118th Congress Agenda
The mid-term elections are over and a divided Congress goes to work in January for a two-year term. The elections seemed at times to be more about personalities than policies. Hopefully that will change when the term begins.
Among the voters’ top issues in the 2022 mid-terms were the economy, education, healthcare, energy, and violent crime. Addressing these issues requires understanding complex relationships between and among numerous components on the federal agenda: inflation, labor force, immigration, education, environment, social services, infrastructure, public safety, demographics, tax revenues.
The enduring effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have flowed through many of these issues. First the economy went into free-fall as 22 million jobs disappeared. Twenty-nine months later the number of employed persons recovered, but six months after that, millions of people remain out of work.
The reasons are diverse, and include a transformation in attitudes toward work. Some workers took early retirement, some returned to schooling to prepare for a different career, some must care for elderly parents or small children, some used pandemic relief funds to delay a return to work. Disturbingly, an estimated six to seven million men of prime working age are simply sitting on the sidelines, even as eleven million jobs remain unfilled.
Shortage of workers has cascading effects. Low unemployment fuels inflation. An abundance of vacant jobs means lower GDP and less tax revenue. Increasing immigration quotas to address worker shortages faces political backlash. Revenue shortfall requires either raising taxes or cutting services. Cutting funding for education or child care would ignore the additional demand that the pandemic has placed on those services.
All of these issues relate back to the country’s demographics. A report published in July 2022 by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected U.S. population to 2052. The 30-year average rate of growth is quite low, 0.3 percent per year, totaling 369 million people in 2052. The rate of growth has been below one percent since 2007 and falling; for the fifty years before that the rate varied between one and two percent but has been on an overall downward trend following the post-World War II baby boom.
The average age of the population is increasing. The number of people aged 65 and over, those eligible for Social Security and Medicare, will increase faster than those 25-54, the prime working age group. Perhaps the CBO report’s most startling finding concerns immigration: “Population growth is increasingly driven by net immigration, which accounts for all population growth in 2043 and beyond.”
All of which points to a packed agenda for the 118th Congress.