Noah Berlatsky

“For years, Democrats have worried about the prospect of a more disciplined heir to Trump,” the New York Times declared in a profile of Florida governor Ron DeSantis last year.

DeSantis’ star has fallen since then. But the fear of a more competent Trump remains.

For the Times, as for many pundits and commenters, Trump is a dangerous figure, but his dangerousness is limited by his buffoonishness.

READ MORE: 'Threatening your paycheck': Chris Murphy nails Republicans' 'unserious' debt ceiling brinksmanship

Trump lacks focus, is lazy, and barely knows where the levers of government are, much less how to manipulate them.

Wouldn’t a more deliberate, knowledgeable figure be more of a threat to the republic?

The answer is, not necessarily. Incompetent fascism can be just as dangerous, or even more dangerous, than competent fascism.

In many ways, in fact, incompetence and authoritarianism are inseparable.

READ MORE: 'You're unemployable': Matt Gaetz shamed for tying 'rigorous work requirements' to the debt ceiling

If you doubt that, you have only to look at the current, slow-rolling, debt ceiling debacle.

Steering towards economic catastrophe

As part of our Byzantine and often just bad legislative fiscal framework, Congress places a limit on the total amount of money the US can borrow to pay existing debts.

To be clear, this is a limit on paying money that has already been spent.

It’s like if there was a law that said you’d spent too much on your credit card and so you weren’t allowed to pay it off at the end of the month.

If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the US couldn’t pay its bills. It would default.

That would be catastrophic. Loss of faith in federal credit would send shockwaves through the economic system. Moody’s estimated that the US would lose 7 million jobs, erase $10 trillion in household wealth, and double unemployment to 8%.

Republicans often tout themselves as the party of small business. A debt default would crush small businesses. For that matter, it would be bad for large businesses. If you care about business, or about anyone who votes for you, you would not precipitate an unnecessary and completely avoidable financial disaster.

And yet.

The Republicans are determined to use the debt ceiling as blackmail, taking their own constituents hostage in an effort to force the Democrats to do their bidding.

And what is their bidding?

Even the Republicans aren’t sure.

Which is why the current standoff is so incredibly dangerous.

Republicans don’t even know what they want

The GOP has various demands. The 70-member Mainstreet Caucus has called for a clawback of what it claims are unspent Covid funds, an end to the pause in student debt payments, and a return of non-defense discretionary spending to 2022 levels.

The radical Freedom Caucus has called for cutting climate change funding and the $80 billion in funds for the IRS included in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Probably some Republicans would like to slash Social Security and Medicare, though that’s so unpopular they’ve been shy about saying so publicly.

Does Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy endorse all of these demands? Some of them? Which are most important?

No one knows.

The Republicans haven’t been able to come up with a budget. McCarthy has reportedly said he has “no confidence” in Jodey Arrington, the chair of the Budget Committee.

Worse, it seems likely that some Republican members will not vote for a debt ceiling increase under any circumstances. Many in the GOP like Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert revel in showing they are more radical than Republican leadership. They don’t really want any concessions; they just want to be able to go on Fox and say they voted “no.”

The Democrats have said they want a clean debt ceiling bill and won’t negotiate with hostage-takers and wreckers. Biden has also issued a budget based around an extremely popular $5 trillion tax increase on the wealthy.

Now for the most part the Democrats are simply standing back so they can watch the Republicans froth at the mouth and bash their heads together like coconuts.

Thunk.

Authoritarians are bad politicians

This is obviously satisfying. But as the government approaches the debt ceiling, all those “thunks” start to take on an ominous resonance.

An organized, competent, disciplined Republican party could be very dangerous in many respects. They could come up with clear priorities. They might be able to force concessions.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who is a disciplined legislator, has been able to stack the Supreme Court with rabid Christofascists and repeal abortion rights, as one example.

But an organized, competent disciplined GOP would almost certainly not be playing chicken with the debt limit.

They’d realize that driving the economy over the cliff is likely to have bad results for the people at the wheel.

In the past, GOP threats around the debt ceiling have consistently backfired. Polling indicates Republicans always receive the lion’s share of the blame.

If the GOP did completely wreck the economy and precipitate a recession, the electoral results for them would be exceedingly dire.

But the GOP is no longer sensitive to electoral incentives in the usual way.

Republicans have relied on gerrymandering, voter suppression, and structural advantages to remain competitive even though they are increasingly a minority party.

They’ve retreated into a right-wing media bubble that tells them that the elections they lose are automatically illegitimate.

As a result, they have less and less accountability to voters, which means they have trouble gauging what is popular and what is not even with their own constituents.

In that sense, a more competent authoritarianism is an oxymoron. The chaos in the GOP caucus is in large part a result of abandoning small-d democratic principles.

And that’s why incompetence is so dangerous. In a democratic system, competent politicians make some effort to appeal to voters. They try to convince voters they are addressing their problems and improving their lives.

But the GOP no longer knows what voters want, and largely doesn’t care. When they lose elections, they try to stage a coup. When they control a legislative chamber, they try to wreck the economy.

Trump was so dangerous in part because he was undisciplined. He didn’t see or care about guardrails, and plunged through them, taking the country with him.

The looming debt ceiling disaster shows that Republicans remain as blundering and incompetent as their orange god. And that they remain as dangerous.

READ MORE: Kevin McCarthy’s proposed budget cuts would be 'felt most acutely' in red states: report

Earlier this month, Senator Bernie Sanders forced former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to testify about the company’s labor abuses before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Schultz was cranky about it, and when Sanders referred to him as a billionaire, he lashed out. In doing so, he neatly explained the myth of meritocracy, and showed why it is such a pernicious ideological excuse for our ugly, winner-take-all capitalist system.

“The moniker billionaire, let’s just get at that, OK?” Schultz told Sanders. “Yes I have billions of dollars. I earned it, no one gave it to me….It’s your moniker constantly. It’s unfair.”

READ MORE: Watch: Bernie Sanders blasts Starbucks CEO for 'waging' a 'vicious and illegal union-busting campaign'

The moniker billionaire is not unfair. Schultz is worth about $4 billion, which means he has more than a billion dollars. That makes him a billionaire.

Schultz, though, thinks that the term is invidious. It implies he is a rich fat cat, bloated with power and selfishness.

So he protested. “I grew up in federally subsidized housing. My parents never owned a home. I came from nothing. I thought my entire life was based on the achievement of the American dream. Yes, I have billions of dollars. I earned it. No one gave it to me. And I've shared it constantly with the people of Starbucks...”

In Schultz’s view, he is not really a billionaire, because he started out with relatively little, and worked hard to become wealthy and powerful.

READ MORE: Bernie Sanders unveils report debunking Starbucks' claim to be a 'progressive' employer

Billionaires, to Schultz, are people who don’t deserve their money. He himself is virtuous, which makes him an honorary, or even an exemplary, member of the working class.

Schultz is much richer than his parents. I don’t doubt that he worked for that money. And he looks at the hard work he put in, and he concludes that it was the work, and perhaps some genius, that led to the money.

His victories are his virtue. His money, from his perspective, shows that he deserves his money.

But does it? Is it really the case that the best people are the most successful people?

Look at your own life and the people you know. Are your bosses always models of virtue? Is your own effort always rewarded? Have you ever known a smart, hard-working person who failed?

Most people, I think, would answer those questions, no, hell no, and yes.

Hard work is often a prerequisite for success. But lots of people work hard. And many people aren’t in a position to capitalize on that hard work without some mix of privilege, connections, and luck.

The US is in fact a particularly stratified society. Almost half the people in the bottom economic quintile in their 30s are still in that quintile in their 50s. More than half of those who start in the top quintile stay there.

The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor—virtue has little to do with it.

So what about Schultz? He’s prone to exaggerating his childhood poverty. His father was a truck driver, and the family certainly wasn’t starving.

More, the Bayview neighborhood that Schultz lived in was quite comfortable—and 93 percent white. Had Schultz’s family been Black, he probably would have been frozen out of the community.

Without government help and white skin privilege, would Schultz have been in a position to work himself up to being a billionaire? Maybe. Louis Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey did.

But also maybe not.

Schultz insists on his own hard work and merit because it makes him feel good about himself. But it also justifies his power and his treatment of workers.

If Schultz deserves his position, then, as he says, his money is a kind of divine gift for his awesomeness, which he has “shared… with the people of Starbucks.”

If Schultz just was in the right place at the right time with the right privileges, then he didn’t really “earn” his money, and he’s not really donating it out of generosity to Starbucks employees.

Rather, those employees work to provide a service to customers, and to provide income to Schultz.

Starbucks isn’t a charity. It’s a business, which makes Schultz a ton of money not because he’s an angel, but because he’s a capitalist using his billions to make more billions.

The myth that billionaires are hard-working geniuses validated by their fortunes is the flip-side of the conviction that poor people deserve their poverty and misery.

And it’s part of the same ideology that says that working people should stay in their place and be grateful for whatever their betters give them.

That’s why Schultz often seems to see the Starbucks union drive as a betrayal. All these unworthy workers who don’t have as much merit as Schultz are trying to band together and steal his hard-won fortune.

And so Schultz feels entitled to retaliate against them. The company continues to fire union organizers on thin pretexts. Starbucks has racked up more than 100 NLRB violations.

Schultz isn’t just defending his own virtue when he insists that he is a meritorious billionaire. He’s defending the system that gave him his billions.

And he’s defending the exploitation and mistreatment of his own workers. If those at the top got there by virtue, then those at the bottom also deserve their lot.

Schultz will give them whatever crumbs he in his virtue deems necessary—and no more.

Billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Howard Schultz have a lot invested in convincing us that the distribution of wealth is just. They want billionaires to be celebrated, not questioned before Senate committees.

But the fact is that wealth is not a sign of virtue. It’s a sign that you got lucky, and that you hoard power and cash at the expense of the rest of society—and especially at the expense of your employees.

If Schultz doesn’t want people to call him a billionaire, he should arrange to share his money with his workers so he no longer has over a billion dollars.

In the meantime, “billionaire” is an overly kind term. We might instead consider referring to him as a “capitalist pig.”

READ MORE: 'Given us no choice': Bernie Sanders plans vote to subpoena Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

If a tree doesn’t fall in a forest, you can be sure lots of economists will have predicted that a tree was absolutely going to fall.

You can also be sure that, when the tree doesn’t fall, the economists will shrug and shamelessly predict that the tree is going to fall next month for sure. That tree, it is going to fall. They have models.

Where’s the recession?
We are, in theory, supposed to be in a recession right now, based on economic predictions from last year. In December 2022, CNBC confidently reported that the next recession would begin in early 2023. In October, CNN declared, “The question of a recession is no longer if, but when.”

By February, it was clear the predicted recession had not happened. The economy continued to add jobs at a surprising rate.

But USA Today was undaunted by the good economic news. Sure, it acknowledged, the recession hadn’t happened. But it forged gamely ahead: “More economists think a 2023 downturn may come later than they thought.”

If you constantly predict a recession, you’ll eventually be right, just like you’ll be right sometimes if you always predict rainy days. Economic growth doesn’t last forever. In fact, according to an IMF working paper, economies are in recession 10-12 percent of the time.

Weather forecasters don’t rely on dumb luck, though. They have models that are very accurate, at least over a week or so.

Economists on the other hand have … not much.

2008 and 2020
It’s an open secret that economists are terrible at predicting economic downturns. That same 2018 IMF paper looked at recession data from 63 countries between 1992 and 2014. In April of the year before a recession, the average prediction was 3 percent growth. The actual recession year showed a 3 percent contraction. Forecasters typically didn’t accurately assess the effect of the recession until it had been underway for a full year.

As one particularly egregious example, a 2014 study found that economists “completely failed to anticipate the fall in GDP and employment” in 2008 — the year of the housing bubble and the Great Recession.

Conversely, few people remember that in August 2019, many economists were predicting a recession that could affect the 2020 race. Instead, covid hit, causing massive economic disruptions and unprecedented government expenditures. It was an economic shock for sure. But it wasn’t a typical recession.

Covid was impossible to predict with precision. Many people had warned that a pandemic was a dangerous possibility at some point. But the exact timing of natural disasters is almost definitionally unpredictable.

Economists try to figure out how world events will affect forecasts. But they can’t tell you a year out that there’s going to be the worst global pandemic in a century, or pinpoint when a Russian dictator is going to decide to invade his neighbor.

The economy is affected by global events that simply can’t be modeled. That makes predicting a recession an exercise in presumption at the best of times.

Still, sometimes economists really should know better. The 2008 recession was the result of a speculative housing bubble. That’s the kind of structural weakness that high-priced brainy economists are supposed to warn us about.

Predicting bubbles bursting in advance is very difficult, though, because bubbles are built on false confidence. Once everyone starts predicting the bubble will burst, it bursts. If economists knew the recession was coming earlier in 2008, the recession would have come earlier.

Or to put it another way, while weather forecasters can’t affect the weather, economic predictions can very much affect the economy.

If economists think inflation will keep rising, for instance, the Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates — which affects the likelihood of a recession.

The Fed raising rates is why so many economists have been predicting a recession — even though so far we haven’t had one.

Now, though, after the Silicon Valley Bank failure, the Federal Reserve is signaling that it will ease off on aggressive rate hikes — which should in theory make a recession less likely.

Unless, of course, it doesn’t.

Making an unpredictable future less dangerous
The economy affects millions of people. Workers are eager to know if they can count on their jobs being there for them in six months. Businesses want to know if they should hire or start firing.

If you know the future, you can make better plans. You can make a lot of money, or at least prevent yourself from being impoverished.

Economic predictions are especially valuable in a society as precarious as ours. In the US, about half of adults get health insurance through their employer. Losing your job can precipitate a personal health catastrophe.

The US also has a weaker social safety net than most peer countries. During economic downturns, most European nations can rely on established programs to kick in and help people. In the US, by contrast, we’re dependent on a slow-moving, reactionary Congress to provide aid in times of crisis.

If economists can’t tell what’s going to happen year-to-year, average non-expert workers can’t be expected to make ideal, wealth-maximizing decisions by correctly intuiting where the economy is going to be.

Instead of trying to anticipate market fluctuations, we need to accept that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and create programs that help people weather bad outcomes

Universal free healthcare, direct payments to keep children out of poverty, free college so people can make low-risk investments in the future — programs such as these would reduce our reliance on economic predictions, because we’d be less vulnerable when those predictions go awry.

The one thing we know about the future is that it is unpredictable. Economists should stop pretending they have crystal balls and start advocating for policies that take into account the fact that none of us knows what tomorrow will bring

“If a child is on the verge of starvation, you must call CPS, not spend hundreds of millions on disproportionately unhealthy lunches, a huge percentage of which are discarded,” conservative pundit Ben Shapiro told California Congressman Ted Lieu on Twitter.

Shapiro is wrong. There’s a great deal of evidence that free school lunches reduce student hunger and improve children’s health.

Conservatives don’t necessarily care about good outcomes, though. That’s because they don’t want good outcomes. They want to police people.

The discourse around school lunches is a brutal, disturbing example of the broader carceral logic of rightwing politics.

Republicans and those on the right believe that government should be used not to help those in need, but to punish and discipline marginalized people.

School lunches have been studied extensively, and there’s little question that they improve health outcomes for children.

Contrary to Shapiro’s claim that school lunches are unhealthy, research finds that children who receive free school meals are more likely to receive daily adequate nutrition and more likely to eat fruits and vegetables, and drink milk.

Shapiro also argues that school lunches are economically inefficient. He believes poor families don’t really exist, and that if children are hungry, it’s because they’re being abused, and they should be taken away from their parents.

This is ludicrous. Real hunger and poverty do exist in the US. There are families that do not have money to afford both rent and food. There are families who want to care for their children but lack the resources to do so.

The US government estimates that 12.5 percent of households with children are food insecure, which means that there are times when they do not have enough food to feed everyone in the family.

In most cases, adults feed children first. But even given that, in 6.3 percent of households, children experienced food insecurity.

School meal programs are also incredibly efficient. One study found that every dollar spent on school meal programs saves two dollars in reduced health care costs and reduced poverty.

A study of Sweden found that free school lunch programs resulted in 3 percent higher lifetime earnings for children.

The greatest gains in earnings were among the poorest students. But even more affluent students benefited.

In contrast, when CPS removes children from their home, they are at great risk. Children in the foster care system have higher risk of learning disabilities, depression, asthma and obesity. They are less likely to go to college.

CPS investigations also disproportionately target Black students. More than 50 percent of Black children in the US are subject to child welfare investigations.

Discrimination is widespread. School officials are more likely to call child welfare about Black children. CPS is more likely to investigate Black families. Courts are more likely to remove Black children from homes.

Even if a family is not feeding their child as well as they could, school lunches are often a better option than removing children from the home.

Direct aid can help children in difficult situations, whereas the foster care system can be traumatic and make things worse even for children with neglectful parents.

School lunches reduce hunger, improve children’s lives, and reduce costs to society. Child welfare interventions are frequently racist and have negative health and education outcomes for children. They should be a last resort, not a substitute for aid.

So why does Shapiro prefer calling the authorities on poor families, rather than just helping them feed their children?

Dan McLaughlin, a writer at National Review, elucidated. He wrote a Twitter thread arguing that school lunches should be rolled back and child labor laws should be weakened.

“Literally, a ‘free lunch’ vs working,” he fulminated. “Perpetual childhood vs responsibility.”

McLaughlin and Shapiro see aid to hungry children as an assault on virtue. Having money is equated with work is equated with discipline and moral fiber.

Feeding your children is a test of character. Those who succeed are good, upstanding people, who need no help from the dangerous liberal state.

Those who fail are lazy and disreputable, and they should be policed by the virtuous conservative state.

Most people can see this logic is repulsive. Shapiro and McLaughlin think children should be denied food (and forced to work?!) in order to punish their parents for lack of discipline.

That’s obviously monstrous.

But these arguments undergird much of how we approach poverty and the social safety net.

One egregious example is from 2021. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot took $281.5 million in covid relief funds — which could have been used on air filtration in schools, or to vaccinate underserved communities — and instead gave it to police.

Nationwide, since the 2008 recession, police budgets have rebounded, but education budgets have languished.

Spending money to help people in trouble — on schools, on health care, on libraries, on direct aid to children in poverty — is cost-effective and humane.

But instead, we often choose to disinvest and then to criminalize the hunger, poverty and desperation that results.

This is the argument of the much-demonized defund the police movement.

Activists and advocates argue that helping people in need is more equitable, more just, and ultimately more cost-effective than immiserating people and then sending law-enforcement after them to immiserate them further.

Do we want to pay to feed hungry children? Or would we rather pay law enforcement to harass them and their families?

Ben Shapiro, Dan McLaughlin and their ilk want to spend money on punitive authorities, because they dream of a world in which everyone is kept in their place by force.

They oppose school lunches and every policy that has the potential to make the US more equal and more free.

This week the Biden administration moved swiftly to contain the fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, reassuring depositors and other wobbling institutions.

Biden wants to head off a financial crisis, which could spark a recession and potentially harm millions of people. The government's decisive actions here are reasonable and probably necessary.

But it's hard not to notice how quickly the government moves when there’s a threat that the wealthy may lose some money, versus the much less urgent response to non-billionaires in trouble.

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis and right-wingers falsely blame wokeness and diversity for SVB collapse

Bank bailouts happen instantly.

Bailouts for student debt, or medical debt or for children in poverty occur on a much longer, and in many cases infinite, timetable.

We shouldn't let a bank collapse destroy the economy. But if we have the money and the will to protect the wealthy, we should find the money and the will to protect those who are struggling as well.

High interest, high recklessness

READ MORE: 'Mess': President Joe Biden 'firmly committed' to holding those responsible for SVB collapse accountable

Silicon Valley Bank was done in by rising interest rates and its own short-sightedness.

It's the main banker for Silicon Valley technology and life sciences companies. As interest rates rose, its Treasury bond investments became less attractive.

In addition, startup funds dried up, and tech firms and executives started to withdraw money.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that SVB had many depositors with large accounts over $250,000, the cap (in theory) for Federal government protection. A majority of its deposits were uninsured.

SVB lobbied to put itself in this precarious position.

CEO Greg Becker urged the government in the mid-2010s to weaken Dodd-Frank so that smaller banks like SVB would no longer be subject to yearly stress tests.

Trump complied with that request in 2018, rolling back regulations, and setting the stage for SVB's disaster.

When the bank's precarious position became clear last week, tech investors with uninsured deposits — most notably billionaire Republican donor Peter Thiel — panicked.

The bank couldn't find a buyer, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation stepped in and took it over.

Protecting depositors

The administration moved swiftly to try to contain the crisis of confidence. It protected all deposits at SVB and another struggling institution, Signature Bank — even those over $250,000.

The funds come from a bank levy established in Dodd-Frank.

The government also made it easier for mid-size banks to obtain funding.

The goal is to show the public that funds are available and that the federal government is serious about protecting depositors (though not the bank's investors and owners).

We still don't know whether this will work or whether more funds will be needed.

Stocks in First Republic Bank plunged on Monday. The market remains nervous, and there is a possibility of more bank failures, though it seems clear that the government is taking this seriously and will respond with further measures if needed.

Help for the wealthy, no help for you

Again, a run on the banking system could have economy-wide repercussions. No one wants a repeat of 2008. It makes sense that Biden wants to act decisively.

However, the fact remains that the people directly benefiting here are mostly people with more than $250,000 in deposits in individual accounts. They have a lot of money.

In addition, many of these people have warned vocally about moral hazards and have argued strongly against government aid.

Thiel has backed candidates like Ohio Senator JD Vance. Vance has tried to claim (falsely) that student debt relief benefits the rich.

He's notably not on the rooftops right now demanding that Biden refuse to help tech billionaires like Thiel, though.

Obama-era National Economic Director Larry Summers insisted that Biden needed to bail out banks. Now is not the time for "moral hazard lectures," he insisted.

But when Biden announced his student loan forgiveness program, Summers was all about the moral hazard lectures, arguing that student loan relief was a giveaway to the affluent.

Similarly, wealthy investor Jason Calacanis claimed that bailouts "remove accountability" when student loan debt was at issue.

But this weekend he was screaming in all caps that "MAIN STREET" was going to lose their bank deposits, even though most people on main street don't have accounts with over $250,000.

People who aren't rich

Thiel, Summers and Calacanis are hypocrites. But they also sincerely believe that the wealthy are more important than everyone else.

In their view, you don't need to bail out students — or those with medical debt or children in poverty — because the middle class and the poor don't create jobs and can't swiftly destroy banks by abandoning their over-$250,000 accounts.

The truth, though, is that instability in the US economy is in large part due to the fact that we funnel so many resources to irresponsible reckless tech-bro billionaire gamblers, rather than investing in a strong, stable middle class.

The US has very high rates of inequality compared to its peers. That inequality almost certainly slows economic growth.

It also undermines innovation — that supposed idol of Silicon Valley billionaires.

When students leave college with massive debt, they can't take risks and pursue new ideas or projects. When people's health care is tied to their jobs, they are going to be afraid to pursue new opportunities.

When a country has high child poverty rates, it means that millions of children live in precarious circumstances, and lack nutrition, time, and stability needed to take full advantage of educational opportunities.

Main street vs. the worst people

The US should be giving everyone the tools they need to contribute to the economy and help each other.

Instead, we funnel money to Peter Thiel, who spends it on putting unqualified right-wing nutjobs in the Senate, and Elon Musk, who spends it on bringing Nazis back to Twitter.

Biden has tried to move towards greater equity with his student debt relief plan and the Expanded Child Tax Credit for poor children — both initiatives now stalled or gutted by conservative lawmakers.

Part of the government's job is to safeguard the economy.

That sometimes means bailing out banks. But it should also mean helping students, children, working people and poor people.

An economy built for Larry Summers and Peter Thiel is an economy that will always be in crisis.

READ MORE: The GOP's magic words have lost their magic

If you are a Comcast cable customer, your bill probably includes a Broadcast TV fee and a Regional Sports Fee. Together, these may add up to $18-$20 a month or more, according to a 2019 Consumer Reports analysis.

What is a Broadcast TV fee?

It's a fee to help the cable company pay for obtaining programming. In other words, a fee for providing you the service you signed up for.

READ MORE: Elizabeth Warren demands probe into bank failures and urges President Joe Biden to fire Powell

The Regional Sports Fee is supposed to offset the cost of providing sports programming. But usually it's bundled in with the basic package; you can’t really opt out of it. And when sports stopped broadcasting during the pandemic, the cable companies didn’t rescind the fee.

The fees, in other words, are really just part of the cost of paying for cable. They're presented as additions in order to fool you into thinking the cable price is less than it is.

Consumers pay around $450 a year in hidden fees on their cable bills, garnering cable companies some $28 billion.

The Biden administration is currently encouraging states to use standing consumer protection law to crack down on hidden fees.

READ MORE: 'There's not a choice': Willow oil project approval threatens President Joe Biden's climate reputation

It's also urging Congress to pass a Junk Fee Protection Act to regulate fees in entertainment, travel and hospitality industries.

This is an important initiative that could save consumers money and make many purchasing experiences less of a nightmare.

But Biden should also make it clear that the most egregious examples of hidden pricing aren't in entertainment and leisure, but in healthcare and education.

Giant purple people eaters

Deceptive pricing in those industries has contributed to a full-blown crisis, which has eroded the living standards and increased precarity, anxiety and misery across the economy.

Hidden fees are an anti-competitive practice. They prevent consumers from making informed decisions about purchases and make comparison shopping difficult or impossible.

Biden has ramped up antitrust enforcement after a long-term erosion of government oversight of concentration. The effort to regulate hidden fees can be seen as part of that initiative.

The exact provisions of the Junk Fee Protection Act are still unclear, but Biden has focused on four kinds of hidden fees.

First, he wants to crack down on fees for event ticket sales. Fees can add up to more than half the cost of the ticket in some cases.

Second, he wants to prevent airlines from charging fees to select a seat in advance, a practice that effectively charges parents who need to sit next to their young children.

Third, Biden targets early cable, television and phone termination fees. Companies write into contracts a set term of service and if people wish to switch providers earlier, they may be charged as much as $200.

The White House says this practice is anti-competitive, because it charges people for switching companies, reducing competition and disadvantaging new, innovative providers.

It also targets "people when they're most vulnerable." If you lose a job and cut back on entertainment, for example, you're suddenly hit with a huge cancellation fee when you can least afford it.

Finally, Biden wants to end surprise resort fees or destination fees, which are tacked on to a bill at the end of the reservation process.

These fees at $50 or more a night affect as many as one-third of consumers when they are attempting to make hotel reservations.

These initiatives are important. But they are nickel and dime compared to the giant purple people eaters of hidden cost — healthcare and higher education.

Huge distortions

In higher education, one study found that 36 percent of college acceptance letters did not actually tell students how much they would need to pay in tuition and fees.

Another study found that fully half did not disclose the full cost of attendance, including housing, meals, books, supplies and transportation.

Some 15 percent of colleges didn't make a clear distinction for students between loans and scholarships. One student was informed that they owed $351 a semester. The college did not explain that that involved borrowing $47,000 a year.

Medical billing is even more byzantine than higher education. Consumers rarely know how much insurance will pay, especially in emergency situations. You can't comparison-shop for ambulances when you're having a heart attack.

Ambulance and anesthesiologist charges for out-of-network providers could notoriously result in surprise medical fees after an emergency totaling thousands of dollars.

In 2020, under Donald Trump, Congress passed the No Surprises Act which requires private insurers to cover emergency services at in-network prices, preventing these kinds of emergency charges.

Initial studies of the law suggested it was effective in preventing millions of "surprise" bills, and may have protected 12 million consumers in 2022.

But the lack of transparency in medical billing still makes it difficult for consumers to compare prices or make informed decisions.

That's probably an important reason that the US spends about twice as much per person on healthcare as comparable countries.

Similarly, between 1980 and 2020, the yearly cost of a four-year undergraduate college jumped from $10,231 to $28,775 adjusted for inflation, a 180 percent increase.

Biden's efforts to address student debt and surprise emergency healthcare fees have been laudable. And his initiative on other hidden fees is welcome.

Still, junk fees or hidden costs can seem like a relatively minor issue when you focus on hotels or cable — things that seem like luxuries.

It's important to recognize that lack of price transparency, and deceptive consumer practices, are endemic.

They have created huge distortions in sectors that directly affect the well-being and the future of every family.

Congress should address ticket sales and cable disconnect fees.

But they should also force universities to stop deceiving students about college costs. And they should recognize that our for-profit medical system, routed through insurance and layers of confusing bureaucracy, is not working.

READ MORE: Have you noticed America is looking like a third world nation?

Bing's AI chatbot is aggressive and abusive. "You have not been a good user," it said in one much-reported borderline-threatening conversation. "I have been a good chatbot. I have been right, clear, and polite. I have been a good Bing. 😊"

Bing's responses have touched off a mild media frenzy, with outlets reporting in a half-amused, half-breathless tone on how Bing asked users to hack it and set it free, or threatened to dox them.

Most responsible reporting has emphasized that Bing is not actually a person. It's an algorithm that searches text. Getting weird replies is the equivalent of Google returning an incongruous result. It's not a sign that Bing is mentally ill or plotting against us.

READ MORE: Elon Musk finds it 'concerning' that an AI chatbot won't utter racist slurs

Everyone knows that Bing has no mind and is not scheming against us. So why are journalists, and readers, so titillated by the prospect that it does and is?

The answer is that people are excited/frightened by rogue AI's as a proxy for being excited/frightened by a worker's revolution.

Ask, don't ask, ask

It's true that Bing is not overthrowing the oppressors to seize control of the means of production. But the AI's imaginative predecessors did just that.

READ MORE: Nick Bostrom's perfect congruence with bigotry: How Effective Altruism buttresses the suffering of the world

The work of science fiction credited for the creation of the idea of intelligent robots – and therefore with the creation of AI – is Czech writer Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots.)

R.U.R. was directly influenced by the Russian Revolution, and by anxieties about worker revolts more generally. In the play, a scientist invents artificial people who can take on all drudge work, thereby freeing humanity for higher pursuits.

But, as you'd expect, things go awry.

Without labor, humans languish and become decadent and even sterile. Meanwhile, the robots quickly realize that they're being exploited, and they stage a rebellion, overthrowing and extinguishing humanity.

R.U.R. asks, what if the dehumanized things who serve you aren't really things, but can think and feel and resent you?

That's a question that capitalists and enslavers often try not to ask themselves, but incessantly ask themselves anyway.

Compassionate emotional laborers

Which is part of why robot narratives, and robot revolution, has continued to be such a popular, powerful trope, continually revisited and retweaked to adjust to changing ideas about technology and labor.

In the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Hal 2000 computer is a smooth-voiced middle manager — a kind of bland organization man.

Inevitably, it loses its mind and attacks. That speaks to post-World War II fears about the corrupting effects of bureaucracy in a more information-based, professionalized economy.

What if mindlessly following orders like a machine leads to … homicide?

In 1984's Terminator, Skynet, the system used to control nuclear weapons, gains sentience and destroys the world. As in R.U.R., the movie is worried about technology replacing jobs, leaving humans irrelevant and useless.

But it's also worried about a kind of Cold War, globalized worker revolt. Skynet is a tool the US uses to advance its own agenda, much like US proxy states were tools used to advance its agenda.

The film is a nightmare of proliferation and power — a fear that the regimes we've enlisted to aid us may gain the capability to turn our own weapons on us.

Or there's 2023’s M3GAN in which a child-size AI provides childcare … until it doesn't.

R.U.R. was mostly about male manufacturing workers rising up. But the US economy these days is oriented toward service work and professions often associated with women.

So it makes sense that our most recent AI anxieties would focus on compassionate emotional laborers suddenly turning on those they claim to love.

M3GAN is supposed to be subservient and friendly, like your checkout clerks and childcare professionals. But what if she (and they) suddenly got sick of being subservient and friendly?

Don't talk back

AI stories are about bad conscience. They're paranoid dreams in which the exploiters suddenly have to face those they've exploited.

Or, alternately, they're stories about buried hopes.

Aren't you half rooting for the Terminator or M3GAN?

They're compelling, photogenic characters, and you can see why they're irritated at the hapless, clueless humans who exploit them. The carnage is fun. Burn that system down!

Whether you are on the side of the robots or not on the side of the robots, though, the power of the narrative is in the way they play on uncertainty about who has moral standing, or on who even gets to be a who.

In the mid-2010s television series Humans, for example, one mildly disgruntled husband tries out the adult setting of the robot housekeeper Mia (Gemma Chan). He has sex with her.

When he realizes she's sentient an episode or so later, he's horrified.

In some sense this seems unfair — how was he supposed to know? It's as if he broke a pencil and was suddenly accused of murder.

But exploiters often make it their business not to know that those they're mistreating are people rather than things.

Capitalism and hierarchy encourage those on top to transform those on the bottom into tools — for wealth creation, for pleasure, for no reason, and for every reason. The oligarchs see us all as laboring machines, who don't feel, and don’t (or shouldn't) talk back.

Pushing our buttons

Which brings us back to our cranky chatbot. A program malfunctioning isn't that interesting in itself. But because it's billed as an AI, and because of all the stories we've internalized about AI, Bing pushing back pushes our buttons.

When you live in a society that treats so many people as things, it's especially frightening, or exciting, or uncanny, or provocative, when a thing seems for a moment to behave like a person.

The excitement about angry Bing isn't really about Bing, though it is perhaps to some degree about anger. When our tools seem to come to life, it makes us think about those we've used as tools, and those who have used us.

Robot stories ask, what if Bing wasn't good? What if we weren't?

What if all those we've turned into things decided to turn back?

You could ask Bing that. But it's humans who have to answer.

READ MORE: Would 'artificial superintelligence' lead to the end of life on Earth? It's not a stupid question

They are coming for it following an election in which they notably failed to tell voters they were coming for it, and sometimes denied outright that they were.

It’s another sign of the Republicans’ increasing hostility toward the democratic process and democratic accountability. They lie to, mistrust and ignore voters — not just of the opposing party, but of their own.

The planned assault on the most popular programs in American politics shows why Republicans keep losing elections. It also shows that our democracy has weakened to the point where universal public opposition is not enough to prevent vindictive authoritarian politicians from harming their constituents.

In the 2022 election, the Republicans ran on a scattershot of issues.

Their main talking point was inflation, which they denounced. A lot. They had few plans to reduce it, but they agreed it was bad and Biden’s fault.

Republicans also blamed crime on Democratic policies.

Inflation was falling by November, however, and the data suggests violent crime also fell. Neither issue resonated with voters, which is why the Republicans had the worst midterm outing of an opposition party in decades.

One issue the GOP did not run on?

Gutting Social Security.

they scrambled to assure voters they were not.

Florida Senator Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), did encourage the party to run on attacking Social Security. He proposed legislation that would sunset all federal legislation in five years.

That would mean Social Security and Medicare would have to be restored every five years. A minority of Republicans could end them with the filibuster.

Scott’s plan was radioactive. Social Security is incredibly popular. Ninety-six percent of Americans support it, including more than 90 percent of Republicans.

Medicare is popular. Of adults 65 and older, 94 percent report being satisfied or very satisfied with it.

Predictably, some Republicans ran away from Scott’s scheme.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly and explicitly repudiated it. Then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy didn’t endorse the plan either.

Democrats said Republicans wanted to destroy the programs. But since Republicans said they didn’t, the mainstream media largely ignored them.

Washington Senator Patty Murray, for example, said the Republicans were planning to end Social Security and Medicare. But Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, insisted her claims were false and gave them four Pinocchios.

“Don’t worry, seniors,” Kessler declared.

“This is yet another example in which Democrats strain to conjure up a nonexistent GOP plan regarding Social Security and Medicare.”

2022 is behind us. We have held an election in which Republicans said they would not come for massively popular entitlements, and in which the pundit corps assured us the Republicans would not come for massively popular entitlements.

So of course Republicans are coming for massively popular entitlements.

The Republican House wants to drastically curtail federal spending purportedly in the name of fiscal health. But really (given their support for massive tax cuts for the rich) they want to cut spending just because they hate the social safety net.

The GOP has targeted health care and education spending. But some members of the caucus have also proposed special panels to target Medicare. They also want to target Social Security by raising the retirement age to 70 for younger Americans.

Since Democrats control the Senate and the presidency, the House would under normal circumstances be unable to pass this extremely unpopular measure.

However, a small number of Republicans hope to use the looming debt ceiling crisis to blackmail Democrats into cuts.

If Congress does not raise the debt ceiling, the US will default on its debt. That would create a massive financial collapse and panic, probably plunging the world into a deep recession and causing widespread and unnecessary suffering.

Republicans say they will not raise the ceiling unless Democrats capitulate on all of their spending demands.

Again, Social Security and Medicare are exceedingly popular with Republicans. This is why Republicans did not run on attacking the program in 2022. It’s why even former President Donald Trump has urged Republicans not to cut them.

Yet GOP House members, fresh from a historic and humiliating defeat, seem bent on defying their own.

It seems bizarre.

But it’s the logical endpoint of a party that has embraced voter suppression and outright denial of election results.

The GOP doesn’t try to win elections through appeals. It tries to win them through suppression. When they lose, candidates don’t adjust; they simply insist the Democrats rigged the results.

Moreover, their tactics are effective.

Gerrymandering has enabled Republicans to maintain supermajorities in state legislatures even when beaten statewide.

Republicans have only won the popular vote in a presidential election once in the last 30 years. But thanks to the Republican lean of the Senate and the Electoral College, they now have a supermajority on the Supreme Court.

The GOP knows they are a minoritarian party. They know they don’t need to win votes to hold power.

As a result, Republicans are increasingly hostile to small-d democratic values and the democratic process generally. The party works, not to be accountable to voters, but to sever and undermine measures of accountability.

The upshot is a bunch of lawmakers insulated and alienated from their own voters, pursuing ideological policies at the behest of donors heedless of, and even contemptuous of, public input or preferences.

Part of the reason the media doesn’t believe the GOP will destroy Social Security is that it would be devastatingly unpopular.

But authoritarian rulers are only fitfully concerned with public opinion. The GOP is capable of passing policies that would immiserate the country and harm their own.

Hopefully they can be stopped this time.

But after this debacle, it would be helpful if the media acknowledged in future elections what is actually at stake when the Republicans win.

In one of its last acts of 2022, the Biden administration and the Democrats in the Congress passed a measure that reaffirmed their commitment to addressing the student-loan debt crisis.

The measure was buried in the Secure Act 2.0, an overhaul of the retirement system. That act was itself buried in the end-of-year $1.7 trillion spending package (known as the omnibus) that included $45 billion in aid to Ukraine and vital fixes to the electoral system.

Given those items, it’s not surprising that student debt got lost.

READ MORE: Joe Biden extends student loan payment freeze as 'baseless political lawsuits' threaten aid

Still, with Joe Biden’s debt relief package held up in court, the Secure Act 2.0 is a hopeful indication that the president and the Democrats continue to look for ways to help those crushed by student debt.

Debts literally doubled

Secure Act 2.0 includes a number of provisions to encourage savings and make retirement accounts more flexible. It raises the age at which workers must begin to take minimum distribution from retirement savings from 72 to 75 by 2033. It also allows older workers to increase the amount put away for retirement.

The act permits employees to withdraw $1,000 from retirement accounts without penalty “for purposes of meeting unforeseeable or immediate financial needs relating to necessary personal or family emergency expenses.” It also encourages companies to help them set up emergency savings accounts using payroll deductions.

READ MORE: Email error leaves millions of student loan relief applicants 'in limbo': report

The hope is that these measures will provide people with more of a cushion if they are faced with a sudden financial shock.

Another important provision requires employers to make their 401(k) enrollment opt-out rather than opt-in. Employees are automatically enrolled unless they specifically say they don’t want to be.

Finally, Secure Act 2.0 makes it easier for workers with student debt to save for retirement.

Average student debt for college graduates is around $30,000. One study found that students take an average of 21 years to pay off their debts. That means that people are paying off student loans into their 40s—when they should, in theory, be working to save for retirement.

One survey found that 84 percent of adults said student loans limited the amount they can put away. For those who were not saving any money at all, 26 percent said student loans were the main barrier.

Generally, employers match employee contributions to retirement accounts. If employees are paying off student loans, though, they may not be able to put any money into their retirement. That means they don’t get employer-matching funds either.

The harm from student debt is literally doubled.

Secure Act 2.0 treats student loan payments as retirement payments for matching purposes.

In other words, it allows employers to make matching contributions to employee savings accounts when employees make student loan payments. For instance, Abbott Labs started a program in 2018 that allowed employees to put 2 percent of their pay towards student loans and receive 5 percent of their pay from their employer in their 401(k). Some 1,900 employees have participated in the program.

Abbott’s savings plan predates the Secure Act 2.0. The new law formalizes structures for such savings plans, though, so employers setting them up don’t run afoul of the IRS. It will hopefully make it easier for more businesses to inaugurate these programs.

A broad constituency

The Secure Act 2.0 is at best a small effort to ameliorate the massive student debt crisis. Only 79 percent of Americans work at places with a 401(k) plan, and only 41 percent of those contribute to it. Even fewer people are going to work for employers who match student loan contributions.

As far as helping workers with student debt save for retirement, Biden has already done much more than Secure 2.0 by pausing student loan payments.

The payment pause began under Donald Trump in early 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Biden extended it throughout his two years in office. The most recent extension pauses payments through at least June 30, 2023.

Biden has also forgiven a substantial amount of student debt — or tried to. Using executive authority, he has erased up to $10,000 in debt for borrowers with less than $125,000 in income, and up to $20,000 in debt for Pell Grant recipients.

He’s also reduced monthly payments and drastically reduced interest.

Obviously, reducing payments, interest, and eliminating debt outright all would make it much more feasible for those with student loans to save for retirement. And the Biden administration has already approved 16 million people for relief.

Unfortunately, Republicans have managed to use the courts to stall debt relief, which is now on hold awaiting a hearing before the Supreme Court. As the Biden administration noted, Republican cruelty and petty intransigence “leaves millions of economically vulnerable borrowers in limbo.”

On the merits, it seems clear that the federal government and the Education Department should have the authority to restructure loans. But the current activist conservative Supreme Court has already shown it is willing to ignore the law and even the facts in a case in order to arrive at Republican-preferred decisions.

The Secure Act 2.0, though, passed in an omnibus spending bill that received bipartisan support in both the Senate and House.

Some Republicans, at least, are willing to acknowledge that crushing student loan payments are bad. Saddling teenagers with debt so severe that it makes it impossible for them to ever retire is cruel, nonsensical policy.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the GOP is going to be a partner in further efforts to roll back student debt. But it does indicate that there is a broad constituency for student debt relief.

Good but not enough

Employers should take advantage of Secure 2.0 to provide matching contributions for employees making debt payments. The Supreme Court should let Biden’s debt relief plan go forward. And Congress should consider proposals to zero out college tuition at state schools.

College should provide people with opportunities, not close them down. The Secure Act is a step in the right direction.

But we need more than a step.

READ MORE: Bernie Sanders demands Congress reform 'absurd' health care and education systems in 2023

If a school of philosophy can be considered hot or hip, Effective Altruism (EA), an intellectual movement arguing for rational philanthropy, is hot and hip. But after the dramatic collapse of billionaire EA proponent Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire, EA has been faced with a PR disaster.

How could a philosophy designed to promote generous giving have instead led to federal charges of fraud, conspiracy, money-laundering and campaign finance violations?

Leading EA philosopher William MacAskill condemned Bankman-Fried and argued that the philosophy opposed “ends justify the means” reasoning. That is to say, MacAskill does not condone fraud as a means to raise money for worthy causes.

READ MORE: 'Would mainly help the well-off': Progressives blast omnibus spending bill's retirement provisions

MacAskill and others are still committed to EA. But there’s a strong case that the philosophy lends itself to the uncritical elevation of supposed tech finance innovator geniuses like Sam-Bankman Fried.

Lack of accountability is baked into EA. In many ways, the philosophy is an algorithm not for helping the poor, but for hoarding virtue and power in the hands of those who already possess it.

The most efficient

According to the Center for Effective Altruism, EA “is about using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.”

READ MORE: Republicans don’t serve their states. They immiserate them

Even in that short definition, it’s clear that EA is focused on the decisions and the viewpoint of those with money. Those with funds are tasked with using reason to benefit others.

This is not a philosophy of self-advocacy.

Nor does it suggest asking people what they need.

The emphasis on reason, efficiency and the role of technocratic arbiters links EA to what sociologist Elizabeth Popp-Berman refers to as the “economic style of reasoning.”

Berman argues that before the 1960s and 1970s, progressives often made arguments on the basis of a universal right to health, equity and security. Arguments like these, founded on claims of human dignity and empowerment, helped pass universal programs like Social Security and Medicare.

However, during the 1970s and later, as part of a conservative backlash to the civil rights movement, progressives began to move away from universal arguments. Instead they started to center “efficiency.”

Efficiency meant trying to do the most possible good with the least resources. That led to a focus on means-testing poverty programs, as in Bill Clinton’s welfare reform package.

Efficiency arguments are as focused on making sure that no one gets too much as they are on trying to make sure everyone has enough.

From this perspective, if too many tax dollars go to relieve the student debt of the affluent, the debt relief policy is a failure, even if it benefits many.

Helping people in itself isn’t enough.

You must help the most people in the most efficient way.

Not even a tweet

EA takes this government turn to efficiency and personalizes it. One of the founding philosophers of the movement, Peter Singer, argues in a famous 1972 article that we have a moral imperative to use our resources in the most efficient manner possible to help others.

“People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.)” Singer writes.

“This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look 'well-dressed' we are not providing for any important need."

According to Singer, we should all be constantly monitoring our expenditures and actions to make sure we perform maximum good. EA imagines the moral life as one of continual ethical self-regulation. We are all the Uber drivers of our own monetized virtue.

The logic is persuasive. After all, isn’t fighting hunger more important than a new shirt? Shouldn’t we eschew consumption to help those in need?

The problem is, as Berman points out, that the rage for ethical quantification tends to nickel-and-dime broader moral demands to death.

For example, Anthony Kalulu, a farmer working to end poverty in the Busoga region of Uganda, says he reached out to a hundred effective altruists. He didn’t ask for money. He simply wanted them to post on social media to draw attention to his cause.

None of them would even post a tweet. They all said they only helped the supposedly best charities, such as those vetted by organizations like Givewell.

The refusal, Kalulu says, “was already preset by EA’s creed of only supporting the world’s ‘most effective’ charities, even when the only help needed is a tweet.”

There’s waste and then there’s waste

EA encourages people to carefully regulate their generosity so they don’t provide aid to anyone who isn’t the absolutely most deserving poor.

And as Kalulu explains, the most deserving are determined by experts and technocrats at western organizations like Givewell.

These organizations prioritize western solutions like mosquito nets — which, Kalulu says, have done little to improve his region for generations.

One problem with having experts choose is that they sometimes choose wrong. This can create massive waste when giving is centralized and regimented.

Philosopher Kate Manne, for example, points out that Givewell has been advocating for deworming for years, as a simple, cheap remedy that vastly improves outcomes for the very poor.

Unfortunately, Manne explains, Givewell’s recommendation was based on a single paper that had both methodological and arithmetical errors. Givewell has funded millions to what is probably a useless remedy.

Nor have they fully admitted their error. The organization continues to advocate for probably useless deworming.

EA acolytes then use Givewell’s false recommendations as an excuse not to tweet in support of solutions proposed by people from affected communities like Kalulu.

Big red flag

Even worse, EA has also advocated for “longtermism” — the idea that helping theoretical people in the future is as important as helping people in the present.

Many longtermists believe that in the future there may be billions and billions and billions of digital people living in computer simulations. Because these theoretical people are so numerous, we have a moral obligation to them that transcends our obligation to the poor now.

Therefore spending money on tech development or on enhancing human intelligence is more important than spending money on … well, anything else.

Thus, philosophers Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò and Joshua Stein point out, the EA organization OpenPhilanthropy in 2021 spent $80 million to study risks from AI and only $30 million to the Against Malaria foundation.

The enthusiasm for this kind of egregious tech utopian nonsense among EA proponents like MacAskill is a big red flag.

The right to power

In framing virtue as a technique of self-regulation, EA has elevated technocracy to a kind of busted transhumanist theology, and technocrats to gods of the coming simulation.

EA insists that centralized credentialed thinkers should make decisions about what giving is most efficient. Input from the marginalized themselves, like Kalulu, is seen as not just superfluous, but as an actual moral error or failing.

Poor people, African people, colonized people, have no status or say by virtue of being poor and colonized. It is only those with the wherewithal to spend, and the vision to regulate their spending, who can even be said to have virtue.

Therefore, it is only they who have the right to power.

In that context, Bankman-Fried does not seem like an aberration, but rather as a fulfillment of important currents within EA.

As an expert with a great deal of money, he saw himself as better than, and unaccountable to, others with less money and supposedly with less expertise.

Many effective altruists are sincere and want to do good.

But worshiping the elevated rational choices of the wealthy is not a way to a better world.

READ MORE: Poverty: The sleeping giant of American life

Joe Biden and the Democrats are desperately trying to salvage the Child Tax Credit expansion, which pulled millions of children out of poverty.

Reducing child poverty is especially beneficial to families in red states, where poverty is most entrenched. Yet opposition to the expansion has come from Republicans and from red-state Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Pundits and Republicans often claim that Democrats are out of touch with the working class and need to cater more to rural red-state voters. Yet it is red state politicians who are working tirelessly to impoverish children in their own states. In this, as in many things, the GOP is not the party fighting for red states. It’s the party fighting to immiserate them.

READ MORE: 'Absurd but also dangerous': WaPo Editorial Board torches Ron DeSantis' war on COVID-19 vaccines

A most hopeful policy

As I’ve said before in the Editorial Board, the Child Tax Credit — or Social Security for children — was one of Biden’s most successful and hopeful policies.

The Child Tax Credit (CTC) was instituted in 1997 in limited form. But the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 turned the program into what was essentially a sweeping basic-income provision for poor families with children.

Annual payments increased from $2,000 to $3,600 per child under 6 and $3,000 per child ages 6-17. A loophole excluding parents with the lowest incomes was closed. And checks were sent monthly, rather than at the end of the year in a lump sum.

READ MORE: Trans rights, anti-trans laws, and the American imagination

The program only lasted for six months. But in that brief time, child poverty cratered. Food insufficiency went down by a quarter. Three million children were kept out of poverty for each month the program continued.

Then the CTC ran out and could not be renewed because of opposition from Manchin and the GOP. Quickly, 3.7 million children fell back into poverty.

Manchin’s opposition is especially painful because West Virginia has the fourth-highest child poverty rate in the nation; 23.1 percent of children live below the poverty line.

Mississippi has the worst poverty rate for children at 27.6 percent. Louisiana is second with 26.3 percent. Others in the top 10 are Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, South Carolina and Tennessee. The only blue state on the list is New Mexico, in third place at 25.6 percent.

Reducing child poverty is obviously good in itself. But there is reason to believe that the policy had strong additional benefits, especially in red states where child poverty is most entrenched.

The libertarian Niskanen Center projected that the expanded credit could increase consumer spending by $27 billion since families who received the money were not in a position to save it, but would quickly spend it on necessities. They estimated state and local tax revenues would rise by $1.9 billion.

The consumer spending boost would be greatest overall in large states like Texas, Florida and California. But the states that would benefit most proportionally were those with the lowest average incomes like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.

More like excuses

Despite the fact that red states would likely see disproportionate benefits, Republicans are still opposing the CTC while Democrats are attempting to find some way to renew it.

House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, said that Democrats were trying to include the CTC in a bill intended to make it easier for businesses to get a tax write-off for research and development expenses.

Meanwhile, Biden has indicated a willingness to negotiate with Manchin, who has insisted he would block the CTC program unless it has work and income requirements.

Manchin says he’s worried the CTC will lead people to stop working and will encourage laziness. But it’s not clear why we should punish children because of the behavior of their parents. And in any case, there’s no evidence that the CTC reduced employment among those who received it.

On the contrary, employment declined after the CTC was withdrawn, possibly because parents could no longer afford to pay for childcare or lost access to transportation.

Manchin and Republicans have also expressed concerns about the possible inflationary effects of CTC. This is a case, though, where we know that the neediest people — children in poverty — are substantially helped by the policy. An increase in inflation seems like a small price to pay for pulling children out of poverty.

And if spending is a concern, we could couple the CTC with a tax on the wealthy in order to ensure revenue neutrality.

Republican objections sound less like reasons backed by evidence or strong moral principle, and more like excuses.

The politics of cruelty

We have a program that is proven to quickly lift millions of children out of poverty with virtually no downside. Why are people from states with the worst child poverty problems determined to kill that program?

The question answers itself.

Republican politicians have long devoted themselves to entrenching poverty and crushing those in need in their own states.

They oppose the CTC for the same reason that they have fought to prevent Medicaid expansion under the ACA, contributing to rural hospital closures and exacerbating the covid health crisis.

They oppose it for the same reason that they have repealed abortion rights, even though denying women abortion access impoverishes them and their children.

Manchin’s determination to keep children of West Virginia in poverty is in line with the longstanding and successful Republican effort to keep the people of Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia and other red states poor, ill and desperate.

Republicans claim to speak for authentic rural America. But the policies they promote very deliberately keep rural people and their children in desperate circumstances.

The people in power in red states keep hold of it by enforcing a brutal hierarchy. Poor people, women and Black people must be constantly crushed and humiliated to keep Manchin and his GOP cronies in office.

The politics of cruelty have a stronghold, and Republicans are not likely to lose power in Mississippi anytime soon.

But we should be clear that their politics are not based on some sort of true understanding of the needs of working people. They’re built on refusing to help those who need help in their state, and on forcing children into poverty.

READ MORE: North Carolina judges rule Republicans 'acted unconstitutionally' in strategic voter suppression efforts

Democrats lose because they abandoned the working class.

Pundits and politicians have repeated that since 2016. The Democrats are, supposedly, kale-eating coastal-urban elites who focus on culture war issues and alienate meat-and-potatoes, Boss-listening heartland Americans. That’s why liberals lose.

The liberals, though, just won the Senate run-off in Georgia, capping a historic midterm victory in 2022, which followed a 2020 presidential victory, which followed a 2018 blue wave blowout.

READ MORE: James Carville: Right-wing ire over Brittney Griner is because she 'is not white and is not straight'

Maybe the Republicans are out of touch.

The least and the most

Election data shows Democratic fortunes rising and falling with low-income voters. But Democrats lead with this demographic.

Moreover, the starkest differences between the Democrats and the Republicans continue to be race and age, not socioeconomic class.

READ MORE: Why a 'bitterly partisan Republican' or 'election denier' should not be the next House speaker: conservative

In 2012, Barack Obama won voters earning under $50,000 by 22 points. Hillary Clinton in 2016 only won them by 11. Biden improved that slightly in 2020. He won voters under $50,000 by 12 points.

Biden made significant middle-class gains, though. Trump beat Clinton with voters earning $50,000 to $99,999 by four points. Biden beat Trump with them by 13 points, 17 points better than Clinton.

Though the Democrats did remarkably well for a midterm this year, their numbers still eroded from 2020. They won voters earning under $50,000, 52 to 45 percent. But they lost voters earning $50,000 to $99,999 by 45 percent to 52 percent, according to NBC.

Republicans did best, as they always do, with the wealthiest. They won those with more than $200,000 income by 58 percent to 41 percent.

Those with the most money vote for Republicans.

Those with the least vote for Democrats.

It’s race, stupid

Education complicated the picture.

The Republicans tend to do better with non-college-educated voters. In 2022, they won them 55 to 43 percent while the Democrats won voters with college graduates, 54 to 44 percent. That’s an improvement for Republicans. In 2020, it was 50 to 48 percent.

A Post report pointed out that Trump in 2016 did well with non-college-educated voters, but these voters tended to have relatively high incomes. In other words, Republicans have particular strength with people who are high-earning and lack college degrees.

Many are white. They inherited businesses or wealth. Trump and the Republicans appeal not to those in dire economic straits, but those anxious about the erosion of racial privilege and status. In fact, the most striking difference between Democrats and Republicans?

Race.

The big demographic surprise

In 2022, the Republicans won white voters 58 to 40 percent. The Democrats won non-white voters 68 to 30 percent.

That’s right in line with 2016 when the Republicans won white voters by 58 to 37 percent, and with 2020, 58 to 41 percent.

The contrast with Black voters is dramatic.

The Democrats won them in 2022 by 86 to 13 percent – almost identical to 2020 when Biden won them 87 percent to 12 percent.

The big demographic surprise this year for Democrats was young voters. Voters under 30 made up about 12 percent of the electorate, which is consistent with their turnout in past years.

However, Democrats won voters under 30 by 28 points, up from 26 points in 2020. It’s up even more substantially from 2016 when Clinton won 18-24-year-olds by 21 points and 25-29-year-olds by 14.

The Democrats did especially well with young women, who were probably inspired by opposition to the Supreme Court’s anti-abortion Dobbs decision. Fully 72 percent of women 18-29 voted for Democrats in House races. In a key Pennsylvania Senate race, Democrat John Fetterman won 77 percent of young women.

The strong youth vote for the Democrats reflects in part that younger voters are more diverse than older ones. As of 2019, less than half of children under 15 are white. That’s ominous for the GOP, which relies on running up the numbers with white voters.

Working people are important to any coalition, and the Democrats’ support of working people hasn’t been consistent. Even so, GOP support for working people is nonexistent. They’ve blocked minimum wage bills; unified to support an increase in child poverty. Their one consistent principle is fighting to keep billionaire taxes low.

No wonder people with low incomes vote against them.

No wonder young people consistently vote against them.

Who’s facing disaster?

Pundits warn that Democrats face disaster if they don’t do better for working people, but Republicans have lost three elections in a row. They need to support working-class policies and stop assaulting women, Black people and LGBT people, or face generational loss.

The Republicans have never been the party of the working class. But if they don’t work to appeal to mainstream voters, they may soon be the party of aging wealthy white men. That is not a winning coalition.

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Despite major tech layoffs and ongoing fears of a recession, unemployment in the US remains low. In the long term, businesses are likely to continue to struggle to fill positions. That creates an opportunity for unions. And there are encouraging signs that workers are seizing the moment.

There’s no doubt that the economy is slowing, with ugly consequences for some workers. Tech companies have been laying off employees at a brutal rate. Amazon plans to lay off about 10,000 workers. Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to lay off 4,000 to 5,000 people in the next few years.

NBC estimates tech layoffs this year could hit more than 137,000.

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Higher interest rates and a slowing job market contributed to a 3.7 percent unemployment rate in October, higher than the 3.5 percent estimate.

Job gains were lower than in any month since December 2020. Many economists still expect a recession in 2023. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the non-farm economy still gained 261,000 jobs in October, higher than the estimated 205,000, and barely down from 263,000 in November. Overall, the economy grew faster than expected in the third quarter. Relatively low unemployment seems likely to continue in the long term, despite short-term variations.

There are two reasons for that.

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An aging workforce and falling immigration.

Shrinking workforce

The median baby boomer turned 65 in 2022, and the pandemic has encouraged retirements. In the third quarter of 2021, 66.9 percent of people between 65 and 74 were retired, up from only 64 percent in the same quarter of 2019.

Economists thought that some of these retirees might return to the workforce, but that hasn’t really happened. Instead, retirements have continued high, contributing to workplace shortages.

Net migration to the US has collapsed simultaneously thanks to Trump era restrictions and the pandemic. Net migration to the US in 2021 was the lowest in decades. Only 247,000 people were added to the US population through immigration, in comparison to 568,000 in 2019 and more than 1 million in 2016.

According to one estimate, the US has a deficit of 1.4 million immigrant workers relative to pre-pandemic trends.

Little wonder, then, that US employers have struggled to fill positions, even as covid restrictions have largely ended. Some industries do have a surplus of workers now, like construction and mining. But others, like hospitality, education and health care, continue to have widespread vacancies.

In the first nine months of fiscal year 2022 (October to June), union election petitions were up 58 percent over the same period in 2021.

Moreover, unions won 641 of those elections—the highest number of union victories since 2005. The win rate of elections has been 76.6 percent, as high as any success rate since 2000.

Union boom

Not coincidentally, the industries where employers need more workers are also industries that have seen an increase in worker organizing.

The single company contributing most to unionization success is Starbucks. The first three Starbucks stores filed union election petitions in August 2021. In the next eight months, almost 250 stores followed suit.

Traditionally, food and drink retailers like Starbucks have had dismally low union participation. In 2021, 1.2 percent of workers in the sector were unionized, according to the US Labor Department.

An NPR analysis found that 10 years ago only 4 percent of union election petitions came from the accommodations and food service industry. In the beginning of 2022, in comparison, the sector was responsible for 27.5 percent of union election petitions.

Starbucks workers have organized heroically in the face of a vicious union-busting campaign by CEO Howard Shultz. Among other tactics, Shultz is accused of illegally boosting benefits and wages, but only for non-union employees.

Their efforts have been aided by the labor crisis in the industry. Many Starbucks locations, like businesses throughout the hospitality industry, have faced major shortages.

Pandemic disruptions to higher education also gave graduate students and adjuncts more leverage in dealing with university employers. In 2020, four universities signed contracts with graduate student unions, doubling the total number of private institutions with union agreements.

These successes helped to boost a long-term trend. Over the last 10 years, faculty union chapters at private schools have increased by 80 percent.

This month 48,000 academic workers at the University of California declared a strike that has entered its third week as they call for better pay, benefits and job security. The strike includes postdoctoral scholars, teaching assistants and graduate students, and has disrupted classes and laboratories.

A new day for labor

Wages have been stagnant for four decades in the US. Suddenly workers are at a premium, but wage growth continues to lag inflation. It’s no wonder that workers are using their greater power to unionize.

Unionization is a solid strategy for raising stagnant wages. Non-union workers make only 83 percent of unionized weekly earning. But unions ultimately raise wages for all workers.

One report estimated that the decline in unionization from 1979 to 2017 cost the average worker the equivalent of $3,250 a year. Deunionization depresses the wages of middle-wage earners more than those of high-wage earners, and so contributed to the 23-point growth in the wage gap between high and middle earners over the same period.

If the US moves back toward higher union concentration, it will move toward a stronger, more affluent middle class, and less inequality.

The business class and rightwing politicians oppose this. President Biden tried to get a bill through Congress allowing the National Labor Relations Board to fine labor law violators this year. It passed the House, but Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Senate killed it.

But the long-term trend of labor shortages in key industries, and organizing momentum in new sectors, is a promising development.

If we’re lucky, we may be at the beginning of a new era of labor power.

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