Pundits of varied political flavors see “rot” permeating our country. Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post rightly chronicles a “crisis of faith” in our institutions, like the Supreme Court, to call honest balls and strikes. “Until we can believe again that the referee is trying to be fair,” he writes, “we will keep shouting ‘Ref, you suck!’ at our own democracy—and then wonder why the game no longer feels worth playing.” In the New York Times, David Brooks laments, “There has been a slow moral, emotional and intellectual degradation—the loss of the convictions, norms and habits of mind that undergird democracy. What worries me most is the rot creeping into your mind, and into my own.” Peggy Noonan, writing lyrically in The Wall Street Journal, has a queasy feeling: “Are we maintaining our republic? Is our equilibrium holding? The last nine months, a lot of lines seem to have been crossed … There are many areas in which you’ve come to think: Isn’t the executive assuming powers of the Congress here? Why is Congress allowing this? The executive branch assumes the authority to bend its foes and defeat them. You ask: Is all this constitutional? The president “jokes” that he may not accept the Constitution’s two-term presidential limit. Are you laughing?”

The cure must come from the vote of the American people, but the right to vote is being diluted as we watch, the constitutional principle of “one man, one vote” dishonored, and the will of the people traduced with partisan and even racial gerrymandering.

This week’s Democratic wave is significant, but it doesn’t obviate Trump’s pressuring Republican legislatures to redraw their congressional districts. This power grab could make it easier for the GOP to retain control of the narrowly divided House of Representatives, which is central to our democracy. The House is a safety valve. With complete turnover every two years—only one-third of Senate seats are up for grabs biennially—it can respond relatively quickly to national shifts in public sentiment. If Trump rigs it to keep the House, the consequences would be monumental. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a Voting Rights Act case from Louisiana last month that could lead to cataclysmic changes in how districts are drawn in Black and Latino communities, giving Republicans extra advantages, perhaps far more than their norm-violating mid-decade gerrymandering frenzy will yield, maybe as many as 20 seats. California’s passage of Proposition 50 could lead to Democrats picking up five congressional seats, but that may be swamped by the fallout from ripping up Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The redistricting march goes on. North Carolina recently redrew its congressional map, with Republican senators endorsing a new map. The state House of Representatives followed suit the next day. “The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: drawing a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation,” state Senator Ralph Hise, the Republican who prepared the map, told colleagues this week: “President Trump has called on Republican-controlled states nationwide to redraw congressional districts. This map answers that call.”

Trump quickly praised North Carolina’s “improved” map last week on Truth Social, saying it would “give the fantastic people of North Carolina the opportunity to elect an additional MAGA Republican in the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Before the gerrymander, Republicans controlled 10 of the Tar Heel state’s 14 congressional districts, and the new map would give Republicans a good shot at winning another, and maybe more. The district held by Representative Don Davis, a Democrat, already leans three percentage points toward Republicans, and the new map would give the GOP an 11-point advantage in that district.

Throughout the debate, Democrats decried the map for carving up Black communities. “By dismantling this district, Republicans aren’t just redrawing lines, they are erasing history, silencing voices, and turning their backs on decades of progress,” said State Senator Val Applewhite

Under North Carolina’s Constitution, Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, lacks the authority to veto the measure. “If I did have that power, I assure you I would veto this map,” Stein responded after the vote. “Republican legislative leaders are abusing their power to take away yours. They’re afraid they will lose in the midterms and afraid to say no to the President, so they’ve turned their backs on you to silence your vote in the 2026 election.” North Carolina’s Democrats have little recourse. Of course, they could turn to the federal and state judiciary, but good luck with that. Whatever happened to “one man, one vote,” a salutary legal principle, now in the ashcan of history?

North Carolina is not the only state being redrawn. In August, Texas (which started this orgy of redrawing) approved a map aimed at gaining five House seats for Republicans. A month later, Missouri Republicans followed with a distorted map that shifted Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s district to be Republican-leaning.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in Kansas and Indiana are considering drawing new district lines. And GOP-controlled Ohio is required to draw new lines this year after passing its last map without Democratic support.

The vote in North Carolina took place two weeks after Republicans in Utah approved a map in response to a court ruling that could give Democrats a chance to win one or two seats. A judge is reviewing that map and may order changes.

Republicans are also considering drawing new maps in Florida and Kansas. In Indiana, the Republican governor is in favor of redrawing the boundaries but hasn’t convinced the GOP-controlled statehouse to adopt it.

Democrats are pushing back. California voters approved Proposition 50, while Maryland Governor Wes Moore announced the formation of a commission to review redistricting, indicating that the heavily Democratic state is ready to participate in mid-decade redistricting.

The significant shift of Hispanic votes toward Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey suggests that the Texas experiment that started this madness may ultimately fail. The Republican statehouse is drawing its new map, assuming Donald Trump’s strong performance in South Texas in 2024 meant Hispanics would reliably vote Republican. However, my colleague Bill Scher pointed out back in August that this was a dubious bet. After nearly a year of aggressive ICE raids and masked agents, it’s turning out to be very risky. Perhaps there’s still a chance to slow the decline.

The post Redistricting, Supreme Court Should Worry Democrats About 2026 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As one of President Joe Biden’s top economic advisers, I frequently made my way out to the White House North Lawn to give interviews to the media about the state of the U.S. economy. Especially as the pandemic-induced recession faded in the rearview mirror, I was out there hundreds of times touting how the unemployment rate was at 50-year lows on the back of remarkably strong job growth. Inflation was falling and inflation-adjusted pay was rising.

And yet in every single interview, I got the same question: So why aren’t people feeling it? Why so much good data amid so many bad vibes?

In fact, the question was not hard to answer. It comes down to one word, a word that defines the dominant economic challenge with which American families have been struggling for years: affordability. Whether it’s housing, child care, health care, groceries, utilities, insurance, or other costs, significant numbers of Americans have found that these and other critical goods and services are either out of reach or so pricey that, after they’ve paid for them, they don’t have enough money left to even think about getting ahead.

This duality between the data and how people experience the economy is the subject of The Mismeasurement of America, by Gene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency during the Clinton administration. Focusing on unemployment, wages, inflation, and the growing economic distance between Americans at the top and the bottom of the income scale, Ludwig argues that the problem is that the numbers I was touting were, if not quite wrong, then “profoundly misleading.” He then develops his own set of numbers, which he argues better explain why people have long felt a lot worse about the economy than you’d glean from the government’s top-line statistics. While Ludwig is right that top-line numbers, all of which are broad averages, fail to present a full picture of how the different income classes are faring, that’s not a “mismeasurement” problem. It instead reflects the impossibility of encompassing in just a few numbers something as complex and disparate as the U.S. economy. A better title for his book might have been “The Incomplete Measurement of America.”

Ludwig’s critique of inflation statistics is particularly germane to the affordability crisis. The Consumer Price Index is an overall metric that averages out the changes in prices faced by 90 percent of the population. (The CPI does not include prices in extremely rural areas, farm households, and religious communities, among other exceptions.) Ludwig reasonably worries, however, that the average obscures important differences in inflation between income groups.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes the CPI, has itself been looking into this and they find that from 2005 to 2024, prices rose 66 percent for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale but just 57 percent for those at the top. This disparity is a double disadvantage: Such households face both lower incomes and higher prices. Ludwig’s adjusted CPI, which he calls the “True Living Cost,” or TLC, captures this dynamic by significantly up-weighting in the index the goods and services that dominate the consumption basket of less-well-off households, including housing, health care, food, and child care.

While this is the right way to drill down on the affordability challenges facing low- and middle-income families today, Ludwig misses one of the more important positive price developments of our time. For technology goods, like computers and smartphones, the TLC registers large price increases while the CPI registers the opposite. The CPI has it right, reflecting a rare cost decline that’s actively making us better off. The BLS statisticians adjust for the fact that computers and cell phones are remarkably more powerful than they used to be. Decades ago, it would have cost millions of dollars for a computer to do what a $700 laptop can do today. Adjusted for quality, the cost of such technology has fallen sharply over the years, and this decline has improved consumer welfare. Yet the TLC appears to ignore these quality improvements and somehow has technology costs soaring over time.

For another example of how Ludwig offers an overreaching solution to a real measurement challenge, consider unemployment. Ludwig argues that instead of the 4.3 percent unemployment rate for August reported by the BLS, what he calls the TRU—the “True Rate of Unemployment”—is 24.7 percent. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of unemployment in America will realize that Ludwig has either made a mistake or is aggressively redefining unemployment. The last time unemployment was that high was during the Great Depression.

Ludwig’s “unemployment” rate, however, includes a lot of people who are, in fact, working, both part-timers and low earners. His terminology is thus off, as is his critique of the current measurement system, which is clearly, transparently, and consistently measuring what it says it’s measuring. If you looked for a job and you didn’t find one, you’re unemployed. That simple and intuitive definition has revealed important information about labor market conditions for many decades.

But as Ludwig’s adjustments reveal, there were a lot more underemployed and underpaid people in the American labor force in August than 4.3 percent. That doesn’t make the official unemployment rate wrong or misleading. Though Donald Trump, who recently fired the commissioner of the BLS, might claim otherwise, our statistical agencies continue to rigorously churn out valid, reliable numbers. (Trump doesn’t like that they show the tariffs raising prices and cracks forming in the job market, but that’s actually a testament to their accuracy.) But Ludwig’s metric helps to bridge the gap between what the official jobless numbers say and the struggle that many working Americans go through every day.

Extracting from these weedy details, and recognizing that the current system is not mismeasuring America, Ludwig’s book provides an important bridge between good data and bad vibes. As he shows, in an economy where inequality has been on the rise for decades, where millions are underemployed, where poor people’s inflation rises faster than that of the rich, averages increasingly fail to tell the full economic story.

Of course, many authors, most notably Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, have made this point before. But by looking at the problem through the lens of jobs, hours worked, wages paid, the costs of housing (and utilities, such as electricity), child care, health care, and so on, Ludwig’s measurements help to shine a light on a policy agenda to address the affordability crisis. His underemployment rate would come down, for example, if we helped involuntary part-timers move to full-time schedules. (Ludwig would correctly note that such a change would not show up in a lower unemployment rate.) An affordability agenda, which Neale Mahoney and I describe in a new brief from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, would help make it easier for economically stretched families to afford housing (by making it easier and cheaper to build), child care (through targeted subsidies), and health care (reversing coverage cuts, Medicare buy-in) in ways that would directly feed into Ludwig’s alternate cost-of-living measure.

What we should take from this book, then, is not that America is mismeasured. It’s that the gap between what the top-line numbers report and how folks feel about their economic situation is, in part, a function of the increase in economic inequality, of how far they’ve fallen relative to the average. Should we want to better understand how America is really doing, we must dig deeper into the numbers.

The post Measuring the Vibecession appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last week, Donald Trump dropped virtual “bombs” on American citizens, demolished a prized symbol of American democracy and leadership, and demanded $230 million in reparations from taxpayers for what he calls unlawful attacks on him.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Trump does not wish to rule as a king or impose an authoritarian regime. People around him very much want the latter. He may think that this is his aim. But it is not.

Some have suggested that the MAGA movement is creating a civil war between the red and blue states. But not Trump.

The president is at war with the United States—the entire country—all of us. He seeks not to rule but to destroy.

What inspires such malice? This country has, in Trump’s mind, brutalized him. In 2020, Trump found Joe Biden to be such a flimsy candidate that he was in terror of being defeated by him. Trump’s unconscious mind is never far from his tongue. On October 16, 2020, he confided in a rally audience that he was terrified of losing to Biden: “Running against the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics puts pressure on me. Could you imagine if I lose? My whole life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics. I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country. I don’t know.”

He did lose. He has tried to rewrite history, but he knows who won in 2020, which makes him furious.

Not only did he lose to a candidate he regarded as a zombie, but he also has memories of 2016, when he lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton by 2 percent, nearly 3 million votes. Twice, then, his fellow Americans had preferred others over him. And in 2024, his dream of a majority of the popular vote against Kamala Harris was just out of reach. Harris held him to 49.8 percent.

For all his talk about “an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump knows that three times he has gone up against candidates he despises—a white woman, a Black woman, and a superannuated old-style pol—and that three times he has failed to secure a decisive win. Twice, in fact, he has, by some measure, lost.

Trump has a long memory for slights. He remains angry and resentful over the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ failure to give an Emmy to The Apprentice two decades ago. “The Emmys are all politics, that’s why, despite nominations, The Apprentice never won—even though it should have many times over,” he told The Washington Post in 2016. His rage extends not only to his enemies (whom he wants jailed and perhaps executed) but even to some who have helped him over the years. His unwittingly comic legal Complaint against The New York Times cites, as one example of the Grey Lady’s gross libels, the mere statement that the producer who brought Trump onto The Apprentice had helped create that TV franchise. No indeed—according to his lawyers, sole credit for the show must go to Trump’s “global profile and charisma.”

Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time whining about how this or that person owes him an apology, and perhaps should be jailed for not giving it. His mental world is bleak, a haunted mansion of anger and grievance.

How can we expect such a person to forgive his fellow Americans for preferring someone else to him?

Trump’s fury with the country explains many otherwise puzzling facts about his conduct in office during his second term. Media coverage and his rhetoric suggest that his animus is directed toward blue states, while his love embraces the red. But love is as love does, and Trump’s policies have been as adverse to his allies as to his foes. His assault on the federal government has been indiscriminate, taking in federal disaster relief and cancer research, both of which benefit all Americans. He has shut down the government rather than extend health-care subsidies that rural and red-state residents rely on for medical and hospital care. In particular, the sweeping tariffs he has attempted to impose threaten devastation to agricultural areas and agricultural states—consider that he has not only managed to cut American farmers’ soybean exports to China to near zero, but is now sending $40 billion to Argentina, which has stepped in to supply the Chinese at market rates. His immigration jihad is also directed disproportionately at agricultural workers, whom Trump-loving farmers depend on to bring in the crops.

He has deliberately crippled the national security and intelligence apparatus that protects the nation against foreign and terrorist attacks. An authoritarian would nurture these; an enemy wipes them out.

As Christmas approaches, not even American children escape his unwinking malice—“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,”—making him almost certainly the only American president to come out against Santa Claus.

He has begun preparing our military to flood the streets of American cities in a war against “the enemy within,” who is, as Walt Kelly’s immortal Pogo once said, us. During the 2024 campaign, he told a rally that “The crazy lunatics that we have—the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country . . . are more dangerous—the enemy from within—than Russia and China and other people.” Lest this seem like mere campaign rhetoric, just a year later, Trump—no longer a candidate but the commander in chief—told the assembled generals and admirals of the defense establishment that “America is under invasion from within. We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” He added ominously, “George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, George Bush, and others all used the armed forces to keep domestic order and peace.”

The administration is now in court seeking authority to deploy the National Guard at any spot the president proclaims to be in “rebellion.” And Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against dancing frogs and other First Amendment protests, which would allow him to deploy heavily armed regular troops on city streets. This may seem like preparation for a red vs. blue civil war, but he is also gearing up to deploy in red states. Those red states have blue cities that are also filled with enemies within who don’t support him.

And once the Democrats are conquered, there will be the RINOS. After that, who knows?

The important thing about Trump is that he lacks aims or plans. What drives him are tropisms, relentless unconscious movements like those of a heliotrope turning toward the sun. Trump cabinet meetings offer clinical proof that there is not enough love and worship in the universe to fill the gaping hole in his psyche. The man is an ocean of need; no victory is enough. There will always be enemies.

Since October 18, Trump has done something no one has done since the British burned Washington in 1814; he has gleefully depicted himself doing to peaceful Americans what the Japanese empire in 1941 did to Pearl Harbor; and he has demanded the kind of reparations that the Allies extracted from Germany at the end of World War I. (Germany did not finish paying off those World War I reparations until 2010.)

That Trump is at war with the country—with all of us—lies in plain sight. On January 6, 2021, his army of brigands attacked the U.S. government in his name. They sought to destroy its government and replace it with a Trump dictatorship.

Trump pardoned the traitors.

His war of conquest has just begun. He may need them again.

The post Trump is a Wartime President appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Venezuela’s tragic collapse from petrostate to failed state has a name: Nicolás Maduro. His first stolen “reelection” in 2018, dismissed globally as neither free nor fair, sealed the fate of a nation now hollowed out and starving. It’s time for him to go. Whether by negotiated exit or the combined weight of domestic defiance and American pressure, his departure is both morally justified and strategically essential.

Donald Trump’s second administration has revived its first-term push for regime change, adding clandestine tools to the diplomatic arsenal. The CIA is now authorized to conduct publicly unspecified covert operations in Venezuela, increasing pressure on Maduro. But anything resembling gunboat diplomacy or the CIA intrusions of the Allende era could be catastrophic—rekindling Latin America’s darkest memories of American heavy-handedness and erasing what moral authority the United States still claims.

This caution becomes even clearer relief given President Trump’s recent remarks: The U.S. naval buildup off Venezuela, primarily tasked with curbing drug trafficking, is “looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control.” Such statements underscore the temptation toward direct military intervention or violent CIA dark ops. But the risk of overstepping—with boots on the ground or overt military ground offensives—could provoke backlash, undermine the moral case, and strengthen Maduro’s grip by rallying nationalist sentiment. The Trump administration must balance pressure with prudence, using intelligence, sanctions, diplomacy, and regional allies to increase the cost of repression without igniting a kinetic catastrophe.

Washington’s earlier attempts defined the battle lines. In 2019, it recognized Juan Guaidó as interim president, marshaled more than 50 nations behind a constitutional transition, and suffocated state oil producer PDVSA, the regime’s cash conduit. The United States also indicted Maduro on narco-trafficking charges, a symbolic but significant marker that criminality would carry a cost. Those efforts didn’t topple Maduro, but they tightened the vise—squeezing oil revenues, limiting global banking access, and isolating Caracas.

Inside Venezuela, the real struggle continued. It’s been waged not by diplomats or spooks, but by millions desperate for dignity. Years of mass protest, the bravery of opposition leaders, and an exiled diaspora still sustaining families at home are the nation’s lifelines. I’ve commented on these developments for the Washington Monthly over the years, as an observer and co-author with opposition leader-in-exile Leopoldo López. Few channel the opposition’s strength and spirit more sharply than this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado, who remains in undisclosed locations inside Venezuela. Her clarity and courage have turned despair into direction. Machado says the Nobel is “an impetus to conclude our task: to conquer Freedom.”

Machado and a popular movement have inspired a democratic awakening that may finally topple the Maduro regime. A bonus: A successful democratic restoration would stem the tide of Venezuelan refugees to the U.S. The Venezuelan opposition’s demands—for monitored elections, safe pathways out for insiders, and guarantees against vengeance—offer the only peaceful path to restore constitutional order.

Yet every autocrat needs their patrons, and for years, Vladimir Putin performed that role—fueling Maduro’s survival with arms, oil deals, and political cover in international forums. Russia’s state oil giant Rosneft helped Caracas evade sanctions, while Kremlin advisors whispered strategies for outlasting unrest. Fast forward to 2025: Putin’s mired in Ukraine, hemorrhaging resources and legitimacy. Russia can no longer bankroll its strongman protégés abroad. Ask Bashar al-Assad. The Kremlin’s reach now stops at its own battlefield lines. Moscow once promised to prop up its friends; today, it can barely sustain itself. For Maduro, that means the cavalry will never come.

Iran long acted as another lifeline for Maduro—providing financing, technology, and networks to evade sanctions, further binding Caracas to Tehran’s geopolitical ambitions. But Tehran’s regional overreach, combined with crippling sanctions and internal pressures, has thankfully sapped its ability to project power abroad. Venezuelan regime change, while unwelcome to Tehran, is no longer preventable by its illegitimate, diminished, and aging leadership. A democratic transition in Caracas would deal Tehran another setback—losing an ideological partner and foothold in the Americas, further isolating the regime against mounting global pressure.

American power can and should amplify Venezuela’s democratic push, not replace it. Supporting continental diplomacy, defending human rights, and imposing targeted sanctions can raise the cost of repression while preserving moral legitimacy. This is the balance Washington must strike: pressure without pretense, influence without too much overt interference. Questionable air strikes on Venezuelan pleasure boats allegedly ferrying drugs to the U.S. haven’t strengthened Trump’s hand.

Beyond Caracas, others are watching. Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, where democracy is dismantled by design, and Cuba, surviving on repression and nostalgia, both feel the tremors. Any transfer of power in Venezuela would broadcast a warning across the hemisphere—autocracy carries an expiration date, and outside enablers can’t always save their proxies.

The global stakes are no less tangible. China’s multi-billion-dollar love affair with Chávez and Maduro—funded by oil-for-loans deals—has left Beijing deeply exposed. A post-Maduro government determined to audit, renegotiate, or even default on opaque Chinese obligations would puncture that dependency. Venezuela, freed from kleptocracy, could remind China that foreign investments anchored in corruption are ultimately bad business.

The most powerful instrument for change remains Venezuelan. Their courage—magnified but not manipulated by U.S. intelligence, diplomacy, and media strategy—holds the key. Anything smacking of direct or violent American intervention risks staining this moment of liberation with an old imperial dye.

Washington’s role must be catalytic, not commanding. The CIA’s job, this time, is to quietly tip the scales toward freedom, not pull them down.

The last thing Venezuela needs is to be rescued by ghosts of the past.

The post Venezuela’s Best Chance for Freedom appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he was cancelling the Pentagon’s review of the Medals of Honor given to cavalry soldiers who participated in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, where over 300 Lakota men, women, and children were gunned down. The slaughter came shortly after the assassination of Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader, in 1889 outside his cabin at Standing Rock, the Sioux reservation in what was then the Dakota territory.

The killing occurred for various reasons. In 1876, the Lakota, Cheyenne, and other allied tribes won a great victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Civil War hero Lt. Colonel. George Armstrong Custer was felled in what became famous as “Custer’s Last Stand,” an incident which has spawned countless books and theories, all still hotly debated in social media forums. Although Sitting Bull did not kill Custer, he was blamed for it, and newspapers nationwide demanded his capture. He had become Public Enemy Number One.

He fled with his people to Canada, where he stayed for six years before returning in 1882. At that time, buffalo populations “across the Medicine Line,” as Native Americans called it, had diminished, and the U.S. government was pressuring Canada to deport Sitting Bull. As Native Americans lost their land and way of life, a phenomenon called “ghost dancing” emerged. It was promoted by a Paiute prophet (or a con man, depending on your view) named Wovoka, who spoke of restoring the old ways before white settlers arrived and bringing back the buffalo if people implored the Creator in ceremonies. Ghost Dances spread across reservations on the Great Plains, and the army saw them as a threat. The dancing was especially intense at Standing Rock, where Sitting Bull lived. Once again, he was blamed for the situation, with officials now viewing the dancing as a way to get rid of Sitting Bull—and exact revenge for the Lakota victory at the Little Bighorn, which was a huge embarrassment for the cavalry, particularly since it occurred just before the July 4 celebrations.

The Medal of Honor review began during Joe Biden’s administration at the behest of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In July, 2024, Austin “directed the Defense Department to review the Medals of Honor awarded to approximately 20 soldiers for their actions during the December 1890 engagement at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, to ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor,” according to the Department of Defense. Native Americans—and many white allies—have sought the rescission for years. In response, in 1990, Congress passed a resolution expressing “deep regret”—not an apology—for the incident, which even General Nelson Miles, prominent Civil War hero and leading figure of the Indian wars, called “an abomination” at the time of the massacre. In 2016, a further reconciliation with Native Americans was made when President Barack Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act, making the buffalo the national mammal, finally, after it had been wiped out by hunters in the 19^th century and served as the symbol of the Department of the Interior for years. The Medals of Honor review was underway at the time of the 2024 election, but no decision had been reached, and Austin left office in January 2025 following Biden’s loss.

Although the panel never made a recommendation, had Biden been re-elected and the medals rescinded, it would have been another landmark in federal policy towards Native Americans, along with the ground-breaking report on Native American boarding schools presented by Biden’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

The famed American soldier, hunter, and showman William Fredrick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, was one of the first and most illustrious figures who tried to make amends for the massacre. He did so by producing a film about it in 1913, a signature re-enactment, using Lakota actors whose relatives had been slain there. Bill, one of the most celebrated men in the world, was known for his touring spectacle, “The Wild West Show,” which featured cowboys and Indians re-creating frontier battles and displaying equestrian feats to the delight of packed arenas across America and abroad. The show included Sitting Bull for four months in 1885. I wrote about the unexpected showbiz alliance of these two towering figures in my book Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship Between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.

I consulted Chief Arvol Looking-Horse, Lakota elder and 19^th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, to write this book. I wanted to know about the legendary “dancing horse” that was outside Sitting Bull’s cabin at the time of his assassination, said to have danced as the shots were fired, trained to do so at the sound of gunfire in the Wild West Show. The image led me to write this book; I could not stop thinking about it since I read it while working on a previous book called Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. What I learned from Chief Looking-Horse opened up a portal into a story whose parameters were already deep and wide. He told me it was the horse taking the bullets for Sitting Bull—not literally, but in spirit.

This was the horse that Buffalo Bill had given to Sitting Bull upon the chief’s departure from the Wild West Show. He had joined the cavalcade to see what changes were occurring across the land and to serve as an ambassador for Lakota culture, the highest-paid member of Cody’s cast. After four months, he decided that he had accomplished his mission. He had encountered many fans and foes during his tour and he had witnessed the technological advances that were underway in American cities. But he was disturbed by many things, including the fact that young wastrels were wandering the streets in many of these locations, and he couldn’t understand how such a wealthy country permitted this to happen. Often, he gave his salary to these destitute kids. Although Cody hoped to remain with the show, he longed to return home to Standing Rock, having witnessed the end of his way of life and seen enough of what had disrupted it. After his death, the dancing horse landed in another Wild West spectacle in Germany; when Buffalo Bill found out, he purchased it outright, and the last anyone knows, as I write in my book, “the horse made another appearance, in 1893, during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was draped with an American flag and ridden in a parade by Buffalo Bill or someone else, the record is unclear, a silent tribute to his friend.”

Unlike his hugely popular traveling circus, Buffalo Bill’s film about Sitting Bull was a flop. However, a very short segment endures at the eponymous Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming, one of five museums at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. History is nuanced: Here we have a story of a failed attempt from a legendary American icon to make things right—and now it’s being shut down again. In this excerpt from Blood Brothers, I explain what happened.

With the film industry beginning to flourish in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, most surviving frontier characters—those of note and lesser-known working cowboys—converged in Hollywood. Trapped in their personas, they had nothing to do except get paid to be some version of themselves. Like the others, Buffalo Bill turned to the new mythmaking machinery for the last phase of his life. But he was not content with his accomplishments and wanted to be more than “Buffalo Bill.” “I grow very tired of this sort of sham hero-worship sometimes,” he told a friend in 1897. He wanted to present the real story of the West, which is to say, not the myth at all. Thomas Edison had already filmed Cody’s show in 1894, and in 1910 and 1911, Buffalo Bill had filmed parts of it as well. He understood the power of film, and it was time to set the record straight. In 1913, he decided to produce a movie called The Last Indian Battles from the War Path to the Peace Pipe. Among other things, it featured General Miles, the cavalry acting out the massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee, and participants, including Native Americans, playing themselves. Some of the cast members had not only survived Wounded Knee but had served on one side or the other in the Battle of the Little Bighorn as well. The film had the blessing of the Departments of War and Interior, with Interior Secretary Franklin K. Lane asking the Pine Ridge Agency superintendent to make sure that it “included pictures of the children in school working and on the farm, and otherwise industrially engaged. The whole presenting an historical event of the progress of the Indians for the last twenty years,” according to the Rapid City Daily Journal on October 22, 1913. The military was hoping that the film would present the army in a positive light, portraying its role in paving the way for settlers and protecting them in their westward journeys.

Yet there was disagreement as to how to depict Wounded Knee. One military advisor asked Cody to hold back footage of the incident unless the War Department approved it. Cody agreed. General Miles did not want Wounded Knee included at all. He blamed subordinates for the massacre, stating in his autobiography that “I have never felt that the action was judicious or justifiable, and have always believed that it could have been avoided.” But Cody did go ahead and film the event; after all, re-enactments were what he was known for—and this one was to be placed in a context that was not sensational like his shows, but an accounting that pulled no punches and portrayed exactly what happened. Yet this time, women and children were not part of the re-created story; General Miles had ordered that they not be included. Miles remained at the Pine Ridge Agency, away from the action, while the Wounded Knee segment was filmed. It was a complicated enterprise. To make this part of the movie, Cody reconstructed the Lakota village along the creek where Big Foot’s band had assembled. (The Minneconjou tribal elder and Lakota ally was the leader of those who had fled to the creek to hide from further repercussions.) “Painted canvas teepees sheltered extended families,” reported American History magazine, “few of which did not grieve for an absent loved one.” There were wails and sobs, and hundreds of soldiers were cleaning their rifles and wheeling in Hotchkiss guns. “Some Sioux wondered if the coming morning’s battle would really be pretend. Or were they to be slaughtered like their ancestors? Painted stick markers shuddered above the sacred grave as the increasing wind filled it with snow. Younger braves thought perhaps the time had come for vengeance. Some talked of loading their rifles with live rounds instead of blanks. Soon, death songs shrilled above thudding drums.”

From the bluffs above, Cody watched the action, along with his wife, Louisa, who had recently rejoined him after their estrangement. Some of the Indians who had traveled with Cody warned him of the threats; a council was quickly arranged in the mess tent, and Cody assured the young men that they were indeed making a movie, and no one was to be killed. On the morning of October 13, 1913, the cameras rolled. “The air erupted with gun smoke, shrieks, and howls. Rifles crackled and ponies whirled,” reported American History. “With the camp aflame, people fled down into the ravine and the artillery lobbed shells into their midst. It was a tragic, bloody business.” In the following days, other aspects of the final days of the Lakota were filmed: the Sioux in starving conditions, Ghost Dances, Sitting Bull’s arrest and death. Even the final siege of the Lakota in the Badlands was filmed, after an arduous 55-mile trek for fifty Sioux families, and a company of troops and heavy wagons loaded with hay, grain, and provisions. Finally, day-to-day life on the reservation was filmed, featuring children in school and farmers harvesting crops. On October 30, Cody hosted a grand celebration to mark the end of production. Fifty-three of the Native American actors had been stranded in Denver when his show had gone bankrupt earlier, and he had not yet paid them. “You have been my friends and I am going to be yours,” he said, and then he wrote a check for $1,313 in back salaries. Later, he headed south in his new seven-passenger Ford touring car. In February 1914, Cody went to Washington, D.C., to screen his films for members of President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, congressmen, and reporters. “Cody was still straight as the arrows that have whizzed around his noble head,” one reporter said. The audience of one thousand was spellbound. “It has been my object and my desire,” Cody said, “to preserve history by the aid of the camera, with the living participants who took an active part in the Indian wars of America.”

On March 8, he was back in Denver, introducing the films to a packed house for a weekly run, twice daily, at the Tabor Grand Opera House. “Nothing like this has ever been done before,” said the Denver Post. “It is War, itself, grim, unpitying, and terrible, and it holds your heart still as you watch it and leaves you in the end, amazed at the courage and the folly of mankind.” On March 28, Cody’s publicist, self-dubbed “Major” John M. Burke, announced that once again Cody had a fortune in sight and “the world by the ears.” But that did not happen. The film fared poorly, possibly because it was too realistic or too intense, criticized by Indians for excluding women and children from the massacre, and not appreciated by whites, who were unimpressed by the anticlimactic ending where Indians were assimilated and went to school, instead of going on the warpath. The movie was cut down into a shorter version called The Adventures of Buffalo Bill. The entire documentary was supposedly donated to archives at the War and Interior Departments, but there is no record that it was ever received. However, a two-minute segment was viewed nearly 20 years ago at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody (now the Buffalo Bill Center for the West) by Andrea I. Paul, reporting for Nebraska History Magazine in the winter 1990 edition. While the clip does not include the incident at Wounded Knee, it does include footage of the Wounded Knee period. The rest of the film portrays scouting and cavalry maneuvers at the Battle of Warbonnet Creek, and a scene of Cody en route to Sitting Bull’s cabin, intercepted by Indian police before he can intervene for his friend to head off a likely assassination. Yet to this day, remnants of the film are rumored to exist elsewhere—a disintegrating and mysterious relic, a side of Buffalo Bill that may be lost to the ages.

The post What Pete Hegseth Could Learn from Buffalo Bill appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As one of President Joe Biden’s top economic advisers, I frequently made my way out to the White House North Lawn to give interviews to the media about the state of the U.S. economy. Especially as the pandemic-induced recession faded in the rearview mirror, I was out there hundreds of times touting how the unemployment rate was at 50-year lows on the back of remarkably strong job growth. Inflation was falling and inflation-adjusted pay was rising.

And yet in every single interview, I got the same question: So why aren’t people feeling it? Why so much good data amid so many bad vibes?

In fact, the question was not hard to answer. It comes down to one word, a word that defines the dominant economic challenge with which American families have been struggling for years: affordability. Whether it’s housing, child care, health care, groceries, utilities, insurance, or other costs, significant numbers of Americans have found that these and other critical goods and services are either out of reach or so pricey that, after they’ve paid for them, they don’t have enough money left to even think about getting ahead.

This duality between the data and how people experience the economy is the subject of The Mismeasurement of America, by Gene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency during the Clinton administration. Focusing on unemployment, wages, inflation, and the growing economic distance between Americans at the top and the bottom of the income scale, Ludwig argues that the problem is that the numbers I was touting were, if not quite wrong, then “profoundly misleading.” He then develops his own set of numbers, which he argues better explain why people have long felt a lot worse about the economy than you’d glean from the government’s top-line statistics. While Ludwig is right that top-line numbers, all of which are broad averages, fail to present a full picture of how the different income classes are faring, that’s not a “mismeasurement” problem. It instead reflects the impossibility of encompassing in just a few numbers something as complex and disparate as the U.S. economy. A better title for his book might have been “The Incomplete Measurement of America.”

Ludwig’s critique of inflation statistics is particularly germane to the affordability crisis. The Consumer Price Index is an overall metric that averages out the changes in prices faced by 90 percent of the population. (The CPI does not include prices in extremely rural areas, farm households, and religious communities, among other exceptions.) Ludwig reasonably worries, however, that the average obscures important differences in inflation between income groups.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes the CPI, has itself been looking into this and they find that from 2005 to 2024, prices rose 66 percent for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale but just 57 percent for those at the top. This disparity is a double disadvantage: Such households face both lower incomes and higher prices. Ludwig’s adjusted CPI, which he calls the “True Living Cost,” or TLC, captures this dynamic by significantly up-weighting in the index the goods and services that dominate the consumption basket of less-well-off households, including housing, health care, food, and child care.

While this is the right way to drill down on the affordability challenges facing low- and middle-income families today, Ludwig misses one of the more important positive price developments of our time. For technology goods, like computers and smartphones, the TLC registers large price increases while the CPI registers the opposite. The CPI has it right, reflecting a rare cost decline that’s actively making us better off. The BLS statisticians adjust for the fact that computers and cell phones are remarkably more powerful than they used to be. Decades ago, it would have cost millions of dollars for a computer to do what a $700 laptop can do today. Adjusted for quality, the cost of such technology has fallen sharply over the years, and this decline has improved consumer welfare. Yet the TLC appears to ignore these quality improvements and somehow has technology costs soaring over time.

For another example of how Ludwig offers an overreaching solution to a real measurement challenge, consider unemployment. Ludwig argues that instead of the 4.3 percent unemployment rate for August reported by the BLS, what he calls the TRU—the “True Rate of Unemployment”—is 24.7 percent. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of unemployment in America will realize that Ludwig has either made a mistake or is aggressively redefining unemployment. The last time unemployment was that high was during the Great Depression.

Ludwig’s “unemployment” rate, however, includes a lot of people who are, in fact, working, both part-timers and low earners. His terminology is thus off, as is his critique of the current measurement system, which is clearly, transparently, and consistently measuring what it says it’s measuring. If you looked for a job and you didn’t find one, you’re unemployed. That simple and intuitive definition has revealed important information about labor market conditions for many decades.

But as Ludwig’s adjustments reveal, there were a lot more underemployed and underpaid people in the American labor force in August than 4.3 percent. That doesn’t make the official unemployment rate wrong or misleading. Though Donald Trump, who recently fired the commissioner of the BLS, might claim otherwise, our statistical agencies continue to rigorously churn out valid, reliable numbers. (Trump doesn’t like that they show the tariffs raising prices and cracks forming in the job market, but that’s actually a testament to their accuracy.) But Ludwig’s metric helps to bridge the gap between what the official jobless numbers say and the struggle that many working Americans go through every day.

Extracting from these weedy details, and recognizing that the current system is not mismeasuring America, Ludwig’s book provides an important bridge between good data and bad vibes. As he shows, in an economy where inequality has been on the rise for decades, where millions are underemployed, where poor people’s inflation rises faster than that of the rich, averages increasingly fail to tell the full economic story.

Of course, many authors, most notably Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, have made this point before. But by looking at the problem through the lens of jobs, hours worked, wages paid, the costs of housing (and utilities, such as electricity), child care, health care, and so on, Ludwig’s measurements help to shine a light on a policy agenda to address the affordability crisis. His underemployment rate would come down, for example, if we helped involuntary part-timers move to full-time schedules. (Ludwig would correctly note that such a change would not show up in a lower unemployment rate.) An affordability agenda, which Neale Mahoney and I describe in a new brief from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, would help make it easier for economically stretched families to afford housing (by making it easier and cheaper to build), child care (through targeted subsidies), and health care (reversing coverage cuts, Medicare buy-in) in ways that would directly feed into Ludwig’s alternate cost-of-living measure.

What we should take from this book, then, is not that America is mismeasured. It’s that the gap between what the top-line numbers report and how folks feel about their economic situation is, in part, a function of the increase in economic inequality, of how far they’ve fallen relative to the average. Should we want to better understand how America is really doing, we must dig deeper into the numbers.

The post Measuring the Vibecession appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Apprenticeship in the United States is enjoying another moment in the spotlight—hopefully one that will last.

Most Americans appreciate that apprentices learn by doing, are productive workers who earn wages, and develop the skills for rewarding careers. Apprenticeships yield higher returns than other training programs, without requiring participants to forego wages while training. One survey found that American parents would prefer the option of a three-year apprenticeship leading to a career over a full scholarship to a college.

President Donald Trump has also supported apprenticeships. His April 23 executive order on skills called for a plan to support over one million registered apprenticeships yearly. Additionally, he made apprenticeships a key part of his new “talent strategy” plan, which the Departments of Commerce, Education, and Labor jointly released.

Trump’s goal is ambitious. Currently, there are 561,000 civilian and 117,000 military apprenticeships—far below the one million per year he envisions. Apprenticeships are also much scarcer in the U.S. than in most countries. For example, apprentices as a share of the labor force in France and the United Kingdom are 8 to 10 times higher than the 0.33 percent share in the U.S. Trump’s ability to scale the level of U.S. apprenticeships will depend on adequate resources, a smart implementation plan, and avoiding some of the obstacles that have stymied past presidents who have championed apprenticeships. 

Stops and starts on apprenticeships

Apprenticeships first gained bipartisan interest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, spurred by the widening earnings gap between college and high school graduates and increased awareness of successful Swiss and German systems. President George H.W. Bush proposed the Youth Apprenticeship Act of 1992, and President Bill Clinton persuaded Congress to pass the School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) of 1994. Unfortunately, STWOA minimized the importance of apprenticeship and mainly supported weak interventions like job shadowing and career exploration. Construction apprenticeships, primarily funded by unions and employers since the 1930s, continued under federal regulations, but apprenticeships were rare in other industries. And the apprenticeship system was also a backwater, even within the Labor Department. The STWOA law’s weak results had few defenders, and it sunset in 2001. 

It took another 15 years for apprenticeships to reappear on the political and policy agenda. President Barack Obama supported the American Apprenticeship Initiative (AAI) late in his term, a $175 million pilot project providing grants of $1 to $3 million over five years to 45 organizations to boost apprenticeships, especially outside the construction sector. Congress started increasing funding for the apprenticeship system from the modest $30 million that the Labor Department’s Office of Apprenticeship (OA) previously allocated to oversee existing programs. The first Donald Trump administration endorsed higher funding and encouraged large companies to develop more apprenticeships. However, instead of creating an expansion plan, the administration and Congress became enmeshed in a controversy over Industry Recognized Apprenticeship Programs (IRAPs), an alternative to the traditional “registered” apprenticeship system, largely dominated by construction unions.

One goal of IRAPs was to bypass the often opaque and time-consuming process of officially “registering” a program with the government, instead giving employers the flexibility to design an apprenticeship program that industry bodies, not government offices, would recognize. Critics argued that this industry self-regulation could limit government oversight and compromise quality. Over the past four years, President Joe Biden ended the IRAP initiative, even as Congress increased appropriations to $285 million for registered programs. 

How to “make apprenticeships great in America”

As Trump begins his efforts, resources for expanding apprenticeships are hardly sufficient. The only aid provided by the recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the improved ability of apprenticeship programs to use Pell grants. If Trump is serious about his goal of one million apprenticeships a year, here are five actions the administration and Congress should take:

1. Encourage employer participation with a “pay-per-apprentice” fund. The main challenge is motivating employers to offer apprenticeships. Many employers have little knowledge of the workings of apprenticeships and how they can improve their recruitment, training, and productivity. But once employers start programs, they generally find them worthwhile. A recent study found high returns on apprenticeship investments. Still, convincing employers to adopt apprenticeships enough to change their policies is difficult. Doing so usually requires intermediaries (say, industry associations, local nonprofits, colleges, unions, staffing, and training firms) that can persuade employers to launch apprenticeships and help them organize and register their programs. Paying these groups for the apprenticeships they help create makes sense. The experience of American grantees funded under Obama’s American Apprenticeship Initiative indicates that each apprentice hire costs the federal government about $5,000 to kickstart. This means that with $5 billion, the fund could create about 1 million new apprentices.
2. Make employer participation easier with ready-made occupational frameworks for structuring apprenticeships. Employers interested in creating apprenticeships in welding, accounting, or information technology should be able to draw on best practices for what the apprentice is expected to learn and how much of that education will occur at the worksite or in class (online or in person). A public-private entity or set of entities could work with employees, trade associations, and education and training organizations to oversee the development of these skills frameworks and ensure they are updated regularly. Once approved, employers agreeing to hire and train apprentices using these frameworks could be fast-tracked for registration under the registered apprenticeship system and qualify for public funding. Using this low-cost initiative, the employer could register the apprentice easily online.
3. Fund classroom learning opportunities for apprentices. Apprenticeships typically combine on-the-job learning with instruction off the job, such as classroom learning. The government could finance most of this off-the-job instruction, lowering the cost of apprenticeship programs for employers and students, and increasing early access to these programs. One way to do this is to allow employers and apprentices to reap already allocated state and federal funds, such as Pell grants, veterans’ benefits, and other sources. This would require expanding eligibility for these programs. Access to short-term Pell grants in the reconciliation bill can assist, but tweaking college Pell grants could boost apprenticeships by lowering employer costs for off-job training. Another option is to fund “dual-credit” courses for high school students interested in apprenticeships. State and local governments already support high school and dual-credit courses, providing the academic component of apprenticeships at little or no cost to employers or other government programs. Starting apprenticeships in late high school can increase young people’s engagement in learning. This is one reason countries like Germany and Switzerland engage 50 to 70 percent of their 16-19-year-olds in apprenticeships. Since the average age of U.S. apprentices is 28 or older, beginning in high school would be a significant shift that could benefit young adults.
4. Streamline the apprenticeship registration process and strengthen assessments. Too often, starting an official federally “registered” apprenticeship program takes too long to approve, which is one reason employers can be reluctant to participate. Fast-tracking approval for programs using well-designed occupational frameworks could ease the bottleneck. If a proposed program matches the requirements in this standardized framework, it should win quick approval. In addition, federal and state apprenticeship offices should continue to monitor program quality with assessments every few years (rather than placing barriers in the approval process and then allowing programs to run on autopilot). Oversight systems operating in Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries offer useful models for how this can be done. For example, England’s Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) ensures that apprenticeship programs follow occupational standards and show adequate completion rates.
5. Create apprenticeships in federal, state, and local governments. Expanding apprenticeships in the public sector for information technology, accounting, health care, and security (including police and fire departments) would reduce vacancies, enhance productivity, and demonstrate credibility when promoting apprenticeships to the private sector. Since HR managers in the public sector often lack experience with apprenticeships, the government will, in most cases, require help from apprenticeship intermediaries or staff in state apprenticeship offices to set up programs.

Building a robust apprenticeship system will take years. However, the experience of advanced economies demonstrates that it is worthwhile: success will enhance worker earnings, economic mobility, and national productivity and inspire a strong sense of identity and pride among apprenticeship graduates.

The post Has the Apprenticeship Moment Finally Arrived? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When I started at the Department of Education in the 1990s, student loans were a popular middle-class benefit. College affordability or student loan debt were rarely front-page news. Our dingy offices, a converted World War II warehouse, were a daily reminder of how our work seemed overlooked, too. But in those hallways—literally, my desk was in a hallway—we celebrated lower interest rates, fewer loan defaults, and record college enrollments.

When I returned to the Education Department a decade later, reports of deceptive recruiting tactics at for-profit colleges raised new questions about the value of college loans. My bosses wanted to know whether these abuses were widespread. Were they a few bad apples or a rotten orchard?

College degrees still led to huge earnings gains, on average, for students who were awarded them. The Department of Labor economists pegged the value of bachelor’s degrees at $1 million over the course of a career. But there was very little data on the actual payoff from any particular college or program.

Instead, we looked at a simple proxy to measure the program’s value: whether loan balances were growing or shrinking. If interest accrued faster than borrowers could pay it down, that was a problem with student loan debt. We thought that might be the case for about a third of borrowers who recently left school. But the real number gave me a knot in my stomach. It was double our estimate: More than two-thirds of students saw their loans getting bigger, not smaller, over time. And while some caught up after years in repayment, one in three borrowers was still underwater, even on the oldest loans in the analysis.

This data led the Obama administration to set minimum standards for for-profit colleges and career programs, protecting hundreds of thousands of students from unaffordable debts. But there remained a larger question: How many students had education loans they would never pay down—and what would become of them?

In her new book, Sunk Cost, Jillian Berman sets out to explain how student loans went from a widely supported student benefit to a generational grievance. Having covered the student loan industry for more than a decade at the financial news service MarketWatch, Berman explains how the student loan programs evolved, revealing how key policy decisions ultimately affected the lives of individual students.

In Berman’s telling, policy debates have a familiar echo from decade to decade. Political leaders called for the opening of the doors of college to everyone, regardless of income, but few were willing to invest the money necessary to pay college costs. Student loans were how they reconciled lofty ideals with paltry budgets. 

“Lawmakers were interested in expanding access to college,” Berman writes, but “they wanted to keep costs to the government low. Crucially, policymakers were confident that students would benefit financially from their education, which justified the idea that students should be investing in it themselves.” 

President Lyndon B. Johnson created the principal federal student loan program in 1965, saying, “This nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.” But his student loan program was enacted at a time when Johnson was “trying to hold the budget down,” according to The New York Times.

Johnson, Richard Nixon (who signed Pell Grants into law in 1972), and Jimmy Carter argued that making college affordable was in the country’s and individual students’ best interests. That view changed under Ronald Reagan. As governor, Reagan imposed the first tuition-like charges at the University of California. As president, he starved Pell Grants of funding. As Reagan’s 1988 budget proposal reported, “Students are the principal beneficiaries of their investment in higher education” and therefore should “shoulder most of the costs.”

Other themes echo through the decades: Ostensibly a benefit for students, loan programs were shaped by commercial interests, intentionally providing ample profits to financial institutions. Quality standards were watered down to benefit for-profit colleges. Student aid programs also tolerated or sometimes exacerbated racial disparities, even before the advent of LBJ’s student loan program. The GI Bill funded a segregated system of higher education. Tuition hikes in California and other states coincided with the growing enrollment of students of color. Black students were—and still are—more likely to go into debt, borrow more, and struggle to repay their loans.

To assess these policies, Berman relies on the voices of borrowers. Her reporting is filled with arresting accounts: Some are single mothers piecing together child care around full-time jobs and full-time course loads; others are students lured by false promises and left with unpayable debts, some never finishing, others graduating only to find their degrees worthless, and some carrying student debt into retirement.

Crippling student debt is often painted as the consequence of irresponsible decisions. But, as Berman points out, it usually isn’t a choice at all. Many of these borrowers believed they were enrolled in the cheapest college they could find or that it represented their only option for postsecondary education.

Looking for a chance to be her own boss, Patricia Gary enrolled in a Bronx beauty school. The instruction was poor, and she dropped out owing $6,000. Over the next 30 years, as an educator and social worker, she repaid a total of $23,000—sometimes through garnished wages and tax refunds—but could not repay her entire loan. Her balance was finally forgiven when she was 75.

Sandra Hinz returned to school in her 50s to become a medical assistant. But when her adult son became disabled in a motorcycle accident, she needed to be his full-time caregiver. She struggled to get help with her $28,000 loan despite income-driven repayment plans designed to help people like her.

As a young mother, Kendra Brooks attended community college for seven years, then followed up with a four-year degree and an MBA at age 50. She borrowed $50,000 over the years to pursue economic security for her family. Now a Philadelphia council member, Brooks says her personal experience—and that of her constituents—is that college never quite pays off.

I have met many people with similar stories. Student loans are a double-edged sword. Many borrowers do graduate and go on to successful careers. Economists say that, at least at current tuition levels, loans increase graduation rates and pay off in the long run. Berman never grapples with the question of whether, in some circumstances, loans might be a reasonable way to pay tuition bills.

But the numbers also say that it is not rare for borrowers to be worse off than if they had never gone to college. Before the student loan pause during the pandemic, a million students defaulted on their loans every year. One in three borrowers never graduates. Typical Black borrowers owe nearly as much as they borrowed even 10 years later, having made no dent in the principal. The experiences Berman describes might not be universal, but they are far from isolated anecdotes. The stories and data suggest that something is seriously wrong with the student loan program.

As I was peering at my charts around 2010, the student loan debt problem was getting worse. The Great Recession triggered state budget cuts, increasing tuition and student borrowing. For-profit online universities boomed, leaving millions with unaffordable debt. Graduates struggled to find footing in a weak job market, making their loan payments even more burdensome.

Around the same time, a political movement was brewing in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street activists called for free college, student loan debt cancellation, and broader economic reforms. From that ferment emerged the Debt Collective, a determined and idealistic group of borrower activists.

Berman describes how the Debt Collective spent years raising grassroots funds to buy and forgive defaulted loans. They organized borrowers cheated by their colleges to press for their legal rights. They recruited allies to push for change through the political process.

In 2020, one of their allies, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, then running for president, made debt cancellation mainstream with a campaign pledge to forgive up to $50,000 in debt for each borrower. It resonated. Soon, other presidential candidates rolled out similar proposals, as did teachers’ unions, civil rights groups, and a new cadre of borrower groups like the Student Borrower Protection Center.

When Joe Biden won the White House in 2020, the focus turned to executive action rather than legislation. In 2022, Biden canceled up to $20,000 in debt per eligible borrower. But only months later, the Supreme Court struck down the plan, finding it to be an executive overreach.

Biden advanced a second set of student loan reforms that received less attention but had a similar price tag, were intended to be permanent, and provided forgiveness to some borrowers. The Washington Monthly called the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan a “revolutionary” solution for borrowers with low incomes and large debts. The administration also broke down the bureaucratic obstacles within existing loan forgiveness programs—for public servants and borrowers with disabilities, among others—from discharging the entire loans of 5 million borrowers, including several people Berman profiles. But the Trump administration repealed the income-driven SAVE plan as part of its tax cut and laid off entire teams that help borrowers receive benefits.

So where do student-loan borrowers go from here? Berman says we need a “philosophical shift to change our higher education system to one in which individuals take on less of a risk and taxpayers take on more.” She calls for fixes to the student loan program, “truly free” options at public colleges, and addressing broader economic issues that have made college—and therefore student loans—feel indispensable to young people.

Right now, Congress is going in the other direction. The Republican budget bill made loans more expensive for many borrowers, redirecting some $300 billion to help pay for tax cuts that accrue primarily to high earners and corporations. Republicans also plan to cut off loans for programs whose former students have low earnings. In principle, this is the right strategy—we should stop making loans, as we know borrowers will not be able to repay them—and a spirit similar to Biden’s college accountability rules.

But without replacing more loans with more scholarships, the Republican plan will only encourage higher-cost private student loans and push college further out of reach for low-income students and students of color. It will also whittle down the goals of college to students’ future earnings at the expense of upward mobility, public service, religion, the arts, and many other social goals. A better approach would replace loans with a combination of free college, scholarships, and student loan benefits, especially for students who did not receive the ordinary economic benefits of a college degree.

We can also make college a more reliable investment. Over the past decade, we have boosted the college graduation rate by eight percentage points, but it is still only 61 percent. Leading colleges have found ways to help many students graduate and then connect their degrees to promising careers, using data and fostering advising and counseling. But we have not yet invested in making those steps the norm, particularly at the community colleges and regional public universities that serve most students.

Readers wondering how debt relief became a top-tier political issue should confront the stories in Sunk Cost. The book tells the same tale as that chart I saw more than a decade ago: For a sizable share of borrowers, the system is not working. A new approach to college finance, with substantial new investments, is needed to finally take advantage of higher education’s potential to build stronger lives and a stronger society.

The post Student Loan Debt: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement that she’s publishing a book about the 2024 campaign, and her subsequent interview with Stephen Colbert, triggered a spate of “go away” comments from named and unnamed Democratic officeholders and strategists.” Her former running mate, President Joe Biden, has received much of the same whenever he has popped up in public.  

I share the frustration at Biden’s decision to run again when he wasn’t up to the task. And I understand the desire of some Democrats to “turn the page,” recruit fresh faces, and mount a 2028 presidential campaign that isn’t bogged down by past questions of Biden’s competency.  

But even if Democrats would be better off without Harris as their standard-bearer, they won’t be better off by pretending the Biden-Harris record doesn’t exist. The two enacted good policies, and they look better with each passing day of the erratic and cruel Donald Trump presidency. 

While it’s true that in November 2024, the strongest aspects of the Biden-Harris record were overshadowed by lingering frustration with inflation, it’s also true that a lot has happened since November 2024.  

Trump promised to lower prices on Day One of his presidency. Then he did the opposite and jacked up tariffs worldwide. Trump has also been trying to end the independence of the Federal Reserve by pressuring its chairman to lower interest rates. Low rates are ideal, but the Federal Reserve was designed by law to be independent so it can do unpopular things like raise rates to check inflation. Biden let the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, do just that, and it worked. That may have been a hard point to make in November 2024, but it’s an easier point to make now.  

Trump has eschewed bipartisanship, ramming through his unpopular Medicaid cuts to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthy through the partisan budget reconciliation process, blowing up a bipartisan deal to fund the government through September by clawing back money for foreign aid and public broadcasting on a party-line vote, and breaking the trust needed to readily pass spending bills to keep government open in the next fiscal year. Under the Biden-Harris administration, we had no government shutdowns. Biden signed a slew of bipartisan legislation into law, including major bills regarding infrastructure investment, semiconductor manufacturing, gun safety red flag laws, and postal service reform. When Democrats used budget reconciliation to pass legislation without Republicans, it wasn’t to deny people health care but to make health coverage and renewable energy more affordable. 

Of course, for future elections, Democrats should primarily talk about the future, not the past. But when you have a good record, you should leverage it to burnish the credibility of your forward-looking ideas.  

Democrats have an odd history of throwing out the good with the bad regarding their presidencies. During his 2000 presidential bid, Vice President Al Gore felt he had to keep some distance from President Bill Clinton in the wake of the latter’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. But he probably overcompensated when he told the nation at the Democratic National Convention, “This election is not an award for past performance.”  

In 2020, Biden tightly embraced his former running mate Barack Obama to get through the primaries. But once in office, he and his top aides bizarrely swallowed the argument that Obama’s two-term presidency was too timid and compromising, despite its many successes. Instead, Biden’s initial legislative strategy essentially involved uncompromising party-line bills using budget reconciliation. This led to the Build Back Better bust and the failure to find the votes that could have kept the expanded child tax credit for more than one year, effectively yanking back money from working-class families. He was able to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, snubbing an offer from moderate Republicans for a smaller pandemic relief package, but then Republicans used the high price tag to blame Biden for high inflation. 

Some disparaged the Obama-Biden legislative record because it wasn’t enough to prevent Trump’s election, similar to how the Biden-Harris legislative record (vastly improved once Biden returned to bipartisanship) has been eclipsed by anger over the 46^th president’s decision to run again and the refusal to stop him by those closest to him.  

However, just because voters can be cranky toward the party in power at the end of a presidency doesn’t mean they won’t become more appreciative with time. 

Why look to the past at all? Because Democrats have a story to tell that’s relevant to the future. Time and time again, Republican presidents leave behind economic messes, and Democratic presidents clean them up.   

Explaining that Biden helped execute a recession-less “soft landing” for an economy upended by the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to a robust relief package and a hands-off approach to the Federal Reserve, was difficult in the wake of an inflation spike. But with Trump breaking his promise to lower prices with a tariff frenzy, and disrupting the labor market with mass deportations, the benefits of the Democratic approach are clearer to see. 

Similarly, with growth a little sluggish in 2016, it was hard for Democrats to make the case that Obama’s infrastructure investments, clean energy investments, health coverage expansion, and financial market rules helped right the economic ship after George W. Bush’s deregulation agenda led to the Great Recession. With the Lewinsky affair dominating the discourse in 2000, it was hard for Democrats to talk about how Clinton’s progressive taxation helped create a budget surplus, lowering interest rates and fueling an economic boom. All of this can be articulated now to show that Democrats have long been the party that takes governing seriously and the party Americans can trust when Republicans take the economy off the rails.  

Democrats are now in the familiar position of casting about for a charismatic savior, which is always great to have but not always available and not something that can be manufactured. A better use of time and energy from Democrats is reminding voters that their party has a long and deep track record of economic repair that will likely come in handy after four more years of Trumpian madness.  

The post Why Memory Hole the Biden-Harris Successes?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Elon Musk’s still-hypothetical third party could become reality because, as I discussed yesterday, combining historically high debt levels with an economic downturn could stoke public frustration with both parties. We saw this in 1992 when independent billionaire Ross Perot exploited rising debt to garner nearly 20 percent of the presidential popular vote.  

But it’s not a given that a large faction of voters will blame both parties for today’s rising debt. With nearly every Republican in federal office having voted for the red-ink-laden budget reconciliation bill, Democrats have a political opportunity to exploit.  

Besides, the winning political party in the 1992 election was the Democratic Party. 

Bill Clinton didn’t position himself as an austerity-minded candidate in that year’s primaries. On the contrary, he savaged the fiscal scold in the race, former Senator Paul Tsongas, for his “cold-blooded” economics. And he touted a “middle-class tax cut,” breaking from past Democratic nominees Walter Mondale (who pledged to raise taxes to balance the budget) and Michael Dukakis (who said tax increases to balance the budget would be a “last resort.”) 

But in the general election campaign, feeling some heat from Perotistas and needing to woo Tsongas voters, Clinton nodded more toward deficit reduction. In his nomination acceptance address, delivered soon after Perot (temporarily) suspended his campaign, Clinton said: 

[President George H. W. Bush] has raised taxes on the people driving pickup trucks and lowered taxes on the people riding in limousines. We can do better. He promised to balance the budget, but he hasn’t even tried. In fact, the budgets he has submitted to Congress nearly doubled the debt. Even worse, he wasted billions and reduced our investments in education and jobs. We can do better. So if you are sick and tired of a government that doesn’t work to create jobs, if you’re sick and tired of a tax system that’s stacked against you, if you’re sick and tired of exploding debt and reduced investments in our future, or if, like the great civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer, you’re just plain old sick and tired of being sick and tired, then join us. 

Clinton’s rhetorical framework glossed over the tension between pursuing deficit reduction, lower middle-class taxes, and future-oriented investments. But once in office, Clinton prioritized deficit reduction with higher taxes on the wealthy (when Democrats ran Congress) and spending restraint (when Republicans ran Congress) while jettisoning the middle-class tax cut. While Clinton took initial political heat for the broken promise, a growing economy fueled by low Federal Reserve interest rates helped him get re-elected. He had a rare string of annual budget surpluses in his second term.  

In a 2008 debate with his Republican opponent John McCain, Obama weaponized the higher debt accumulated by the incumbent George W. Bush: 

When President Bush came into office, we had a budget surplus and the national debt was a little over $5 trillion. It has doubled over the last eight years. And we are now looking at a deficit of well over half a trillion dollars … And, frankly, Senator McCain voted for four out of five of President Bush’s budgets. 

Obama promised to run a tighter ship but steered clear of specifics, and also stressed the need to immediately pump money into the economy to deal with the “economic crisis,” while also arguing “we’re not going to be able to go back to our profligate ways” after the crisis is over. 

As president, Obama enacted an enormous economic stimulus package. But his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is a deficit reducer thanks to tax increases and cost efficiencies. Also, like Clinton, once Republicans claimed control of the House and the Great Recession subsided, Obama accepted more spending restraints. The annual deficit as a percent of GDP plummeted during his presidency from 9.8 percent in 2009 to 3.1 percent in 2016. 

While both Clinton and Obama narrowed or eliminated annual budget deficits throughout their presidencies, neither was succeeded by a Democrat, raising the question of whether budget balancing had any political benefit.  

During his one presidential term, Joe Biden was far more concerned about spending than saving. He enacted massive pandemic relief, vastly expanded the child tax credit (though the stingy Senator Joe Manchin blocked an effort to extend the costly expansion beyond one year), secured significant infrastructure investment, and implemented student loan forgiveness by executive order (though losses in court limited the total amount). Whether or not it’s fair to blame Biden’s spending for the period of high inflation on his watch, the high inflation was the main driver of Trump’s election victory and has given big spending a bad name.  

And now it’s Trump piling on the debt with massive tax cuts skewed to the wealthy, paired with, but not offset by, huge cuts to health care, food aid, and clean energy. And any relief for working stiffs from tax cuts may be undercut by Trump’s tariffs. The issue will be challenging to ignore with debt at historically high levels relative to the economy. Democrats will be sorely tempted to whack Republicans as fiscally irresponsible, and rightfully so.  

The electoral successes of Clinton and Obama remind us that it’s easier to level attacks on high debt in the campaign than produce a deficit reduction plan that squares with other party priorities and yields electoral victories. For example, Democrats will have no problem arguing for higher taxes on the wealthy. But how much will they want to commit additional tax revenue to deficit reduction when there is health coverage, food aid, and clean energy tax incentives to restore? What other big-ticket ideas will they fund, such as baby bonds or vocational and higher education support? Is it better to launch programs that deliver direct benefits, or indirectly improve the cost of living by reducing deficits and making it easier for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates? 

As the successful Clinton and Obama campaigns show, such tensions don’t need to be resolved until after Democrats regain power. But until then, the tension will percolate. 

The post Democrats Should Prepare for the Return of Debt Politics  appeared first on Washington Monthly.