Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

  1. September 28, 2021

We know that our collective consumption of consumer goods, from the creation of plastic toys to the fossil fuels that ship them to our homes, isn’t good for the environment. Yes, on a consumer level, our ability to control resource consumption is minimal, but that doesn’t mean there’s no good in a holiday season where gift exchanges don’t require an Amazon Prime account or transit via multiple shipping containers. Mindfulness has its own benefits, especially for affluent consumers, which includes America’s upper-middle class. The higher-income consumers among us use far more resources than the less well-off and are responsible for influencing shopping norms at large.

Americans are now more aware than ever of the global supply chain and its vulnerability to unexpected snarls (like the Suez Canal blockage), raw-material shortages, and shipping delays. Experts predict that these problems, set off by the pandemic, won’t let up until 2022 or 2023. To help reduce supply chain backlogs, the Biden administration has ordered major ports and shipping companies, including Walmart, UPS, and FedEx, to increase their working hours. These domestic efforts, while heartening for consumers, are unlikely to assuage existing supply and demand issues across the world.

Meanwhile, the growing severity of climate disasters threatens to impact how we produce, source, and ship these goods, raw materials, and the food we eat. Product shortages and delays, it seems, are the new normal. At the end of this logistic maze is the shopper, whose buying tendencies are cultivated and incentivized from a young age. The entire consumer enterprise could be summed up in one Ariana Grande lyric: “I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it.”

If these supply chain problems are expected to persist, however, we must be prepared to curb our shopping habits. Conscious or decreased consumption might not move the needle much on climate change or improve the exploitative working conditions faced by those who produce and ship our goods, but that doesn’t mean we have to be trapped in a cycle of thoughtless buying. The alternative isn’t a moral neutral. Must we continue to drown in our unlimited and unfettered need for more stuff, or could we start buying less?

In his book The Uninhabitable Earth, journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote that “there is something of a moral crime in how much you and I and everyone we know consume, given how little is available to consume for so many other people on the planet.”

Shopping, by this logic, is a sin, one that Americans can’t live without. Well-intentioned consumers have tried to do the next-best thing: Shop sustainably. But sustainable shopping is still … shopping. It’s an oxymoronic act that makes us feel good about the things we buy. True sustainability requires reducing our consumption (and, likely, the country’s economic growth), not through buying “greener” products.

“In an exploitative consumer market, the answer is not buying more. It’s buying less,” argues fashion journalist and activist Aja Barber. “We can’t buy our way to an ethical world.”

Still, most consumers are swayed by the hope of “voting with one’s wallet.” Shopping and boycotting became a means to perform politics in the Trump era and beyond. But consumer activism, or conscious consumerism, does little to impact legislation or corporate policy. The fossil fuel industries, to that end, have weaponized the fallacy of “personal responsibility” to avoid talking about corporate carbon emissions. (An infuriating, oft-repeated statistic from the Carbon Majors Database is that 100 major fossil fuel companies have produced 71 percent of total carbon emissions since 1988.)

As born consumers, we’re faced with a tricky, paralyzing conundrum: Any collective effort will be futile against the scale of climate change, so why should regular people be tasked with modifying their behaviors when the system that runs global commerce is so ubiquitous?

According to one sustainability researcher, intent matters. Making the active choice to think twice before we buy could improve both our happiness and quality of life. It could help shape social norms and influence others toward more-sustainable choices.

Daniel Fischer, an assistant professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, wants to reframe the conversation around sustainable living. People, he told me, often assume they’re adopting a lower quality of life by owning and buying less. “We need to flip this narrative around and emphasize how sustainability allows you to have a better quality of life,” Fischer said. “It’s not about renunciation, but choice.”

His sustainability philosophy centers human needs, or how people can meet their needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. In a consumer society, Fischer explained, our base impulse is to desire material goods that satisfy our needs. People have fundamental needs — food, shelter, safety — and more advanced, self-actualized wants. Most people aren’t fully aware of how to discern these motivations, Fischer added. They buy simply because they “feel like it,” without thinking deeply about the lasting purpose of the purchase. Americans, on average, buy more than one item of clothing each week.

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A post shared by Aja Barber (@ajabarber)

Fischer believes people can be trained to break out of this cycle of consumption. They can choose to replace certain shopping “satisfiers” with more sustainable options: buying vintage and used goods instead of new; seeking out hearty, plant-based meat substitutes; purchasing an experiential gift for their loved ones instead of something material. Fischer calls this process social innovation.

“Our basic needs have always been the same and will always be the same,” he said. “The idea that we have to own every single thing in our household is a recent phenomenon, historically speaking. With social innovation, people can improve their level of satisfaction by still meeting their basic needs while [also] reducing environmental harms.”

Fischer’s work examines how practices such as mindfulness and intention-setting can help a person reflect on their needs. It allows them to consider whether a purchase will bring long-term satisfaction — or, as Marie Kondo puts it, “spark joy” in their lives.

For some shoppers, the pandemic was an opportunity to reassess their consumption habits and relationship to material goods. Many “buy nothing” groups proliferated in quarantine as people sought to trade or give away things they no longer needed. Reddit communities like r/frugal, r/anticonsumption, and r/nobuy, where thousands of members discussed ways to reduce unnecessary spending while stuck at home and shared tips on how to shop intentionally, similarly thrived.

Steph, a 30-year-old corporate lawyer in New York, has gone an entire year without buying a new item of clothing. It’s a commitment that may seem antithetical to fashion, but Steph cares about clothes and appearing stylish — she has an entire Instagram account dedicated to slow fashion and styling. Her intent isn’t to be anti-fashion; she just thinks it’s possible to make do with less.

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A post shared by Steph | Slow Fashion Diary (@repeatoutfitters)

“During the pandemic, I started a challenge called Project 33, where I could only wear the same 33 items of clothing for the next three months,” Steph told me. “That made me curious about how I could maximize the number of wears I get out of the clothes I already own. Eventually, I committed to not buying anything for an entire year.”

She said she felt freed by the challenge, not restricted: “I have more space in my mind to think about other parts of my life,” she said, “rather than just the things I want.”

Social norms are shifting, and some people are starting to push back against thoughtless, unlimited consumption. Consumers are not only aware of the forces that influence them to buy things but are also, like Steph, actively working to combat them. “I like to believe that everything we do, no matter how small it is, has some sort of impact,” Steph said. “You can demand corporate responsibility while making better individual choices. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.”

Individual choice has had an outsized role in climate change discussions, even when it’s clear that federal regulation is the best and most direct way to curb global carbon emissions. The “personal responsibility” debate has trapped American consumers in a cycle of cynicism. It’s easy to shrug our shoulders and continue to order from Amazon while we mutter under our breath that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

As citizens of the wealthiest country in the world, Americans’ personal choices do carry some weight. The problem is, it’s hard to quantify the environmental impact of individual actions and lifestyles. Plus, structural systems and social norms make it nearly impossible for people to break shopping habits. About 70 percent of the US economy, after all, stems from consumer spending.

Research has found that a person’s carbon footprint is closely tied to how much wealth they have, even if they’re a supposedly “green” consumer. Wealthy people travel more, buy more stuff, and live in larger, energy-intensive homes. Most “middle class” Americans, according to a 2020 report from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, fall in the global top 1 or 10 percent of individuals responsible for blowing through the world’s carbon budget. (For context, anyone earning over $109,000 is categorized in the richest 1 percent of the world, and over $38,000 as within the top 10 percent.) These choices add up over a person’s lifetime, and our tendency to overconsume carries lasting consequences.

On a recent podcast, New York Times opinion writer (and Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein encouraged listeners not to think of their consumption decisions as individual or as only affecting themselves. Rather, they serve as mechanisms for “social, political, and moral contagion.” It’s a mindset that Fischer, the ASU professor and sustainability expert, also champions.

For instance, while Klein admitted his decision to not eat meat is “meaningless” in the context of the global animal trade, it did carry some influence in other people’s choice to go vegetarian or vegan:

It’s in that way that individual attitudes ladder up to social attitudes, and then to social and political change. … So taking seriously the ideas and morals and views of individuals, that’s not a different sphere than what ends up happening in politics. And it’s not just individual. All of the stuff catches. … I think that a lot of the value of the choices we make is in our willingness to try to use those to change the choices other people see as normal for them to make.

Reducing one’s carbon footprint requires more frugal sacrifices than buying less stuff (such as flying less, eating less meat, using more public transportation), but it’s a good place to start. This holiday season offers a bizarre, supply-chain-induced opportunity to change our shopping habits, to give more thoughtfully, to buy more locally and less overall. Most households are hard-wired to splurge on end-of-year gifts, and it’s unlikely people will ever stop even if the crisis worsens. The supply chain issues can, though, lead us to buy more conscientiously.

The mission to buy less with more intention is achievable for everyone, especially affluent shoppers. It’s incumbent on Americans, the wealthiest people in the world, to cut back on and be critical of their consumption. Plus, if you haven’t ordered that Xbox Series X for the lucky gamer in your life, you might already be out of luck.

  1. But that still leaves 27.4 million people without insurance.

    The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that states could choose whether to expand their Medicaid programs, and 12 states never did — leaving 2 million people with no health coverage, a disproportionate share of whom are people of color living in the South. Other uninsured Americans include people who are not eligible for government assistance (either because of their immigration status or because, until recently, they made too much money to qualify) and can’t afford it on their own, as well as people who are eligible but have not, for whatever reason, signed up for benefits.

    Democrats’ newest health care measure, part of their Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill, tries to close those gaps, though they will again fall short of reaching universal coverage.

    Some Democrats also have other goals: Many progressives want to expand Medicare benefits to cover dental, hearing, and vision care. But Congress may still have to scale back the health care section of the reconciliation legislation if centrist Democrats continue to balk at a plan to cap prices for prescription drugs. If those plans must be cut to get the bill passed, Congress and the White House could end up having to decide which parts of their agenda to pass now and which ones to postpone.

    Should it come to that, dealing with some of the ACA’s unfinished business seems likely to be Democratic leaders’ top priority.

    Why Obamacare still has so many issues to fix

    When Democrats set out to reform health care in 2010, they made a choice: Rather than fundamentally changing US health care by creating a single-payer system or an aggressive public option to compete with private insurers, Democrats tried to patch up the existing system through Medicaid and the individual commercial market.

    The law gave government help to middle-class people who buy private coverage; it also intended to expand Medicaid to people whose incomes were at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

    That design was dictated, in part, by concerns about cost. The Obama White House promised to craft a health care proposal that would pay for itself to meet demands from more conservative members of the Democratic Party. Expanding Medicaid was projected to be cheaper than subsidizing private coverage. Cutting off subsidies for private individual insurance at 400 percent of the federal poverty level — today, that equals about $51,500 for one person and around $88,000 for a family of three — brought the bill’s cost down too.

    But these choices ultimately made coverage unaffordable for millions of middle- class Americans.

    Pent-up demand for medical services drove insurers’ expenses higher than they had anticipated. Premiums increased significantly during the years after the law’s marketplace opened, though they eventually stabilized.

    People getting federal assistance were protected; their own costs were fixed, while the federal government picked up the cost of premium increases. But people with incomes too high to qualify faced the full brunt of rate hikes — and many of them dropped their ACA-compliant coverage as a result. Enrollment among those ineligible for assistance dropped by more than 3 million from 2016 to 2018, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

    This became one of the ACA’s most obvious failures. In the American Rescue Plan (ARP), Democrats expanded the law’s subsidies to people earning above 400 percent of the federal poverty, and an estimated 235,500 of those who became newly eligible have enrolled in coverage this year, according to federal data.

    However, the ARP authorized the new subsidies for only two years. The new reconciliation bill would make them permanent.

    The other problem with Obamacare was unexpected. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Medicaid expansion was too coercive and that states needed to be able to choose to opt out.

    Although the expansion was still a really good deal for states — the federal government covered 100 percent of the cost for the first three years, and 90 percent in perpetuity as of 2020 — a dozen states are still holding out, seven years after the expansion first took effect. Those states are concentrated in the South; Texas and Florida account for more than half of the 2.2 million people in poverty who have been left uncovered because of their state’s opposition to the expansion.

    Closing the expansion gap was also already a priority for Democrats in the ARP. In that bill, Congress offered an additional financial incentive for the holdout states: a temporary boost in their traditional Medicaid funding. But none of them have taken that deal in the six months since it passed.

    So Democrats have concocted a new plan. They would initially cover people stuck in the Medicaid expansion gap through private insurance on the ACA markets, before eventually transferring them into a newly created federal program that would replicate the coverage they would have received through Medicaid.

    It sounds clumsy, but that’s because Democrats have been trying to walk another legal tightrope as they’ve worked on a fix for the expansion gap. They don’t want to create a situation where the states that refused the expansion are getting a better deal than the states that accepted it, opening themselves to another lawsuit.

    The ACA improvements would drive the number of uninsured Americans down by several million — 3.9 million, according to Congressional Budget Office projections — another incremental step toward universal coverage.

    But the fixes in the bill alone are not sufficient to get the US caught up to the rest of the developed world, where universal health care is assured. And neither would any of the other proposals Democrats are considering.

    The hard choices Democrats face

    Many Democrats now view the ACA as a political winner, having run on the law in the last two elections. The proposed improvements to Obamacare probably enjoy the most widespread support among the party’s majorities in Congress.

    But as in 2010, Democrats may soon have to make important decisions about which policies to push through and which ones to cut out. They have thin majorities, again, and the more conservative wing is once more putting pressure on leadership to constrain the size of the legislation.

    Recent comments from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her allies, and center-left Democrats suggest that fixing the ACA would be the first priority.

    Other plans to achieve universal coverage — an aggressive public option or a single-payer Medicare-for-all — are still divisive among Democrats, and they face stiff opposition from the insurance industry. The party isn’t trying to pass them with the narrow majorities it currently has in Congress.

    Progressive Democrats have other ideas about how to improve health care, short of Medicare-for-all. These include adding to and improving Medicare benefits and making more people eligible for that program, which they hope will eventually serve as a vessel for single-payer health care.

    At first, it appeared Congress would try to do all of this at once. The first draft of the reconciliation bill included not only the ACA fixes but also the expansion of dental, hearing, and vision benefits for Medicare’s 62.7 million beneficiaries.

    But Congress faces the same kind of fiscal limitations now as when it was trying to pass the ACA: Centrists want the bill to be paid for, though some are also leery of major tax increases. Congress traditionally funds health care spending through health care savings, and those constraints could dictate the policy again. (Whole proposals, like a major funding infusion for long-term care, may end up being scrapped because of centrist disinterest and their demand to lower the bill’s cost.)

    Prescription drug savings are supposed to cover the cost of most of the bill’s health care provisions. But those reforms are running into trouble with some Democrats who sound receptive to the drug industry’s arguments that the price controls Congress is contemplating would hamper medical innovation.

    If Democrats are forced to scale back or scrap the prescription drug plan to assuage those concerns, they’ll need to either find new savings to pay for their spending — which may be hard, without making new industry enemies who would try to tank the bill — or they’ll likely start cutting some of their coverage proposals.

    What would the priority be in the latter scenario? Democrats have already attempted to address these ACA issues in the American Rescue Plan. In comments last week, Democratic leaders again made the 2010 law sound like their top priority.

    “I feel very proprietary about the ACA,” Pelosi said, according to NBC News. The No. 3 Democrat in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn, said Medicaid expansion is his focus. A coalition of center-left Democrats is pushing House leadership to confine their health care agenda to these ACA remedies.

    All of these health care proposals cost money. The ACA coverage provisions total about $550 billion in new spending, according to the Congressional Budget Office. New Medicare benefits would add as much as $350 billion over 10 years to the health section’s projected cost. It may simply cost too much, in the eyes of center-left Democrats trying to trim the size of the package, to do all of it at once. Still, progressives are strongly backing the Medicare benefit expansion.

    Finishing the Obamacare project may be the safest bet for the budget reconciliation legislation — it has a real consensus within the party, and there are glaring problems that do need to be fixed.

    But even if the Democrats patch up the ACA, they’ll simply be postponing the larger debate to come. The American health care system still has serious problems, and those problems are, in some cases, only becoming more acute.

“It would be very hard for people to take things away, and that’s part of our goal,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) told the Hill last week, citing the expanded child tax credit as an example. “Once people see how popular they are … once people start to see it, [they will support it].”

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images
Activists highlight climate initiatives in the Build Back Better agenda outside the US Capitol on October 20.

Another example progressives have pointed to is the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans repeatedly attempted to unravel when they had congressional control. The ACA, though, was not set to sunset by a certain time, unlike some of the policies being discussed in the budget bill. To undo it, Republicans actually had to pass repeal legislation of their own, which they were ultimately unable to advance. To effectively end the budget bill’s proposed programs, all Republicans would need to do would be to deny them funding in future budgets.

Still, progressives argue this won’t happen due to pressure from constituents benefiting from the new programs. An example of this, the Brookings Institution’s Molly Reynolds told Vox, is the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for low- and middle-income households enacted by Republicans during the Bush administration, many of which were set to expire in 2010. Because of how popular they were, they were renewed again that year and in 2012, when Democrats had control of the Senate.

Democrats are betting that this will be the case, once more, with the many programs in their budget bill.

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