Pennsylvania Senate candidate Fetterman publishes op ed on inflation's impact on working families

Fetterman tweet dated June 17, 2022
A voter got this photo of him shopping at Costco, 
the discount warehouse store

John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate, published this a few days ago in the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat under the headline, "Domestic solutions: High prices not a random problem."  Here's an excerpt, which is striking in its specificity and furthers his "everyman" image: 

Across Pennsylvania, people are getting squeezed. We’re paying more at the grocery store, more at the pump and more almost everywhere.

My opponent, millionaire celebrity Mehmet Oz, doesn’t feel a change in price when he’s filling up his gas tank – if he even pumps his own gas at all (they don’t let you do that in Oz’s native New Jersey). He doesn’t have to worry about his gas or grocery bill, and doesn’t even notice if it’s more than it used to be.

When I fill up my Dodge RAM, it’s costing a hell of a lot more than it did a year ago.

When Gisele and I go shopping for groceries at Giant Eagle, almost everything we buy costs more.

All of our families are dealing with this. In May, the Consumer Price Index saw the largest jump in consumer prices in 41 years, with inflation at 8.6% compared to the previous year. Inflation is hitting families across the commonwealth.

But what’s happening isn’t just random. It’s plain wrong.

Just last week, gas prices hit a record high of $5.07 per gallon in Pennsylvania, an outrageously high price that is impacting families across Pennsylvania.

But the truth is, if it wasn’t for the greed of oil companies, prices likely wouldn’t be this high.

In fact, the last time a barrel of crude oil cost as much as it does now was in July 2014, but at that point, a gallon of gas only cost about $3.54. Oil companies don’t need to be charging this much for gas – they’re just doing it to make excess profits.

Johnstown, in western Pennsylvania, has a population of about 20,000 and is in Cambria County and part of the Johnstown-Somerset metro.  Perhaps Fetterman sought to place this in a small-town newspaper to further and illustrate his campaign slogan, "every county.  every vote."  Or maybe this is the only paper that would run it. (I note that his wife, Gisele, got her op-ed advocating the availability of contraception in the Pittsburgh paper).   Either way, I'm happy to see a candidate taking his message about inflation straight to the people in a local newspaper. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

Edsall on Democrats' uphill battle in 2022, 2024, with attention to the white working class

The headline for Thomas Edsall's column is "Democrats are Making Life too Easy for Republicans," and an excerpt focusing on the white working class follows:  

At the moment, there is widespread pessimism among those on the left end of the political spectrum. Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, replying by email to my inquiry, wrote that for predictable reasons, “Democrats face an uphill battle in both 2022 and 2024.”

But, she went on, “the problems are much deeper. First, the white working class that used to vote Democratic no longer does.” Sawhill noted that when she

studied this group back in 2018, what surprised me most was their very negative attitudes toward government, their dislike of social welfare programs, their commitment to an ethic of personal responsibility and the importance of family and religion in their lives. This large group includes some people who are just plain prejudiced but a larger group that simply resents all the attention paid to race, gender, sexual preference or identity and the disrespect they think this entails for those with more traditional views and lifestyles.

Messages coming from the more progressive members of the Democratic Party, Sawhill warned, “will be exploited by Republicans to move moderate Democrats or to move no-Trump Republicans in their direction.”

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is highly critical of the contemporary Democratic Party, writing by email:

Misguided focus on unpopular social policies are driving voters away from the Democratic Party and are mobilizing Republicans. Democrats used to be the party of the working class, but today they are instead seen as a party defined by ostensibly legalizing property crime, crippling the police and injecting social justice into math classes.

As a result, Westwood continued,

It is no surprise that this doesn’t connect with a working family struggling to pay for surging grocery bills. By abandoning their core brand, even Democrats who oppose defunding the police are burdened by the party’s commitment to unpopular social policy.

The traditional strategy in midterm elections, Westwood wrote, is to mobilize the party base. Instead, he contended, Democrats

have decided to let the fringe brand the party’s messaging around issues that fail to obtain majority support among the base. Perhaps the most successful misinformation campaign in modern politics is being waged by the Twitter left against the base of the Democratic Party. The Twitter mob is intent on pushing social policies that have approximately zero chance of becoming law as a test of liberalism. Even if you support reducing taxes on the middle class, immigration reform and increasing the minimum wage, opposing defunding the police or the legalization of property crime makes you an unreasonable outcast.  (emphasis mine)

In other words, Westwood is blasting purity tests. 

I have highlighted the column's comment about the rural-urban dynamic in a post at Legal Ruralism.  

Is an orientation to work and self-sufficiency making Democrats' domestic policies unpopular?

National Public Radio reported a few days ago on new poll that shows Democrats not getting credit for their assistance to low-income families.  Kelsey Snell and Domenico Montanaro report, with some excerpts following, including this part I want to highlight the most, but which doesn't show up in the transcript.  It's a quote from a Republican voter in Oklahoma who got the child tax credit for his kids but says it didn't help it all.  In that regard, he represents one in five voters who responded to the survey.  Curious, because it's hard to imagine how a cash infusion couldn't help "at all." 

Perhaps more importantly, that respondent--whose race is not specified--doesn't think it's good for government to give money to people.  Here's his quote (transcribed by me):  

Long term, it's a problem because you need a better choice.  What you're doing when you actually give these people that Band Aid is you're making them dependent on that Band Aid.

This reflects a long-standing attitude of Americans who value work--the idea of work.  These folks expect all people to work because they work--even if the fruits of their labor don't truly meet their economic need.  This is reflected most prominently in Jennifer Sherman's book, Those who Work, Those who Don't:  Poverty, Morality and Family in Rural America, and I've written about it here and here.  

What follows is an excerpt from the story's transcript with more context on the poll on which they're reporting:   

Democrats say the child tax credit has a particularly large impact on low-income families for whom the additional funds have been crucial. A recent study from Columbia University found that those monthly payments kept 3.6 million children out of poverty in October.

In the NPR/Marist survey, almost 6 in 10 eligible households said they received the child tax credit. But the 59% of eligible respondents is far below the number of families that the government expects should be getting funds. The IRS estimated earlier this year that the families of 88% of children in the U.S. would be eligible for the payments and said in September that 35 million families received them.

The disconnect between the government figures and respondents' answers is a perception and credit problem for Biden and Democrats.

Even among those who did recall receiving the tax credit, two-thirds said it only helped a little and 1 in 5 said it didn't help at all.
Biden's perception problem

For the president, there were further signs that voters don't give him credit for the policies of his own administration.

When it came to those direct payments, respondents gave Democrats in Congress a plurality of the credit for getting them to people (40%), while 17%, credited Republicans — even though zero congressional Republicans voted for the March relief bill.

The same percentage — just 17% — felt Biden was most responsible for sending the cash.

* * *

While the numbers are a sign of a deeply polarized society, there's also evidence of lackluster feelings for the president among even people in his own party.

For example, in the survey, while 76% of Republicans strongly disapproved of the job Biden is doing, only 38% of Democrats strongly approved.

* * *

Democrats have spent months repeating the message that their legislation will not add to the deficit or worsen inflation. In an address from the White House in October, Biden called the plans fiscally responsible policies to help the country grow.

"They don't add a single penny to the deficit," he said. "And they don't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. In fact, they reduce the deficit."

Overall, 61% of respondents said things in the country are going in the wrong direction. That's a significant drop from back in July, when .Biden was saying the U.S. was on the cusp of independence from the pandemic. Americans then were split but more optimistic than they are now on the direction of the country.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

Including working-class whites in stories about failures of the coronavirus economy

Two in the New York Times caught my attention in the last few days.  The first was this one, really a photo essay, by Brenda Ann Kenneally, documenting food insecurity, from New York to California.  It features two families, primarily, one black and one white, and the headline is, "America at Hunger's Edge."   It reminded me of this 2013 story out of Dyersburg, Tennessee, in which Sheryl Gay Stolberg showed both black and white families relying on food stamps. 

The other story is Eduardo Porter's feature on service workers, who have been badly hurt by the coronavirus shutdown.  It's "The Service Economy Meltdown."

As I have written in my scholarly work, it's important that the media depict poverty of all colors.  Conflating poverty and low-income/precarity struggles with blackness is bad for economically struggling folks of all races and ethnicities--including non-Hispanic whites. 

The working class and coronavirus (Part II): Pandemic throws inequality into sharp relief

I've been trying to write a nicely composed post on this topic for weeks now, but I'm giving up and providing just headlines, links, and brief excerpts, with featured stories arranged in chronological order. 

One of the earliest inequality stories by the national media was this one under the headline, "‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide, by Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu, published on March 27, 2020 in the New York Times. Among the places featured was Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Here's an excerpt:

In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth.

And across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

Another early story focused on inequality played up the distinction between "essential workers" and the typically more privileged who are working from home.  "Location Data Says it All:  Staying Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury."  Jennifer Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel J.X. Dance reported for the New York Times on April 3, 2020.  The lede follows:

It has been about two weeks since the Illinois governor ordered residents to stay at home, but nothing has changed about Adarra Benjamin’s responsibilities. She gets on a bus nearly every morning in Chicago, traveling 20 miles round trip some days to cook, clean and shop for her clients, who are older or have health problems that make such tasks difficult. 

Ms. Benjamin knows the dangers, but she needs her job, which pays about $13 an hour. She also cannot imagine leaving her clients to fend for themselves. “They’ve become my family,” she said. 

In cities across America, many lower-income workers continue to move around, while those who make more money are staying home and limiting their exposure to the coronavirus, according to smartphone location data analyzed by The New York Times.

Charles Blow, New York Times columnist, observed on April 5, 2020, that "Social Distancing is a Privilege."  There he writes:

People like to say that the coronavirus is no respecter of race, class or country, that the disease Covid-19 is mindless and will infect anybody it can. 

In theory, that is true. But, in practice, in the real world, this virus behaves like others, screeching like a heat-seeking missile toward the most vulnerable in society. And this happens not because it prefers them, but because they are more exposed, more fragile and more ill. 

What the vulnerable portion of society looks like varies from country to country, but in America, that vulnerability is highly intersected with race and poverty.

From April 9, an op-ed in the New York Times by Walter Scheidel was titled, "Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics."  He writes of the aftermath of the Bubonic Plague:

Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.” 

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrank the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades.

This is sounding ominous for the wealthy, but only if government responds appropriately to what is happening.  Scheidel is a professor of history at Stanford University.

This data driven story is one that launched the "The America We Need" series on April 9, from the New York Times.  It was published on April 10, by David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez.  The headline is, "America Will Struggle after the Coronavirus.  These Charts Show Why."  Here's an excerpt:

Inequality didn’t cause the coronavirus crisis. But it is making the crisis much worse, having created an economy in which many Americans are struggling to get by, and are vulnerable to any interruption of work or income and any illness. 

On this page, we present dozens of ways to look at American life that together provide a more meaningful picture than G.D.P. There is reason to expect that many of these indicators are already beginning to look worse, as the country grapples with both a pandemic and a recession. Together, they also help show the areas in which Americans will struggle to recover from this crisis.

Jason DeParle of the New York Times reports on "The Coronavirus Class Divide:  Space and Privacy," on April 12, 2020.  The dateline is Robesonia, Pennsylvania, and the initial subject is Mark Stokes, a student at Kutztown University, who shares a house with 10 other people:

Housemates come and go to jobs in fast food and a chocolate factory, sharing a single shower. Dirty dishes crowd the kitchen that no one cleans. Lacking a bed, Mr. Stokes, a freshman at Kutztown University, sleeps on the floor in the room of a friend who took him in when the dorms closed.

No stranger to hardship, Mr. Stokes, who spent part of high school living in a car, worries that the crowded conditions will expose him to coronavirus. But like many poor Americans, he says the sanctioned solution — six feet of physical space — is a luxury he cannot afford.

DeParle quotes Stokes regarding his current living situation: 

It’s just so many people in the house and there’s nothing I can do about it — it’s not my house.  You can’t be six feet apart when you have to rely on other people’s space.

Stokes is sleeping on the floor of his friend's room in the house.  His friend sleeps on the bed with her child.  Stokes talks of sitting in his car to get some privacy, and also of reciting affirmations to calm himself. 

DeParle quotes Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins: 

The pandemic is a reminder that privacy is at a premium among the poor — hard to find and extremely valuable.  Living in crowded conditions not only increases the risk of infection but can also impose serious emotional and mental health costs. The ability to retreat into one’s own space is a way to cope with conflict, tension and anxiety.

This is a deeply reported and powerful story that also features a recovering heroin addict living in a one-room trailer, along with several family members, in Oklahoma and several homeless folks living together on Whidbey Island, Washington.  I highly recommend the entire story.

From Patricia Cohen of the New York Times on April 16, 2020, "Struggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis."  Here's the lede:

An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well-dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.” 

The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment captured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up groceries from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; renters and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospitals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing.

Damon Winter, a photographer on assignment to the Opinion section of the New York Times, contributed this photo essay (text also by Winter), which was published o April 20, 2020.  It's titled "The Great American Divide" and features photos from central New York, Ithaca (home to Cornell) and Syracuse.  This is part of the New York Times "The America We Need" series.

This April 23, 2020  New York Times Upshot piece is framed in terms of "Who Has Enough Cash to get through the Coronavirus Crisis?"  Alissa Quart and Yaryna Serkez report that just 47% of Americans say they have enough savings to get through three months of unemployment:

Even before Covid-19, many Americans were living check to check, because of the costs of housing and child care, student debt payments, medical bills and the rest. Despite the cheery insistence of people like President Trump and personal finance gurus, the economic growth of the last decade had not brought wealth or security to most Americans. Fewer than half of American adults — just 47 percent — say that they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted this month by the Pew Research Center. 

In the coronavirus’s wake, those without savings may also be losing their jobs, leaving them with little to support their families other than the CARES Act relief from the government, help from charitable groups or GoFundMe or Venmo tip jar campaigns. This won’t be enough to save many families from ruin.

Lastly, here's a story from The Economist on April 27, 2020, which offers a global perspective on how the coronavirus is aggravating inequality.  It's one of a number of stories I've seen that highlights the likelihood of dramatic food shortages around the world. The headline is "Closing schools for covid-19 does lifelong harm and widens inequality," and it contrasts quarantined kids in Amsterdam and Paris with those in Dakar.