Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
U.S. Faces Deficit of 6 Million Workers
U.S. employers will confront a shortage of some 6 million workers within a decade.
A combination of retirements, mismatches between workers and available jobs, and a decline in workforce participation among men is set to drive the gap, according to by Lightcast, a provider of labor market data. Based on expected growth in the population, it projects a 6 million shortfall of workers by 2032 compared with the current level.
Fed Cuts Rates by Half Percentage Point
The Federal Reserve voted to lower interest rates by a half percentage point, opting for a bolder start in making its first reduction since 2020.
The long-anticipated pivot followed an all-out fight against inflation the central bank launched two years ago.
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
FWIW, Genetic tracing at the Huanan Seafood market further supports COVID animal origins
Politics:
“I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien.” — Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), at a campaign rally, on Haitian immigrants who are in Ohio legally.
What a little weasel:
JD Vance defends pet-eating remarks: ‘The media has a responsibility to fact-check’
J.D. Vance Keeps Pushing False Pet Eating Claim
A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.
Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.
This Is What a Losing Campaign Looks Like
The day before Vance tweeted at me, former President Donald Trump was livestreaming to promote a dubious new cryptocurrency venture. That same day, he gave an interview to the conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root in which Trump reverted to old form to denounce mail-in voting because the U.S. Postal Service could not be trusted to deliver pro-Trump votes fairly.
The day before that, the Secret Service had fired upon a man with a rifle near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course. The apparent assassination attempt drove the headlines, but beneath the story was the reality that a candidate for president took a day off to golf only 50 days before Election Day.
Trump golfs a lot, and campaigns surprisingly infrequently. When he does campaign events, he makes odd choices of venue: Today, he will appear in New York’s Nassau County. New York State has not voted Republican for president since 1984. In 2020, Trump won 38 percent of the New York vote. Yet Trump has convinced himself, or somebody has convinced him, that this year he might be competitive in New York…
Trump’s Derision of Haitians Goes Back Years
Donald Trump had been in office for less than six months when he made clear his disdain for people from Haiti, offering a revealing prelude to his recent embrace of false rumors about Haitians eating pets in an Ohio town.
He insisted one afternoon in 2017 that immigrants from Haiti should not be let into the United States, shocking his chief of staff, secretary of state, homeland security secretary and others gathered in the Oval Office by declaring that people from the beleaguered nation ‘all have AIDS.’
Now, as he runs for a second term, Mr. Trump is once again denigrating Haitians, part of a pattern that goes back years and appears to have its roots in the early 1980s, when the Centers for Disease Control stigmatized Haitians as a particular threat in the spread of AIDS, driving years of panic about the newly discovered disease.
The Failure Was the Point: House Rejects Mike Johnson’s Government Funding Gambit
Even if Johnson always intended to illustrate to Republicans that they have to work with Democrats to pass a funding bill — shorn of the GOP provisions on requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote — 16 defections will sting for Johnson.
But the embarrassment may be the point. The writing wasn’t just on the wall for the doomed fate of this bill; it was etched into the marble of the House chamber.
Why Millions Have Amnesia About Trump’s Presidency
To regain the White House, Trump needs to cover not just the pandemic but a lot else with the mists of time, including his attempt to overturn an election and his incitement of January 6’s insurrectionist attack, a trade war with China that cost the US hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in GDP, his love affairs with dictators like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, his broken vows to boost infrastructure and to replace the Affordable Care Act with a better and cheaper program, his two impeachments, and nine years of chaos, scandals, and mean-spirited, racist, and ignorant remarks.
That’s a lot of forgetting to rely upon, and the fact that Trump still has a good shot at victory is a sign that he can successfully stuff much of this history into the mental recesses of the electorate. Fortunately for him, the nature of human memory plays to Trump’s favor—even, perhaps especially, when it comes to a pandemic.
Trump’s Talk of Prosecution Rattles Election Officials
Donald Trump’s escalating calls to investigate and prosecute election officials he sees as ‘corrupt’ are sounding alarms among democracy experts and the local and state workers preparing to run elections and tally millions of votes across the country.
In his refusal to accept his defeat in 2020, Mr. Trump already has accused election officials of working against him, calling them out by name on social media and spreading falsehoods about their work.
