately sent Derek Reich a donation to his campaign.
Dear Friend,
I’m Derek Reich, a local high school government teacher here in Sarasota. I’m now the Democrat running to be your state representative in District 73 so I can fully fund our children’s public schools, lower homeowner’s insurance, and restore a woman’s freedom to control her body.
I was born and raised in Sarasota County, and never envisioned myself running for office. But when Fiona McFarLand, our current representative, voted to cut $12 million in funding from our public schools, I was outraged. What representative would go to Tallahassee to cut funding from their own community’s children? She also voted for no exceptions for rape or incest in Florida’s new abortion law. Enough is enough. I will fight for my hometown and for all of my neighbors in Sarasota County who are being ignored by Tallahassee politicians.
This is the most competitive state house race in Florida. In 2020, Biden and Trump practically tied it at 49% each. I am going to flip this seat, and I hope to earn your support to do it. If you want to learn more about my campaign and the issues I’m fighting for, you can visit my website: https://derekforflorida.com/.
We’re working to build the campaign needed to get our message out by the voters, and any support you can give would help us knock doors and let voters know what our opponent is doing in Tallahassee. If you’re able to help, you can donate securely online at this link.
Let’s send this #TeacherToTallahassee
Sincerely, Derek Reich Teacher, Candidate for State Representative
The supermajority of Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are driving fast and hard to enact universal vouchers, which means the state will subsidize the tuition of students in private and religious schools, regardless of family income. In every other state that has adopted universal vouchers, most of the students who sought them had never attended public schools. The voucher was used by families who could afford to pay tuition. The voucher was a nice plum for families that didn’t need it. And many of the voucher/receiving schools were openly discriminatory—against students not of their own religion, against LGBT students, against students with disabilities.
Cc: Unity Group of Chattanooga Opposition to Universal School Voucher Program
This week, the Tennessee General Assembly is expected to begin the process of crafting legislation that would permanently affix universal school vouchers throughout the State.
On the surface, this would appear to be a worthwhile and noble goal. We hear numerous romanticized soliloquies to describe why this is justified, such as providing expanded access, flexibility, choice, and opportunity. The glossy and rosy pictures they paint would have one to believe that universal vouchers were the best thing for schools and students since assorted Crayola boxes, number two pencils, and Mr. Rodgers and Sesame Street starting on PBS.
Yet, the research and data paint a starkly different picture. In fact, at a budget hearing held in November 2023, the State’s own Department of Education had to concede that 63 of the 75 schools that received funding from the State’s budget program, well over 80%, were “private “religious “schools in nature. Even more shocking is that last week, a report from the Education Trust concluded that 39% of TN school districts receive less in per-student funding than students that used private school vouchers.
Also last week, a draft plan of the proposed legislation was leaked that illustrated that the expanded voucher program would have no accountability measures, no anti-discrimination provisions, and no safeguards for students with disabilities. It is no wonder that there was consideration to forgo federal education funding because not only does this proposal not pass the smell test, but it very well could be in violation of federal law under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
As a matter of record, there have already been multiple lawsuits launched that have challenged the constitutionality of the State’s voucher program, and in fact in January the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that Davidson and Shelby County families could go forward with a potential suit.
From a fiscal management sense, the projected amount universal vouchers will cost Tennessee taxpayers is murky at best. If the budget shortfalls we have seen occur in other States are any indicator, then we can expect major cost overruns that will go down the well so deep it will eventually run dry.
A 2023 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Education Law Center provides a good analysis on this. In The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, it was found that between 2008-2019, voucher disbursements in at least 7 states doubled in contrast to initial budgetary projections.
In Arizona alone, voucher spending for the current academic year is more than 300 million over initial estimates; it is expected that the State may spend close to 1 billion dollars for their voucher program. In North Carolina, there were reports where some schools received more vouchers than they had students. There are also numerous reports that voucher recipients from states across the country have made highly questionable purchases like theme park tickets, kayaks, trampolines and yes, in one instance a chicken coop.
It does beg the question, will one able to use universal voucher funds to build a chicken coop in Tennessee as we have witnessed in other states.
Perhaps most profoundly, the process in which the universal voucher program is being crafted is both procedurally and fundamentally flawed. While there has been a basic framework “leaked” to the public, there remains critical questions about transparency, accountability, and oversight. The general publichas received little to no official details on this plan, only that the voucher program is being filed as a caption bill which, if we can borrow from a metaphor taught to our youngest students, lacks the “who, what, when, where, why, and how.”
In a perfect world, legislation of such consequence would merit a public hearing where experts on all sides would gather to provide analysis, evaluation, insights, and recommendations. The directly impacted people such as your local school boards and local education agencies would be invited to detail if the proposed legislation would have a positive or negative effect on them. The people of Tennessee, the taxpayers who would ultimately have to foot the bill, would be allowed to give sworn testimonies like they do in their city councils, county commissions and school boards.
Without such a process along these lines, can the legislators in Nashville really be able to measure the temperature across the State? Will they truly be able to establish public faith, confidence or trust if a potentially harmful program is simply ramrodded down the taxpayer’s proverbial throats?
The Economic Policy Institute released a rather frank and somber assessment on the growing school voucher moment in 2023 entitled, “State and local experience proves school vouchers are a failed policy that must be opposed.” They noted that at least 23 voucher bills were introduced in state houses last year, with universal bills passing. They noted that there is, “growing evidence that voucher programs do not serve students and may deepen educational and economic inequality.”
Further assessments found within the report are: (1) Evidence and research suggests vouchers do not improve academic achievement or education outcomes; (2) Vouchers represented a redistribution of school funding; (3) Vouchers benefited more wealthy and affluent areas over low income and rural. Amongst other major points of contention, one of the more profound conclusions of this analysis is that universal vouchers are, “Ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable.”
A decision that will affect schools and districts throughout the State, rural and urban, merits greater public discourse, fiscal analysis, and research-based evidence. The lack of this type of transparency will truly make the universal voucher program, “Ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable.” For these reasons, the Unity Group of Chattanooga must be adamantly opposed because this program will not solely be about autonomy, school choice or expanded options, rather, it will be ushering in a new era of Separate but Equal; and for the sake of our children, we must be better than that.
The latest jobs report was released a few days ago, and economists were astonished. The economy added 353,000 jobs in the past month, and unemployment remained low at 3.7%. This should be good news for Biden, But consumers are still concerned about inflation, which hits them in their pocketbook.
President Biden came into office in the midst of a global pandemic. Supply chains were disrupted, and prices were soaring in response. After the chaos of the Trump years, Biden set about hiring seasoned Cabinet officers and a strong economic team. Although the experts predicted that the instability of the COVID years would be followed by a deep recession, that’s not what happened. Throughout Biden’s term, unemployment remained low; the stock market reached historic records; manufacturing revived; and the U.S. economy outperformed nations in Europe and Asia. Yet public opinion polls showed a different picture: Consumers knew that the price of gasoline and grocery store staples went up and didn’t go down. Biden got no credit for the healthy economy because of the price of eggs, cereal, and other staples.
Joe Biden’s opponents focus on his age as something that makes him doddering, confused and ultimately unfit for office. So the great paradox of the 81-year-old’s first term is that he has presided over perhaps the most energetic American government in nearly half a century. He unleashed a surge in spending that briefly slashed the childhood poverty rate in half. He breathed life into a beleaguered union movement. And he produced an industrial policy that aims to reshape the American economy.
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There is plenty to debate about the merits of all of this. A steep rise in federal spending has aggravated the country’s worrying fiscal trajectory. Subsidies for companies to invest in America have angered allies and may yet end up going to waste. But there is no denying that many of these policies are already having an impact. Just look at the boom in factory construction: even accounting for inflation, investment in manufacturing facilities has more than doubled under Mr Biden, soaring to its highest on record.
What would he do in a second term? Mr Biden’s re-election motto—“we can finish the job”—sounds more like a home contractor’s pledge than the rhetoric of a political firebrand. Yet to hear it from the president’s current and former advisers, Bidenomics amounts to little short of an economic revolution for America. It would be a revolution shaped by faith in government and a mistrust of markets.
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Five elements stand out. The first is a desire to boost workers, mostly through unions. The second is more social spending, especially on early-childhood education. Third is tougher competition policy to restrain big business. Fourth, a wave of investment intended to make America both greener and more productive. Last, Mr Biden wants to tax large firms and the wealthy to pay for much of this.
As with any president, Mr Biden’s agenda thus far has been limited by Congress. The five elements were all present in the $3.5trn “Build Back Better” bill that Democrats in the House of Representatives backed in 2021, only to run smack into a split Senate. The result is that the most prominent part of existing Bidenomics has been the investment element, comprising three pieces of legislation focused on infrastructure, semiconductors and green tech. Signing three big spending bills into law nevertheless counts as a productive presidential term. They add up to a $2trn push to reshape the American economy.
If Mr Biden returns to the White House for a second term but Republicans retain control of the House or gain the Senate, or potentially both, advisers say that his focus would be on defending his legislative accomplishments. Although Republicans would be unable to overturn his investment packages if they did not hold the presidency, they could chip away at them.
Take the semiconductor law. Along with some $50bn for the chips industry, it also included nearly $200bn in funding for research and development of cutting-edge technologies, from advanced materials to quantum computing. But that giant slug of cash was only authorised, not appropriated, meaning it is up to Congress to pass budgets to provide the promised amount. So far it is falling well short: in the current fiscal year, it is on track to give $19bn to three federal research agencies, including the National Science Foundation, which is nearly 30% less than the authorised level, according to estimates by Matt Hourihan of the Federation of American Scientists, a lobby group. If Congress refuses to work with Mr Biden, these shortfalls will grow.
The funding directed at infrastructure and semiconductors is more secure, but much of it will run out by 2028, before the end of a second term. Without Republican support for funding, the investment kick-started over the past couple of years may ease off. High-cost producers will struggle to survive. Critics may see no reason to devote so much treasure to manufacturing when a modern economy based on professional, technical and scientific services already generates plenty of well-paying jobs.
But Mr Biden will have some leverage if Republicans try to water down his policies. Many of the big tax cuts passed during Donald Trump’s presidency expire at the end of 2025. Republicans want to renew them, to avoid income-tax rates jumping up. So one possibility is that Mr Biden could fashion a deal in which he agrees to an extension of many of the tax cuts in exchange for Republicans in Congress backing some of his priorities, including his industrial subsidies—never mind that such an agreement would be fiscally reckless.
The White House is also hoping that Mr Biden’s investment programmes will develop momentum of their own. “We are very pleasantly surprised by the extent to which private capital has flowed in the direction of our incentives,” says Jared Bernstein, chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Much of the money is going to red states, spawning constituencies of businesses and local politicians who would object to cuts. Meanwhile, there is, in principle, bipartisan support for federal spending on science and technology as a way of safeguarding America’s competitive edge over China. That is why a few dozen Republicans in the House and Senate, albeit a minority, voted for the semiconductor package. Given this constellation of interests and leverage, the industrial policies that defined Bidenomics in the president’s first term would probably survive his second term, albeit in somewhat more limited form.
But what if Mr Biden is less constrained? To really understand the potential scope of Bidenomics, it is worth asking what the president would do if the Democrats end up controlling both houses of Congress. Once they come down from their elation at such an outcome, the team around Mr Biden would know that they have a limited window—probably just two years, until the next set of midterm elections—to get anything of note done.
For starters they would turn to the social policies left on the Build Back Better cutting-room floor. These include free pre-school for three- and four-year-olds, generous child-care subsidies, spending on elderly care, an expanded tax credit for families with children and paid parental leave. Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, has described this agenda as “modern supply-side economics”. She argues that investments in education would make American workers more productive, while investments in care would free up people, especially women, to work, leading to a bigger labour force. But it would also be costly, running to at least $100bn a year of additional spending—adding half a percentage point to the annual federal deficit (which hit 7.5% of gdp in 2023). And implementation would be challenging. For instance, funding for child care would fuel demand for it, which in turn would exacerbate a chronic shortage of caregivers.
Mr Biden’s desire to strengthen unions would also receive fresh impetus. The president describes himself as the most pro-union president in American history—a claim that may well be true. In his first term support for unions was expressed most clearly through words and symbolic actions: when he joined striking auto workers near Detroit in September, he became the first president to walk a picket line. Mr Biden would have liked to have done more. He had at first wanted to make many industrial subsidies contingent on companies hiring unionised workers, a requirement that did not make it into law. The labour movement’s big hope for a second Biden term is passage of the pro Act, which would boost collective bargaining by, among other things, making it harder for firms to intervene in union votes. That would represent a gamble: the flexibility of America’s labour market is a source of resilience for the economy, which has been good to workers in recent years.
The flipside of Mr Biden craving approbation as a pro-union president is that he has also come to be seen as anti-business. Members of his cabinet bridle at this charge, noting that corporate profits have soared and that entrepreneurs have created a record number of businesses during his first term. Yet the single biggest reason why Bidenomics has got a bad rap has been his competition agenda, led by Lina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission (ftc). Although her efforts to cut down corporate giants have spluttered, with failed lawsuits against Meta and Microsoft, she is not done. The ftc has introduced new merger-review guidelines that require regulators to scrutinise just about any deal that makes big companies bigger, which could produce even more contentious competition policy. Excessive scrutiny of deals would also use up regulators’ scarce resources and poison the atmosphere for big business. An alternative focus, on relaxing land-use restrictions and loosening up occupation licensing, would provide a much healthier boost to competition.
Captain of Industry
At the same time, Mr Biden may double down on the manufacturing policies of his first term. The $50bn or so of incentives for the semiconductor industry has been a start, but it is small relative to how much investment is required for large chip plants. Advisers talk of a follow-on funding package. There would also be a desire to craft new legislation to smooth out bumps in the implementation of industrial policy. Todd Tucker of the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think-tank, advocates a national development bank, creating a reservoir of cash that could be channelled to deserving projects.
How to pay for it all? Mr Biden has long made clear that he wishes to raise taxes on the rich, in particular on households earning over $400,000 a year and on businesses. The president’s advisers argue that he truly believes in fiscal discipline. His budget for the current fiscal year would, for instance, cut the deficit by $3trn over a decade, or by 1% of gdp a year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (crfb), a non-profit outfit. That, however, is predicated on Democrats exercising restraint as tax receipts increase—something that is hard to imagine, says Maya MacGuineas of the crfb….
Most of the action, then, would be in the domestic arena—the battleground for everything from child-care spending to semiconductor subsidies. Supporters argue that these policies would make America more equal, propel its industry and tilt the playing-field towards workers and away from bosses. To many others, they look like a lurch back to bigger government, with an outdated focus on both manufacturing and unions, which may strain ties with allies. Mr Biden was a most unlikely radical in his first term. If the polls head his way, he may go further yet in a second. 7
Several weeks ago, the Charlotte News-Observer in North Carolina, reported that a charter school —Children’s Village Academy—was under investigation because a member of its board was paid more than $140,000 in interest on a loan to the school of $180,000. The member in question is a high-level federal official, Dr. Peggy Carr, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a federal agency that oversees data collection, issues reports, and supervises the NAEP assessment program.
The state ordered the school to repay money it is accused of spending inappropriately. The charter itself is under review as to whether it will lose its charter. As a side note, NCES tweeted a congratulatory note about School Choice Week, an unusual move for a statistical agency.
The latest update:
A North Carolina charter school tied to a high-ranking federal official has been ordered by the state to repay $162,597 it’s accused of inappropriately spending.
The state Department of Public Instruction presented reports in December alleging conflict of interest violations and misspending of state and federal dollars at Children’s Village Academy in Kinston. On Monday, DPI sent the school a letter ordering it to repay $162,597 in “unallowable costs” in the next 10 days.
The letter comes as the state Office of Charter Schools has recommended that both Children’s Village Academy and Ridgeview Charter School in Gastonia lose their charters when they expire in June. The Charter Schools Review Board will vote in March whether to renew the schools.
On Monday, Children’s Village leaders told the Review Board that it’s addressing the concerns, including investigating questioned financial transactions and improving its internal control policies….
Many of the questions have revolved around the school’s dealings with Peggy Carr, the vice chair of Children’s Village’s board of directors…
Carr is commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education. The center oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly called NAEP, which is a series of national tests given to assess the state of education.
Carr’s family founded Children’s Village Academy in Lenoir County in 1997. In 2008, Carr gave the school a loan of $188,000 to help it get through a financial crisis.
DPI questioned the documentation of the loan and how Carr has received more than $140,000 in interest payments so far.
“Although the reports do not say so expressly, they implicitly allege that the board should not have taken out the loan, or that it paid too much interest,” Matthew Tilley, Carr’s lawyer, wrote in a letter to the Review Board.
“Those allegations, however, are unfounded and would require DPI or the CSRB to second-guess the board’s business judgment.”
Tilley said that the amount repaid in interest was reasonable for a 15-year loan. But Tilley said that both his client and the school agree that the loan could have been “better documented.”
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