The Poverty Crisis Is Here, About to Get Worse
Everything you need to know for Dec. 17, 2020: The latest on the stimulus + Wake protects transgender students + LG-elect Mark Robinson embarrasses us before getting sworn in
Thursday, Dec. 17, 2020:
8 days until Christmas
9 days until Boxing Day and the start of Kwanzaa
15 days until this cursed year ends
35 days until this cursed presidency is over
Today’s Numbers:
7.8 million
Americans who have fallen into poverty since the summer.
“The poverty rate jumped to 11.7 percent in November, up 2.4 percentage points since June, according to new data released Wednesday by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame.” (WaPo)
21.3% of Blacks lived below the poverty line in November.
The US began the year with a poverty rate of 10.8%. By June, it had fallen to 9.3%.
UC/Notre Dame researchers: “The entire decline in poverty through June can be accounted for by the one-time stimulus checks the federal government issued, predominantly in April and May, and the expansion of unemployment insurance eligibility and benefits. In fact, in absence of these programs, poverty would have risen sharply.”
1.1
Percentage by which US retail sales fell in November, just in time for the holiday rush. (NYT)
PNC Financial Services Group economist Gus Faucher: “Weak retail sales in the fall, along with a recent increase in unemployment insurance claims, are warning signs for the economy at the end of 2020.”
When people are broke, they don’t buy stuff.
When they’re really broke, they steal it: Shoplifting is way up.
12 million
Renters who will owe back rent as of January—on average, $5,850 apiece.
North Carolina isn’t immune: “We’re looking at potentially 300,000 evictions come January,” said Rick Glazier, executive director of the Justice Center. “There are probably another 800,000 other total folks who are in utility arrearages in this state.” (Policy Watch)
+ ABOVE THE FOLD
—> Stimulus Checks In, Aid to Local Governments Out
With a Friday deadline looming—after dragging their feet for months—lawmakers appeared to be nearing a deal on a $900 billion relief package as of Wednesday evening. The details are a moving target, but here’s what we’ve got right now.
What’s in:
More funding for the Paycheck Protection Program
$300/week federal unemployment supplements
$600 stimulus checks
$25 billion for emergency rental assistance
Protections against surprise medical billing that insurance companies hate
What’s not:
$160 billion in aid for city and state governments
Unemployment benefits after March, when they’d be cut off
—> POLITICS: “Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, privately made the case to Republicans on Wednesday for a stimulus deal that includes another round of direct payments to struggling Americans, suggesting that delivering such help could boost the party’s hopes of hanging onto their majority in the Senate. … Mr. McConnell said that Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are both facing January runoffs that will determine which party controls the Senate, were ‘getting hammered’ for Congress’s failure to deliver more pandemic aid to struggling Americans—particularly the direct payments—and that enacting the measure could help them.”
—> POLICY: The $600 checks come at the expense of $160 billion that might otherwise be allocated to local governments. Without that money, many state and local governments—which have seen their tax revenues decimated but lack the ability to borrow—will have to enact brutal austerity measures.
Republicans have opposed any aid to cities and states, alleging that they have mismanaged their budgets.
In reality, while congressional Republicans will take credit for the one-time checks—many of which will go to people who are doing just fine—they’ll Democrats who run cities to shut down bus routes, lay off cops, first responders, and teachers, and jack up property taxes.
As Governing noted in August: “Economists almost universally agree that direct aid to states and localities is one of the best tools the federal government has at its disposal to avoid a weak recovery or a dip back into recession. States and localities employ about one out of seven American workers.”
—> RELATED: On Tuesday, some of North Carolina’s biggest restaurateurs lobbied Representative-elect Deborah Ross and Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon to pass Blumenauer’s Restaurants Act, a $120 billion measure that would award bars and restaurants grants based on their pre-pandemic revenues. Unlike PPP money—which can only be used for payroll and rent—those funds could also go toward utilities, supplies, and general expenses. The House included the Restaurants Act in the Heroes Act it passed in May but the Senate ignored.
The Senate version of the Restaurants Act has 50 cosponsors, including Thom Tillis, but it seems unlikely that it will be folded into the last-minute stimulus deal, given Republican insistence on keeping the total amount below $1 trillion.
+ LOCAL & STATE
—> Wake Schools Expands Transgender Protections
On Tuesday, the Wake County school board unanimously voted to cover transgender students and employees under its antidiscrimination rules.
The school district cited two federal court decisions: a June Supreme Court ruling that federal employment discrimination laws apply to transgender people, and an August ruling in the 4th Circuit that found it unconstitutional to bar students from using the bathroom that conforms to their gender identity.
The state’s prohibition on local LGBTQ antidiscrimination ordinances, originally passed as part of HB 2, expired on Dec. 1.
Some people were mad about this. Their arguments are boring.
Example: “Males should not be allowed in the female bathroom. Schools should consider female students’ feelings because many female students are not comfortable with male in their bathroom.”
The protections will become final following a final vote in January.
—> Cooper Won’t Reveal What He Offered Apple
I hoped when Roy Cooper took office four years ago that his administration would provide a clean break from Team McCrory’s tendency to respond to public records requests on the Fourth of Never. Alas, no. A case study:
In December 2018, Apple announced that it had chosen Austin for its new facility, having been lured by tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives.
Since Raleigh had been competing for the same facility, reporters asked what incentives Cooper had been willing to shell out to get in Tim Cook’s good graces.
The state and Wake County had offered Amazon more than $100 million in goodies to locate its second HQ here. (Amazon didn’t.)
Yet six months after Apple passed, Cooper’s Department of Commerce declined to fork over records about Apple, telling WRAL that the so-called Project Bear was still “active.”
It’s been a long two years, and most of us (okay, me) forgot about Raleigh’s flirtations with tech giants. But Tyler Dukes, now at the N&O and persistent as a mosquito after a thunderstorm, did not. The administration’s answer, however, is the same: The project is open.
Their stance concerns open government advocates and watchdog groups, who say the state’s position runs counter to the spirit of transparency and undermines public trust. And they also raise doubts about whether North Carolina really is in the running for a new Apple expansion on the scale of its site in Austin.
“The law seems to be pretty clear that once a project is no longer viable, the interest in privacy or confidentiality subsides,” said Brooks Fuller, director of the N.C. Open Government Coalition at Elon University. “I think we’ve reached that point.”
Nothing has changed in the last two years. The only loose thread: A week after Apple passed, an LLC affiliated with an Apple lobbyist (and Parker Poe lawyer) acquired land near RTP.
Construction on Apple’s Austin campus is underway.
—> In Other News: North Carolina
DEQ Secretary Michael Regan might be Joe Biden’s EPA administrator. (Coastal Review)
A federal judge expedited a challenge, filed by the Eastern Band of the Cherokees, to a planned Catawba casino outside of Charlotte. (WRAL)
MacKenzie Scott—who, since her very expensive divorce from Jeff Bezos, has become quite the philanthropist—donated $90 million to three North Carolina HBCUs as part of a $4.15 billion giving spree. (AP via CBS17)
Two of Art Pope’s tentacles—the Civitas Institute and the John Locke Foundation—have merged. (AP via the N&O)
Incoming Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson isn’t about to tone down his aggro-bordering-on-psychopathic social media presence just because he’ll soon be one heartbeat away from running the state.
Outgoing Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest made a cameo in PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year:
—> In Other News: Triangle
Elfland residents really hate that massive gas station proposal: “A massive Buc-ee’s with 60 gas pumps and 64,000 square feet of cheesy retail clearly violates the character of the Efland community, which is characterized by farms and forests, relative quiet, and the absence of traffic congestion.” (N&O)
An Apex cop flipped his wig when his school principal neighbor sent him a Christmas card that included a pic of her family at a Black Lives Matter protest. (ABC11)
Airbnb suspended 21 Triangle-area homes as part of a crackdown on so-called party houses. (ABC11)
Weather: Mostly cloudy, high of 50. (WRAL)
+ NATION & WORLD
—> In Brief: 3 Stories to Read Today
“A top Trump appointee repeatedly urged top health officials to adopt a ‘herd immunity’ approach to Covid-19 and allow millions of Americans to be infected by the virus …. ‘There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,’ then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.” (Politico)
“Suburban and exurban counties turned away from Trump and toward Democrat Joe Biden in states across the country …. In part, this may be because the suburbs are simply far more diverse than they used to be. But suburbs have also become increasingly well-educated—and that may actually better explain why so many suburbs and exurbs are turning blue than just increased diversity on its own. … Among white people, at least, educational attainment is often a proxy for how open they are to growing racial diversity, with more highly educated white people likely to think increased racial diversity is a good thing.” (538)
“The largest burden of Covid-19 has undoubtedly fallen on people older than 65, accounting for around 80 percent of deaths in the United States. [But] young adults are dying at historic rates. In research published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, we found that among U.S. adults ages 25 to 44, from March through the end of July, there were almost 12,000 more deaths than were expected based on historical norms. In fact, July appears to have been the deadliest month among this age group in modern American history.” (NYT)
—> Quote of the Day
From Joe Biden’s campaign manager and incoming deputy chief of staff, Jen O’Malley Dillon:
The president-elect was able to connect with people over this sense of unity. In the primary, people would mock him, like, “You think you can work with Republicans?” I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers. Mitch McConnell is terrible. But this sense that you couldn’t wish for that, you couldn’t wish for this bipartisan ideal? He rejected that.
After sleeping the last four years, the Republican Tone Police is back on the job. Bidenland, meanwhile, is unhappy with O’Malley Dillon for committing that very Washington sin of telling the truth.
—> The Rundown
Good news: Some vials of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine evidently contain viable extra doses, expanding the country’s supply. (WaPo)
Bad news: A record 3,400-plus Americans died of COVID yesterday. (COVID Tracking Project)
The Trump administration has executed 10 people this year. All 50 states combined? Seven. (WaPo)
State attorneys general plan to accuse Google of operating as an illegal monopoly. (NYT)
Forty-five of the country’s 50 largest businesses turned a profit this year. Twenty-seven of them laid people off anyway—a total of more than 100,000 people. (WaPo)
Oddly—truly, a weird coincidence—COVID deaths in Florida, a state governed by mini-Trump Ron DeSantis, vanished right before the election. (Sun-Sentinel)
The appraised value of Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s mansion declined by more than half for no discernable reason, saving her and her husband more than $100,000 a year in property taxes. (Daily Beast)
A Philly cop appears to have planted a gun and framed a man for rape to cover up an unjustified shooting. Joseph Termaine Hicks has finally been exonerated after 19 years in prison. (Inky)
Biden picked former Michigan governor and electric car enthusiast Jen Granholm to be his energy secretary. (NYT)
The University of Mississippi plans to fire an acclaimed tenure-track professor after telling him that a planned program on immigrant detention and mass incarceration could cost the university funding. (Mississippi Free Press)
The International Criminal Court won’t investigate China’s genocide of the Muslim Uighurs because China isn’t a party to the ICC. (The US is also not a party to the court, along with Israel, Libya, Qatar, Yemen, and Iraq.) (NYT, HRW)
+ OUR SO-CALLED LIVES
—> MLB Decides the Negro Leagues Were Major
Righting a half-century-old slight, Major League Baseball announced yesterday that it now considered the Negro Leagues of 1920–48 to be major leagues. For baseball fans, the announcement amounts to more than historical revision. It also requires a “wholesale recalibration of [baseball’s] record book.”
“The ‘long overdue recognition,’ as MLB called it in a news release, will add the names of some 3,400 Negro Leaguers from seven distinct leagues in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, along with all their accumulated statistics, to its official records.”
“In effect, the move reverses the decision of MLB’s Special Baseball Records Committee—a five-person, all-White group commissioned in 1969 to codify the historical standards that define the major leagues—which bestowed big-league status on six leagues (including the Union Association, which played its only season in 1884) but never even considered including the Negro Leagues.”
“The change … is likely to upend segments of the sport’s cherished record book. [Willie] Mays, whose 3,283 career hits across a 22-year, Hall of Fame career rank 12th on the all-time list, could gain as many as 17 extra hits from the 1948 season, which he spent with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. … [Bob] Feller’s legendary Opening Day no-hitter in 1940—long considered the only one of its kind in the sport’s history—will share that designation with Leon Day of the Negro National League’s Newark Eagles, who no-hit the Philadelphia Stars on Opening Day in 1946.”
“The all-time MLB rankings for ‘rate’ statistics, such as batting average … could see a wholesale rewriting. [Josh] Gibson’s career batting average of .365, for example, would rank second only to [Ty] Cobb’s .366 and—along with Jud Wilson’s .359, [Oscar] Charleston’s .350, and Turkey Stearns’s .348—would push Babe Ruth’s .342 out of the top 10. Gibson’s career slugging percentage of .690 would edge out Ruth’s .6897 as the highest in major league history.”
—> Et Cetera
Premium French spirits company Moet Hennessy has acquired a stake in Vermont rye whiskey-maker WhistlePig. (NYT)
Though the monarch butterfly meets the criteria for protection on the endangered list, officials say they don’t have the resources to protect the species. (NYT)
HBO Max and Roku finally cut a deal. (CNN)
Here’s Rolling Stone’s list of the year’s 50 best songs, of which I have heard approximately four. (Rolling Stone)
As always, thanks to Beth Keena for her help. I’ll see you tomorrow.