Politics
Inflation is seen climbing to 7.8 percent in February, a new four-decade high.
Costs within the 12 months although February have been anticipated to have risen 7.8 p.c, which might be the quickest tempo of inflation in 40 years as gasoline costs elevated and an array of products and providers grew to become dearer.
Recent Client Value Index information is ready for launch Thursday morning, and that estimate — the median in a Bloomberg survey of economists — underscores the grim actuality going through financial policymakers. Climbing costs are hitting shoppers within the pocketbook, inflicting their confidence to fall and stretching family budgets. The burden is falling most intensely on lower-income households, which dedicate a giant chunk of their budgets to every day requirements which can be quickly changing into costlier.
The quickest inflation in most Individuals’ lifetimes is hurting President Biden politically, and the problem might develop quickly worse amid fallout from sanctions and different financial responses to Russia’s struggle in Ukraine, which has already pushed gasoline costs increased. Rising costs are likely to make voters sad, posing hassle for Democrats forward of the midterm elections in November.
Perceive Inflation within the U.S.
They’re additionally an issue for the Federal Reserve, which is accountable for attaining value stability. The central financial institution has signaled it can increase rates of interest by 1 / 4 proportion level at its assembly subsequent week, seemingly the primary in a collection of strikes meant to extend the price of borrowing and spending cash and decelerate the financial system. By lowering consumption and slowing the labor market, the Fed is ready to take some stress off inflation over time.
“Mortgage charges will go up, the charges for automotive loans — all of these charges that have an effect on shoppers’ shopping for choices,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, instructed Congress final week. “Housing costs received’t go up as a lot, and fairness costs received’t go up as a lot, so folks will spend much less.”
Even because the Fed prepares to rein in demand, excessive gasoline prices tied to the battle in Ukraine threaten to maintain inflation elevated for longer. They may change into a critical difficulty for central financial institution policymakers if they assist persuade shoppers that the burst in costs will final. If folks start to count on inflation, they could change their conduct in ways in which make it extra everlasting — accepting value will increase extra readily and asking for larger raises to maintain up.
That is simply the newest occasion, so far as costs go, during which what can go improper does appear to be going improper.
What’s inflation? Inflation is a lack of buying energy over time, that means your greenback won’t go as far tomorrow because it did right this moment. It’s sometimes expressed because the annual change in costs for on a regular basis items and providers corresponding to meals, furnishings, attire, transportation and toys.
Inflation F.A.Q.
Quick inflation started to kick in early final 12 months, and economists initially predicted that it might fade by the top of 2021 because the financial system reopened from the pandemic and circumstances returned to regular.
As an alternative, turmoil in provide chains collided with robust shopper demand for items, and value positive aspects accelerated. Now, how shortly and the way a lot costs will average in 2022 are more and more unsure because the struggle in Ukraine threatens to maintain delivery routes tangled and key elements scarce. Ukraine is a vital producer of neon, which might preserve pc chips in brief provide, perpetuating the shortages which have plagued automakers. Increased power prices might ricochet by way of different industries.
There are nonetheless causes assume value positive aspects will sluggish at the least considerably. Beginning within the March information, they are going to be lapping excessive readings from final 12 months, which ought to mechanically carry down the year-over-year measure. However it’s unclear when they may recede to the Fed’s 2 p.c inflation purpose. The central financial institution defines that concentrate on utilizing a separate inflation index, however one which can be elevated.
Since his death, Jimmy Carter has been lauded for brokering the Camp David Accords and for his post-White House mission to help the poor and battle disease. But glossed over amid all the tributes is the burdensome legacy that Mr. Carter left for his Democratic Party: a presidency long caricatured as a symbol of ineffectiveness and weakness.
This perception has shadowed the party for nearly 40 years. It was forged in the seizure of American hostages by Iranian militants in 1979 and the failed military attempt to free them, as well as the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. And it lingered in memories of Mr. Carter wearing a cardigan as he asked Americans to conserve energy, or bemoaning what he called a “crisis of confidence” in an address to the nation that became a textbook example of political self-harm.
Over the decades, these events have provided endless fodder for attacks by Republicans, who reveled in invoking Mr. Carter’s name to deride Democrats. And that mockery, in turn, influenced the way Democrats have presented themselves to voters. Without Mr. Carter’s image of weakness on national security and defense, for example, it is hard to imagine the party’s war-hero candidate for president in 2004 introducing himself with a salute at its nominating convention and saying, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.”
Mr. Carter’s political legacy produced what many analysts argue was a kind of conditioned response: an overreaction among Democrats anxious to avoid comparisons to him on foreign policy issues. This was evident in the roster of prominent congressional Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, who voted for the 2002 resolution that authorized President George W. Bush to take the nation to war in Iraq, a vote many said they came to regret.
It could even be discerned in the taciturn response from President Biden after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 descended into chaos, said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton.
“Democrats always feel defensive about these messy situations,” Professor Zelizer said. He linked that reflex to the taking of the Iranian hostages and to the raid Mr. Carter ordered to save them, which ended in a helicopter crash that killed eight Americans.
“They don’t act with command in talking about tough foreign policy events,” Mr. Zelizer said, pointing in particular to the struggle by Democrats in Congress over Iraq. “The instinct when things go bad is to either be silent or apologetic.”
Historians and Democrats say the characterization of Mr. Carter as weak is in many ways unfair and exaggerated, ignoring some of the major accomplishments of his four years in office. He ordered an American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and a grain embargo against the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, “He became an exemplar of why you had to look tough and not weak in foreign policy,” said Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant who worked for Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts when Mr. Kennedy challenged Mr. Carter for the presidential nomination in 1980.
Indeed, more than 30 years after Mr. Carter left office, Republicans reached back to the Carter years to dismiss a momentous decision by President Barack Obama that delivered a forceful rebuttal to the idea of Democrats as weak or ineffective: approving the American raid to assassinate Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” said Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president.
(None other than Mr. Biden, as Mr. Obama’s vice president, made that raid a staple of his speeches in their 2012 re-election campaign. “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive,” Mr. Biden said often.)
This aspect of Mr. Carter’s legacy was ultimately set in cement by his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor who presented himself as a decisive and forceful contrast to the sitting president. “He was the standard by which Democrats and Republicans judged political effectiveness,” Tim Naftali, a presidential historian, said of Mr. Reagan. “So by definition, Carter, whom Reagan had beaten, was the opposite of effective, the model to be avoided.”
“The killer Reagan line, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ was first aimed at Carter,” he said.
So it was that from the moment Mr. Carter left office — on the day Iranian militants released the hostages — Democratic candidates for president have sought, with word and action, to escape his shadow.
Bill Clinton frequently invoked strength in talking about both international and domestic issues when he ran for president. During his 1996 re-election campaign, he boasted of putting 100,000 police on the street and promised to keep America “the world’s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity.”
For her part, Mrs. Clinton, who as the Democratic candidate in 2016 also had to allay voters’ doubts about whether a woman had the fortitude to be president, repeatedly cited her experience as secretary of state under Mr. Obama, and made “Stronger together” her campaign slogan. She used the words “strong,” “stronger” and “strength” 13 times in her speech accepting the party’s nomination.
In last year’s presidential campaign, Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic candidate against Donald J. Trump, boasted of owning a Glock pistol, and left little doubt about her belief in military might as she accepted her party’s nomination in Chicago.
“As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she said.
But some efforts to escape the Carter legacy only seemed to reinforce it.
Michael S. Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, was ridiculed when he donned a green tank helmet and “military coveralls over his Filene’s suit,” as a New York Times report said at the time, to ride a 63-ton M1 tank around a field at a manufacturing plant in front of a battery of television cameras. “Rat-a-tat,” Mr. Dukakis said.
“Dukakis was trying to demonstrate strength,” Mr. Shrum said. “Instead, he demonstrated weakness. People are always fighting the last campaigns, and they are often wrong.”
In the case of Mr. Kerry, who, like Mr. Kennedy, was a Shrum client, Republicans sought to turn his decorated military record against him by accusing him of fabricating details of his Navy service, in an advertising campaign — later discredited — that was launched by a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (One producer of those ads was Chris LaCivita, a co-manager of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.)
To be fair, the seeds for this line of attack against Democrats predated Mr. Carter: In 1972, four years before Mr. Carter burst on the national scene, Republicans invoked the “weak on defense” argument against George McGovern, the Democratic senator from South Dakota, when he challenged Richard M. Nixon for the presidency.
“The 1972 presidential campaign and the landslide defeat of McGovern made the weak-on-defense argument a centerpiece for the G.O.P.,” Mr. Zelizer said. “The problems that Carter faced in the final year — Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — cemented this political imbalance, placing Democrats in a position to constantly stress that they would be tough on defense.”
President-elect Trump on Wednesday morning filed an emergency petition to the United States Supreme Court in an effort to block his sentencing in New York v. Trump.
Judge Juan Merchan set Trump’s sentencing in New York v. Trump for Jan. 10 after a jury found the now-president-elect guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree, stemming from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges and has appealed the ruling but was rejected last week by Merchan.
NEW YORK JUDGE SETS TRUMP SENTENCING DAYS BEFORE INAUGURATION
“President Trump’s legal team filed an emergency petition with the United States Supreme Court, asking the Court to correct the unjust actions by New York courts and stop the unlawful sentencing in the Manhattan D.A.’s Witch Hunt,” Trump spokesman and incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital.
“The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the Constitution, and established legal precedent mandate that this meritless hoax be immediately dismissed.”
Cheung said the “American People elected President Trump with an overwhelming mandate that demands an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and all of the remaining Witch Hunts.”
He added: “We look forward to uniting our country in the new administration as President Trump makes America great again.”
Former President Donald Trump attends the first day of his trial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on April 15. Judge Juan Merchan poses for a picture in his chambers on March 14 in New York. (Angela Weiss/AFP via AP, POOL/AP)
TRUMP FILES MOTION TO STAY ‘UNLAWFUL SENTENCING’ IN NEW YORK CASE
Trump’s lawyers, in its petition to the high court, said it should “immediately order a stay of pending criminal proceedings in the Supreme Court of New York County, New York, pending the final resolution of President Trump’s interlocutory appeal raising questions of Presidential immunity, including in this Court if necessary.”
“The Court should also enter, if necessary, a temporary administrative stay while it considers this stay application,” the filing states.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg arrives at Daniel Penny’s trial following a lunch break at the Manhattan Supreme Criminal Court building in New York City on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024. (Julia Bonavita/Fox News Digital)
Trump attorneys also argued that New York prosecutors erroneously admitted extensive evidence relating to official presidential acts during trial, ignoring the high court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
The Supreme Court, earlier this year, ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution related to official presidential acts.
Trump’s legal team is arguing Merchan should not be permitted to move any further, and said their appeal on the ruling “will ultimately result in the dismissal of the District Attorney’s politically motivated prosecution that was flawed from the very beginning, centered around the wrongful actions and false claims of a disgraced, disbarred serial-liar former attorney, violated President Trump’s due process rights, and had no merit.”
“In the meantime, the New York trial court lacks authority to impose sentence and judgment on President Trump—or conduct any further criminal proceedings against him—until the resolution of his underlying appeal raising substantial claims of Presidential immunity, including by review in this Court if necessary,” the filing states. “As discussed herein, this Court should order an immediate stay of criminal proceedings against President Trump in the New York trial court, including but not limited to the criminal sentencing hearing scheduled for January 10, 2025, at 9:30 a.m.”
New York has to file a written response by Thursday at 10:00 a.m.
JUDGE DENIES TRUMP MOTION TO STOP NY CRIMINAL CASE SENTENCING
The filing to the United States Supreme Court comes after a judge in New York on Tuesday denied Trump’s motion to stay the Jan. 10 sentencing, which is currently set for Friday, Jan. 10, at 9:30 a.m.
U.S. Supreme Court. Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Merchan set the sentencing date last week but said he will not sentence the president-elect to prison.
Merchan wrote in his decision that he is not likely to “impose any sentence of incarceration,” but rather a sentence of an “unconditional discharge,” which means there would be no punishment imposed.
Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States on Jan. 20.
Trump has maintained his innocence in the case and repeatedly railed against it as an example of “lawfare” promoted by Democrats in an effort to hurt his election efforts ahead of November.
Fox News’ Shannon Bream and Bill Mears contributed to this report.
Politics
Bracing for Trump, Mexico aims to roll out a 'panic app' for Mexican nationals being deported
Mexico City — Hardly a day goes by here that Mexico’s president or one of her aides does not speak of some plan being devised in case President-elect Donald Trump goes through with his threats of mass deportations and punishing tariffs — testament to how vulnerable Mexico is to shifting policies in Washington.
The latest from Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum‘s administration is a “panic button” — an emergency cellphone application that will enable Mexican citizens fearing detention and deportation in the United States to alert diplomats and relatives of their plight.
Sheinbaum also says her government has bolstered staff at Mexico’s more than 50 consulates in the United States, adding advisors to provide legal counsel to those facing potential deportation.
Trump’s pronouncements have generated profound uncertainty among Mexican officials, business leaders on both side of the border and millions of Mexican immigrants in the United States.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has spoken out against President-elect Donald Trump’s deportation threats.
(Fernando Llano / Associated Press)
Sheinbaum, who calls Mexican migrants “heroes,” opposes Trump’s mass-deportation plan but has been muted in her criticisms of Trump himself.
Mexican nationals who could face deportation “are not alone and will not be alone,” Mexico’s foreign minister, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, vowed last month, speaking to reporters during one of Sheinbaum’s daily morning news conferences.
According to Mexican government estimates, some 4.8 million Mexicans reside in the United States illegally, by far the largest number among any nationality. Some have resided in the north for decades and have U.S.-born children, own homes and run businesses.
Trump and his representatives have offered no comprehensive details on how his deportation plan will take shape. Some aides have spoken of prioritizing roundups of undocumented immigrants with criminal records and pending deportation orders — longtime targets of U.S. immigration enforcement.
The U.S. House on Tuesday passed a bill that would target for deportation immigrants who are in the country illegally and have been charged with nonviolent crimes.
And some Trump proxies have not ruled out expanded raids in workplaces and sweeps in immigrant communities.
It’s unclear if Sheinbaum and her government hold out any hope that Trump’s deportation threats — a central pillar of his campaign — can be averted. Their public posture is to try to convince Trump of the importance of Mexican workers to key U.S. industries, including agriculture, meatpacking and the hospitality sector. But Trump and his allies have shown little sympathy for that argument.
Vulnerable Mexican citizens “need to know that they have rights,” Sheinbaum told reporters. “You can’t just deport a person, detain them, take them to the border. There are a series of legal procedures that need to be followed.”
Formal deportation cases can take months, even years, to resolve before immigration judges.
A legal assistance program for Mexicans residing in the United States now includes more than 300 advisors across Mexico’s 53 U.S. consulates, the government says, and also receives voluntary support from consultants and law firms.
Some critics question whether the Mexican government’s preparations will be effective, or if they’re really meant to be.
“The panic button, the stuff with the consulates — it’s all a smokescreen to give the impression of doing something in response to Trump,” said Irineo Mujica, who heads the Pueblo Sin Fronteras rights group. “Basically, they are going to give in to whatever Trump wants.”
The so-called panic-button app, to be fully rolled out this month, would allow citizens to alert officials at the nearest Mexican Consulate — as well as previously selected family members — of enforcement action targeting them, officials say.
Questions remain about how the app will work, and when it will become widely available. It will be simple to use and designed to be utilized if someone is facing “imminent detention,” De la Fuente said. Some immigration lawyers in Texas have launched a similar initiative, albeit of a smaller scale, and it has proved an effective tool, the foreign minister said.
“If someone is detained, independent of their migratory status, the most important thing is that the consulate is notified,” said De la Fuente. “This guarantees that the consulate is advised and we can make a quick reaction.”
According to the State Department, foreign nationals detained in the United States must be advised of the option of having the closest consulate or embassy notified. Immigrant advocates say arrested migrants are often not told of this option.
A deportation officer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducts a briefing before an operation last month in the Bronx borough of New York.
(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)
People in immigration proceedings may hire attorneys, but they often cannot afford the fees — or may be unaware of how to go about finding counsel. Unlike criminal defendants, those detained for immigration violations have no right to court-appointed lawyers. Various studies have shown that having counsel greatly reduces the chances of someone being deported.
Mexican authorities, De la Fuente said, are also making “extensive efforts” to encourage compatriots in the United States with U.S.-born children to register their names and those of their children with consulates. One of the great fears of mass deportation is that sweeps could separate U.S.-citizen children from undocumented parents — or even result in the removal of U.S. citizen minors.
In Mexico, the migrant panic-button plan has been greeted with considerable skepticism. Some have noted that, in Mexico, authorities are often slow to respond to emergency calls reporting crimes or to the many fixed panic buttons in parks and other sites that are meant to summon police.
“Are Batman and Robin going to come to the rescue?” one person asked on social media after the government unveiled the app plan.
Also, many remain unconvinced that Mexican consulates — which, like other parts of the Mexican government, have seen budget cuts in recent years — will be much help in the face of sweeping deportations. Mujica said the consulates are often viewed with distrust by Mexican migrants. “They treat people like second-class citizens,” Mujica said.
Another element of Sheinbaum’s plan is to bolster aid for deportees removed to Mexican border cities and elsewhere in Mexico. “They will be received with social programs … and all the help they need,” Sheinbaum said, but she has provided few details.
Skeptics note that Mexican authorities have traditionally done little to assist Mexican nationals who are daily deported or otherwise repatriated to Mexico — beyond welcoming them and offering free or discounted bus fare back to their areas of origin.
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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