Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of November 29

The Betrayal of Roe v Wade from Rebecca Traister, one of the best writers on feminism in American politics today:

I understand the impulse to point fingers at individuals and factions, have myself often felt the gratification that comes from naming the bad guy responsible for a mess.

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But this impulse is itself shortsighted and self-serving, in that it allows us to evade the far more suffocating and incriminating reality: that we got to this terrifying place not just by some wrong turn made recently by one wrong person we don’t like, but by decades-long, systemic failures. The biggest and most damning of these is the failure to counter a regressive movement’s project to ensure minority rule and thus dismantle the rights and protections won by activists who labored over generations to gain them — abortion rights very much included. That failure in turn reflects a deeper one: an unwillingness to take the full humanity of women, of pregnant people, of Black and brown and poor people, seriously.

It wasn’t four years after Roe that the Hyde Amendment — which barred the use of government insurance programs to pay for most abortions — first passed, making the purported legal right to abortion care practically nonexistent for people who relied on federal insurance programs for their health care. Over the half-century that abortion has been officially legal on a federal level, it has become ever more inaccessible to people of color, to poor people, to immigrants, to younger people, to people in rural communities and in red states, thanks to Hyde and thousands of state and local restrictions and regulations. Curtailed abortion access has made already imperiled populations ever more imperiled, all while Roe has officially stood.

Yet this does not mean despair or accepting defeat, which would be yet another instance of giving in to short-term comfort and ease. It’s incumbent on us to not check out, to not give up, as it will be tempting to do on most days: to not evade responsibility by shifting the blame to others, but instead to face the future with the respect owed to our forebears and a crystal clear vision of who is going to be suffering right now and in the coming years. To settle into the work ahead, knowing that the answers won’t come in the form of a superhero candidate or a single election cycle, but rather in a rethinking of who’s authoritative and who’s hysterical; of who should be at the center and who should be at the margins; in staying committed through both wins and losses because people’s lives, and not just our own grievances, are at stake. We must reimagine whose lives and experiences should guide us into a future that must, now, be different from our recent past.

This is the US's 770th mass shooting and the 28th school shooting in 2021 alone.

Update: Michigan shooting suspect’s parents charged with involuntary manslaughter

The gun was an early Christmas gift from his parents: a semiautomatic 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun. “My new beauty,” Ethan Crumbley, 15, called it.

The day after Thanksgiving, he and his father had gone together to a Michigan gun shop to buy it. He and his mother spent a day testing out the gun, which was stored unlocked in the parents’ bedroom. On Monday, when a teacher reported seeing their son searching online for ammunition, his mother did not seem alarmed.

“LOL I’m not mad at you,” Jennifer Crumbley texted her son. “You have to learn not to get caught.”

A day later, the authorities say the teenager fatally shot four classmates in the halls of Oxford High School in suburban Detroit, using the handgun his parents had bought for him.

On Friday, Karen D. McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor, laid out those and other chilling details as she took the rare step of filing involuntary manslaughter charges against the accused gunman’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley.

Ms. McDonald said the Crumbleys were culpable in the year’s deadliest school shooting because they had allowed their son access to a handgun while ignoring glaring warnings that he was on the brink of violence.

The Economic Outlook: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Could there be imminent risks to the U.S. economy from too much federal debt?

We think the Federal Reserve will wait until at least 2023 to start increasing the fed funds rate. If realized, this should keep a firm lid on short-term federal borrowing costs.

But a continued rise in real interest rates, should it occur, would put increasing pressure on the federal budget, as both new debt and maturing debt that needed to be rolled over was financed at increasingly higher rates.

But if real rates kept rising over the long run, and particularly if higher real rates were not matched by higher real potential GDP growth, the negative impact on public finances would compound amid the long-term budget deficits that emanate from federal tax revenue growth not keeping up with spending on mandatory spending programs like Social Security and Medicare.

A swing of just one percentage point in real interest rates over this time horizon changes the debt-to-GDP ratio in 2050 by more than 50 percentage points, all else equal (Figure 8).

Rather than viewing the long-term fiscal outlook in the United States as a “wolf at the door” problem, we think of it as more of a “termites in the foundation” challenge that could put downward pressure on the potential growth of the U.S. economy if left unchecked over the long run. If public investment is curtailed or fiscal policy is kept tight during recessions due to high public debt levels, then there could be negative long-term repercussions on the U.S. economy.

in 2013, Ben Bernanke made comments regarding an end to QE that caused what’s now colloquially referred to as “the taper tantrum”. The U.S. 10-year yield jumped by over 1% in a matter of months. This is an even greater risk now, as the Fed is set to own a larger proportion of Treasuries and other segments of the market relative to that period.