The News Caravan

Tag: Shrinking

  • IMF Projects UK Economy to Keep Shrinking as Rishi Sunak Marks 100 Days in Office

    [ad_1]

    Prime Minister Rishi Sunak marked 100 days in office last month. The International Monetary Fund and UK economists predicted that the UK economy would continue to shrink, despite the PM’s best efforts to stabilize the country’s markets.

    The same report predicted that China and India’s economies would account for more than half of GDP growth and stated that the UK would be the only country with an economy in recession this year. Experts expect that there will be a 0.06% overall reduction in the UK economy this year, and various cabinet members are citing several reasons for the shrinkage.

    In February, their independent Office Of Budget Responsibility warned that the recession would last at least through 2023. The UK’s economic situation is deteriorating over many factors, including the increased price of heating, gas, and oil due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the fallout from Brexit, and the fact that the country’s economy never quite recovered after Covid-19 shutdowns.

    Additionally, annual inflation hit 11.1% in October and stayed at 10.5% in December, the highest in four decades. It is important to note that the overall GDP increased by 4% in 2022. However, the UK remains the only G-7 country not to recover its output after the pandemic fully.

    While Sunak blames outside forces like the Russian invasion, other experts point the finger at Brexit, which has caused much lower trade exports with the rest of Europe. The British PM focuses on expanding trade with other countries, including India. Over the last year, the UK and India have had six rounds of talking over trade and investment agreements that would boost trade by billions of dollars in both countries. While this much-needed trade agreement will help boost the economy overall, the UK has a long way to go before the government can quell its economic woes.

    As with any recession, unemployment is up, and so is inflation, further infuriating labourers, who have already organized dozens of strikes – which conservatives in the government blame for some of the economic stagnation. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the UK recorded the highest number of working days lost in over 30 years in 2022. Transportation, teaching, and healthcare industries have been the most affected. With inflation continuing to rise, workers demand better conditions and higher pay. While some contracts have been negotiated, the strikes will continue as the Prime Minister and this government refuse to budge on pay raises in the public sector. Earlier in February, over half a million teachers, train drivers, and other civil servants organized a walkout, the largest coordinated labour strike in a decade.

    As the labour unions persist, members of Sunak’s own party immediately proposed a round of tax cuts, which they promise will stimulate the economy, especially job growth. Sunak has so far refused either party, saying that raising pay for workers will cause inflation to rise and that the “best tax cut right now is a cut in inflation.”

    As the workers who have jobs walk out due to economic inequality, employment is falling across the private and public sectors, which economists predict will continue into 2023. This creates its own concerns. As residents fail to believe in the country’s economy, the black market economy always sees a boost. Currently, the UK is already dealing with the black gambling market. Numerous offshore casino sites that aren’t under UK regulations and therefore, not a part of GamStop, and are currently not being taxed. Increasing illegal goods/services and off-the-books jobs is another worry for lawmakers as small businesses try to avoid taxation. According to a report published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), these black market businesses cost the UK over 150 billion euros every day, says a report published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). Of course, this is a problem all over the EU, where over 30 million people work or run businesses without paying taxes.

    The rising cost of imports, like food and energy, has particularly alarmed families across the UK. In combination with rising inflation, it caused a curb on spending, leaving the country in a loop where they can’t quite stimulate new growth. With nothing in the works to address those families, Sunak’s government has instead focused on new trade with Ireland and India in recent weeks. A dispute over trade routes in Northern Ireland has added to rising costs and completely shuttered Belfast’s government, which Sunak seeks to alleviate. The PM says some progress has been made, but any concessions will likely anger his own party.

    With two years left until reelection season and crushing economic predictions, Rishi Sunak will have a long fight ahead of him if he stands a chance of keeping his position. While Sunak is downplaying the role of Brexit, which he has been a long-time supporter of, many across the country are now finding that the economic fallout deeply affects every corner of the economy. With decreased foreign investment after the event, European and American companies have continued to resist investment opportunities in the UK.

    Instability in the economy is the number one reason many companies pulled their investments. Then, last year, Liz Truss produced several (now abandoned) unpopular plans to cut taxes, which angered critics and caused further divestment. As she left her very short-term, most investors pulled out again, causing the economy to plummet. Though this up-and-down has remained chiefly quiet as Sunak’s continued leadership is once again signalling that it may be safe for foreign companies to reinvest, these new economic reports may further deter this.

    In current opinion polls, the Conservative party is trailing the Labour Party by about 20 points, and some election experts are already predicting Sunak’s defeat. With local elections looming in May and polls showing a disgruntled populace that wants a change in leadership, the UK’s economy may not recover as quickly as the country’s leadership hopes.

    [ad_2]
    #IMF #Projects #Economy #Shrinking #Rishi #Sunak #Marks #Days #Office

    ( With inputs from : kashmirlife.net )

  • Shrinking Colorado River hands Biden his first climate brawl

    Shrinking Colorado River hands Biden his first climate brawl

    [ad_1]

    The current feud centers on California, a longtime Democratic stronghold, and Arizona, a newfound swing state that has proven crucial to the party’s control of the White House and Senate.

    The 1,450-mile long Colorado River made much of the West inhabitable, and now supplies water to 40 million Americans from Wyoming to the border with Mexico, as well as an enormously productive agricultural industry. But climate change has shriveled its flows by 20 percent over the past two decades, and for each additional degree of warming, scientists predict the river will shrink another 9 percent.

    Water levels at the system’s two main reservoirs are falling so fast, the Interior Department has said that water users must cut consumption by as much as a third of the river’s flows or risk a collapse that could cripple their ability to deliver water out of those dams. That would also cut off hydropower production that is crucial to the stability of the Western grid.

    The states broadly agree that the vast majority of those immediate cuts must be made by the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, whose decades of overuse have accelerated the crisis. But the fight is over whether California, which holds strong legal rights to the lion’s share of the Lower Basin’s water, should have to share in those reductions.

    This week, six of the seven states along the river asked the Biden administration to spread the cuts among the Lower Basin’s water users. They argued, in effect, that climate change has so fundamentally altered the waterway that the century-old legal system governing who must sacrifice in times of shortage should not be the final word in how those cuts are divvied up.

    But California, whose major agricultural regions would be among the last to take cuts under the existing rules, is refusing to budge from its legal claim. Its rival proposal for apportioning the pain would almost entirely cut off Colorado River deliveries to Phoenix, Tucson and the 11 Native American tribes getting water from central Arizona’s primary canal before California’s agricultural users would face any mandatory cuts.

    “We agree there needs to be reduced use in the Lower Basin, but that can’t be done by just completely ignoring and sidestepping federal law,” said J.B. Hamby, who leads the Colorado River Board of California and serves on the board of the state’s biggest user of the river’s water, the Imperial Irrigation District.

    But Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, argued that his state agreed to take junior rights to river water back in 1968, before climate change was known to be a factor in shrinking the river’s flow.

    “Why should Arizona in the Lower Basin take the entire cost of climate change changes to the river?” he asked.

    The state-level politics, alone, are a disaster for a Democratic administration.

    On one side of the fight is the most populous state in the country with a $3.4 trillion economy, fueled in large part by its powerhouse agricultural sector. A Democratic stronghold run by a governor with his own presidential ambitions, California has also enacted some of the most aggressive climate mitigation policies in the country.

    On the other side is Arizona — a swing state on which Democrats’ national electoral fate could turn — joined by every other state in the river basin.

    And while the immediate fight is centered on Arizona and California, the Upper Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, which backed Arizona’s approach, have their own interest in moving toward a more flexible interpretation of century-old water rules. Climate change is expected to soon make it impossible for them to deliver the legally required amount of water to the Lower Basin without draconian cuts to their own cities and tribes — an even bigger brawl that will have to be fought out in the next two years.

    But within each state, the fault lines aren’t always clear. Since Western water law allows whoever claimed the water first to be first in line, agricultural users often hold some of the strongest rights, whereas cities and suburbs are almost always the first to take cuts.

    Meanwhile, notably absent from the dueling proposals were any of the 29 tribes that reside within the river basin, and whose interests the Biden administration has vowed to be particularly attentive to. They haven’t been in the room for negotiations involving the states and the federal government.

    Tribal interests on the river are also complex and competing: The Gila River Indian Community, whose ancestors farmed with Colorado River water for millennia, are among those most vulnerable to cuts under the priority approach backed by California. But the Colorado River Indian Tribes hold senior rights decreed by the Supreme Court that align their interests with the Golden State’s approach.

    Environmentalists are also likely to enter the fight soon, with the fate of nearly three dozen endangered species hanging on the line and a risk that the Grand Canyon could one day have no river running through it.

    Adding to the pressure on the Biden administration is the fact that lawmakers on Capitol Hill are increasingly jumping into the fray.

    Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won reelection last fall in one of the most competitive Senate races in the country after staking out an aggressive position defending his state’s Colorado River water interests — and fighting California’s. And a bipartisan group of lawmakers from Arizona and Nevada this week wrote Biden to endorse their states’ “consensus” proposal, calling it “a roadmap to avoid devastating economic impacts while sharing in the sacrifice of adapting to a permanently reduced water supply.”

    But California’s Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla shot back in a statement contending that “six other Western states dictating how much water California must give up simply isn’t a genuine consensus solution.” Feinstein has for years wielded intense power over Western water issues on Capitol Hill and chairs the appropriations panel overseeing water funding.

    The Biden administration won’t have to make any tough decision on who wins and who loses just yet, though. First, the Interior Department will need to publicly lay out exactly what effect the competing approaches would mean to communities and ecosystems across the West if the next few years turn out to be dry ones.

    The analysis is part of the National Environmental Policy Act process that Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation launched in October to give itself legal cover if the states can’t reach agreement among themselves and the Biden administration decides it must act unilaterally — which it has indicated it could do as soon as this summer.

    “The Department remains committed to pursuing a collaborative and consensus-based approach, and ongoing conversations with the Basin states, Tribes, water managers, farmers, irrigators and other stakeholders are helping to inform the supplemental process to revise the current interim operating guidelines for the operation of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams,” Interior spokesperson Tyler Cherry said by email.

    Some of the state negotiators think this process of publicly detailing the exact risks and costs to communities of the two competing concepts could help energize the negotiations among the states.

    If the analysis of California’s proposal shows the result would be “drying up the Central Arizona Project [and] major metropolitan areas and taking all of the water away from native American tribes, I think the choices will become really stark,” said John Entsminger, Nevada’s top Colorado River negotiator.

    “I definitely think there’s still a chance for a seven-state agreement, and I think the modeling outputs that are going to be public could be very helpful for helping drive some form of compromise,” he said.

    Regardless of how the negotiations turn out and what Interior decides, many legal experts expect the fight to ultimately land in court.

    “No matter what that decision is, one or more of the states is going to sue the Bureau of Reclamation and we’re going to have to work this out through litigation,” said Rhett Larson, who teaches water law at the Arizona State University and has worked on water rights issues along the Colorado River.

    But while a legal battle may be the only way to resolve some of the longstanding conflicts among the river’s users, it could also slow down the federal government’s ability to respond to a fast-evolving crisis on the Colorado River.

    Even more concerning to federal, state and local water managers is the risk that a court decision, particularly from the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, could end up curtailing the federal government’s broad authorities to manage not just the Colorado River, but waterways across the West. This would be occurring at a time when climate change requires flexibility to adapt to hydrologic systems that are evolving in unprecedented and unpredictable ways.

    “The court could impose real limits on its ability to adapt existing laws to hydrologic and climatologic realities,” Larson said. “That’s something that the Bureau of Reclamation doesn’t want to do for practical reasons — climate change is changing our hydrologic systems and we need to be able to adapt it — and also for institutional reasons. No one likes to give up power.”

    Reporter Camille von Kaenel contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]
    #Shrinking #Colorado #River #hands #Biden #climate #brawl
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • The Cold Calculus Behind the Shrinking GOP Presidential Field

    The Cold Calculus Behind the Shrinking GOP Presidential Field

    [ad_1]

    Palin, though, is more likely to belt out another rendition of “Baby Got Back” on The Masked Singer than be the Republican standard bearer in 2024.

    That the GOP primary is developing more slowly this election, a departure from the accelerated trajectory of recent nominating contests, is by now plain to see.

    What’s even more striking three months after the midterms, though, is just how many Republicans are planning to sit out the White House race or remain on the fence about whether to run at all.

    For all the preemptive Republican panic about a 2016 replay, and Trump claiming the nomination again thanks to a fractured opposition, the 2024 GOP field is shaping up to be smaller than expected.

    “I would’ve told you last fall that there would be five senators in the race,” Ward Baker, a Republican strategist, told me, recalling a presentation he put together for lawmakers and donors projecting at least a double-digit sized group of contenders.

    Now, Baker and other well-connected Republicans believe the ultimate field may be closer to seven or eight serious candidates with an even smaller number still standing by the time the first votes are cast in the kickoff states a year from now.

    This is partly because of what those RNC members found in California last week.

    Trump has already declared for a third consecutive run and his imprint was all over the meeting and remains all over the party. Until he declared his candidacy, the RNC was still covering some of his legal bills. And the race for party chair was mostly notable for the fact that neither major candidate was willing to acknowledge the culprit for a disappointing midterm, largely because the committee members would rather focus on nefarious claims about Democratic ballot harvesting than the role of Trump, the man Democrats have organized, mobilized and fundraised off of for six consecutive elections.

    So, yes, a number of would-be Republican candidates this time see the party still in the former president’s grip, cast an eye at his preemptive attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and say: who needs it, I’ll check back in 2028 when, one way or another, Trump is out of the picture.

    However, it’s not only Trump who’s causing the Great Deep Freeze of 2023.

    “They don’t have a Trump problem, they have a DeSantis problem,” explains Scott Jennings, a GOP strategist, of the potential field. “It’s going to be hard fighting for the other 60 to 70 percent of the vote [not going to Trump] when another guy could get 90 percent of it.”

    DeSantis has, thanks to Covid and his ubiquity on right-wing media, become a “national conservative celebrity,” said Jennings, and the other would-be contenders are not likely to claim that status “by giving a bunch of speeches.”

    Republican officeholders and their advisers see the polling, public and private, demonstrating just how formidable DeSantis already is with Republican primary voters, who typically wouldn’t even know the name of another state’s governor this early in a race.

    That DeSantis has already burned in the conservative psyche was on display this week in Mississippi, where far-right State Sen. Chris McDaniel — whose proto-Trump 2014 primary nearly toppled then-Sen. Thad Cochran — opened a campaign for lieutenant governor by asking Republican voters: “Do you want a Trump or DeSantis, or do you want a Mitt Romney or a Liz Cheney?”

    That an undeclared Florida governor is already receiving equal billing on the conservative seal of good housekeeping with a former president and worldwide household name explains a great deal about how this contest is getting underway.

    Now, to be sure, it’s early and initial frontrunners can, and often do, fall.

    However, the history most on the minds of the Republicans considering the race, who are not named Trump or DeSantis, is what happens when there’s a bloody battle between top contenders. Spoiler: It augurs well for a third candidate.

    This is what’s giving hope to the other Republicans most likely to run. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who’s ready to announce later this month, hopes voters will turn to a younger, female alternative when the going gets rough between Trump and DeSantis. And older figures like former Vice President Mike Pence and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson have told people they’re counting on a frontrunner food fight to create an appetite for a so-called adult in the race.

    Where it gets complicated for the would-be third option candidates is when it comes to money. As in: how will they raise it?

    And this question, as much as Trump’s grip or DeSantis’s strength as an alternative, is what’s giving (or what gave) a number of potential candidates pause.

    Among the party’s top contributors, as well as with many small-dollar givers, there’s simply no appetite for a prolonged, fractured primary that could pave the way for another Trump nomination-by-plurality.

    In this sense, the 2024 GOP donor is a lot like the 2020 Democratic primary electorate: They have one criteria and it’s who’s the safest bet to beat Trump. And the bundler bed-wetting about whether a larger field will merely open a path for Trump puts the onus on most every non-Trump candidate to demonstrate why they won’t just siphon votes from a single alternative.

    “The mega donors are going to keep their checkbooks in the desk for a while because they saw what happened in ’16,” said Dave Carney, a longtime GOP consultant.

    This will hurt Trump and DeSantis the least, in part because they’re already sitting on tens of millions of dollars that can likely be used for Super PACs and in part because they’re sure to be the most formidable online fundraisers.

    “If he runs that takes a lot of the oxygen out for others,” Carney said of DeSantis.

    The only other potential candidate even close to Trump and DeSantis on money is Sen. Tim Scott, who has over $21 million in his Senate account that he can transfer to a presidential campaign.

    Then there’s the matter of what wing of the party is not being represented. Between Trump, DeSantis, Pence, Haley, Scott and an anti-Trump Republican to be named later, most of the modern GOP’s factions are covered (and speaking of that anti-Trump Republican wing — let’s call it the John Kasich lane for the television interview-to-votes-received ratio — I hear New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu is planning to meet with a group of well-connected Republicans about his plans when he’s in Washington later this month.)

    Still, as the current president demonstrates, there’s real value to running and losing because it can double as a vice-presidential tryout.

    But to a whole generation, and then some, of ambitious Republicans even that may not be compelling enough.

    Consider the roster of who’s not running or at least uninclined to run, absent a shift in the fundamentals of the race.

    From the 2016 field there’s former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas). Also on the sidelines from the Senate: Rick Scott (Fla.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Joni Ernst (Iowa), Josh Hawley (Mo.). These are people, for the most part, in their 40s and 50s.

    Among the governors, it’s possible that Sununu, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Georgia Gov, Brian Kemp, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and a pair of former governors, Maryland’s Larry Hogan and New Jersey’s Chris Christie, could all run. But it’s more likely they won’t.

    To speak with members of the RNC is to understand why so many Republicans in the prime of their careers are, at the very least, uncertain about running for president.

    It’s not that Trump’s lieutenants, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, were issuing be-with-us-or-else threats alongside some magnificent views of the Pacific or that Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign chief, used her dinner speech to demand fealty to Trump.

    Yet their presence and the refusal of the two candidates for chair to actually grapple with Trump’s impact on general election voters helps reinforce a sort of code of silence among most of the committee.

    The most frequently cited fig leaf for not offering an opinion on the presidential race is that, as committee members, they’ve taken a vow of celibacy when it comes to primaries.

    What they actually mean is they don’t want to be seen as telling their states’ voters what to do, in part because that could alienate Trump’s diehards, risking their own posts, and in part because Trump could weaponize any such intervention.

    As Luis Fortuño, the former Puerto Rican governor and one of the few RNC members to speak candidly about the committee’s calculations, told me: “There’s a sensitivity to his base in the sense that 30 percent of them will be with him and we need everyone at the end of the day.”

    There were, however, private indications of an eagerness to move on from Trump. While Ronna McDaniel easily won re-election, and with the tacit support of Trump, two candidates for other RNC offices he openly endorsed both lost.

    In the treasurer’s race, Florida GOP chair Joe Gruters was defeated in part because he had Trump’s backing — and trumpeted the endorsement to committee members.

    Gruters’s allies texted committee members the day of the vote with a siren emoji, an all-caps headline: “PRES. TRUMP ENDORSES JOE GRUTERS FOR RNC TREASURER” and a message from Trump about his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”

    However, Gruters told me it was only supposed to go to about 20 Trump diehards on the committee and instead went to the entire 168-member party roster. That, according to Fortuno and other Trump skeptics who want a neutral leadership slate, caused a backlash on the floor and doomed Gruters’ candidacy.

    Not that many potential presidential candidates were there to witness or even hear about what transpired.

    The only likely 2024 contender to show up was Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor, who’s a longshot but would bring perhaps the most sterling resume to the field. Now a certified member of the old guard, he was once a Reagan-appointed U.S. Attorney, House impeachment manager against Bill Clinton and DEA chief and top border official under George W. Bush before serving two terms in Little Rock.

    Hutchinson wasn’t in the actual RNC program, but didn’t ask to be included. Unlike a number of once-hungry Republicans he’s still intent on testing the 2024 waters — he was the only potential candidate to show up for Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’s inauguration and legislative breakfast last month. He believes the case has to be made directly against the former president.

    Citing a much-read Peggy Noonan column from December, Hutchinson told me flatly: “The only way to get rid of Donald Trump is to beat him.”

    [ad_2]
    #Cold #Calculus #Shrinking #GOP #Presidential #Field
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )