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The findings suggest that political efforts to cut welfare programs are driven less by conservative principles than by racial anxiety, the authors conclude

Those results show that the push to cut welfare programs is not driven by pure political motives, such as decreasing government spending or shrinking government bureaucracy, Wetts said.

Between 2008 and 2012 in particular, they found, opposition to welfare rose among all Americans -- but far more sharply among whites, who also began scoring higher on racial resentment scales during that period

These trends weren’t necessarily linked, however. So to determine if there was a connection, Wetts and Willer designed two more experiments: one in which they quizzed respondents on their feelings about welfare after seeing a graph about U.S. demographic change, and another in which respondents took a similar quiz after viewing information on average income by race and the demographics of welfare beneficiaries.

White Americans called for deeper cuts to welfare programs after viewing charts that showed they would become a racial minority within 50 years. They also opposed welfare programs more when they were told that people of color benefit most from them.

“My main hope here is that people take a step back, look at what these sorts of programs do for the poor, and think about what’s driving opposition to them.”

“We find evidence that these shifts [in sentiment against welfare programs] are specifically directed at programs people see as benefiting minorities instead of whites,” she added.

Wetts isn’t ruling out the possibility that alternate factors could also be at play, of course. Some researchers have found that people embrace more conservative politics during periods of rapid social change -- not necessarily because they fear their racial status is threatened, but because they fear change is happening too fast

Researchers have also shown that white Americans' racial prejudice affects their views on everything from healthcare policy to the death penalty to dogs

On the same day Wetts' paper published, a separate study in the journal Environmental Politics found that people with high levels of "racial resentment" are more likely to believe that the scientific consensus on climate change is false.

"More and more, white Americans use their racial attitudes to help them decide their positions on political questions such as whom to vote for or what stance to take on important issues including welfare and health care."

The Trump administration has begun allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and has proposed tripling the rents for the poorest households receiving federal housing assistance. The House is also scheduled to vote again next month on a plan to cut $9 billion from food-stamp benefits over 10 years and require most adults to hold a job  to receive payments.

Figures from the federal government and the Kaiser Family Foundation show that white Americans make up 36 percent of food-stamp recipients, 43 percent of Medicaid recipients and 28 percent of recipients for cash welfare.

The ethnic backgrounds of students also vary greatly depending on where their universities are in the UK.

The three universities with the biggest black student populations are all in London: London Metropolitan, the University of East London and the University of West London, where black students make up more than a third of all first-year undergraduates.

while it is fun to scoff at her hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides, it is easy to forget that hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides are extremely powerful and popular among a massive subset of Americans, many of whom represent the exact sort of voters who decide Democratic primaries.

hey can also fall into war with one another, over differences more significant than the debate over Medicare for All.

because the mix of hard scientific materialism and well-meaning liberal humanitarianism has always been somewhat incoherent, the cult of reason necessarily shares space in liberal circles — especially liberal circles outside the innermost ring of the meritocracy — with other cults, other commitments, of the sort associated with “A Course in Miracles.”

in the long run her fusion of spiritual celebrity and political activism might be imitated and amplified, even as her distance from the technocratic norm points to a potential schism in the mind of liberalism

you might usefully describe certain potential intra-liberal conflicts as left-romanticism versus left-technocracy, or “Waldorf versus STEM.”

within the new progressive world there is a tension between a desire to claim the mantle of science and a yearning to fuse the political and mystical — what Tara Isabella Burton has described as the “progressive occultism” of astrological charts and anti-Kavanaugh séances and “Trump-era how-to spellbooks that blend folk magic with activist practice.

t’s also not a coincidence that perhaps the most popular of the Intellectual Dark Webbers, Jordan Peterson, talks about Enlightenment values in one breath while offering Jungian wisdom and invoking biblical archetypes in the next. Chase religious ideas out one door and they inevitably come in another — because the human mind naturally rebels against a worldview as incomplete, as manifestly threadbare, as pure materialism.

her warnings of spiritual crisis are at least as relevant to an America beset by addiction, suicide and atomization as any of Elizabeth Warren’s white papers.

It would take the entire course in miracles to put Williamson in the White House, but she’s right about one big thing: There’s more to heaven and earth, and even to national politics, than is dreamed of in the liberal technocrat’s philosophy.

There has been a sharp decline in the number of new onshore windfarms since the block was put in place by David Cameron in 2016. The rollout of new onshore wind capacity fell to its lowest level since 2015 last year, prompting warnings that the UK risked missing its climate targets.

The chief executive of Scottish Power, Keith Anderson, said the decision to back onshore wind was “one of the first clear signs that the government really means business” on reaching its climate targets.

Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said governments “should not allow today’s crisis to compromise the clean energy transition”.

The FTSE, Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nikkei have all seen huge falls since the outbreak began on 31 December.

The Dow and the FTSE recently saw their biggest one day declines since 1987.

Investors fear the spread of the coronavirus will destroy economic growth and that government action may not be enough to stop the decline.

In response, central banks in many countries, including the United Kingdom, have slashed interest rates.

In the United States, the number of people filing for unemployment hit a record high, signalling an end to a decade of expansion for one of the world's largest economies.

The travel industry has been badly damaged, with airlines cutting flights and tourists cancelling business trips and holidays.

Governments around the world have introduced travel restrictions to try to contain the virus.

In the US, the Trump administration has banned travellers from European airports from entering the US.

Supermarkets and online delivery services have reported a huge growth in demand as customers stockpile goods such as toilet paper, rice and orange juice as the pandemic escalates.

In order to stop the spread of the Covid-19 outbreak, many countries across the world have started implementing very tough measures. Countries and world capital have been put under strict lockdown, bringing a total halt to major industrial production chains.

The new images clearly show how a strong reduction in emission is now in place over major cities across Europe - in particular Paris, Milan and Madrid.

In China, where the coronavirus first appeared, industrial production, sales and investment all fell in the first two months of the year, compared with the same period in 2019.

Chinese car sales, for example, dropped by 86% in February. More carmakers, like Tesla or Geely, are now selling cars online as customers stay away from showrooms.

But even the price of gold tumbled briefly in March, as investors were fearful about a global recession.

First and foremost: Early and persistent testing helps. And so does tracking people.

Across the country, the pattern was repeated. Local health departments and federal authorities worked together to test, track and quarantine exposed citizens.

Germany has also been better at protecting its older residents, who are at much greater risk. States banned visits to the elderly, and policymakers issued urgent warnings to limit contact with older people

Patients over the age of 80 make up around 3 percent of the infected, though they account for 7 percent of the population. The median age for those infected is estimated to be 46; in Italy, it’s 63.

many more young people in Germany have tested positive for the virus than in other countries

“Both skiing and carnival may have affected the low average age of the first wave of confirmed cases,”

In general, countries that test less and reserve it for those already very ill, like Italy, have higher fatality rates.

Though Germany’s health care system is overall in good shape — recently modernized, well staffed and funded, with the highest number of intensive-care beds per 100,000 patients in Europe — it hasn’t really been tested yet.

On average, a severely ill Covid-19 patient dies 30 days after being infected

It’s quite possible that Germany is just behind the curve

Since we’re nowhere close to that point — in particular, testing is still far behind what’s needed — we’re months away from a safe end of the lockdown. This is causing severe hardship for workers, businesses, hospitals and — last but not least — state and local governments, which unlike the federal government must balance their budgets.

Yet at the moment further relief legislation is stalled. And let’s be clear: Republicans are responsible for the impasse.

But the special loan program for small businesses has already been exhausted. State and city governments are reporting drastic losses in revenue and soaring expenses. And the Postal Service is on the edge of bankruptcy.

So we need another large relief package, targeted at these gaps. Where would the money come from? Just borrow it. Right now, the economy is awash in excess savings with nowhere to go. The interest rate on inflation-protected federal bonds is minus 0.56 percent; in effect, investors are willing to pay our government to make use of their money

What policy can and should do is mitigate that hardship. And the last relief package did, in fact, do a lot of the right things. But it didn’t do enough of them.

It’s true that Senate Republicans are trying to push through an extra $250 billion in small-business lending — and Democrats are willing to go along. But the Democrats also insist that the package include substantial aid for hospitals and for state and local governments. And Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is refusing to include this aid.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows what is really happening: McConnell is trying to get more money for businesses while continuing to shortchange state and local governments. After all, “starve the beast” — forcing governments to cut services by depriving them of resources — has been Republican strategy for decades

At a basic level, then, anti-government ideologues are preventing us from responding adequately to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.

Their obstructionism will cause vast suffering, as crucial public services are curtailed. It will also compound the economic damage.

In the near future, we’ll see millions of unnecessary job losses as impoverished families cut back spending, as local governments lay off teachers and firefighters, as the post office, if it survives at all, becomes a shadow of its former self.

And many of these job losses will probably persist even after the pandemic subsides.

If there’s a silver lining to all this, it is that the people sabotaging our response to Covid-19 economics may also be sabotaging their own political future. Trump is, after all, counting on rapid economic recovery to erase public memories of his disastrous handling of the pandemic itself. Yet he and his allies in the Senate are making such a recovery much less likely.

Think of it this way: If South Korea were a country of 100 people and the nation’s wealth were a pie with 100 slices, the richest person would get 25 slices of that pie all to himself, while the poorest 50 would have to split two slices between them all. That disparity is at the heart of “Parasite.”

As many economists have noted, growing inequality in the United States is no accident, but rather the direct result of policy decisions made by lawmakers and their wealthy allies in the business community.

t the bottom half owns something of value. In America, the bottom 50 percent have literally none of the nation’s wealth and, in fact, have a negative net worth. That’s a relatively new phenomenon: As recently as the late 1980s, the bottom half of Americans could claim several percent of the country’s wealth as their own.

“People in positions of power tend to capture political processes.” The wealthy use their power to write rules that allow them to accrue more wealth.

there are some big differences. South Korea provides universal health care, for starters — something many economists and public health experts have identified as a key tool in the fight against poverty. The country also provides much more support for working families: New parents can claim up to 40 weeks of paid leave (American parents, by contrast, are guaranteed nothing). The country also provides universal early-childhood education, something lacking in the United States, and subsidizes child care for children under age 3.

On the revenue side, South Korea collects bigger taxes on corporate profits than the United States does. South Korea also collects four times as much revenue (as a share of GDP) from estate, gift and inheritance taxes as the United States does. Those taxes, if used correctly, have the potential to be a powerful corrective of runaway inequality.

it’s not difficult to imagine that if the United States had similar social programs and collected a similar level of corporate and estate taxes, the distribution of wealth here would be similar to that in South Korea.

The film talks about two opposing families, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.”

With US health officials sounding alarms similar to those of their world counterparts, governors across the country have continued to roll out aggressive measures to stop the rise in cases.

Without the proper data in hand, "it would be premature for us to roll back any of these restrictions which frankly have just started," the George Washington University professor said. "We need to know the data, and if we don't have the data, how are we making these decisions at all?" she asked. "It seems like these dates that are being picked are arbitrary and not based on science and evidence."At least 709 Americans have now died from the virus, and 53,209 have been infected. More than half of the US population is under stay-at-home orders.

As more states implement stay-at-home orders, Trump isn't planning on a nationwide quarantine, he said. Social distancing guidelines set forth by the federal government this month will expire next week. Among other guidelines, the "15-day pause" urges Americans to avoid public gatherings with more than 10 people.

The US has turned to Italy to understand how social distancing measures can help slow the virus' spread, a health official said Tuesday.

New York's surge in cases should serve as a warning for the rest of the country, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. "We are just a test case," he said. "Where we are today, you will be in three weeks or four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. ... What we do here will chart the course for what we do in your city and in your community."New York has a case tally several times that of any other state, and the majority of the state's cases are in New York City. The state and city are making appeals to the federal government for more medical supplies.

Because of the varying tallies -- more than 25,000 in New York, while other states have fewer than 50 -- timelines for reopening businesses and returning to normalcy need to remain flexible, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Ferguson said their analysis “provides some hope for countries currently in various levels of lockdown that once case numbers are brought to low levels, it might be possible to relax social distancing – provided equal measures to limit the risk of the resurgence of transmission are introduced”.

The analysis shows that “intermediate levels of local activity can be maintained while avoiding a large outbreak”, the report says

That would mean testing everyone with symptoms and following up and isolating their contacts, in order to stamp out any further flare-ups of infection.

He stressed, however, that relaxing the lockdown policies would depend on “rapid and ubiquitous testing and rigorous case and contact isolation policies”.

after very intense social distancing which resulted in containment, China has successfully exited their stringent social distancing policy to some degree.

The report adds: “Globally, China is at a more advanced stage of the pandemic. Policies implemented to reduce the spread of Covid-19 in China and the exiting strategies that followed can inform decision-making processes for countries once containment is achieved.”

The plan is for individuals to get up to $1,200 and married couples to get up to $2,400, including $500 for each child. The size of a check would diminish gradually for those whose income is above $75,000, while individuals earning more than $99,000 and couples earning more than $198,000 will not be getting any checks. The checks will be based on a household or individual’s 2018 tax return unless they filed their 2019 tax return, in which case it will be based of their 2019 return.

Democrats and even some Republicans are adamant that corporations are given fair assistance that will not end up in the pockets of wealthy shareholders or corporate executives.

Companies who receive government assistance will also see restrictions on stock buybacks, which is when a company buys shares of its own stock to increase the value of its shares, ultimately helping their wealthy stockholders and corporate executives. Commercial airlines have been known for buying back their own shares.

The deal extends unemployment insurance by 13 weeks and covers self-employed and furloughed workers, offering workers $600 a week for those additional four months in addition to what a state will provide through their own program.

The bill will relieve burden on the healthcare sector by including a “Marshall Plan” that will give $130bn in grants and assistance to hospitals. The bill also boosts Medicare payments for hospitals treating patients with Covid-19.

Remember, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a total of just under 80,000 votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump got a shade under 63 million votes in 2016, which means that if he loses one tenth of one percent of those people, his margin is gone.

Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign manager Jeff Roe told Republicans that the only way to survive the midterms was by staying on board with Trump. “[Y]ou are in the same boat as Mr. Trump, whether you like it or not,” he wrote. “If enough people jump ship, generic party identification will suffer, and everyone will sink. . . . The lesson for Republicans: Stay in the boat and keep rowing.”

While not many Republicans identify as “NeverTrump,” an important bloc vote like they are.

Despite Trump’s inevitable Senate acquittal, the fact that he’s the first impeached president in history to face re-election is likely to have some negative impact on the race

Democrats will run ads from sea to shining sea accusing the president of cheating to win elections. And, what a lucky label for them to hang on Trump, since “cheater” applies neatly to pretty much every aspect of his personal and professional life

10 percent of Republicans think he should be removed from office. If 10 percent of Republicans are unhappy enough to rip him out of the Oval Office today, how many more would be content to send him packing in November?

In all these states there seems to be an analogous cohort of voters who probably don’t care about hashtags, but who are, functionally, Never Trump in their outlook. It would be an exaggeration to call them a silent majority. It’s better to understand them as the silent majority-makers.

All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable.

The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin

o state the obvious: The technological and political obstacles are massive. While similar efforts have borne fruit in Singapore and South Korea, the US is a very different country, with a more mistrustful, individualistic culture. Already, polling shows that 70 percent of Republicans, and 46 percent of Democrats, strongly oppose using cellphone data to enforce quarantine orders.

The alternative to mass surveillance is mass testing. Romer’s proposal is to deploy testing on a scale no one else is contemplating — 22 million tests per day — so that the entire country is being tested every 14 days, and anyone who tests positive can be quickly quarantined

The AEI proposal is the closest thing to a middle path between these plans. It’s more testing, but nothing approaching Romer’s hopes. It’s more contact tracing, but it doesn’t envision an IT-driven panopticon. But precisely for that reason, what it’s really describing is a yo-yo between extreme lockdown and lighter forms of social distancing, continuing until a vaccine is reached.

This, too, requires some imagination. Will governors who’ve finally, at great effort, reopened parts of their economies really keep throwing them back into lockdown every time ICUs begin to fill? Will Trump have the stomach to push the country back into quarantine after he’s lifted social distancing guidelines?

even if the political hurdles could be cleared, it’s obvious, reading the AEI proposal, that there’ll be no “V-shaped recovery” of the economy. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who helped craft the plan, says he thinks something like 80 percent of the economy will return — that may sound like a lot, but it’s an economic collapse of Great Depression proportions.

As unlikely as these futures may be, I think the do-nothing argument is even less plausible: It imagines that we simply let a highly lethal virus kill perhaps millions of Americans, hospitalize tens of millions more, and crush the health system, while the rest of us go about our daily economic and social business.

That is, in my view, far less likely than the construction of a huge digital surveillance state. I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother.

My point isn’t to criticize these plans when I have nothing better to offer. Indeed, my point isn’t to criticize them at all. It’s simply to note that these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal

They either envision life under a surveillance and testing state of dystopian (but perhaps necessary!) proportions, or they envision a long period of economic and public health pain, as we wrestle the disease down only to see it roar back, as seems to be happening in Singapore.

As of now, the White House has neither chosen nor begun executing on a plan of its own. That’s a terrible abdication of leadership, but reading through the various proposals, you can see why it’s happened. Imagine you’re the president of the United States in an election year. Which of these futures, with all its costs and risks and pain, would you want to try and sell to the American people?