Closing the economic divide in the hard-hit industrial Midwestern United States could dampen the fervor of anti-democratic populism, a new working paper suggests.

Populism is ascribed to political movements that embrace an us-versus-them mentality. Battles are often fought along socioeconomic, ethnic or communal lines.

“When communities are in decline, when residents are anxious about their own futures and the futures of their children, when the younger generation has left, there is a great feeling of frustration, of anxiety, of ill ease about losing status and a changing world,” says John Austin, principal author of the report. “And the populists, of both left and right, prey on these attitudes and anxieties.”

The American Midwest was once an economic powerhouse with thriving steel, oil, aviation and auto industries. But globalization and technological change shuttered many of those factories, leaving struggling communities with far fewer high-wage unionized jobs. Some studies suggest economic grievances, often stemming from an erosion of earning potential and living standards, are behind the rise of populism in the United States.

“Left-wing populists definitely prey on the same resentment and anxieties about a changing world as right-wing populists, but the left-wing populists offer a policy solution: ‘Let’s soak the rich, get you free health care, free college, a decent wage.’ That’s their solution,” says Austin, director of the Michigan Economic Center and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“Right-wing populists offer a culture war: ‘Don’t trust the government, immigrants or someone else who’s getting theirs (opportunities and benefits) at your expense. They’re the cause of your community distress.’ And the right-wing populists also encourage anti-democratic behaviors: ‘Don’t trust the press. You can’t trust the government. We can’t trust our own institutions,'” he says.

Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, sees the right-left divide differently.

“My sense is that populism on the right often seeks to retain our institutions and hearken back to some sense of what that institution may have been,” says Abrams, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The flip side is, if you look at the rhetoric on the left, my sense is that it’s not about preserving institutions, it’s about destroying institutions. It’s not about saving them at all, and I tend to see a lack of proposals on the left of what would replace these institutions.”

The report finds that some Midwestern communities are on the rebound because they’ve been able to exploit their local assets.

“Their economic development approach is, ‘We have to grow our own new future based on who we are,” Austin says. “It’s not about chasing factories to come in, and it’s not about giving tax breaks to get folks to move to town. It’s about looking around and investing in and leveraging whatever assets you have and building from within.”

That can mean growing local universities and research institutions, revitalizing downtowns to make them more walkable and livable, and investing in schools, the arts and recreation.

“Those investments in quality of life and play have much stronger impacts on a community’s employment growth and population growth than do traditional business-friendly measures like ‘Let’s cut taxes and lower regulation and hope that that will attract some industry or some investment,'” Austin says.

The problem, according to Abrams, is that voters aren’t necessarily rational about what they need, often embracing wholesale a set of ideas on the left or the right rooted more in ideology than practical concerns.

“So, yes, you could absolutely transform these heartland communities. I think it would be very powerful to do that, and I think that would go a long way,” Abrams says. “But we then still have to deal, again, with this ideological polarization. … If you look at a lot of the rhetoric of the populist movement right now with immigration, defense, a lot of xenophobic (attitudes) … you can make people wealthy or more comfortable, but it’s not going to change that.”

Data from the 2020 presidential election between incumbent Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden show that some Midwestern cities and counties that experienced economic growth shifted toward the Democrats, away from Trump’s brand of populism and toward Biden’s center-left views.

But, in Abrams’ view, economic resurgence can only do so much.

“I do think there’ll be some change if we can enhance economic stability and help people feel less exposed to economic change,” Abrams says. “But there are also numerous examples of where you can find Trump supporters and populists, on the left and the right, where it has nothing to do with money and it has everything to do with ideology.”
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The International Monetary Fund has slashed its forecast for global economic growth to 3.6% this year, saying Russia’s war in Ukraine threatens a fragile recovery from disruptions caused by the pandemic. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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The world economy will grow at a slower pace because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the International Monetary Fund said in a report Tuesday.

The organization forecasts growth of 3.6% this year, compared to 6.1% last year. Originally, it had predicted 4.4% growth this year.

“The economic effects of the war are spreading far and wide,” the IMF said in its report.

The war has exacerbated negative economic trends such as disrupted commerce and price hikes for fuel and food.

“In the matter of a few weeks, the world has yet again experienced a major, transformative shock,” IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas wrote in the foreword to the fund’s World Economic Outlook report. “Just as a durable recovery from the pandemic-induced global economic collapse appeared in sight, the war has created the very real prospect that a large part of the recent gains will be erased.”

The IMF predicts the Russian economy will shrink by 8.5% this year, and Ukraine’s will fall by a whopping 35%.

The United States, China and Europe were also expected to see slower growth as a result of the war.

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press.
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Цей крок є останнім у списку санкцій, які британський уряд запровадив проти Росії після її вторгнення в Україну
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Франція намагалася переконати європейських партнерів припинити імпорт російської нафти, наголосив Ле Мер, стверджуючи, що деякі країни «вагаються» в цьому питанні
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The Biden administration is taking a key step toward ensuring that federal dollars will support U.S. manufacturing — issuing requirements for how projects funded by the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package source their construction material. 

New guidance issued Monday requires that the material purchased — whether it’s for a bridge, a highway, a water pipe or broadband internet — be produced in the U.S. However, the rules also set up a process to waive those requirements in case there are not enough domestic producers or the material costs too much, with the goal of issuing fewer waivers over time as U.S. manufacturing capacity increases. 

“There are going to be additional opportunities for good jobs in the manufacturing sector,” said Celeste Drake, director of Made in America at the White House Office of Management and Budget. 

President Joe Biden hopes to create more jobs, ease supply chain strains and reduce the reliance on China and other nations with interests that diverge from America’s. With inflation at a 40-year high ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, he’s betting that more domestic production will ultimately reduce price pressures to blunt Republican attacks that his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package initially triggered higher prices. 

“From Day One, every action I’ve taken to rebuild our economy has been guided by one principle: Made in America,” Biden said Thursday in Greensboro, North Carolina. “It takes a federal government that doesn’t just give lip service to buying American but actually takes action.” 

Biden said that the roughly $700 billion the government devotes annually to procuring goods is supposed to prioritize U.S. suppliers but regulations going back to the 1930s have either been watered down or applied in ways that masked the use of foreign imports. 

The administration could not say what percentage of construction material for existing infrastructure projects is U.S.-made, even though the federal government is already spending $350 billion on construction this year. The new guidelines would enable government officials to know how many dollars go to U.S. workers and factories. 

Tucked into the bipartisan infrastructure package that became law last November was a requirement that starting on May 14 “none of the funds” allocated to federal agencies for projects may be spent “unless all of the iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in the project are produced in the United States.” That’s according to Monday’s 17-page guidance. 

The guidance includes three standards for these requirements to be waived: if the purchase “would be inconsistent with the public interest”; if the needed materials aren’t produced “in sufficient and reasonably available quantities or of a satisfactory quality”; or if U.S. materials increase a project’s cost by more than 25%. 

American manufacturers are about 170,000 jobs short of the 12.8 million factory jobs held in 2019, as manufacturing jobs began to decline before the pandemic began. But the U.S. has 6.9 million fewer manufacturing jobs compared with the 1979 peak, a loss caused by outsourcing and automation. 

Getting more industrial jobs will likely mean adding more factories and assembly lines — as manufacturers are operating at a 78.7% capacity, which the Federal Reserve notes is above the historical average. 
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У рамках візиту «заплановані важливі зустрічі», повідомив Андрій Сибіга
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