Day: September 29, 2021

A major issue facing the city of Littleton, and one of the reasons why I am running for city council, is the growing problem of homelessness, which has been increasing across the metro area. My approach to this issue sets me dramatically apart from my city council opponent Krista Kafer who is a regular columnist for The Denver Post and has written on the issue.

Unhoused people are people first, and like all people, their history and their journey through life have been unique and often deeply traumatic. Many have lost their jobs due to COVID. Many are military veterans with PSTD. Many have experienced domestic violence. Many are families with children. Some have experienced racism or mental health or addiction issues.

I suggest we build communities that are more informed about the complexities of homelessness, not just show these vulnerable people more “tough love,” as Kafer wrote recently. So how do we develop communities that are more compassionate and well-informed about the impact of trauma and stress?

First, as a mental health professional, I believe that Littleton and other metro-area cities need to consider increasing the use of trained mental health professionals to assist police on calls for help from people suffering a mental health crisis.

I’ve met with Littleton Police Chief Doug Stephens, who wishes his department had twice as many mental health professionals available to respond to calls that are clearly not criminal in nature but are mental health-related. The involvement of a mental health professional can defuse situations that can otherwise be dangerous for citizens and police officers alike.

Second, we need to build more compassionate communities by giving back to others through volunteer work and mentorship. That is why I coach a girls’ softball team as a South Suburban Parks and Recreation volunteer, and why I have volunteered with hospice, mentored foster children, and worked with people who are blind.

Third, we must not underestimate the importance of parks, trails, and beautiful open spaces in reducing stress (especially pandemic-related stress) and at other difficult times. Parks must be safe for everyone, especially children. That’s why I pledge to enhance and protect the quality of Littleton’s outdoor spaces.

Fourth, we need to use the power of the arts to bring joy and healing in stressful times. That’s why I play viola with the Denver Pops Orchestra and for my church, and why I support programming at the Littleton Museum, Town Hall Arts Center, Hudson Gardens, and other Littleton venues.

Fifth, as the child of grandparents who ran their own small business, I know the stress facing our small businesses entrepreneurs. Compassionate communities take care of their local businesses, especially during stressful times, which is why I am deeply committed to doing everything possible to help our small businesses thrive.

Compassionate communities are healthy and well-rounded places that are welcoming to all and where all people want to live, work, play, and retire. Littleton has always striven to do the things that will make everyone feel welcome.

As a mental health professional, I understand all the different steps needed to ensure that Littleton continues to value its history, to face the future with confidence, and to continue to be the community we love.

Like other cities across the state, Littleton needs city council members who can build compassionate communities. I hope that on Nov. 3, The Denver Post will be able to report that I have been elected by the voters to help lead Littleton into a positive future.

Gretchen Rydin is a candidate for Littleton City Council and is a clinical social worker, and addiction counselor.

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Poverty rates have dropped to their lowest level in more than a decade. Workers’ wages are rising. Children’s hunger rates are falling, bankruptcy filings have plummeted and more people had health insurance in 2020 than the year before.

Pretty upbeat news for an otherwise wretched pandemic year.

Many Americans of ordinary means are doing markedly better in key areas than they were before the coronavirus shutdowns crippled major parts of the economy, recent data and surveys show, suggesting that the trillions of dollars in government relief in the last year not only kept people afloat but also pushed lots of them further ahead.

That’s fueling a debate over what role the government should continue to play in reshaping Americans’ livelihoods. Democrats say the gains offer a case study in what U.S. society could look like if Congress vastly expanded the social safety net — an argument that many are making as lawmakers weigh whether to shell out another $3.5 trillion on programs that would limit families’ child-care expenses, make health insurance more affordable and offer permanent tax breaks to families with kids, among other provisions.

“You have to concede that these changes are making a difference — that we are inching up a bit, and that there is a discernible reduction of poverty,” said Rep. Danny Davis, an Illinois Democrat who chairs the House Ways and Means subcommittee on worker and family support. “We are investing in the return of our economy.”

But Republicans and others who oppose the additional spending on social programs say that enlarging the government safety net through policies like the expanded child tax credit would be prohibitively expensive, leave families dependent on federal money and destroy incentives to work.

“The best way out of poverty and to raise the standard of living is not endless government checks but our job opportunities and growing paychecks,” said Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee. “That provides unlimited opportunity for families, especially those trying to climb the economic ladder.”

To be sure, large swathes of the economy are still reeling from the pandemic, with nearly 8.4 million people unemployed in August. Some 2.6 million tenants are in danger of imminent eviction without aid after a federal eviction moratorium expired, according to the Urban Institute. And economic forecasters have slashed their growth estimates through the rest of the year amid concern that the resurgent coronavirus is upending plans to return to normal.

And there’s no guarantee that the benefits bestowed by the federal government in 2020 will have staying power. Some real-time data shows a direct link between increases in government aid and immediate boosts to Americans’ livelihoods, and in contrast, a drop as soon as relief payments dried up.

Still, some areas have shown remarkable improvement since the government rolled out its relief measures, the most dramatic of which is the reduction in poverty.

Just over 9 percent of Americans were in poverty in 2020, according to the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure, which takes into account federal programs aimed at aiding low-income families. That’s a 2.6-percentage-point drop from the 2019 rate of nearly 12 percent. The bureau also found that stimulus checks moved 11.7 million people out of poverty, while enhanced federal unemployment benefits prevented 5.5 million from dropping into extreme hardship.

More broadly, other aspects of the economy have boomed as well. Median hourly wages are up 3.9 percent from a year ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, largely because of an unexpected labor shortage. Annual bankruptcy filings fell nearly 30 percent in 2020 from the year before.

American net household wealth surged by $5.85 trillion in the second quarter of this year, up 4.3 percent from the first three months of the year, the Federal Reserve reported on Thursday. Household net worth is now about $24.5 trillion above its level at the end of 2019 after more than a year of solid growth, the Fed said.

Credit card balances are $140 billion lower than they were at the end of 2019, and the percentage of people late on their debt payments has declined 2.0 percentage points since the pandemic first hit, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“There’s more money in low-income households than at any time in 2019, and many, many metrics to show that that is true,” said Angela Rachidi, an expert in poverty studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

It’s impossible to fully know what the economy would have looked like without any government aid. But the Urban Institute estimates that the poverty rate in 2021 would stand at 12.6 percent with only the country’s long-standing relief measures, like Social Security, in place. When accounting for the extra measures enacted last year — the enhanced federal jobless benefits, expanded child tax credit and stimulus checks — the poverty rate would fall to 7.7 percent, keeping nearly 50 million Americans out of hardship, the Washington think tank found.

“We’ve often heard that we have more will than wallet, but when we actually open up our wallet, we can do a lot,” said Greg Acs, vice president for income and benefits policy at the institute.

Rates of food insecurity spiked in March of 2020, for example, when the pandemic first hit. And though they dropped in the following months after stimulus checks and extra unemployment benefits went out, they ticked back upward in September of 2020 once the aid lapsed, said Elaine Waxman, an expert on food insecurity and the food assistance safety net with the Urban Institute.

“There are two big lessons,” Waxman said. “One is that when we lean in, we can make a big difference. And when we let up, you know, we lose some of that ground.”

Despite the improvements, however, some experts emphasize that the massive levels of federal spending in 2020 were born out of extreme necessity, and that in normal economic times — especially once the unemployment rate drops closer to 3.5 percent, where it stood before the pandemic — there is less justification for such expensive social programs.

The argument against further investment is that spending so much could ultimately drag on economic growth, especially if taxes are raised to pay for the programs, and that government intervention in private industries like child care could lead to redundancies and inefficiencies, Rachidi said.

“It’s not a foregone conclusion that we need these very large, expansive government programs,” she said, “in order to maintain the progress that we’ve made on poverty.”

The veteran official leading the pandemic response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is stepping aside, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Henry Walke, who has overseen the CDC’s Covid-19 response for more than a year, will be replaced by Barbara Mahon, the deputy chief of the agency’s enteric-disease branch, those sources said. Walke will remain at the agency as director of the CDC’s Division of Preparedness and Emerging Infections.

The switch comes amid a growing sense of burnout and fatigue within the CDC after almost two years of fighting Covid-19. Employees there are facing a crushing workload brought on by the surge in Delta cases and hospitalizations and the expansion of the nation’s vaccination campaign. Armed with CDC data and analyses, the administration last week expanded its use of booster shots. In the coming months the agency will help evaluate whether to give Covid-19 shots to children younger than 12.

Walke’s departure from the Covid-19 team raises questions about the agency’s future pandemic response and whether he stepped aside because of increasingly untenable working conditions at the agency. His change in role comes after two prominent CDC leaders — Anne Schuchat, the agency’s former number two official, and Nancy Messonnier, the agency’s top respiratory official and Covid-19 vaccine lead — left the agency earlier this year.

“He is not leaving the agency, just passing the torch on the response after serving as the Incident Manager for more than a year,” CDC spokesperson Ben Haynes said in a statement to POLITICO. “Shifts in response personnel and leadership are normal.”

Walke’s official title was incident response manager for the Covid-19 response. Mahon, a longtime CDC employee, specializes in enteric diseases — illnesses caused by viruses, bacteria and other microorganisms.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is in the middle of trying to rebuild the pandemic response team in an attempt to combat recent surges driven by the Delta variant and the potential for an increased workload this fall as more people get booster shots and cold weather and holidays threaten to drive new spikes in infections and hospitalizations.

But Walensky is having difficulty staffing that team, in part because CDC employees say they are overworked after nearly two years fighting the pandemic. Some member of the agency’s pandemic response team have returned to their regular duties; other employees who have not worked on Covid-19 are resisting calls for help knowing the time and energy it demands.

States are wrestling with how to dole out Covid-19 boosters after federal regulators set eligibility guidelines so broad that nearly all of the 100 million Americans who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine qualify for a third shot.

People age 65 and older, as well as people 18 to 64 with underlying health conditions or jobs that increase their risk of developing severe Covid, are eligible for a third dose, federal health officials said last week. The sheer breadth of qualifying medical conditions and occupations, plus the lack of any proof requirements, means just about anyone who got the Pfizer vaccine can now seek out a booster. The only hard-and-fast rule is that people must wait at least six months after their initial two shots to get a third.

In West Virginia, where just 40 percent of the population is vaccinated against Covid-19, Gov. Jim Justice — a Republican — is encouraging nearly any adult who has received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine to get in line for a third, citing the growing burden on the state’s hospitals. Vermont, which has one of the nation’s highest vaccination rates, is taking a phased approach, starting with people 80 and older last Friday.

The expanded booster push comes as state and local health officials are struggling to convince many people to get their first round of Covid-19 shots, amid fears that colder weather and the coming holidays could further fuel the virus’ spread. Now they must help the public navigate the ambiguities of the federal guidelines to ensure those who need third shots get them. The task is complicated because many people who would otherwise be eligible for another dose are in limbo until the Biden administration authorizes boosters of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

The booster rollout also will look different in many states than the initial vaccine push last spring. Many people can now get Covid-19 shots at pharmacies, and the mass-vaccination sites that once dotted the country have largely closed.

“In the winter, it was all hands on deck,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “Right now, that’s not necessarily the case.”

Local health agencies are facing different resource constraints than they did last winter, she said. While the country has an ample supply of doses and vaccination sites, “that doesn’t always translate to appointments when folks want them with the Pfizer vaccine,” Casalotti said.

Some local vaccine providers may not have enough Pfizer doses on hand to meet demand at a given time, or enough workers to immunize people, Casalotti said. “And at this point, many, many, many people are beyond that six-month window” of when they received their second dose, she added.

That hasn’t stopped some governors from pushing boosters to broad swaths of their residents. “For the most part, if you want a booster shot and you’re 18 and older — in any situation, just about, that you feel compromised — you can now get your booster shot,” Justice said Friday.

But Scott Harris, Alabama’s health officer, said his state isn’t “automatically asking” every adult resident to get a booster. “This is a very confusing situation,” he said Friday.

Molly Howell, the immunization program manager for the North Dakota Department of Health, echoed his concerns. She said the biggest booster-related stumbling block so far has been effectively communicating who needs a third shot.

“I think the public may be a bit confused,” she said. “It may prevent them from coming in for boosters.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said people 65 and older, as well as individuals 50 to 64 with underlying health conditions, should get a booster, while younger adults with qualifying illnesses or jobs may opt for one. There are still many questions about which underlying health conditions and which jobs qualify people for the additional shot, she added.

People who are unsure whether they need a Pfizer-BioNTech booster should talk to their health care provider about their underlying conditions and their potential Covid-19 exposures, Howell said.

“If you’re a healthy 30-year-old who works from home, and you’re fully vaccinated, right now you’re likely not going to be hospitalized and die due to Covid. You may still get a breakthrough infection, but it’ll still be fairly mild,” she said. “But if you’re an elementary school teacher, and every day you’re going into a situation where you’re probably exposed [to Covid] … then you may say, ‘I don’t want to risk it.’”

Part of the confusion surrounding booster eligibility stems from the Biden administration’s announcement last month that it hoped to roll out the shots for most adults beginning in late September.

That plan morphed amid objections from health experts in the government and outside, who argued that the administration did not have sufficient safety and efficacy data to justify a widespread booster launch. The Food and Drug Administration and CDC ultimately approved narrower eligibility criteria on the advice of their staff and their independent vaccine advisory committees. The federal government has estimated that 20 million people now qualify for the Pfizer-BioNTech booster and a total of 60 million will qualify in the coming months.

The “back-and-forth” between Biden administration officials and federal health agencies created “some amount of confusion,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said on Monday during his regular press briefing in Trenton. While the state health department has been “crystal clear” in specifying what groups are eligible, the Garden State won’t aggressively enforce the criteria at points of access.

“We never asked you to prove that you have X or worked in Y, or give us your driver’s license, or any of that,” Murphy said. “Our view was, the more shots in arms — assuming you’re eligible and doing the right thing — the faster we get that done, the better and safer we’ll be. That’s our same mindset for the boosters.”

The federal government has urged states and vaccine providers to remove as many barriers as possible to additional Covid vaccine doses, beginning in August when health agencies endorsed third Pfizer or Moderna doses for people with severely weakened immune systems.

But with 2.78 million people having received a third vaccine dose as of Monday — 410,000 more than had by Friday — it’s an open question how many were among those the FDA and CDC intended to reach.

“Basically, they’re opening the floodgates completely now, and they’re dancing around it with some gobbledygook language,” Justice said Friday.

Sam Sutton contributed to this report.

Larry Hogan is going national, using his cred as a popular blue-state Republican to help other GOP candidates ahead of a potential 2024 presidential bid.

The Maryland governor, an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, is lending his help to Republicans in states filled with suburban voters who bolted the party during the Trump era. Over the past few weeks, Hogan has campaigned for Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Glenn Youngkin and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. This weekend, he was the keynote speaker at an Amelia Island, Fla., conference hosted by the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership.

And next May, Hogan is set to speak at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum’s “Time for Choosing” series focused on the future of the Republican Party. The forum in Simi Valley, Calif., has drawn an array of would-be presidential candidates, including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

During Hogan’s travels, he has also set aside time to meet with donors, a ritual for those looking to build a national political apparatus.

Hogan told POLITICO he was currently focused on the 2022 midterms rather than the 2024 race. But, in an indication of his interest, Hogan said he saw an opening in the forthcoming primary for a Trump critic, and he added that he would not be dissuaded from running for president in the event Trump waged a comeback, a position some other prospective Republican candidates have been reluctant to take.

“If I decide that I want to run for president, it certainly wouldn’t stop me that he’s in the race, that’s for sure,” Hogan said.

Within much of the Trump-dominated party, however, there is skepticism that Hogan would be a serious contender, despite his sterling electoral record in Maryland. While polling indicates a portion of Republican voters would like to see an alternative to Trump emerge, there is consensus that the nomination would be his for the taking should he run. A POLITICO/Morning Consult survey conducted Sept. 18-20 showed Trump with an 86 percent approval rating among registered Republicans.

But Hogan — who flirted with a long-shot primary challenge against Trump in 2020 and called on Trump to resign following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — argued that the former president’s influence was diminishing. And while other potential candidates jockey to win over Trump’s supporters, Hogan said there was an opening in the 2024 GOP primary for someone unaligned with the former president.

“I believe that there’s 10 or 12 or 15 people all fishing in the same pond,” Hogan said. “They want to be the next Donald Trump, and … there’s some 30 percent of the Republican base that wants to go in a different direction.”

Other Trump critics, including Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, have been mentioned as possible candidates, though they have so far been less aggressive in positioning themselves for a national run.

Would-be Republican 2024 hopefuls are already crisscrossing the country to campaign for congressional candidates, make trips to early primary states and set up vehicles to raise money and increase their national profiles. Hogan supporters have launched An America United, a nonprofit group that’s been churning out slickly produced web videos promoting the governor as a bipartisan problem-solver.

As he travels the country, Hogan is assiduously casting himself as someone who can cure his party’s ills. Hogan offered what may be a preview of his national message during his speech at the Republican Main Street Partnership over the weekend, declaring that “successful politics is about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division,” and that “frankly we have been doing a lot of subtracting and dividing.”

The two-term governor has defied the political odds in deep-blue Maryland, a state Republicans haven’t won at the presidential level since 1988. While Republicans suffered a national bludgeoning in 2018, Hogan won reelection by more than 10 percentage points, making him only the second Maryland Republican governor in history to win a second term. He has remained popular since: A February poll conducted by Goucher College showed Hogan with a 65 percent approval rating.

Hogan’s team says it expects the governor to remain active in the run-up to the 2022 election, particularly in areas the party has recently lost ground in. Campaigning for Youngkin and Kemp were natural choices for Hogan, they say. Youngkin’s prospects partly depend on his ability to make inroads in the Democratic-heavy Washington, D.C., suburbs — where Democrats are trying to tie the Republican to Trump, who has also endorsed him. Kemp, who Trump has attacked repeatedly for not subverting Georgia’s 2020 vote count, needs to stanch his party’s bleeding in the fast-growing Atlanta suburbs.

The governor is also looking to bolster swing-district House Republicans, including members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, who he has supported through his co-chairmanship of the centrist No Labels organization.

With his home-state approval ratings sky-high, there have been discussions within Republican circles that Hogan might be better off waging a 2022 challenge to Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen rather than prepping a presidential bid. But Hogan flatly rejected that idea.

“I really don’t have any desire to run for Senate in 2022,” he said. “Being one of 100 people and arguing all day and getting nothing done just doesn’t have a big appeal for me.”