Mediaboss Marketing

Like biting into a madeleine was reading a federal court injunction against the Biden administrations pandemic bailout program for restaurants, which favored some ethnicities over others. Memories came flooding back of South Africas apartheid in its waning days, with its absurd designation of certain Asians as honorary whites.

Slight difference: Under the Biden plan some became honorary whites for the purpose of being disadvantaged, i.e., sent to the end of the line for government aid. According to no rhyme or reason, said the court, spared the prejudicial status were Pakistanis but not Afghans; Japanese but not Iraqis; Hispanics but not Middle Easterners.

Youve noticed a herd of meme-performing pundits insisting that critical race theory is hardly even a thing. Radicals ritually downplay their radicalism as they sense their nearness to power, though perhaps prematurely in this case. Also likely to be voided by the courts is a Biden program favoring black farmers over white farmers.

Meanwhile, still intact is the administrations larger agenda of extending more entitlements to the middle class, inevitably making the entitled population whiter (and more Asian). Indeed, the more Joe Biden mouths the words Jim Crow, the more it seems hes trying to satiate a part of his base (mostly consisting of white progressive racial extremists) with rhetoric alone. Perhaps you believe todays voting rights kabuki is so Democrats can do even more to help blacks. Political realism suggests otherwise.

One premise of critical race theory is certainly correct: Today is built on a foundation of yesterdays. On the foundation of slavery, Jim Crow and housing segregation nowadays is built the exploitation of black communities by multicultural elites playing their defund the police games at the expense of blacks who suffer the lions share of violent crime.

See the original post here:
Progressives Punish Honorary Whites but Arent Helping Blacks - The Wall Street Journal

Introduction

Progressive started its ignition in the auto insurance business in 1937 when Joseph Lewis and Jack Green had the idea of offering basic insurance that anyone could afford. Today, Progressive is the third-largest auto insurance company in the United States and a leading seller of commercial auto insurance and motorcycle insurance.

When it comes to good drivers, Progressives rates are in the middle of the pack among other top auto insurers.

Progressive car insurance rates go up an average of $250 a year after a speeding ticket, based on our analysis of national averages. Progressive is again the middle of the pack for rates when compared to top competitors.

Expect a potentially large rate increase at renewal time if you cause an accident with an injury to someone else. With Progressive, we found an increase of over $1,200 a year.

Progressive car insurance rates are second-best for drivers who have a DUI, based on national averages. Still, State Farm handily wins out with the lowest rates in this category among top competitors.

Car insurance companies dont like to see lapses in insurance. If you were caught driving without auto insurance, expect to pay about $450 a year from Progressive. Geico and State Farm offer better national average rates for people in this situation, based on our analysis.

The level of auto insurance complaints against Progressive is lower than the national average, but higher than Allstate, State Farm and Geico.

In a survey of collision repair professionals by CRASH Network, Progressive earned a C grade.

The opinions of collision repair professionals are valuable because they see how insurers compare in the claims process. They have an insiders view of the use of lower-quality repair parts, whether insurance companies encourage the use of repair procedures recommended by car makers, and whether insurers have fast and satisfactory claims processes for customers.

Progressive sells insurance for cars, RVs, ATVs, classic cars and boats. For drivers who prefer more unique forms of transportation, Progressive also offers Segway, Sea-Doo, golf cart and snowmobile insurance.

Optional auto insurance coverage types include roadside assistance, custom parts, rideshare insurance and rental reimbursement. Progressive also offers a deductible savings bank which helps pay your deductible. For every claim-free policy period, Progressive will subtract $50 from your deductible.

Additionally, Progressive sells loan/lease payoff coverage (also known as gap insurance). This helps cover the difference between what you owe on the car and the cars actual worth if its totaled in an accident covered by your policy.

Progressive offers a usage-based program, known as Snapshot, which determines your insurance rate in part based on your actual driving.

Youll get an automatic discount simply for participating in the program (depending on your state). Your personalized insurance rates will be calculated based on when you renew your policy, based on your driving habits.

At Progressive, customers who are Uber or Lyft drivers are required to add rideshare insurance to their personal auto policies. With this rideshare insurance, drivers are protected if an accident occurs when they are waiting for a passenger while out driving for Uber or Lyft. During this time, rideshare coverage from Progressive will provide collision and comprehensive coverage, uninsured motorist coverage, and other coverage you may have such as rental car reimbursement.

Progressive offers many discounts, especially for drivers who practice safe driving habits. If you have a teen driver, look for Progressives discounts for teen drivers, good students and distant students.

If youre a loyal Progressive customer, you can benefit from the multi-policy and multi-car discounts. Here are a few other insurance discounts you may qualify for:

Progressive sells homeowners, condo and renters insurance in most states, often from other companies through its Progressive insurance agency. Progressive also sells insurance for mobile/manufactured homes. Optional coverage types include water back-up and personal injury coverage.

If you live in an area prone to natural disasters, Progressive sells policies to help cover problems like earthquakes, floods, landslides, mudslides and sinkholes.

For those who need to protect a small business from financial loss, Progressive provides a variety of coverage types including a business owners policy, professional liability, workers compensation, commercial auto insurance and general liability insurance.

With identity theft and cybercrime continuing to pose challenges, many people are searching for a way to protect their assets from fraud and theft. Progressive sells identity theft protection and a credit monitoring service sponsored by Experian.

Progressive also sells life, dental, phone and electric device, health, travel, umbrella, vision and pet insurance. You also can find financial services such as personal loans and car shopping services.

The Progressive app lets users easily manage their insurance policies from their smartphones. Some mobile app features include:

In 1937, Joseph Lewis and Jack Green launched the Progressive Mutual Insurance Co. with the idea to provide security and protection to vehicle owners. Progressive Insurance first specialized in nonstandard insurance, which led them to launch the Safe Driver Plan in Ohio. This plan offered lower rates to drivers who went without accidents.

Today, Progressive is headquartered in Mayfield Village, Ohio, and has 20.4 million insurance policies in force.

Established in 2001, The Progressive Insurance Foundation gives back to communities by supporting causes and organizations that Progressive employees care about. When employees donate any amount from $20 to $3,000 to a qualified nonprofit, they can request a matching gift. The Foundation will match those donation dollars up to 100%. Matching gift donations depends on the number of requests and Progressives profitability for the year.

Additionally, Progressive encourages and supports its employees to give back through volunteerism and other charitable efforts.

Other causes that Progressive supports include:

To find average car insurance rates nationwide, we used rates from Quadrant Information Services, a provider of insurance data and analytics. Rates are based on a female driver with a clean record insuring a Toyota RAV4 with $100,000 in bodily injury liability coverage per person, $300,000 per accident and $100,000 in property damage liability, uninsured motorist coverage and any other coverage required in the state. The rate also includes collision and comprehensive with a $500 deductible.

Read the rest here:
Progressive Car Insurance Review Forbes Advisor - Forbes

Millennials have long been cast as the great progressive hope, or "New Progressive America: The Millennial Generation," as one study would have it. 25- to 40-year-old Americans, already the largest portion of the current adult population, have been cast by progressives as "a hero generation" that will escape the material trappings of their Boomer parents' suburban lives and pull American politics far to the Left.

To be sure, millennials are the most Democratic-leaning of generations, as the Pew Research Center found; they have close to a 60 percent fealty to Democrats, and their votes clearly helped get rid of Donald Trump. So it's fitting that their avatar is the congressional "Squad" led by the ubiquitous 30-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of their own.

It's also undeniable that the ideological cast of millennials, who will be the largest voting block by 2024, will shape our political future. But a closer look at millennial attitudes suggests that the difference between their lives and the lives of their parents is not always by design, and that given the choice, many millennials would prefer to be parents and enjoy family life in the suburbs (and the attendant centrist politics) than be the "heroes" of a left-wing movement.

You can see this in the fact that millennials have been increasingly leaving big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago for more conventional locales, as an analysis of the past decade found. Millennials have spent the past 10 years moving en masse to less expensive, redder metros in the Sunbelt and to the suburbs and exurbs of select Midwestern cities like Columbus, Des Moines and Indianapolis.

Millennials just aren't the overwhelmingly enthusiastic urbanites that people say they are; big skies and small towns are in high demand for a significant number of younger Americans. Some 26 percent told researchers they would like to end up in small-town or rural America, while another 39 percent are headed for the suburbs. This even applies to better educated workers, nearly 70 percent of whom prefer suburban or small-town living. This pattern is strongest among whites and Latinos, but even among African Americans, roughly half opt for suburban living.

And this desire to leave cities is correlated strongly with marital status. Almost a third of married millennials want to move out to the countrycompared to 21 percent of singles. It reflects a political divide between primarily childless, left-leaning urbanites and more conservative or centrist families on the periphery.

Reflecting their geographic diversity, millennials are also proving less uniformly Left than imagined, as Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist, found; as they age and start families, millennials tend to focus more on economic improvement than abstract notions of cultural or social justice.

A poll of over 1,400 people sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and Reality Check Insights after the November 2020 elections revealed that a plurality of millennials consider themselves centrists. 50 percent are politically independent or lean only a bit in one direction, while another 16 percent are conservative. Just a third identify as liberal.

And newer data collected well into the Biden administration reveals no real ideological shift: About a third (27 percent) identify as liberal, 16 percent as conservative, and the majority are independents and those who only lean slightly one way or another (58 percent).

And again, despite what you may have heard, most are a far cry from the stereotypical "woke" social justice warrior. Research from the American Enterprise Institute found that most millennials do not fit easily into the liberal "monoculture" and they do not approve of the politically correct culture pervading so many facets of society. Only about a third of millennials and Gen Zers feel the nation is not politically correct enough, a level practically identical to the third of those who are 65 years old or older.

One stereotype about millennials that is true is that they are financially screwed. Millennials face enormous obstacles in gaining assets; according to projections by the Deloitte Center for Financial Services, they will own barely 15 percent of the nation's assets by 2030, when most will be well in their late thirties or forties. They are also far less likely to own homes than previous generations by the time they turn 30.

And millennials know they are screwed. Many younger people are putting off college while others are demanding refunds or choosing less expensive options.

And the pandemic has made things much worse. Seniors may have suffered a much higher risk from the virus, but from an economic point of view, millennials suffered the most.

In a new report, Data for Progress found that a staggering 52 percent of people under the age of 45 lost a job, were put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared with 26 percent of people over the age of 45. It led one conservative writer to predict that millennials will curdle into a "resentful generation" that could threaten the establishments of both parties.

Particularly vulnerable are the two-thirds between 25 and 32 who lack a four-year college degree, who would have been employed in factories a generation ago, or owned small businessesanother facet of American life the pandemic decimated. And this huge divide between college-educated millennials and the rest is reflected everywhere, including in Silicon Valley. The top 10 percent of millennials who grew up in relatively wealthy families and went to selective colleges are "doing just fine" according to one analysis. Not so everyone else; according to a 2018 UC-Santa Cruz study, nine out of 10 jobs in Silicon Valley now pay less than twenty years ago, adjusted for inflation.

With good reason many young people feel abandoned by the system and are increasingly alienated. And yet, it would be a mistake to predict that this economic precariousness will lead millennials to embrace the far Left. While some may adopt the Left's agenda as a pablum, others will join the lunatic far right, particularly less educated white millennials who backed Trump in 2016 and have made up a vocal part of his base.

The big question then may not be where millennials want to livethe trend is clearbut whether they will be able to attain their aspirations like their parents. This could drive our politics further toward the extremes on both sides, unless Boomers and others in older generations come up with economic answers that restore the American dream for their successors.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the authors' own.

Read the original here:
Millennials Are a Lot Less Progressive Than You Think | Opinion - Newsweek

Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Thank you for signing up forThe Nations weekly newsletter.

When Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes made his much-anticipated entry into the Democratic primary contest to take on Republican Senator Ron Johnson on Tuesday, the 34-year-old rising star in progressive politics immediately secured a list of endorsements from national groups that have focused on the race. That provided an indication of the seriousness of Barness candidacy, as did the predictably crude attacks from Republican groups that recognize his potential as a challenger to the scandal-plagued incumbent.

Barnes will have to fight for the nomination in a race that features eight other Democratsseveral of them impressive contenders with statewide reputations and networks of supportersand in a fall contest that could decide control of the Senate. Though he has not yet announced whether he will bid for a third term, Johnson has already gained enthusiastic support from former president Donald Trump and has begun to collect campaign money from the right-wing donors who embrace his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and his lies about supposed threats posed by Covid-19 vaccinations.

What was striking in the 24 hours after Barnes joined the Democratic field was the speed with which progressive groups lined up behind his candidacy. Barnes is a long way from securing the nomination. But, even though his is a relatively late entry in a crowded field, the lieutenant governor has started strong.

Mandela is a progressive not just in name, but in track recordhe has devoted his life to fighting for our families and it shows, declared Democracy for Americas Chris Scott, as he announced the groups endorsement. Mandela is ready to go to the mat on issues like criminal justice reform, climate justice, and ending gun violence because he knows the pain and suffering they inflict firsthand. Just as this Senate run is a natural progression in Mandelas lifelong pursuit of activism and community-building, its a no-brainer that DFA would jump in on day one to back this progressive powerhouse. MORE FROM John Nichols

Collective PAC, the nations largest political action committee dedicated to increasing Black political engagement and representation, pledged to help Wisconsins first Black lieutenant governor make history again, this time as the first Black U.S. Senator from Wisconsin.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which had already backed another progressive contender for the US Senate seat, state Senator Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee), shifted to a dual endorsement that included Barnes. When we endorsed Chris Larson in this race a few weeks ago, we said this race is too important for us to sit on the sidelinesand if another bold progressive jumps in, well endorse them too, explained PCCC cofounders Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor. Mandela Barnes is just such a candidate. Like Chris, Mandela is a longtime ally of PCCC, national progressives, and Wisconsin progressives. Mandela and Chris are the two candidates in this 8-way race who will reliably fight for Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, and bold progressive policies.

The Working Families Party, which has developed a base of strength in the Milwaukee area and several other regions of Wisconsin, lavished praise on Barnes, with WFP national director Maurice Mitchell saying, Mandela Barnes is the model Working Families Democrat. Mandela comes from the communities he wants to represent, and he will fight hard to deliver jobs, care, and justice to his constituents. Theres no better candidate to send Ron Johnson packing, and were proud to fight alongside Mandela for a future where all of us can thrive.

The WFPs endorsement memo outlined the argument for Barnes, a high-profile activist since the days of Wisconsin uprising against former Republican Governor Scott Walkers 2011 assault on labor rights. The son of a union teacher and a union autoworker, Mandela was born in one of the most under-invested zip codes in Milwaukee, and has seen firsthand how the GOP has hurt working families across Wisconsin, it noted. As Lt. Governor, Mandela Barnes has established himself as a leader on the issues that are driving politics, from COVID relief to racial justice, police accountability, womens rights to climate change, workers rights to gun safety, voting rights to healthcare to small businesses to the Capitol insurrection. He earned the majority vote of nearly every Wisconsin county in his 2018 victory in the Democratic primary despite being outspent more than two to one, becoming part of the ticket that produced historic midterm turnout and defeated Scott Walker.

The most important line in any of the endorsements of Barnes was that reference to his having earned a majority of the vote in nearly every county in his 2018 Democratic primary.

Barnes has demonstrated an ability to win votes in rural and small-town regions, which makes him a consequential contender for the nomination and in an anticipated race with Johnson. He is not the only Democratic contender who has done this. Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson makes the point that he has repeatedly been electedas a Bernie Sanders-aligned Democratin a historically Republican region of the state that includes many small manufacturing towns and cities. And most of the contenders have begun making the rounds of county fairs and rural Democratic gatherings.Current Issue

Subscribe today and Save up to $129.

They get that a whole-state strategy is key to winning Wisconsin.

While it is true that the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison provide a lot of the votes in Democratic primaries, and serve as the base for Democrats running in November, Wisconsin is a state with rural progressive and populist traditions where Democrats still have the potential to run well in small towns and farm country. In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama won 45 percent of the small-town and rural vote. That was more than enough, when combined with his strong urban support, to sweep the state. Obama won almost half the states counties in 2012, as did Democratic US Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin.

In 2016, however, almost two dozen Wisconsin counties that had voted for Obama and Baldwin backed Trump and, in many cases, Johnson. Hillary Clinton won just 35 percent of the rural vote, losing counties that had voted for George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis as well as Obama.

In 2018, Democrats won a number of those counties backin an election that saw Baldwin win, along with Governor Tony Evers, Barnes, and state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, another contender for the partys 2022 US Senate nomination. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden improved the Democratic numbers from 2016 just enough to carry the state. But there is still work to do. Thats something Barnes understands. The video launching his campaign featured plenty of scenes of the candidate jogging through his hometown of Milwaukee. But a substantial portion of it was shot on small farms, where the lieutenant governor has spent a good deal of time over the past several years, and in factories around the state. In interviews, Barnes emphasized the fact that Ive been to all 72 countiestalking to people on farms and from rural school districts.

The endorsements Barnes has secured count for a good deal. But that understanding of the need to focus on all the voters, and all the regions of Wisconsin, counts for even more.

Originally posted here:
A New Entrant in the Race to Take on Ron Johnson Gets a Boost From Progressive Groups - The Nation

Richard Nixon announces a wage-price freeze on August 15, 1971, shocking the world. Photo: Richard Nixon Foundation

When I was a freshman college debater at Emory University in the fall of 1970, the national debate topic was not Vietnam, but the desirability of wage and price control. Little did we know that just months ahead a Republican president would impose a wage-price freeze, long the anti-inflationary prescription of the left wing of the Democratic Party. But the surprise known in financial circles as the Nixon shock, nearly a half-century ago (on August 15, 1971) showed how pervasive the fear of inflation running at just over 5 percent in 1970 had become.

Thats ancient history now, even to those of us who remember the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s, and the particularly horrid scourge of stagflation (high inflation and unemployment simultaneously). Inflation seems to have been tamed by wise monetary policies. The periodic warnings from 21st-century conservatives that low interest rates and federal budget deficits would create inflation didnt much bother me. It was like hearing an old priest chant a forgotten litany in a lost language just one among many ritualistic arguments for the tight credit and reactionary social policies these people favored instinctively as a sort of class self-defense posture.

The current surge in consumer prices doesnt necessarily change that picture; the current post-pandemic (we hope) economic environment was sure to produce a spike in wages and prices that cannot be projected into a future where something approaching normalcy will surely return (though the real-estate bubble is indeed troubling). But now I am beginning to hear echoes of the inflation panics of the not-so-distant past, which make me tremble.

Like Tim Noah, I suspect there may be a generational lapse in understanding the politics of inflation:

I dont care to be condescended to by a bunch of Gen Xers and Millennials about my 70s-bred fear of inflation. It feels too much like the condescension we Boomers directed toward Depression babies whenever they warned us that we were playing with fire in deregulating the financial markets. Poor dears, we thought, traumatized for life by the 1929 crash andone-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

The Depression babies turned out to be right, of course.

Noah makes it clear hes not arguing inflation per se is bad for the economy. It is, however, bad for progressive politics, and not just because stagflation probably killed the Carter presidency and ushered in the Reagan era far more than the Iranian hostage crisis or other better-remembered Democratic foibles. The deflationary economic strategies of the 1980s werent called austerity, but rather a corrective for undisciplined policies that fed wage and price spirals which in turned hammered the value of savings, the living standards of those on fixed incomes, and the political case for federal domestic spending.

Most lethally for progressivism, the conservative supply-side tax-cutting when combined with inflationary fears can create enormous pressure for public disinvestment and the shredding of safety nets (which is why reactionaries happily labeled the intended result starving the beast). We are still living with some of the long-term consequences of anti-inflationary backlash. As Noah points out, Californias Proposition 13 ballot initiative in 1978 and similar tax revolts were a by-product of price spirals that boosted tax assessments on property and income alike.

But sometimes lost in an examination of the rights exploitation of inflation fears is the abiding fact that the left has no clear prescription for dealing with it, either, other than by denying its existence or significance (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly). Ironically, that was made most evident by the supposedly illiberal Richard Nixons surprising use of the great liberal instrument for taming inflation.

The veteran ex-conservative economic and political analyst Bruce Bartlett has penned an exceptional explainer on the background and consequences of the Nixon shock, particularly its international dimensions, and the role played by Treasury Secretary John Connally, who like his boss and ally Nixon was more focused on short-term politics than on long-term economic realities. Whats clear is that Nixon was convinced a recession induced by the Eisenhower administration and its Federal Reserve Board appointees designed to kill inflationary pressures also killed his 1960 presidential candidacy. As prices spiked in 1970, he was terrified the same thing could happen in 1972.

Nixon had inherited (and temporarily extended) an income-tax surcharge from LBJ that was designed to pay for the skyrocketing costs of the Vietnam War, but its effects were limited. So with his signature televised bombshell reveal (the one he deployed a month earlier to announce his trip to China), amid great secrecy, Nixon rolled out a combo platter of initiatives to fight inflation and international economic instability. They included a suspension of fixed currency exchange rates and the convertibility of the dollar to gold (to head off a raid on gold supplies triggered by a British demand for a major conversion); an import surcharge (to prevent a worsening of the trade balance); and most significantly for most Americans, a 90-day freeze on wages and prices to be followed by an indefinite period of controls by federal panels.

As political theater, Nixons speech announcing a new economic policy was, well, Nixonian. He began with dessert: an assortment of tax breaks and job-creation incentives balanced by mostly unspecified spending cuts; only then did he mention the wage-price freeze. After promising to break the vicious circle of spiraling prices and costs, Nixon moved on to his international proposals, which he downplayed as very technical, while assuring viewers that if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American-made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.

The wage and price controls were initially very popular (as polls had told the White House they would be) and did indeed hold down inflation through the reelection year of 1972, when Nixon won his famous landslide reelection over poor George McGovern, in part by goosing federal appropriations to create a mini-boom. By then the administration had moved on to a more discretionary system for regulating wage and price increases, which generated rumors of employers currying favor with generous donations to CREEP (the Committee to Reelect the President), the notoriously corrupt operation heavily complicit in the Watergate scandals that brought down the Nixon presidency. Between the suppressed and eventually unleashed inflationary pressures and the oil-price shock Nixons international economic policies helped create, the country paid a very high economic price for the brief respite from inflation the wage-price freeze earned him. He sowed the wind with even greater inflation, and his successors Gerald Ford (whose feckless Whip Inflation Now campaign was widely mocked) and Jimmy Carter reaped the whirlwind.

Before you dismiss these events from 50 years ago as irrelevant, consider how much Nixons short-sighted approach sounds like something President Donald Trump might have done if inflation had became a political problem during his tenure (or in, God help us, a future term). Indeed, any president mulling Nixons choice of recession-inducing fiscal or monetary policies might be tempted to resort to the easy-to-understand, if dangerous, strategy of wage and price controls in which the pain is mostly back-loaded, particularly in or near an election year. We old folks remember how it preceded Nixons landslide 1972 win, followed by a decade of economic pain and multiple decades of political misery for progressives.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

Here is the original post:
Why Inflation Panics Are Poison for Progressive Politics - New York Magazine