Skip to content

Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

No loyalty, no trust

Published by digby on July 25, 2023

Nobody works for DeSantis for long

Ron DeSantis is apparently in the process of “re-tooling” his campaign in light of the miserable failure it’s been so far. He’s been burning through money using private planes and using the Four Seasons as his stomping grounds. Now he’s firing staff. None of this comes as any surprise to people who’ve been watching his career from the beginning:

[T]he latest staff shakeup isn’t an anomaly within the arc of DeSantis’ career. It’s part of a larger pattern of a politician who has struggled to maintain a core group of trusted advisers or loyal employees.

During his five years in Congress, his office had one of the highest turnover rates in the House. No employed member from his victorious 2018 gubernatorial campaign team is working in a senior role on his 2024 presidential race. And things didn’t change when he became governor. In his first term, he fired staffers with enough regularity that some formed an emotional support group, according to a 2021 Politico report. Now, DeSantis is shedding staff only two months into his bid to beat out former President Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.

DeSantis’ long history of staffing woes has been a red flag to some of the party’s veteran hands. One prominent GOP operative in touch with DeSantis, who requested anonymity to speak freely, advised him last winter that he would struggle to compete at the national level without a cohesive campaign nucleus. “I told him early on: In my lifetime, I’ve never watched someone win a major race—not a congressional race, but a major contested race—without being able to keep a team and trust the team,” the source recounts to TIME.

It’s a reason why that same Republican operative warned high-net-worth donors who were looking for an alternative to Trump against investing too heavily in DeSantis until they could see how he performed as a presidential candidate. “People who were big players were thinking about giving 50 or 100 million dollars,” the source says. “I told them, ‘You should stitch that in and see if he can make it more than six months with actual professionals in charge.’”

Since DeSantis formally entered the race in May through a glitch-riddled announcement on Twitter, he hasn’t inspired more confidence. A national Reuters/Ipsos poll from last week has Trump leading him by a commanding 28-point margin. It comes as Trump’s multiple criminal indictments have only appeared to endear him more to Republican primary voters.

those who’ve worked with the Florida governor before expect staff turnover to continue to plague his presidential bid. They say he has never been one to forge lasting emotional bonds with people who work for him. “The same struggle that he has with voters, he has with staff,” another Republican operative familiar with the DeSantis campaign operation tells TIME. “When things start to sour, it’s easy for staff to either leave on their own volition, or it’s easy for the boss to ultimately cut staff loose. There are no personal connections there.”

Well, he has Casey. Isn’t that all he needs?

One person who has been at DeSantis’ side through every campaign is his wife Casey, who has a heavy influence over his political strategy. That dynamic has led some to doubt that any staffing changes can truly reorient the campaign when it will always be the two of them calling the shots. “His top advisor comes with the house,” the source close to DeSantis says. “It’s his wife. There’s no firing his spouse. The idea that DeSantis can do a reset is a complete fallacy.”

Maybe everyone needs to face the fact that he is a terrible politician who fell into the Governorship by a hair and then won re-election because he was running against a terrible retread candidate in a state that’s been wired for Republicans for decades now. He’s not good at it. And his “anti-woke” campaign should be a lesson to the GOP about the salience of those issues beyond Trump but it won’t be. They love it too much.

It’s the Republicans stupid

Published by digby on July 25, 2023

Senate Republicans have not been eager to sign onto Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s, R-Ala. one-man blockade of military promotions to protest a Pentagon abortion policy. A new online poll of likely voters from Data For Progress suggests their political instincts might be right: Given two statements, one dismissive of Tuberville’s actions and another supportive, 55% went against the senator’s plan while only 33% backed it.

You will note that 57% of Republicans agree with interfering with the military in order to make a point about abortion. Tuberville is right in the mainstream of the party. It’s the party that is out of the mainstream of America,

Another very stable genius

Published by digby on July 25, 2023

Less than a day after owner Elon Musk changed the company’s logo from a decade-old internationally recognized symbol with sky-high brand awareness value to the letter ‘X,’ workers had moved in to start dismantling the building’s giant Twitter sign.

The only problem was that Musk hadn’t secured the correct permits for the crane now blocking the street, according to a witness at the scene. Officers with the San Francisco Police Department quickly arrived and started “shutting it down,” he tweeted. The half-finished removal operation left only the sign reading just “er.”

I think that says it all.

After Donald Trump and Elon Musk, I wonder if we might be coming to the end of the “Genius Businessman will save us” era.

Nah… Americans just love the idea that being rich means you must be smart. It’s hard to imagine them giving that up even in he face of such humiliation.

Here comes the predicted impeachment

Published by digby on July 25, 2023

Last fall as we were all girding ourselves for the impending “Red Tsunami” and contemplating what it was going to do to the remains of the Biden agenda, I wrote that we should be prepared for Revenge of the MAGA cult and recognize that it was inevitable that the Republicans were going to try to impeach Joe Biden. At that time Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene had already filed five impeachment resolutions against him and it was well known that Donald Trump would not be very happy if the new Republican majority didn’t issue payback for the two impeachments on his record.

One of the resolutions she filed on Biden’s very first day in office claimed that he had tried “to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept benefits from foreign nationals in exchange for favors.” That was, of course, based upon the bogus Ukraine scandal that prompted Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Nothing would be more satisfying to Trump than for Biden to be impeached for doing what Trump did when he attempted to blackmail the President of Ukraine into smearing Biden.

The then presumptive new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a staunch Trump acolyte, was asked by Punchbowl News before the mid-term election if would pursue the president’s impeachment and he replied:

I think the country doesn’t like impeachment used for political purposes at all. If anyone ever rises to that occasion, you have to, but I think the country wants to heal and … start to see the system that actually works.

Clearly that whole “system that actually works” thing didn’t pan out so McCarthy is predictably signaling that they are ready to go ahead with an impeachment inquiry. He told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday:

This was always going to happen. As Barton Gelman presciently wrote in the Atlantic before the midterm election:

[T]here is little reason to think that McCarthy can resist the GOP’s impulse to impeach once it gathers strength. He is a notably weak leader of a conference that proved unmanageable for his predecessors Paul Ryan and John Boehner. If he does in fact reach the speakership, his elevation will be a testament to his strategy of avoiding conflict with those forces.

The chaotic and inane House “investigations” into President Biden’s son Hunter and the screaming outrage about the alleged “sweetheart deal” for paying his taxes late and lying on an application to buy a firearm have been leading this way for some time. The notorious laptop, an informant’s unverified statement that Joe Biden was in the room when Hunter was making business deals, another informant who is on the lam from the DOJ, and IRS whistleblowers who say that the Trump appointed US Attorney was hamstrung by the Justice Department from throwing the book and Biden’s son are, so far the extent of “evidence” if you want to call it that, that they’ve produced. The DOJ refutes these charges and that US Attorney is expected to testify when congress comes back into session.

The details of all these investigative threads are opaque but highly suggestive, consisting of unproven speculation, dubious sourcing and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. But that’s the point. It’s Republican scandal-mongering 101. If you rapidly throw volumes of incomprehensible minutia into the media ether and deliver it with breathless intensity, you can make the public believe that even though they may not understand what it’s all about, there must be something to it or everyone wouldn’t be talking about it.

Donald Trump is the biggest megaphone and he has dubbed Biden “Crooked Joe” and is calling him the most corrupt president in history and repeatedly slandered his family as the “Biden Crime Family.” It may seem as if he’s lost his touch, re-purposing that nickname from “Crooked Hillary” and the GOP’s long standing use of the term “Clinton Crime Family” but he knew what he was doing. He was drawing on all those years of character assassination of Bill and Hillary Clinton and wrapping Biden in them like cozy old sweater.

And he is pushing McCarthy hard to not only impeach Biden as soon as possible but also “expunge” his impeachments which would almost certainly, in his mind, mean that he can go into the election claiming that Biden was impeached and he wasn’t. (You know that’s how he thinks, right?)

This strategy is starting to work, and you know this by the fact that it’s not longer just the usual suspects who are flogging the scandals. Some high profile GOP Trump apostates are getting in on the action to. We saw former New Jersey Gov. and presidential candidate Chris Christie on Face the Nation this past weekend on the alleged “sweetheart deal” for Hunter Biden:

Far be it from me to second guess a presidential candidate and former U.S. Attorney but I was under the impression that prosecutors didn’t reveal all the details about investigations in which they didn’t charge someone because it’s not fair to smear people with innuendo and suspicions of wrongdoing for which there isn’t adequate evidence. But apparently, that doesn’t apply to the sons of presidents.

Christie has at least, to his credit, also raised the question of how Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner got a 2 billion dollar sweetheart deal from the Saudi Investment Fund which is much more than the Republicans in congress have done.

Then we have No Labels supporter and former GOP Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan with this startling comment:

This is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest that Biden might be facing “serious legal troubles” much less that they might be on par with Trump, who is under two indictments currently and possibly facing at least two more. Hogan did retreat a bit later when pressed by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki who pointed out that Hunter Biden isn’t in the government and that any equivalency between Trump and Biden in terms of “legal problems” is false.

It’s lucky for Biden that the credibility of most of his antagonists is so tattered that people who aren’t already in the fold aren’t likely to buy into it. Speaking of serious legal problems:

According to CNN, Speaker McCarthy has been in close consultation with a former House Speaker who is telling him it’s time to strike. That would be the Newt Gingrich who, when he was Speaker, pushed the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton — whose approval rating hit an all time high the day he was impeached. It lost Gingrich the Speaker’s gavel and he had to resign from congress over it. It sounds like he’s following that same script today and McCarthy is taking his advice.

No wonder Joe Biden smiled when he was asked about it on Tuesday.

Salon

I wonder what the presumptive GOP nominee’s been up to?

Published by digby on July 25, 2023

You’ll note that New Hampshire voters pick Vivek Ramaswamy as their dream president over Ronald Reagan too…

He posted this rambling screed from Congressman Mike Davis:

They all sound like him now.

This is what he spends most of his time posting, however:

I guess this is what’s known as campaigning in the Republican Party these days.

Own the Libs! Vote Republican.

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 25, 2023

The all-circus, no-bread party

Polling suggests (as I wrote earlier) that Americans really don’t get that things are looking up for them economically. Inflation is down — down by 44% — from last September. Unemployment is at record lows in many states, the lowest in 54 years in February. What Republicans cannot afford is for voters to notice.

So it’s culture wars a-go-go (Politico):

Republican policy riders seeking to limit diversity efforts, drag shows, Pride flag displays and promotion of critical race theory are rife throughout the House’s dozen proposed annual spending bills, including those that would fund the national parks, pay for roads or maintain U.S. embassies abroad.

The cascade of social issues turning up in the must-pass bills is noteworthy for how it’s pervaded this year’s appropriations process — and for how the GOP concerns have spread far beyond top-tier conservative causes such as limiting abortions and gender-affirming care.

And liberal groups are keeping score: Of the 12 bills moving through the House appropriations process in recent months, policy riders targeting agency diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have appeared in 11, according to tracking from Human Rights Campaign. Language seeking to ban “discrimination” against people who do not believe in gay marriage appeared in 10. Eight sought to block funding for Pride flags and gender inclusive care. Three took aim at drag shows.

That’s not exactly bringing home the bacon, is it? But it’s all they’ve got. Endless culture war.

“We just are continuing to spiral downward with more and more partisan rancor,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), an 18-year veteran of the committee, during a markup of the transportation, housing and urban development spending bill last week.

Republicans have maintained that they’re only responding to Democrats’ efforts to use government power to move the country to the left.

Democrats are instead working to move people’s standard of living up.

Cultural grievance has been a sure-fire vote-getter for the GOP for years. But how long will it be before their voters realize they can’t eat it?

Bidenomics works

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 25, 2023

The banks know it. Why don’t more Americans?

President Biden delivers remarks in Chicago surrounded by signage that reads: “Bidenomics.” Photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Those folkloric man-on-the-street (or in a rural diner) puff pieces are as infuriating as they are uninformative. They do, however, reinforce false, often minority, impressions of what’s really happening in the country, Timothy Noah argues in The New Republic. Misinforming tales abound (his mock example): “People Believe Stuff That Isn’t True, but They Feel Like It Is True, So Let’s Give Them a Hearing Because We Don’t Want to Seem Elitist.”

Outlets such as The Wall Street Journal regularly hand Joe Everyman a megaphone and let him expound on microchips in vaccines, schoolteachers “trying to turn your children gay or trans,” and the crappy Biden economy that isn’t. Given a platform, uninformed views steer public opinion by making the wrong seem right.

Polling later confirms that people think the economy sucks. It doesn’t. Ask Morgan Stanley. The firm was “obliged to nearly quadruple its previous estimate of gross domestic product growth for the first six months of 2023” and double “its GDP growth prediction for October–December 2023, to 1.3 percent, and predicts 1.4 percent growth in 2024.”

“We have now reached the point where the Wall Street titans on whom Biden wishes to raise taxes maintain a higher opinion of Biden’s economic stewardship than the public at large,” Noah wryly observes.

But you won’t find that out by asking the red-hat in the diner.

How voters feel about the economy has more to do with partisanship than reality, Noah writes. Raw public polling on Bidenomics is meaningless without examining the party affiliation of respondents.

For example:

In 2016, Gallup polled voters on the economy one week before the election and one week after. During the week preceding the election, with President Obama in the White House and Hillary Clinton widely expected to win, only 16 percent of Republicans thought the economy was improving, compared to 61 percent of Democrats. One week after the election, fully 49 percent of Republicans suddenly thought the economy was improving, compared to only 46 percent of Democrats. Note how much greater this postelection swing was for Republicans: 33 percentage points, compared to 15 for Democrats. 

Huh? Noah suggests, “Republicans were twice as mindlessly partisan as Democrats when they opined about economics. My unscientific guess is that the spread has gotten much wider since then.”

Very likely. Last week’s Monmouth poll found public opinion split on Biden’s handling of the economy (47 percent approve, 48 percent disapprove). But studying the crosstabs for the partisan split renders those figures near-meaningless.

The inescapable conclusion is that when you ask somebody whether the economy is doing well, you won’t get an answer about the economy. You may not even get an answer about that individual’s personal experience (which may or may not reflect broader economic trends as compared to one, two, or 10 years ago). Most of the time, you’d be better off just asking, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” Because these days, that determines how people—especially Republicans—feel about pretty much everything. If the man on the street sounds like a blowhard, hyperpartisanship explains why. The rest is just noise.

Fine. Now what?

We do not counter the fact that the platformed uninformed spread misinformation by carping about bad or slanted coverage. And yes, the right has the bigger media megaphone. But as Anat Shenker-Osorio points out, many people form their opinions by listening to what people in their communities think. They get a finger-in-the-air sense of what’s normal. The way to counter misimpressions is by reinforcing your normal, by spreading your view of the economy at every casual opportunity. Not with statistics but with your own man-on-the-street testimony.

Anand Giridharadas explains in this clip from a longer YouTube.

A quote from Bill McKibben’s 2005 “The Christian Paradox – How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong” has stayed with me on how uninformed opinion works to warp perception. He was writing about American Christianity, but the distinction between the Christian right and the Republican right today is also near-meaningless:

The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track.

Guess where authoritarian Republicans want to lead this country?

Reality starting to bite

Published by digby on July 24, 2023

This is from Axios the font of all beltway CW. It’s about time:

Republicans are hammering “Joe Biden’s America” as a land of rising violent crime, surging immigration and out of control inflation, but there’s just one problem: the numbers are starting to move in the opposite direction.

The big picture: With 2024 around the corner, the U.S. is making measurable progress in the areas where Biden has been most vulnerable to GOP attacks.

Violent crime surged in U.S. cities during the pandemic and ranked as a top concern for voters in the 2022 midterms.

Republicans slammed Biden and Democratic leaders for rising crime rates, and many Democrats started embracing a more centrist approach to policing.

Homicides were down 9% in the first half of this year over the same period last year, according to a study of 37 major cities from the Council on Criminal Justice.

State of play: Violent crime rates are generally down across the board, thought they’re still higher than 2019 levels.

Meanwhile, illegal border crossings dropped to the lowest level in over two years in June, the first full month under Biden’s new, restrictive asylum rule, which makes it much harder to attain asylum.

That policy replaced a pandemic-era policy enabling rapid expulsion of migrants, and was sharply criticized by immigration advocates and some Democrats as something out of former President Trump’s playbook For now, though, it seems to have helped stave off an expected summer spike in migrants crossing the southern border.

What to watch: A pending court ruling may threaten the relative calm at the border. And even with border numbers plummeting, House Republicans have pushed forward with their effort to impeach Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas over the “illegal immigration crisis.”

Arguably the biggest factor driving voter discontent has been inflation, which made consumers feel lousy about the Biden economy, despite otherwise favorable economic and job market conditions.

Now, as inflation retreats, there are signs of a shift.

Consumer sentiment, as measured by a long-running survey conducted by the University of Michigan, is the highest in two years — a jump “largely attributed to the continued slowdown inflation along with stability in labor markets.”

Small town saga

Published by digby on July 24, 2023

It’s even worse than we knew

Rolling Stone catches up with more Jason Aldean racism:

JUST WHEN YOU thought there couldn’t possibly be anymore dog whistles embedded in the Jason Aldean “Try That in a Small Town” saga, an intrepid, sharp-eyed TikTok user has potentially picked out one more.

Amazingly, this incident doesn’t involve the song itself, or even its controversial video — part of which was reportedly filmed outside a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a 1933 lynching (and features a surprising amount of footage from Canada). Rather, it involves a promotional video shared on TikTok. It’s a largely innocuous lyric video with a newspaper theme, but as TikTok user Danny Collins discovered, there’s an actual old newspaper clipping featured in the video — and it’s tied to a Jim Crow-era story about a writer who was harassed for fighting segregation and white supremacy. 

@dannyfcollins Thank you to my followers who tag me. All I’m saying is lets get real. To everyone supporting Jason Aldean what else do you need to see or hear? Accept accountability and do better. #fyp #endracism #jasonaldean ♬ original sound – Danny Collins

The clipping in question appears around the eight second mark of Aldean’s TikTok. Collins was able to trace it back to an Aug. 30, 1956 article in The Petal Paper, a weekly paper out of Petal, Mississippi (an actual small town, unlike, say, Macon, Georgia, where Aldean grew up). The Petal Paper was run by Percy Dale East, who frequently delivered satirical broadsides against segregation, racism, and white supremacy. (Rolling Stone was able to confirm Collins’ findings.)

The clipping featured in Aldean’s TikTok refers to the most famous incident in The Petal Paper’s history: In March 1956, East published a full-page ad calling out the White Citizens Council, a network of white supremacist groups that had formed a few years prior. The ad (which you can see on the Smithsonian website) featured a caricature of a mule and “promoted” an upcoming “Glorious Citizens Clan” meeting, where attendees were promised the “freedom” to yell racist slurs and “be superior without brain, character, or principle!” 

The satirical ad actually went proto-viral, with East republishing it a few times himself and licensing it to papers not just in the U.S., but across the world. There was, of course, a lot of backlash, too — and the Aug. 30, 1956 clipping featured in Aldean’s TikTok finds East responding to some it.

Specifically, East addressed the the allegation that he was serving as “the local mouthpiece” for groups like the NAACP, the Republican Party (this is pre-Southern Strategy realignment), or “other monied interests.” East even offered up a $1,000 reward to anyone who could prove he had any ties to any groups (outside of the Methodist Church, “to which I was at one time a member,” he joked), stating, “I do not represent anything or anyone except myself.”

Below that notice, East printed a letter exchange with a man named Don Gross, who said he worked as a public relations consultant for the NAACP. Gross praised East for running the ad, but dryly noted: “I hope I am not congratulating a dead man. This must have taken courage and I hope you are still with us.”

n response, East offered up a few more details about how the people of Petal had responded to his satirical ad, saying he and his wife received numerous threatening calls filled with racist language. He also said he’d lost over 200 subscriptions and suggested there was “something resembling an organized effort to stop advertising with my paper.” (This part of the clipping is not featured in Aldean’s TikTok.)

A rep for Aldean did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment regarding how the Petal Paper clipping wound up in the country star’s TikTok video.

Aldean has rejected the interpretation of “Try That in a Small Town” as pro vigilante or “pro-lynching.” Instead, the musician released a statement saying he believes the song “refers the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief.

He knew what he was doing.

The wrong apartment problem

Published by digby on July 24, 2023

Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic had an interesting take on why so many people are unhappy in this booming economy:

Dr. Dre on the radio, The Matrix on the big screen, The Sopranos on TV: The year 1999 was wonderful for many reasons, including economic ones.

That year, the median household income rose to a record level, a watermark that held for nearly two decades. (The average American family was poorer when Donald Trump was running for office than when Bill Clinton left office.) Wages were growing across the board—all kinds of workers were getting consistent raises. Productivity growth was strong. Wealth inequality was holding steady and far lower than it is today. The poverty rate hit its lowest point in years.

I could go on and on with the hard statistics: The share of workers with a college degree was climbing. The homeownership rate was booming. The stock market, booming. Consumer confidence was the highest it has ever been. The share of people employed was the highest it has ever been. Investor optimism was the highest it has ever been. The share of Americans saying the country was going in the right direction—also the highest it has ever been.

Things just felt like they were going well and getting better. High-quality televisions were becoming ubiquitous; cellphones beginning to replace pagers. The share of homes with a computer and an internet hookup was exploding, and the web was promising to change everything.

Now: Earwormy TikTok blips on the radio, warmed-over superheroes on the big screen (at least until Barbenheimer), Peak TV drowning us in okay content: 2023 is blah for many reasons. Roughly half the country thinks we’re in a recession or about to be in one. Consumer confidence is down, as is investor sentiment. Inflation is weighing on American families.

But I’m here to tell you that this is the best economy ever. Really. This year’s economy has now outpaced that of 1999, the previous best on record. It is growing more equitably than it has in years. American families are more financially secure and wealthier than they ever have been. Things are going great, I swear.

The labor market is flourishing, and not just for rich folks for once. The unemployment rate is at its lowest level in 60 years—jobs are more plentiful than they have been in a generation. Competition for workers has not only pushed earnings up—median household income is sitting near its brand-new high, one that is $6,000 higher than it was in the late 1990s. It has also pushed earnings up more for the lowest-paid workers than the highest-paid workers. The past three years have erased a quarter of the run-up in wage inequality created in the past four decades. Real wages for the lowest-paid workers are growing faster than they have since the 1960s. The country’s wage structure is getting more equal, not less.

Arindrajit Dube, a labor economist studying this “unexpected” phenomenon, told me that the country’s “job ladder” had broken about 20 years ago: Workers in crappy jobs found themselves stuck in those crappy jobs, unable to move up. “Starting around 2018 or 2019, you start to see the tight labor market bring back some health and dynamism,” he told me. “People are making more changes. The Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle, whatever you want to call it—it means the market is working better. And it’s allowing people to leave jobs that are really bad.” As a result, workers report feeling more satisfied with their jobs now than at any point since the 1980s, and 4 million more people have full-time jobs (and 1.6 million fewer people have part-time jobs) than before the pandemic.

Improvements in earnings, along with the stimulus payments the government made during the pandemic, have helped lift millions of families out of poverty. The child-poverty rate has fallen from 12.5 percent to just 5.2 percent over the past three years. That’s the lowest level ever recorded. The share of people living in deep poverty and near-poverty has declined, too, and food insecurity is at its lowest-ever rate.

Bigger paychecks are helping middle-class families buy houses and build wealth. The homeownership rate was increasing faster than it ever had, until interest rates spiked a year ago; families in the lower half of the income distribution are more likely to own their homes now than at any point since the real-estate bubble burst in 2006. Most Millennials own property; the generation is starting to catch up with Gen Xers and Boomers in terms of net worth and household formation.

The economy has also delivered extraordinary gains for Black Americans. The jobless rate for Black workers is near a historic low, and the gap between the unemployment rate for white workers and Black workers is the smallest it has ever been. Black workers’ earnings are increasing rapidly too.

Measured in all sorts of more esoteric ways, American families are doing the best they ever have. The delinquency rate on loans is the lowest it has ever been. Real disposable income is the highest it has ever been. The personal-bankruptcy rate is at an all-time low.

So we have to ask: Why aren’t we partying like it’s 1999?

She points out that inflation has freaked people out and they aren’t seeing the lowering prices just yet. And then she points this out which I haven’t thought of before:

Then there is something I like to call the Wrong-Apartment Problem. The country’s big cities have added far too few housing units over the past few decades; now even rural areas have shortages. By one estimate, roughly half of Americans would live somewhere different if supply met demand; New York would be eight times as big as it is now, and San Francisco five times as big. Renters spend a larger share of their income on housing than they did in 1999, and rents have grown by 135 percent, whereas average incomes have grown just 77 percent. The country has an affordability crisis, with health care, child care, and rent eating up huge shares of family budgets.

Yet these statistics still underplay just how bad the situation is. People don’t spend what they can’t afford, and pretty much nobody can afford what they want anymore. Yes, we have more income, more disposable cash, and a better standard of living than at any other point in our history. But millions of us can’t live in the neighborhoods we want. We’re stuck in too-small, too-far-away accommodations, giving up on the dream of having a second bathroom or a third kid. This is why you get all the social-media nostalgia for the economic conditions of the 1950s, when many Americans still lacked indoor plumbing, but at least could live in Brooklyn or Somerville or San Francisco on a reasonable salary. We’re all stuck in the Wrong Apartment.

I think that’s huge. I don’t know how people are managing this problem in these populated areas. It’s very daunting.

She goes on to point out that inequality is still a big problem and I have to say that the profligate spending of the super rich is enough to make anyone feel depressed. These people have way too much money. And needless to say the political situation in this country sucks. That we’re even thinking of putting that orange monster back in the White House is enough to drive you to drink.

But the housing problem for average people is a major problem in the cities and all along the coasts and if it doesn’t right itself I’m not sure what’s going to happen.