Earmarks, Fed' Job and Renter's Revolt

I. Earmarks
According to  Money Magazine, reporting on figures from the New York Fed, Americans' debt hit a new high of $13 trillion last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2008 by $280 billion. On a personal level, individual American debt averages $7,800, according to the U.S. Census.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) counted 282 earmarks being added to spending bills in the fiscal 2019 budget, a 21.6% increase from fiscal 2018.

II. Fed's Job
[Trump] "We have people on the Fed that really weren't, you know, there's not my people," he complained, despite the fact that the people on the Fed are quite literally his people. As in, he formally nominated almost all of them. This isn't the first time Trump or his surrogates have argued that the Fed should ditch its legislative mandate in the service of helping the president manage trade, specifically by cutting rates. "For prices to remain stable in the long run, the public needs to genuinely believe that the central bank will be willing to do politically unpopular things." [1]

III. Renter's Revolt
The "Renter's Revolt" refers to activists in a "growing struggle against an acute housing crisis that threatens the economic survival of renters in every corner of the Empire State." [New York] "Roughly 90,000 people experience homelessness in New York State in any given day." "Approximately half of New York's 3.36 million tenant  households are rent-burdened, meaning they spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent -- and these households exist in all corners of the state." [2]

"In 2016, 37 percent of home sales in the United States were made to absentee investors, including banks, hedge funds and private equity firms like Blackstone -- now the world's largest landlords." "In recent decades, landlords and developers have pressured lawmakers in Albany to poke the system full of loopholes, and as a result, the city has hemorrhaged more than 152,000 regulated units since 1993." "But strengthened rent protections are an essential element in their struggle to put an end to mass evictions, gentrification, and other social ills. They see such measures as a front-line defense against predatory landlords and profiteers, and a corrective to the power imbalance that so often characterizes the landlord-renter relationships." "At the same time, New York State has an unusually high concentration of renters -- nearly half its residents are tenants -- and it boasts a vibrant history of housing activism" "There are about 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in the New York metropolitan area, the vast majority of them in the city in buildings built before 1974."

IV. Gerrymandered States
"The Wisconsin GOP had passed a voter ID law, designed to depress Democratic participation, that took effect before the 2016 election. As a result, turnout in Milwaukee's black neighborhood dropped by more that 20 percent." Democrats won 53 percent of the statewide vote in 2018, but they took only 36 percent of the seats in the state legislature." [3]

"Nearly a decade later, Republicans still control very legislative chamber in heavily gerrymandered states like Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin."

Footnotes:
[1] Catherine Rampell, "Mr. Trump, the Fed's job isn't maximum stock values," The Albuquerque Journal, June 15, 2019.   

[2] Jimmy Tobias, "Renters Revolt," The Nation, June 17/24, 2019.

[3] Ari Berman, "Map Quest," Mother Jones, July/August 2019.