More than 32 million Americans was receiving some form of unemployment benefits and Thursday it was reported that another 1.2 million filed first-time unemployment claims in the past week — marking the 20th straight week that such claims exceeded one million. So what’s President Trump’s jobs plan?

The same as his “plan” to address the COVID-19 health crisis: Lie, deny and hope things “miraculously” get better. That approach didn’t work with the virus and it’s not going to work with our economy.

Is Treasury Secretary Mnuchin so uninformed?

Manuel Castro Rodríguez

August 3, 2020

“We're paying people more to stay home than to work”: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rejects plan to extend $600 unemployment benefits

This article published two months ago in Chicago Fed Letter, No. 441, demonstrates another lie of Trump’s GOP:

How do unemployment benefits relate to job search behavior?

Conclusion

This article documents the relationship between the take-up of UI benefits and job search. We find that, among the nonemployed, those collecting UI benefits are more likely to be male and more likely to have a college degree. They are also more likely to have separated from higher-paying jobs, suggesting that these individuals’ skills differ from those of other workers in ways that are unobservable in the data. Nevertheless, we find that those currently receiving UI benefits search intensely for new work, and their effort appears to be somewhat greater than that of the unemployed not receiving benefits. At the same time, once individuals exhaust their benefits, their search effort drops precipitously. Finally, those collecting UI benefits tend to receive better job offers than those who have exhausted their benefits. This may be because the quality of job offers declines the longer an individual is unemployed. Regardless, both groups receive poorer offers than the employed or those currently out of the labor force.

These results challenge the notion that collecting unemployment benefits reduces job search. Those collecting UI benefits actually search the hardest among all the groups we studied. If anything, search effort declines once individuals exhaust their benefits. Furthermore, individuals collecting benefits tend to receive better job offers than those who are not collecting benefits. In contrast, those who exhaust their benefits both receive and are willing to accept lower-paying job offers, suggesting that UI benefit exhaustion may have detrimental effects on employment outcomes.

GOP pays price for healthcare stubbornness

David Lauter

August 7, 2020

In a democracy, a political party that steadfastly sets itself against the public will is asking for defeat and will likely get it.

That’s the GOP these days on healthcare.

For a dozen years, Republicans have fought an unrelenting campaign in Congress, state legislatures and courts against expanded government help for Americans who need health coverage. At first, that effort yielded the party some big wins, then it became a loser. Now it’s become a trap.

How do we know voters disagree with the Republican stand? They’ve been asked. Six times in six states, all but one with Republican majorities. As of this week, the score stands 6-0.

The result teaches an important lesson for the presidential campaign and forecasts where policy likely will head if Joe Biden wins in November.

Medicaid’s growing popularity. At the high point of his Great Society, President Lyndon Johnson won passage in 1965 of legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid — government-provided healthcare for, respectively, the elderly and the poor. For years after, as a common saying had it, the programs’ names described their difference: Americans would care for the elderly; they would, sometimes grudgingly, aid the poor.

Even as Medicare gained steadily in popularity — and cost — becoming politically all-but unassailable, Medicaid initially languished, attacked by conservatives as a form of welfare.

Over the past couple of decades, that’s changed, in part because of expansions of the program engineered by one of its champions, former Los Angeles congressman Henry Waxman. With the program now covering one in five medical bills in the U.S. and serving more than 75 million Americans, Medicaid has largely lost the stigma that so often attaches to programs for poor people.

Polling by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation has found that roughly three-quarters of Americans have a favorable view of Medicaid. That includes a large majority of Democrats, unsurprisingly, but even among Republicans, 65% had at least a “somewhat favorable” view of the program, Kaiser found in a 2018 survey.

That shift in attitudes, however, has by and large not reached Republican lawmakers.

In 2010, as part of the Affordable Care Act, Congress approved expanding Medicaid to cover more low-wage working Americans — people with incomes of up to 135% of the federal poverty level, or slightly more than $17,000 per year for an individual. Under the law, the federal government would pick up 90% of the cost, with states covering the rest.

Once the Supreme Court ruled that states had the right to opt out of the expansion, Republican legislatures and governors in 19 red states did so. Many of them had won their elections in 2010, when voters, fearful of the changes Obamacare might bring, swept Republicans into office.

But while voters warmed to the new law, Republican lawmakers remained firmly opposed, and they’ve fostered a no-compromise position among their core supporters that now gives them little room to maneuver.

In 2016, beaten back in efforts to change the minds of elected officials, Medicaid advocates, led by California healthcare unions, decided to take their case directly to voters in a series of ballot initiatives.

As Dave Regan, president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, told Noam Levey in 2018 after the first three victories in their campaign, on healthcare, at least, “we are showing that people in Utah and Idaho and Nebraska want the same thing as people in California.”

Maine later joined the other states on that list. Earlier this summer Oklahoma did, too. Now add Missouri.

On Tuesday, Missouri voters, by 53% to 47%, approved a constitutional amendment expanding Medicaid. The measure only won majorities in the state’s two big-city regions, St. Louis and Kansas City and their suburbs, and its two university centers, Columbia and Springfield. But even across heavily Republican swaths of rural Missouri, it ran well ahead of the vote share that former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill got in her unsuccessful reelection effort two years ago.

What does that string of victories, five of them in solidly Republican states, mean for the wider course of politics and policy? Two lessons jump out.

First, Democrats have learned over the past decade that complex efforts at market-based solutions to expanding healthcare, like the Affordable Care Act’s subsidized marketplaces for low- and middle-income families who lack job-based coverage, don’t work politically on two levels: They fail to win over the Republicans they were designed to attract and they aren’t as popular with voters as straightforward expansions of public programs.

Biden opposes Medicare for All, but if he wins in November, some form of Medicaid for Many — a public option built around further expansion of the program — will likely form a key part of his administration’s program.

And, second, over the next dozen weeks, look for healthcare to once again move into the spotlight of the campaign.

In 2018, Republican efforts to repeal healthcare coverage proved far and away the most effective issue for Democratic congressional candidates.

This year, that issue has been eclipsed by the coronavirus. But if the spread of the virus slows, which President Trump‘s campaign strategists hope will allow him to start a comeback, he will still face a host of issues on which he was vulnerable long before the pandemic began. His efforts to repeal healthcare coverage for millions of Americans remain high on the list.

Remember that before the coronavirus outbreak, one of the previous low points in Trump’s job approval came during his 2017 effort to repeal Obamacare.

Trump knows that, which is why he periodically promises to unveil a “tremendous healthcare plan,” as he pledged in his interview last month with Chris Wallace of Fox News. In that interview, he promised a plan in “two weeks” — a standard Trump trope meaning roughly the equivalent of the 30th of February.

He can’t develop a real healthcare plan, not only because he’s uninterested in the policy issues, but also because he’s shackled himself to an ideological faction of his adopted party that firmly opposes any expansion of government help.

In 2016, voters by and large perceived Trump as a moderate. He was hard-line on immigration, of course, but in his campaign, he carefully avoided previous Republican pledges to slow spending on Medicare, Social Security and other entitlements, made supportive statements about same-sex marriage and stepped around many other hot-button ideological issues.

As president, by contrast, he’s allied himself firmly with the far-right of the party, and voters have noticed. A series of CBS polls in battleground states this week, for example, found that only about one in eight voters in North Carolina and Georgia viewed Trump as a moderate, compared to well over half who saw him as conservative.

That’s fine, of course, with voters who see themselves as conservative, but it’s a problem for Trump with the swing voters in closely divided states whose support he barely won four years ago.

Missouri stands as the latest reminder that for Democrats seeking to remind voters why that ideological contrast matters to them, healthcare provides a potent weapon. If the presidential campaign tightens in the fall, as contests typically do, expect to see them wield it far more widely.