One of the big questions facing Congress right now is how bold the next recovery package needs to be.
From my conversations, it feels like there’s a simple disconnect here.
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For lots of professionals, the economic recovery has already occurred. Their office may have done some layoffs early on, but folks have largely been rehired and things are chugging along.
You see this in the numbers for North Carolina.
Our financial and business services sectors have basically completely recovered in terms of job loss.
And that’s great.
But check out our state’s numbers for manufacturing and hospitality.
For these folks, it’s still a brutal mess.
Across our state, we still have hundreds of thousands of families who are in serious financial peril - which also means we have at least that many children who are struggling right along with them.
In 2009, we forgot about that.
We let a rapid recovery among high-earners dampen our determination to help everyone else.
As a result, it was a long, slow, painful recovery for tens of millions of families.
Our decision to look the other way caused a lot of suffering - and it led to massive political consequences, many of which we are still dealing with today.
We can’t make the same mistake. We have to get this recovery right.
And for a lot of people that means seeing beyond their immediate spheres and getting a sense of how other people are doing.
We can always debate the specifics of what a recovery package should emphasize - but that debate should begin with a broad consensus that, as a nation, we have millions of families who are still in a deep hole and looking the other way should not be an option.
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Lots of cynicism on whether we can ever break through with folks who have been deeply misled about the election.
First, we have an obligation to try.
Second, even if it's 90% unsuccessful, it's still plainly worth it. That feels like brutal defeat, but it's not - it's a win.
Yesterday I took one approach by providing an avalanche of counter-evidence.
A simpler approach - from Carl Sagan - is to say, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Make sure they know they're making an extraordinary claim, and ask for extraordinary evidence.
And for as frustrated as you may feel, imagine that it slowly dawned on you that *you* were actually the one who was wrong about the election - and how painful that would be, and the lengths you would go to to avoid dealing with that.
In my view, if you genuinely believe that the election may have been stolen, you owe it to yourself to at least check your beliefs against what you see below.
(And if, upon review, you determine that the evidence *does not* support a conclusion that the election was rigged, the next step would be to cast a skeptical eye toward the sources that repeatedly tried to convince you otherwise.)
When I have constituents respond to my emails about vaccine distribution with angry notes about the virus being a joke and not worthy of their concern, I just think about the people who have worked so hard to mislead them.
And how many of them are in Congress.
Pretending a global pandemic isn't worthy of concern isn't a notion you arrive at on your own.
It takes a concerted effort by people who *fully understand* that they are being deceptive.
And lots of these folks are elected officials who should exist to *do the opposite thing.*
And if your elected official is planning on spending tomorrow objecting to the clear outcome of an election, then I'm talking about that guy, too.
Because this is a reality-detachment thing now.
I just don't understand the ethical willingness to knowingly mislead people.
We lost far more Americans to Covid in December than we lost in the entire Vietnam War.
And as we start January, all of our state's Covid numbers are moving swiftly in the wrong direction.
The most troubling metric is our positive test percentage, which just hit a record.
This metric is important because it controls for the amount of tests we're giving.
So for the people who say, "Sure, there are more positive tests, but that's just because we're testing more people," we've got this metric to determine just how prevalent the virus is.
There was a brief moment in September where we fell below 5% and we were starting to feel better about things. Sec. Cohen said she really wanted us below 2%.