The Morning: Debt-ceiling showdown, Facebook outage, MLB playoffs

Nobody seems to know how the latest fight in Congress will be resolved.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story October 5, 2021 By David Leonhardt Good morning. Nobody seems to know how the latest debt-ceiling fight will be resolved. President Biden discussed the need to raise the debt ceiling yesterday.Doug Mills/The New York Times Tick, tick, tick The uncertainty over the federal debt ceiling is starting to get serious. The U.S. government will run out of its ability to borrow money sometime this month, the Treasury Department has said. Economically, that does not need to be a problem, because investors remain enthusiastic about lending money to Washington. Doing so has been among the world's safest investments. Politically, however, the debt-ceiling deadline presents a problem. Over the next few weeks, Congress will need to pass legislation to increase borrowing, and nobody in Washington seems to know how that will happen. The uncertainty has the potential to roil financial markets and ultimately increase Washington's borrowing costs, as happened during a debt-ceiling fight in 2011. Today, we will explain the three most obvious ways the current standoff could end, as well as the obstacles to each. 1. The bipartisan solution The debt ceiling is a strange creation. In many other countries, the legislature effectively approves government borrowing when it passes a spending bill or a tax cut, and many economists consider that policy to be wise. It's akin to the way a household budget works: You decide whether you can afford a car before you buy it — rather than buying it and later debating whether to pay off the auto loan. Today's federal debt stems from a mix of Democratic and Republican policies, including Donald Trump's tax cut and President Biden's first Covid-19 rescue bill. And for much of American history, the solution would have been straightforward: After some grandstanding from both parties, Congress would have raised the debt ceiling along bipartisan lines. But congressional Republicans have become more aggressive about using the debt ceiling as a political tool in recent decades. This time, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, has taken that aggressiveness to a new level. McConnell has said that he agrees the debt ceiling needs to rise. But he has also said Republicans won't vote for it because they oppose Biden's agenda and because Democrats control Washington. Senate Republicans have gone even further than withholding their votes: Last week, they filibustered a Democratic bill to raise the ceiling. There is little Senate precedent for a filibuster on the debt ceiling. Speaking at the White House yesterday, Biden reiterated that Democrats were willing to raise the debt ceiling on their own and described the Republicans' filibuster as "hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful." Many Democrats continue to predict that Republicans will cooperate in the end, given the huge economic consequences that a government debt default would have. Yet that prediction seems based more on hope than evidence. McConnell seems to believe that voters will punish Democrats for economic chaos, given that they hold the White House and control Congress. It's a reminder of why many Republicans consider McConnell to be a ruthlessly effective leader — and also why one biography of him is titled, "The Cynic." Senator Mitch McConnell.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times 2. Scrap the filibuster The filibuster — which effectively requires 60 out of 100 Senate votes to pass a bill — is merely a Senate tradition, not a law. A majority of senators can end it at any time, as they already have for judicial nominations. One option for Democrats is to declare the debt ceiling, and by extension the American economy, too important to be subject to a filibuster. They could then quickly pass a bill to lift the ceiling — and also change the law to eliminate future debt-ceiling showdowns. Virtually every other country takes a version of this approach. Scrapping the filibuster for the debt ceiling would be a way for Democrats to answer McConnell's toughness with a similar toughness. But Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, indicated yesterday that he was opposed: "We have other tools that we can use," Manchin said. 3. Use reconciliation Manchin seemed to be alluding to an existing exception to the filibuster known as reconciliation. Under reconciliation, a simple majority of senators can pass a very small number of budget bills each year. Democrats are planning to use that process to pass the centerpiece of Biden's agenda, a bill that would expand pre-K, community college, Medicare, the child-tax credit, clean-energy programs and more. The party could also lift the debt ceiling through reconciliation, although that would come with downsides. The process is sufficiently complex that it would probably take a couple of weeks and distract Democrats from their negotiations over Biden's agenda — another reason that McConnell is taking a hard line. Adding to the urgency of the issue, the Treasury Department has said that the government is likely to breach the debt ceiling less than two weeks from now, on Oct. 18. Some analysts think the Treasury may be able to take some technocratic measures to push back that deadline by several days or more. Legally, the government has options beyond these three — like minting a trillion-dollar coin — but they seem highly unlikely. What now? There is genuine uncertainty about what happens next. Congressional Republicans have a history of using the debt ceiling for political advantage, even when it damages the economy. Senate Democrats seem unlikely to change the filibuster. Democrats also seem reluctant to use reconciliation, with Biden yesterday saying that it was "fraught with all kinds of potential danger for a miscalculation." One possibility is that investors will get nervous in the coming days, causing declines in stock or bond prices. If that happens, it could change the politics of the situation and make Republicans more open to cooperation. For now, the most likely scenario seems to be that Democrats will resort to reconciliation to lift the debt ceiling without Republicans' help — but not do anything to prevent future debt-ceiling fights. Related: McConnell has a record of tying debt-ceiling increases to policy demands. This time around, he has yet to make any. Democrats frequently try to shame McConnell into changing his legislative approach. It rarely works. Biden called Republicans' tactics "reckless." THE LATEST NEWS The Virus As a New York City vaccine mandate for school workers went into effect yesterday, 99 percent of principals and 96 percent of teachers had gotten at least one dose. New Zealand, which has one of the world's lowest case rates, ended its "Covid-zero" policy after a lockdown failed to halt a Delta outbreak. Tech Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. More than 3.5 billion people use the company's services.Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times Facebook and its apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, were down for more than five hours yesterday. "When WhatsApp or Facebook are down, we all go down," said a businessman who relies on the services. Kevin Roose, a Times columnist, argues that Facebook is a company in decline. Other Big Stories Organizations that provide abortion referrals will be able to receive federal funding again, in a reverse of a Trump-era rule. Sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in France was more systemic than people knew, according to a report that estimates that clergy members abused 216,000 minors since 1950. Nearly 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico. Their families are searching for clues. Russia is sending a film crew to space to shoot movie scenes. And next week, William Shatner, 90, will fly to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin rocket. The Nobel Prize in Physics went to three scientists for their work in helping to understand complex systems, including how humanity influences the climate. Opinions Texas, not California, previews America's future, Steven Pedigo argues in The Times. Subscribe today Because of subscriber support, The New York Times remains one of the few organizations with the resources to cover the world in all its complexity. Become a subscriber today. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT MORNING READS Electric cable cars in Bogotá, Colombia.Federico Rios for The New York Times Electric travel: The future of mass transit. A medical first: A "pacemaker for the brain" treated a woman's severe depression. Crowd control: Venice is using surveillance on tourists. A Times classic: Why it's hard to make friends as an adult. Lives Lived: The conservative political theorist Angelo Codevilla predicted the populist revolt against the Republican establishment that coalesced behind Trump. He died at 78. ARTS AND IDEAS The San Francisco Giants celebrated after winning their division on Sunday.Brandon Vallance/Getty Images A baseball playoffs primer The M.L.B. playoffs begin tonight with the Yankees and the Red Sox, the sport's biggest rivals, meeting for an elimination game in Boston. Whoever wins will be an underdog in the next round against the low-budget Tampa Bay Rays. Here's our playoff guide: The favorites: Oddsmakers like the Los Angeles Dodgers, the defending champions and practically an all-star team. But they have a long path to the World Series, as they first need to win a one-game playoff tomorrow against the red-hot St. Louis Cardinals. The interlopers: The Dodgers must play tomorrow because their biggest rivals, the San Francisco Giants, stunningly won 107 regular-season games, one more than the Dodgers. Almost no one expected much from the Giants, a team built around veterans known as "the old guys." The villains: The Houston Astros have become baseball's antiheroes, because of a scandal in which they banged on a garbage can to tip off batters about what pitch to expect. Yet the Astros are hitting almost as well now as when they were cheating. Statistical analysis has found that the garbage can wasn't much help. The Midwesterners. Two less glamorous contenders — at least on the coasts — are the Milwaukee Brewers (whose pitchers led the majors in strikeouts) and the Chicago White Sox (a young team led by a 77-year-old manager, Tony La Russa). For more, The Times has Wild Card previews: Yankees-Red Sox history, and the St. Louis legend now on the Dodgers. PLAY, WATCH, EAT What to Cook David Malosh for The New York Times This pasta with eggplant and ricotta is inspired by traditional caponata, a tangy, salty-sweet Italian dish. What to Watch "Six," an exuberant musical about the wives of King Henry VIII, was shut down on opening night by the pandemic. It's back and it totally rules, Jesse Green writes in a review. World through a lens See photos of a remote Indian island that's a Garden of Eden for a colorful endangered bird. Late Night The hosts joked about the Facebook outage. Now Time to Play The pangram from yesterday's Spelling Bee was immediacy. Here is today's puzzle — or you can play online. Here's today's Mini Crossword, and a clue: Great delight (four letters). If you're in the mood to play more, find all our games here. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David P.S. "Dr. No," the first James Bond film, premiered 59 years ago today. Read The Times's review. Here's today's print front page. "The Daily" is about the Supreme Court. Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti, Ashley Wu and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for the Morning newsletter from The New York Times, or as part of your New York Times account. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. 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The Morning: Covid is in retreat

U.S. cases are down 35 percent since Sept. 1.

View in browser|nytimes.com October 4, 2021 By David Leonhardt Good morning. New Covid cases in the U.S. have fallen by more than a third in the past month. A medic cleaning a stretcher in Houston after transferring a Covid-19 patient last month.John Moore/Getty Images That two-month cycle Covid-19 is once again in retreat. The reasons remain somewhat unclear, and there is no guarantee that the decline in caseloads will continue. But the turnaround is now large enough — and been going on long enough — to deserve attention. The number of new daily cases in the U.S. has fallen 35 percent since Sept. 1: Worldwide, cases have also dropped more than 30 percent since late August. "This is as good as the world has looked in many months," Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Research wrote last week. These declines are consistent with a pattern that regular readers of this newsletter will recognize: Covid's mysterious two-month cycle. Since the Covid virus began spreading in late 2019, cases have often surged for about two months — sometimes because of a variant, like Delta — and then declined for about two months. Epidemiologists do not understand why. Many popular explanations, like seasonality or the ebbs and flows of social distancing, are clearly insufficient, if not wrong. The two-month cycle has occurred during different seasons of the year and occurred even when human behavior was not changing in obvious ways. The most plausible explanations involve some combination of virus biology and social networks. Perhaps each virus variant is especially likely to infect some people but not others — and once many of the most vulnerable have been exposed, the virus recedes. And perhaps a variant needs about two months to circulate through an average-sized community. Human behavior does play a role, with people often becoming more careful once caseloads begin to rise. But social distancing is not as important as public discussion of the virus often imagines. "We've ascribed far too much human authority over the virus," as Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota, has told me. The recent declines, for example, have occurred even as millions of American children have again crowded into school buildings. Hospitalizations, too Whatever the reasons, the two-month cycle keeps happening. It is visible in the global numbers, as you can see in the chart below. Cases rose from late February to late April, then fell until late June, rose again until late August and have been falling since. The pattern has also been evident within countries, including India, Indonesia, Thailand, Britain, France and Spain. In each of them, the Delta variant led to a surge in cases lasting somewhere from one and a half to two and a half months. In the U.S., the Delta surge started in several Southern states in June and began receding in those states in August. In much of the rest of the U.S., it began in July, and cases have begun falling the past few weeks. Even pediatric cases are falling, despite the lack of vaccine authorization for children under 12, as Jennifer Nuzzo of Johns Hopkins University told The Washington Post. (You can see the overall trends for every state here.) The most encouraging news is that serious Covid illnesses are also declining. The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid has fallen about 25 percent since Sept. 1. Daily deaths — which typically change direction a few weeks after cases and hospitalizations — have fallen 10 percent since Sept. 20. It is the first sustained decline in deaths since the early summer. 'The last major wave'? This is the part of the newsletter where I need to emphasize that these declines may not persist. Covid's two-month cycle is not some kind of iron law of science. There have been plenty of exceptions. In Britain, for example, caseloads have seesawed over the past two months, rather than consistently fallen. In the U.S., the onset of cold weather and the increase in indoor activities — or some other unknown factor — could cause a rise in cases this fall. The course of the pandemic remains highly uncertain. But this uncertainty also means that the near future could prove to be more encouraging than we expect. And there are some legitimate reasons for Covid optimism. The share of Americans 12 and over who have received at least one vaccine shot has reached 76 percent, and the growing number of vaccine mandates — along with the likely authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 — will increase the number of vaccinations this fall. Almost as important, something like one-half of Americans have probably had the Covid virus already, giving them some natural immunity. Eventually, immunity will become widespread enough that another wave as large and damaging as the Delta wave will not be possible. "Barring something unexpected," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former F.D.A. commissioner and the author of "Uncontrolled Spread," a new book on Covid, told me, "I'm of the opinion that this is the last major wave of infection." Covid has not only been one of the worst pandemics in modern times. It has been an unnecessarily terrible pandemic. Of the more than 700,000 Americans who have died from it, nearly 200,000 probably could have been saved if they had chosen to take a vaccine. That is a national tragedy. Covid also isn't going to disappear anytime soon. It will continue to circulate for years, many scientists believe. But the vaccines can transform Covid into a manageable disease, not so different from a flu or common cold. In the past few weeks, the country appears to have moved closer to that less grim future. Whatever this autumn brings, the worst of the pandemic is almost certainly behind us. Virus developments: The pandemic has made diapers more expensive and scarce. Johnson & Johnson is planning to ask for federal authorization for boosters this week. THE LATEST NEWS Politics Progressive Democrats said that they were open to compromising with moderate senators on Biden's social and climate bill. It's the first day of the Supreme Court's term, which will include cases on abortion, gun rights and more. Other Big Stories Huntington Beach, Calif. A spill created a 13-square-mile slick, and dead fish and birds washed ashore.Mario Tama/Getty Images A pipeline failure near Orange County, Calif., caused an enormous ocean oil spill. A former Facebook product manager said that she was the whistle-blower behind a leak. She said the company "has shown it chooses profit over safety." Clint Eastwood won a $6 million lawsuit against a Lithuanian company that used his image to promote CBD products. The Pandora Papers: The Washington Post and others reveal how the wealthy, including world leaders, hide billions from tax authorities. Among them: the king of Jordan. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to two U.S. researchers. Their work sheds light on how to reduce chronic and acute pain. Tom Brady became the N.F.L.'s career passing leader. He now has 80,560 career yards passing. Opinions "Sinema is a puzzle": Maureen Dowd writes about the Sphinx-like Arizona senator. Pessimistic liberals should remember their many victories over the past two decades, says Ross Douthat. Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Democrats' disagreements over Biden's agenda. Subscribe today Because of subscriber support, The New York Times remains one of the few organizations with the resources to cover the world in all its complexity. Become a subscriber today. MORNING READS Legoland in Goshen, N.Y.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times Bricks: Developers wanted to build a Legoland theme park. It tore a small town apart. The Media Equation: What did investors see in Ozy Media? Saildrone: This is what it looks like inside a Category 4 hurricane. Quiz time: The score on our most recent News Quiz was 9.6. Can you beat it? Advice from Wirecutter: Tips for better laundry. Lives Lived: Marcia Freedman was the first and only open lesbian — and first American-born woman — to serve in the Knesset, Israel's Parliament. She died at 83. ARTS AND IDEAS A statue of the Beatles in Liverpool, England.Duncan Elliott for The New York Times The Beatles in the classroom Would you get a master's degree in the Beatles? In the band's hometown, a postgraduate program aims to turn fans into students of the Fab Four's legacy by studying their sociological, historical and economic impact. As a new semester began last week at the University of Liverpool, 11 eager students, ages 21 to 67, trooped into class to start the program. One wore a Yoko Ono T-shirt, Alex Marshall reports in The Times, while another had a yellow submarine tattooed on his arm. Two had named their sons Jude, after one of the band's most famous songs. Academics have studied the Beatles for decades, and the program is the latest example of that. The Beatles are big business locally as well: Liverpool's association with the band was worth over $110 million a year, a 2014 study found. Tourists visit sites named in the band's songs and venues where the group played. Two professional tour guides in the course said they hoped the program would help them attract customers. "The tour industry in Liverpool is fierce," one said. Another student, Alexandra Mason, recently completed a law degree but decided to change track when she heard about the Beatles course. "I never really wanted to be a lawyer," she said. "In my mind, I've gone from the ridiculous to the sublime." — Sanam Yar, a Morning writer PLAY, WATCH, EAT What to Cook Craig Lee for The New York Times It's not a 30-minute meal, but this lasagna is worth the effort. What to Read Stanley Tucci's passion was acting. Now, it's food. What to Watch Are you watching "Squid Game"? The dark Korean drama, where desperate characters play lethal children's games for money, is on track to become Netflix's most popular original series ever, Vulture reports. Late Night "Saturday Night Live" returned, with a new cast member playing Biden. Now Time to Play The pangram from Friday's Spelling Bee was juvenile. Here is today's puzzle — or you can play online. Here's today's Mini Crossword, and a clue: School tests (five letters). If you're in the mood to play more, find all our games here. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David P.S. Colby College gave its courage in journalism award to eight journalists, including from The Times, whose phone records were secretly seized by the Justice Department. Here's today's print front page. "The Daily" is about ivermectin. On the Book Review podcast, Richard Powers and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers talk about their novels. "Sway" features Monica Lewinsky. Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti, Ashley Wu and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for the Morning newsletter from The New York Times, or as part of your New York Times account. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018