Schedule:

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been a big focus in national politics in the months ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The USPS’s significant fiscal problems are long-standing and well documented. Mail volume has steadily declined to 142.6 billion pieces in FY 2019 from 213.1 billion in FY 2006. The USPS, which is a self-funded entity by law, hasn’t posted a budget surplus, or profit, since FY 2006 and reported a loss of $8.8 billion in FY 2019, which ended months before COVID-19 hit the United States.

Last week, we took a look at the Congressional Budget Office’s rather gloomy budget projections over the next 30 years. Between FY 2021 and FY 2050, federal spending will grow as more Americans retire, structural budget deficits will worsen, and the share of the debt held by the public will rise to unprecedented levels. But the projections weren’t limited to the budget. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also looked at economic and labor trends. Those are just as alarming as the budget projections.

The Senate is in session this week. The House isn’t expected to be back in session until Monday, November 16.

Since Judge Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to serve on the Supreme Court, Joe Biden and Senate Democrats have repeatedly said that Barrett would be a vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which most of us know as Obamacare.

Over the weekend, Sam Berger of the Center for American Progress tried to make the claim that Republicans had packed federal courts with conservative nominees by confirming circuit court judges. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) made a similar statement on Sunday during an appearance on Meet the Press. “The American people have watched the Republicans packing the court for the past three and a half years,” he said, “and they brag about it.”

If you used your free time on Saturday or Sunday to watch football, you may have seen an ad run by Joe Biden’s campaign in which the narrator says that Biden won’t raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 annually. The ad perpetuates the myth that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was a “tax cut for the rich.” As Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute notes, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “provided the largest percentage tax cuts to the bottom two quintiles—that is, the bottom 40 percent of U.S. households.”