The Washington Post - 24.02.2020

monday, february 24 , 2020. the washington post ez re a

T

he survival of our planet as we

know i t is i n danger.

We have at hand a bipartisan,

rigorous plan to address that

danger.

And now it is more than possible that

we will end up with two presidential

candidates who reject that plan in favor

of two varieties of u tter unseriousness.

The first is the denialism of President

Trump. He either believes or cynically

pretends to believe that climate change

is not a threat. His administration has

gravely aggravated the threat, for exam-

ple by recklessly relaxing regulation of

the s uper-warming gas methane.

The second version is the fantasy ex-

tremism of Sen. Bernie Sanders. He

would prosecute oil executives “for the

destruction they have knowingly

caused” (he “welcomes their hatred”)

and phase out carbon-neutral nuclear

power. The Vermont independent w ould

ban the fracking of natural gas, which is

— if you control the methane emissions

— a useful transitional fuel from dirty

coal to clean wind a nd solar.

As though by magic, Sanders’s pro-

posals will “dramatically decrease the

cost of energy storage” and (why not?)

make electricity “virtually free” after

2035 (though, sadly, we would still have

to pay for “operations and maintenance

costs”). All fossil fuels will be gone by

2030, the r enewable energy that t akes its

place will be “publicly owned,” and —

not to worry — the plan “will pay for

itself over 15 y ears.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic

wand to make such things happen, as

Patrick Pouyanné told me last week.

Pouyanné is one of those people whose

hatred Sanders might welcome; he is

chairman and chief executive of Paris-

based Total, o ne of the world’s b iggest o il

and g as companies.

On a recent visit to Washington,

P ouyanné himself did not seem particu-

larly h ateful; on the contrary. Unlike t he

U.S. president, he has no doubt that

climate change is real and “a huge chal-

lenge for mankind.”

“I believe the scientists,” he said, and

he favors a global ( and c orporate) evolu-

tion away from fossil fuels. He wrote to

the E nvironmental Protection A gency to

oppose Trump’s methane regulation

rollback.

As an executive doing business in

many countries, however, he is aware of

some realities:

l E ighty percent of t he world’s energy

comes from f ossil fuels.

l D espite g rowing awareness, a nd the

Paris accord, last year, coal u se increased

and forests (the best means to pull car-

bon out of the atmosphere) shrank.

l Close to 1 billion of the world’s

7 billion people have no access to elec-

tricity, and their governments are not

going to be satisfied with that situation.

l When it comes to energy, every

nation i s concerned first with the s ecuri-

ty of supply; second with the cost of

supply; and only third with its

c leanliness.

l T he t echnology d oes not exist today

to allow a system to rely only on inter-

mittent sources of energy such as wind

and s unshine.

l Climate change is a global chal-

lenge, “and we do not have a global

government.”

Pouyanné said a U.S. ban on fracking

— or the jailing o f oil e xecutives, for t hat

matter — would have little impact on

climate change. Why? Because much of

the world’s oil is located in poorer coun-

tries that depend desperately on oil ex-

ports, and they will gladly make up any

shortfall.

“Change will n ot come from changing

the source of supply,” he said. “You have

to reduce demand.”

Which brings us back to the plan, put

forward t his month b y the Climate Lead-

ership Council, that would actually

work. Supported by energy companies

(including To tal) and environmental

groups alike, it would impose a steadily

rising tax on carbon. That would lead to

reduced consumption and increased in-

novation in alternatives, including bat-

tery storage for s olar a nd wind power. To

get buy-in f rom industry, the plan would

do away with a lot of regulation — but

only so long as emissions were, in fact,

going down.

By imposing a tariff on imports from

countries without similar carbon taxes,

the p lan would pressure those countries

to follow suit. And the tax would be

politically palatable, because every dol-

lar would be returned in equal shares to

taxpayers — with 70 percent of U.S.

households ending up better off.

“A carbon tax offers the most cost-ef-

fective lever to reduce carbon emissions

at the scale and speed that is necessary,”

several thousand economists, including

virtually every prominent economist to

have served in Democratic or Republican

administrations, said in a statement.

It should be encouraging, then, that

when The Post asked the Democratic

candidates whether they would support

setting a price on carbon, almost all

either said yes (Joe Biden, Mike

Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobu-

char, Tom Steyer) or maybe (Elizabeth

Warren). There were two naysayers:

T ulsi Gabbard and Sanders.

It s hould be encouraging, but i t won’t

be — if both parties end up with nomi-

nees who each, in his own way, rejects

reality.

[email protected]

Fred Hiatt

Two ways to

deny climate

realities

LAS VEGAS

I

k new the win was coming, but I

didn’t understand how big it would

be. It only really hit me as I walked

out of a caucus in the East Las Vegas

Community Center where Bernie Sanders

had carried all five precincts; in two of

those, no other candidate even got

enough votes to earn a single delegate.

This was the sort of place where the

socialist senator from Vermont had once

been expected to founder: It was jammed

with Latinos, African Americans, some

white gentrifiers — not the stereotypical

college students, grooving to whatever

hot band was out busking for Bernie last

week. I spoke to military wives and

service workers, retirees and small busi-

ness owners — normal people with real

jobs. These voters went overwhelmingly

for Sanders, as did the rest of the state;

with 70 percent of the vote in, Sanders’s

support stood at 47 percent, more than

25 points ahead of former vice president

Joe Biden’s distant second.

The Nevada results undo all the dire

predictions that Sanders’s opponents

have (rather hopefully) been making.

There’s no obvious cap on Sanders’s sup-

port, no suburban or minority firewall

that will keep him from winning the

nomination. Moreover, the makeup of his

supporters suggests all the reasons it is

going to be hard for his opponents to

unify against Sanders — at least, not fast

enough to matter.

I’m not even talking about the racial

and gender diversity of his coalition; I’m

talking about the way Sanders voters

seem to be thinking about the race. They

can be broadly divided into three catego-

ries: the Realist-Idealists, the Revolution-

aries and the Bandwagoners.

The Realist-Idealists are attracted to

his far-left position on some issue they

care about — usually climate change or

Medicare-for-all. Many supported Sand-

ers in 2016. But they are Democrats before

they are Sanders voters. They will “Vote

Blue No Matter Who” in November, a

point they often spontaneously

e mphasize.

The Revolutionaries, by contrast, re-

semble the new voters President Trump

brought into the GOP. They value authen-

ticity over flexibility; they always tell you

that Sanders has been saying the same

thing for 40 years. Often they add that

2016 was the first time they got interested

in politics or voted.

These folks insist it’s Bernie or Bust.

“A ny Blue Won’t Do,” said Charlee

M agenot, who served as a delegate for

Sanders in 2016 and was at a rally for him

here Friday.

Even at the expense of keeping Trump

in office?

At that point, Magenot’s m other, Debra

Cole, interjected. “Donald Trump is not

worse, for one reason: He’ll destroy it

faster than they will. And then we can

rebuild.”

And then there are the Bandwagoners.

A few days ago, Tim Miller, veteran of a

short-lived Stop Trump PAC, offered a

grim warning for Democrats who wanted,

say, an actual Democrat to be their nomi-

nee. Voters, he noted, like winners; they

are inclined to sign on with any candidate

who opens up a commanding lead. To

stop Sanders, he argued, the other candi-

dates need to attack the front-runner

instead of one another, now. They n eed to

think about building a unity ticket, now.

But the Trump equivalent of Bernie’s

Revolutionaries are why Republican can-

didates in 2016 spent months attacking

everyone but the front-runner. An early

sustained attack might have taken Trump

down, but it looked like his ultra-loyal

faction would destroy anyone who

mounted it. So they tried to knock out

everyone else, in the hope that with a

larger base, it would be safer to take

Trump on.

They failed. As the rest of the Demo-

cratic field is failing now. And the Band-

wagoners are why.

In East Las Vegas, I spoke to seven

Sanders supporters and two undecideds

who were considering him. Three out of

the nine either said they chose Bernie

because he already had so much support

— or that they had rejected another

candidate for having too little.

Moderate Republicans often claim that

Trump is enabling Sanders — that

Trump’s unpopularity makes it safer to

vote for the socialist. But that’s close to

the opposite of what I hear from the

voters who are driving his growing mar-

gin: Bandwagoners choose Sanders be-

cause they think he’s the most electable

candidate. After all, his rallies are huge,

and his primary margins keep growing.

Maybe those voters are wrong. But if

Sanders’s opponents want to stop them

from climbing onto the Bernie Bandwag-

on, they have to build a different wagon —

one single wagon, not five — and fill it

with enough voters to make it look even

more popular than the Berniemobile.

That c ould shift enough Bandwagoners to

lure some Realist-Idealists along. If the

alternative candidate’s margins are suffi-

ciently overwhelming, even the grum-

bling Revolutionaries will find it hard to

claim they’ve been robbed.

It could work — maybe. But Democrats

have to execute this whole maneuver by

March 3, Super Tuesday. Because by the

end of that day, almost 40 percent of the

Democratic delegates will have been allo-

cated. And the Sanders caravan may have

enough momentum to cruise all the way

to the nomination.

Twitter: @asymmetricinfo

megan mcardle

Look who’s

riding the

Berniemobile

B

ernie Sanders is for real, his

opposition is fractured, and

President Trump is delighted

to play the Democrats against

one a nother.

The Vermont senator’s sweep of Ne-

vada’s caucuses on Saturday is no proof

he can win in November. But it does

reveal a campaign that can back what

for many voters is a trusted brand with

the political machinery to close the sale.

While Sanders’ more moderate op-

ponents wring their hands over what

to do next, they might consider that

Sanders built this brand in part

through a series of specific promises:

single-payer health c are, free college, a

Green New Deal, universal child care

and m uch more.

Sanders may not have explained in

detail how he’d pay for all this, let

alone, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-

Mass.) pointed out on Saturday night,

how he’d shepherd it through Con-

gress. But Sanders understands the

hunger for very specific forms of relief

within a significant part of the Demo-

cratic electorate, particularly the

young who suffered most from the

fallout of the Great Recession.

In Mike Bloomberg’s business

world, it might be said that Sanders

offers a lot of “deliverables”— putting

aside whether they can be delivered.

Warren’s early “I have a plan for that”

appeal made her competitive in this

segment of the political marketplace,

but she lost much of that edge after

wavering on Medicare-for-all. In

N evada, Warren ran fourth, behind

Sanders, former vice president Joe

Biden and former South Bend, Ind.,

mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Sanders’s deliverables mattered in

Nevada — and his performance there

confirmed that in a multicandidate

field, he can keep winning simply by

holding enough of the 2016 vote he

assembled against Hillary Clinton.

His showing among L atino voters is

a good example. Four years ago and

again on Saturday, Sanders won about

half the ballots cast by Latinos. This

time, he outpaced Biden, his nearest

competitor, b y 3-to-1.

Because so many Latinos think of

themselves as moderates or conserva-

tives — roughly 40 percent of them

labeled themselves t his way in Nevada,

according to the Edison Entrance Poll

— their strong support for expansive

government programs and economic

progressivism is often ignored. Sand-

ers never made that mistake. He thus

carried even self-described moderate

and conservative Latinos by better

than 2-to-1.

A key test for Sanders will come on

Super Tuesday in Te xas, where Latinos

rejected him in 2016 for Clinton. But

here is the dilemma for the divided

moderates: Roughly two-thirds of Ne-

vada caucus-goers said their priority

was t o find a candidate who could beat

Trump, a nd Sanders r eceived less than

a quarter of their preferences. But the

rest of that beat-Trump-above-all

crowd was relatively evenly scattered

across the candidacies of Biden,

B uttigieg, and then Warren and

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

Sanders is beating them all because

they are all beating e ach other.

After Klobuchar’s late surge in New

Hampshire — its main impact was to

deprive B uttigieg of a chance of defeat-

ing Sanders there — she was pum-

meled in Nevada. Klobuchar now has

no plausible place to go (except as a

favorite in her home state), and her

continuing in the race would only

make her a spoiler.

In the meantime, Biden and Butt-

igieg each have a significant share of

the non-Sanders vote, but neither has

been able t o secure the rest they need.

Buttigieg ran second to Sanders

among w hite Nevada c aucus-goers but

received virtually no A frican American

votes and j ust 1-in-10 Latinos.

Biden defeated Sanders among Afri-

can American caucus-goers, a sign that

he may be able to slow Sanders’s mo-

mentum with a victory next Saturday in

South Carolina, where black voters

constitute a majority of the primary

electorate. However, Biden’s profound

weakness among the young r emains an

anchor around his candidacy.

The splintering of the non-Sanders

vote may get worse. Warren could not

take full advantage of her strong de-

bate performance l ast week because s o

many Nevada votes were cast early, so

she’ll soldier on. And Bloomberg’s gar-

gantuan spending for March 3’s Super

Tuesday primaries guarantees him a

share of the middle-ground vote, de-

spite his ineffectual response to War-

ren’s p ummeling.

Unity is nowhere in sight. Sanders’s

Friday tweet — “I’ve got news for the

Republican establishment. I’ve got

news for the Democratic establish-

ment. They can’t stop us” — showed

he’s in no mood to pull this fractured

party t ogether.

This breach of party solidarity

alarmed down-ticket Democrats hop-

ing to keep control of the House and

win the Senate — and must have de-

lighted Trump, whose Saturday night

tweet announced how he’ll exploit the

opposition’s fractiousness, no matter

what’s next. He congratulated “Crazy

Bernie” on his Nevada victory, adding,

“Don’t let them take it away f rom you!”

Trump would love to tie the entire

Democratic Party to “crazy socialism”

— but he’d also relish attacking “the

Democratic establishment” for deny-

ing Sanders t he n omination. What pet-

rifies Democrats is t hat not one o f their

candidates, whether on the left or in

the middle, has found a way out of this

box.

Twitter: @EJDionne

e.J. dionne Jr.

Why Trump is gloating

Joe buglewicz/bloomberg

A supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) checks in for the Nevada caucuses at the Bellagio ballroom in Las Vegas.

Federal Budget. The extra spending and

tax cuts put more money in the pockets of

businesses and consumers, including

through higher dividends and stock repur-

chases. Some o f this extra money was spent

boosting the economy.

It’s important to acknowledge what we

know, what we don’t know and what’s up

for grabs. Based on a reasonable reading o f

the record, the economy’s growth reflects

continued reliance on large deficits. How

long this can last is one of the unknowns up

for grabs.

beneficiaries. “The labor market experi-

ences that people are gaining today will

change the trajectories of their lives—and

those of their c hildren—for years t o come,”

wrote Trump in the “Economic Report of

the President,” a shorter version of the C EA

report.

All this seems impressive. So what’s all

the fuss about? Just this: There’s an alter-

native explanation of what happened. In

this t elling, the sustained economic expan-

sion doesn’t result mainly from Trump’s

lower tax rates, deregulation and trade

agreements. Indeed, it’s widely acknowl-

edged that Trump’s trade wars with China

depressed economic growth because they

created g reater uncertainty.

Trump’s theory is that by lowering tax

rates the government can stimulate invest-

ment and raise living standards. The rea-

son: Investments become more profitable.

In 2017, Congress dutifully passed legisla-

tion that cut the top corporate tax rate

from 3 5 percent to 21 percent.

But it didn’t work out as planned. There

was a spurt of investment a fter the rate cut,

but it rapidly declined. For the first nine

quarters after passage of the tax bill,

growth of private nonresidential business

investment grew at an average rate of

3.4 percent, with faster growth (6.8 per-

cent) in the first four quarters and much

slower in the next five quarters (0.8 per-

cent), according to the CEA report.

The implication is that lower tax rates

may be much less powerful in stimulating

investment than has been assumed. The

economy may be more influenced by out-

side events (Boeing’s 737 Max jet crisis or

the coronavirus) that affect the c onfidence

of corporate executives and their willing-

ness — or unwillingness — to invest.

Trump’s policy has been straight -

forward: keep pressure on the Federal

Reserve for low interest rates and expand

budget deficits. The extra spending en-

dorsed by the White House and Congress,

along with the 2017 tax cut, has added

$4.7 trillion to deficits over a decade, esti-

mates the Committee for a Responsible

W

e are going to have this argu-

ment repeatedly between now

and Election Day: Who gave us

this lengthy economic expan-

sion, which i s now in its 11th year and is the

longest in U.S. history? Is it President

Trump and his economists, who claim that

their policies — tax cuts, deregulation,

trade agreements — have restored dynam-

ic growth? Or is it mostly a stroke of good

luck, reflecting a gradual revival of confi-

dence after the crushing Great Recession

of 2007-2009?

Politically, the answer may not matter

all that much. As long as the economy

continues to advance, Trump will probably

receive the lion’s share of credit. For better

or worse, incumbents usually get reward-

ed or blamed for the state of the economy

when they’re in office. Still, the a dministra-

tion, through t he White House’s C ouncil of

Economic Advisers (CEA), has m ounted an

aggressive campaign to show that good

policies — not good luck — are the main

reason the economy is faring so well.

The gist of the CEA’s case is to compare

the economy’s actual performance with

what was predicted before Trump’s elec-

tion. If the actual performance substan-

tially exceeds the predicted performance,

then something must account for the dif-

ference. The “something,” t he CEA says, is

better policies. Since the 2016 election, the

economy has added more than 7 million

jobs, far more than the 1.9 million jobs

forecast by the Congressional Budget Of-

fice. Similarly, says the CEA, growth of the

economy’s output (gross domestic prod-

uct) has exceeded earlier forecasts.

The result, it has argued, has been a

huge drop in unemployment across virtu-

ally all major ethnic, educational and ra-

cial groups, as the adjoining table shows.

For example, among African Americans,

the peak monthly unemployment rate fell

from 16.8 percent in March 2010 to 6 per-

cent in January of this year. Other groups

also e njoyed l arge declines.

The administration argues that the poor

and the near-poor were among the biggest

robert J. samuelson

Is this Trump’s economy?

THE WASHINGTON POST

Vanishing unemployment

Sources: Council of Economic Advisers;

Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Less than high

school

High school

Some college

Bachelor degree

or higher

15.8%

(Feb. 2010)

11%

(March 2010)

8.9%

(Sept. 2010)

5%

(Nov. 2010)

EDUCATION

5.5%

3.8%

2.8%

2%

African

American

Hispanic

White

Asian

16.8%

(March 2010)

12.9%

(Dec. 2010)

9%

(April 2010)

8.4%

(Dec. 2009)

RACE AND ETHNICITY

6%

4.3%

3.1%

3%

RECENT PEAK JAN. 2020

Unemployment rates have dropped

dramatically across social classes from

recent peaks induced by the Great

Recession.