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This article is a collaboration between FiveThirtyEight and The Fuller Project, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on issues that affect women.

One day last spring, Naima Kaidi waited nearly an hour for her kindergartener and first-grader to get home from school. She stood on the corner near her house, but the bus was nowhere to be seen and there was no word why it was so late. Northport Elementary in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, had only recently reopened for in-person classes, and day after day, Kaidi’s family had been struggling with late school bus drop-offs. This day was the worst. Cold and worried, she eventually carried her younger children back home to get her phone and try to find out what was going on — and that was when she got a knock on the door. 

It was Roberta Steele, who had driven the school bus in Kaidi’s neighborhood for years, there to bring the two children home. Steele knew where the kids on her route lived. She knew who their parents were. And even though it wasn’t her fault that the bus was late, Steele made sure the kids arrived home safely. “She helped me, she [brought] my kids over here,” Kaidi said. Even if the bus system wasn’t reliable, the driver was. 

But that was last school year. Even then there was already a shortage of bus drivers in the district. Steele said that had been the case for years, though district representatives were quick to point out that there had never been a shortage of this magnitude. This fall, the shortage became dire enough that Steele’s old route — the one where she knew all the kids well enough to take them to their doorsteps when needed — was consolidated out of existence. In October, the district told parents that 12 routes probably wouldn’t be staffed this year. Steele was transferred to a different route with new kids, and sometimes the chaos of route changes and late buses meant she also had to drive kids home from other, equally unfamiliar routes.

The route that Steele drove for years was eliminated by the company that operates buses for the district.

Craig Lassig / AP IMAGES FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

It isn’t an easy job. The kids don’t behave. Some, unsure of their own addresses, can’t tell Steele where to go. When parents get angry at a system that isn’t working, they blame Steele. And the company that runs the buses has packed her schedule to the point that there’s no longer time left to pee between runs. She’s thinking of quitting, even though she knows that will make things even harder for the families relying on her.

Meanwhile, Kaidi’s family spent the first two months of school with no bus at all. Instead of waiting at her corner with other parents, she spent her afternoons sitting in her car in the pickup line outside school. The line backed up for blocks, 40 or 50 cars deep, threading out of the parking lot and down an undulating suburban road. Kaidi had to get there an hour before school ended just to make sure she was near the front. She says she turned down a job so she could do this. Likewise, other parents had to change their hours, lose pay and go without sleep — all to sit in their cars, waiting for their children. 

As the bus driver shortage continues, parents and drivers, often women on both sides, have been stretched to the breaking point as they try to do more with less — less time, less money, less help, less of a sense of safety and respect. “This problem existed before COVID, but nobody wanted to hear about it, especially the school districts,” said Zina Ronca, a driver supervisor for DuVall Bus Service in West Grove, Pennsylvania, who has been in the industry for nearly two decades. There haven’t been enough school bus drivers nationwide for years. But it took a pandemic to make that shortage visible and painful to more than just the drivers themselves. 

In part because of the bus driver shortages, long lines of cars — like this one in Orlando, Florida — have been a mainstay at schools this fall.

Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

And in that way, what’s happening at Northport Elementary reflects an even bigger problem for schools nationwide. Across the country, reports have documented shortages of substitute teachers, school nurses, cafeteria workers and the paraprofessionals who help teachers manage their workloads and give kids more small-group attention. As with drivers, those shortages existed before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. The problems were there, waiting, and then the pandemic came along and made them simultaneously more visible and more … just more. 

All these jobs are about service and care, at pay scales that simply aren’t competitive with jobs that use similar skills but don’t require child care balanced precariously on top of other demands. And when the people who do those jobs quit, the effects get tangled up with other parts of the economy and other parts of society. Amid the pandemic, individual workers are making choices for themselves and their families that affect other people’s families and jobs in ways nobody quite expected. The bus driver shortage isn’t just a bus driver shortage — it’s a knot nobody knows how to cut.

Craig Lassig / AP IMAGES FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

When I pictured the village of people who would help me raise my children, the person driving them to and from school didn’t come immediately to mind. But in the third year of school disruption, it turns out that the bus driver is a person in your neighborhood whom you miss when you don’t see them every day. The job involves only a minimal amount of interaction, Roberta Steele told me. But it’s daily interaction. “You know you’re making a difference for some kids, and that brings me great joy,” she said. “I have kids that I had in middle school that are now in high school. And they will walk from the high school to the middle school just to say hi.”

Steele, 50, is a barrel-chested woman with cropped, spiky hair the color of her last name. She comes off as perky and outgoing, basically the vibe of a favorite grade-school gym teacher. She doesn’t have kids of her own but places a lot of value in the role she can play in the lives of other people’s. 

Steele has been driving a school bus since 2014, all of it for Robbinsdale School District 281, one of those sprawling suburban districts that encompass schools and children in multiple cities on the fringes of Minneapolis. She took the job after leaving the Minneapolis Police Reserve but almost quit in the first two years. The kids were just a lot. A typical school bus can carry 70 children when full. They get bored, or they just plain don’t know how to behave. “I resorted to bribery as a method of training,” she told me, using small treats to manage the threat of prepubescent uprisings. 

Kids have had to navigate a new normal on school buses during the pandemic. But bus shortages aren’t a new normal for school districts. They were there before the pandemic and are still there now.

Alex Kormann / Star Tribune via Getty Images

Today, she can quell most bad behavior with a look delivered through the rearview mirror. Her starting pay, driving a 15-ton vehicle down the winding, narrow roads of inner-ring suburbs while managing the behavior of a small village worth of kids, and for which she needed to take classes and earn a special license, was $14 an hour. “It’s really rewarding, or it can be, if you like children, right?” Steele said. 

But not everyone does. Or, at least, not at that price point. Steele’s entire bus driving career has been marked by not having enough colleagues. She told me she found the job in the first place because the district was recruiting heavily to fill a shortage, though representatives from the district stressed that they had never had a shortage like this before. Nationwide, more than 50 percent of districts have experienced a shortage of drivers every year since at least 2006, according to annual surveys conducted by School Bus Fleet magazine. Most years, the driver shortage affected more than 70 percent of districts. The lowest the shortage has been in all that time was in the depths of the Great Recession.

Over the years, as shortages continued, Steele’s pay did increase. Today, after a big post-COVID pay raise, she’s making $23.75 per hour, well above the nationwide average starting pay for school bus drivers, $18.82 per hour according to a 2021 survey.

At year-round, full-time hours — the way the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates an annual wage — the average school bus driver makes more than $39,000 a year. But school bus drivers don’t work year-round, full-time hours. “We’re only guaranteed four hours of pay a day,” Steele said. 

There are no paid holidays or sick days, she and other bus industry experts say. Benefits vary from company to company, and there’s no guaranteed work at all in summer. “Spring break is all unpaid. Every teacher-compensatory day, every snow day, any time they cannot pay us they will,” Steele said. She added that a recent, failed unionization effort among the Robbinsdale bus drivers started in part as a fight for snow-day pay. 

Craig Lassig / AP IMAGES FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Working as a school bus driver means, essentially, needing another source of income. This is part of why the job has long attracted women — particularly mothers — who were able to work while their children were at school. In 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 58.5 percent of all school bus drivers were women. The hours are predictable and short, with a gap in the middle of the day when your time is your own, during which some drivers earn money doing other jobs, like working as a mechanic for the bus company, or doing a different caregiving job in schools. And the job comes with unusual perks like the ability to take the bus home, turning the morning commute into a walk to the driveway. At some bus companies and school districts, drivers have the freedom to take their young children on the bus with them during their rounds — a chance to bring in money without adding to the ever-rising cost of day care. 

But it doesn’t pay enough to live on. For Steele, the job works only because her partner brings in a paycheck and benefits. Other drivers depend on a second job, performed between roughly 9 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., when they aren’t on the clock. LaShawn Favors, a bus driver in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, had a second part-time job as a paraprofessional in a school while his wife worked from home in the health-care industry. His route didn’t overlap with where his own kids, who lacked reliable bus service, needed to go, so his wife and his daughter’s boyfriend were stuck shuttling the kids to and from school while Favors rushed from one job to another and back to the first.

Drivers spackle their work lives together this way, with voluntary overtime and luck, and they still struggle. COVID didn’t make the job hard, it just made it harder.

Pay is the problem, and COVID made it worse by threatening the unique benefits that kept people driving buses, despite the low pay, to begin with. Older drivers suddenly had to deal with the increased risk of sickness and death, risks that haven’t really been properly calculated anywhere. No one knows how many bus drivers are no longer in their jobs because they died from COVID-19 infections acquired on the job, because no one is keeping track. 

Other drivers had no real choice but to find other work during the long months when schools were remote and had no need of them, while drivers who were mothers found themselves trying to juggle home and work in a job they’d taken precisely so they wouldn’t have to do this in the first place. When schools moved to hybrid systems, the districts needed drivers every day, but those drivers’ own kids’ schedules may not have been in sync, said Erin Ducharme, vice chair of membership for the Women in Buses Council and an executive at Bloom Tour and Charter Services in Taunton, Massachusetts. 

A majority of school districts nationwide have suffered from bus driver shortages for more than a decade.

Michael Siluk / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Schools are filled with essential workers whose difficult jobs were made even harder, and their ranks even thinner, by the pandemic. School nurses, for instance, have also been in short supply for years, even more so amid the pandemic. Like drivers, school nurses are most likely to be women, and they earn far less than what they could get if they took their skills and training elsewhere — as little as $58,810 in median annual wages compared with more than $75,000 if they worked in a hospital. 

Nationwide, there have been reports of shortages of cafeteria workers, custodians, substitute teachers and paraprofessionals. According to a survey conducted by EdWeek Research Center in late September and early October, 40 percent of district leaders and principals said they were experiencing “severe” or “very severe” staffing shortages. The bus driver shortage is part of a larger, longer problem in schools — one that extends beyond the school building. When “women’s jobs” go unfilled, other women, namely moms, pick up the slack — and the effects reverberate across the economy.

Caregiving is interconnected. Roberta Steele doesn’t just drive a bus. She drove a bus to pick up and drop off Naima Kaidi’s children. Without Steele’s services, Kaidi still had to get the kids to school. But the task became harder and required her to make more sacrifices. 

Parents like Kaidi depend on the services of bus drivers, nurses, lunch ladies and subs. Statistically, the parents who depend on those services the most are moms — they still do more of the parenting labor, and their own jobs become more disrupted when there aren’t other women doing the outsourced work for things like transportation or food preparation. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey of adults in opposite-sex relationships found that 59 percent of women reported handling more of the household chores and responsibilities than their partners, and among those with children under 18 at home, 78 percent of women reported doing more work to manage their children’s activities and schedules. Working mothers were more likely than working fathers to report having to reduce work hours to deal with household or family needs. And during the pandemic, women were twice as likely as men to say they had to juggle “a lot” of parenting duties while simultaneously teleworking. 

Low-paid caregiving jobs bind together a lot of big trends happening in the economy, said Abigail Wozniak, a labor economist at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. And you can see those themes play out in the lives of the women whose children used to ride to school on Roberta Steele’s bus — and now have no bus service at all.

Take Amanda Swanson, a neighbor of Kaidi’s, who spent the first months of school making a point of being first in the hour-long pickup line every day at Northport Elementary. She’s supporting her family working as a manager at an Amazon fulfillment center while her husband stays home with their youngest children because child care is too expensive. He used to be able to walk the children to the bus stop. But after the bus stopped running, Swanson switched to an overnight shift and frequently left her job early so she could drive them in the family’s only car. 

Craig Lassig / AP IMAGES FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Not long ago, Swanson (or her husband) would have been a prime candidate to be a school bus driver. Instead, she’s working a job that didn’t exist a decade ago but pays enough to keep her family solvent. It’s not just that school-support jobs don’t pay enough, it’s that they’re in direct competition for workers with jobs that pay more. 

“At least since the 1970s, wages for the majority of Americans have barely budged, and if anything they’ve decreased for workers that don’t have a college degree,” said Krista Ruffini, a professor of economics at Georgetown University. Even before COVID-19, that squeeze is part of what has made jobs like bus driving less attractive today than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and it’s also put those jobs in competition with newer kinds of work — gig-economy jobs or delivery and warehouse jobs that require the same kinds of skills, pay the same or more, and require less emotional labor, Wozniak said.

So far, these newer jobs are still a relatively small portion of all jobs and because of that probably can’t explain big, economy-wide trends. “But there will be some employers now who are competing with, basically, Amazon,” she said. A school bus driver could instead drive a delivery vehicle. School support staff like paraprofessionals and lunch ladies have logistics skills that are needed in a warehouse. 

And when there’s a shortage of school bus drivers, that makes it hard for some parents to take a job. Once her children were finally old enough to be in school during the day, Kaidi had intended to go back to work this fall for the first time in years. But, she said, she’s received multiple job offers she couldn’t accept because of the time she has to spend ferrying her children to and from four different school buildings. 

Her conundrum makes it easy to understand how the pandemic has disproportionately affected women’s careers. “On the female side of the labor market, we know that there’s been an increase in people that say that they can’t work because they’re providing care,” Ruffini said. Some have had to quit; others just don’t reenter the workforce, even when they have an opportunity. That’s been a feature of the pandemic, affecting a wide swath of the kinds of service and emotional-labor jobs that disproportionately employ women — jobs like the ones in schools. Kaidi’s experience shows how shortages in one field can create or exacerbate shortages in another. 

Meanwhile, many of the women who have stayed in their emotional-labor jobs are being pushed to a breaking point — women like Swanson and Kaidi’s neighbor Christiana Metzger, a nursing assistant who works nights and has been running on almost no sleep since the beginning of the school year in September. She described breaking the speed limit, exhausted, trying to get home fast enough to take her older children to class on time, preparing meals and picking kids up from school and checking their homework, and the headache she’d had for several days straight. 

The jobs done by people like Metzger are what middle-level jobs look like today, said Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Along with the lack of growth in real wages, there’s the idea that the job spectrum has hollowed out, leaving nothing but the worst-paying jobs and the ones that pay well but require college degrees. But that’s not exactly the case, Smith says. There are jobs left in the middle, but they’re no longer in manufacturing — they’re jobs that involve caring for people (like nurses) or supporting other workers (like school paraprofessionals). Again, women’s jobs. Jobs that continually conflict with women’s labor at home.

The emotional and psychological aspects of work are something economists are only just beginning to pay attention to, Wozniak said. But when shortages happen — whether through the cost-saving design of a lean staffing model or a chain of unfortunate events — it’s those intangible, immeasurable parts of a job that can quickly spiral out of control. “Now there are three people in the lunchroom instead of five or eight,” she said. “It’s the same job but not at all the same because you’re doing it faster and with less help.” 

The bus driver shortage is a pay issue, but it’s also clearly more than that. It’s about how your job treats you. It’s about what you’re expected to do outside of the office. It’s about the narrow space women are squeezed into where we need to be better paid for the hard work we do at caregiving jobs but also need other women to do caregiving jobs at a lower price we can afford. It’s about being forced to make a choice between fulfilling your responsibilities at work and getting your children home safely. And it’s about how schools do, and don’t, function.

At the end of October, Kaidi, Metzger and Swanson finally got bus service again. But they didn’t get it from Steele, who remains relegated to a different route, increasingly unhappy with the way the bus company and the district are treating her and other drivers. The immediate crisis ended for some of the moms of Brooklyn Center. But the problem isn’t solved. Not for the drivers. Not for the school districts suffering disruption on top of disruption. And not for the nation as a whole. “What’s going on in the labor market is something that we certainly haven’t seen in my lifetime,” Ruffini said. People have been out of work and out of their normal routines for a long time, she noted. Their responsibilities have changed at home. And so have the ways they spend their time and their resources. Nobody knows what happens next. 

But we do know that what happens with bus drivers is going to affect what happens with a lot of other people. The pandemic didn’t create these shortages. But it made clear how inextricably linked one job is to a whole bunch of others — how our lives and livelihoods are lashed together with cords we can’t usually see. When a time of stress and tragedy makes those invisible bonds more tangible, we can’t go back to pretending they don’t exist. All we can do is try to untangle them together. 

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This full-time role with benefits is a U.S.-based position, and remote work may be considered. The Data Editor will report to the Copy Chief. To apply, please submit a cover letter and résumé through the Disney Careers portal. Due to the number of applications we receive, individual emails to the hiring manager cannot be answered.

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Function as the quantitative editor on daily and feature stories — i.e., evaluate the methodological choices underlying our reporters’ and freelancers’ data analysis and statistical modeling, verify that any code used in that analysis is correct, and audit the statistical and empirical claims being made.Collaborate with the Copy Desk to manage daily and weekly editorial workflow, ensuring that quantitative edits are completed in a timely manner.Use statistical programming languages, such as R, to create original analyses and models to tell stories.Publish datasets to our public-data repository and work with the Interactives Team to maintain and improve those pages as resources for the public and our own work.Collaborate with reporters and the Interactives Team to create nuanced, statistically literate data visualizations and interactive projects.

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Experience conducting original data analysis, creating statistical models and critically evaluating others’ work.A deep understanding of traditional statistics (particularly causal inference) and, at a minimum, a conversational understanding of machine-learning techniques.Fluency with spreadsheets and at least one statistical programming language (ideally R) plus an enthusiasm for learning new technologies as needed.Familiarity with survey methodologies and the uses of public-opinion polling.Demonstrated success collaborating with kindness and generosity on large, multi-stakeholder projects and completing complex work under deadline pressure.The ability to derive satisfaction from patiently and incrementally improving and documenting evergreen data resources.

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How Fast Is The Economy Recovering?
By Julia Wolfe and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

For nearly a year, the economy has been on a long, exhausting slog toward post-pandemic “normalcy.” And it isn’t over yet.

This page — which we plan to update every month — will tell us how far we still have to go before the economy is back where it was before the pandemic shut down much of American life.

We have made significant progress, of course: After hitting the highest level of unemployment the country has seen since the Great Depression in April, the unemployment rate has steadily fallen.

But as of this month, we’re still 3.2 percentage points higher than the pre-pandemic unemployment rate.

Change from January 2020 in the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate
Jan.
Dec.
+11.3
+3.2
The unemployment rate in December was 6.7%, according to the latest jobs report, unchanged from 6.7% in November.

Crucially, the recovery isn’t affecting all workers equally. Just as Black and Hispanic communities have struggled with higher rates of infection and death since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, communities of color are continuing to bear the brunt of high unemployment and economic insecurity, even as the overall numbers fall.

A persistent gap
Change from January 2020 in the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, by race
Jan.
Feb.
March
April
May
June
July
Aug.
Sept.
Oct.
Nov.
Dec.
0
+5
+10
+15
HISPANIC
HISPANIC
BLACK
BLACK
WHITE
WHITE
At its peak, this recession increased the unemployment gap between Hispanic and white workers by 3.5 points
Jan.
Dec.
0
+5
+10
+15
HISPANIC
HISPANIC
WHITE
WHITE
Jan.
Dec.
0
+5
+10
+15
BLACK
BLACK
WHITE
WHITE
Even in good times, Black unemployment often hovers at levels much higher than for white Americans. But the pandemic has exacerbated that stubborn inequality, and now we’re in the midst of a profoundly unequal economic crisis. Low-wage workers — who are disproportionately likely to be Black and Hispanic — have been hardest hit by the pandemic because they generally work in sectors, like retail and hospitality, where their work can’t be done from home. Those workplaces pose significant public health risks in a pandemic, and have been subjected to full or partial shutdowns as infections ebb and flow.

As a result, we’re much closer to economic normalcy in sectors like construction and professional and business services than we are in sectors like leisure and hospitality.

A long way to zero
Change from January 2020 in seasonally adjusted nonfarm jobs added or lost for six major private sectors
Jan.
Feb.
March
April
May
June
July
Aug.
Sept.
Oct.
Nov.
Dec.
-20
-15
-10
” “-5m
0
Leisure and Hospitality
Jan.
Dec.
-20
-15
-10
” “-5m
0
-8.3
-3.8
Trade, Transportation and Utilities
Jan.
Dec.
-20
-15
-10
” “-5m
0
-3.4
-0.8
Education and Health Services
Jan.
Dec.
-20
-15
-10
” “-5m
0
-2.7
-1.2
Professional and Business Services
Jan.
Dec.
-20
-15
-10
” “-5m
0
-2.3
-0.8
Manufacturing
Jan.
Dec.
-20
-15
-10
” “-5m
0
-1.4
-0.5
Construction
Jan.
Dec.
-20
-15
-10
” “-5m
0
-1
-0.2
Some sectors have been able to adjust (more or less) to the realities of the pandemic, but others, like leisure and hospitality and education and health services, have left their workers in a painful no-win situation. They face precarious employment, with temporary furloughs or permanent layoffs always on the horizon, plus the unenviable prospect of going to work every day with the risk of infection hanging over their heads.

These disparities are important to remember because even when employment appears to be approaching pre-pandemic normalcy, a lot of people aren’t part of that economic rebound — and those workers are still disproportionately likely to be people of color, young and low-wage.

Check back next month for an update on how close — or far — we are to the levels of unemployment we saw before the pandemic.

All-out partisan conflict has jammed the gears in the U.S. Senate in recent years, causing a virtual standstill. We’ve seen the Republican Party block a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court without a hearing or vote. We’ve seen both parties increasingly use the filibuster when they’re in the minority to impede the opposition from passing legislation. And we’ve seen a ratcheting up of brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, which establishes how much money the federal government can borrow to pay its existing financial obligations.

The use of the debt ceiling as a legislative hostage started in earnest in 2011, when a divided government in Washington nearly caused a debt default. Energized by the tea party movement, Republicans refused to back an increase in the debt ceiling unless then-President Barack Obama agreed to budget cuts, and they also refused to raise taxes as part of a bipartisan bargain. A last-minute agreement followed, but the delay still led to a downgrade in the country’s credit rating. Yet we’ve seen continued clashes over the cap ever since.

Those conflicts have escalated further in the current round. Although Democrats and Republicans have just about reached a deal to go ahead with a simple majority vote on a short-term debt ceiling increase, Republicans remain intent on filibustering a straight up-or-down vote on a longer-term suspension or increase of the limit in December. Democrats control the Senate, which is split 50-50, through Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote. But that’s well short of the 60 votes required by the filibuster to advance to a final vote.

“What I see as new here is filibustering debt limit increases and forcing a Senate majority party that doesn’t have 60 seats to try to come up with some way to raise the debt ceiling — even though it doesn’t have 60 seats and can’t get any help from the minority party,” said Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton University who studies congressional politics.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/democrats-passing-bidens-agenda-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-80405623

Failing to raise the debt limit would result in a default on U.S. debt, which could cripple the economy and cause terrible repercussions for everyday Americans. The date the country runs out of money is quickly approaching: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently said it could be as soon as Oct. 18. While the parties seem set on a short-term agreement to push that deadline back to at least December, Republicans continue to say that, for a longer-term increase, Democrats must raise the cap on their own using the more complex reconciliation process, which allows passage of certain fiscal legislation with only a simple majority. And, while there are paths out of this predicament, this amplified disagreement is emblematic of the dangers the debt ceiling presents to our political system, especially when partisan enmity is so high. 

Here, then, is a look at how we got here; what could prevent politicians from using the debt ceiling to put Congress in a political stranglehold; and why it’s unlikely that the debt ceiling will go away anytime soon.

How the battle over the debt ceiling escalated

Congress has always placed limits on federal debt, but it first established the debt ceiling in 1917 over concerns about debt piling up during World War I. About two decades later, in 1939, the cap came into its modern form after modifications applied it to nearly all federal debt. The idea was that aggregating most debt would give the Treasury Department more flexibility to manage it while maintaining Congress’s constitutionally mandated control of the nation’s finances. Over time, the state of the debt ceiling has also come to symbolize the federal government’s frugality or wastefulness.

Yet the limit’s means as a check on spending is questionable considering that the national debt has only gone up since the late 1930s. More importantly, as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product, debt has surged since the 1980s, following a long-running decrease after World War II, as the chart below shows. In other words, the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio — a measure of our debt that factors in our ability to pay it off by looking at it relative to the size of the nation’s economy — has grown immensely.

Who’s to blame? Well, both parties, and … circumstances. The steepest rises in debt-to-GDP ratio came during the presidencies of two Republicans (Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump) and one Democrat (Barack Obama). However, some of these increases happened partly because of crises. When Obama came into office during the Great Recession, a loss of tax revenues due to the economic downturn and a $831 billion stimulus package led to large budget deficits. And in 2020, during Trump’s presidency, stimulus efforts to combat the negative economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a further rise. Yet much of this was of their own making, such as the tax cuts passed during the presidencies of Reagan and Trump that ballooned deficits and increased the national debt.

It’s never been an easy vote, but Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than 100 times. Its history as a political tinderbox long predates our current era. “The debt ceiling has been a problem going back to the 1950s, because it’s difficult for Congress to support an increase,” said Lee. “It looks to their constituents like they are free spending, don’t care about the deficit, that they’re voting themselves a blank check. That’s how it gets understood.” This misunderstanding of the debt ceiling — which affects only our ability to pay what we already owe — continues to be a problem, too, as many Americans still mistakenly believe it authorizes new spending.

What’s different in the latest debt-ceiling fight

Prior to this current fight, if one party had full control but lacked 60 seats in the Senate, the minority party wouldn’t block the majority from advancing debt ceiling legislation. With a looming deal to allow a short-term increase, that has remained true — for now. But later this year, Republican opposition may compel Democrats to raise the cap on their own using reconciliation, a special legislative process that requires just a simple majority but can only be used sparingly. While it’s not unheard of to increase the limit via reconciliation, having the minority force the majority to raise it this way is new.

Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute who studies budgetary politics, viewed this fight as potentially “a new era of just insane levels of brinkmanship” because there doesn’t appear to be any path to a bipartisan agreement on a long-term debt ceiling increase. Blessing noted that it was then-Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who came together at the last minute to salvage things in 2011. But McConnell “has changed his tune in terms of how he thinks the debt ceiling should work,” she observed, as he now argues the party in power has sole responsibility for raising it. “And there is not, at least not publicly, any sort of negotiating position that [Republicans are] using this for,” said Blessing.

“It seems that de facto, they’re attempting to slow down the Biden administration legislative train by putting this kind of a roadblock in the works. It’s just the most dangerous roadblock that you can possibly imagine.”

Why it’s going to be hard to remove the debt ceiling cudgel from our politics

As we’ve seen, the debt ceiling has done little to reduce federal spending, in part because the cap affects the country’s ability to pay off already-existing financial obligations and is handled separately from legislation that actually authorizes expenditures. Additionally, the debt ceiling has provided opportunities for partisan maneuvering that can take us to the brink of default. So it’s probably past time to rethink the debt ceiling. “You’ve got this fiscal tool that is antiquated and can only harm people and that virtually no other country around the world has,” said Blessing. “You could procedurally blunt this.”

One move would be to reinstitute some version of the Gephardt Rule, which from 1979 to 1995 linked an increase in the debt ceiling to the passage of the budget. When Congress passed its fiscal plan, it simultaneously authorized any necessary borrowing. But after the GOP captured all of Congress in the 1994 election, it mostly did away with this rule. Unfortunately, reinstating this rule might not be enough, in part because the budgetary process hasn’t functioned properly for years now. “The federal budget process has been broken for the past 10 years. We have not passed a budget resolution most of the time,” observed Blessing. “So even if you went back to a classic fix, that classic fix would be a problem because things have broken down so much.” In fact, after Democrats captured the House in 2018, they implemented a new version of the Gephardt Rule that suspends the debt limit rather than establishing a new ceiling. That hasn’t fixed things, partly because the Senate still has to approve of the suspension. Blessing said that Senate rules could also be adjusted to include something similar to the Gephardt Rule, but that could be difficult to do in such a narrowly divided chamber.

In a similar but more ambitious vein, Georgetown University law professor David Super has argued that Senate Democrats could use a stand-alone reconciliation vote to pass legislation that directly ties the debt ceiling to whatever the national debt happens to be. And with Senate Republicans opposed to assisting a long-term debt ceiling hike, Democrats may indeed have to raise it via reconciliation. In a bit of good news for Democrats, though, Punchbowl News reported earlier this week that the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that a separate reconciliation vote on the debt ceiling wouldn’t disrupt Democrats’ ongoing legislative efforts to pass a large social spending package, which is also being done via reconciliation. Democrats could try to mimic Super’s plan or raise the debt ceiling to an astronomically high number that would essentially make it meaningless for the foreseeable future. Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said in late September that he was in favor of “eliminating the law or raising the debt limit to a gazillion dollars.”

However, it’s not clear whether Super’s approach or raising the debt ceiling to an extreme might be palatable to many Democrats, who may instead prefer a smaller increase. “It’s a painful vote for members of Congress,” said Lee. “They don’t want to have to vote for it because it makes them look irresponsible to their constituents.” And sure enough, Republicans are licking their chops at the prospect of using this vote in the 2022 midterms, especially by linking it to the Democrats’ ambitious spending plans. For instance, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, recently said that the committee’s midterm election ads will hit Democrats on a debt limit increase.

And therein lies the rub with the debt ceiling: It’s really a political tool, not a fiscal instrument. “A reason why it’s hard to reform is that it’s a valuable mechanism for forcing a conversation about deficits and gives Congress leverage to demand concessions,” said Lee. “In the case of unified government, it’s the chance for the party out of power to make some political headway against the party in power, to say they’re governing in an irresponsible manner.” 

Moreover, even if many Democrats want to change how the debt ceiling works, Blessing pointed out that such a reform could be too much for members of Congress to take on while Democrats are also trying to pass a still-developing social spending plan. “I don’t see them having the bandwidth to do that right now,” said Blessing. “You’re asking a lot of people to take votes that are going to make them a little squeamish, particularly for well-known and moderate Democrats, and asking them to deal with debt limit reform on top of that. That is kind of a big ask.” The short-term deal to raise the debt ceiling does give Democrats a little more space to work out the party’s exact social spending legislation, but it’s unclear whether they’ll have enough time to finish those deliberations before the debt issue once again becomes pressing.

Yet another wrinkle is that the Republican filibuster of a long-term debt ceiling hike has also reanimated discussions within the Democratic caucus over changes to the traditional filibuster. Some Democrats, including President Biden, have raised the idea of altering the rules to allow a simple majority vote to raise the debt ceiling, or even something less specific, such as a one-day elimination of the filibuster. However, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have publicly opposed changes to the filibuster rules. And earlier this week, Manchin pushed back on adjusting the filibuster for a debt ceiling hike. Still, Lee wondered if there may have been some calculation by the Democratic leadership in not trying to address the debt limit earlier this year, even though everyone knew well ahead of time that the fight was coming. “This is not a surprise, so why are they letting it come to crisis now at the same time as they have to deal with the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation negotiations on the Build Back Better plan?” asked Lee. “I’m totally speculating, but it is a pressure point for the filibuster.” The filibuster’s future may have played into McConnell’s decision to yield on a short-term increase, as forcing senators such as Manchin and Sinema to choose between defending the filibuster and avoiding default could have generated enough pressure to truly threaten the filibuster.

However, changes to the filibuster remain unlikely, and while there are other, more outrageous ideas for overcoming the debt ceiling, it’s not at all a surprise that Congress has opted to kick the can a few feet down the road with a short-term increase. Come December, Congress will be right back at this same juncture. But as long as the debt ceiling exists in its current form, Congress will keep having these fights over raising it — even if doing so seems to align with Einstein’s definition of insanity. “As a good governance person, I would like them to procedurally blunt this thing, because I don’t think that they have the votes to get rid of it,” said Blessing. “It’s just, how do you crowbar that into the congressional calendar with everything else that they’re handling, I think is the real question.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/buy-democrats-worried-virginia-gubernatorial-race-silver-80379206

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/latest-crime-data-us-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-80334237

UPDATE (Aug. 25, 2021, 11:35 a.m.): When FiveThirtyEight published this video in July, longtime sex workers described their experiences with censorship across platforms in the past and told us it was only a matter of time before OnlyFans kicked them off the platform. On Aug. 19, OnlyFans announced that it would ban sexually explicit content. The company’s CEO attributed the decision to pressure from banking partners. On Aug. 25, however, OnlyFans announced it was reversing that decision after getting assurances from payment processors.

During the pandemic, many sex workers found themselves without support. Even sex workers — like strippers — whose jobs are legal were denied unemployment benefits and stimulus money. As a result, a number of in-person sex workers turned to online work. But online performers have struggled to get paid for years, long before the pandemic. As the industry changes and more performers move online, will the very platforms that sex workers made famous turn on them?

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/year-karaoke-fivethirtyeight-77653577

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-starting-make-climate-agenda-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-78546775

In the last year and a quarter, the pandemic has served as a stark reminder of just how unequal America still is. But it also hasn’t been a “reminder” for everyone. Black Americans and other Americans of color didn’t have the luxury of forgetting that American society is unequal. 

For Black Americans, in particular, the statistics around the inequalities of COVID-19 are numerical stand-ins for a much larger issue that permeates so many aspects of life — everything from being able to get a life-saving vaccine to the risk of being killed by police.  

The reality is that our nation is still racially segregated. And it’s segregated in ways that limit our opportunities to learn about each other’s life experiences, even if our laws do not formally segregate our nation as they once did. This means that some live in a world in which they rarely encounter the conditions that bring harm to others everyday; others can’t escape those very conditions.

You can see this segregation in great detail by exploring the University of Virginia’s Racial Dot Map, which takes data from the 2010 U.S. Census and plots where people are living across the country. For instance, take southeastern Michigan, where I lived as a graduate student. You can see clear geographic separation between predominantly Black, white, Asian and Hispanic neighborhoods.

This pattern is, of course, not unique to Michigan: It’s all over the country. And now as a professor, when I travel to other universities to give talks about my research on inequality, I often include the map for the location I am visiting to show the audience how this process manifests in their own city or town.

Why does this matter? The places where we live affect not only our access to resources, but also who we meet, interact with and become friends with. And because our neighborhoods are so segregated, our social networks are also siloed — about three-quarters of white Americans don’t have any nonwhite friends, according to a 2014 survey from PRRI. The nature of segregation in the U.S. means that we only end up seeing and learning about what our own groups experience, making it hard to understand the lives of people outside of our own group.

This explains, in part, why Americans have such a hard time understanding just how unequal our nation is, and moreover, the racialized nature of that inequality. For example, if you ask Americans about racial wealth gaps, you’ll find that they severely underestimate those gaps; according to a 2019 paper from a team of psychologists, Americans think the Black-white wealth gap is 40 to 80 percent smaller than it actually is.

This data is consistent with the idea that Americans misperceive the state of racial progress in the nation — they see far more racial progress than has actually taken place. To be clear, our nation has surely made some progress toward racial equality since its founding. But that progress does not negate the vast gaps that still exist between racial groups.

These kinds of misperceptions are consequential. Failing to understand the nature of racial inequality can make it difficult to generate effective solutions to the problems it causes. 

We saw this play out with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. When the data started showing racial disparities in vaccination rates, Americans blamed “vaccine hesitancy,” insinuating that the main reason Black Americans weren’t getting vaccinated as quickly as white Americans was due to Black Americans’ negative attitudes about vaccines or a lingering distrust about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which researchers denied Black men treatment for syphilis so they could track the natural progression of the disease.

As Dr. Rhea Boyd noted, however, a closer look at the data shows that when Black Americans are given the opportunity, they tend to get vaccinated, which means that addressing the larger structural issues of access can go far in reducing racial disparities in vaccination. Neglecting and then blaming marginalized communities for their misfortunes is not a new phenomenon, however. Black Americans were also neglected during the smallpox epidemic of the 1860s. 

Over the past year, white Americans had an opportunity to learn more about these racial dynamics in our nation — dynamics that should have been covered in U.S. history classes, but often aren’t. It was an opportunity to learn more about the underlying conditions that continue to divide our nation, in order to to take more action to unite it.

Some bought books and say they learned. But there is a question of whether those lessons will stick. Although the police killing of George Floyd sparked massive, worldwide protests that many white people participated in, just one year later, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has already dissipated; some white Americans are even less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were prior to Floyd’s death.

Moreover, some of the companies that made commitments to racial equality in the past year have since engaged in behavior that contradicts what they pledged to do. For instance, six months after saying they stood with the Black community, Google fired Timnit Gebru, whom they had hired to make their artificial intelligence more ethical and inclusive and is one of the few Black women in her field.

Google, of course, is not alone in its contradictions. A recent study of diversity in the technology industry found that companies that made statements of solidarity after the murder of George Floyd had 20 percent fewer Black employees, on average, than those that did not. In other words, at least some of the people and institutions who say that Black lives matter are doing so even when their own behaviors or organizational cultures reinforce racial inequality.

When I first started studying these issues, I thought that we could just “train away” biases that perpetuate racial inequality. I’m not the only one who thought so; companies spend around $8 billion per year on diversity training programs trying to do just that. But that turns out to be more challenging than it sounds; interventions to change implicit biases, for instance, fade rapidly — according to one paper, after about 24 hours.

To better understand why this happens and why so many people still misunderstand disparate outcomes, I reviewed and synthesized research from across the social sciences for an academic paper about why Americans misunderstand inequality, and what that means for efforts to address it. What I found, in short, is that the biases we have that lead us to see some things but not others, don’t exist in vacuums. They come from the same segregated and racialized neighborhoods and institutions that we go right back into when the diversity trainings are over. Our environments and institutions reinforce our biases. So if our social structures don’t fundamentally change, it’s difficult to change the people within them.

Our social structures make it really difficult to see the bigger, unequal picture as individuals, and thus to reach consensus about both the nature of racial inequality as well as efforts to address it. The same group of psychologists I mentioned earlier actually tried to correct white Americans’ misperceptions about racial economic inequality in two recent studies. What they found was that, ironically, reminding white Americans about racial disparities actually led them to view the past as more racially equitable than those who were not reminded; and the reminder of long-standing disparities did not change their misperceptions about the present — despite the researchers’ efforts, participants still believed that our nation had made more racial progress than it really had.

What can we do to close these racial gaps that are well-documented, but that some Americans do not believe in? In some ways, this issue is similar to climate change. Climate change is a deeply political issue, but its existence doesn’t depend on people believing in it — there is plenty of evidence that it’s real. The same is true of racial inequality in America: There is a mountain of evidence documenting its manifestation in education, health, criminal justice, employment and many other domains. And there are experts who have devoted their careers to studying how the structure, culture and politics of American society (re)produce inequality, as well as pathways for disrupting those cycles. 

Therefore, if we want to disrupt long-standing patterns of racial inequality, our best course of action as a country might be to rely on that evidence and expertise instead of trying to convince people that the disparities exist, as it will always be hard for people to see inequality if it doesn’t bring harm to their own lives.

In the last year and a quarter, the pandemic has served as a stark reminder of just how unequal America still is. But it also hasn’t been a “reminder” for everyone. Black Americans and other Americans of color didn’t have the luxury of forgetting that American society is unequal. 

For Black Americans, in particular, the statistics around the inequalities of COVID-19 are numerical stand-ins for a much larger issue that permeates so many aspects of life — everything from being able to get a life-saving vaccine to the risk of being killed by police.  

The reality is that our nation is still racially segregated. And it’s segregated in ways that limit our opportunities to learn about each other’s life experiences, even if our laws do not formally segregate our nation as they once did. This means that some live in a world in which they rarely encounter the conditions that bring harm to others everyday; others can’t escape those very conditions.

You can see this segregation in great detail by exploring the University of Virginia’s Racial Dot Map, which takes data from the 2010 U.S. Census and plots where people are living across the country. For instance, take southeastern Michigan, where I lived as a graduate student. You can see clear geographic separation between predominantly Black, white, Asian and Hispanic neighborhoods.

This pattern is, of course, not unique to Michigan: It’s all over the country. And now as a professor, when I travel to other universities to give talks about my research on inequality, I often include the map for the location I am visiting to show the audience how this process manifests in their own city or town.

Why does this matter? The places where we live affect not only our access to resources, but also who we meet, interact with and become friends with. And because our neighborhoods are so segregated, our social networks are also siloed — about three-quarters of white Americans don’t have any nonwhite friends, according to a 2014 survey from PRRI. The nature of segregation in the U.S. means that we only end up seeing and learning about what our own groups experience, making it hard to understand the lives of people outside of our own group.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/democrats-winning-elections-progressives-winning-debate-78300815

This explains, in part, why Americans have such a hard time understanding just how unequal our nation is, and moreover, the racialized nature of that inequality. For example, if you ask Americans about racial wealth gaps, you’ll find that they severely underestimate those gaps; according to a 2019 paper from a team of psychologists, Americans think the Black-white wealth gap is 40 to 80 percent smaller than it actually is.

This data is consistent with the idea that Americans misperceive the state of racial progress in the nation — they see far more racial progress than has actually taken place. To be clear, our nation has surely made some progress toward racial equality since its founding. But that progress does not negate the vast gaps that still exist between racial groups.

These kinds of misperceptions are consequential. Failing to understand the nature of racial inequality can make it difficult to generate effective solutions to the problems it causes. 

We saw this play out with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. When the data started showing racial disparities in vaccination rates, Americans blamed “vaccine hesitancy,” insinuating that the main reason Black Americans weren’t getting vaccinated as quickly as white Americans was due to Black Americans’ negative attitudes about vaccines or a lingering distrust about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which researchers denied Black men treatment for syphilis so they could track the natural progression of the disease.

As Dr. Rhea Boyd noted, however, a closer look at the data shows that when Black Americans are given the opportunity, they tend to get vaccinated, which means that addressing the larger structural issues of access can go far in reducing racial disparities in vaccination. Neglecting and then blaming marginalized communities for their misfortunes is not a new phenomenon, however. Black Americans were also neglected during the smallpox epidemic of the 1860s. 

Over the past year, white Americans had an opportunity to learn more about these racial dynamics in our nation — dynamics that should have been covered in U.S. history classes, but often aren’t. It was an opportunity to learn more about the underlying conditions that continue to divide our nation, in order to to take more action to unite it.

Some bought books and say they learned. But there is a question of whether those lessons will stick. Although the police killing of George Floyd sparked massive, worldwide protests that many white people participated in, just one year later, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has already dissipated; some white Americans are even less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were prior to Floyd’s death.

Moreover, some of the companies that made commitments to racial equality in the past year have since engaged in behavior that contradicts what they pledged to do. For instance, six months after saying they stood with the Black community, Google fired Timnit Gebru, whom they had hired to make their artificial intelligence more ethical and inclusive and is one of the few Black women in her field.

Google, of course, is not alone in its contradictions. A recent study of diversity in the technology industry found that companies that made statements of solidarity after the murder of George Floyd had 20 percent fewer Black employees, on average, than those that did not. In other words, at least some of the people and institutions who say that Black lives matter are doing so even when their own behaviors or organizational cultures reinforce racial inequality.

When I first started studying these issues, I thought that we could just “train away” biases that perpetuate racial inequality. I’m not the only one who thought so; companies spend around $8 billion per year on diversity training programs trying to do just that. But that turns out to be more challenging than it sounds; interventions to change implicit biases, for instance, fade rapidly — according to one paper, after about 24 hours.

To better understand why this happens and why so many people still misunderstand disparate outcomes, I reviewed and synthesized research from across the social sciences for an academic paper about why Americans misunderstand inequality, and what that means for efforts to address it. What I found, in short, is that the biases we have that lead us to see some things but not others, don’t exist in vacuums. They come from the same segregated and racialized neighborhoods and institutions that we go right back into when the diversity trainings are over. Our environments and institutions reinforce our biases. So if our social structures don’t fundamentally change, it’s difficult to change the people within them.

Our social structures make it really difficult to see the bigger, unequal picture as individuals, and thus to reach consensus about both the nature of racial inequality as well as efforts to address it. The same group of psychologists I mentioned earlier actually tried to correct white Americans’ misperceptions about racial economic inequality in two recent studies. What they found was that, ironically, reminding white Americans about racial disparities actually led them to view the past as more racially equitable than those who were not reminded; and the reminder of long-standing disparities did not change their misperceptions about the present — despite the researchers’ efforts, participants still believed that our nation had made more racial progress than it really had.

What can we do to close these racial gaps that are well-documented, but that some Americans do not believe in? In some ways, this issue is similar to climate change. Climate change is a deeply political issue, but its existence doesn’t depend on people believing in it — there is plenty of evidence that it’s real. The same is true of racial inequality in America: There is a mountain of evidence documenting its manifestation in education, health, criminal justice, employment and many other domains. And there are experts who have devoted their careers to studying how the structure, culture and politics of American society (re)produce inequality, as well as pathways for disrupting those cycles. 

Therefore, if we want to disrupt long-standing patterns of racial inequality, our best course of action as a country might be to rely on that evidence and expertise instead of trying to convince people that the disparities exist, as it will always be hard for people to see inequality if it doesn’t bring harm to their own lives.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/racial-justice-protests-started-contemporary-culture-war-77883986

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/sex-marriage-broke-partisan-politics-fivethirtyeight-78231501

Accuracy, rigor and clarity are core values here at FiveThirtyEight, and we’re looking for someone who shares them. FiveThirtyEight is hiring a part-time copy editor and fact-checker to join its copy desk and help ensure that our stories, charts, videos and interactive graphics meet the site’s standards for methodological rigor, clear presentation and sound argument. That means someone who is detail-oriented, comfortable working with numbers and eager to collaborate with FiveThirtyEighters in departments across the newsroom.

A successful candidate for this position could have a variety of backgrounds and skill sets — perhaps a fact-checker, someone with experience on a traditional copy desk, or even a recent college graduate who has a background in statistics or coding and is eager to develop editing and research skills. Candidates should not feel that they need to check every box listed below in order to apply.

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If you’re interested, please apply here, and include your resume and a cover letter, by April 5. And, again, if you don’t check every box, that’s OK — we’d still love to hear from you. 

Finally, if you don’t have the time or interest in working 29 hours per week but you check many of the boxes above, we’re also looking for freelancers to copy edit and fact-check. For more information, please email contact@fivethirtyeight.com with “FREELANCE COPY EDITOR” in the subject line.

President Biden will soon sign into law a $1.9 trillion bill intended to boost the economy and help the U.S. deal with the effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic. It’s only the second bill Biden has signed into law and likely to be one of the most significant. So let’s look at what we learned from the process of enacting this legislation: 

The Biden-led Democratic Party is more liberal and populist than the Obama or Clinton versions. 

In 2009, Barack Obama was in the White House and Democrats controlled both the U.S. House and Senate. The Great Recession was still in full force, and one of the first things the party did was propose a stimulus bill. But many Democrats, particularly more moderate members of Congress, were wary of being cast as supporting too much spending. So Democrats made sure the bill cost less than $1 trillion, eventually landing at a figure of $787 billion.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/white-house-economists-thinking-covid-19-relief-fivethirtyeight-76157114

Twelve years later, Democrats passed a bill with about double the spending of the 2009 bill.1 The economic challenges caused by COVID-19 are much different than those caused by the banking and housing-bubble crash of 2008, so it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison and say whether the 2009 stimulus or this one is closer to the optimal range of spending to boost the economy. But in my view, the higher spending in the 2021 stimulus bill compared to 2009 isn’t just about the underlying economic conditions. Today’s Democratic Party is further to the left than its 2009 version — in particular, it is more open to spending and much less worried about being cast as big-government liberals. So while this bill is about boosting the economy in the short term because of COVID-19, it also includes a number of liberal policies that Democrats probably would have tried to adopt even if there was no coronavirus-induced shutdown, such as increasing the child tax credit to $3,000 per school-aged child and increasing subsidies for people buying health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Indeed, the party’s left wing is delighted with this legislation. 

“This is spending at the scale of the problem,” said Mike Konczal, director of the progressive Roosevelt Institute. 

He added, “It wasn’t cut down by worries of doing too much, or performing moderation, or cynical debt fear. Remarkable.” 

David Dayen of the left-leaning American Prospect described the bill as “a down payment on reversing 40 years of inequitable treatment for the middle class in America.” 

“The American Rescue Plan is the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. 

What has changed since 2009 to make Democrats more comfortable with this kind of bill? Most of all, the left wing of the party — think Sens. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — has much more power and influence, pulling more moderate figures like Biden to the left. Democrats also seem to have concluded that there is not much electoral risk to spending a lot or being portrayed as too eager to spend federal dollars. That’s probably because it’s not clear that Republicans suffered electorally because of the massive increase in the national debt during the Trump presidency. 

Democrats, and Biden specifically, also seem to have learned some lessons since those early days of the Obama presidency …  

To Biden, ‘unity’ does not necessarily mean bipartisanship. 

Before his inauguration, Biden laid out a $1.9 trillion proposal for COVID-19 relief. I figured this was a negotiating tactic and that he would bring this figure down in part to win over Republican votes on Capitol Hill. He did not. Instead, Biden and his aides met with congressional Republicans and said the administration was open to striking a compromise with the GOP — but Biden never fundamentally changed his proposal. The Biden administration appeared to prioritize enacting its policy goals over trying to reach a deal that Democrats didn’t think Republicans were interested in anyway. (More on Republicans’ posture in a bit.) 

Biden’s approach suggests that the former vice president took the same lesson from the Obama years that political experts and other Democratic politicians did: The GOP may be unwilling to reach deals with a Democratic president on major legislation, no matter its details. The Obama administration spent months in 2009 negotiating with congressional Republicans on the bill that is now known as Obamacare, even though it is now fairly clear that Republicans were never going to reach an agreement and make one of Obama’s signature pieces of legislation bipartisan. 

If their approach to the COVID-19 relief bill is any guide, it looks like Biden and his aides aren’t exactly abandoning the president’s unity rhetoric from his inaugural speech — they’re just not willing to sacrifice legislative goals in chase of it. Instead, the Biden team is pursuing unity by performing the rituals of bipartisanship — holding regular meetings with congressional Republicans and being polite to them — and by pursuing legislation that is popular with a substantial number of Republicans voters (and continually emphasizing that point). Polls, for example, showed a big chunk of Republican voters backed the stimulus proposal.

But will major Biden initiatives get passed with lots of Republican votes? That seems very, very unlikely at this point. Congressional Democrats are already discussing using the reconciliation process again — that’s how this stimulus package was enacted — to pass an infrastructure bill. By using reconciliation, Democrats can bypass the Senate filibuster and pass legislation without any GOP votes. 

Democrats have a big filibuster problem.

Democrats like Sanders were desperate to include a minimum wage increase in the COVID-19 relief bill because it may be one of the few major laws enacted this year — at least as long as the filibuster remains in place. But the Senate’s parliamentarian said that a $15 federal minimum wage would violate the budgetary rules that govern what can be included in reconciliation bills. So Democrats dropped it from the legislation.

As long as a 60-vote threshold remains in place, it is likely that a $15 minimum wage is not the only major part of the Democratic agenda that will go nowhere. Bills to reform the election system, limit discrimination against Americans on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and change policing practices that were passed recently in the House also seem dead on arrival in the Senate because of the filibuster. 

Democrats also have a big Manchin-Sinema problem.

This is true most of all with regards to the filibuster, of course. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are the most vocal Democrats opposed to getting rid of the filibuster. And because Democrats control only 50 Senate seats,2 the filibuster will remain in place as long as any Democrat (and all Republicans) wish it so. 

But at least based on this stimulus process, Democrats may have a Manchin-Sinema problem, even putting the filibuster aside. Getting the vote of the senator from West Virginia, in particular, will continue to be hard. Biden may get the house, plane and oval-shaped office, but there’s a chance his years in office are most defined by what Manchin wants (and doesn’t want). 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/democrats-covid-relief-bill-popular-gop-vote-76055259

On this stimulus bill, Manchin — along with a few more conservative Democrats — forced the party to limit cash payments to individuals making less than $80,000 per year, while the bill had originally allowed people making up to $100,000 to get at least some money. Manchin also successfully pushed to lower enhanced unemployment benefits in the bill from $400 to $300 per week. And while this bill was making its way through Congress, Manchin announced his opposition to Neera Tanden, Biden’s then-nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, effectively killing her nomination. The senator is already hinting that he is wary of backing an infrastructure bill if it doesn’t have some GOP support. 

All that said, Manchin, who represents a state that Biden lost by 39 percentage points in 2020, did just back a $1.9 trillion bill. So let’s not overstate his resistance to his party’s main goals.

Republicans are using their Obama-era playbook.

Democrats all but guaranteed strong GOP opposition to this bill by sticking to its $1.9 trillion price tag and including non-COVID-19-related priorities in it. At the same time, it is not clear that any but a few Republicans would have ever voted for a Biden stimulus. The votes over Trump’s impeachment and removal and controversies over Reps. Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene had divided congressional Republicans. So GOP congressional leaders wanted the party to unite in opposing Biden’s stimulus bill. 

And even without a desire to get past the intra-party friction over Trump, Republicans might have still mobilized against this bill. All indications are that Republicans think that the way to win back control of the House and/or Senate next year is to repeat their strategy from the Obama years: intense and total opposition to the agenda of the sitting Democratic president. 

Those are my main takeaways from the COVID-19 relief bill. None are exactly surprising, but this process has clarified how Biden is approaching his presidency. 

During the 2020 campaign and after his victory, Biden had suggested that some Republicans could be persuaded to back his agenda because of his persona and long tenure on Capitol Hill. Those comments were (and are) probably politically and electorally smart, because most voters want the parties to work together, and most lawmakers are going to view a president more favorably if he at least gives the veneer of wanting to work with them. But it looks like that rhetoric was just that: a veneer. I mean, maybe Biden actually thought he could win some Republican votes, and the COVID-19 relief bill has showed him how hard-to-impossible that will be. But, more likely, Biden’s talk of working with Republicans was politically expedient spin all along. 

When things got real, Biden pushed a bill through with only Democratic votes, didn’t make major changes to placate Republicans and defined bipartisanship in a way that didn’t include getting any support from Republican members of Congress. Biden can’t change the underlying partisan dynamics in Washington, and it looks like he is quite aware of that, no matter what he told voters on the campaign trail.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/senate-democrats-voted-raising-minimum-wage-76340709

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/cpac-broader-republican-party-agree-trumps-party-now-76190882

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, host Galen Druke speaks with Heather Boushey, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, on the rationale behind the American Rescue Plan.