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Tag: social and economic status

  • Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers | CNN Business

    Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Amazon is cutting 9,000 more jobs, CEO Andy Jassy announced Monday in a memo to staff.

    The latest cuts come after the company announced earlier this year that it was eliminating some 18,000 positions as part of a major cost-cutting bid at the e-commerce giant.

    Jassy said the fresh round of job cuts will take place in the coming weeks, and will mostly impact people working in the following divisions: Amazon Web Services, People Experience and Technology (PXT), advertising and Twitch.

    “This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term,” Jassy wrote in the memo.

    “Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” Jassy added. “The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”

    The latest layoffs at Amazon come amid a spate of job cuts in the technology industry in recent months, as the sector confronts a whiplash in pandemic-induced demand for digital goods and services and broader macroeconomic uncertainty.

    Amazon, like a number of other Big Tech companies, also rapidly grew its headcount during the early days of the pandemic. Jassy wrote on Monday that the hiring “made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole.” “However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” he added.

    Just last week, Facebook-parent Meta said it was laying off an additional 10,000 workers, on top of the 11,000 job cuts announced late last year.

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  • French workers may have to retire at 64 and many are in uproar. Here’s why | CNN

    French workers may have to retire at 64 and many are in uproar. Here’s why | CNN

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    Paris
    CNN
     — 

    Impromptu protests broke out in Paris and across several French cities Thursday evening following a move by the government to force through reforms of the pension system that will push up the retirement age from 62 to 64.

    While the proposed reforms of France’s cherished pensions system were already controversial, it was the manner in which the bill was approved – sidestepping a vote in the country’s lower house, where President Emmanuel Macron’s party crucially lacks an outright majority – that arguably sparked the most anger.

    And that fury is widespread in France.

    Figures from pollster IFOP show that 83% of young adults (18-24) and 78% of those aged over 35 found the government’s manner of passing the bill “unjustified.” Even among pro-Macron voters – those who voted for him in the first round of last year’s presidential election, before a runoff with his far-right adversary – a majority of 58% disagreed with how the law was passed, regardless of their thoughts about the reforms.

    Macron made social reforms, especially of the pensions system, a flagship policy of his 2022 re-election and it’s a subject he has championed for much of his time in office. However, Thursday’s move has so inflamed opposition across the political spectrum, that some are questioning the wisdom of his hunger for reforms.

    Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne conceded in an interview Thursday night with TF1 that the government initially aimed to avoid using Article 49.3 of the constitution to crowbar the reforms past the National Assembly. The “collective decision” to do so was taken at a meeting with the president, ministers and allied lawmakers mid-Thursday, she said.

    For Macron’s cabinet, the simple answer to the government’s commitment to reforms is money. The current system – relying on the working population to pay for a growing age group of retirees – is no longer fit for purpose, the government says.

    Labor minister Olivier Dussopt said that without immediate action the pensions deficit will reach more than $13 billion annually by 2027. Referencing opponents of the reforms, Dussopt told CNN affiliate BFMTV: “Do they imagine that if we pause the reforms, we will pause the deficit?”

    When the proposal was unveiled in January, the government said the reforms would balance the deficit in 2030, with a multi-billion dollar surplus to pay for measures allowing those in physically demanding jobs to retire early.

    For Budget Minister Gabriel Attal, the calculus is clear. “If we don’t do [the reforms] today, we will have to do much more brutal measures in the future,” he said Friday in an interview with broadcaster France Inter.

    “No pensions reform has made the French happy,” Pascal Perrineau, political scientist at Sciences Po university, told CNN on Friday.

    “Each time there is opposition from public opinion, then little by little the project passes and basically, public opinion is resigned to it,” he said, adding that the government’s failure was in its inability to sell the project to French people.

    They’re not the first to fall at that hurdle. Pensions reform has long been a thorny issue in France. In 1995, weeks-long mass protests forced the government of the day to abandon plans to reform public sector pensions. In 2010, millions took to the streets to oppose raising the retirement age by two years to 62 and in 2014 further reforms were met with wide protests.

    An anti-pension reform demonstrator writes

    For many in France, the pensions system, as with social support more generally, is viewed as the bedrock of the state’s responsibilities and relationship with its citizens.

    The post-World War II social system enshrined rights to a state-funded pension and healthcare, which have been jealously guarded since, in a country where the state has long played a proactive role in ensuring a certain standard of living.

    France has one of the lowest retirement ages in the industrialized world, spending more than most other countries on pensions at nearly 14% of economic output, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

    But as social discontent mounts over the surging cost of living, protesters at several strikes have repeated a common mantra to CNN: They are taxed heavily and want to preserve a right to a dignified old age.

    Macron is still early in his second term, having been re-elected in 2022, and still has four years to serve as the country’s leader. Despite any popular anger, his position is safe for now.

    However, Thursday’s use of Article 49.3 only reinforces past criticisms that he is out of touch with popular feeling and ambivalent to the will of the French public.

    Politicians to the far left and far right of Macron’s center-right party were quick to jump on his government’s move to skirt a parliamentary vote.

    “After the slap that the Prime Minister just gave the French people, by imposing a reform which they do not want, I think that Elisabeth Borne should go,” tweeted far-right politician Marine Le Pen on Thursday.

    Members of Parliament of left-wing coalition NUPES (New People's Ecologic and Social Union) hold placards as French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne addresses deputies to confirm the force through of the pension law without a parliament vote on Thursday.

    The leader of France’s far-left, Jean-Luc Melenchon was also quick to hammer the government, blasting the reforms as having “no parliamentary legitimacy” and calling for nationwide spontaneous strike action.

    For sure, popular anger over pension reforms will only complicate Macron’s intentions to introduce further reforms of the education and health sector – projects that were frozen by the Covid-19 pandemic – political scientist Perrineau told CNN.

    The current controversy could ultimately force Macron to negotiate more on future reforms, Perrineau warns – though he notes the French President is not known for compromise.

    His tendency to be “a little imperious, a little impatient” can make political negotiations harder, Perrineau said.

    That, he adds, is “perhaps the limit of Macronism.”

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  • This CNN Hero paid tribute to her late father by transforming a library into a center for feeding, teaching, and nurturing her community | CNN

    This CNN Hero paid tribute to her late father by transforming a library into a center for feeding, teaching, and nurturing her community | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    During Guatemala’s violent, decades-long civil war, an estimated 200,000 people were killed. Among them was Brenda Lemus’s father, Bernardo Lemus Mendoza, a prominent academic and intellectual who spoke out against the government.

    “There were many people who were fighting for their rights, who were being repressed,” Brenda Lemus said. “My father (fought for) … their right to an education and access to work. He was persecuted, he was exiled from the country many times, and he was ultimately assassinated.”

    Lemus’s father grew up in poverty in the small rural town of Purulhá, several hours outside of Guatemala City. Despite the odds, she said he managed to graduate school and eventually become the financial director at the San Carlos de Guatemala University.

    During the peace process, the Guatemalan government wanted to dignify the memory of those killed by the state. To commemorate Bernardo and his love of literature, the government donated 180 books to his family to start a library in his hometown. In 2011, the Bernardo Lemus Mendoza Library opened in Purulhá.

    Lemus relocated her family there and dedicated herself to getting the library off the ground. Today, it serves as a beacon of hope and a center of learning for young people living in extreme poverty.

    From the start, Lemus saw how the community was struggling in many ways.

    “The community’s youth had a lot of needs, especially in education,” Lemus said. “But all the books that were given to us … were about the armed conflict. None of them were for kids or young people, and there were no schoolbooks at all.”

    Children would arrive at the library looking for books so they could attend school and do their homework. Many families couldn’t afford school supplies. So, Lemus got schools to agree to donate books, and she started giving them to children in the community.

    She also saw that students needed notebooks for class. Some were writing on crumpled, old, torn pieces of paper.

    “It made me think about when I was younger, going to school and hiding my notebooks because I didn’t want to do my homework. I had everything. And yet here were a bunch of kids who had nothing, holding on to a rotten piece of paper to be able to take notes,” Lemus said. “That filled me with compassion for these kids. I wanted to help them as much as I could.”

    Realizing that young people in Purulhá were growing up under similar conditions as her father had, Lemus wanted not only to address their needs but to help them break the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

    In 2012, she co-founded Yo’o Guatemala, a nonprofit whose name means “together we go.”

    She began providing after-school programming and noticed many students had trouble focusing.

    “I had to repeat the subjects often until one of the kids said to me, ‘Please, don’t repeat it to me again. I just can’t concentrate because I’m so hungry,’” Lemus said. “We realized that many of our kids were malnourished, some chronically, and it was impossible for them to focus on anything else.”

    Her organization started a nutrition program for more than 40 families suffering from chronic malnutrition and has since expanded, providing extensive literacy, health, and community building programs.

    “My goal with all of this is to make sure the kids in this community get a proper education, eat well, and get ahead with the same opportunities as if they were my own kids or yours,” Lemus said. “We are dignifying the memory of my father, and we are dignifying the lives of the children of Purulha.”

    CNN spoke with Lemus about her efforts. Below is an edited and translated version of their conversation.

    CNN: The assistance you provide is constantly evolving, depending on the community’s needs. How are you helping girls to access education?

    Brenda Lemus: In Purulhá, girls stop studying very early, get pregnant, get married, and the cycle repeats itself. It’s a cycle of poverty that seems endless; it’s like a spiral that takes them to the bottom. We want to break (that) through education.

    Parents usually reject sending their daughters to school because they help mom at home. The girls don’t perform the same as boys in school because it’s different: The boy goes to school, and when he leaves, he goes to play soccer. The girl goes to school, and comes home to cook, take care of siblings, wash clothes. And so she drops out of school because she doesn’t do her homework. Of course she doesn’t do her homework because she has too much of a burden at home. The girls have the entire burden, and it isn’t easy.

    We currently have 10 girls in our residency. The girls come on Mondays, leaving on Fridays. They spend weekends at home. We are in charge of everything with respect to them during that time. And we give the opportunity to the girls who are much more vulnerable when it comes to dropping out of school. I’m convinced that by giving the girls an integral educational opportunity, with quality, we can break the cycle of poverty.

    CNN: What is your focus with the “Mi Nino Bonito” program?

    Lemus: We began a daycare program for children. We receive them very early because most of their mothers work in the local market. We give them a warm breakfast. We give them all the stimulation that they should have according to their age, but we teach the children to be independent.

    They are usually the youngest in their house and the last in the food chain, so they have to fight for a piece of bread. We teach them to wash their dishes, to clean up if they spilled. We give them pediatric check-ups with vitamins, taking care that they don’t get sick. They become very independent children who then excel.

    CNN: How does your eco-brick program work and what’s its significance?

    Lemus: The eco-brick program has a special magic because it is the education of the children, by the children, through garbage. Children whose parents are unable to buy them school supplies have the opportunity to recycle materials such as non-recyclable aluminum or single-use plastics, encapsulating them in PET bottles forever.

    The children collect garbage, clean the environment, recycle, and they receive school supplies as the tradeoff – for 10 eco-bricks, they have their full list of school supplies. If they deliver five more bricks, they get to take a brand-new backpack. With (the eco-bricks), schools are built in other parts of Guatemala by volunteers who come from the United States.

    The value and dignity of the hard work they do is instilled in all the children. They provide their community with cleanliness and sanitation through recycling; this gives them dignity. The children come here in hopes of being able to finish their studies without dropping out. But they earn it with pure, hard work. This has allowed youth to have better opportunities for more dignified paid jobs.

    Want to get involved? Check out the Yo’o Guatemala website and see how to help

    To donate to Yo’o Guatemala via GoFundMe, click here

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  • US to pay $6.5 million in lost wages owed to Mexican migrant workers | CNN

    US to pay $6.5 million in lost wages owed to Mexican migrant workers | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Some 13,000 Mexican migrant workers are owed $6.5 million in unpaid wages, according to a tweet from the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which announced a joint effort with Mexico to locate and compensate the workers.

    “This program will return millions of dollars in back wages to Mexican nationals who participated in US temporary foreign worker programs,” tweeted Ken Salazar, the United States Ambassador to Mexico, on Tuesday.

    The Mexican ministry and the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs is launching the H-2A Workers’ Wages Recovery Program to ensure the workers can collect their compensation, Salazar added.

    Skilled foreign farm workers are the backbone of US agriculture and are often in the US on H-2A seasonal visas. It is unclear who these workers were employed by when they failed to receive their full wages, and what years they were employed.

    The money owed to these thousands of workers was recovered by the US Department of Labor after it failed to locate the individuals in order to deliver their checks, according to a press release from Mexico’s Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare.

    The partnership will attempt to locate the migrant workers who are believed to have “received less than the legally established salary from their employers in the United States,” according to a press release by Mexico’s Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare.

    The US is expected to send Mexico a list with names of workers who are “owed wages and overtime.” Mexico will then look up the workers in government databases and inform them of their checks.

    “Together, we watch over labor rights,” tweeted Luisa Alcalde, Mexico’s Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, on Tuesday.

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  • China’s economic recovery is on track. But youth unemployment is getting worse | CNN Business

    China’s economic recovery is on track. But youth unemployment is getting worse | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China’s economic recovery appears to be on track as it gradually emerges from three years of its strict zero-Covid policy. But rising youth unemployment underscores the tough challenges ahead for the new government to achieve its economic targets and maintain social stability.

    The National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday released key economic indicators for January and February combined, a usual practice to avoid any distortion by the long Lunar New Year holiday, which usually falls on different dates every year.

    Industrial production rose by 2.4%, accelerating from December’s 1.3% growth. Retail sales increased 3.5%, reversing a 1.8% decline in the previous month. The growth figures are in line with market expectations.

    Investment in fixed assets, such as real estate and infrastructure, jumped 5.5%, beating estimates. In particular, capital spending on electricity and heating facilities and railways soared around 20%.

    “The economic data released today confirmed the recovery in China was well on track,” said Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.

    Recent PMI figures had indicated a strong recovery in China’s economic activity, with February’s factory output from large, state-owned enterprises hitting the highest level in more than a decade.

    “The fading of virus disruptions led to a rapid improvement in economic conditions at the start of the year,” analysts from Capital Economics wrote.

    But there are some weak spots in Wednesday’s data.

    Youth unemployment surged. The jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds hit 18.1% in the January-to-February period, compared to 16.7% in December. The overall unemployment rate also increased to 5.6%.

    The real estate sector remains mired in a deep slump.

    Property investment fell 5.7% from a year ago in the first two months of this year, although it was an improvement from the 12.2% drop seen in December. Property sales by floor area contracted 3.6%.

    At the just-concluded session of the National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, the government set a cautious growth plan for this year, with a GDP target of around 5% and a job creation target of 12 million.

    But Li Qiang, the new premier who took office on Saturday, admitted it’s “not an easy task” to achieve the stated goals.

    At his first news conference on Monday, Li highlighted the challenge to create enough jobs.

    “This year’s college graduates are expected to reach 11.58 million people. From the perspective of employment, there will be certain pressure,” he said. “We will further expand employment channels and help young people.”

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  • Facebook-parent Meta plans to lay off another 10,000 employees | CNN Business

    Facebook-parent Meta plans to lay off another 10,000 employees | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Facebook-parent Meta plans to lay off another 10,000 workers, marking the second round of significant job cuts announced by the tech giant in four months.

    The latest layoffs, announced on Tuesday, come after Meta said in November that it was eliminating approximately 13% of its workforce, or 11,000 jobs, in the single largest round of cuts in the company’s history.

    In a Facebook post Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the job cuts will take place “over the next couple of months.”

    “We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May,” he wrote. In a “small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes.”

    “Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired,” Zuckerberg said.

    As of September 2022, Meta reported a headcount of 87,314, per a securities filings. With 11,000 job cuts announced in November and the 10,000 announced Tuesday, that would bring Meta’s headcount down to around 66,000.

    Meta is far from the only Big Tech company to undergo layoffs amid higher inflation, recession fears and a whiplash in pandemic-induced demand. In the first months of this year, Amazon, Google-parent Alphabet and Microsoft have all confirmed major job cuts impacting tens of thousands of tech workers.

    Shares of Meta rose more than 4% in early trading Tuesday following the announcement.

    When the first round of job cuts was announced in November, Zuckerberg blamed himself at the time for the company’s over-hiring earlier in the pandemic. Meta  nearly doubled its headcount between March 2020 and September of last year, as the Covid-19 crisis led to a surge in demand for digital services.

    But the situation changed radically for the social media giant and other tech companies last year as pandemic restrictions eased and people returned to their offline lives. Meta’s core business was also hit by privacy changes implemented by Apple and advertisers tightening budgets amid recession fears.

    In its most-recent quarterly earnings report, Meta posted a sharp drop in profits and reported its third straight quarterly decline in revenue. But during the earnings call, Zuckerberg promised investors that 2023 would be the “year of efficiency” for the company, following years of heavy investment in growth and a more immersive version of the internet called the metaverse.

    On that call, Zuckerberg also suggested that more job cuts could be coming.

    “We closed last year with some difficult layoffs and restructuring some teams. When we did this, I said clearly that this was the beginning of our focus on efficiency and not the end,” Zuckerberg said during the earnings call in early February. He added that the company would be focused on “flattening” its org structure and “removing some layers of middle management to make decisions faster.”

    “As part of this, we’re going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing or may no longer be as crucial, but my main focus is on increasing the efficiency of how we execute our top priorities,” Zuckerberg said.

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  • From Wile E. Coyote to edibles: Recession forecasts are getting weird | CNN Business

    From Wile E. Coyote to edibles: Recession forecasts are getting weird | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Understanding the economy is a complicated task, and even the experts are struggling to answer seemingly simple questions like “Are we on the brink of a recession?” or “Why isn’t inflation falling faster?”

    Many have resorted to the use of metaphor to convey the current complexity of the economy.

    It’s a communications tactic that some Federal Reserve officials have long favored. In the early 1980s, Nancy Teeters, the first woman appointed to the Federal Reserve Board, came up with an apt metaphor to explain why she disagreed with steep rate hikes implemented by then-Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

    Her colleagues were “pulling the financial fabric of this country so tight that it’s going to rip,” she said. “Once you tear a piece of fabric, it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to put it back together again,” she added, before remarking that “none of these guys has ever sewn anything in his life.”

    These days, economists and analysts are turning to increasingly outlandish metaphors to help translate their thoughts.

    Here are some of the most interesting descriptors used recently and what they mean:

    Wile E. Coyote

    If you think back to Saturday morning cartoons, you may remember the never-ending, and mostly futile, chase between Wile E. Coyote and his nemesis, Road Runner. That pursuit often ended with Wile E. running off a cliff and into mid-air.

    The toons were fun sources of entertainment in our salad years, but former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says they now double as a case study for the Fed and the economy.

    “The [Federal Reserve’s] process of bringing down inflation will bring on a recession at some stage, as it almost always has in the past,” Summers told CNN last week.

    And for the US economy, it could likely mean a “Wile E. Coyote moment,” Summers said — if we run off the cliff, gravity will eventually win out.

    “The economy could hit an air pocket in a few months,” he said.

    Antibiotics

    When describing the state of the economy, Summers doesn’t just rely on Looney Tunes. He also borrows from the medical community.

    While describing why the Fed can’t end its rate hike regimen when inflation shows signs of showing, Summers has compared higher interest rates to medicine for a country sick with high inflation. The entire dose must be taken for the treatment to fully work, he says.

    “We’ve all had the experience of taking a course of drugs and giving up, stopping the drugs, before the course was exhausted, simply because we felt better. And then, whatever infection we had came back and it was harder to fight the second time,” Summers told Boston’s NPR news station WBUR in February.

    For what it’s worth, Before the Bell is also guilty of using this one.

    Fog report

    We may be driving in the fog, landing a plane in the fog or even just walking in it.

    What’s important in this oft-used scenario is that it’s hard to see and we’re doing something that typically requires clear visibility.

    Clients “facing the fog of uncertainty in financial markets, economic growth and geopolitics,” should “avoid unnecessary lane changes,” and “allow extra time to reach your destination,” advised Goldman Sachs analysts earlier this year.

    It’s essentially a fancy way of saying that no one really knows what’s going on in this economy. Instead of attempting to find a way out of the chaos, investors should slow down, stay the course and wait for recovery.

    Edibles

    Late last year, investment analyst Peter Boockvar used a semi-illicit metaphor to explain why he thought the Fed might be over-tightening the economy into recession. He compared the Fed to an inexperienced consumer of weed gummies, which can take a long time to kick in.

    During that waiting period, an eager consumer may think the drugs aren’t working and eat more before the effects of the first dose even set in. They then inevitably find themselves way too stoned and feeling not-so-great.

    Boockvar was careful to note that he himself does not indulge in this practice, by the way.

    Storm chasing

    JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon should receive an honorary degree in meteorology for his recessionary weather predictions.

    The Big Bank exec has repeatedly referred to economic recession as a storm gathering on the horizon — occasionally he’ll update the public on how far away and how bad that storm is.

    Last summer Dimon spooked markets when he compared a possible upcoming recession to a “hurricane.” In November, he downgraded it to a “storm.”

    By January, his forecast was simply “storm clouds,” adding that he probably should never have used the term “hurricane.”

    Polyurethane

    Rick Rieder, BlackRock’s Chief Investment Officer of Global Fixed Income, has likened the economy to a bendable piece of plastic. Much like the economy, he wrote, polyurethane, “displays flexibility and adaptability, but also durability and strength.”

    He added that “the material’s ability to be stretched, bent, stressed and flexed without breaking, while in fact returning to its original condition, is what makes it so chemically unique. In recent years the US economy has displayed a remarkable resilience to stresses and an extraordinary ability to adapt to changing conditions.”

    Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell about American job losses being potential casualties of the central bank’s battle against high inflation.

    Warren, a frequent critic of the Fed’s leader, noted that an additional 2 million people would have to lose their jobs if the unemployment rate rises from its current 3.6% rate to reach the Fed’s projections of 4.6% by the end of the year.

    “If you could speak directly to the two million hardworking people who have decent jobs today, who you’re planning to get fired over the next year, what would you say to them?” Warren asked.

    Powell argued that all Americans, not just two million, are suffering under high inflation.

    “Will working people be better off if we just walk away from our jobs and inflation remains 5% or 6%?” Powell replied.

    Warren cautioned Powell that he was “gambling with people’s lives.”

    The discussion was part of a larger cost-benefit conversation that keeps popping up around the jobs market: Which is worse — widespread job loss or elevated inflation?

    CNN spoke with two top economic analysts with different perspectives to gain a deeper understanding of the debate.

    Below is our interview with Johns Hopkins economist Laurence Ball.

    Yesterday we published our interview with Roosevelt Institute director Michael Konczal, you can read that here.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Before the Bell: Is it necessary to increase the unemployment rate to successfully fight inflation?

    Laurence Ball: There’s a trade off between inflation and unemployment. When the economy is very strong and unemployment is pushed down, inflation tends to be higher. Right now there are almost two job openings per unemployed worker, the supply of workers looking for jobs and the demand for firms to hire is out of whack. That’s leading to faster wage increases, which sounds good except that gets passed through to faster price increases and more inflation. So somehow the labor market has to be brought back towards a normal balance of workers and jobs and that means slowing down the economy, and that probably means raising unemployment.

    Can you explain the cost-benefit analysis of two million jobs lost to get down to 2% inflation?

    If we assume we have to get inflation down to 2%, then it’s just an unhappy fact of life that that’s going to require higher unemployment. But a lot of people, including me, think that if the Fed gets it down to 4% or 3%, that’s the time to declare victory or say, ‘close enough for government work.’

    It gets more and more expensive in terms of how much unemployment it costs to go from 3% to 2% inflation. Those last few points will have disproportionately large costs, and it’s very dubious if that’s really worth it.

    Now, the Fed has the political problem that they’ve been insisting on a 2% target rate for years. If they say right at this moment that 3% or 4% is okay that would be seen as surrendering or moving the goalposts. I think a likely outcome is that inflation gets down to 3% or 4% and the Fed continues to say their target is a 2% inflation rate but never does what has to be done to get it there.

    If you examine Fed history you see that 5% appears to be a magic number. When inflation is above 5% it becomes this big political issue. When it goes below 5% it disappears from the headlines.

    What do you think is important for our readers to know about this back-and-forth between Powell and Warren?

    Behind all of this, in a market economy there’s sort of a basic glitch. We have this thing called unemployment, we sort of chronically have not enough jobs for everybody and that’s a big problem. The problem can be reduced somewhat in the short run if you get the economy going very fast. But then that leads to inflation. Accepting that unemployment has to go back up is just recognizing that there’s this glitch in the market economy or capitalism. It’s not clear how we can get around that.

    CNN Business’ David Goldman reports: 

    In an extraordinary action to restore confidence in America’s banking system, the Biden administration on Sunday guaranteed that customers of the failed Silicon Valley Bank will have access to all their money starting Monday.

    In a related action, the government shut down Signature Bank, a regional bank that was teetering on the brink of collapse in recent days. Signature’s customers will receive a similar deal, ensuring that even uninsured deposits will be returned to them Monday.

    SVB collapse: live updates

    In a joint statement Sunday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg said the FDIC will make SVB and Signature’s customers whole. By guaranteeing all deposits — even the uninsured money that customers kept with the failed banks — the government aimed to prevent more bank runs and to help companies that deposited large sums with the banks to continue to make payroll and fund their operations.

    The Fed will also make additional funding available for eligible financial institutions to prevent runs on similar banks in the future.

    Wall Street investors were relieved that the government intervened as stock futures rebounded on Sunday evening, although the rally is fading Monday morning. Markets had tumbled more than 3% Thursday and Friday as investors feared more bank failures and systemic risk for the tech sector.

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  • Parisian streets littered with trash after wave of strikes | CNN

    Parisian streets littered with trash after wave of strikes | CNN

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    Paris
    CNN
     — 

    The City of Lights has a garbage problem.

    Massive strikes in Paris against pension reform this week are affecting trash pickup services in the French capital, with piles of waste sitting on many of the city’s normally picturesque streets, including those just steps from monuments like the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe.

    As of Saturday, about 4,400 tonnes of trash were awaiting collection, a spokeswoman for the Paris mayor’s office said. The spokeswoman said that the problem is a blockage at trash incinerators caused by the strikes. Garbage trucks have thus been unable to pick up waste in much of the city because they have nowhere to put it.

    Not all neighborhoods have been equally affected. The municipal government is in charge of garbage collection in half of Paris’ 20 arrondissements. Private contractors are responsible for the other 10.

    Municipal services like trash collection in Paris have been affected since Tuesday, when strikes saw flights and trains canceled and delayed; oil refiners blockaded; schools shuttered; and left thousands without electricity. The French capital was the most affected, with nearly 60% of its primary school teachers walking out and the local metro forced to cut service to all but the busiest times.

    Massive protests have been staged regularly throughout France since January 19, with more than a million people coming out multiple to voice their opposition to the government’s plan to raise the official retirement age for most workers as part of reforms to the government’s pension system, one of Europe’s most generous.

    As of Saturday, about 4,400 metric tones of trash were awaiting collection on the streets of Paris, a spokeswoman for the mayor's office said.

    President Emmanuel Macron’s government says the changes are necessary to make the system financially stable.

    The trash buildup in Paris has been sparked health concerns among Parisians and local politicians. The mayor of the 17th arrondissement, Geoffroy Boulard, said in an interview with CNN affiliate BFMTV that he has asked Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to hire a private service provider to intervene.

    “We can’t wait,” he said. “This is a matter of public health.”

    Boulard said he’s also worried about the proliferation of rats and rodents as well as Paris’ image.

    Another local mayor, Jean-Pierre Lecoq of the 6th arrondissement, asked Hidalgo to intervene in an open letter he published on Twitter.

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  • Biden and Trump agree on one big thing | CNN Politics

    Biden and Trump agree on one big thing | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Joe Biden and Donald Trump are bizarrely on the same page on the top issue so far in the 2024 White House race, as they aim huge, possibly campaign-defining swings at Republicans who they claim will shred retirement benefits.

    The current and former presidents – bitter rivals who agree on little else – are both forcing their foes into political retreats and attempts to whitewash past support for changes that could cut Medicare and Social Security payouts.

    Their strategy is reinforcing a truism of presidential election campaigns that candidates who even entertain the notion of “reforming” these cherished entitlement programs for seniors are playing with fire.

    With typical bluntness, Trump has blasted his potential top rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as a “wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy” after he voted, as a member of the US House, for non-binding resolutions that would have raised the age at which most seniors can collect their benefits to 70. As a 2012 congressional candidate, he supported privatizing Social Security, CNN’s KFile has reported. But trying to ease his vulnerability on the issue, DeSantis insisted in a Fox News interview last week: “We’re not going to mess with Social Security.”

    Despite his own proposed cuts to these programs as president, Trump has kept up the attacks. “We’re not going back to people that want to destroy our great Social Security system – even some in our own party; I wonder who that might be – who want to raise the minimum age of Social Security to 70, 75 or even 80 in some cases, and who are out to cut Medicare to a level that will be unrecognizable,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last Saturday.

    A few days later, another Republican hopeful gave both Biden and Trump a new opening to exploit.

    Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was forced to make clear Thursday that her striking and unspecific call the day before for raising the retirement age was only supposed to refer to Americans currently in their 20s, who are in effect a half century away from drawing their pensions. But her clarification won’t protect the former ambassador to the United Nations from Trump, who is splitting his party down the middle, yet again, by pouncing on competitors who have voiced traditional conservative orthodoxy on cutting or changing the programs. Biden is sure to also highlight Haley’s remarks as he claims only he can thwart a secret GOP agenda to kill off the vital programs.

    “I guarantee you, I will protect Social Security and Medicare without any change. Guaranteed,” the president vowed in Philadelphia on Thursday. “I won’t allow it to be gutted or eliminated as MAGA Republicans have threatened to do.”

    Biden browbeat Republicans during his “State of the Union” address last month to confirm on camera that they support shoring up Social Security and Medicare. And he’s anchoring his likely reelection bid on the most forceful campaign by a Democratic candidate in years on the issue. Some of his attacks are fair; others take statements by GOP leaders out of context. But they’re still potent – since both he and Trump know that when conservatives are explaining that they don’t plan to cut Medicare or retirement benefits, they are usually trying to dig out of a losing position.

    And Biden has public opinion on his side. A Fox News poll last month, for instance, showed that Democrats are preferred over Republicans to better handle Medicare (by 23 points) and Social Security (by 16 points). No wonder Biden seems to relish this particular political battlefield.

    The odd confluence of approaches – from a former president who sought to overturn an election and a successor who sees his administration as vital to saving democracy – says so much about each man’s political instincts, backgrounds and campaign strategy. It is also reflects the shifting character of the Republican Party, which Trump has torn from its corporate, ideologically pure conservative roots to build a new coalition that includes working class voters, often in the Midwest, that Biden is battling hard to win back.

    In one sense, possibly the most thorny domestic issue of the years to come should, of course, have a place in a presidential campaign. But when candidates use it to inflame their political bases, it only makes it harder to address in government. This is especially the case with entitlements since they cut into the DNA of each party and have defined the dividing lines between them for decades – at least until Trump came along and took over the GOP.

    Ever since the New Deal reforms of Franklin Roosevelt, who was president from 1933 to 1945, Democrats – through presidents Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama and Biden, especially – have sought to use government power to secure the living standards and health care of less well-off and elderly Americans. Republicans, from 1980s President Ronald Reagan onwards, have increasingly sought to find ways to shift the burden of some of this care to the private sector and to reduce or eliminate government’s role in an attempt to whittle away the New Deal reforms of FDR and the Great Society program of LBJ, who was president in the 1960s. They have often paid a heavy price. Republican President George W. Bush’s failed attempt to partially privatize Social Security contributed to a disastrous second term. And Trump still rails against former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who promoted a similar plan.

    While raising the alarm about threats to social programs for seniors might be a shrewd political tactic – especially in mobilizing older voters more likely to show up at the polls – it usually does nothing to address the program’s increasingly dire solvency challenges.

    The latest Congressional Budget Office projection found that Social Security’s retirement trust fund could be exhausted by 2032. At that point, with fewer workers paying into the program and with a rapidly aging population, benefits could be cut by at least 20%, CNN’s Tami Luhby reported. Medicare is even more precarious since its hospital insurance trust fund, known as Part A, will only be able to fully pay scheduled benefits until 2028, its trustees said in their most recent forecast.

    Biden, who released a new budget on Thursday that will help shape the message of his likely reelection bid, has proposed a plan to raise taxes on people earning more than $400,000 a year to shore up the program and would expand the range of drugs for which its managers can negotiate prices. He says the move would keep Medicare solvent until 2050 and would involve no cuts in benefits. The president also wants to target those who earn more than $400,000 with increasing payroll taxes to secure Social Security for the future. There is an infinitesimal chance, however, that the Republican-led House will agree to tax increases, so Biden’s plan represents more a device to deliver a political message than a viable plan.

    Despite warning his fellow Republicans to avoid cutting these programs, it’s unclear how Trump would save them if he wins back the White House – and doing nothing isn’t an option. And while other Republicans insist they don’t want to cut benefits or raise taxes, it’s unclear how they can square the circle.

    Florida Sen. Rick Scott has now excluded Social Security and Medicare from his proposal for all spending programs to be reviewed every five years. His original plan, released when he was leading the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, sparked the ire of his Republican Senate colleagues, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who quickly identified it as a political liability. That hasn’t stopped Biden from repeatedly claiming that it represents Republican policy.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, meanwhile, said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “completely off the table” in what he insists must be negotiations with Biden over raising the government’s borrowing limit later this year. But that position has put him in a bind because it means that in order for the GOP to honor their pledge to slash spending, they will probably have to take aim at other social programs that could also prove unpopular with voters.

    America is not the only country staring down a crisis.

    French President Emmanuel Macron sparked nationwide strikes and protests with his plan to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62. Even China’s Communist Party is struggling as a falling birthrate threatens to inflict severe costs on the world’s most dynamic emerging economy.

    Back in the US, whoever wins the 2024 elections for the White House and Congress, there seems no easily identifiable solution to safeguard these vital programs on which millions of Americans depend. And time is running out.

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  • Rain rates in California during newest storm may reach 1 inch per hour | CNN

    Rain rates in California during newest storm may reach 1 inch per hour | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Millions of Californians already hammered by ferocious snowfall were hit Thursday by a new storm, with torrential rain threatening to cause dangerous flooding and the Weather Prediction Center increasing its excessive rainfall outlook for parts of the state to a level 4 of 4.

    “If you have feet of snow on your roof, all of a sudden that’s going to get very, very heavy. That snow is going to absorb the rainfall,” CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers warned Thursday.

    “And then in the higher elevations, it will wash away some of that snowfall. So, rain on snow will begin to fill up parts of the San Joaquin Valley.”

    About 16.7 million people are under flood watches in California and slices of Nevada. Hourly rainfall rates will steadily increase in intensity across California from Thursday overnight through Friday morning, potentially reaching 1 inch per hour.

    The level 4 excessive rainfall warning is targeted to two sections in central California – the coast from Salinas southward to San Luis Obispo and areas in the foothills of the Sierras near Fresno – Thursday overnight into Friday. The last time the Bay Area and Central Coast were in “high risk” was in 2010, the National Weather Service office in San Francisco said.

    Much of the state is under some risk of excessive rainfall Thursday and Friday.

    “An atmospheric river will bring anomalous moisture to California Thursday and Friday. The combination of heavy precipitation and rapid snow melt below 5,000 feet will result in flooding,” the prediction center said Wednesday, adding that “numerous” floods are likely for millions.

    The most vulnerable areas for flooding from rain and snowmelt are creeks and streams in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the prediction center said.

    Higher elevations will see heavy, wet snow. “This will lead to difficult travel, and combined with an already deep snowpack, may lead to increasing impacts from the depth and weight of the snow,” the prediction center said.

    The bleak forecast spurred officials across central and Northern California to urge residents to prepare, with residents in one area advised to stock up on essentials for two weeks. Others were asked to use sandbags to protect their properties and clear their waterways to lessen any flooding impacts.

    “We are asking people to watch their news, stay informed, have a full tank of gas in case they need to evacuate, get snow off of their roof if they can, if it’s safe,” Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis told CNN on Thursday. “And just be very vigilant and prepared, because we are in the era of extreme weather, and that’s what we are seeing this week.”

    Here’s what the storm could bring:

    • Heavy rainfall: The National Weather Service in San Francisco forecasts rainfall totals through Sunday morning will be from 1.5-3 inches for most urban areas with 3-6 inches in some hilly areas. As many as 8 inches could fall on the Santa Cruz Mountains and locally up to 12 inches over some peaks and higher terrain of the Santa Lucia Mountains. The National Weather Service in Los Angeles is forecasting 2-4 inches across Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, with some areas in the latter receiving as many as 10 inches through late Friday night. The Weather Prediction Center said: “The abnormally warm and wet conditions moving in are expected to cause rapid snowmelt.”

    • Ferocious winds: More than 15 million people across central and Northern California, northern Nevada and southwestern Idaho are under high wind alerts. Wind gusts could reach up to 55 mph across lower elevations and up to 70 mph across peaks and mountains. Strong winds could knock down power lines and trees – exacerbating thousands of existing power outages from previous storms that dumped heavy snow, particularly in higher elevations.

    • More intense snow: Parts of the Sierra Nevada above 8,000 feet could get hit with 8 feet of snow. And some higher elevations across southern Oregon and the Rocky Mountains in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming could get pounded by 2 feet of snowfall between Thursday and Friday.

    Already, 34 of California’s 58 counties are under a state of emergency issued by the governor’s office due to previous storms and this week’s severe weather. The state activated its flood operations center Thursday morning.

    The forecast also led some ski resorts to announce closings. Kirkwood Mountain Resort said it would not open Friday, as did the Northstar California resort and the Heavenly resort in South Lake Tahoe, on Nevada’s border with California.

    Meanwhile, the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center issued a backcountry avalanche warning for sections of Mono County, according to the National Weather Service in Reno, Nevada.

    Many of the areas preparing for Thursday’s storm have not had a chance to recover from the multiple rounds of fierce snow that buried some neighborhoods and made roads inaccessible as residents ran low on essential supplies.

    In hard-hit San Bernardino County, one of the recent storms claimed the life of a resident in a car crash, the sheriff’s department told CNN on Wednesday.

    video thumbnail california snowbank 81year-old

    Grandson reveals 81-year-old’s reaction after surviving in snowbank for a week

    As the storm hits central California, some urban flooding along with flooding from the smaller creeks and streams is likely. Eventually, more roads are expected to flood as the main rivers rise, said Katrina Hand, a meteorologist at the weather service’s Sacramento office.

    San Francisco officials urged small businesses to clear storm drains, stock up on inventory, use sandbags and ensure equipment is properly stored. They also suggested employers consider adjusting their work schedules for workers’ safety.

    In Merced, crews tried to clear storm drains and fortify creek banks ahead of the storm.

    City officials said flooding from previous, deadly rounds of atmospheric rivers that battered much of the state in January has made the city’s water ways unsafe.

    Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands of moisture in the atmosphere that carry warm air and water vapor from the tropics.

    “The city urges all residents to avoid these waterways and walking paths,” Merced officials said. “Because of ground saturation and erosion from prior storms, expect to see more debris in creek flows.”

    In San Luis Obispo, city officials on Wednesday said residents should be informed on flood insurance policies and be prepared to protect their homes. On Thursday, they issued an evacuation order for residents south of the Arroyo Grande Creek Levee.

    Evacuation warnings were also issued for residents in low-lying areas of Santa Cruz County and for people in Tulare County.

    In the Big Sur area, officials urged residents to have enough food and other essentials for at least two weeks. The Big Sur area, a roughly 90-mile stretch of California’s central coast, is one of the area’s renowned tourist attractions with rugged cliffs, mountains and hidden beaches along the Pacific Coast Highway.

    In Kern County, home to Bakersfield, fire officials urged residents to create emergency kits and to be aware of escape routes and safe areas to seek shelter if needed. Officials also encouraged the use of sandbags to protect properties.

    And in Sacramento, city officials said they intend to open overnight warming centers beginning Friday in preparation for the expected heavy rainfall and low temperatures.

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  • Not touching Social Security could lead to 20% benefit cut within a decade | CNN Politics

    Not touching Social Security could lead to 20% benefit cut within a decade | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden and House Republicans have promised not to touch Social Security in their battle over cutting spending to address the nation’s debt ceiling crisis.

    While that vow is intended to indicate support of the popular entitlement program, it could actually lead to financial disaster.

    Tens of millions of senior citizens and other recipients could see their benefits slashed by at least 20% within a decade. The latest Congressional Budget Office projection found that Social Security’s retirement trust fund would be exhausted by 2032.

    “There’s a sense in which doing nothing does not preserve Social Security but affects the benefits that are not able to be paid out,” CBO Director Phillip Swagel said at a Bipartisan Policy Center event last month.

    Social Security has long been on shaky financial ground. As the US population ages, there are fewer workers paying into the program and supporting the ballooning number of beneficiaries, who are also living longer. In all, nearly 66 million retired workers, their dependents and survivors, disabled workers and their dependents receive monthly payments.

    Forecasts on when Social Security’s retirement and disability trust funds may be depleted differ by a few years. Social Security’s trustees last year pegged the date at 2035 if Congress doesn’t act.

    However, the entitlement program is also one of the third rails of American politics, so elected officials are hesitant to suggest any changes that could lead to benefit cuts.

    “Pretending this isn’t a problem, that this isn’t current law, is dishonest,” said Gordon Gray, the director of fiscal policy at the right-leaning American Action Forum. “And it is a choice – a number of policymakers are making this choice. And it is a major financial risk to the retirement benefits of tens of millions of Americans.”

    The last time Congress enacted a major overhaul, in 1983, Social Security was only months away from being able to pay full benefits. At that time, Democratic lawmakers who controlled the House agreed with Senate Republicans and GOP President Ronald Reagan to increase payroll taxes and gradually raise the normal retirement age from 65 to 67, among other reforms.

    While Biden has promised to strengthen Social Security and defend it from any cuts by Republicans, he has yet to lay out his vision for protecting the program. Ahead of his full budget release this week, the president on Tuesday unveiled a plan to bolster a key Medicare trust fund – which could be depleted as soon as 2028 – by raising taxes on higher-income earners and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for even more drugs.

    There are several ways to put Social Security on more solid financial footing, though each has its opponents on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Lawmakers could raise the early retirement age, currently 62, or increase the normal retirement age again. They could hike the payroll tax rate, now 12.4% split between the employer and worker, or lift the cap on income subject to the levy, currently $160,200. Congress could also change the formula of the annual cost-of-living adjustment so it ramps up more slowly.

    However, it’s unlikely anything will be done in the near term, in part because of the current lack of bipartisanship in Washington, said Gary Engelhardt, economics professor at Syracuse University.

    “It’s only going to be more expensive, the longer you wait,” he said. “But Americans have a penchant for waiting to do things politically. So I just feel like nothing’s going to happen in the short run.”

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  • This is the dynamic that could decide the 2024 GOP race | CNN Politics

    This is the dynamic that could decide the 2024 GOP race | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The same fundamental dynamic that decided the 2016 Republican presidential primaries is already resurfacing as the 2024 contest takes shape.

    As in 2016, early polls of next year’s contest show the Republican electorate is again sharply dividing about former President Donald Trump along lines of education. In both state and national surveys measuring support for the next Republican nomination, Trump is consistently running much better among GOP voters without a college education than among those with a four-year or graduate college degree.

    Analysts have often described such an educational divide among primary voters as the wine track (centered on college-educated voters) and the beer track (revolving around those without degrees). Over the years, it’s been a much more consistent feature in Democratic than Republican presidential primaries. But the wine track/beer track divide emerged as the defining characteristic of the 2016 GOP race, when Trump’s extraordinary success at attracting Republicans without a college degree allowed him to overcome sustained resistance from the voters with one.

    Though the early 2024 polls have varied in whether they place Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the lead overall (with the latest round tilting mostly toward Trump), that same overriding pattern of educational polarization is appearing in virtually all of those surveys, a review of public and private polling data reveals.

    “Trump does seem to have a special ability to make this sort of populist appeal [to non-college voters] and also have a special ability to make college-educated conservatives start thinking about alternatives,” GOP pollster Chris Wilson said in an email. “I think we’ll continue to see a big education divide in his support in 2024.”

    The stark educational split in attitudes toward Trump frames the strategic challenge for his potential rivals in the 2024 race.

    On paper, none of the leading candidates other than DeSantis himself seems particularly well positioned to threaten Trump’s hold on the non-college Republicans who have long been the most receptive audience for his blustery and belligerent messaging. By contrast, most of the current and potential field – including former Governors Nikki Haley and Chris Christie; current Governors Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia; former Vice President Mike Pence; and Sen. Tim Scott – appear better suited to attract the white-collar Republicans who have always been the most skeptical of Trump.

    That could create a situation in which there’s too little competition to Trump for voters on the “beer track” and too many options splintering the voters resistant to him on the “wine track.” That was the dynamic that allowed Trump to capture the nomination in 2016 even though nearly two-thirds of college-educated Republicans opposed him through the primaries, according to exit polls, and he didn’t reach 50% of the total vote in any state until the race was essentially decided.

    While the political obstacles facing Trump look greater now than they were then, his best chance of winning in 2024 would likely come from consolidating the “beer track” to a greater extent than anyone else unifies the “wine track” – just as he did in 2016. In each of the past three contested GOP presidential primaries, the electorate have split almost exactly in half between voters with and without college degrees, analyses of the exit polls have found.

    “Right now, unless somebody cracks that code to get competitive with Trump there [among blue-collar Republican voters], it could fall into the old pattern which is the best scenario for him,” said long-time GOP strategist Mike Murphy, who directed the super PAC for Jeb Bush in the 2016 race.

    Jennifer Horn, the former GOP state chair in New Hampshire, added that while Trump’s ceiling is likely lower than in 2016, he could still win the nomination with only plurality support if no one unifies the majority more skeptical of him. “He isn’t going to need 50% to win,” cautioned Horn, a leading Republican critic of Trump.

    The wine track/beer track divide has been a consistent feature of Democratic presidential primary politics since 1968. Since then, a procession of brainy liberal candidates (think Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Gary Hart in 1984, Paul Tsongas in 1992 and Bill Bradley in 2000) have mobilized socially liberal college-educated voters against rivals who relied primarily on support from non-college educated White voters and racial minorities (Robert F. Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton and Al Gore in those same races). In the epic 2008 Democratic primary struggle, the basic divide persisted in slightly reconfigured form as Barack Obama attracted just enough white-collar White and Black voters to beat Hillary Clinton’s coalition of blue-collar Whites and Latinos. Joe Biden in 2020 was mostly a beer track candidate.

    Generally, over those years, the educational divide had not been as important in Republican primary races. More often GOP voters have divided among primary contenders along other lines, including ideology and religious affiliation. Both the 2008 and 2012 GOP races, for instance, followed similar lines in which a candidate who relied primarily on evangelical Christians and the most conservative voters (Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012) ultimately lost the nomination to another who attracted more support from non-evangelicals and a broader range of mainstream conservatives (John McCain and Mitt Romney).

    The conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, in his long-shot 1992 and 1996 bids for the GOP nomination, pioneered a blue-collar conservatism centered on unwavering cultural conservatism and an economic nationalism revolving around hostility to foreign trade and immigration. Huckabee and even more so Santorum advanced those themes, clearing a path that Trump would later follow – with a much harsher edge than either.

    In 2008, there was no educational divide in the GOP race: McCain won exactly the same 43% among Republican voters with and without a college degree, according to a new analysis of the exit poll results by CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta. But by 2012, Santorum’s blue-collar inroads meant Romney won the nomination with something closer to the Republican equivalent of a wine-track coalition: Of the 20 states that conducted exit polls that year, Romney won voters with at least a four-year college degree in 14, but he carried most non-college voters in just 10.

    Wilson, the GOP pollster, said that an educational divide also started appearing around that time in other GOP primaries for Senate, House and governor’s races more frequently though by no means universally.

    “This wasn’t always the driving demographic or ideological difference in primaries before Trump,” Wilson said. “Sometimes a candidate [who] was particularly strong in sounding populist themes would create this type of gap, but often a more traditional issue difference either on social issues or on issues like tax increase votes or support for Obamacare or something adjacent to it would be a stronger signal in a primary.”

    In 2016, Trump turned this traditional GOP axis on its head. He narrowed the big divisions that had decided the 2008 and 2012 races. He performed nearly as well among voters who identified as very conservative as he did among those who called themselves somewhat conservative or moderate, according to a cumulative analysis of all the 2016 exit polls conducted by ABC’s Gary Langer. Likewise, Trump performed only slightly better among voters who were not evangelicals than those who were, Langer’s analysis found.

    Instead, Trump split the GOP electorate along the wine-track/beer-track divide familiar from Democratic primary contests over the previous generation. According to Langer’s cumulation of the exit polls, Trump won fully 47% of GOP voters without a four-year college degree – an incredible performance in such a crowded field. Trump, in stark contrast, carried only 35% of Republican voters with at least a college-degree across the primaries overall. But the remainder of them dubious of him never settled on a single alternative. Sen. Ted Cruz, who proved Trump’s longest-lasting rival, captured only about one-fourth of the white-collar GOP voters, with the rest splitting primarily among Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Trump himself.

    In October 2015, I wrote that Trump’s emerging strength in the GOP nomination race could be explained in two sentences: “The blue-collar wing of the Republican primary electorate has consolidated around one candidate. The party’s white-collar wing remains fragmented.” That same basic equation held through the primaries and largely explained Trump’s victory. The question now is whether it could happen again.

    There’s no question that some of the same ingredients are present. Recent national polling by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, according to detailed results shared with CNN, shows that Republicans without a college degree are more likely than those with advanced education to agree with such core Trump themes as the belief that discrimination against Whites is now as big a problem as bias against minorities; that society is growing too soft and feminine; and that the growing number of immigrants weakens American society.

    The educational divide is also appearing more regularly in other GOP primaries for offices such as senator or governor, especially in races where one candidate is running on a Trump-style platform, Republican strategists say. It is also reappearing in polls measuring GOP voters’ early preferences for 2024. Recent national polls by Quinnipiac University, Fox News Channel and Republican pollsters including Whit Ayres, Echelon Insights and Wilson have all found Trump still running very strongly among Republicans without a college degree, usually capturing more than two-fifths of them, according to detailed results provided by the pollsters. But those same surveys all show Trump struggling with college-educated Republican voters, usually drawing even less support among them than he did in 2016, often just one-fourth or less.

    Wilson, for instance, said that in his national survey of prospective 2024 GOP voters, Trump’s support falls from about half of those with a high school degree or less, to about one-third of those with some college experience, one-fourth of those with a four-year degree and only one-fifth of those with a graduate education. In a recent national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, half of Republicans without a college degree said nominating Trump again would give the party the best chance of winning in 2024; two-thirds of the Republicans with degrees said the party would have a better chance with someone else.

    State polls are showing the same pattern. The latest University of New Hampshire survey showed Trump attracting about two-fifths of GOP voters there without a high school degree, about one-third of those with some college experience, and only one-sixth of those with a four-year or graduate degree. A recent LA Times/University of California (Berkeley) survey in that state produced very similar results. Trump also ran much better among Republicans without a degree than those with one in the latest OH Predictive Insights primary poll in Arizona, according to detailed results provided by the firm.

    Craig Robinson, the former GOP state party political director in Iowa, said he sees the same divergence in his daily interactions. “The people that I hang out with or have breakfast with on Saturday, it’s the more business, more educated guys, and they are like, ‘Hey, we just want to move on [from Trump],’” Robinson told me. “But if I go back home to rural Iowa, they are not like that. They are looking for the fighter; they are looking for the person that they think will stand up for them and that’s Trump by and large.”

    Republicans who believe Trump is more vulnerable than in 2016 largely point to one reason: the possibility that DeSantis could build a broader coalition of support than any of Trump’s rivals did then. In many of these early state and national polls, DeSantis leads Trump among college educated voters. And in the same polls, DeSantis is generally staying closer to Trump among non-college voters than anyone did in 2016. “DeSantis may be able to do some business there,” said Murphy, referring to the GOP’s blue-collar wing.

    When DeSantis spoke on Sunday at the Ronald Reagan presidential library about an hour northwest of Los Angeles, he smoothly displayed his potential to bridge the GOP’s educational divide. For the first part of his speech, he touted Florida’s economic success around small government principles – a message that could connect with white-collar GOP voters drawn to a Reaganite message of lower taxes and less regulation. In the speech’s later sections, DeSantis recounted his clashes with what he called “the woke mind virus” over everything from classroom instruction about race, gender and sexual orientation, to immigration and crime and his collisions with the Walt Disney Co. Those issues, which drew the biggest response from his audience, provide him a powerful calling card with GOP voters, especially those without degrees, drawn to Trump’s confrontational style, but worried he can’t win again.

    “There is a lot of energy in the party right now around these cultural issues,” said GOP consultant Alex Conant, who served as the communications director for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “If you watch Fox prime time, they are not talking about tax cuts and balancing budgets. They talk about the same cultural issues that DeSantis is putting at the core of his campaign.”

    The risk to DeSantis is that by leaning so hard into cultural confrontation on so many fronts he could create a zero-sum dynamic in the race. That approach could allow him to cut into Trump’s blue-collar base, but ultimately repel some college educated primary voters, who view him as too closely replicating what they don’t like about Trump. (If DeSantis wins the nomination, that same dynamic could hurt him with some suburban voters otherwise drawn to his small government economic message.)

    That could leave room in the top tier of the GOP race for another candidate who offers a sunnier, less polarizing message aimed mostly at white-collar Republicans. “I think there is absolutely room for more than two candidates, especially two candidates who are both competing very hard for the Fox News audience,” Conant said. Almost anyone else who joins the race beyond Trump and DeSantis (assuming he announces later this year) may ultimately conclude that lane represents their best chance to win.

    In many ways, Trump looks more vulnerable than he did in the 2016 primary. But assembling a coalition across the GOP’s wine-track/beer-track divide that’s broad enough to beat him remains something of a Rubik’s Cube, and the countdown is starting for the field that’s assembling against him to solve it.

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  • Fire rips through Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh leaving thousands homeless | CNN

    Fire rips through Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh leaving thousands homeless | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A massive fire has ripped through a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh’s southern district of Cox’s Bazar on Sunday, leaving around 12,000 people homeless, local Superintendent of Police Mohammad Mahfuzul Islam told CNN.

    Sweeping through the Kutupalong refugee camp in the afternoon, the blaze gutted around 2,000 huts before it was brought under control, Islam said.

    No casualties have been reported so far, he said, adding that the cause of the fire is not yet determined but an investigation is under way.

    Authorities are working with international and local humanitarian organizations to provide food and temporary shelters to those who have lost homes, he added.

    “We will ensure no one sleeps under the open sky. Everyone will get a temporary shelter,” Islam said, with community centers and mosques providing housing to those affected by the fire.

    Ninety facilities including hospitals and learning centers were burnt down, the Bangladesh branch of the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR tweeted on Sunday.

    “Rohingya refugee volunteers trained on firefighting & local fire services have controlled the fire,” it added in another tweet.

    Rohingya refugees try to salvage their belongings after the major fire ripped through the camp.

    The UN’s International Organization of Migration (IOM) in Bangladesh said on social media that “they are assessing the needs of people to provide support.”

    Sunday’s fire marks one of the largest of several fires that have plagued the camp in recent years.

    An estimated 1 million members of the stateless Muslim minority Rohingya live in what many consider to be among the world’s largest refugee camps after fleeing a brutal campaign of killing and arson by the Myanmar military.

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  • The US dollar is at a crossroads | CNN Business

    The US dollar is at a crossroads | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Wall Street investors are reaching for their neck braces in preparation for yet another volatile swing in stock markets: A surging US dollar.

    The greenback — which is not just the dominant global currency but also “the key variable affecting global economic conditions,” according to the New York Federal Reserve — reached a 20-year high last year after the Fed turned hawkish with its aggressive rate hikes.

    Since then, inflation seemed to have softened, pushing the dollar down. But in recent weeks, as a slew of economic data has shown the Fed’s inflation battle is far from over, the currency soared by about 4% from its recent lows, and now sits near a seven-week high.

    Investors are stressing about this sudden rebound, since a stronger dollar means American-made products become more expensive for foreign buyers, overseas revenue decreases in value and global trade weakens.

    Multinational companies, naturally, aren’t thrilled about any of this. And around 30% of all S&P 500 companies’ revenue is earned in markets outside the US, said Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist for LPL Financial.

    What’s happening: The US dollar “finds itself at a significant crossroads yet again,” said Krosby. “While the Fed remains steadfastly data dependent, the dollar’s course as well remains focused on inflation and the Fed’s monetary response.”

    “The strong US dollar has been a headwind for international earnings and stock performance (for US investors),” wrote Wells Fargo analysts in a recent note.

    February was a rough month for markets: The Dow ended February down 4.19%, the S&P 500 fell 2.6% and the Nasdaq lost just over 1%.

    What’s next: Investors are clearly focused on the next Fed policy meeting, which is still three weeks away, for signals about the direction of rates. But until then, investors may gain some insight Tuesday when Fed Chairman Jerome Powell speaks before the Senate Banking Committee.

    They’ll also be watching next Friday’s jobs report for any softening in the labor market that could temper the Fed’s hawkish mood.

    Don’t forget the debt ceiling: Another significant threat to the dollar is looming in Congress — the ongoing debt ceiling fight. The United States could start to default on its financial obligations over the summer or in the early fall if lawmakers don’t agree to raise the debt limit — its self-imposed borrowing limit — before then, according to a new analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    That could potentially lead to a disastrous downgrade to America’s credit rating and could send the dollar spiraling as investors start to sell off their US assets and move their money to safer currencies.

    “It would certainly undermine the role of the dollar as a reserve currency that is used in transactions all over the world. And Americans — many people — would lose their jobs and certainly their borrowing costs would rise,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CNN in January.

    ▸ A lot has changed in the last twenty years. The gender pay gap hasn’t.

    In 2022, US women on average earned about 82 cents for every dollar a man earned, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers.

    That’s a big leap from the 65 cents that women were earning in 1982. But it has barely moved from the 80 cents they were earning in 2002.

    “Higher education, a shift to higher-paying occupations and more labor market experience have helped women narrow the gender pay gap since 1982,” the Pew analysis noted. “But even as women have continued to outpace men in educational attainment, the pay gap has been stuck in a holding pattern since 2002, ranging from 80 to 85 cents to the dollar.”

    ▸ Initial jobless claims, which measures the number of people who filed for unemployment insurance for the first time last week, are due out at 8:30 a.m. ET on Thursday.

    This will be the last official jobs data investors see before February’s heavily anticipated unemployment report next Friday.

    Economists are expecting 195,000 Americans to have filed for unemployment, which is higher than the seasonally adjusted 192,000 who applied two weeks ago.

    Initial claims have come in lower than expected in recent weeks and remain well below their pre-pandemic levels.

    The white-hot labor market in the US added more than 500,000 jobs in January, blowing analysts’ expectations out of the water and bringing the unemployment rate to its lowest level since May of 1969.

    That’s bad news for the Federal Reserve where policymakers have been attempting to tame inflation by cooling the economy through painful interest rate hikes.

    ▸ It’s a big day for groceries. Kroger (KR), Costco (COST) and Anheuser-Busch (BUD) all report earnings on Thursday.

    Investors will be watching closely for clues about consumer sentiment during an uncertain retail earnings season. On Tuesday, Kohl’s reported that it had a rough holiday season and executives at the company put the blame on inflation. The company said higher prices squeezed sales and forced it to mark down some products to entice shoppers — which hurt its profit margin.

    Those comments echoed those of other big box retailers like Walmart (WMT) and Target (TGT), who have said consumers are feeling the pinch of inflation.

    Still, Target and Walmart’s bottom lines were bolstered by food sales even as consumers pulled back on discretionary purchases.

    The US Senate voted on Wednesday to overturn a Biden administration retirement investment rule that allows managers of retirement funds to consider the impact of climate change and other ESG factors when picking investments.

    As my CNN colleagues Ali Zaslav, Clare Foran and Ted Barrett write: The rule is not mandated – it allows, but does not require, the consideration of environmental, social and governance factors in investment selection.

    Republicans complained that the rule is a “woke” policy that pushes a liberal agenda on Americans and will hurt retirees’ bottom lines.

    “This rule isn’t about saying the left or the right take on a given environmental, social, or governance issue is ‘correct,’” countered Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) on the Senate floor Wednesday. “It’s about acknowledging these factors are reasonable for asset managers to consider.”

    The measure will next go to President Joe Biden’s desk as it was passed by the House on Tuesday. The administration, however, has issued a veto threat. As a result, passage of the resolution could pave the way for Biden to issue the first veto of his presidency.

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  • Senate votes to overturn Biden administration retirement investment rule Republicans decry as ‘woke’ | CNN Politics

    Senate votes to overturn Biden administration retirement investment rule Republicans decry as ‘woke’ | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Senate passed a politically charged resolution on Wednesday to overturn a Biden administration retirement investment rule that allows managers of retirement funds to consider the impact of climate change and other environmental, social and governance factors when picking investments.

    Republicans complain the rule is “woke” policy that pushes a liberal agenda on Americans and will hurt retirees’ bottom lines, while Democrats say it’s not about ideology and will help investors.

    The measure, which would rescind a Department of Labor rule, will next go to President Joe Biden’s desk as it was passed by the House on Tuesday. The administration, however, has issued a veto threat. As a result, passage of the resolution could pave the way for Biden to issue the first veto of his presidency.

    Opponents of the rule could try to override a veto, but at this point it appears unlikely they could get the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to do so.

    The resolution, authored by GOP Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, only needed a simple majority to pass. It passed on a vote of 50 to 46 with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana voting with Republicans.

    Republican lawmakers advanced it under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to roll back regulations from the executive branch without needing to clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate that is necessary for most legislation.

    Opponents of the rule have argued that it politicizes retirement investments and that the Biden administration is using it as a way to push a liberal agenda on Americans.

    “The Biden Administration wants to let Wall Street use workers’ hard-earned savings to pursue left-wing political initiatives,” Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell said in remarks on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning.

    Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming said at a news conference on Tuesday, “What’s happened here is the woke and weaponized bureaucracy at the Department of Labor has come out with new regulations on retirement funds, and they want retirement funds to be invested in things that are consistent with their very liberal, left-wing agenda.”

    Supporters of the rule argue that it is not a mandate – it allows, but does not require, the consideration of environmental, social and governance factors in investment selection.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday that Republicans are “using the same tired attacks we’ve heard for a while now that this is more wokeness. … But Republicans are missing or ignoring an important point: Nothing in the (Labor Department) rule imposes a mandate.”

    “This isn’t about ideological preference, it’s about looking at the biggest picture possible for investments to minimize risk and maximize returns,” he said, noting it’s a narrow rule that is “literally allowing the free market to do its work.”

    The statement of administration policy saying that Biden would veto the measure similarly states, “the 2022 rule is not a mandate – it does not require any fiduciary to make investment decisions based solely on ESG factors. The rule simply makes sure that retirement plan fiduciaries must engage in a risk and return analysis of their investment decisions and recognizes that these factors can be relevant to that analysis.”

    Republicans are also working to advance a measure to rescind a controversial Washington, DC, crime law – which critics argue is soft on violent criminals – with a simple majority vote in the Senate.

    Many Democrats oppose overriding the DC law. They argue local officials should make their own laws free of congressional interference and decry Republicans as hypocrites since they typically promote state and local rights.

    A Senate vote on the DC measure is expected next week.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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  • The US gender pay gap: Why it hasn’t narrowed much in 20 years | CNN Business

    The US gender pay gap: Why it hasn’t narrowed much in 20 years | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A lot can change in two decades. Or… not.

    In 2022, US women on average earned about 82 cents for every dollar a man earned, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers.

    That’s a big leap from the 65 cents that women were earning in 1982. But it has barely moved from the 80 cents they were earning in 2002.

    “Higher education, a shift to higher-paying occupations and more labor market experience have helped women narrow the gender pay gap since 1982,” the Pew analysis noted. “But even as women have continued to outpace men in educational attainment, the pay gap has been stuck in a holding pattern since 2002, ranging from 80 to 85 cents to the dollar.”

    Before getting to potential reasons why the pay gap hasn’t narrowed for two decades — let alone disappeared — it’s worth noting that the top-line average doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s been going on for women in different cohorts.

    Take age: Women between the ages of 25 and 34 are much closer to achieving pay parity with men than they are likely to be when they get older.

    Since 2007, younger women have been earning about 90 cents on the dollar, according to Pew: “But even as pay parity might appear in reach for women at the start of their careers, the wage gap tends to increase as they age.”

    Having children is a factor, Pew found. For example, parenthood leads some women to put their careers on hold, or put in a shorter workweek. For employed fathers between the ages 35 and 44, having children at home is a time that often coincides with receiving higher pay even though the pay of employed mothers that same age is unaffected.

    “In 2022, mothers ages 25 to 34 earned 85% as much as fathers that age, but women without children at home earned 97% as much as fathers. In contrast, employed women ages 35 to 44 — with or without children — both earned about 80% as much as fathers,” the report said.

    Or take race and ethnicity: Pew found that Black women last year earned just 70% as much as White men. Hispanic women earned 65% as much. For White women, the gap was less, at 83%. Asian women were closest to parity, at 93%.

    “To some extent, the gender wage gap varies by race and ethnicity because of differences in education, experience, occupation and other factors that drive the gender wage gap for women overall,” the Pew analysis noted.

    “But researchers have uncovered new evidence of hiring discrimination against various racial and ethnic groups, along with discrimination against other groups, such as LGBTQ and disabled workers,” the report continued. “Discrimination in hiring may feed into differences in earnings by shutting out workers from opportunities,”

    Lastly, consider occupation: Women are still overrepresented in lower-paying occupations such as personal care and service jobs; and underrepresented in higher-paying ones, like managerial and STEM jobs.

    Regardless, the gender pay gap is typically narrowest when you pick any single occupation and control for measurable factors between men and women like education, tenure and hours worked.

    “But it never goes away,” said Rakesh Kochhar, a Pew senior researcher.

    The persistence of a gap over the past 20 years, even when comparing apples to apples, suggests there are other factors at play.

    These can include potential discrimination. When Pew asked Americans in October what factors they believed played a role in the gender wage gap, half indicated a major reason is that employers treat women differently. Women were much more likely than men (61% vs 37%) to cite this as a major reason.

    Another factor that may help explain the stickiness of the pay gap is that the wage premium for those with college degrees has grown smaller. So while more employed women (48%) now have at least a bachelor’s degree than men (41%), it is worth less.

    Individual choices such as taking periods away from the workforce to care for children also continue to play a role. Those choices may be borne of cultural norms, societal issues such as a lack of affordable child care, or personal preference.

    Narrowing the gender pay gap from here may be tough sledding.

    “More sustained progress in closing the pay gap may depend on deeper changes in societal and cultural norms and in workplace flexibility that affect how men and women balance their careers and family lives,” Pew researchers suggested.

    And even then, progress may be slower than desired, since, as they noted, “even in countries that have taken the lead in implementing family-friendly policies, such as Denmark, parenthood continues to drive a significant wedge in the earnings of men and women.”

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  • 401(k) balances rise, despite economic and market challenges | CNN Business

    401(k) balances rise, despite economic and market challenges | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Despite higher prices, endless talk of a possible recession and falling markets, 401(k) participants managed to keep their savings rates relatively steady in the fourth quarter of last year, helping to stabilize their nest eggs and increase their overall average balances.

    That’s according to new data from Fidelity Investments, one of the largest providers of workplace retirement plans, which combined represent $2.8 trillion in assets on its platform.

    “Fortunately, the data show that retirement savers understand the importance of saving for the long-term, despite market shift. We are encouraged to see people look past the current volatility and continue to make smart choices for their future,” said Kevin Barry, president of Workplace Investing at Fidelity.

    By that Barry means the average 401(k) savings rate (including both employee contributions and employer matches) held roughly steady at 13.7%, down from the 13.8% in the third quarter and 13.9% in the second quarter.

    Among generations in the workforce, Baby Boomers had the highest savings rate as a percent of their income (16.5%). The youngest cohort – Gen Z workers – saved 10.2%.

    A third of participants actually increased their contribution rate over the last year, according to Fidelity. But the average rate among this group is still very low – at just 2.6%.

    The average 401(k) balance in Fidelity-administered plans, meanwhile, rose 7% from the third quarter, to $103,900. That said, thanks to poor performances in both stocks and bonds last year, the average is still 23% below the $135,600 recorded at the end of 2021.

    In terms of 401(k) loans, the percent of active plan participants with outstanding ones remained at 16.7%. That’s down from 17% a year earlier and 21% from five years ago, Fidelity said.

    The average outstanding loan amount was $10,200. Among different age groups, Gen Xers had the highest average, followed by Baby Boomers. And even though they are just getting started in their careers and haven’t had a lot of time to amass savings, 3.2% of Gen Z workers also had outstanding 401(k) loans, but their average amount ($3,000) was the lowest among all age groups.

    Hardship withdrawals from 401(k)s – money taken when a participant is under financial stress of some kind (e.g., to prevent eviction, pay for funeral expenses or to cover a near-term tuition bill) – stood at 2.4% for the year, up from 1.9% in 2021. The average amount taken out was $2,200. Unlike a 401(k) loan, a hardship withdrawal does not need to be paid back, and will be taxed. Plus, in some instances it may be subject to a 10% penalty if you’re under 59-1/2.

    The new retirement law, Secure 2.0, includes a provision that will make it easier and less costly for 401(k) participants to take money out of their account for emergency needs up to $1,000 in a year.

    Apart from its workplace retirement plans, Fidelity reported a 10.2% annual increase in the number of IRAs on its platform, noting that 61% of the IRA contributions made in the fourth quarter of last year went into Roth IRAs.

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  • How an old debate previews Biden’s new strategy for winning senior voters | CNN Politics

    How an old debate previews Biden’s new strategy for winning senior voters | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    In pressing Republicans on Social Security and Medicare, President Joe Biden is reprising one of the most dramatic moments of his long career.

    During the 2012 vice-presidential debate, Biden engaged in a nearly 11-minute exchange with GOP nominee Paul Ryan over Republican plans to reconfigure the two massive programs for the elderly, several of which Ryan had authored himself.

    Biden and many Democrats felt he had won the argument on stage. Yet on Election Day, Ryan and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney routed Biden and President Barack Obama among White seniors, and beat them soundly among seniors overall, exit polls found.

    That outcome underscores the obstacles facing Biden now as he tries to recapture older voters by portraying Republicans as threats to the two towers of America’s safety net for the elderly. While polls consistently show that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to safeguard the programs, GOP presidential nominees have carried all seniors in every presidential election back to 2004 and have reached at least 58% support among White seniors in each of the past four contests, exit polls have found. Democrats have likewise consistently struggled among those nearing retirement, older working adults aged 45-64.

    Those results suggest that for most older voters, affinity for the GOP messages on other issues – particularly its resistance, in the Donald Trump era, to cultural and racial change – has outweighed their views about Social Security and Medicare. Those grooves are now cut so deeply, over so many elections, that Biden may struggle to change them much no matter how hard he rails against a range of GOP proposals that could retrench or restructure the programs.

    Biden’s charge that Republicans are threatening the two giant entitlement programs for the elderly – which triggered his striking back and forth exchanges with GOP legislators during the State of the Union – fits squarely in his broader political positioning as he turns toward his expected reelection campaign.

    As I’ve written, the 80-year-old Biden, at his core, “remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands.” As president he’s expressed that inclination primarily through what he calls his “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” – the planks in his economic plans, such as generous incentives to revive domestic manufacturing, aimed at creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree. Politically, Biden’s staunch defense of Social Security and Medicare, programs critical to the economic security of financially vulnerable retirees, represents a logical bookend to that emphasis.

    “We all know that whose side you are on is a critical debate point for every election and this debate over Social Security and Medicare really helps crystallize whose side Biden is on versus whose side Republicans are on in a very effective way for him,” said Democratic pollster Matt Hogan, who helped conduct an extensive series of bipartisan polls during the 2022 campaign measuring attitudes among seniors for the AARP, the giant lobby for the elderly.

    From Franklin Roosevelt through Hubert Humphrey and Tip O’Neill, generations of Democrats have framed themselves as the defenders of the social safety net for seniors against Republicans who they say would unravel it. Biden showed how comfortable he was stepping into those shoes during his 2012 vice-presidential debate with Ryan, then a young representative from Wisconsin who Romney had selected as his running mate.

    Nearly 30 years Biden’s junior, Ryan was an unflinching advocate of restructuring Social Security and Medicare to reduce costs over time. In particular, Ryan was the principal supporter of a conservative plan to convert Medicare, the giant federal health insurance program for the elderly, into a system called “premium support.” Under that proposal, Medicare would be transformed from its current structure, in which the government directly pays doctors and hospitals who provide care for beneficiaries, into a voucher (or “premium support”) system, in which the government would provide recipients a fixed sum to purchase private insurance. Ryan had also drafted proposals to partially privatize Social Security by allowing workers to divert part of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts, a change that would have reduced the tax dollars flowing into the system and eventually required substantial cuts in guaranteed benefits.

    For nearly 11 minutes during the debate in October 2012, moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC skillfully guided Biden and Ryan through a heated, but civil and substantive, discussion of Social Security and Medicare’s future. Ryan insisted that changes were needed to preserve the programs’ long-term viability and that current seniors and those near retirement would not see their benefits reduced.

    Biden appealed openly to the Democrats’ historic image as the programs’ protectors and condemned Ryan and the GOP for wanting to partially privatize them. At one point in the debate, Biden declared: “we will be no part of a [Medicare] voucher program or the privatization of Social Security.” A few moments later, he insisted: “These guys haven’t been big on Medicare from the beginning. And they’ve always been about Social Security as little as you can do. Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this?”

    At the time, Democrats felt Biden had at least held his own, restoring the party’s momentum after Obama’s surprisingly listless performance eight days earlier in his first debate against Romney. And Democrats through the rest of the campaign railed against the Republican ticket as a threat to Social Security and Medicare.

    But on election day, those arguments did not translate into gains for Obama and Biden among seniors or the older working adults (aged 45-64) nearing retirement. As Hogan noted, the newly passed Affordable Care Act, which generated some of its funding through savings in Medicare, was extremely unpopular at the time among older voters. Obama and Biden not only lost seniors and the older working age adults, but actually ran slightly more poorly among both groups in 2012 than they did in 2008.

    In fact, no Democratic presidential nominee since Al Gore in 2000 has carried most seniors in a presidential campaign; Obama in 2008 was the only one since Gore to carry most of the older working age adults. Among older Whites, the Democratic deficit is even more pronounced: the Republican presidential nominee has carried around three-fifths of both White seniors and those nearing retirement in each of the past four elections. Biden in 2020 slightly improved on Hillary Clinton’s anemic 2016 performance with both groups, but still lost to Trump by 15 percentage points among White seniors and by 23 points among the Whites nearing retirement, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. Biden performed especially poorly among older Whites without a college degree – an economically stressed group heavily reliant on the federal retirement programs.

    Estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, and the Pew Research Center likewise found that Trump in both 2016 and 2020 beat his Democratic opponents among both seniors and the older working adults. Like the exit polls, the Catalist data show the Republican nominees carrying about three-fifths of White seniors and older working adults in each of the past three presidential elections.

    The story is similar in congressional contests. In House elections, the exit polls found Republicans winning all seniors and older working adults comfortably in the 2014 and 2022 midterm campaigns and narrowly carrying them even in 2018 when Democrats romped overall. In all three of those midterm congressional elections, Republicans carried about three-fifths of the near retirement White adults, while they also reached that elevated threshold among White seniors in both the 2014 and 2022 campaigns.

    Republicans have maintained these advantages with older voters despite polls showing that most Americans trust Democrats more than the GOP to protect Social Security and Medicare, and that most Americans, especially seniors, oppose the intermittently surfacing GOP proposals to partially privatize both programs.

    Politically, “Democrats have used Social Security and Medicare really a lot over the past two or three decades, maybe four decades,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “The payoff has been a lot less than Democrats have generally thought it would be.”

    Could this time be different for Biden and the Democrats? Congressional Republicans have certainly provided plenty of evidence for his claim that they still hope to restructure the programs. The proposed 2023 budget by the Republican Study Committee, the members of which include about three-fourths of House Republicans, reprises the ideas of converting Medicare into a premium support system and establishing private investment accounts under Social Security, while also raising the retirement age for both programs and reducing Social Security benefits over time. And although Florida Sen. Rick Scott renounced the idea late last week, his “Rescue America” agenda did include a proposal to require Congress to reauthorize all federal programs, including Social Security and Medicare, every five years.

    These ideas have precipitated an unusual degree of open Republican dissension. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell repeatedly, and unreservedly, denounced the Scott plan until the Florida senator backed off. Trump recently released a video in which he declared the GOP should not cut “a single penny” of Social Security or Medicare benefits – which put him directly at odds with the three-fourths of House Republicans in the Republican Study Committee. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, bending more toward Trump’s position, seems unlikely to incorporate into the GOP budget plans the RSC’s most sweeping changes in Social Security and Medicare.

    Kessler believes Biden may succeed where other Democrats have failed at hurting the GOP with the issue, and he argued that the conspicuous Republican infighting demonstrates they share that concern. “We are watching a high-profile battle that I’ve never really seen before on these issues in the Republican Party,” Kessler said. “And part of it is clearly they think it’s a problem when they didn’t years ago. If they think it’s a problem, maybe it’s a problem.”

    Stuart Stevens, who served as Romney’s chief strategist in the 2012 campaign but has since become a fierce critic of the Trump-era GOP, also believes the party could face more risk over its entitlement agenda than it did back then. The reason is that he thinks the idea of sunsetting Social Security and Medicare every five years, even if Scott is trying to jettison it, may prove more immediately tangible and understandable to voters than Ryan’s complex ideas of partially privatizing both programs.

    “The question I always ask myself in campaigns is ‘are you talking about something the other side doesn’t want to talk about?’” Stevens said. “That’s probably a good sign that they are losing on the issue.”

    Whether Biden proves more effective than other recent Democrats at attracting older voters around Social Security and Medicare will likely pivot on whether seniors believe the GOP genuinely would cut the programs if given the power to do so, argued Robert Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, who specializes in public attitudes about the social safety net. “If the senior community actually believes that it’s being threatened it really would affect their votes,” he predicted. But, he added, “as long as they are not threatened, the other values of seniors on top issues more and more correspond with Republicans.”

    There’s no doubt about the second half of that equation. Polling has consistently found that older Whites, in particular, are more receptive than their younger counterparts to hardline Trump-era GOP messages around crime, immigration and the broader currents of racial and cultural change: for instance, about half of Whites older than 50 agree that discrimination against Whites is now as big a problem as bias against minorities, a far higher percentage than among younger Whites, according to a new national survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Older Whites are also more likely than younger generations to lack a college degree or to identify as Christians, attributes that generally predict sympathy for GOP cultural and racial arguments.

    Through the 21st century, those cultural and racial attitudes among older White voters have consistently trumped any concerns they may hold about the Republican commitment to Social Security and Medicare. Despite Biden’s impassioned articulation of the case against the GOP, that didn’t change even in 2012 when Republicans placed on their national ticket a vice presidential nominee who directly embodied the GOP aspirations to reconfigure and retrench those programs.

    Even small changes in seniors’ preferences could have a big impact in closely balanced states with a large retiree population like Arizona and Pennsylvania. But the entrenched GOP advantage among older voters over the past two decades suggests Biden’s hopes in 2024 may pivot less on improving with the “gray” than maximizing his vote among the “brown”: the diverse, younger generations that recoil from the same Republican messages on culture and race that electrify so many older Whites.

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  • China’s capital offers $6 monthly handout to offset inflation. The public says it’s not nearly enough | CNN Business

    China’s capital offers $6 monthly handout to offset inflation. The public says it’s not nearly enough | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Beijing will give out a $6 monthly cash subsidy to low-income residents to cushion the impact of rising food prices, a move that has unexpectedly angered many online who say the amount is far too low.

    The announcement from the city government comes as food inflation accelerated in China after policymakers scrapped their zero-Covid strategy in December and eased monetary policy further to fuel economic recovery.

    Last week, protests by retirees broke out in the cities of Wuhan and Dalian over cuts to their medical care benefits, highlighting the growing risk of unrest over livelihood issues as China’s economy struggles to regain its footing after being drained by pandemic policies.

    The demonstrations were the latest outburst of public discontent since mass protests against Covid curbs gripped the country late last year. The recent protests underscored the financial pressure on local governments, after three years of the zero-Covid policy strained their coffers and a property market slump severely eroded their income.

    According to the Beijing Municipal Commission of Development and Reform, the city’s economic regulator, more than 300,000 people on low incomes will each receive a cash payment of 40 yuan (about $6) per month. The first payment will be given out later this month and it’s unclear for how long they will continue.

    “In January, food prices in Beijing rose by 6.6%, meeting the conditions for starting the price-linked subsidy program,” the state-run Beijing Daily newspaper quoted an official from the commission as saying in a Friday report.

    “[We will] try to do a good job in ensuring the basic livelihood of the needy people … and continuously enhance the people’s sense of gain, happiness and security.”

    China launched a low-income subsidy program in 2011 to offer cash handouts to the needy when the consumer price index or food prices hit certain thresholds. Each city or region sets its own standard as living costs vary across the country.

    The news of Beijing’s latest handout was not well received by the public, who took to social media to complain about the high cost of living in the city.

    “40 yuan? Are you serious? [When] the low-income people take the subway to collect the money and then they return, they lose 8 yuan,” said one comment on Weibo.

    “Is it like an insult? [The amount] just subsidizes a bowl of noodles,” another Weibo user said.

    Some people criticized the country’s weak social welfare system, while others blasted the government’s move to write off billions of debt to other countries.

    “Can’t we question the move? Do you think the current welfare system in our country is good? Can it meet the needs of people?” one said.

    China’s consumer inflation accelerated in January, as the CPI rose 2.1% from a year earlier. Although the headline figure remains relatively low compared to other countries, food prices jumped 6.2%, with pork and fruit prices rising the most.

    In Beijing, food prices outpaced the national level. Vegetable prices soared 24% last month.

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  • Key senators torn over retirement decisions as party leaders try to fortify 2024 standing | CNN Politics

    Key senators torn over retirement decisions as party leaders try to fortify 2024 standing | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Sen. Joe Manchin, torn over whether to run for reelection, says he’s “given everything I possibly can” over four decades of holding public office. Sen. Jon Tester is close to making his final decision on a 2024 bid and concedes there’s a risk of his seat flipping next year.

    “It’s a commitment,” the Montana Democrat said of another run.

    They’re not the only ones in a tough spot.

    Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, is weighing health considerations after treatment for prostate cancer. Sen. Bernie Sanders, 81, says he’ll make a decision about whether to run for a fourth Senate term in Vermont “at the appropriate time.”

    And Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican who has gone to battle with former President Donald Trump, says he’ll decide whether to run for a second term by mid-April, sounding ready to take on his party’s MAGA wing if he runs again.

    “People understand that every action has a consequence, and you accept the consequences for the actions that you think are right,” Romney, 75, said of potentially facing a stiff challenge from the right. He then added bullishly: “If I run, I’ll win.”

    As the 2024 landscape begins to take shape, the senators’ decisions about their political futures will dramatically alter the map and hold major ramifications for the makeup of the institution itself.

    For Democrats, the concern is the most acute. They already have a difficult road to maintain their slim 51-49 majority, with 23 seats to defend compared to just 11 for the GOP.

    Plus they’ll have to hold onto Democratic seats in GOP terrain, such as in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia – not to mention keep their seats in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. The map provides them with scant pickup opportunities, since Republican incumbents are mostly running in ruby-red states or states that have trended to the GOP, like Florida.

    Then there’s the complicated dance for both parties in Arizona, if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent, decides to run again for a seat that would put her up against a Republican and Democrat in a messy, three-way race. For Republicans, fear is growing that the hard-right Kari Lake may mount a bid and put their hopes for a pickup in jeopardy.

    And with few pickup chances, Senate Democrats recognize they’ll have to limit losses – and prevent retirements – in order to cling to power.

    “I’m doing everything I can to help Manchin in West Virginia,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told CNN when asked if he were concerned that the conservative Democrat might hang it up, referring to legislative actions.

    After Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow announced she’d retire, Schumer and his top deputies are hoping to prevent others from following suit, recognizing that an open seat would give Republicans an even better chance of seizing control of the chamber they lost in the 2020 elections. The exception is California, where the 89-year-old Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement this week, something widely expected, as Democrats are expected to keep the seat in their control in the blue state.

    In particular, Democratic leaders are urging Tester and Manchin to run again, knowing full well that finding another Democrat to win in those conservative battlegrounds will be an extremely tall order in 2024.

    “Clearly, it’s important for them to run,” said Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate Democratic campaign arm, when asked about Tester and Manchin. “I don’t know where they are. I’ve talked to them, but they’re just working through issues, personal issues for themselves as to what they want to do. So we just have to give them time to think that through and I look forward to their answers.”

    Peters acknowledged that his party’s effort to keep the Senate will grow bleaker if either or both men retire.

    “Those are states that are very Republican,” Peters told CNN, referring to Montana and West Virginia. “And I know they can win again, but they’re without question the strongest candidates in those states. It’d be more difficult without them running.”

    Democrats acknowledge they have close to no backup plans in Montana or West Virginia. But they have been heartened by the polls that are being released publicly by Republican groups in those states, showing their numbers have been better than expected – and perhaps encouraging – for the incumbents.

    But neither Manchin nor Tester seem concerned that the seat could turn red if they retire.

    “That’s not my factor,” Manchin said in the interview. “I’m not weighing that because of my, what it might do to the numbers as far as up here. No, I’ve been at this for quite some time. This term being up, there’ll be 42 years I’ve been in public service so I’ve given everything I possibly can.”

    Several Democratic operatives involved in planning for Senate races tell CNN they expect that ultimately, Tester will run and that Casey will as well after his successful surgery this week. Manchin has them more on edge, and they anticipate that’s how they’ll remain for almost a year: the West Virginia filing deadline isn’t until next January.

    That, after all, is what he did in 2018.

    Manchin, a former governor and state legislator who has served in the Senate since 2010, insists he’s not concerned about the prospects that the GOP governor, Jim Justice, is strongly considering a run against him, though Justice would have to escape a difficult primary against Rep. Alex Mooney and potentially the state’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, who may run as well. He has acknowledged that Justice would be the toughest candidate to face, though he insists he could still pull off a victory.

    Manchin, 75, just doesn’t know if he wants to do it again as he looks back at the last several years – especially in the 50-50 Senate in the last Congress where he was at the peak of his power in the chamber and played a central role shaping major laws. The question Manchin is weighing: whether he’ll have the same kind of impact with another six years.

    “I make a decision based on if I’ve been able to deliver for the state, have I been able to support the Constitution and the oath I’ve taken, I think I have,” Manchin said, confirming he’s been urged by Biden and Schumer both to run. “Is there more I can do in different, other areas? I don’t know.”

    Tester, who also said Schumer has been urging him to run, conceded that his seat could flip if he bows out.

    “Oh, absolutely there’s a risk of flipping there’s no doubt about that but so are all of them,” Tester said.

    But he contended other Democrats could mount a vigorous challenge for the seat.

    “Actually, we’ve got some really good folks in the wings that can run,” Tester, 66, said before he noted that things have gotten dire for Democrats in recent cycles. “We haven’t had the best of luck the last few cycles in Montana but I think that’s as much self-inflicted as it is the state turning red.”

    But Tester pointed to key positions he holds – chairing a subcommittee on Pentagon spending and running the veterans panel – as he weighs another run.

    “I’m at a point and time where we can get a lot of good things done because of my position on Veterans Affairs and defense chairman but it’s just something where I think you just need to take the time to think over,” he said.

    Yet Democrats could benefit from a potentially divisive GOP primary in Montana – with the possibility of candidacies from two House members, the governor and the state attorney general. That will put the other Montana senator, Republican Steve Daines, to the test as he plans to use his National Republican Senatorial Committee to be more assertive in GOP primaries to root out lackluster general election candidates, though it’s unclear how he would handle his home state.

    In an interview, Daines was noncommittal when asked about one candidate in particular – Rep. Matt Rosendale – a hard-right Republican who lost to Tester in 2018 and is considering running again. He said “it’s early” since candidates have yet to declare and that the field will get “sorted out,” contending the race is “winnable.”

    “These are three red states where the only statewide elected official left that’s a Democrat is a US Senator. That’s Montana, it’s West Virginia, it’s Ohio,” Daines said. “These are going to be spirited races.”

    And after last cycle’s GOP debacle, where several Donald Trump-aligned candidates petered out in the general election and effectively cost them winning the majority, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is determined not to allow that to happen again.

    “I just think we need to focus on candidates who can win in the general election,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas and close McConnell ally. “We had some great primary candidates, but that won’t get the job done. You got to have somebody who can have a broader appeal than just the base. That was one of the most important lessons of this last cycle.”

    Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, at left, is challenging Sinema, at right, for her US Senate seat in 2024.

    Senate leaders in both parties see Arizona as the biggest wildcard – depending on what Sinema decides to do and which Republican decides to run.

    Lake, the Trump-aligned Republican who lost one of the nation’s premier governor’s races last fall, recently met with officials at NRSC headquarters – even though many Republicans are nervous about her potential candidacy and one GOP strategist called the potential of a Lake Senate run “disastrous.”

    As she made the rounds in Washington, Daines told CNN that he spoke with Lake.

    “I want to see a candidate who can not only win a primary, but can win a general election,” Daines said when asked about that visit, not commenting on Lake directly.

    Other top Republicans are unnerved about Lake – and her evidence-free claims of widespread election fraud – and are pushing for other candidates to jump into the race.

    “I’ve just said to any of our candidates or potential candidates in 2024, that you got to talk about the future, not the past,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican. “And I think if you’re building your campaign around the theme of a stolen election, that’s not a winning strategy. We’ve seen that. So if she does decide to do it again, I think she’s gonna have to talk about the things that are on the hearts and minds of American people.”

    Schumer and Democratic leaders, themselves, are in a bind in the state, refusing to say if they’ll back their party’s nominee with Sinema still undecided on a run. The reason: They need Sinema to continue to organize with them in order to maintain their 51-49 majority and are in no mood to alienate her.

    But some Democrats are angry at their leaders for refusing to say if they’ll back their nominee, especially backers of Rep. Ruben Gallego, the party’s leading candidate in the race.

    “At some point, they’re going to have to endorse a Democrat,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, a fellow Arizona Democrat who backs Gallego, noting it would be “problematic” if party leaders didn’t dump huge resources to help their party’s nominee win a general election.

    “If they don’t, that would be an insult at many levels,” Grijavla said.

    While some Democrats are nervous that Gallego and Sinema would split the vote and give Republicans a victory, Gallego dismisses the possibility and says only a “strong Democrat” can win.

    “No matter what happens, Kyrsten Sinema is always going to be in third place,” Gallego said. “I also doubt she fully runs.”

    As she’s grown more alienated from her former party, Sinema has grown closer to Republicans, including one – Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who told CNN she would endorse the senator if she ran again.

    “I absolutely support Sen. Sinema,” Murkowski said, noting she’s also backing Manchin. “She’s not afraid to take on hard things, and I’m gonna be supporting her too.”

    Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan speaks to members of the media at the U.S. Capitol on August 03, 2022 in Washington, DC.

    Even in safe Democratic seats, there’s the potential for a shakeup that could bring more diversity and younger members into the ranks, including in Maryland and Delaware where Sens. Ben Cardin and Tom Carper, respectively, have not made a final decision to run yet.

    Cardin, 79, who hasn’t spent much time fundraising yet, said he would make his decision sometime in the spring, while Carper, 76, said he’d be ready to run but noted that campaigns are “way too long.”

    In Hawaii, Sen. Mazie Hirono said she plans to run again, as did Maine’s Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.

    “There’s only two ways to run: Scared or unopposed,” King said.

    In more contested states, Nevada’s Jacky Rosen said she is running, as did Ohio’s Sherrod Brown. And in Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said she’d make her announcement about her plans in the spring after upcoming elections in the state.

    In Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz has announced plans to run for a third Senate term, and Democrats are weighing whether to mount a serious effort to try to unseat him in the red state – with a focus on whether Democratic Rep. Colin Allred will try to mount an upset bid against the conservative senator.

    In Michigan, where Stabenow’s retirement is leaving Democrats with an open seat in a swing state, Rep. Elissa Slotkin is eying a run and could get some implicit help from the outgoing senator herself. Stabenow has spoken by phone with several prominent Michigan Democrats, and while some have perceived that as dissuading some weaker candidates from running, a Stabenow spokesperson says she’s just been giving everyone advice on the challenges of running statewide in Michigan and not trying to clear the field.

    Republican recruitment efforts in the state are also up in the air, with a push for newly elected Rep. John James, who has lost two previous bids for the Senate. If he passes, GOP leaders believe other contenders will emerge, potentially former Rep. Peter Meijer and even some current members of the House delegation or local officials.

    While several potential Democratic candidates have decided not to run, other political players in the state remain unsure about Slotkin’s statewide strength and have continued talking privately about finding an alternative.

    Given how much Democrats in the state rely on high turnout in heavily African-American Detroit, finding a candidate who could run strong there has been a major topic in those discussions. Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, who got his start in Detroit politics is “very seriously thinking about making a run” and is expected to make a decision over the next month, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

    Meanwhile, several Democrats in Michigan tell CNN they have been surprised by outreach they’re getting from “The Good Doctor” actor Hill Harper, whose political experience mostly relates to being Barack Obama’s law school roommate, but who owns a coffee shop in Detroit and has gotten involved with the local business community there. Harper did not return a request for comment.

    Stabenow said she’s not endorsing any candidate in the primary to replace her.

    “What I’m saying to folks is that I want somebody that is strong, effective, who can raise money, who can win,” Stabenow said. “But I’m talking to everybody.”

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