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The Wave of the Future: Surge Pricing for Everything

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2024 //
12

Sarah Jaffe wrote in The American Prospect about the latest way to extract profit from consumers: surge pricing. It’s not only Uber and Lyft. It’s spreading into every corner of business.

She writes:

The internet nearly exploded this February when Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner announced that the fast-food chain intended to embrace “surge pricing,” raising the prices of a burger and a Frosty in line with customer demand.

The company had included a mention of “dynamic pricing” in its fourth-quarter earnings presentation, but clarified after the kerfuffle that the announcement of its new digital menu displays had been “misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest,” and said that it had “no plans to do that.” Instead, the new system would merely allow Wendy’s to “offer discounts and value offers to our customers more easily.”

The snark, which included Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), ranged from pure outrage to questions of whether the company would also offer “surge pay” to its low-wage workforce. But it’s not like Wendy’s invented price-gouging. A quarter-century earlier, Coca-Cola’s CEO mused about equipping its vending machines with thermometers, and triggering them to raise the price of a soda on a hot day. People hated that too; we just didn’t have social media then.

Wendy’s and Coke aside, surge pricing is spreading. Since deregulation in the late 1970s, airlines have used a form of it, with flights costing more at short notice or at high-demand times of year. Now, the practice has crept into golf courses, hotel rooms, gyms, pubs, and concert venues. Amazon alters its prices every ten minutes. Like Wendy’s, brick-and-mortar retailers are moving to digital price tags, allowing them to surge at will. Consulting firms like Sauce Pricing promise automatic surge pricing at restaurants to boost revenues. A chain bowling alley called Bowlero charged $418.90for two lanes one day last year. Surge pricing “will eventually be everywhere,” the Financial Times, that chronicler of modern capitalism, said last September.

Customers tend to want to know in advance how much something will cost, and though we’re used to the cost of a gallon of gas, or even a quart of milk or a can of Coke, changing over time, those things tend not to fluctuate rapidly over the course of a day or even an hour. People make a distinction between things you need right away and things you could wait for; between luxury items, like market-price lobster at the hottest restaurant in town, and something we all know is cheap and easy, like a Wendy’s cheeseburger.

As companies gather more data available on consumer preferences, the process of algorithmically adjusting prices rapidly based on supply and demand will get easier, affecting all sorts of goods and services we’ve grown to count on. And there’s a case study in how this affects not only consumers but the workers who serve them. You encounter it every time you hit up your phone to find a way home.

IN RECENT YEARS, “SURGE PRICING” has been mostly associated with rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft. It was one of Uber’s earliest sources of bad press, even back when the tech press mostly penned breathless paeans to genius founder-disruptors. Uber took advantage of dysfunctional taxi systems in cities like Washington, D.C., to win goodwill, according to Kafui Attoh, associate professor of urban studies at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies and co-author of Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City.

The pricing system was justified as a way to encourage drivers to come out at peak times by offering them more money, something that a regulated taxi system could not offer. It worked, ostensibly, by some combination of three incentives: reducing demand for rides because fewer people could afford the higher price; offering drivers a higher rate if they hit the road; and getting already-working drivers to head to the high-rate zone.

But regulated taxi systems at least offered a steady price that users could count on, whereas Uber’s sudden price spikes turned a short ride home into a luxury good. Uber spokespeople would suggest that riders simply wait for prices to fall again, but anyone who’s ever been stranded at closing time or missed the last subway knows that waiting sometimes isn’t an option.

Please keep reading by opening the link.

Categories Economy, For-Profit

Dan Rather on the Republican Convention

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2024 //
36

Dan Rather is gobsmacked by the short memories of the delegates at the RNC. How could they have wiped their memories of the insurrection of January 6? How could they take pride in nominating a convicted felon? How could they opine for the Trump economy when Biden’s economy has been so successful? How could they endorse a man who still insists that he won in 2020 without a scintilla of evidence? Sore loser.

He writes:

At their convention in Milwaukee, Republicans see themselves as celebrating what they are convinced is going to be not only a win in November, but an overwhelming one. Among delegates and others on the convention floor and around the hall, there is much chatter about an “avalanche” building. 

This, as they have nominated for president a man who tried to overthrow our government.

Their hope is that a majority of voters will simply forget all Donald Trump has done to help himself and hurt this country. That strikes many Americans as falling in the narrow space between revolting and appalling. 

And my goodness, the lies are flying fast and furious at the Republican fantasy convention. This glitzed-up affair is full of speeches that don’t even come close to the truth. Here’s how bad it is: Some major news organizations (although unfortunately not all) are fact-checking the speeches live, calling out the lies in real time. 

But it’s more than that. Republicans must believe Americans are in a mood to forgive and forget. To forgive the insurrection of January 6 and forget the fact that the former president kept top-secret documents strewn about Mar-a-Lago like last month’s junk mail, among many other indiscretions.

How much airtime and how many column inches will be devoted this week to what the previous president has done to harm our democracy? My guess is almost none. Instead there will be a celebration, one devoid of context. It will be an anointing without proper perspective and analysis. And there will be misleading speech after misleading speech. 

Tip of the Stetson to The Washington Post and The New York Times, whose fact-checkers are calling out a myriad of false claims. MSNBC is doing the same in real time. CNN is airing a fact-checking segment after the convention coverage. Unsurprisingly, Fox “News” is airing live speeches unchallenged and unchecked.

So far, the speeches have been riddled with stunning yet emphatically stated lies. Trump, the liar-in-chief, is getting a run for his money in the telling of tales. Over two days, the Post’s fact-checkers have found that convention speakers have made false claims about border crossings, gas prices, fentanyl, tax cuts, Vice President Kamala Harris, peace during Trump’s presidency, voting by migrants, energy independence, the relative wealth of young Americans, and Easter Sunday.

The lies and misinformation are meant to rile and to scare. Texas Senator Ted Cruz actually said this out loud from the convention podium: “Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”

And then there’s the old chestnut, election denialism. According to the Post, 62 convention speakers have previously questioned President Biden’s 2020 election win. 

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have capitulated, forgiving Trump for his miserable and untruthful treatment of them when they were running against him. They both gave speeches endorsing him on Tuesday night.

And don’t forget House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that the Republican Party is “the law and order team,” as it nominates a convicted felon.

It is no secret that the political nominating conventions lost their significance decades ago. Today, they are nothing more than hour upon hour of campaign advertising, which makes them a great place to court undecided voters. This MAGA convention will be hard-pressed to appeal to middle-of-the-roaders. Republicans can no longer claim to be the party of Lincoln or even of Reagan. It is wholly the party of Trump and his MAGA extremist followers. Their newly anointed vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, is even more extreme on issues like gun control and abortion than Trump.

Vance and the convention speakers are talking some about America’s need for unity, and that’s good, if they actually mean it. But after only two days, they seem to have abandoned the calls for unity and reverted back to the MAGA talking points. Against the backdrop of Republicans celebrating in Milwaukee, let’s hope that most of the rest of the country gives itself a gut check on Trump’s record and the reality of what his victory in November would mean.

Categories Democracy, Economy, Elections, Extremism, Republicans, Shame, Trump

Biden on Fire at Detroit Rally! LINK TO RALLY ADDED!

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2024 //
78

Watch President Biden’s Detroit rally tonight. Biden spoke for about 30-40 minutes, and he was outstanding. He touted the economic record of his administration, and he described his agenda for his first 100 days in his second administration.

He also described the dangerous agenda of Trump’s Project 2025. He said “Trump is a loser!”

Number #1 on his agenda would be signing legislation to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land. He promised to promote good union jobs. He pledged to protect healthcare, Medicare, and Social Security. He said he would revive the Child Tax Credit, which cut child poverty in half before Republicans blocked its renewal. There was more.

He made clear that his goal was to strengthen the middle class.

President Biden was vigorous, passionate, and articulate. The crowd was fired up.

Biden is in it to win it.

Categories Biden, Economy, Elections, Trump

John Thompson: Oklahoma Hurtles Toward Environmental Disaster

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2024 //
19

John Thompson, retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the environmental crisis in his state, propelled by greed.

He writes:

Oklahoma City is again in the national news. On one hand, it was ranked 16th in the nation in the U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Places to Live” in 2024-2025. On the other hand, The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health’s, (ICF) Climate Center just projected how Oklahoma City’s “temperature will change by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario.” 

From 1981 to 2010, the average annual days in Oklahoma City where heat put a strain on electric transformers was 10. This was due to “blistering daytime highs along with sultry nighttime lows, depriving electrical equipment of a chance to cool down.” By the midcentury (2036 to 2065) it is projected to reach 45 days. Also, Tulsa is expected to reach 44 days and Altus 65 days of heat waves. 

It also estimated that Phoenix, which is in the news for its current heat wave, “will endure an estimated 126 days each year with heat that reduces transformers’ performance, the analysis found. A power outage during a heat wave would kill thousands of people in the city, according to a peer-reviewed study published last year.”

Of course, the stress that heat waves dump on transformers is just an indicator of the predicted effects of a 350% increase in heat waves in Oklahoma City, and worse increases across the world. The distress imposed on infrastructure should be seen as a symptom of the devastation that humans, and other living beings will face.

The national press has also reported on possible ways that Oklahoma (and other places) could respond to global warming. In an editorial in the Tulsa World, Philip-Michael Weiner explained, “If we want to have a more stable climate in the future, we need to remove a lot of the carbon already in the air.” He adds, “Our elected representatives must not miss the chance to help Oklahoma become a global leader in carbon removal.”

Weiner explains that Oklahoma is “well-situated to become a global leader in carbon removal and reap meaningful economic benefits for our state.” He cites “Oklahoma’s geo-workers, technology, and resources, [and] vast geologic capacity, subsurface geology, needed for carbon storage.” And Weiner adds that, “Exxon Mobil Corp. estimates there will be a $4 trillion market by 2050 for capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground.”

But that leads to another concern. Yes, given our failure to adequately tackle the proven threat of climate change, we must invest heavily in a range of efforts to decarbonize our atmosphere. And that will require major commitments from corporations, especially oil and gas companies, as well as government programs. But, we wouldn’t be facing such an existential threat if oil and gas companies, especially Exxon, had not hid their research which confirmed the findings of scientists who nearly convinced the H.W. Bush administration that carbon dioxide emissions needed to be quickly and massively cut. As the Guardian noted, their study:

Made clear that Exxon’s scientists were uncannily accurate in their projections from the 1970s onwards, predicting an upward curve of global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions that is close to matching what actually occurred as the world heated up at a pace not seen in millions of years.

But they borrowed the tactics of the tobacco industry, which knowingly lied about the deadly dangers of their product. And then Exxon “continued its disinformation campaign for another half century.”

Yes, there has been reporting on Oklahomans seeking to apply technologies developed for fracking in order to cut greenhouses gases. But the bigger stories have focused on Oklahoma oil billionaire Harold Hamm, who pledges, “We’re going to be on oil and gas for the next hundred years,” It was Hamm who organized the “energy round table” at former President Trump’s private club where he promised “to eliminate Mr. Biden’s new climate rules intended to accelerate the nation’s transition to electric vehicles, and to push a ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda aimed at opening up more public lands to oil and gas exploration.”

The New York Times reported that sources:

Asked not to be identified in order to discuss the private event.  Attendees included executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry.

One would think that the new predictions regarding global warming in Oklahoma City, and elsewhere, would convince the Chamber of Commerce and political leaders to immediately make de-carbonization a #1 priority. And it should be clear that the Hamm/Trump agenda – pushed by oil industry lobbyists – would devastate our planet. Somehow, we have to come together and hope businessmen will value stakeholders as well a shareholders, and place mankind over short-term corporate profits for a very few.  

By the way, as I was about to complete this post, United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said:

There is now an 80% chance that at least one of the next five years will mark the first calendar year with an average temperature that temporarily exceeds 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – up from a 66% chance last year.

As Reuters reports, “scientists warn of more extreme and irreversible impacts” if the 1.5C threshold is passed. So, “U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for urgent action to avert ‘climate hell.”” And I would add, Oklahomans and other Americans must double down on our abilities to fight global warming. But it is too late to make a difference in saving our planet if we don’t resist Exxon, Harold Hamm, Donald Trump, and others who are promoting the economics of destruction.

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Deregulation, Economy, Environment, Oklahoma

Heather Cox Richardson: Biden Exposes Trump’s Wisconsin Scam

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2024 //
8

Heather Cox Richardson wrote the following post on May 8 about President Biden’s recent visit to Wisconsin. She compares Biden to FDR. Under Trump, Wisconsin lost jobs. Under Biden, Wisconsin has gained jobs. That’s the heart of the Biden agenda: building a strong middle-class and creating good union jobs.

She writes:

Today, in Racine, Wisconsin, President Joe Biden announced that Microsoft is investing $3.3 billion dollars to build a new data center that will help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world. It is expected to create 2,300 union construction jobs and employ 2,000 permanent workers. 

Microsoft has also partnered with Gateway Technical College to train and certify 200 students a year to fill new jobs in data and information technology. In addition, Microsoft is working with nearby high schools to train students for future jobs. 

Speaking at Gateway Technical College’s Racine campus, Biden contrasted today’s investment with that made by Trump about the same site in 2018. In that year, Trump went to Wisconsin for the “groundbreaking” of a high-tech campus he claimed would be the “eighth wonder of the world.” 

Under Republican governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin legislators approved a $3 billion subsidy and tax incentive package—ten times larger than any similar previous package in the state—to lure the Taiwan-based Foxconn electronics company. Once built, a new $10 billion campus that would focus on building large liquid-crystal display screens would bring 13,000 jobs to the area, they promised. 

Foxconn built a number of buildings, but the larger plan never materialized, even after taxpayers had been locked into contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for upgrading roads, sewer system, electricity, and so on. When voters elected Democrat Tony Evers as governor in 2022, he dropped the tax incentives from $3 billion to $80 million, which depended on the hiring of only 1,454 workers, reflecting the corporation’s current plans. Foxconn dropped its capital investment from $10 billion to $672.8 million.  

In November 2023, Microsoft announced it was buying some of the Foxconn properties in Wisconsin.

Today, Biden noted that rather than bringing jobs to Racine, Trump’s policies meant the city lost 1,000 manufacturing jobs during his term. Wisconsin as a whole lost 83,500. “Racine was once a manufacturing boomtown,” Biden recalled, “all the way through the 1960s, powering companies—invented and manufacturing Windex…portable vacuum cleaners, and so much more, and powered by middle-class jobs.

“And then came trickle-down economics [which] cut taxes for the very wealthy and biggest corporations…. We shipped American jobs overseas because labor was cheaper. We slashed public investment in education and innovation. And the result: We hollowed out the middle class. My predecessor and his administration doubled down on that failed trickle-down economics, along with the [trail] of broken promises.” 

“But that’s not on my watch,” Biden said. “We’re determined to turn it around.” He noted that thanks to the Democrats’ policies, in the past three years, Racine has added nearly 4,000 jobs—hitting a record low unemployment rate—and Wisconsin as a whole has gained 178,000 new jobs. 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have fueled “a historic boom in rebuilding our roads and bridges, developing and deploying clean energy, [and] revitalizing American manufacturing,” he said. That investment has attracted $866 billion in private-sector investment across the country, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs “building new semiconductor factories, electric vehicles and battery factories…here in America.” 

The Biden administration has been scrupulous about making sure that money from the funds appropriated to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing base has gone to Republican-dominated districts; indeed, Republican-dominated states have gotten the bulk of those investments. “President Biden promised to be the president of all Americans—whether you voted for him or not. And that’s what this agenda is delivering,” White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian told Matt Egan of CNN in February. 

But there is, perhaps, a deeper national strategy behind that investment. Political philosophers studying the rise of authoritarianism note that strongmen rise by appealing to a population that has been dispossessed economically or otherwise. By bringing jobs back to those regions that have lost them over the past several decades and promising “the great comeback story all across…the entire country,” as he did today, Biden is striking at that sense of alienation.

“When folks see a new factory being built here in Wisconsin, people going to work making a really good wage in their hometowns, I hope they feel the pride that I feel,” Biden said. “Pride in their hometowns making a comeback. Pride in knowing we can get big things done in America still.” 

That approach might be gaining traction. Last Friday, when Trump warned the audience of Fox 2 Detroit television that President’s Biden’s policies would cost jobs in Michigan, local host Roop Raj provided a “reality check,” noting that Michigan gained 24,000 jobs between January 2021, when Biden took office, and May 2023.

At Gateway Technical College, Biden thanked Wisconsin governor Tony Evers and Racine mayor Cory Mason, both Democrats, as well as Microsoft president Brad Smith and AFL-CIO president Liz Schuler. 

The picture of Wisconsin state officials working with business and labor leaders, at a public college established in 1911, was an image straight from the Progressive Era, when the state was the birthplace of the so-called Wisconsin Idea. In the earliest years of the twentieth century, when the country reeled under industrial monopolies and labor strikes, Wisconsin governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette and his colleagues advanced the idea that professors, lawmakers, and officials should work together to provide technical expertise to enable the state to mediate a fair relationship between workers and employers. 

In his introduction to the 1912 book explaining the Wisconsin Idea, former president Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, explained that the Wisconsin Idea turned the ideas of reformers into a workable plan, then set out to put those ideas into practice. Roosevelt approvingly quoted economist Simon Patten, who maintained that the world had adequate resources to feed, clothe, and educate everyone, if only people cared to achieve that end. Quoting Patten, Roosevelt wrote: “The real idealist is a pragmatist and an economist. He demands measurable results and reaches them by means made available by economic efficiency. Only in this way is social progress possible.”

Reformers must be able to envision a better future, Roosevelt wrote, but they must also find a way to turn those ideals into reality. That involved careful study and hard work to develop the machinery to achieve their ends. 

Roosevelt compared people engaged in progressive reform to “that greatest of all democratic reformers, Abraham Lincoln.” Like Lincoln, he wrote, reformers “will be assailed on the one side by the reactionary, and on the other by that type of bubble reformer who is only anxious to go to extremes, and who always gets angry when he is asked what practical results he can show.” “[T]he true reformer,” Roosevelt wrote, “must study hard and work patiently.” 

“It is no easy matter actually to insure, instead of merely talking about, a measurable equality of opportunity for all men,” Roosevelt wrote. “It is no easy matter to make this Republic genuinely an industrial as well as a political democracy. It is no easy matter to secure justice for those who in the past have not received it, and at the same time to see that no injustice is meted out to others in the process. It is no easy matter to keep the balance level and make it evident that we have set our faces like flint against seeing this government turned into either government by a plutocracy, or government by a mob. It is no easy matter to give the public their proper control over corporations and big business, and yet to prevent abuse of that control.”

“All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote in 1912.

“We’re the United States of America,” President Biden said today, “And there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we work together.”

Go to the post to read her footnotes.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Economy, Elections, History, Wisconsin

Thom Hartmann: The Close Connection Between Monopolies and Labor

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2024 //
2

Thom Hartmann is releasing his new book The Hidden History of Monopolies on his blog, one chapter at a time. This one is fascinating. Big business has always opposed labor unions. They drive up wages, meaning less profits.

Thom explains:

When people consider monopolies, or even highly concentrated markets like airlines or pharmaceuticals, generally the only thing they think of is the ability of companies in concentrated markets to set prices wherever they’d like. But there are fully three primary benefits to monopoly or oligopoly, from the monopolists’ point of view.

In addition to setting prices by restricting competition, monopolies can (and typically do) drive down wages so that they end up with a steady supply of cheap labor, and—both by market (selling) control and labor market (workers) control—they send vastly more money flowing to stockholders and senior management than can companies in truly competitive marketplaces.

At its core, though, virtually every aspect of the movement that embraced monopoly (Bork actually wrote about all the “lost” inventions, innovations, and profits that were caused by a lack of monopoly!) boiled down to cheap labor. 

Joe Lyles, writing as Conceptual Guerilla, put up a brilliant analysis of this more than a decade ago titled “Defeat the Right in Three Minutes,” suggesting that quite literally everything we call “conservative” was really about driving down wages. While racial hatred and misogyny also play big roles these days in the “conservative” movement, there’s still a lot of truth to Lyles’s analysis.50

Cheap-labor conservatives don’t want a national health care system, because they want workers to be dependent on their employers and thus willing to accept lower wages.

Cheap-labor conservatives hate the minimum wage and unions because both support wage floors and, over time, raise wages for working people.

Cheap-labor conservatives want women relatively powerless (particularly over their own reproductive functions) so that, as in the era before the 1970s, they’ll work for far less than today’s $.78 to a man’s dollar.

Cheap-labor conservatives go on and on about, as Lyles notes, “morality, virtue, respect for authority, hard work and other ‘values’” so that when workers can’t climb the ladder, society will blame it on the individuals instead of a system rigged to maintain cheap labor.

Cheap-labor conservatives encourage bigotry, fear, and hatred to prevent working people from seeing their commonality of human and economic interests, regardless of race, gender identity, or the urban/rural divide.

America has a long history with the cheap-labor crowd: slavery was the ultimate expression of this “conservative” value system, and under the 13th Amendment, it continues to be legally practiced in the United States in our for-profit prison systems.

The 13th Amendment didn’t actually end slavery in the United States; it merely turned it over to prisons, be they state-run or for-profit corporations. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” As a result, the pressure on Congress and state legislatures from for-profit prison corporations to increase criminal penalties to give them more literal slave labor has exploded.

Cheap-labor conservatives, it turns out, are also huge fans of monopoly and oligopoly, in large part because these systems keep wages low. 

There’s a marketplace for labor, just like for everything else, and when a small number of corporations control a large number of employment venues, they can simply keep wages low through that market power. Check out the pay of fast-food workers or flight attendants or nurses back in the 1960s compared with today; every industry that concentrates or consolidates sees wages go down….

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Disruption, Economy, Unions

Biden Sends $16 Billion to Texas for Clean Energy and Infrastructure: No Gratitude!

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
12

Texas is represented by some loathsome public officials (looking at you, Governor Abbott, Lt. Gov. Patrick, and Senator Ted Cruz). They have denounced President Biden in every imaginable way. Yet the Biden administration is sending $16 billion to Texas for clean energy and infrastructure. Texas Republicans voted against the legislation but they will gladly take the dollars and the new jobs. (All the red states are getting funds from Biden’s bills that they opposed, while taking credit for them.) And they will continue to insist that climate change is a hoax.

Chris Tomlinson writes in The Houston Chronicle:

Delivering reliable, affordable and sustainable electricity wouldn’t be difficult if officials in Austin and Washington worked together. The challenges are not technological or economic; they are about setting priorities.

Pablo Vegas, chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, promised a new approach to grid planning on Tuesday, promising to better track the growing demand for power from industry.

“We need to accelerate aspects of our planning processes and be able to look further into the future, anticipate what’s coming, because it still takes three to six years to build transmission,” Vegas said.

The Legislature ordered ERCOT to start considering long-term proposals to add load to the grid rather than relying only on finalized plans. The new approach makes demand forecasts look much, much larger but also less reliable because not all proposed projects come to fruition.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is offering Texans billions of dollars to fortify the electric grid, reduce electricity bills and cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the administration promised to upgrade 100,000 miles of transmission lines.

The Environmental Protection Agency also gave $249.7 million to the Texas Solar For All Coalition and  $156.1 million to the Clean Energy Fund of Texas this week to provide solar energy equipment to low-income communities.

The EPA has also granted $104 million in federal funds to 19 Texas school districts to purchase 288 electric school buses. The EPA grants are part of the $16 billion the federal government has committed to clean energy projects in Texas that have created 23,000 jobs.

The money comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, which Texas Republicans vehemently opposed. The massive investment in energy and manufacturing is intended to grow the economy while fighting climate change.

Past investments led Waaree Energies to invest $1 billion in a solar panel manufacturing facility near Houston, creating 1,500 jobs. San Antonio has committed $30 million to build, with federal help, the largest municipal onsite solar project in Texas. Diligence Offshore Services announced in August it would invest $1.23 billion to open an offshore wind support and manufacturing facility off the coast of Port Arthur.

Climate change, though, is still missing from Vegas’ and ERCOT’s lexicon. He’s happy to talk about the growing electricity demand from artificial intelligence and fossil fuel facilities but never mentions the residential demand during climate change-driven extreme weather. That’s what causes record-setting peaks that can trigger outages.

Nationwide, weather caused 80% of the power outages since 2000, and the frequency of blackouts has doubled in the past decade, according to data collated by research nonprofit Climate Central. Texas experienced the most weather-related outages, and the pace is accelerating.

Improving the grid to meet growing industrial electricity demand is quite different from building a system that can withstand a changing climate. Adding more power generation and transmission lines is not enough when facing stronger hurricanes, larger wildfires, colder winter storms and hotter summers.

ERCOT’s planning will remain flawed until officials start preparing for more polar vortexes like 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, rain events like Hurricane Harvey and heat waves like last summer’s.

Transitioning to clean energy and building resilient generation plants and transmission lines offer huge economic opportunities. BlackRock, the world’s largest financial manager, says the world spent $1.8 trillion on the energy transition in 2023 but will need to spend $4 trillion annually by the mid-2030s.

Vegas never mentions climate change because the Republican elected officials who oversee him call it a hoax. Texas will never chart a strong economic course until we have a governor, lieutenant governor and speaker who recognize the greatest threat yet to human prosperity….

Categories Biden, Economy, Elections, Environment, Funding, Republicans, Texas

Catherine Rampell: Our Economy Is Booming Because of Immigrants

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2024 //
42

Catherine Rampell, opinion writer for the Washington Post, recently explained the positive effect that immigrants have on our economy. She is not advocating “open borders,” nor am I. She is describing the role that immigrants play in boosting our national well-being. We need more legal immigrants.

She writes:

Don’t want more immigrants in this country? Then tell grandma she can never retire.

As I’ve noted before, immigrants are driving the U.S. economic boom. That is: The United States has escaped recession, hiring growth has exceeded expectation, and inflation has cooled faster than predicted — all largely because immigration has boosted the size of the U.S. labor force. Don’t just take my word for it; ask the Federal Reserve chair or Wall Street economists.

After a stretch of depressed immigration levels — primarily driven by Donald Trump’s hobbling of the legal immigration system — the number of immigrants coming here began to rebound mid-2021. Immigrants are more likely to be working-age than native-born Americans, so their arrivals helped solve a number of problems facing the U.S. economy.

For instance, some of our pandemic-related supply-chain woes were related to worker shortages in critical fields such as construction and food processing. An influx of new workers helped fill those vacancies and unsnarl stuck supply chains. In other cases, immigrants have been willing to take jobs that native-born Americans are unwilling to do, such as the backbreaking work of harvesting potatoes, building homes and caring for the elderly. They’re also filling high-tech positions that Americans cannot do because there are insufficient numbers of us with the necessary skills. And they are creating entirely new job opportunities by launching new businesses — something immigrants do at much higher rates than the native-born.

And then there are the jobs we native-born Americans might theoretically be willing and able to fill, but there simply aren’t enough of us around to fill them. The arithmetic is clear: Boomers are retiring and U.S. birthrates have plummeted. Absent immigration, the U.S. working-age population would be either flat or soon shrinking.

As a result, all of the new job growth since the pandemic, on net, has been due to foreign-born workers. That is, if you stripped away immigrants, there would be no more people employed today than was the case before covid.

On many dimensions, our ability to attract global talent to our shores is a blessing. But this being an election year, and demagogues being demagogues, right-wing pundits and political operatives have worked to darken these bright statistics.

Fox News refers to Bidenomics as a “migrant job fair.” The Republican-aligned Heritage Foundation alleges that “Americans have been completely left behind in this economy,” citing as evidence that fact I just mentioned: that all the net new job growth is accounted for by immigrants.

But the labor market is not zero-sum, and native-born workers happen to be doing extraordinarily well, too. In fact, the share of native-born Americans considered “prime working age” (25 to 54 years old, so after traditional college-going years and preretirement) who have jobs is higher than it was pre-pandemic. There just aren’t enough of us, in total, to fill all the jobs that employers are creating as boomers retire.

It’s true that overall, native-born Americans are less likely to be in the workforce today than in years past, but that’s entirely due to aging.
To put a finer point on it, there’s so much demand for workers now that even the most marginal American workers, such as teenagers and people with disabilities, are doing unusually well in the labor market. Ironically, some parts of the country complaining loudest about immigration today are the same places trying to loosen limits on child labor because their worker shortages are so acute.

It’s almost like there’s a simpler, more mutually beneficial solution at hand.

Some other countries would love to have the problems we have — to have so many talented people clamoring to replace retiring boomers (or care for them) and to infuse their economies with new skills, ideas, businesses and drive. The influx of new talent has not only helped us beat recent recession predictions; it’s also helped us best our competitors in Asia and elsewhere, where demographic challenges are dragging on growth. The U.S. economy is one of the only places in the world right now that is doing even better than expected before the pandemic began.

And, if current immigration trends continue — which they might not, depending who wins in November — immigration is likely to boost our fortunes in the years ahead: The Congressional Budget Office recently revised upward its 10-year gross domestic product projections by $7 trillion, attributing the increase to immigration-driven labor force growth. Our longer-term fiscal challenges also look better, since immigrants pay taxes and are much less likely than native-born Americans to (ever) qualify for benefits, including programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Yet, somehow, the Trumpy right argues that greedy, freeloading immigrants are simultaneously stealing both our jobs and our precious tax dollars. In reality, they’re beefing up both.

Categories Bigotry, Economy, Immigration

Joel: Why Does the Media Lie About the Economy?

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2024 //
27

Our reader is a retired union worker who follows economic and political news closely. He lives on long Island in New York. He wrote this comment in response to Jonathan V. Last’s article about the media’s insistence on saying that good economic news is “bad for Biden.” His response: “It’s about time!”

Joel wrote:

What we call MSM is owned by very wealthy people whose interests will not be hurt by a Trump re-election. Tax cuts for the wealthy don’t trickle down and never have, but they go into his and their pockets . But even a more benign explanation is that Trump is good for the business of the Washington Post , the New York Times , CNN… All with increased readership and thus advertising sales. Generated by the buffoon.

The jobs report was released on Friday the 5th showing a remarkable stretch of below 4% unemployment not seen since ” we partied like it was 1965″ . Showing millions of more Jobs created on top of all the Jobs recovered since the Covid recession. Jobs recovered in record time for any recovery. After a recession business close employees who were employed have moved on it took from 2010 till 2017 to just recover the Jobs lost in the great recession.

The US has a higher growth rate and lower inflation than almost the entire G20. We have been told by the MSM (not just Right Wing Media ) that the 10s and 10s of millions who either went to work or changed jobs during the recovery, don’t really care about easily getting a Job and changing Jobs for better paying Jobs. Don’t care that the real (inflation adjusted) median wage actually exceeded inflation by a few dollars a week. That most of those raises went to non-supervisory workers. In other words the working class. Not the upper middle class and the wealthy. What they care about we were told was inflation that subsided almost as quickly as it arose. Inflation that was due to supply shortages of Labor and Materials generated by Covid shut downs at home and overseas. By autocrats overseas manipulating oil prices to see an autocrat elected in America. Not due to the typical wage price spirals of the past. Inflation that saw corporations because of the hysteria generated in the media feel free to boost profits by raising prices far and beyond any increase in Labor or material costs.

Laughing in many Corporate Board Rooms that the people have been duped to expect inflation and we are going to give it to them as corporate profits rose to record levels not seen since WW2 and profits still are near record highs. I thought I could sleep after Biden was elected. Garland dispelled that hope quickly. So on Sunday the 7th two days after the employment report , I am up at 4AM. I tuned to CNN . They ran a story I thought was about the fantastic employment report that quickly turned to “but this may not be good for Biden”. And then for the next 8 minutes of perhaps a 10 minute segment diverted to the”oh but inflation”story.

I will say this again !!!! when Reagan declared morning in America inflation was 4.3% not 3.5% as now. Un-employment was still at 7.8% not 3.8% as now . Mortgage rates were at 13% not 7%. Biden compared to the Reagan administration should be declared the second coming by the media.

But it gets worse. As I pointed out by November of 2021 and several times since on this Blog and elsewhere. The media was hyping inflation beyond any reality. The National price of Gas before Putin was $3.21 a gallon as people went back to living their lives after Vaccinations and Oil fields had not fully opened!!!!!. Yet the NY Times , CNN and PBS found people who used a 1000 gallons of milk or Gas a week to highlight the impacts of inflation . Worse the Picture in the NY Times on line was of a station that had to be in the Pacific off the Coast of California with gas at $5.99. As their own writer Niel Irwin pointed out the price of Gas was CHEAPER than it was for 4 whole years from 2011 till 2014 when the Euro crisis tanked oil prices. Pointed out that workers were working significantly fewer hours to fill that tank than in 2011-14 when the National Average never went below $3.60 and went as high as $3.90.

So imagine me waking up two Sundays ago to see the picture on that CNN segment with gas prices at $5.39 a gallon . The National Price was $3.50 . I had paid $303 a gallon in Trumplandia Long Island (Commack ) on the Friday before. I had paid $3.13 a gallon in Hicksville LI to fill my wife’s car the day before the Employment report . I rewound the TV and paused the TV to snap a picture of the $5.39 cent gas on my cell phone. The following Thursday I filled up in Elmont Long Island at an Exxon station cash or credit $3.15. Long Island is not Texas it has new Wind Mills going up , not oil wells and refineries. The inflation report that rattled Wall Street last week was a whopping 3.5% up 2/10ths from its recent lows in December of 2023 . Not exactly historically high and food inflation was 1.2% year over year .

But again the other day Niel Irwin now writing for Axios (?) came to the rescue with an interesting tidbit. This gets a little nerdy. As Krugman points out rents are responsible for 1/3 of the Consumer price index. The US Labor Department computes rents with a factor no or few other Foriegn Economies do “Owner Equivalent Rent”. Something that does not exist in the real world and no body ever actually pays. It is what you would have to pay to rent your own home. If you had to rent it. But I don’t rent my own house I own it (and the mortgage is free and clear ). Neil Irwin pointed out that back in January the BLS changed the way it computes this fictional cost. It added 5% more single family homes and thus 5% fewer less expensive multi family homes and condos to the mix. As detailed in an Email from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that soon got deleted.  Now this may be a perfectly legitimate statistical change from their view point . But it is like declaring Ketchup a vegetable . Forcing you to compare apples to oranges.

Rent increases across the Nation have moderated significantly . “BLS data on rents for new tenants out today(4/17) show they rose just 0.4% over the last four quarters, marking the slowest pace of advance since 2010. The largest and most important component of the consumer price index is likely soon to follow them lower.” Dean Baker WELL MORE BAD NEWS FOR BIDEN

Categories Biden, Economy, Elections, Fake News, Media

Ohio: Immigrants Boost Economy in Columbus

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2024 //
51

Ohio has experienced population decline but one city is growing: Columbus. Peter Gill of the Columbus Dispatch explains that new immigrants have fueled population growth and the local economy.

He writes:

Kikandi Lukambo has reinvented himself many times in his life.

After war forced him, his parents and siblings to flee their home in the Congo, he became a tailor, catering to the fashionable ladies of Kampala, the Ugandan capital.

Nearly a decade later, in 2015, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program resettled Lukambo in Columbus. He quickly found a job with a perfume manufacturer, then at a distribution warehouse.

Recently, he founded a transportation business that shuttles other immigrant workers — including people from Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere — to and from their workplaces in Greater Columbus.

Sitting in Kivu Transportation Services’ small office in the Northland neighborhood recently, Lukambo, 37, spoke of his gratitude for the opportunities Ohio has afforded him.

“(Ohio) has a very good reputation of employment,” he said. “We have the best life here.”

Lukambo, who became an American citizen in 2022, also found love locally. Four months ago, he and his fiancée Wedny Dauphin, an immigrant from Haiti, became parents to a baby boy.

Foreign-born people like Lukambo and Dauphin have been essential to Columbus’ population growth and economy in recent years, according to new government data and local economists.  

Because native-born Americans are having fewer children and are moving away from Ohio, the state’s population shrunk by about 13,000 between mid-2020 and mid-2023. But it would have shrunk by about 61,000 more if it weren’t for the flow of immigrants moving in, according to Census Bureau estimates.

In Columbus — Ohio’s fastest-growing metro area— international immigrants accounted for more than half of the population growth over the three years, according to the bureau. 

This includes everyone from refugees like Lukambo to high-skill workers on H-1B visas, people admitted based on family ties and undocumented individuals. Franklin County’s largest foreign-born groups come from Asia, followed by Africa and then Latin America.

Mark Partridge, an urban economist at Ohio State University, told The Dispatch that population expansion comes with certain growing pains, such as greater demand for housing and public services like schools. 

But he said immigrant-driven population growth is a “first-order factor” benefitting the region’s economy — in contrast to shrinking cities like Youngstown, where relatively few immigrants settle.

“Population growth drives demand for businesses. … And (likewise), population growth (increases) the supply of workers that firms want to hire,” he said.

“It’s easy to scapegoat immigrants. … However, if it wasn’t for immigration in a state that struggles retaining population like Ohio, we would have much faster population loss. Once you start losing population, it’s pretty easy to turn into a vicious cycle downward.”

Lukambo had never driven a car before moving to the U.S. nine years ago. Soon after arrival, he and his brother paid another Congolese refugee $1,000 to teach them how to drive so they could get to work, he said.

While his job at a warehouse provided some stability, Lukambo dreamed of starting his own business. At first, he thought of starting a language school for other immigrants, since he speaks English fluently. But then he realized that very few of his potential students would have a means of transportation to get to class. This insight led him to start the transportation company, which now has contracts with a sawmill in Newark, the refugee resettlement agency Jewish Family Services and elsewhere.

Lukambo and Dauphin drive vans for their company while also working other jobs — Lukambo is a weekend supervisor at a Macy’s warehouse in Groveport, and Dauphin works for Cheryl’s Cookies in Westerville.

“I don’t really take time off,” Lukambo, who works seven days a week, said with a chuckle.

Bill LaFayette, an economist who owns the local consulting firm Regionomics, told The Dispatch that immigrants are good for the economy in part because Columbus-area firms are in desperate need of workers.

“Our employment growth has been somewhat stunted since mid-2022, just because there aren’t enough workers,” LaFayette said. “(Immigrants) tend to be younger than the population as a whole, and they tend to be more likely in the labor force.”

LaFayette said that immigrants are also significantly more likely than native-born people to become entrepreneurs.  

“My guess is that (is because) they have pulled up stakes and moved to a completely different part of the world, and they are inherently risk-takers,” he said.

He pointed to Morse Road as an area with an abundance of immigrant-owned businesses, which he said retain a greater percentage of their sales revenue within the local economy than national chains.

Studies also show that immigrants are a boon to the local tax base.

In 2019, immigrants in the Columbus metro area paid $712.4 million in state and local taxes, according to a study commissioned by the city of Columbus and Franklin County.

And a new study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that refugees and asylees contribute more on average in tax revenue than they cost in expenditures to federal, state and local governments.

LaFayette said immigrants contribute to the growing demand for affordable housing in Columbus, but this is an inevitable byproduct of economic growth — no matter where workers are coming from.

“Whether you come from Cleveland or Calcutta, you still need a place to live,” he said.

Skeptics of immigration sometimes raise concerns about immigrants taking jobs away from native-born people, but LaFayette said this is not a concern in central Ohio, at least not right now.

“Our unemployment rate’s barely above 3%. … All you’ve got is pretty much frictional unemployment — people going from one job to another,” he said. “We need everybody we can get.”

Another criticism is that even if immigrants do not take jobs away from native-born Americans, by expanding the labor pool, they can drive down wages in certain fields. 

Partridge, the Ohio State professor, said economists still debate the size of this effect, though most agree it is small. He believes that low-wage workers are most affected, but “it’s not a massive effect.” On the other hand, he said immigrants often come up with innovations or insights that help firms expand into markets abroad — boosting wages for high-skill workers.

As Columbus’ foreign-born population continues to grow, Lukambo hopes to expand his business by partnering with more employers and by offering driving classes for newly arrived immigrants.

“I’m under obligation to help other people — because I don’t like to see people struggling the way I struggled with at the beginning when I came here,” he said.

Lukambo said many of his relatives and friends from his refugee camp in Uganda resettled elsewhere in the U.S. But when they come to visit Columbus, he makes the pitch for them to relocate here — which, increasingly, they accept.

“(Congolese) people used to say, ‘Ohio is like a village. Ohio is not a really good state.’ But with time … a lot of refugees and a lot of immigrants are coming here. … With the economy, you can be at least successful with one job, and you manage your time and you feel like you are having a good life,” he said.

“Ohio is growing.”

Peter Gill covers immigration and new American communities for The Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America here:bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.

pgill@dispatch.com

@pitaarji

Categories Economy, Hope, Immigration, Ohio
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