Yesterday, the NY Times reported that just-released national test scores showed a marked drop in students’ knowledge of U.S. history and a modest decline in civics, accelerating “a downward trend that began nearly a decade ago, hitting this recent low at a time when the subject itself has become increasingly politically divisive… About 40 percent of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in U.S. history last year, compared with 34 percent in 2018 and 29 percent in 2014… Questions ranged from the simple— knowing that factory conditions in the 1800s were dangerous, with long days and low pay— to the complex. For example, only 6 percent of students could explain in their own words how two ideas from the Constitution were reflected in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” Exactly what conservatives— particularly Republicans— have worked so hard for long long to achieve!
In its own political class, Britain also has plenty of loud-mouthed, ignorant bigots exactly like our own Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Gym Jordan, Marjorie Traitor Greene, Paul Gosar, Ronny Jackson… Eventually— for various reasons, not the least of which was Russian disinformation campaigns— Britons stopped fighting their crackpot ideas about Brexit... just as America allowed Trump into the White House. The chickens, wrote David Frum yesterday, are now coming home to roost— terrible news just as that rich old guy is being crowned king.
Brits can’t buy fresh ingredients for salads any longer, or if they can, those ingredients are prohibitively expensive… the way they were before Britain joined the E.U. and Britain was reviled for its terrible food. “The temporary disappearance of some fresh fruits and vegetables for a few weeks in winter,” wrote Frum, “may be only a nuisance. Yet such nuisances are ramifying throughout the British economy, signals and symptoms of larger, system-wide trouble. British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019. The British are holding on to their cars longer: The average age of the vehicles on British roads has reached 8.7 years, a record. The British made about 2 million fewer trips abroad in 2022 than they did in 2018 and 2019, an almost 20 percent decline… Altogether, Britain is expected to be the worst performing of the world’s 20 biggest economies this year. The British government’s official forecaster predicts that after-inflation household incomes will decline by an average of 7.1 percent over the three years ending in spring 2024. On the present trajectory, Britain will not return to 2019 levels of disposable income until 2027. By 2024, the average British household will likely have a lower living standard than the average household in Slovenia. On present trends, the average British household will be poorer than the average in Poland by 2030.
The pandemic has not helped, but the slowdown of the British economy cannot be explained by COVID. Italy has suffered more deaths from COVID than any other major European country has, yet its economy had mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021.
Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Britain voted to exit in the summer of 2016. The departure was formalized on December 31, 2020. Since then, new barriers to trade, investment, and movement have risen between Britain and its nearest neighbors. Investment in Britain has tumbled, and the British economy has shrunk. By one authoritative estimate, Britain is 4 percent poorer today than if it had stayed in the EU.
Many in the British government are reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, lamented in a recent podcast interview, “What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off.”
…[T]he British were not honestly alerted to the cost of their choice. In 2016, future Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned for Brexit in a big red bus carrying a huge printed message: We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.
The British were promised that Brexit meant more: more resources for public and private consumption. Instead, Brexit has predictably turned out to mean less, and the British are surprised, baffled, and angry.
The British health service is now threatened with waves of strikes by nurses and junior doctors. With the country’s finances in a post-pandemic, post-Brexit mess, the British government has squeezed the pay of health-care providers. Between 2010 and 2022, nurses have suffered a nearly 10 percent decline in their pay after adjusting for inflation; junior doctors have lost much more, according to some estimates. Many have emigrated: One in seven U.K.-trained doctors now works abroad, according to a Financial Times analysis.
Britain is compensating by importing health-care providers from Africa and Asia. Yet this contradicts another central promise of Brexit: less immigration.
The most recent polling I’ve seen on the debt ceiling makes me thinking the U.S. is fiddling up to its own pre-Brexit moment. Among registered voters, 44% want to see Congress raise the debt ceiling and 39% do not. Independent voters are 35% for it and 34% against. And when it comes to the specific GOP proposals, most voters liked them:
Taking away $71 billion from the IRA- 45% in favor, 44% oppose
Shit-canning student debt relief- 46% in favor, 49% oppose
Forcing more work for Medicaid- 64% in favor, 25% oppose
Increasing oil and gas production- 69% in favor, 24% oppose
It looks to me like Democrats have not made their case strongly enough and that in another couple of years… there may be no more fresh fruits and vegetables, or something like that.