The U.S. is no longer one of the 20 happiest countries. If you’re young, you probably know why.
Yuliya Talmazan – March 20, 2024
Happiness is a relative concept, but an annual index that tracks it in countries around the world has found that the United States and some Western European countries are falling in overall well-being because younger people are feeling less and less happy.
The U.S., in particular, dropped out of the top 20 for the first time, falling to 23rd place from 15th last year, driven by a large drop in the well-being of Americans under 30. The age disparity is stark: The U.S. ranks in the top 10 for those over 60, but for those under 30, it ranks 62nd, pulling down the overall score.
This makes the U.S., along with a handful of other countries, such as Canada, Germany and France, the global outliers — the report found that in many regions of the world, the young are still happier than the old.
The findings, announced Wednesday to mark the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness, are part of the World Happiness Report, which has been tracking well-being ratings around the world for more than a decade. It’s based on data collected by the research company Gallup and analysis by well-being academics led by the University of Oxford in the U.K.
Tuska 2023 (Vesa Moilanen / Sipa USA via Reuters file)
For the first time this year, the report gave separate rankings by age group, which in many cases vary widely from the overall happiness rankings for different nations. The report found that Lithuania topped the list for people under 30, while Denmark is the world’s happiest country for those aged 60 and older.
“We had picked up in recent years from scattered sources of data that child and youth well-being, particularly so in the United States, had seen a drop,” said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and behavioral science at Oxford, who is one of the editors of the report. “That has pushed us for the first time to really slice and dice the data by these age categories, which we normally don’t do.”
The finding that in many but not all regions of the world, the young are still happier than the old, is consistent with the long-standing paradigm that people are the happiest in their younger years.
“To my surprise, youth well-being going off a cliff in the United States and North America, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe and Great Britain, is really explaining why the United States, Canada and the U.K. are getting lower and lower in the general population rankings,” De Neve said. “So that’s really explaining it because it’s not the case that the middle-aged or the people that are above 60 are dropping. If anything, the above 60s in the U.S. would be No. 10.”
Well-being for people under 30 in the U.S. ranks below the Dominican Republic, and is in line with countries such as Malaysia and Russia. Canada’s unhappy youth rank 58, four spots above the U.S.
When it comes to the tanking youth happiness in the U.S., De Neve said there is not a single smoking gun, but it is likely due to a combination of many factors ranging from political polarization to overuse of social media to uncertainty about the future and growing economic inequality between generations, with people under 30 struggling to get onto the real estate ladder.
“It’s a very complex time for youth, with lots of pressures and a lot of demands for their attention,” he added.
Meanwhile, the report also found that in countries of central and Eastern Europe, younger people are much happier than the old. But these countries have also seen the largest increases in happiness, for all ages. It was one of the biggest insights, De Neve said, that could be a big learning point.
“I think we can try and dig into why the U.S. is coming down in terms of wellbeing and mental health, but we should also try and learn from what, say, Lithuania is doing well,” he said.
The rankings are based on self-assessments by people in more than 140 countries, in which they rate their life on a scale from zero to 10, with the best possible life for them as a 10. Among the predictors of people’s happiness are not just economic well-being, the report says, but also other factors including freedom, life expectancy and social support.
This year, Finland remained on top of the list, and was followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. The lowest happiness scores were registered in war-ravaged Afghanistan.
The consistently high performance of Scandinavian nations is likely down to “a high sense of contentment” and high levels of trust in the society, De Neve said.
“They are obviously wealthy nations,” he added. But more than the high gross domestic product per capita, he said, wealth is also equally distributed, “they are amongst the most equal societies, so everybody benefits from the wealth that also underpins a welfare state, which provides psychological stability.”
The report, created via a partnership involving Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the World Happiness Report’s editorial board, pointed to happiness decreasing in all age groups for the US. It also found a significant decline among young people, who are now the least happy age group.
“This is a big change from 2006-10, when the young were happier than those in the midlife groups, and about as happy as those aged 60 and over. For the young, the happiness drop was about three-quarters of a point, and greater for females than males,” the report said.
Among people below the age of 30 from 2021 to 2023, the US ranks 62nd in happiness. Meanwhile, among those who are 60 and above, the US ranks 10th.
“In comparing generations, those born before 1965 are, on average, happier than those born since 1980. Among millennials, evaluation of one’s own life drops with each year of age, while among boomers life satisfaction increases with age,” according to a summary of the report.
Finland, for the seventh straight year, has been ranked the world’s happiest country. It is followed by Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Israel. The least happy country is Afghanistan, the report said, followed by Lebanon, Lesotho, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The report’s rankings are not based on any index of factors including GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption. Instead, the scores are based on individuals’ own assessments of their lives, according to researchers.
Meet the wealthy boomer Americans fleeing to Portugal, Spain, and Italy out of fear of a Donald Trump presidency: ‘This country of mine has become intolerant’
Ryan Hogg – March 20, 2024
Fortune· Gabriel Mello—Getty Images
For years, aging Americans have looked south to Florida for their ideal retirement home to escape into retirement from their four-decade grinds in the U.S. workforce.
But wealthy citizens are increasingly considering a life across the Atlantic, with an unappealing showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump being labeled as the reason.
‘This country of mine has become intolerant’
David, a 65-year-old lawyer from Chicago, is going to Portugal on a scouting trip next month with a $500,000 budget in the hopes of finding a new second home on the Silver Coast, between Lisbon and Porto.
The lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous, citing concerns he might be harassed, said the political climate had turned so toxic that he was driven to seek peace across the Atlantic.
As the grandson of four immigrants who landed on Ellis Island, David has become particularly perturbed by debate in the U.S. around immigration.
“This country of mine has become intolerant,” David says.
“This country has always vilified people who are not like them. So we see these pictures of people on the south of the border, and they’re just people, but both sides use them for political reasons, and that’s just one example of the absolute intolerance, and it’s sad.”
The lawyer is also moving to escape the looming threat of gun violence.
“I told my wife about 15 years ago that I had made peace with the fact that I could be shot dead at any moment in time in this country,” David said.
David is hoping to close a deal before the U.S. elections in November, because he believes that if Trump secures a second term as President, demand for homes abroad could skyrocket.
Americans rushing abroad
The lawyer isn’t just going on a scouting trip for himself next month. He and his wife intend to earmark locations and properties for five of their other friends.
David’s and his friend’s politically motivated decision to start uncoupling themselves from their home country isn’t uncommon, according to Kylie Adamec, a real estate consultant for Casa Azul who is advising David and other Americans on their moves.
“People are not caring so much about the tax situation, they’re more concerned with what’s going to happen in the United States in the next couple of months. Come November with the election, people just want to have options set up,” Adamec told Fortune.
Last week, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were confirmed as the respective Republican and Democrat nominees for the U.S. presidency in a rematch of 2020.
If this year’s battle is anything like the last one, voters can expect an incredibly toxic election battle, something Adamec’s clients are well aware of.
“From what I can see, it’s, this is a first-time thing in terms of the decision of an election really being a determining factor in whether or not someone moves abroad, be it full-time or part-time.”
Adamec says it’s a mix of American buyers looking at property options in Portugal, but they are more left-leaning.
According to Marco Permunian, you can get a good sense of political instability in the U.S. simply by observing the number of people applying for Italian passports through his company, Italian Citizenship Assistance (ICA), at any given time.
Inquiries began to spike in 2016 following Trump’s election to the White House. They did so again in 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic and instability stoked by protests and riots following the murder of George Floyd, as well as after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.
As the U.S. gears up for a second gruesome showdown between Trump and Biden, it’s no surprise that ICA has seen inquiries triple since the end of last year.
The latest spike, though, is attributable to exhaustion on both sides of the political spectrum, Permunian says.
The majority of his clients are from the East Coast areas of New York, Pennsylvania, and Boston, but there are more dotted across the country in places like California and Texas.
He says demand for passports is often the first move for many in a long-term plan to seek a new home in Italy or elsewhere in the European Union, rather than a sign of imminent emigration.
“The majority is still not ready to move but is getting ready, just in case,” Permunian told Fortune.
The company mainly works with people between the ages of 35 and 65 who are looking for extra citizenship options.
That chimes with the latest data. The latest USA Wealth Report found a record number of Americans were looking abroad for residency and citizenship options as the political environment frayed.
Christopher Willis, managing director of citizenship and residency advisor Latitude Consultancy, is experiencing a 300% increase in client inquiries.
It means the smart money is going toward getting exit plans in place now before demand jumps further later in the year. Portugal and Spain are proving to be particularly popular European locations for Willis’s clients.
“People are not waiting for November. They’re getting their affairs in order now,” Willis says.
“So if things go sideways, they’ve already got the option to act on it as opposed to scrambling once the election is completed.”
Steven, who is also is also using a pseudonym as he is awaiting visa approval, is a New Yorker making the move to Portugal through Casa Azul. Having grown sick of New York City, he and his Brazilian wife are giving up their $3,500 rent in the Big Apple for a $2,100 per month three-bedroom home in Lisbon.
“It’s a great city if you have to still have ambition and drive,” Steven says of New York. “But if you want to downshift a little, it will just steamroll you.”
While the political climate isn’t the main reason for his move, Steven acknowledged that the U.S. political system had become “crazy.”
“Being back here is horrifying,” Steven said.
Europe’s own political toxicity
Americans escaping the U.S. in the event of a Trump presidency may find the grass isn’t necessarily greener across the pond.
Europe may appear a haven for U.S. expats tired of their polarized climate and growing threats of violence, but the continent is no longer the safe or mild-mannered haven it has been for so much of the post-World War Two era.
Trump has threatened to pull out of NATO if he is re-elected if “delinquent” European nations don’t pay an agreed 2% of their GDP towards membership in the bloc.
That leaves Europe strategically exposed, as leading figures from the Airbus CEO to European Commission chief Christine Lagarde have warned.
It is also more complicated than it once was for Americans to buy their place on the continent.
Portugal scrapped its golden visa program last year, which allowed foreigners to acquire residency and eventually citizenship in the country through the purchase of property. This set off a scramble to secure visas in the country before the scheme closed.
A higher level of investment, crucially not in real estate, is now the best option for wealthy foreigners.
There are fears that the elevation of right-wing parties into the country’s parliament could further intensify harmful rhetoric against immigrants, aping the kind of polarization that has become commonplace in the U.S.
In Italy, the ruling far-right party has made sweeping changes to the country’s cultural landscape and clamped down on immigration.
Casa Azul’s Adamec, though, said despite expecting inquiries about residency in Portugal to nosedive following the closure of the golden visa program, applications have remained steady, probably fueled by the U.S. election.
As for Europe’s own political toxicity, David isn’t feeling anywhere near as anxious as events in the U.S. have made him.
“They’re all kind of like baby Trumps, so I’m not going to worry about it,” David says of Europe’s intensifying political cauldron.
“Portugal’s always been a pretty liberal place. I’m not overly concerned.”
15 promises Donald Trump has made so far in his campaign for a second term
Piper Hudspeth Blackburn and Abby Turner – March 6, 2024
Former President Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican nominee, has made a number of promises on the campaign trail, including rolling back car pollution rules, building 10 new cities and appointing a special prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden and his family.
While some of Trump’s plans are lacking in detail, here are some of the policies he says he would enact if elected for a second term.
Immigration
Trump has made immigration and the border a central campaign issue, successfully pressuring Republicans to reject a major bipartisan border deal last month and making a trip to the southern border on February 29, where he touted his previous hard-line immigration policies.
In a Des Moines Register op-ed published roughly a week before winning the Iowa caucuses in January, Trump vowed to use the “Alien Enemies Act to remove known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the United States.”
“We will shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement — including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS,” he wrote.
In a video posted on Truth Social in late February before his border visit, Trump also promised to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
After the Israel-Hamas war began last October, Trump also promised to terminate the visas of “Hamas’ sympathizers.”
“We’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country, if that’s OK with you,” he added.
Drug cartels
The former president has also made waging “war” on drug cartels a priority for his second term. If elected, Trump said in his November 2022 campaign announcement that he would ask Congress to ensure that drug smugglers and human traffickers can receive the death penalty for their “heinous acts.”
Trump also vowed to “take down” drug cartels by imposing naval embargos on cartels, cutting off cartels’ access to global financial systems and using special forces within the Department of Defense to damage the cartels’ leadership.
Education
Trump announced plans in a September 2023campaign video to close the Department of Education and send “all education and education work and needs back to the states.”
“We want them to run the education of our children, because they’ll do a much better job of it,” he added.
The former president has also promised to “put parents back in charge and give them the final say” in education. In a January 2023 campaign video, the former president said he would give funding preferences and “favorable treatment” to schools that allow parents to elect principals, abolish teacher tenure for K-12 teachers, use merit pay to incentivize quality teaching and cut the number of school administrators, such as those overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Trump also said in that campaign video that he would cut funding for schools that teach critical race theory and gender ideology. In a later speech, Trump said he would bring back the 1776 Commission, which was launched in his previous administration to “teach our values and promote our history and our traditions to our children.”
The former president said he would charge the Department of Justice and the Department of Education with investigating civil rights violations of race-based discrimination in schools while also removing “Marxists” from the Department of Education. A second Trump administration would pursue violations in schools of both the Constitution’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, which prohibit the government establishment of religion and protect a citizen’s right to practice their own religion, he said.
Health care
Last November, Trump promised to replace the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, in a series of posts on Truth Social. A Trump-backed effort to repeal andreplace Obamacare failed in 2017 after three Republicans senators joined with Democrats to vote against the bill.
“Getting much better Healthcare than Obamacare for the American people will be a priority of the Trump Administration,” he said.
“It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH. America will have one of the best Healthcare Plans anywhere in the world. Right now it has one of the WORST!,” he continued. He also doubled down on his vow during a speech in early January.
Trump also vowed in a June 2023 campaign video to reinstate his previous executive order so that the US government would pay the same price for pharmaceuticals as other developed countries. Some of the former president’s pharmaceutical policies were overturned by Biden.
Gender care
“I will revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,” Trump said at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference last March.
Trump added in a campaign video that he would issue an executive order instructing federal agencies to cut programs that promote gender transitions, as well as asking Congress to stop the use of federal dollars to promote and pay for gender-affirming procedures. The former president added that his administration would not allow hospitals and health care providers to meet the federal health and safety standards for Medicaid and Medicare if they provide chemical or physical gender-affirming care to youth.
Justice system
Trump has promised to use the Department of Justice to attack critics and former allies. In several videos and speeches, the former president also laid out plans to gut the current justice system by firing “radical Marxist prosecutors that are destroying America.”
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said in June 2023 remarks. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”
Trump said in a campaign video last year that he would reinstate a 2020 executive order to remove “rogue” bureaucrats and propose a constitutional amendment for term limits on members of Congress.
To address what he labeled the “disturbing” relationship between technology platforms and the government, the former president said in a January 2023 video that he would enact a seven-year cooling off period before employees at agencies such as the FBI or CIA can work for platforms that oversee mass user data.
Trump added in multiple campaignreleases that he would task the Justice Department with investigating online censorship, ban federal agencies from “colluding” to censor citizens and suspend federal money to universities participating in “censorship-supporting activities.”
In a September 2023 speech at the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington, DC, Trump also touted plans to continue appointing conservative judges.
“I will once again appoint rock-solid conservative judges to do what they have to do in the mold of Justices Antonin Scalia; Samuel Alito, a great gentleman; and another great gentleman, Clarence Thomas,” he said.
Trump has also pledged to “appoint U.S. Attorneys who will be the polar opposite of the Soros District Attorneys and others that are being appointed throughout the United States.”
In a September 2023 speech in Washington, DC, Trump also announced that he would appoint a task force to review the cases of people he claimed had been “unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration.” Trump noted that he wanted to “study the situation very quickly, and sign their pardons or commutations on day one.”
It’s a move that could lead to potential pardons of many rioters from the January 6, 2021, insurrection – which he suggested he would do at a CNN town hall in May 2023.
Crime
Trump said in two February 2023 campaignvideos that if “Marxist” prosecutors refuse to charge crimes and surrender “our cities to violent criminals,” he “will not hesitate to send in federal law enforcement to restore peace and public safety.”
Trump added that he would instruct the Department of Justice to open civil rights investigations into “radical left” prosecutors’ offices that engaged in racial enforcement of the law, encourage Congress to use their legal authority over Washington, DC, to restore “law and order” and overhaul federal standards of disciplining minors to address rising crimes like carjackings.
Addressing policies made in what Trump calls the “Democrats’ war on police,” the former president vowed in a campaign video that he would pass a “record investment” to hire and retrain police, strengthen protections like qualified immunity, increase penalties for assaulting law enforcement officers and deploy the National Guard when local law enforcement “refuses to act.”
The former president added that he would require law enforcement agencies that receive money from his funding investment or the Department of Justice to use “proven common sense” measures such as stop-and-frisk.
Foreign policy
Trump has continued his attacks against member countries of NATO, a European and North American defense alliance. At a South Carolina rally last month,Trump said he would not abide by the alliance’s collective-defense clause and would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” if a member country didn’t meet spending guidelines.
“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”
The former president has also previously pledged to end the war in Ukraine, though he’s offered no details on how he would do so.“Shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Trump said at a New Hampshire campaign event last year, adding in another speech that it would take him “no longer than one day” to settle the war if elected.
Trump further addressed his strategy of stopping the “never-ending wars” by vowing to remove “warmongers,” “frauds” and “failures in the senior ranks of our government,” and replace them with national security officials who would defend America’s interests. The former president added in a campaign video that he would stop lobbyists and government contractors from pushing senior military officials toward war.
Trump said in multiple campaignvideos that he would spearhead an effort to build so-called “Freedom Cities” to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”
In his plan, the federal government would charter 10 new cities on federal land, awarding them to areas with the best development proposals. The former president said in a campaign video that the Freedom Cities would bring the return of US manufacturing, economic opportunity, new industries and affordable living.
In the March 2023 video, Trump added that the US under a second Trump administration would lead in efforts to “develop vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for families and individuals,” not letting China lead “this revolution in air mobility.” The former president said these airborne vehicles would change commerce and bring wealth into rural communities.
Electric vehicles
Trump has promised to roll back new car pollution rules at the Environmental Protection Agency that could require electric vehicles to account for up to two-thirds of new cars sold in the US by 2032. Biden’s electrical vehicle-related policies, Trump claimed at a Michigan rally last September, “spell the death of the US auto industry.”
“On day one, I will terminate Joe Biden’s electrical vehicle mandate, and I will cancel every job-killing regulation that is crushing American autoworkers,” Trump added.
Energy
Trump has promised to reduce energy prices by increasing domestic production. In several campaign appearances, he has laid out plans to end delays in federal drilling permits and leases.
“We’re going to ‘drill, baby, drill’ right away,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, during a victory speech after winning the state’s Republican caucusesin January.
At a South Carolina rally in February, he pledged to remove limits on American natural gas exports.
Trade
At the same rally in South Carolina,Trump pledged to impose “stiff penalties on China and other trade abusers.”
“It’s called you screw us, and we screw you,” Trump said.
Under his proposed “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act,” the former president said if other countries impose tariffs on the US, the country would impose “a reciprocal, identical” tariff right back.
It was the same pledge Trump made in a campaign video in 2023: to impose the same tariffs that other countries may impose on the US on those countries. The goal, the former president said then, is to get other countries to drop their tariffs.
As part of a larger strategy to bring jobs back into the US, Trump also said he would implement his so-called “America First” trade agenda if elected. By setting universal baseline tariffs on a majority of foreign goods, the former president said Americans would see taxes decrease as tariffs increase. His proposal also includes a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, as well as stopping China from buying up America and stopping the investment of US companies in China.
The former president has particularly focused on China, vowing in a January 2023 campaign video to restrict Chinese ownership of US infrastructure such as energy, technology, telecommunications and natural resources. Trump also said he would force the Chinese to sell current holdings that may put national security at risk. “Economic security is national security,” he said.
Economy
Trump has promised to extend the cuts from his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, notably the TCJA’s individual income tax breaks. The former president has also talked about reducing the corporate tax rate from the current 21% to 15%.
“I will make the Trump tax cuts the largest tax cut in history,” the former president said last month at the Black Conservative Federation’s Honors Gala in South Carolina. “We’ll make it permanent and give you a new economic boom.”
Trump has also pledged to repeal Biden’s tax hikes, “immediately tackle” inflation and end what he called Biden’s “war” on American energy production.
Second Amendment
“I will take Biden’s executive order directing the federal government to target the firearms industry, and I will rip it up and throw it out on day one,” Trump said at the 2023 National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action leadership forum last April.
The former president also promised in the speech that the government would not infringe on citizens’ Second Amendment rights and that he would push Congress to pass a concealed carry reciprocity.
Equity
“I will create a special team to rapidly review every action taken by federal agencies under Biden’s ‘equity’ agenda that will need to be reversed. We will reverse almost all of them,” Trump said in a campaign video.
Trump added in multiple campaignvideos that he would revoke Biden’s equity executive order that required federal agencies to deliver equitable outcomes in policy and conduct equity training. If elected, Trump said he would also fire staffers hired to implement Biden’s policy, and then reinstate his 2020 executive order banning racial and sexual stereotyping in the federal government.
CNN’s Tami Luhby, Kate Sullivan and Kristin Holmes contributed to this report.
Anthropologist: CPAC displays how Trump’s base believes he is a savior
Alexander Hinton, Rutgers University – February 26, 2024
Former President Donald Trump acknowledges applause as he arrives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday. Thousands of conservative activists, elected officials and pundits gathered to hear speakers with this year’s theme “CPAC: Where Globalism Goes to Die.” Photo by Mike Theiler/UPI
Feb. 26 (UPI) — What is happening in the hearts of former President Donald Trump’s supporters?
The event began on Feb. 21, in National Harbor, Maryland, with Steve Bannon’s routine, untrue banter about how President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, and it peaked with an angry speech from Trump three days later. In between, I sat among the MAGA masses listening to speaker after speaker express outrage about American decline — and their hope for Trump’s reelection.
Everywhere I turned, people wore MAGA regalia — hats, pins, logos and patches, many with Trump’s likeness. I spent breaks in the exhibition hall, which featured a Jan. 6 insurrection-themed pinball machine featuring “Stop the Steal,” “Political Prisoners” and “Babbitt Murder” rally modes and a bus emblazoned with Trump’s face. Admirers scribbled messages on the bus such as, “We have your back” and “You are anointed and appointed by God to be the President.”
Those on the left who dismiss the CPAC as a gathering of MAGA crazies and racists who support a wannabe dictator do not understand that, from this far-right perspective, there are compelling and even urgent reasons to support Trump. Indeed, they believe, as conservative politician Tulsi Gabbard stated in her CPAC speech on Feb. 22, that the left’s claims about Trump’s authoritarianism are “laughable.” This is because CPAC attendees falsely perceive President Joe Biden as the one who is attacking democracy.
Here are my top three takeaways from CPAC about Trump supporters’ current priorities and thinking.
1. There’s a Reagan dinner – but CPAC is Trump’s party
Former President Ronald Reagan runs in CPAC’s DNA. Reagan spoke at the inaugural CPAC in 1974 and went on to speak there a dozen more times.
In 2019, the conservative advocacy group the American Political Union, which hosts CPAC, published a book of Reagan’s speeches with commentary by conservative luminaries. In the preface, Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Political Union, says he often asks himself, “What would Reagan do?”
CPAC’s pomp gala, held Friday, is still called the “Ronald Reagan Dinner.” But Reagan is otherwise hardly mentioned at the conference.
Reagan’s ideas of American exceptionalism have been supplanted by Trump’s populist story of apocalyptic decline. Reagan’s folksy tone, relative moderation and clear quips are long gone, replaced by fury, grievance and mean-spirited barbs.
2. There’s a method to the madness
Many commentators and critics, including groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, view CPAC as a frightening or bizarre gathering of white nationalists who have a nativist agenda.
Indeed, the U.S.-Mexico border was a constant topic at this year’s CPAC, which included controversial anti-immigrant speakers such as the head of Spain’s far-right Vox party and a representative of Hungary, whose leader stated at the 2022 CPAC that Europeans should not become “mixed-race.” Hungary will also host a CPAC meeting in April 2024.
Many of the sessions have alarming titles like, “Burning Down the House,” “Does Government Even Matter” and “Going Full Hungarian.” There are right-wing, populist speakers like Bannon and U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Overall, the program is informed by a conservative logic that largely boils down to God, family, tradition, law and order, defense and freedom.
Of these, God looms largest. As a result, CPAC’s hardcore conservative Christian orientation is anti-abortion rights, homophobic and oriented toward traditional family structure and what it considers morality.
Schlapp co-wrote a book in 2022 that warns of the dangers of “evil forces” — what he considers to be progressives, the radical left and American Marxists. Schlapp’s book title even dubs these forces “the desecrators.” Such inflammatory language is frequently used at CPAC, including by Trump during his Saturday speech.
3. Trump believers think he is their savior
CPAC’s love of Trump is shocking to many on the left. But at CPAC, Trump is viewed as America’s savior.
According to his base, Trump delivered on abortion by appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. They believe that, despite evidence of mixed results, Trump had wide successes at securing the border and creating jobs. For example, during Trump’s time as president, the U.S. economy lost nearly 3 million jobs, and apprehensions of undocumented migrants at the border rose.
Trump’s CPAC speech, like his campaign speeches, harped on such supposed achievements — as well as Biden’s alleged “destruction” of the country.
Conservatives roll their eyes at liberal fears of Trump the despot. Like all of us, they acknowledge, Trump has flaws. They say that some of his comments about women and minorities are cringeworthy, but not evidence of an underlying misogyny and hatefulness, as many critics contend.
Ultimately, CPAC conservatives believe Trump is their best bet to defeat the radical-left “desecrators” who seek to thwart him at every turn — including, as they constantly complained at CPAC, social media bans, “fake news” takedowns, rigged voting, bogus lawsuits, unfair justice, and lies about what they call the Jan. 6, 2021, “protest.“
Despite these hurdles, Trump battles on toward the Republican nomination for presidential candidate — the hero who CPAC conservatives view as the last and best hope to save the USA.The Conversation
Biden considering major new executive actions for migrant crisis
Myah Ward – February 21, 2024
The Biden administration is considering a string of new executive actions and federal regulations in an effort to curb migration at the U.S. southern border, according to three people familiar with the plans.
The proposals under consideration would represent a sweeping new approach to an issue that has stymied the White House since its first days in office and could potentially place the president at odds with key constituencies.
Among the ideas under discussion include using a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act to bar migrants from seeking asylum in between U.S. ports of entry. The administration is also discussing tying that directive to a trigger — meaning that it would only come into effect after a certain number of illegal crossings took place, said the three people, who were granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
A trigger mechanism was part of a bipartisan Senate border deal that never reached the floor earlier this month. During the deal’s construction, President Joe Biden repeatedly said it would have given him the authority to “shut down” the border.
The administration is also discussing ways to make it harder for migrants to pass the initial screening for asylum seekers, essentially raising the “credible fear standard,” as well as ways to quickly deport others who don’t meet those elevated asylum standards. Two of the people said the policy announcements could come as soon as next week ahead of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on March 7.
The slate of policies could allow the administration officials to fill some of the void left after congressional Republicans killed a bipartisan border deal in the Senate. But it would also open up the administration to criticism that it always had the tools at its disposal to more fully address the migrant crisis but waited to use them.
No final decisions have been made about what executive actions, if any, could be taken, an administration official said, speaking about internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. Administrations often explore a number of options, the official said, though it doesn’t necessarily mean the policies will come to fruition.
The consideration of new executive action comes as the White House tries to turn the border deal failure into a political advantage for the president. It also comes amid growing concern among Democrats that the southern border presents a profound election liability for the party. Officials hope that policy announcements will drive down numbers of migrants coming to the border and demonstrate to voters that they’re exhausting all options to try to solve the problem as peak migration season quickly approaches.
“The Administration spent months negotiating in good faith to deliver the toughest and fairest bipartisan border security bill in decades because we need Congress to make significant policy reforms and to provide additional funding to secure our border and fix our broken immigration system,” said White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández.
“No executive action, no matter how aggressive, can deliver the significant policy reforms and additional resources Congress can provide and that Republicans rejected,” he continued.
The three people familiar with the planning cautioned that the details of proposed actions remain murky and that the impact of the policies — particularly the asylum ban — is also dependent on the specific language of the federal regulation, they said. For example, the Senate bill included exceptions for unaccompanied minors and people who meet the requirements of the United Nations Convention Against Torture rules.
There are other complications as well. The implementation of any action from the White House would come without the funding and resources that could make implementation easier, though the administration is looking into ways to unlock additional funding. The actions would likely face legal challenges as well.
The Trump administration repeatedly used Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to aggressively shape the immigration system. In late 2018, President Donald Trump signed a policy that temporarily barred migrants who tried to illegally cross into the U.S. outside of official ports of entry. It was quickly blocked by a federal judge in California. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the decision, which was then upheld by the Supreme Court.
The policies, once announced, will likely be met with steep backlash from immigration advocates who will claim the president is once again walking back on his campaign promises to rebuild a humane immigration system and protect the right to asylum.
Single family homes in the Elm Trails development near San Antonio, Texas, on Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024. (Josh Huskin/The New York Times)
Robert Lanter lives in a 600-square-foot house that can be traversed in five seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet. He doesn’t have a coffee table in the living room because it would obstruct the front door. When relatives come to visit, Lanter says jokingly, but only partly, they have to tour one at time.
Each of these details amounts to something bigger, for Lanter’s life and the U.S. housing market: a house under $300,000, something increasingly hard to find. That price allowed Lanter, a 63-year-old retired nurse, to buy a new single-family home in a subdivision in Redmond, Oregon, about 30 minutes outside Bend, where he is from and which is, along with its surrounding area, one of Oregon’s most expensive housing markets.
Lanter’s house could easily fit on a flatbed truck, and it is dwarfed by the two-story suburban homes that prevail on the blocks around him. But, in fact, there are even smaller homes in his subdivision, Cinder Butte, which was developed by a local builder called Hayden Homes. Some of his neighbors live in houses that total just 400 square feet — a 20-by-20-foot house attached to a 20-by-20-foot garage.
This is not a colony of “tiny houses,” popular among minimalists and aesthetes looking to simplify their lives. For Lanter and his neighbors, it’s a chance to hold on to ownership.
Lanter, who is recently divorced, came back to central Oregon from a condominium in Portland only to discover that home prices had surged beyond his reach. He has owned several larger homes over the years and said he began his recent search looking for a three-bedroom house.
“I did not want to rent,” he said after a five-minute tour of his “media room” (a small desk with a laptop) and bedroom (barely fits a queen). After being an owner for 40 years, the idea of being a tenant felt like a backslide.
And after living on the 17th floor of a Portland condominium, he had ruled out attached and high-rise buildings, which he described as a series of rules and awkward interactions that made him feel as though he never really owned the place.
There was the time he sold a sofa, and the front desk attendant scolded him for moving it down the elevator without alerting management a day in advance. Or the times he came home to find someone parked in the spot he owned and paid property taxes on. Try to imagine a random driver parking in a house’s driveway, he said — there’s no way.
A single-family home means “less people’s hands in your life,” Lanter said.
He wanted the four unshared walls of the American idyll, even if those walls had minimal space between them and were a couch length from his neighbor.
A Chance at Ownership
Several colliding trends — economic, demographic and regulatory — have made smaller units like Lanter’s the future of American housing, or at least a more significant part of it. Over the past decade, as the cost of housing exploded, homebuilders have methodically nipped their dwellings to keep prices in reach of buyers. The downsizing accelerated last year, when the interest rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage reached a two-decade high, just shy of 8%.
Mortgage rates have fallen since, and sales, especially of new homes, are beginning to thaw from the anemic pace of last year. Even so, a move toward smaller, affordable homes — in some cases smaller than a studio apartment — seems poised to outlast the mortgage spike, reshaping the housing market for years to come and changing notions of what a middle-class life looks like.
“This is the front end of what we are going to see,” said Ken Perlman, a managing principal at John Burns Research and Consulting.
Extremely small homes have long been an object of curiosity and fodder for internet content; their tight proportions seem to say large things about their occupants. On social media and blogs, influencers swipe at American gluttony and extol the virtues of a life with less carbon and clutter than the standard two-car suburb.
Now, in the same way décor trends make their way from design magazines to Ikea, mini homes are showing up in the kinds of subdivisions and exurbs where buyers used to travel for maximum space.
The shift is a response to conditions that are found in cities across America: Neighborhoods that used to be affordable are being gentrified, while new condominiums and subdivisions mostly target the upper end of the market, endangering the supply of “starter homes” in reach of first-time buyers. That developers are addressing this conundrum with very small homes could be viewed as yet another example of middle-class diminishment. But buyers say it has helped them get on the first rung of the housing market.
“They should help out more people that are young like us to buy houses,” said Caleb Rodriguez, a 22-year-old in San Antonio.
Rodriguez recently moved into a new community outside San Antonio called Elm Trails, which was developed by Lennar Corp., one of the country’s largest homebuilders. His house sits in a line of mini dwellings, the smallest of which is just 350 square feet.
On a recent evening after work, neighbors were walking dogs and chatting along a row of beige, gray and olive-green two-story homes of the same shape. The development has a pond where residents picnic and catch bass and catfish. The houses do not have garages, and their driveways are wide enough for one vehicle or two motorcycles — proportions that pushed the sale prices to well under $200,000.
“I wanted to own, and this was the cheapest I could get,” said Rodriguez, who moved in this month and works at a poultry processing plant in nearby Seguin, Texas. He paid $145,000 and hopes the house can be a step toward wealth building. Maybe in a few years he will move and rent it out, Rodriguez said.
Homes under 500 square feet are not taking over anytime soon: They are less than 1% of the new homes built in America, according to Zonda, a housing data and consulting firm. Even Lanter, who evangelizes about his newly low heating bill and the freedom of shedding stuff, said he would have preferred something bigger, around 800 square feet, if he could find it.
While these floor plans might be an edge-case offering reserved for certain kinds of buyers — “Divorced … divorced … really divorced,” Lanter said as he pointed to the small homes around him — they are part of a clear trend. Various surveys from private consultants and organizations like the National Association of Home Builders, along with interviews with architects and developers, all show a push toward much smaller designs.
“Their existence is telling,” said Ali Wolf, chief economist of Zonda. “All the uncertainty over the past few years has just reinforced the desire for homeownership, but land and material prices have gone up too much. So something has to give, and what builders are doing now is testing the market and asking what is going to work.”
Builders are substituting side yards for backyards, kitchen bars for dining rooms. Suburban neighborhoods have had a boom in adjoined townhouses, along with small-lot single family homes that often have shared yards and no more than a few feet between them — a kind of mash-up of the suburb and the urban rowhouse.
The great compression is being encouraged by state and local governments. To reduce housing costs, or at least keep them from rising so fast, governments around the country have passed hundreds of new bills that make it easier for builders to erect smaller units at greater densities. Some cities and states, like Oregon, have essentially banned single-family zoning rules that for generations defined the suburban form.
These new rules have been rolled out gradually over years and with varying degrees of effectiveness. What has changed recently is that builders are much more willing to push smaller dwellings because they have no other way to reach a large number of buyers.
“There is a market opportunity and people are using it,” said Michael Andersen, a senior researcher at Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank focused on housing and sustainability.
Big House on a Little Lot
American homes have long been larger on average than those in other developed countries. For most of the past century, the country’s appetite for size has only grown.
The Cape Cods in Levittown, New York — often considered the model post-World War II suburb — were typically about 750 square feet, roomy for a one-bedroom apartment but small for a free-standing house with two bedrooms. Today, though, the median American home size is about 2,200 square feet, up from around 1,500 in the 1960s. Lot sizes have remained more or less the same, which means the typical home is built to maximize the size of the kitchen and bedrooms even as its yard contracts.
The expansion came despite a profound shift in household composition. Over the past half-century, America has gone from a country in which the predominant homebuyer was a nuclear family with about three children to one in which singles, empty nesters and couples without children have become a much larger share of the population. Meanwhile, housing costs shot up in recent years as cities around the nation grappled with a persistent housing shortage and a surge in demand from millennial and Gen Z buyers.
This has created a mismatched market in which members of the Baby Boom generation are disproportionately living in larger homes without children, while many millennial couples with children are in smaller houses or in rental apartments, struggling to buy their first home.
Even buyers who are willing to move across state lines are finding that affordable housing markets are increasingly hard to find. In the Bend area where Lanter lives, housing costs have been pushed up by out-of-state buyers, many from California, who have flocked to the area to buy second homes or work there remotely.
The influx of money has helped raise the median home price to almost $700,000 from a little over $400,000 in 2020, according to Redfin. Driving through the downtown on a snowy afternoon recently, Deborah Flagan, a vice president at Hayden Homes, pointed left and right at storefronts that used to be boarded and are now part of a vibrant ecosystem of retailers that includes numerous high-end coffee shops, a “foot spa” and a bar where people drink craft beer and throw axes at wall-mounted targets.
The upscaling extends well beyond downtown to adjacent neighborhoods, where the small-footprint “mill houses” that once served a blue-collar workforce now sit on land that is so valuable they are being slowly erased by two-story moderns with seven-figure sales prices. Toward the end of the snowy driving tour, Flagan pointed toward one of those old mill houses — a compact ranch-style home with fading yellow paint and a white picket fence pocked with broken boards. She estimated it was no more than 800 square feet, and framed it as an example of the small and affordably priced housing whose stock needs to be rebuilt.
“What we are doing now is what they were doing then,” she said.
Four Walls, Close Together
Hayden builds about 2,000 homes a year throughout the Pacific Northwest. Its business model is to deliver middle-income housing that local workers can afford, Flagan said, and it does this by skipping larger cities like Portland and Seattle in favor of lower-cost exurbs like Redmond (where the company is based).
Like a lot of builders, Hayden has spent the past few years whittling back sizes on its bread-and-butter offering of one- and two-story homes between 1,400 and 2,500 square feet. But because its buyers are so price-sensitive, it decided to go further. After rates began rising, Hayden redesigned a portion of Cinder Butte — the Redmond subdivision where Lanter lives — for homes between 400 and 880 square feet.
Most of Cinder Butte looks like any subdivision anywhere: A mix of one- and two-story homes that have faux exterior shutters and fill out their lots. The corner where Lanter lives is strikingly different, however, with a line of cinched homes that front the main road into the development and have driveways in a back alley.
The alley is where neighbors say hi and bye, Lanter said. And because nobody has much space, people often throw parties in their garages.
The smaller houses sold well, so Hayden has now expanded on the idea. It recently began a new development in Albany, Oregon, in which a third of the 176 homes are planned to be under 1,000 square feet. “Our buyers would rather live in a small home than rent,” Flagan said.
A decade ago, Jesse Russell was a former reality TV producer looking to get started in real estate. He had just moved back to Bend (his hometown) from Los Angeles, and began with a plot of two dozen 500-square-foot cottages sprinkled around a pond and common gardens. When he pitched it at community meetings, “the overwhelming sentiment was, ‘Nobody is going to live in a house that small,’” he said.
Then the units sold out, and his investors nearly doubled their money in two years.
Russell’s company, Hiatus Homes, has since built about three dozen more homes that range from 400 square feet to 900 square feet, and he has 100 more in development — a thriving business. How does he feel about subdivision builders’ getting into a business that used to belong to smaller companies like his?
“I love it!” he said. “I hope that at some point a tiny house just becomes another thing. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a duplex, that’s a townhouse, that’s a single-family house, and that over there is a cottage.’ It just becomes another type of housing you get to select.”
Has the planet warmed more than we thought? Ocean sponges might be telling us something
By Seth Borenstein – February 5, 2024
This undated image provided by Amos Winter shows a sponge from the Caribbean. This sponge, a simple animal that filters water, and a handful of other centuries-old sponges are causing some scientists to think human-caused climate change began sooner and has heated the world more than they thought. Many sponge species live long, and as they grow they record the conditions of the environment around them in their skeletons. (Courtesy of Amos Winter via AP)
This undated image provided by Amos Winter shows a sponge from the Caribbean that has been cut. This sponge, a simple animal that filters water, and a handful of other centuries-old sponges are causing some scientists to think human-caused climate change began sooner and has heated the world more than they thought. Many sponge species live long, and as they grow they record the conditions of the environment around them in their skeletons. (Courtesy of Amos Winter via AP)
A man walks past an abandoned canoe at the Sau reservoir amid a drought in Vilanova de Sau, north of Barcelona, Spain, Jan. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti File)
A pedestrian uses an umbrella to shield against the sun while passing through Times Square as temperatures rise, July 27, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
A boy rests under a tree while watching the sun set as triple-digit heat indexes continue in the Midwest, Aug. 20, 2023, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)
Beachgoers flock to Ipanema beach to beat the extreme heat in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sept. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado, File)
A handful of centuries-old sponges from deep in the Caribbean are causing some scientists to think human-caused climate change began sooner and has heated the world more than they thought.
They calculate that the world has already gone past the internationally approved target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, hitting 1.7 degrees (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) as of 2020. They analyzed six of the long-lived sponges — simple animals that filter water — for growth records that document changes in water temperature, acidity and carbon dioxide levels in the air, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature Climate Change.
Other scientists were skeptical of the study’s claim that the world has warmed that much more than thought. But if the sponge calculations are right, there are big repercussions, the study authors said.
“The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate changes is being brought forward by at least a decade,” study lead author Malcolm McCulloch, a marine geochemist at the University of Western Australia. “Basically, time’s running out.”
“We have a decade less than we thought,” McCulloch told The Associated Press. “It’s really a diary of — what’s the word? — impending disaster.”
In the past several years, scientists have noted more extreme and harmful weather — floods, storms, droughts and heat waves — than they had expected for the current level of warming. One explanation for that would be if there was more warming than scientists had initially calculated, said study co-author Amos Winter, a paleo oceanographer at Indiana State University. He said this study also supports the theory that climate change is accelerating, proposed last year by former NASA top scientist James Hansen.
“This is not good news for global climate change as it implies more warming,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who was not part of the study.
Many sponge species live long, and as they grow they record the conditions of the environment around them in their skeletons. Scientists have long used sponges along with other proxies — tree rings, ice cores and coral — that naturally show the record of changes in the environment over centuries. Doing so helps fill in data from before the 20th century.
Sponges — unlike coral, tree rings and ice cores — get water flowing from all over through them so they can record a larger area of ecological change, Winter and McCulloch said.
They used measurements from a rare species of small and hard-shelled sponges to create a temperature record for the 1800s that differs greatly from the scientifically accepted versions used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The study finds that the mid-1800s were about half a degree Celsius cooler than previously thought, with warming from heat-trapping gases kicking in about 80 years earlier than the measurements the IPCC uses. IPCC figures show warming kicking in just after 1900.
It makes sense that the warming started earlier than the IPCC says because by the mid-1800s the Industrial Revolution had begun and carbon dioxide was being spewed into the air, said McCulloch and Winter. Carbon dioxide and other gases from the burning of fossil fuels are what causes climate change, scientists have established.
Winter and McCulloch said these rusty orange long-lived sponges — one of them was more than 320 years old when it was collected — are special in a way that makes them an ideal measuring tool, better than what scientists used in the mid- to late 1800s.
“They are cathedrals of history, of human history, recording carbon dioxide in the the atmosphere, temperature of the water and pH of the water,” Winter said.
“They’re beautiful,” he said. “They’re not easy to find. You need a special team of divers to find them.”
That’s because they live 100 to 300 feet deep (33 meters to 98 meters) in the dark, Winter said.
The IPCC and most scientists use temperature data for the mid-1800s that came from ships whose crews would take temperature readings by lowering wooden buckets to dip up water. Some of those measurements could be skewed depending on how the collection was done — for example, if the water was collected near a warm steamship engine. But the sponges are more accurate because scientists can track regular tiny deposits of calcium and strontium on the critters’ skeleton. Warmer water would lead to more strontium compared to calcium, and and cooler water would lead to higher proportions of calcium compared to strontium, Winter said.
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t part of the study, has long disagreed with the IPCC’s baseline and thinks warming started earlier. But he was still skeptical of the study’s findings.
“In my view it begs credulity to claim that the instrumental record is wrong based on paleo-sponges from one region of the world. It honestly doesn’t make any sense to me,” Mann said.
In a news briefing, Winter and McCulloch repeatedly defended the use of sponges as an accurate proxy for world temperature changes. They said except for the 1800s, their temperature reconstruction based on sponges matches global records from instruments and other proxies like coral, ice cores and tree rings.
And even though these sponges are only in the Caribbean, McCulloch and Winter said they are a good representation for the rest of the world because they’re at a depth that doesn’t get too affected by warm and cold cycles of El Nino and La Nina, and the water matches well with global ocean temperatures, McCulloch and Winter said.
Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who also wasn’t part of the sponge study, said even if the McCulloch team is right about a cooler baseline in the 1800s that shouldn’t really change the danger levels that scientists set in their reports. That’s because the danger levels “were not tied to the absolute value of preindustrial temperatures” but more about how much temperatures changed from that time, he said.
Although the study stopped at 2020 with 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) in warming since pre-industrial times, a record hot 2023 pushes that up to 1.8 degrees (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit), McCulloch said.
“The rate of change is much faster than we thought,” McCulloch said. “We’re heading into very dangerous high-risk scenarios for the future. And the only way to stop this is to reduce emissions. Urgently. Most urgently.”
Teresa de Miguel contributed to this report from Mexico City.
Why Are Americans Wary While the Economy Is Healthy? Look at Nevada.
Peter S. Goodman – February 5, 2024
Nevada is dependent on a single industry — casino resorts and the hospitality trade — for roughly one-fourth of its jobs. (Bridget Bennett/The New York Times)
LAS VEGAS — Toni Irizarry recognizes that the economy has improved. Compared with the first wave of the pandemic, when Las Vegas went dark, and joblessness soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression, these are days of relative normalcy.
Irizarry, 64, oversees a cafe at the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a property just off the Las Vegas Strip that caters mostly to locals. Guests have returned, filling the blackjack and roulette tables amid the cacophony of jingling slot machines — the sound of money.
She started in the hospitality industry busing tables when she was only 16. Her paychecks have allowed her to purchase a home, raise three children and buy each of them their first car. But as she contemplates the future, she cannot shake a sense of foreboding.
The outlook of people like Irizarry could be crucial in determining who occupies the White House. Nevada is one of six battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome of November’s presidential election. Its economic centerpiece, Las Vegas, was constructed on dreams of easy money. That proved a winning proposition for generations of working people, yielding middle-class paychecks for bartenders, restaurant servers, casino dealers and maids. Yet over the last two decades, a series of shocks have eroded confidence.
First, a speculative bonanza in real estate went spectacularly wrong, turning the city into the epicenter of a national foreclosure crisis. The Great Recession inflicted steep layoffs on the hospitality industry, demolishing the notion that gambling was immune to downturns. Then in 2020, the pandemic turned Las Vegas into a ghost town.
“There is that sense of the unknown,” Irizarry said. “People are scared. They think, ‘If this could happen, which we never ever had before, what else could happen?’”
That the fate of the 2024 presidential election could hinge on economic sentiments is widely taken as a given among political operatives.
In the battleground states, 57% of registered voters identified the economy as the most important issue in a poll conducted in October by The New York Times and Siena College. More than half of all respondents described economic conditions as “poor” — a key reason that President Joe Biden was trailing his presumptive Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, in five of the six states.
Such indications of worry appear to conflict with data points that reflect an unambiguous strengthening of the U.S. economy. Incomes have risen, unemployment remains low and consumer confidence is improving. Fears of recession have yielded to exultation over economic growth that registered 3.3% over the last three months of 2023. And the Super Bowl, coming to Las Vegas for the first time Sunday, will bring a short-term boost of as much as $700 million to the local economy.
Still, a sense of insecurity has seeped into the crevices of everyday experience. This feeling is especially palpable in Nevada, a state dependent on a single industry — casino resorts and the hospitality trade — for roughly one-fourth of its jobs.
In Nevada, 59% of those polled described the economy as “poor,” the highest margin among the six states. Seventeen percent of registered Democrats asserted intentions to vote for Trump.
The state’s unemployment rate is down sharply, registering 5.4% in November — a fraction of the 31% logged in April 2020 — even as it remains higher than any other state. Wages have grown, especially for more than 40,000 leisure and hospitality workers represented by a pair of local unions. The rate of inflation on a range of consumer goods has slowed markedly.
But those figures leave out key sources of distress that are playing out across the country and even globally, and whose origins are not confined to the four-year windows conventionally used to assess presidential administrations.
While prices for many goods have stopped rising, they remain higher than before the pandemic, especially for critical things like gasoline, groceries and rent.
Higher interest rates — the result of the Federal Reserve’s credit tightening to choke off inflation — have increased credit card burdens for those carrying balances. They have multiplied mortgage payments for homeowners whose interest payments float with broader rates.
Of special concern in Nevada is recognition that potentially lucrative pursuits like advanced manufacturing could take years to produce significant numbers of jobs.
For decades, Nevada’s leaders have sought to diminish the state’s dependence on casinos and tourism. Las Vegas is rapidly filling with warehouses as the metro area emerges as a hub for the distribution of products. Ventures centered on the transition to green energy are generating high-paying jobs, especially near Reno.
Nonetheless, Nevada remains heavily reliant on the willingness of people around the world to fly in, pack into resorts and convention centers, and scatter their dollars across casinos, restaurants and entertainment venues. Which makes the enterprise subject to abrupt changes of fortune. Which makes people nervous.
“We’re still very vulnerable to another recession,” said Andrew Woods, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “If the U.S. economy decides to go off the deep end, we are not any more resilient than we were before.”
The Strains of High Prices
Much of the unhappiness in Nevada, as in the rest of the country, centers on high costs for everyday items along with housing.
Antonio Muñoz, a former police officer, owns 911 Taco Bar, a restaurant tucked inside a food court near the Strip. He laments how the price of chicken has increased to $3.50 a pound from $1.20 before the pandemic. A 5-gallon jug of cooking oil has risen to $60 from $25. He has been forced to increase wages to keep his five full-time workers.
Much of his business is dedicated to catering work. Large events have come back robustly, he said. The annual Consumer Electronics Show in early January produced a surge of orders for rib eye and shrimp tacos as technology companies hosted visitors in private suites. He was gearing up for the Super Bowl.
But smaller bookings — birthday parties in particular — diminished last year by one-fifth compared with 2022. He blames Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East and acrimony over the U.S. election for making people nervous and tight with money.
He worries that worry itself could take down the economy.
“I feel like it’s teetering,” Muñoz said. “People seem to be waiting to see what happens.”
More Pay, Greater Security
One group is celebrating potent gains. After threatening to strike, tens of thousands of people represented by the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and Bartenders Union Local 165 secured a contract settlement that includes raises of 32% over the next five years.
Union workers played a critical role in turning out voters for Biden four years ago, and their greater pay could motivate them to repeat that effort. And given the importance of their wages in fueling local spending, the new contracts are themselves a source of economic vibrancy.
Kimberly Dopler has worked as a cocktail server at Wynn’s Las Vegas for nearly 20 years. The job is physically exhausting and fraught with the pitfalls of tending to customers who are “drinking and gambling, and not in their right state of mind,” she said. Yet she navigates those risks for the resulting security.
“I get to go home with money in my pocket every day, and I can take my shoes off and relax,” she said.
The union contract has enhanced her sense that the economy is strong. “I see a lot of hiring happening at my job, hiring events throughout town,” Dopler said. “I feel like people have a good opportunity in this town to find work.”
Raymond Lujan, 61, a union steward and server at Edge Steakhouse, a restaurant inside the Westgate Las Vegas, was born and raised in the city. His mother worked as a cocktail server at the Stardust. His brother is a bellman at the Bellagio.
Before the pandemic, Lujan had never been out of work. When the restaurant where he worked closed, he drew on savings, but many of his co-workers live check to check.
He remains confident in a future centered on the hospitality industry.
“This is Vegas,” he said. “It’s still the destination capital of the world.”
‘It’s Still Hard’
Yet for working people who lack the protection of a union, Las Vegas remains something else: an economy subject to violent fluctuations.
Before the pandemic, Carlos Arias, 51, was earning more than $2,000 a week as an Uber driver. When the casinos shut down, he found work as a cook — first at Denny’s for $13.75 an hour, then at IHOP for 50 cents more.
Suddenly earning only one-fourth of his previous income, Arias and his partner, a manger at a McDonald’s, struggled to pay the $1,100 monthly rent on their one-bedroom apartment. They tapped credit cards to keep gas in their car. They cut grocery purchases to bare essentials like rice, beans and instant ramen.
They fell behind on the payments for their Cadillac van. One morning, it was gone, seized in repossession.
He found a new job as a cook at a Mexican restaurant for an extra $1 an hour, and then a second one at an eatery inside the Ellis Island casino. For a year, he worked both positions, rising at 4 a.m. for the early shift, and sometimes not getting home until after midnight.
He felt dizzy, his vision blurring. He could not tell if he was ill or merely exhausted, and he had no health insurance. When he nearly collapsed, he went to the hospital and was diagnosed with diabetes. The medicine the doctor prescribed cost more than $50 for a 30-day course — more than he could manage.
Early last year, he took a job at a restaurant in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, for $19 an hour.
On paper, Arias presents as an example of an improving economy. He is earning more than during the worst of the pandemic. He has health insurance, and is taking medication for his diabetes.
But he is earning less than half what he did before the unraveling began.
“It’s still hard,” he said. “You go to the store and buy $100 worth of groceries and there’s nothing in the car.”
US Senate unveils $118 billion bill on border security, aid for Ukraine, Israel
Richard Cowan and Costas Pitas – February 4, 2024
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Senate on Sunday unveiled a $118 billion bipartisan border security bill that would also provide aid to Ukraine and Israel, but it promptly slammed into opposition from the House of Representatives.
“I urge Congress to come together and swiftly pass this bipartisan agreement,” President Joe Biden said, also praising the migration measures in the bill, which took months to negotiate.
However, House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival” if it reaches his chamber.
“This bill is even worse than we expected, and won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe the president has created,” he said in a statement on X, formerly called Twitter.
The Democratic and Republican Senate backers of the wide-ranging U.S. border security and foreign military aid bill pledged to push ahead, despite opposition by Donald Trump as well.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would take steps to hold an initial vote on the bill on Wednesday.
If the bill were to become law, it would mark the most significant changes in U.S. immigration and border security in decades.
Some progressive Democrats are angry the measure does nothing to provide a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people who have lived in the U.S. for many years, including “Dreamer” immigrants who were brought in as children.
Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema told reporters the legislation would secure the U.S. southern border, including by requiring the Department of Homeland Security to temporarily “shut down” the frontier to most migrants if there are an average of more than 5,000 crossing attempts per day over seven days.
Republican Senator James Lankford, one of the negotiators on the bill, said that the border likely would remain closed for at least three weeks as the numbers of arriving immigrants drop significantly.
In addition to $20.23 billion for border security, the bill included $60.06 billion to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, $14.1 billion in security assistance for Israel, $2.44 billion to U.S. Central Command and the conflict in the Red Sea, and $4.83 billion to support U.S. partners in the Indo-Pacific facing aggression from China, according to figures from Senator Patty Murray, who chairs the Senate’s Appropriation Committee.
An additional $10 billion would provide humanitarian assistance for civilians in conflict zones including in Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank, although the bill includes a provision barring its funds from going to the U.N. agency for Palestinians, UNRWA. The Biden administration and other nations have paused funding to the agency over allegations that some of its staff were involved in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel.
“The priorities in this bill are too important to ignore and too vital to allow politics to get in the way,” Schumer said in a statement. “The United States and our allies are facing multiple, complex and, in places, coordinated challenges from adversaries who seek to disrupt democracy and expand authoritarian influence around the globe.”
The key overseas security provisions of the bill largely match what Biden requested from Congress in October, when he asked for additional funds for aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
That request has been stalled by House Republicans’ insistence that it be tied to a shift in immigration policy.
With House Republicans divided over how to address the huge number of immigrant arrivals and whether to provide Ukraine with any more aid, Johnson on Saturday said he plans to hold a vote this week on a new bill providing $17.6 billion in military assistance to Israel. That measure has no new funding for Ukraine or for U.S. border security.
Meantime, Lankford said he would engage with Johnson in hopes of more House support for the Senate bill.
Schumer said the agreement would provide more frontline personnel and asylum officers and provide “faster and fair” immigration decisions. Lankford told reporters it would fund as many as 50,000 immigrant detention beds, up from the current 34,000.
The bill’s proponents said it would end the controversial “catch-and-release” practice that critics said contribute to high numbers of illegal immigrants arriving at the southern border. It would do so by speeding up the adjudication of asylum cases instead of quickly releasing apprehended migrants and allowing them to stay in the United States for years while they await hearings.
Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican, has supported the negotiations, saying Republicans would not get a better deal under a Republican White House.
“The Senate must carefully consider the opportunity in front of us and prepare to act,” McConnell said in a statement.
Schumer said in a news conference that he had never worked so closely with long-term Senate colleague McConnell as on the bill.
“At many occasions we thought the negotiations had fallen apart,” Schumer said.
RIGHT-WING OPPOSITION
Nonetheless, right-wing Republicans are skeptical of the new Senate bill.
“Here’s what the people pushing this ‘deal’ aren’t telling you: It accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day and gives automatic work permits to asylum recipients — a magnet for more illegal immigration,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said on X.
Other congressional Republicans have said Biden can enact many of the changes they want to immigration policy through executive action, though they had previously called for legislative action.
Immigration is the second largest concern for Americans, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Wednesday, and is a top issue for Republicans specifically. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested about 2 million migrants at the border in fiscal year 2023.
Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to challenge Biden in the November election, has campaigned heavily on opposition to immigration. House Republicans are also pushing ahead with an effort to impeach Biden’s top border official, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Costas Pitas; Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Makini Brice; Writing by Simon Lewis; Editing by Scott Malone, Rosalba O’Brien, Lisa Shumaker and Himani Sarkar and Miral Fahmy)
