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After days of intrigue, gamesmanship and partisan assaults, the Senate finally came together late Wednesday after nearly coming apart. As midnight was about to toll, lawmakers approved in an extraordinary 96-to-0 vote a $2 trillion package intended to get the nation through the crippling economic and health disruptions being inflicted on the world by the coronavirus.

With Democrats in control of the House and Republicans wielding a thin majority in the Senate, Mr. Schumer would have to be accommodated in any final bill.

In the end, Democrats won what they saw as significant improvements in the measure through their resistance, including added funding for health care and unemployment along with more direct money to states. A key addition was tougher oversight on the corporate bailout fund, including an inspector general and congressionally appointed board to monitor it, disclosure requirements for businesses that benefited, and a prohibition on any of the money going to Mr. Trump’s family or his properties — although they could still potentially benefit from other provisions.

Republicans plunged ahead, pulling together their own ideas. On March 19, Mr. McConnell unveiled the Republican approach — a $1 trillion proposal that centered on $1,200 cash payments to working Americans to tide them over, guaranteed loans and large tax cuts for corporate America and a newly created program to provide grants to small businesses that kept their workers on the payroll.

Democrats had their own ideas, calling for a major infusion of cash to beleaguered hospitals and health care workers, more money for states and a major expansion of unemployment benefits — “unemployment on steroids” as Mr. Schumer called it — though they were not opposed to the cash payments. Democrats criticized the corporate aid in the Republican bill, saying they wanted restrictions on using the money for stock buybacks and raising executive pay among other conditions.

Democrats drew a particularly hard line on unemployment insurance, one Senate official said, with Mr. Schumer instructing his side to refuse to negotiate on the tax relief sought by Republicans until they had a deal on the jobless benefits. The idea was to boost the aid to the level of a laid-off worker’s pay, but when that proved logistically difficult, the two sides agreed on a $600 across-the-board supplement.

Republicans were further outraged when they saw the draft House bill, a $2.5 trillion measure that included an array of progressive policies well beyond the scope of emergency aid, saying Democrats were trying to use the crisis to advance a liberal agenda

And with members of the House falling ill and quarantine orders going into effect around the country, it was becoming clear that lawmakers from that chamber would not be returning to Washington to consider the plan. The emerging compromise would have to be acceptable enough to Democrats and Republicans that it could pass without a recorded vote.

in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.

Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.

the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.

have any of the individuals commenting ever met or talked to the uneducated trailer dwellers referred to in this article. I think not. This poor pitiful underclass that we must now fix as true liberals has been making poor decisions for decades. Serial children withe serial mothers and resulting large child support payments. Job hopping and laying around the house all winter when laid off while waiting for the Wife to get home from work and make dinner. Gun purchases for thousands of dollars and 45,000 dollar trucks on an annual income of 35,000. Cashing in 401ks. To buy the latest 4 Wheeler. Oh and don't forget the biannual trips to Disney world or to hunt out west on credit cards. I sprang from uneducated people of another generation and the men by and large did not engage in self destructive behavior like this. sorry you make your bed and don't expect me to cry about it.

I think at least half of the American political class, the republican half, wants Americans to be ignorant. The ignorant are easily duped and manipulated. The GOP establishment clearly knows that, but they never expected someone like Trump to beat them at their own game. That explains why the GOP is generally unwilling to adequately fund public education and is content to punish the non-rich who seek higher education by burying them in debt.

Until now I had deceived myself into believing that I am a college educated hard working East coast Caucasian with moderate views and a penchant for reading a multi-faceted world class newspaper. However, the continued biased reports concerning Mr. Trump and his campaign are quite distasteful and have completely lost objectivity.Now, the journalistic attacks have moved toward his supporters and potential voters. Well, as with many of my fellow unintelligent white trash friends this only cements my unwavering support for the Trump campaign.

I have seen technology take jobs from people more than immigrants. It is a terrible feeling. Most of my peers and I are now working freelance jobs. Sometimes its voluntary but often times it is because we can't find full time jobs with benefits. For those of us over 60 it is the only work available. If you have never been independent you are in for a shock at how hard it can be to run a small sole proprietor business from scratch.

Enormous advances in technology have made the trans-oceanic distances disappear. Foreign-based administrative jobs are now transparent, meaning that "back-room" corporate jobs such as payroll, accounting and corporate management can be off-shored. Jobs in this category also include computer software development and computer system help-line support. The concept of the "virtual corporation", which maintains low levels of "project managers" can scale up or down, and only a small "corporate core" needs to be physically in the USA.

Trump has said that he hires people from other countries over American citizens and thinks Americans are already overpaid. So, why is he so popular with the angry voters who are living from paycheck to paycheck or were forced to retire? Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. The working class voters need wage insurance or a living wage solution and they need the government to step in and help them. Remember the WPA programs from the 30s? My guess is that Trump's supporters don't want to be the takers after years of thinking they were above that and were the makers. Surprise, we are all in the same boat.

there is a much bigger issue than creating jobs for these people. It is figuring out why so many are incapable of learning at a college level and beyond. I refuse to believe that it is nature dictating such a limitation. My money is on nurture; therefore, my money is on being able to solve that problem too.

Until we as a country stop treating intelligence as a disease and take steps to improve education across the board, this is what the fall-out will be. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out they could get to the White House by courting the angry white people vote.

among high school or less, 40% some college, but 33% among college graduates, and 19% among the post-graduates. In no election did Trump get the vote of the majority of college graduates or postgraduates. The education gap is consistent and steady. The gender gap is equally consistent.

The jobs engine the drove the US to its post war boom was the manufacturing sector. That has been gutted - by US consumer decisions.FDR did not practice racial identity politics.

Racism lurks - always - near the surface for ALL human beings. Don't believe me? Go take Harvard's Project Implicit tests (free) and learn about your own racist proclivities!By nature, all human beings tend toward tribalism; we are *wired* to notice and react to "difference". Civilization is the mass awareness of that proclivity towards shunning or rejecting "the other" and creating laws to stop it from becoming reality.When people become stressed, the veneer of civilization starts to break down - our more primitive, wired behaviors take over. That's what is happening now.We also have a huge propensity - as a species - towards cooperation. We have to somehow keep pursuing that "Better Angel of Our Nature" to keep the tide from turning permanently ugly.

As I read this article I began to confront an uncomfortable reality. We, as a society are to blame for Mr. Trump's support. Apparently we have ignored or overlooked the tragic plight faced by a sizable minority. Imagine the unemployed coal minor in West Virgina. His financial life is probably a shambles and he has no realistic prospect of recovering. He feels hopeless and abandoned. He sees publicized efforts to address problems of ethnic minorities and immigrants, yet he sits cold and jobless without anyone clamoring to address his situation. He starts getting angry and frustrated.Then, out of nowhere someone comes who appears to want to fight for him. Finally, someone who might champion his cause. Bring back jobs. Stop cheap labor from coming in.

Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.

Don't people realize that technology, computers, automation and especially robots have replaced more manufacturing and more factories than all the illegal immigrants ever have? On many factory floors you hardly see any human beings at all. Every product is whisked along conveyor belts and assembled (or cooked), and then inspected, labeled, packaged and shipped with a minimum of human intervention. That's today's world. What are we to do? Protest against computers and robots.Also, American corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their loyalty is to their bottom line. They take advantage of every tax loophole they can; and if their product is labor intensive they would much rather pay 5000 workers a dollar a day with no benefits rather than stay in America and have to pay someone $18 an hour will vacation time, holiday time off, Soc Sec taxes and Medicare taxes.

This is the Party of Stupid the Republican carefully constructed through painstaking racism, defunding of public education, defunding of infrastructure, hate radio, Fox-Henhouse News and trickle-down poverty.Donald Trump's supporters are the direct result of the Republican's decades-long efforts at dumbing down a large swath of Americans.The Republican Party needs to take a giant proud bow as their electorate walks down the runway of nationally-assisted-suicide.

The irony of all this is that, yes, the world is shifting out from under the feet of the less-educated poor, but none of us face a really BIG or YUGE problem like slavery, Civil War, total war, a Great Depression, or even a gold/silver conflict. Yet Ken Lay and others can seriously muse over the possibility of secession from the union.The goals that so many of T's supporters are crying for are already in the process of being achieved -- the debt is too high but the national deficit has been cut in half under Obama. Millions now have health care that they didn't have before. "Taxed Enough Already" couldn't be more of an inept slogan.I wonder sometimes if the collapse of the USSR was such a good thing. Having a common enemy provided a kind of glue that held us together. Now some of us seem -- recklessly., hysterically, feverishly -- anxious to find an equally powerful enemy in our own ranks.

I can't count the number of my husband's uneducated white southern relations who have taken extensive advantage, repeatedly, of both state and federal programs, including unemployment, food stamps, occasional welfare, and (sometimes specious) "disability." (My husband's mother was one of 11 born to poor sharecroppers, and the only one to leave her subculture

Oh, and about the "myth" that opposition to Islam is only is by simplistic Islamophobes. Let me suggest for those who didn't get to it, this article about about the premier public intellectual of France: "Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France" It said that he has concluded that Islam is not comparable with 'Western enlightenment values."

It's obvious that the changing economy has structurally disadvantaged many less educated people across America. But, it is also true that economically distressed whites enjoy access to exactly the same programs that assist minorities. They just don't "feel" like this is true.

Truth be told, Trump is supported by numerous highly educated people who choose not to support known liars and/or socialists. These same people are tired of candidates who are bought and paid for by secret and evil Super PACs-- Trump is not controlled by these groups. Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and C;inton are.

The counties where Trump is most popular also have the lowest employment participation rates. Ordinarily, those folks would be expected to vote Democratic, which is more likely to continue the government spending that sustains them. Trump followers are willing to support him even though it is probably against their economic interest.So how to explain this? The strong correlation to previous support for George Wallace suggests it's about identity. A certain segment of the population does not accept diversity and change. They cling to white supremacy. The irony, as the article notes, is that these are the same folks who self-identify their heritage as "American," rather than, say "English" or "German." However, to me, they seem very un-American.

If policy hadn't been influenced by campaign funding, perhaps we would be in a better situation. Maybe congress would have paid more attention to improving the education system. It's a shame that most people don't understand that their only true weapon is voting for someone that isn't in debt to an industry. If we don't change our campaign finance system, nothing will change. Our voices will never be heard, our needs will never be met and policy will continue to favor profit, not people.

You are misinterpreting the analysis. This is a correlation analysis and what it says is that there is a moderately strong positive correlation between the % of people in a county that are white and have no high school and the % of people that support Trump. The 61 number is the correlation coefficient. The analysis does NOT show that folks in mobile homes vote for Trump.

There is only one interesting question regarding Trump: can he win Ohio and Florida in the national elections? Otherwise his campaign will turn into a footnote in American history like the campaign of many other unsuccessful candidates (Dukakis someone?). His voters, then, will be forgotten, as they usually are, until the next elections. That's the only time America's, winner takes it all culture, remembers those people exist.

However crude his message, on trade Trump has a legitimate point, which is that the US (not US companies, which don't care about international boundaries, but US workers) has got the short end of trade deals for decades. Whatever benefits the US has gleaned from these deals, they are minuscule compared to their utterly transformative effects on India, Mexico and especially China, which begs the question of why we couldn't have negotiated a better deal, one less devastating to old-line manufacturing. It often seems US negotiators are driven more by a religious belief in and devotion to free-trade principles, than by national self-interest. Trump may be unfit to be president, but I don't doubt he would have driven a harder bargain and come out with a better deal, if only because, unlike US negotiators, he'd be fully prepared to walk away from a deal he didn't like.

It's high time we re-engage in our communities with love and empathy. We need less talk of the theoretical economics underpinning trade deals and the credibility of climate science. It's not because these things are unimportant or irrelevant to governing in a complex world, but because our neighbors are afraid we've forgotten them in all our sophistication. They need to hear and see that we care about them. Our ideas about common efforts to improve their lives need to be less about class and more about community. We need to be clear that even the least among us are important to our common future

So many of the comments on this piece seem to fall into the category of subliminal rationales for long held prejudices that many of us have but don't understand.

this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.

There's a very powerful stigma associated with being poor in this country. Frankly, it makes it nearly impossible for an elite institution like the Times to write about poor populations without those same people perceiving a condescending tone. At the first mention of trailer parks--even if that is an apt descriptor for a type of housing--the words begin to cut and defenses rise. When spoken by a rich person, those words demean, even if they're not meant to by the speaker

The problem is that "Thug Trump," just so happens to touch on some truths, and existing bi-partisan defects that we ignore. Funny, as different as they are, Ralph Nader made the same point, that the major defects of our country are supported by both parties and thus untouchable. I guess the nature of a revolutionary is part misfit but also sensing the time is ripe for a drastic change. It may be better to look less at the person, and more that the endemic defects that he promises to change. From Huey Long to Norman Thomas, outsiders have had positive effects.

These relatives, who are very pleasant to talk to on a one-to-one basis, are the same people who send us rabid chain emails about how Obama hates America, how we need to "take back our country," etc. "The blacks" are "parasites and takers" and the real reason they invariably vote Republican. They see no relationship between their own "taking" and the "taking" by blacks and Hispanics.

Whether Trump can appeal to enough independent or even blue collar Democrats is problematic absent some sensational catastrophe in the economy or in government. But you never know. Recall the charge of "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" late in the 1884 election. It changed history

I bought into that "it's the fault of freeloaders" shtick for years, until i was laid off at age 50. Suddenly, I was one of those "freeloaders" with a 30 year impeccable work history and it changed my mind drastically. I've run into people like me from all walks of life; people with degrees and skills who lost jobs and are cut out of returning to the world of employment. I found something eventually, but at half the pay with no benefits. I don't support Trump but he's tapped into the lives of people like me. Globalization has showed us that for those at the very top, the elites, our country and it's workers don't matter much as long as the money keeps flowing. Unfortunately, I can't see that Trump would do much to change that

racism in the US is complicated. Some people who say the right things do the worst things, and vice versa. What gets you in trouble is saying blue-collar stuff like "nappy-headed ho's" White liberals are the most politically correct and the most critical of crude speech. But white liberals often have less contact with blacks than any other whites. Bigotry is not easily identified.

One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.

The point is that now, the entire middle class and working class have been fleeced by the Repubs AND the Dems, elected representatives who have shirked their duties and spent their time helping their billionaire puppetmasters.

Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have something big in common: their basic grievance, which is that the economy is rigged for the 1%. It's helpful to understand our differences, but then we should be finding common ground, not calling each other names. We're all people; we all deserve dignity and respect.

We are in the early throes of another revolution now, and this one will even more dramatically favor those with superior cognitive abilities and education over those with average or below average cognitive abilities and education. Yet all people at all levels need to eat, have shelter, and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. It remains unclear what kind of society will emerge from the current disruptions, but it is increasingly obvious that the transition will not be pretty.

Children and adult dependents would be eligible for the full $1,400.

Enhanced unemployment benefits totaling $300 a week are set to expire on March 14, creating a de facto deadline for Congress to act. Senate Democrats struck a last-minute agreement Friday to set federal unemployment benefits at $300 a week, down from the $400 passed by the House, but extend their duration by a month, through September. In addition, the first $10,200 of the benefits for 2020 wouldn’t be taxable.

the restaurant industry will receive $25 billion in relief targeted at small and midsize restaurants and chains.

Vaccine development would also get a boost, with around $20 billion going to federal biomedical research for vaccine and therapeutic manufacturing and procurement, along with around $3 billion for a strategic national stockpile of vaccines. Another $25 billion would be spent on testing, contact tracing and reimbursing hospitals for lost revenue related to the pandemic.

While the package would make the child tax-credit changes only for one year, it is broadly expected that Democrats will seek to make them permanent in the future.

allow federal workers, including postal workers, to take as many as 600 hours of emergency paid leave related to Covid-19.

It allocates $8.75 billion to federal, state, local, territorial and tribal public-health agencies for distributing, administering and tracking vaccinations, with some funds specially dedicated to making sure the vaccination process reaches underserved communities.

Senate Democrats added a provision that would make much student-loan forgiveness free from income taxes, creating an exception from 2021 through 2025 to the normal rule that canceled debt is income

Not likely. Republicans see the bill as too large, saying it sprawls beyond pandemic aid and instead is a wish list of liberal priorities.

Republicans have used the budget-resolution amendment process to inflict political damage on Democrats and expose their differences on issues like providing aid to undocumented immigrants and raising the minimum wage. But they have been unable to strike many blows against support for the overall package, which enjoys strong approval in polls and has so far kept congressional Democrats united on its top-line priorities.

Individuals earning less than $75,000 will receive the full $1,400. Married couples earning less than $150,000 a year will receive $2,800 -- and families with children are eligible for an additional $1,400 per dependent. Heads of households earning less than $112,500 a year will also receive the full $1,400 plus another $1,400 per dependent.

The jobless will receive a $300 weekly federal boost to unemployment benefits and get those payments through September 6.

The bill also calls for making the first $10,200 of unemployment payments tax-free for households with annual incomes under $150,000.

Food stamp recipients will see a 15% increase in benefits continue through September, instead of having it expire at the end of June.

Enrollees will pay no more than 8.5% of their income towards coverage, down from nearly 10% now. Also, those earning more than the current cap of 400% of the federal poverty level -- about $51,000 for an individual and $104,800 for a family of four in 2021 -- will become eligible for help.

It authorizes about $10 billion to help struggling homeowners pay their mortgages, utilities and property taxes.The bill also provides $5 billion to help states and localities assist those at risk of experiencing homelessness by providing safe, socially distant housing, for example. Another $5 billion goes to emergency housing vouchers for those who are homeless.

Qualifying families can receive a child tax credit of $3,600 for each child under 6 and $3,000 for each one under age 18, up from the current credit of up to $2,000 per child under age 17.The enhanced portion of the credit will be available for single parents with annual incomes up to $75,000 and joint filers making up to $150,000 a year.

The bill will send roughly $20 billion to state and local governments to help low-income households cover back rent, rent assistance and utility bills.

The bill provides $15 billion to the Emergency Injury Disaster Loan program, which provides long-term, low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration. Severely impacted small businesses with fewer than 10 workers will be given priority for some of the money.

It also provides $25 billion for a new grant program specifically for bars and restaurants. Eligible businesses may receive up to $10 million and can use the money for a variety of expenses, including payroll, mortgage and rent, utilities and food and beverages.

Workers being paid at or just above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour will not see a boost in pay.

The $1.9 trillion coronavirus package contains a wide range of benefits to help Americans who are still struggling with the economic fallout of the pandemic.

But in the last decade, the party and Clinton himself have been forced to admit the failures of the bill and to work to rectify it. As Clinton told the N.A.A.C.P. in 2015, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it.”

Part of the goal of the bill was to blunt Republican criticisms that Democrats were soft on crime, so the bill gave permission for Democrats across the country to engage in a sort of criminal justice policy and punishment arms race with Republicans, each group attempting to be more draconian than the other.

Then there was the welfare reform bill, which Clinton promised would “end welfare as we know it.” One of its central provisions was block-grant assistance to the states.

As Clinton said when the bill was passed:“Today the Congress will vote on legislation that gives us a chance to live up to that promise, to transform a broken system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence to one that emphasizes work and independence, to give people on welfare a chance to draw a paycheck, not a welfare check.”

On the day Clinton signed the bill, Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and Hillary Clinton’s longtime mentor, released a statement that read, “President Clinton’s signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.”

As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out in 2020, the block grant to states “has been set at $16.5 billion each year since 1996; as a result, its real value has fallen by almost 40 percent due to inflation.”

Furthermore, only a fraction of the money goes to income assistance, and state-set benefit levels are low and “do not enable families to meet their basic needs,” the report outlines. It continues:

“The wide variation in benefit levels across states exacerbates national racial disparities because many of the states with the lowest benefits have larger Black populations. Fifty-five percent of Black children live in states with benefits below 20 percent of the poverty line, compared to 40 percent of white children.”

A lot of people are going to get hurt, and the pain will not be distributed randomly.

The legacy of the racism that infected so many of the New Deal’s achievements is particularly bitter for Black workers, who continue to live disproportionately in the states that provide the least aid to those who lose their jobs. During the last recession, only 23.8 percent of unemployed Black workers received benefits, compared to 33.2 percent of white workers, according to a 2012 analysis by the Urban Institute. Those who qualify for benefits also get less money. On average, the 11 former Confederate states replace just 40 percent of lost wages, compared to an average of 46 percent in the rest of the United States.

Although Americans generally agree that government should not act with racist intent, the unemployment safety net was designed with racist intent. And it continues to work in the way that it was designed, allowing Mississippi to badly serve Americans who live there.

For opponents of the federal supplements, any evidence the payments are allowing people to stay out of the job market or are driving up wages is seen as damning.

President Franklin Roosevelt and his lieutenants knew that a stronger safety net would drive up wages. They understood that helping those who weren’t working would help those who were working, too.

The average amount that workers got, relative to prior wages, has also been in steady decline.

Biden is pushing for the big steps he says are needed to address immediate needs and control the coronavirus pandemic. He also plans to lay out an economic recovery plan in coming weeks that aims to create jobs and combat the climate crisis, among other measures.

The plan calls for sending another $1,400 per person to eligible recipients. This money would be in addition to the $600 payments that were approved by Congress in December and sent out earlier this month -- for a total of $2,000

nother $5 billion would be set aside to help struggling renters to pay their utility bills.

Biden would increase the federal boost the jobless receive to $400 a week, from the $300 weekly enhancement contained in Congress' relief package from December.

He would also extend the payments, along with two key pandemic unemployment programs, through September. This applies to those in the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program who have exhausted their regular state jobless payments and in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which provides benefits to the self-employed, independent contractors, gig workers and certain people affected by the pandemic.

These are key parts of a $1.9 trillion proposal that President-elect Joe Biden unveiled Thursday evening.

The plan would provide $25 billion in rental assistance for low- and moderate-income households who have lost jobs during the pandemic. That's in addition to the $25 billion lawmakers provided in December.

Biden would extend the 15% increase in food stamp benefits through September, instead of having it expire in June.

The plan calls on Congress to create a $25 billion emergency fund and add $15 billion to an existing grant program to help child care providers, including family child care homes, to pay for rent, utilities, and payroll, and increased costs associated with the pandemic like personal protective equipment.

Biden wants to boost the Child Tax Credit to $3,600 for children under age 6 and $3,000 for those between ages 6 and 17 for a year.

Also, he wants Congress to provide $4 billion for mental health and substance use disorder services and $20 billion to meet the health care needs of veterans.

It also proposes making a $35 billion investment in some state, local, tribal, and non-profit financing programs that make low-interest loans and provide venture capital to entrepreneurs

Under Biden's proposal, people who are sick or quarantining, or caring for a child whose school is closed, will receive 14 weeks of paid leave. The government will reimburse employers with fewer than 500 workers for the full cost of providing the leave.

he plan calls for providing $15 billion to create a new grant program for small business owners, separate from the existing Paycheck Protection Program.

He wants to increase and expand the Affordable Care Act's premium subsidies so that enrollees don't have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for coverage -- which is also one of his campaign promises. (The law is facing a challenge from Republican-led states that is currently before the Supreme Court.)

Biden wants to send $350 billion to state, local and territorial governments to keep their frontline workers employed, distribute the vaccine, increase testing, reopen schools and maintain vital services.

Additional assistance to states has been among the most controversial elements of the congressional rescue packages, with Democrats looking to add to the $150 billion in the March legislation and Republicans resisting such efforts. The December package ultimately dropped an initial call to include $160 billion.

Biden's plan would also give $20 billion to the hardest-hit public transit agencies to help avert layoffs and the cutting of routes.

The plan would provide an additional $170 billion to K-12 schools, colleges and universities to help them reopen and operate safely or to facilitate remote learning.

It would also fund the hiring of 100,000 public health workers, nearly tripling the community health workforce.

The proposal would also invest $50 billion in testing, providing funds to purchase rapid tests, expand lab capacity and help schools implement regular testing to support reopening.

The plan calls for investing $20 billion in a national vaccination program, including launching community vaccination centers around the country and mobile units in hard-to-reach areas

Biden is calling on Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and to end the tipped minimum wage and the sub-minimum wage for people with disabilities.

they might at least help clarify the choices that will define the future of our economy.

How did two men, whose work is widely respected, reach such different conclusions from data about the same economy? As I read their papers, I realized that they simply asked different questions.

Hubbard was fascinated by analyzing the ways in which government intervention can distort otherwise efficient markets; many of Summers’s papers explored the reasons markets aren’t always perfectly efficient.

I met Summers and Hubbard in a small, well-appointed room at the Council on Foreign Relations on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to hear them battle it out as if they were preparing to brief the president and leaders of Congress on what must be done to fix our economy right now

I wanted to hear their answers, of course, but I was also interested in how they made them. I wanted to understand the extent to which empirical economic research can provide objective guidance for policy — and at what point even brilliant, highly trained economists resort to articles of faith.

Hubbard quickly zeroed in on the issue that has defined his career. In regard to the size of the government, Hubbard said the real challenge is the steady rise in so-called entitlement spending

His views all seemed to coalesce around a fairly simple idea: the U.S. economy is better off when the government gets out of the way.

Summers’s worldview seemed to take into account more moving pieces. “It would surely be better to address long-run fiscal issues sooner rather than later,” he said. “But this needs to be done in a balanced way. The highest priority is getting the economy growing.”

Their views were especially incompatible when the talk veered to rising inequality.

Summers said he would limit benefits for the rich like “carried interest” rules that allowed private-equity managers (including, I recalled, Mitt Romney) to convert their income, which would be taxed close to 40 percent, into something that looked just like capital gains, which are taxed at 20 percent. He also said that the very wealthy should pay higher inheritance taxes. Dynastic wealth is “highly problematic in a society committed to freedom of opportunity,” he said.

For Hubbard, though, the rich aren’t the problem. The pursuit of wealth, he said, is an engine that powers the economy, and it makes no sense to address inequality by redistributing the very thing that fuels growth. “The real question is ‘What can we do to improve the earnings of lower- and middle-income Americans?’ ” he said. “That’s about increased education and skills training, and that may require higher government spending.” (Hubbard’s belief in more education financing sets him apart from more doctrinaire conservatives.) Hubbard also dismissed Summers’s concerns about dynastic wealth. So few Americans have that kind of money, he said, that taxing them doesn’t make a major impact on the nation’s finances.

In the end, it became clear that Hubbard sees many of our economic challenges — rising entitlements, inequality and even the financial crisis — as different manifestations of the same basic problem: unsustainable debt. Those challenges also have the same solution. If Congress and the White House can agree on a long-term plan to reduce the entitlements, everything will begin to look better. With a permanent solution in sight, investors will gain confidence from the fact that their country’s finances are in good shape and that their future tax burden will be lower; companies will hire workers. Then, once the big fiscal problem is solved, the government can redouble its efforts on education and help the truly needy.

. “There is no serious statistical evidence in support of the view that tax rates at current levels have a major disincentive effect on economic growth,” he said. He suggested, pointedly, comparing the rapid economic growth during the Clinton years with the comparatively worse performance of the post-tax-cut Bush period.

Summers settled on his point: The United States, he said, is not simply facing one unified problem that could be solved through one straightforward solution. The country is facing myriad challenges, starting with unemployment and slow growth. These immediate challenges, he said, can be addressed with a 10-year commitment by the government to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure.

both men took evident satisfaction in sticking to their guns, leaving me feeling the frustration that many do these days: Why can’t these two sides just work something out?

t he has come to think of the presidential election of 2016 as a battle between whoever will hire Larry Summers and whoever will hire Glenn Hubbard

Because somewhere in those following four years, he said, the fiscal crisis will become unavoidable, Congress will have to act, and it will have to work with the White House.

Mr. Trump’s criticism of the relief effort, which he called a “disgrace,” was that it was not generous enough: He called on Congress to provide $2,000 a person in direct payments to households, rather than the $600 included in the bill.

The pullback in spending is spilling over into the labor market. About 869,000 people filed new claims for state jobless benefits last week. That was down from a week earlier but is significantly above the level in early November, before a surge in coronavirus cases prompted a new round of layoffs in much of the country.

A further 398,000 people filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, one of two federal programs to expand jobless benefits that were set to expire this month without congressional action. Some forecasters expect the December employment report to show a net loss of jobs.

By waiting until the last minute to act, legislators forced state labor departments — which administer both state and federal unemployment benefits — to prepare for the programs’ end. Many states won’t be able to reverse course in time to avoid a lapse in payments.

Those savings could help fuel a rapid recovery once coronavirus vaccines are widely available, allowing Americans to resume traveling, attending concerts and gathering in bars and restaurants. But that prospect only underscores the need for aid to ensure that businesses make it until then.

The president-elect has said the $900 billion fiscal rescue package proposed by a bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic senators is a good start. It probably isn't what his economic team would have designed if given carte blanche — that package probably would have included another round of stimulus checks to individuals, for example — but they understand that the priority is speed, and not necessarily size, as millions of Americans face eviction and the loss of unemployment insurance benefits in just a few weeks.

Powell has said more than once that lawmakers need to provide additional help to the economy, and that the risks of overdoing it are much lower than not doing enough.

Once the pandemic is over, it will take deft policymaking to get all the unemployed back to work anytime soon. Given the possibility of the Senate being under Republican control, the Biden administration could be engulfed in budget wars like those with which the Obama administration grappled

From the trenches, Neera Tanden, who Biden wants as his director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is well-suited to lead the charge. The OMB controls the government purse strings and thus policy priorities across the executive branch. Unless the OMB is on board with a government agency's plan, it won't get done.

A Republican-controlled Senate would make legislative wins tough to come by when Biden is president, and he will surely turn to executive orders to accomplish his goals.

Biden will use executive orders as aggressively as Trump, in part to unwind much of what Trump did, and his economic team has the experience to do it efficiently.

President-elect Biden's most important long-term economic challenge will be to lift the financial fortunes of hard-pressed lower-income and minority households. Things were tough for these groups before the pandemic given the decades-long skewing of income and wealth distribution, and the virus has further undermined their finances.

If there is a gap in Biden's economic team it is that it lacks someone who has started or managed a business. Getting the economy back to a place in which all Americans benefit requires businesses to do well. This means economic policies also need to be considered from a businessperson's perspective. The new administration is sure to solicit many outside business voices, but policymaking would benefit from an experienced voice on the team.

The Covid-19 pandemic is sure to have long-lasting economic fallout. Just how long will depend in large part on the new president's economic policies. Judging by the economic team he has assembled, we are in good hands.

He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall

societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.

Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk

even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.

Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.

that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems

All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”

Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.

Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”

Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.

Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.

This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”

haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?

Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.

Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.

A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse

Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.

Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.

The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?

Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations

The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study

Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.

We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”

In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,

Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd

Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”

Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.

Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”

In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”

The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.

A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.

If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”

Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit

The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.

He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.

It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.

The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.

And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.

“As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”

The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping

Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.

Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two

if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.

Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals

Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?

If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.

Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.

The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems

the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.

If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.

When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.

There are many people calling for Congress to act. Economists warn that without more relief for out-of-work people and small-business owners the economy will be damaged more than it needs to be.

"The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another is not due to some mysterious force beyond our control," he said. "It's a conscious decision. It's a choice that we make."

The recession’s inequality is a reflection of the coronavirus itself, which has caused more deaths in low-income communities and severely affected jobs in restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues

No other recession in modern history has so pummeled society’s most vulnerable. The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 caused similar job losses across the income spectrum, as Wall Street bankers and other white-collar workers were handed pink slips alongside factory and restaurant workers.

“The sectors most deeply affected by covid disproportionately employ women, minorities and lower-income workers.

At the height of the coronavirus crisis, low-wage jobs were lost at about eight times the rate of high-wage ones, The Post found.

The less workers earned at their job, the more likely they were to lose it as businesses across the country closed.

By the end of the summer, the downturn was largely over for the wealthy — white-collar jobs had mostly rebounded, along with home values and stock prices. The shift to remote work strongly favored more-educated workers, with as many as 6 in 10 college-educated employees working from home at the outset of the crisis, compared with about 1 in 7 who have only high school diplomas.

Americans ages 20 to 24 suffered the greatest job losses, by far, of any age group when many businesses closed in the spring. College-age workers and recent graduates tend to be overrepresented in low-paying retail and restaurant jobs, which allow them to gain a toehold in the workforce and save money for school or training.

In the wake of widespread closings of schools and day-care centers, mothers are struggling to return to the workforce. Mothers of children ages 6 to 17 saw employment fall by about a third more than fathers of children the same age, and mothers are returning to work at a much slower rate. This disparity threatens years of progress for women in the labor force.

The unemployed are facing new challenges. Despite President Trump’s promises of a short-lived recession, 26 million people are still receiving now-diminished unemployment benefits. The unemployed went from receiving, on average, over $900 a week in April, May, June and July, under the first federal stimulus package, to about $600 for a few weeks in late August and early September under a temporary White House executive action, to about $300 a week now on state benefits.

What ties all of the hardest-hit groups together ― low-wage workers, Black workers, Hispanic men, those without college degrees and mothers with school-age children ― is that they are concentrated in hotels, restaurants and other hospitality jobs.

Most recessions, including the Great Recession, have affected manufacturing and construction jobs the most, but not this time. Nine of the 10 hardest-hit industries in the coronavirus recession are services.

Economists worry that many of these jobs will not return

While the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 8.4 percent, double-digit unemployment lingers in cities and states that depend heavily on tourism.

over 30,000 restaurant and hospitality workers are unemployed in New Orleans, making it nearly impossible to find a job.

Ten percent of renters reported “no confidence” in their ability to pay next month’s rent, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted Sept. 2 to 14.

Black women are facing the largest barriers to returning to work, data shows, and have recovered only 34 percent of jobs lost in the early months of the pandemic.

It took until 2018 for Black women’s employment to recover from the Great Recession. Now almost all of those hard-won gains have been erased.

Historically, people of color and Americans with less education have been overrepresented in low-paying service jobs. Economists call it “occupational segregation.”

Black and Hispanic men face many of the same challenges as Black women, encountering discrimination in the workforce more often than others, and they struggled to rebound from the Great Recession.

Women had logged tremendous job gains in the past decade before the coronavirus hit.

But with many schools and child-care centers closed and the migration to online learning, many working parents have had to become part- or full-time teachers, making it difficult to work at the same time. That burden has fallen mainly on mothers, data shows. For example, mothers of children ages 6 to 12 — the elementary school years — have recovered fewer than 45 percent of jobs lost, while employment of fathers of children the same age is 70 percent back.

Single parents have faced an especially hard blow.

One in eight households with children do not have enough to eat, according to the September survey by the Census Bureau.

The Fed predicts unemployment will not near pre-pandemic levels until the end of 2023. For many jobs, it may take even longer — especially those already at high risk of being replaced with software and robots.

“Since the 1980s, almost all employment losses in routine occupations, which are relatively easier to be automated, occurred during recessions,”

Many economists and business leaders are urging Congress to enact another large relief package, given the unevenness of the recovery and the long road for those who have been left behind.

“There are very clear winners and losers here. The losers are just being completely crushed. If the winners fail to help bring the losers along, everyone will lose,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Things feel like they are at a breaking point from a societal perspective.”

Women are disproportionately likely to stay at home to look after their children, so encouraging them to work in the formal sector could increase gender equality.

spending on some high-quality programmes for children from birth until their fifth year generated an internal rate of return of 14%.

The system must not only free up parents to work and be good for children; the benefits must also exceed the costs to the public purse.

Many studies find that universal schemes (ie, those that apply to families of all incomes) boost labour-force participation. In 1997 the Canadian province of Quebec implemented a full-time universal scheme, costing parents just C$5 (and later C$7, $4-5.50) a day.

The large returns on investment identified by Mr Heckman and his colleagues, for instance, relate to targeted programmes for poor families. The outcomes of universal schemes, though, are less glowing.

Only a third found a positive effect of the schemes on children’s outcomes, and a fifth found negative effects.

a study by Michael Baker of the University of Toronto, Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Kevin Milligan of the University of British Columbia found that children suffered worse cognitive and health outcomes.

The literature review also found that poor children gained the most from universal programmes

as a heavily subsidised child-care scheme began expanding. They found strong positive effects on future earnings for poor children, but negative effects on rich ones, whose parents would otherwise have provided better child care than the state.

“that the benefits of providing subsidised child care to middle and upper-class children are unlikely to exceed the costs”.

low-income families are a third less likely to use early child-care schemes than richer ones. In America poorer families are more likely to tell surveys that they prefer informal, family-based child care to formal care.

Full-time programmes do not necessarily deliver better results than part-time ones. The disappointing results from Quebec are often attributed to wildly disparate standards.

Left-leaning American politicians like Elizabeth Warren tend to talk in terms of “underinvestment” and “child-care deserts”.

But if existing child-care arrangements are low-quality, then spending alone will not improve outcomes for children.

University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran — who held tax policy roles at the Treasury Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — calls the current state of affairs “the great American retirement fraud.”

Secure 2.0 would take the fraud to a new level: Its congressional supporters have engaged in Enron-style accounting gimmicks to mask the bill’s effects on deficit

from the outset, IRAs were a generous gift to the upper class. At the time, very few low- and middle-income individuals could afford to stash $1,500 in a retirement account each year — median income for U.S. households was $11,100 in 1974 — so the people taking full advantage of the new IRAs tended to be relatively rich

since the benefit was structured as a deduction, it was worth more to taxpayers in higher income brackets.

In the nearly half-century since, Congress has continually expanded the amount that individuals can pour into tax-deferred savings accounts.

Now, the JCT estimates that 401(k)s and other similar defined-contribution plans cost the federal government $200 billion per year.

individuals can contribute up to $6,000 per year to an IRA ($7,000 if age 50 or older), plus $20,500 to a 401(k) ($27,000 for 50-year-olds and up), with their employers potentially chipping in to bring the 401(k) total to $61,000 ($67,500 for the over-50 set).

In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, 58 percent of taxpayers with wage income made no contribution to 401(k)-style plans, and less than 4 percent bumped up against the contribution cap.

As of 2020, approximately 63 percent of U.S. households had no such accounts.

(The very largest IRAs, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s reported $5 billion account, result from a different loophole: the ability of founders and early-stage investors to stuff IRAs with start-up stock

When JCT released data last summer showing that 28,615 taxpayers had accumulated $5 million or more in IRAs, lawmakers cried foul. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is the top tax writer in the House, lamented the “exploitation” of IRAs. “IRAs are intended to help Americans achieve long-term financial security, not to enable those who already have extraordinary wealth to avoid paying their fair share in taxes,”

I calculated that an individual who made the maximum 401(k) contributions since 1990, investing exclusively in an S&P 500 index fund, would have more than $7 million in her account today.

Forbes revealed more than a decade ago that Thiel and another PayPal co-founder were using their IRAs to shelter entrepreneurial earnings; the Government Accountability Office flagged the IRA-stuffing phenomenon in 2014; and rather than clamping down, lawmakers from both parties sat on their hands.)

The Secure 2.0 bill, sponsored by Neal, doubles down on the inequities of the status quo. It will inevitably result in even more of the mega-IRAs that Neal and other Democrats decry.

Under current law, taxpayers must begin to take withdrawals from their 401(k)s and traditional IRAs at age 72. (It had been 70½ before Secure 1.0, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019, raised the age by a year and a half.

Secure 2.0 would bump that up to age 75. The change would mean that taxpayers with supersize IRAs could enjoy three extra years of tax-free growth before they needed to take money out

Lower-income retirees wouldn’t benefit because they don’t have the luxury of holding off on withdrawals, which they need to cover living expenses.

Another provision would lift the cap on 401(k) catch-up contributions at ages 62, 63 and 64 from $6,500 to $10,000. Factoring in employer matching contributions, that would raise the maximum 401(k) inflow to $71,000 per year.

if lawmakers were genuinely concerned about retirement security for people who need it, they wouldn’t start by aiding taxpayers who can afford to save more each year than most Americans earn. The higher limit on catch-up contributions will simply allow high-income taxpayers to race further ahead.

The top-weighted benefits of Secure 2.0 might be tolerable if they were offset by other tax increases on the rich — if this were all just moving money from one deep pocket to another. But the items audaciously labeled as “revenue provisions” in the bill generate revenue as real as Monopoly money.

The Rothification provisions in Secure 2.0 bring $35 billion of revenue into the 10-year window — ostensibly offsetting the cost of the bill’s giveaways — but the $35 billion is pure make-believe: It comes at the expense of an equivalent amount of revenue down the road.

If lawmakers from either party were truly concerned about the plight of low-income retirees, they would focus on strengthening Social Security, which actually provides a safety net for older people, rather than adding more deficit-financed bells and whistles to retirement accounts for the rich.

Recent reports suggest that the economic cost of Hurricane Sandy could reach $50 billion and that in the current quarter, the hurricane could remove as much as half a percentage point from the nation’s economic growth. The cost of that single hurricane may well be more than five times greater than that of a usual full year’s worth of the most expensive regulations, which ordinarily cost well under $10 billion annually

climate change is increasing the risk of costly harm from hurricanes and other natural disasters. Economists of diverse viewpoints concur that if the international community entered into a sensible agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the economic benefits would greatly outweigh the costs.

some of the best recent steps serve to save money, promote energy security and reduce air pollution. A good model is provided by rules from the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, widely supported by the automobile industry, which will increase the fuel economy of cars to more than 54 miles per gallon by 2025. The fuel economy rules will eventually save consumers more than $1.7 trillion, cut United States oil consumption by 12 billion barrels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by six billion metric tons — more than the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the United States in 2010. The monetary benefits of these rules exceed the monetary costs by billions of dollars annually.

In his 2013 paper, Burkhauser and his two co-authors have completely upended the thrust of Figures 1 and 2.

Burkhauser’s 2011 methodology worked to make the pattern appear far less extreme, as illustrated by Figure 2:

First, take a look at Figure 1, a 2011 Congressional Budget Office chart showing significant inequality in the distribution of income gains from 1979 to 2007. Many on the left consider work done by the C.B.O. to be the gold standard of inequality measurement:

If — a virtually impossible if — the economic and policy-making community were to reach even a rough consensus in support of Burkhauser’s 2013 analysis, the victory for the right would be hard to overestimate.

If Burkhauser’s approach was accepted, it would render moot the basic political and philosophical tenets of the Obama presidency

Not only would Burkhauser lay waste to a core liberal argument — inequality is worsening — but his claim that a declining share of income is going to the wealthy could be used to justify further tax cuts for the affluent in order to foster top-down investment and growt

Burkhauser et al. achieve their reversal of past income distribution data by amending the definition of income developed in their 2012 paper — “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits” — to incorporate another accounting tool: “yearly-accrued capital gains to measure yearly changes in wealth.”

it is a game changer.

Burkhauser attempts to measure the year-to-year increase in taxpayers’ assets — stocks and bonds, housing and privately held businesses – and to count those annual increases as income. Increases in the value of such assets do not show up in tax data because they are taxed by the federal government only when the asset in question is sold and the increased value is realized as taxable gains.

The Burkhauser approach does a number of things. First, it spreads and flattens income from capital gains over the duration of ownership. For a wealthy individual who makes a huge killing selling stock or a businesses, his or her income does not spike in the year of the sale, but emerges instead as a series of yearly incremental gains.

For assets that have been held for a long time, the Burkhauser system effectively backdates much of currently realized capital gains onto earlier years. This is especially significant in calculating income gains from the current sale of assets purchased in the 1980s and 1990s, since much of the added value was acquired in those earlier decades.

I raised the following question: Is it a fair measure of a person’s well-being to include unrealized capital gains? Their house or other assets may have increased in value, but their standard of living has not changed.

The unfairness of Burkhauser’s approach is clearly acute at the bottom and middle of income distribution. The most common large asset for those on the bottom rungs is a house. Burkhauser would increase the income of those below the median lucky enough to own a home by the annual appreciation in the value of the home through 2007. For many of these families, however, selling their home is not an option. In Burkhauser’s view, their income goes up even if their living conditions remain unchanged.

Burkhauser is respected by his peers; his critics, including some friends, do not accuse him of ideological bias. In addition to A.E.I, he has received support from such center-left institutions as the Pew Foundation, Brookings Institution and the Russell Sage Foundation.

the “problem is that in such things, especially when it is a difficult task based on lots of new data sources, the devil is in the details. It’s pretty hard to judge those details without doing a substantial amount of work.” Acemoglu’s conclusion: “Bottom line: conceptually there is a valid point here, and this is a serious paper. The rest is to be determined.”

“Rich Burkhauser’s work is really the state of the art — the most important research on inequality being done, in my view,” Scott Winship, of the Brookings Institution, e-mailed me. Winship voiced some concern over the reliability of the statistical data used by Burkhauser, but concluded:All that said, I think Rich’s paper is incredibly disruptive for many fields of research in labor economics and other social sciences, and potentially it could change our entire view about rising inequality over the past few decades.

Burtless continued:The problem with the authors’ estimates of accruing capital gains is that those numbers are wholly made up based on a prediction that everyone is equally successful in finding homes, stocks, bonds and other assets to invest in.  But they’re not:  Some people are wildly successful, and get into the 1%; others are horribly unsuccessful and become paupers (or receive foreclosure papers); and most earn mediocre returns that are — surprise! — a bit lower than the economy-wide average.

Burkhauser et al. measure the period from 1989 to 2007 because those are both peak years in the business cycle. This timing results in a failure to account for the consequences of the 2008-9 financial crisis and the subsequent struggle toward recovery accompanied by persistent high levels of unemployment.

During the post-crisis years 2009-11, according to the Pew Center, the wealthiest mean of the nation saw the value of their assets grow by 28 percent, to $3.17 million from $2.48 million, while the bottom 93 percent saw their net worth drop by 4 percent, to $133,816 from $139,896.

Wealth trends since the 2008 crash, shown in Figure 5, demonstrate an extraordinary growth in inequality, suggesting that Burkhauser’s findings — restricted to his carefully tailored definition of income — are fatally flawed as an instrument to assess the current real-world position of the poor and middle class compared with the very rich:

A key purpose in measuring both wealth and income is to determine what kind of standard of living is possible for those at the top, the middle and the bottom. Do individuals, families and households have enough to provide for themselves, perhaps most importantly for their children? Do they have the financial resources to enter the highly competitive global marketplace?On that score, Burkhauser’s use of “yearly accrued capital gains” fails the test of measuring what is most significant to know in policy making and in assessing the true quality of life in America.

globalization has produced enormous benefits. From 1970 to the 2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled, and the benefits did not flow exclusively to the rich. According to the economist Steven Radelet, the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011, while the percentage of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.

statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities

from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat.

This disruption has been closely associated with the growth of American power and the liberal world order that the United States has shaped since the end of World War II. Understandably, there has been blowback, both against the United States and within the nation.

Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property

The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one

Vladimir Putin, perhaps the world’s chief practitioner of illiberal democracy. Mr. Putin has become very popular in Russia, particularly since his annexation of Crimea in 2014. He does not feel bound by law: Mr. Putin and his cronies use political power to enrich themselves and business wealth to guarantee their hold on power.

Mr. Orbán, Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan all came to power in countries with an electorate polarized between a more liberal, cosmopolitan urban elite — whether in Budapest, Moscow or Istanbul — and a less-educated rural voter base. This social division is similar to the one that drove the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump’s rise in the United States..

Mr. Trump’s ascent poses a unique challenge to the American system because he fits comfortably into the trend toward illiberal democracy.

Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump seemsto want to use a democratic mandate to undermine the checks and balances that characterize a genuine liberal democracy. He will be an oligarch in the Russian mold: a rich man who used his wealth to gain political power and who would use political power to enrich himself once in office

The citizens of India and Japan have elected nationalist leaders who many say they believe champion a more closed form of identity than their predecessors

How far will this trend toward illiberal democracy go? Are we headed for a period like that of the early 20th century, in which global politics sank into conflict over closed and aggressive nationalism?

The outcome will depend on several critical factors, particularly the way global elites respond to the backlash they have engendered.

In America and Europe, elites made huge policy blunders in recent years that hurt ordinary people more than themselves.

Deregulation of financial markets laid the groundwork for the subprime crisis in the United States, while a badly designed euro contributed to the debt crisis in Greece, and the Schengen system of open borders made it difficult to control the flood of refugees in Europe. Elites must acknowledge their roles in creating these situations.

Now it’s up to the elites to fix damaged institutions and to better buffer those segments of their own societies that have not benefited from globalization to the same extent.

Above all, it is important to keep in mind that reversing the existing liberal world order would likely make things worse for everyone, including those left behind by globalization. The fundamental driver of job loss in the developed world, after all, is not immigration or trade, but technological change.

We need better systems for buffering people against disruption, even as we recognize that disruption is inevitable. The alternative is to end up with the worst of both worlds, in which a closed and collapsing system of global trade breeds even more inequality.

The seemingly endless entertainment choices created by the Web have eaten into the time people spend reading books

"We aren't seeing a generation of readers coming along that supports writers today the way that young people supported J. D. Salinger and Philip Roth when they were starting out,

The e-book is good news for some. Big-name authors and novels that are considered commercial are increasingly in demand as e-book readers gravitate toward best sellers with big plots

Mr. Pipkin, who has Ph.D in English literature, says he cobbles together an income based in part on grants, fellowships and a partial advance he has received for his second book. "I've had to rethink my plans in terms of supporting my family full time as a writer," he says.

His wife, a tenured professor, provides health benefits for his family. Mr. Pipkin, who teaches an undergraduate creative-writing class at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, receives no benefits. Although he has an IRA, he doesn't receive employer contributions. Mr. Pipkin, 43, says his goal is to find a full-time teaching position with benefits. "Unless you're a best-selling author, I don't see how it's possible for an author to get together enough income to pay for health insurance, retirement and other things," he says.