You’re not going to find a better analysis of the state’s broken unemployment insurance system than Larry Edelman’s take on it today at the Globe. … And, unfortunately, he’s right: don’t bet on lawmakers passing necessary reforms.
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Dell orders workers back to office, donut shops thrilled
A lot of local tech companies are going to be monitoring how this back-to-office move turns out for Dell, which employs thousands of people in Massachusetts. The BBJ has more. … Needless to say, workers won’t be compensated for their hours of daily commutes to and from work. … Sure, restaurants and other businesses that have traditionally catered to office workers are ecstatic by all the recent back-to-office mandates. But they’re not the ones picking up the tab for the commuting hours lost by employees. The workers are. And they’re the ones paying a high price to make sure donut shops thrive.
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The House’s common-sense restrictions on shelter eligibility
Update — And it was indeed done. Now it’s up to the Senate.
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For many Republicans, the end justifies the means
That’s one of the inescapable conclusions one can draw from congressional Republicans’ compliant response to President Trump’s blatant unconstitutional power grabs. They hate big government more than they love constitutional niceties. …. Sorry, it has to be said. We’re living through truly historic days in America.
P.S. – The NYT has a handy-dandy list of the dizzying array of Trump’s orders and actions since Jan. 20, some of them legitimate exercises in powers, many of them not.
P.S. II – Scot Lehigh at the Globe has more on Trump’s power grab. Scot’s not counting on congressional Republicans to stop our king wannabe.
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Mayor Wu’s Achilles’ heel: Her ideological certainty
The Globe’s Joan Vennochi has an excellent column on Josh Kraft’s pluses and minuses as a new mayoral candidate. I liked this graf from Joan’s piece regarding Mayor Wu:
“But Kraft also knows that Wu’s biggest weakness is not policy. It’s the perception of how she goes about implementing it. As he said in his speech, “We have a leader that just does not listen. Too often, Mayor Wu acts as if she alone has all the answers. Whether it’s housing, schools, neighborhood services, or bike lanes, instead of listening to community voices … too often she’s tuning them out.”
Wu’s a true-believer progressive, that’s for sure. She’s not a flexible, pragmatic progressive like Gov Maura Healey. That’s one of my biggest gripes about the mayor. …
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Josh Kraft’s impressive debut
I was somewhat impressed by Josh Kraft’s launch of his mayoral campaign yesterday. He didn’t look and sound like a newcomer to politics. No rookie stumbles and gaffes, etc. Instead, he sounded confident and prepared as he spoke to the cameras with an obligatory diverse group of supporters in the background. … OK, so that’s a style-over-substance view. But Contrarian Boston’s Scott Van Vooris was also impressed by his first-day focus on housing costs. “He’s sure picked a great issue to run on,” he writes. … The Globe’s Adrian Walker questions whether going all negative on Mayor Wu is enough to win in the fall. … And Wu is already hitting back at Kraft’s newfound Boston residency, as the Herald reports. …
My money’s still on Wu, an incumbent with a proven track record of winning citywide elections. She’s vulnerable. But not that vulnerable.
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Trump and Musk’s not totally misguided criticism of USAID
Donald Trump is once again acting like a king, not a president, effectively dismantling a government agency that Congress has authorized and funded for decades, i.e. USAID. Some believe Trump and Elon Musk may be targeting USAID for what they perceive as out-of-control woke transgressions at the agency, as this Globe article notes. That’s probably true, at least partly so. … But let’s not kid ourselves: USAID is a very flawed agency. How do I know this? PBS says so. Yes, PBS. The PBS NewsHour recently aired a piece, just prior to Trump taking office, that focused on how less than 10 percent of US foreign aid actually gets to its intended recipients. Where does the rest of the money go? To pay for “activities, not results,” as one non-conservative critic told PBS. The thing is, most USAID grants are funneled through private contractors, known as “implementing partners,” and, well, we all know what that means. It’s pretty outrageous. Watch the PBS video for just a few minutes. It comes out of the gate fast and convincingly. …
Bottom line: USAID shouldn’t be eliminated – and most certainly not through unconstitutional fiats issued by our royal-highness wannabe. But USAID is clearly in desperate need of reform – massive reform – if the PBS findings are even half true.
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Part II of ‘How long before he declares victory’
Re President Trump agreeing to pause the Mexican and Canadian tariffs before they even went into effect: I told you so. … This is the Trump administration pattern to watch for in coming months and years: declaring great and glorious victories – and then quickly moving on before people realize the great and glorious successes were either very minor or non-existent. … That’s what happened with the Columbia tariff threats. That’s what happened with the Mexican-Canadian tariff threats. It’s what probably will happen with the new China tariffs, though this one may take a little longer for the administration to find an excuse to declare victory and get out.
Here’s why these tariff wars will, usually, remain tariff skirmishes unless they spin out of control: Trump knows full well long-term tariffs are harmful to the economy. And that’s why he’ll huff and puff on tariffs but will be extremely reluctant to impose actual long-term tariffs. He knows they’ll lead to higher prices. He knows Americans really hate inflation, as evidenced by last year’s presidential-election results. He knows he’s playing with economic and political fire.
Believe it or not, all of this partly ties into Scott Lehigh’s Globe column the other week about how to deal with a colossal egomaniac like Donald Trump: PLACATE him. That’s what the leaders of Columbia, Mexico etc. are learning. It’s what other countries are learning. Find a way to placate him. It’s got to involve a small morsel of success so he can declare victory and brag to the masses, a face-saving component that covers his tracks as he conducts a non-retreat retreat.
There will be times when his achievements are more than just minor – and we’ll need to recognize them as genuine achievements, as Peggy Noonan has astutely noted. By and large, though, he will engage in petty fights that lead to petty results that he’ll inevitably portray as great triumphs. That’s just who he is.
Update – From the WSJ: “Trump Blinks on North American Tariffs.” … And he blinked after securing ‘minor concessions,’ as the WSJ notes.
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Sweet deal: Sell an office building for $46.1 million, buy it back later for $13.5 million
This doesn’t look like a recovery to me. The BBJ has the details. … Mayor Wu, take note.
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Beat Up Dems Weekend
As Democrats gathered in D.C. this past weekend to select a new DNC chair, there was no shortage of media stories and columns about what ails the party. Check out some of the weekend headlines. From the NYT: “Many Americans Say the Democratic Party Does Not Share Their Priorities.” … From Rahm Emanuel at the Post: “Democrats have become the party of permissiveness. That’s ballot box poison.” … From Michael Bloomberg at the WSJ: “Democratic Politicians Are in Denial on the Education Crisis.” … And back to the NYT: “‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump.”
Update – From the Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait, post-DNC conference:
“The good news about the DNC, for those who prefer that the country have a politically viable alternative to the authoritarian personality cult currently running it, is that the official Democratic Party has little power. The DNC does not set the party’s message, nor will it determine its next presidential candidate. The bad news is that the official party’s influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups.”
