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A Birmingham police officer has been reassigned following a social media post in which he called President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party the enemy of the United States of America.

The officer has not been publicly identified, and department spokesman Sgt. Rod Mauldin said he is on administrative duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

According to CBS 42, the officer wrote: Our nation is under siege by these socialist enemies and if we cannot soon vote them out, it will be time to fight. If we are forced to fight, much blood will be spilled on both sides. I pray we can remove them peacefully before it is too late.

The Birmingham Police Department released the following statement:

The Birmingham police department was recently made aware of an inflammatory social media post made by an officer on his personal Facebook page. The Birmingham Police Departments command staff took immediate action according to Bpd protocol to initiate an internal investigation. The officer has been assigned to administrative duties pending the outcome of an internal investigation. This opinionated post made by this officer is not reflective of the views of the Birmingham Police Department. BPD takes these instances seriously and our goal is to assure open accountability of each officer that serves the City of Birmingham.

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Birmingham police officer under investigation for calling Democrats the enemy of the United States - AL.com

Can Joe Biden "reimagine and rebuild" the American economy in just 550 days? Because that's how long it is until the 2022 midterm elections. And history suggests a good chance Democrats will lose their narrow control of Congress, most likely by losing the House. Then gridlock resumes. It's doubtful that Republicans will have much interest in helping Biden further become a "transformational president" by passing more wish-list items from the progressive agenda.

Democrats surely understand the clock is ticking. But they also have to be hoping that the extraordinary power of the emerging economic boom might make the 2022 midterms an exception to the political pattern. Moody's Analytics, for example, recently revised its 2021 real GDP growth outlook to nearly 7 percent and to over 5 percent next year. "If we are right," chief economist Mark Zandi told clients in a report, "and there's good reason to believe we will be, this will be the strongest two years of growth since 1950-1951 at the height of the post-World War II economic boom." And Moody's is hardly alone in predicting warp-speed GDP and job growth this year and next.

So we're really off the map here. Who knows, not only might the Biden Boom keep the House and Senate in Democratic hands, it might also make a second Biden term (or a first Harris term, perhaps) a pretty good bet. And when you think about it, two presidential terms might be what Democrats need to pass key legislation and then make sure those programs survive during an era of extreme partisanship. Democrats are already trying to undo the Trump presidency wherever possible, such as attempting to partially reverse the Trump tax cuts, restore environmental rules, and rebuild America's trade relationship with Europe.

But the political impact of an unprecedented economic surge isn't the only unknown here. Putting aside the possibility of a dangerous new COVID-19 variant, perhaps the greatest risk to the recovery and thus the Biden legacy is how Washington is helping generate that recovery. The stimulus continues to flow even as consumers boost spending and businesses fully reopen. And some Democrats still don't think there's enough federal dough being spent, such as those who want recurring stimulus checks to be sent out and the $2.3 trillion Biden infrastructure plan to be a $10 trillion plan. As is, the tsunami of spending might yet boost inflation, resulting in surprise action from the Federal Reserve and an unexpected slowdown. Imagining pre-election recessions during the first terms of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama creates a pretty interesting game of "what if" alternate history with Presidents Mondale, Kerry, and Romney.

An inflation surprise is hardly the only risk. While the recovery is currently generating gobs of jobs, the expansion will eventually slow. And it might slow faster than necessary thanks to generous jobless benefits that could potentially discourage work and create shortages. The $1.9 trillion COVID relief package last March extended supplemental benefits of $300 a month through early September. Its an argument sure to gain momentum after Friday's wildly disappointing April jobs report that showed 266,000 net new jobs were created last month vs. a Wall Street forecast of a million or so. Now fat unemployment checks might not be the main reason for that undershoot. Home schooling, a lack of child care, virus fears, and data issues all might have played a role. But the report does suggest why some economists are worried about the labor-supply impact of impact of jobless benefits as the economy continues to gain strength in the coming months. A worker shortage would also add to the inflation threat. Again, many Democrats don't seem at all worried, at least so far. Late last month, nearly 40 Democrats on Capitol Hill sent the Biden White House a letter proposing "more generous and long-lasting jobless benefits on a permanent basis," according to the Wall Street Journal.

Then there's the proposed tax increases, more than $3 trillion worth including a record increase in capital gains tax rates. A nation's tax burden matters. How an economy is taxed matters. What is taxed matters. Tax rates matter. And although the economy didn't soar after the Trump tax cuts, the impact of the business tax cuts might have been offset by the Trump trade war.

It is generally accepted, however, that tax rates affect how much and where a company invests. More investment makes workers more productive and will, over time, boost their wages. There's an economic risk that these proposed Biden tax increases will hurt investment. While many Wall Street banks have some pretty rosy economics forecasts, they are generally not incorporating any downside impact of the tax hikes. Those same firms are also, for the most part, assuming the economy returns to its modest pre-pandemic pace in 2023. So there could be less room for economic policy mistakes than it seems right now.

And Democrats pushing for more, more, more should be worried a transformational presidency might just end up transitioning back to a Republican one.

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The economic threats that could derail the Democrats' election dreams - The Week

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealthnot of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently producedto provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nations economic machinery.

Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 192930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumer, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world.

Roosevelt, however, never committed himself wholly to the underconsumptionist view, and few economists endorsed it. Hobson, Foster, and Catchings were well outside the economic mainstream. However, in 1936, the eminent British economist John Maynard Keynes revived the underconsumptionist view in his book The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. He argued that capital was not created by saving but by capitalists perceiving an increase in demand for their products. As Keynes wrote, [C]apital is brought into existence not by the propensity to save but in response to the demand resulting from actual and prospective consumption. Indeed, he argued that thrift was counterproductive to growth by diminishing consumption. He called this the paradox of thrift.

Subsequently, the Roosevelt-Keynes idea that increasing consumption was the key to economic growth became known as trickle-up economics, in contrast to the trickle-down policies of the Republicans, which saw the prosperity of the wealthy as the key to growth that would eventually benefit the masses. One of the first people to draw the trickle-up/trickle-down distinction was the Democratic humorist Will Rogers. In a November 26, 1932, column, he wrote:

The money was all appropriated for the top [under the Republicans] in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didnt know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.

This was in fact the historical Democratic point of view. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president, had articulated it in his famous Cross of Gold speech in 1896. There are two ideas of government, Bryan said. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

I bring up all this history because President Joe Biden made a revealing comment in his April 29 address to a joint session of Congress: My fellow Americans, trickle-downtrickle-downeconomics has never worked, and its time to grow the economy from the bottom and the middle out. Biden is the first Democrat since Lyndon Johnson to forthrightly declare that trickle-up is the partys philosophy of growth. Indeed, Bidens program is reminiscent of Johnsons declaration on January 15, 1964, launching the Great Society: We are going to try to take all the money that we think is unnecessarily being spent and take it from the haves and give it to the have nots that need it so much.

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Joe Biden and the Democrats' Rediscovery of Trickle-Up Economics - The New Republic

As Joe Biden closed in on the Democratic Partys nomination, with only Bernie Sanders still running against him, part of his pitch was that he knew how hed pay for his proposals.

Bernies $32 trillion single-payer Medicare-for-all plan? Unrealistic and unaffordable. Bidens $800 billion plan to create a new public insurance option and build on Obamacare? Joe has it covered.

The fact of the matter is, everything I call for I pay for, Biden said in his final debate with Sanders on March 15, 2020.

But in practice, an $800 billion plan may be almost as politically daunting as a $32 trillion one.

Its still a monumental lift, Kim Monk, who follows Congress for investment clients at Capital Alpha Partners, told me.

And that is forcing Biden to aim lower still.

Right now, in his proposed American Families Plan, Biden is asking Congress for $200 billion to expand the Affordable Care Acts subsidies for health insurance premiums. The expansion already passed in the American Rescue Plan but expires after two years; the new proposal would make them permanent. The public option is nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, the payment plan Biden proposed during his campaign and in his debate with Sanders an increased tax on capital gains will probably be used to pay for other parts of the Biden agenda, while a $450 billion savings proposal, favored by most Democrats in Congress, that would allow Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies was also left out of the Families Plan. Congressional Democrats were urging Biden to include the drug price idea and use the savings to pay for coverage expansions, such as lowering Medicares eligibility age.

Its hard not to see one as related to the other. Bidens plans for expanding health coverage earlier Medicare eligibility, a public option were modest compared to Sanderss. But their fate, even as Biden proposes trillions in other new spending, shows that health care programs still have to pass a difficult test: They need to at least partially pay for themselves.

For decades, the norm has been that when Congress wants to pass a new expansion of health coverage, it will find the money to pay for at least some of that expansion from the health care industry, whether in the form of new taxes or spending cuts. Health care funds health care.

But that creates a huge political problem: The health care industry can block new reforms not by opposing the reforms themselves but by campaigning against the cuts or taxes used to pay for them. Doctors, hospitals, and health care companies retain a lot of influence in Congress; every congressional district has a hospital, as lobbyists happily point out.

So even as their ambitions for health care grow, as demonstrated by Bidens embrace of the public option, Democrats find themselves caught in this trap.

Nobody knows for sure why Biden dropped the Medicare negotiations proposal from the American Families Plan, even as he called for lawmakers to pass it this year on a bipartisan basis an unlikely prospect in his first address to Congress. The reporting has been circumspect.

But we do know the pharma industry has a massive war chest, refilled every year by member fees, and has promised to deploy it if any major drug pricing reform started moving through Congress. Drug manufacturers also enjoy their best public approval in years after delivering Covid-19 vaccines in record time.

Why go after the very industry that basically is our lifeline out of the pandemic? Monk said.

This is how the trap closes: When health care must pay for health care, the health care industry must take a hit in order to cover more people. That is something the industrys immense lobbying apparatus usually wants to stop, and given its influence in the halls of Congress and in the White House, that can make anybodys health care plan whether it costs $800 billion or $32 trillion a nonstarter.

Biden avoided this problem with the initial two-year expansion of the ACA subsidies in the American Rescue Plan by mostly not paying for it. But even in this age of deficit doves, the $200 billion to make that expansion, or any other major health care expansion, permanent would need to be paid for. That presents a massive political problem, even for Bidens more modest (compared with Sanderss) proposals.

It was quite easy to get the health care industry on board for temporarily increasing ACA premium help without any budgetary offset to pay for it, as was the case in the American Rescue Plan, said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation. Levitt framed that bills health care provisions as all winners, no losers.

As soon as there starts being pressure to pay for health care enhancements, he continued, it becomes a zero-sum game with losers as well as winners.

The health care industry can be persuaded that the trade-off is worth it. Its happened before.

The platonic ideal of this framework is the ACA itself, the 2010 law Biden says he wants to build on with this subsidy expansion and (eventually) a public option. About 80 percent of the ACA was covered by spending cuts (for Medicare payments to providers, for example) or new taxes (various new levies on pharma and health insurers and medical devices) targeted to the industry.

The industry bought into the law and didnt oppose its passage. It took the deal that is at the heart of this long-held tradition: The coverage expansion would mean more paying customers. It might take a trim in payment rates or on new taxes, but itd make up for it with more volume. And, as it turned out, more than 20 million people were covered by the law.

But the industry may not be willing to make the same kind of bargain with Biden because his proposals dont have the same appeal. The Medicare expansion is opposed by many hospitals and doctors Medicare pays lower rates than private health insurers; more people on Medicare means less reimbursement for them.

The industry opposes the public option, which would presumably set rates lower than private insurance so it could charge cheaper premiums, for the same reason. Considering more than half of Americas uninsured already qualify for Medicaid or the ACA, the public option is less a device for expanding coverage than a way to drive down health care costs. And that is exactly why the health care industry would fight fiercely to stop it.

The Biden administration still can, and has, taken steps to expand health coverage. An additional 4 million people qualify for ACA subsidies since Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law. Nearly 1 million people have signed up for insurance during a special open enrollment period Biden started shortly after taking office.

The administration is also bound by the rules and politics of the Senate. A public option may not be permissible under the budget reconciliation rules that allowed Democrats to move some legislation without any Republican votes. Some moderate Senate Democrats may be less enthused about the public option or even a Medicare expansion than some of their peers who are more progressive.

But America still has the highest uninsured rate in the developed world and the highest health care costs. So long as the health care industry wields a veto pen over any plan that would cut into its profits to address those problems, little is going to change.

Democrats will have to find a way to escape this trap.

Link:
Joe Biden is narrowing his health care plans to more Obamacare, not a public option. Heres why. - Vox.com

AUSTIN, Texas Democrats hoping for some encouraging signs in Texas did not find any on Saturday in a special election to fill a vacant congressional seat. Instead, they found themselves locked out of a runoff that will now see two Republicans battle for the seat in northern Texas.

The two Republicans Susan Wright, who was endorsed by President Donald J. Trump, and State Representative Jake Ellzey emerged as the top vote-getters in a 23-candidate, all-party special election to replace Mrs. Wrights husband, U.S. Representative Ron Wright, who this year became the first congressman to die of Covid-19.

Jana Lynne Sanchez, a Democrat who made a surprisingly strong showing for the seat in 2018 and was considered by many as a likely cinch for the runoff, came in a close third, leaving the two Republicans to fight for the seat that their party has controlled for nearly four decades.

Democrats who needed a strong turnout to be competitive did not get one. They were hoping for signs of weakness in the Republican brand because of the states disastrous response to the brutal winter storm in February or any signs of weariness with Mr. Trump, but they did not see that, either.

Michael Wood, a small-business man and Marine veteran who gained national attention as the only openly anti-Trump Republican in the field, picked up only 3 percent of the vote.

Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. When the seat is filled, Texas house delegation will be 23 Republicans and 13 Democrats.

The Republicans turned out and the Democrats didnt, said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Thats a critical takeaway. The party has to think very systematically about whats wrong and what they need to change in order to be successful.

Since 1983, Republicans have held seat, in Texas Sixth Congressional District, which includes mostly rural areas in three northern Texas counties and a sliver of the nations fourth-largest metropolitan region around Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington.

But growing numbers of Hispanics and African-Americans fueled Democrats hopes that they had a strong shot of at least getting into a runoff. Mr. Trump won the district by only 3 points in November. Ms. Sanchez, who grew up in the district and built a strong political organization, was widely portrayed as the lead contender in the field of 10 Democrats.

But in the end, she came up 354 votes short after the Democrats splintered the partys vote, and Mr. Ellzey nudged her aside for the runoff. Mrs. Wright won 19.2 percent of the vote to Mr. Ellzeys 13.8 percent. Ms. Sanchez got 13.4 percent of the vote.

The large field may have cost Ms. Sanchez a runoff spot, but in the end Republicans won 62 percent of the vote and Democrats 37 percent, not auspicious numbers for her hopes of winning if she did get in the runoff.

Democrats have come a long way toward competing in Texas but we still have a way to go, Ms. Sanchez said in a concession statement on Sunday morning.

She said: Well keep fighting for a healthier, equitable and prosperous Texas and to elect leaders who care about meeting the needs of Texans, although it wont happen in this district immediately.

The Republican runoff was already showing signs of being fought along familiar right-of-center turf.

Ms. Wrights general consultant, Matt Langston, assailed Mr. Ellzey, a former Navy pilot who was endorsed by former Gov. Rick Perry, as an opportunistic RINO a Republican in Name Only.

And one of her prominent supporters, David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth, which has spent more than $350,000 on mail, social media and texts against Mr. Ellzeys bid, on Sunday called on the second-place candidate to pull out of the race. He said it was more important for Republicans to unite behind Mrs. Wrights candidacy in advance of the critical midterm congressional races next year.

If he wants to unite, stop attacking, said Craig Murphy, Mr. Ellzeys spokesman, firmly rebuffing Mr. McIntoshs proposal. Mr. Murphy also denounced Mr. Langstons statement against his candidate as silly and insulting and described Mr. Ellzey as a guy who has been under enemy fire eight times.

The defeat in the special election in some respects evoked the 2020 elections in Texas, when Democrats believed that demographic changes put them in reach of a potential blue wave to possibly take over the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives and flip several congressional seats. Instead, the blue wave never washed ashore, and the House remains in Republicans hands by the same margin as before.

The Sixth District was once a Democratic stronghold, until Phil Gramm, formerly a conservative Democrat, switched party affiliations in 1983. The district has been a reliable Republican bastion ever since.

The seat came open in February after Mr. Wright, who had lung cancer, died after he contracted the coronavirus. His wife was an early front-runner to replace him, but her chances of outright victory narrowed after the field grew to 23 candidates: 11 Republicans, 10 Democrats, a Libertarian and an independent.

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For Democrats, Another Bad Election Night in Texas - The New York Times