The president attributed the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation — a move Mr. Trump believes was the moment his administration effectively lost control over the inquiry. Accusing Mr. Sessions of “disloyalty,” Mr. Trump unleashed a string of insults on his attorney general.
.. Ashen and emotional, Mr. Sessions told the president he would quit and sent a resignation letter to the White House, according to four people who were told details of the meeting. Mr. Sessions would later tell associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the most humiliating experience in decades of public life.
.. Mr. Trump ended up rejecting Mr. Sessions’s May resignation letter after senior members of his administration argued that dismissing the attorney general would only create more problems for a president
.. the attorney general has stayed in the job because he sees a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity as the nation’s top law enforcement official to toughen the country’s immigration policies.
.. In the middle of the meeting, Mr. McGahn received a phone call from Rod J. Rosenstein
.. In the telephone call to Mr. McGahn, Mr. Rosenstein said he had decided to appoint Mr. Mueller to be a special counsel for the investigation.
.. When the phone call ended, Mr. McGahn relayed the news to the president and his aides. Almost immediately, Mr. Trump lobbed a volley of insults at Mr. Sessions, telling the attorney general it was his fault they were in the current situation. Mr. Trump told Mr. Sessions that choosing him to be attorney general was one of the worst decisions he had made, called him an “idiot,” and said that he should resign.
.. An emotional Mr. Sessions told the president he would resign and left the Oval Office.
.. In the hours after the Oval Office meeting, however, Mr. Trump’s top advisers intervened to save Mr. Sessions’s job. Mr. Pence; Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist at the time; and Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, all advised that accepting Mr. Sessions’s resignation would only sow more chaos inside the administration and rally Republicans in Congress against the president.
.. For Mr. Sessions, the aggressiveness with which Mr. Trump has sought his removal was a blow.
.. But Mr. Trump continued his public attacks in the days that followed, including taking to Twitter to call him “weak” — a word that is among the harshest criticisms in Mr. Trump’s arsenal.
How We Are Ruining America
Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
.. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
.. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.
.. zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009.
.. Educated parents live in neighborhoods with the best teachers, they top off their local public school budgets and they benefit from legacy admissions rules, from admissions criteria that reward kids who grow up with lots of enriching travel and from unpaid internships that lead to jobs.
.. I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop.
.. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette.
.. the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
.. To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
Why It’s So Hard to Get Ahead in the South
In Charlotte and other Southern cities, poor children have the lowest odds of making it to the top income bracket of kids anywhere in the country. Why?
Charlotte ranked dead last in an analysis of economic mobility in America’s 50 largest cities
.. Children born into the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution in Charlotte had just a 4.4 percent chance of making it to the top 20 percent of the income distribution. That’s compared to a 12.9 percent chance for children in San Jose, California, and 10.8 percent change for children in Salt Lake City.
.. much of the South has low mobility rates
.. there are a few key factors that play into where people struggle with economic mobility. These areas tend to be more racially segregated, have a higher share of poverty than the national average, more income inequality, a higher share of single mothers, and lower degrees of social capital
.. The South also has among the highest poverty rates in the country. Mississippi ranks last, Louisiana is 49th, and North Carolina is 39th in the country when it comes to the percentage of people living below the poverty line.
.. in North Carolina, 65 percent of African-American children live in single parent families
.. 77 percent of black students attend majority-poverty schools, while only 23 percent of white students do.
.. “The school system is very racially segregated, housing is racially segregated,” Gene Nichol told me. “When you put that big stew together, it’s hard for people born in economically challenging circumstances to work their way out
.. Southern states have low minimum wages, so many poor people make less than they do in other regions, and have less money to spend on creating opportunities for their children.
.. While states like New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts spend $15,000 per student on elementary and secondary education, North Carolina spends almost half that, at $8,500 per student
.. Hunt’s mother could earn a decent wage in manufacturing without a college education; now someone without a college degree is stuck struggling in a low-wage job.
.. “We had an economic philosophy in the South, in the Jim Crow era and beyond, that we would lead with cheap labor, cheap land, and low taxes,”
.. the biggest problem in Charlotte is that city leaders are happy to try and tackle the problem of economic mobility, but that they are not as interested in addressing the real problem, which is poverty. “There’s a greater reluctance to engage in programs which fight poverty in the South than in the rest of the country,” Nichol told me.
.. This, Nichol says, has largely to do with race. People in the South view poverty as a “problem that black people have,” and don’t support programs to fight poverty because those programs are targeted at black people, he said. Research backs this up. As I’ve written before, efforts to cut back welfare and other programs for the poor arose once black people were able to get on those programs—there was widespread support for them when they had been majority white... North Carolina is rolling back benefits for the poor. It eliminated its state Earned Income Tax Credit in 2014, cut unemployment benefits to a maximum of 14 weeks (the lowest in the nation), and made it more difficult for poor people to get food stamps. Benefits for families on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are among the lowest in the nation, at just $272 a month. “The link between poverty and race is very strong in the South and in North Carolina,” Nichol said.
Improving Economic Opportunity in the United States
- Near-term policy solutions aimed at reducing these barriers include running tight labor markets, infrastructure investment, direct job creation, health care and other work supports, apprenticeships, and more.
.. Janet Yellen recently noted that unemployment rates “averaged 13 percent in low- and moderate-income communities from 2011 through 2015, compared with 7.3 percent in higher-income communities.”
.. Racial disparities exist in unemployment rates even controlling for education.[3] Among white people with terminal high school degrees, unemployment was about 5 percent in 2015. For black people, it is twice that.
.. Black people with at least BAs have unemployment rates of 4.1 percent, compared to the 2.4 percent for whites with at least BAs.
.. While employment levels fell about the same amount in percentage terms in both areas over the Great Recession of 2007-2009, metro employment has recovered much more quickly
.. Rising income inequality provided high-income households more resources, and parents used these resources to purchase housing in particular neighborhoods, with residential decisions structured, in part, by school district boundaries.
.. Yellen noted that close to 100 percent of children of parents with higher incomes and levels of educational attainment pursued higher education, and 60 percent earned a bachelor’s degree. But among children of parents with lower incomes and education levels, 72 percent pursued higher education and only 14 percent completed a BA. The figure below, from Chetty et al., shows that the likelihood that a child from a wealthy family will attend an Ivy-league or similarly elite school is 50 times that of a child from a low-income family.
.. children who grow up in affluent households but do not graduate from college are 2.5 times as likely to have high incomes in adulthood as children who grow up poor but do graduate from college
.. Other OECD countries spend 5 times what we spend on young children, often through pre-kindergarten education, despite the fact that solid research shows the benefit-cost ratio of such spending to be more than 8-to-1
.. In the presence of high inequality, stronger growth is necessary but not sufficient to take down mobility barriers. If most of the growth flows to the top of the scale, as has occurred in recent decades, then absent aggressive redistribution, we cannot expect to push back on the many problems just documented.