“Why Liberals Have To Be Radicals”: Going After The Grotesquely Concentrated Wealth And Power At The Top
Just about nothing being proposed in mainstream politics is radical enough to fix what ails the economy. Consider everything that is destroying the life chances of ordinary people:
- Young adults are staggered by $1.3 trillion in student debt. Yet even those with college degrees are losing ground in terms of incomes.
- The economy of regular payroll jobs and career paths has given way to a gig economy of short-term employment that will soon hit four workers in 10.
- The income distribution has become so extreme, with the one percent capturing such a large share of the pie, that even a $15/hour national minimum wage would not be sufficient to restore anything like the more equal economy of three decades ago. Even the mainstream press acknowledges these gaps.
The New York Times’s Noam Scheiber, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, calculated that raising the minimum wage to $15 for the period 2009 to 2014 would have increased the total income for the 44 million Americans who earn less than $15 an hour by a total of $300 billion to $400 billion. But during the same period, Scheiber reported, the top 10 percent increased its income by almost twice that amount.
Scheiber concludes:
So even if we’d raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the top 10 percent would still have emerged from the 2009-2014 period with a substantially larger share of the increase in the nation’s income than the bottom 90 percent. Inequality would still have increased, just not by as much.
Restoring a more equal economy simply can’t be done by raising incomes at the bottom, even with a minimum wage high that seemed inconceivable just months ago. It requires going after the grotesquely concentrated wealth and power at the top.
Last week, another writer in the Times, Eduardo Porter, assessed Hillary Clinton’s eagerly anticipated speech on how to rescue the middle class.
Porter’s conclusion? Far from sufficient. He writes:
Mrs. Clinton’s collection of proposals is mostly sensible. The older ones — raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing child care to encourage women into the labor force, paying for early childhood education — have a solid track record of research on their side. The newer propositions, like encouraging profit-sharing, also push in the right direction.
But here’s the rub: This isn’t enough.
Nothing in mainstream politics takes seriously the catastrophe of global climate change. Few mainstream politicians have the nerve to call for a carbon tax.
The budget deadlock and the sequester mechanism, in which both major parties have conspired, makes it impossible to invest the kind of money needed both to modernize outmoded public infrastructure (with a shortfall now estimated at $3.4 trillion) or to finance a green transition.
The economy is so captive to financial engineers that even interest rates close to zero do not help mainstream businesses recover. There is still a vicious circle of inadequate purchasing power and insufficient domestic investment.
The rules of globalization and tax favoritism make it more attractive for companies to assemble products, export jobs and book profits overseas.
To remedy the problem of income inequality would require radical reform both of the rules of finance and of our tax code, as well as drastic changes in labor market regulation so that employees of hybrids such as Uber and TaskRabbit would have both decent earnings and the protections of regular payroll employees.
Congress would have to blow up the sequester deal that makes it impossible to invest money on the scale necessary to repair broken infrastructure and deal with the challenge of climate change.
Politicians would have to reform the debt-for-diploma system, not only going forward, as leaders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have proposed, but also to give a great deal of debt relief to those saddled with existing loans.
Unions would need to regain the effective right to organize and bargain collectively.
This is all as radical as, well, … Dwight Eisenhower. Somehow, in the postwar era, ordinary people enjoyed economic security and opportunity; and despite the economy of broad prosperity, there were plenty of incentives for business to make decent profits. There just weren’t today’s chasms of inequality.
But the reforms needed to restore that degree of shared prosperity are somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders.
This is one of those moments when there is broad popular frustration, a moment when liberal goals require measures that seem radical by today’s standards. If progressives don’t articulate those frustrations and propose real solutions, rightwing populists will propose crackpot ones. Muddle-through and token gestures won’t fool anybody.
By: Robert Kuttner, Co-Founder and Co- Editor, The American Prospect, July 22, 2015
“Scott Walker Picks A Fight He Can’t Win”: Walker’s Boast About His State’s “Dramatic” Economic Recovery Is Belied By, Well, Reality
Neither President Obama nor anyone on his team have spoken publicly about who they think might win the Republican presidential nomination. It’s not, however, unreasonable to think they have one candidate on their minds.
In March, for example, Obama raised eyebrows by taking a not-so-subtle shot at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) far-right agenda, and a month later, the president did it again, calling out Walker – by name – as a candidate who needs to “bone up on foreign policy.”
Today, the president will be in Wisconsin, where Walker will greet him at the airport, before Obama fleshes out his new overtime policy at a University of Wisconsin campus. Politico reported that Walker has “become the White House’s bete noire” – the conservative governor is the one Republican “the president’s aides always hold up as an example of exactly what’s wrong with politics.”
And it’s equally clear the president is on Walker’s mind, too. Today, the Wisconsin Republican has a new piece, published by Real Clear Politics, suggesting Obama could learn a few things from GOP policymakers in the Badger State.
Bright spots in the Obama economy are few and far between, as opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs are often quashed by a federal government that has grown too large, powerful and pervasive. That’s why it’s telling that the president is scheduled to be in La Crosse, Wis., this week for an event focusing on the economy.
To be sure, Wisconsin’s economy has enjoyed a dramatic recovery over the last few years. But our fortunes have improved in spite of – not because of – the president’s big-government policies.
Walker’s piece added that he intends to tell the president how great far-right governance is, and “for the sake of hard-working taxpayers across the country, I hope he will listen.”
Whether he realizes it or not, the governor is picking a fight he’s unprepared to win.
Let’s put aside, at least for now, the fact that President Obama has a pretty amazing record on job creation and ending the Great Recession. Let’s instead focus on his critic because Walker’s boast about his state’s “dramatic” economic recovery is belied by, well, reality.
Just last week, the Chicago Tribune published a report with this headline: “Wisconsin economy lags after Walker’s spending and tax cuts.”
In 2011, new Republican Gov. Scott Walker set the creation of 250,000 jobs as the benchmark for success of his new administration. Walker missed that goal by a wide margin over his first term despite an embrace of sweeping tax cuts aimed at stimulating growth. Instead, the cuts helped dig a more than $2 billion hole in the state budget.
Wisconsin ranked 36th among the states and District of Columbia in the pace of private-sector job growth during Walker’s term, trailing all Rust Belt states and all but one other state in the Midwest.
More specifically, when it comes to job creation, Wisconsin ranked 35th in the nation in 2011, 36th in 2012, 38th in 2013, and 38th in 2014. Walker not only failed to keep his promise about creating 250,000 in his first term, he barely made it to 129,000.
In May, the Washington Post reported that the state’s rate of private-sector job growth “is one of the worst in the nation” and Wisconsin’s middle class “has shrunk at a faster rate than any other state in the country.”
It’s against this backdrop that the state is also struggling badly with a major budget shortfall, which Walker still doesn’t know how to close.
This is the guy who wants to brag about his economic record? The one who hopes to teach Obama a few things?
Seriously?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 2, 2015
“Basically Impossible”: Chris Christie Promised To Tell It Like It Is. Here’s What That Would Actually Sound Like
In his presidential campaign announcement Tuesday, the reliably brash and blunt Chris Christie vowed that “telling like it is” would be both his campaign motto and his promise to voters.
Even for Christie, whose entire political persona is based on no-nonsense candor, consistently “telling it like it is” is basically impossible. Can you imagine if the New Jersey governor — or any of the other Republican candidates — really told it like it is about the most important issues and challenges facing America? What would that even sound like? Well, maybe something like this:
“…and that’s why I am announcing my candidacy for president of the United States! [Applause.] Thank you! Thank you! Now during my campaign, I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m going to let ‘er rip! [Applause.] Hard truths need to be spoken, and I will speak them.
‘What are these truths?’ you ask. For starters, we Republicans are way too focused on President Obama. Trust me, I’ll have a lot to say during this campaign about the president’s mistakes. Heaven knows, there’s been a lot of them. [Extended applause.] But he’s gone in a year and half. [Extended applause.]
Here’s the thing: The U.S. economy didn’t run into trouble the day Barack Obama took the oath of office. Even before the Great Recession, there were signs something wasn’t quite right. The economy grew by 4 percent annually and created 20 million new jobs during both the Reagan and Clinton booms. But in the [candidate makes air quotes] “Bush boom” of the 2000s, we couldn’t even hit 3 percent growth. And we created only about seven million jobs. Income growth was also a lot slower. I could go on and on. Productivity growth has been terrible during Obama’s Not-So-Great Recovery, but the slowdown started in 2006, when we had a Republican president. We’ve had problems with jobless recoveries and middle-income job lag since the early 1990s. Heck, the new business startup rate in this country has been falling for 30 years!
You can’t blame ObamaCare or Dodd Frank for all that. [Confused murmurs from audience.] The truth is technological automation and global competition are presenting new challenges to American workers. To meet those challenges and to turn them into opportunities means embracing new approaches, not recycling old ones. Certainly tax reform is part of the answer. I mean, we’re Republicans after all. Tax cuts are what we do. But you have to be savvy about cutting taxes when you’re already $18 trillion in the red. You need to pick your spots and get the most bang for your buck, like tax cuts and credits that boost working-class incomes — a rising tide is not lifting all boats right now — and spur business investment.
You want to do deep, across-the-board tax cuts like President Reagan did? Fine. God bless you. But keep in mind that for every percentage point you cut from those tax rates, you lose about $70 billion a year in revenue. And don’t expect to make up anywhere near that in economic growth. Even the Reagan tax cuts lost money, and the tax code was in far worse shape back then. [Unintelligible shouts from audience.] Heck, 40 percent of Americans don’t even pay income taxes.
Oh, and while we’re thinking about tax reform, keep in mind the federal tax burden will almost certainly need to rise in the future because we’ll have a lot more old folks. [Booing.] And we’ll have to pay for their pensions and healthcare. Smart entitlement and healthcare reform can reduce that tax increase — in that way it’s like a future tax cut — but it’s highly unlikely to eliminate it. Democrats need to accept that projected future benefits will need reduction, and Republicans need to accept a higher tax burden. [Extended booing.] Republicans should also be in favor of spending less money on rich people through tax breaks for homes and health insurance. [Several fist-shaking audience members stomp out.]
There’s just too much short-term thinking in this country. I mean, I’m no scientist, but we are doing something new to our planet and it hardly seems crazy to take out some insurance against a worst-case outcome. [Boos continue, get louder.] Let’s invest more in basic clean-energy research and remove regulatory barriers to more nuclear power. Maybe also eliminate the corporate income tax and replace it with a carbon tax. I note that even my friends on the Wall Street Journal editorial page said the other day that might be a good idea. And let’s not let Corporate America off the hook here. Too much short-termism there, as well, not just in Washington. Too much cash being returned to investors rather than going to fund new investment and innovation.
Now turning to foreign policy… Wait, where did everybody go?”
By: James Pethokoulis, The Week, July 2, 2015
“From TPA To TPP; A Trade Deal Explainer”: A Mix Of Policy, Procedure, And 2016 Politics
There is no shortage of acronyms or confusion surrounding the trade deal legislation being debated in Washington.
Hillary Clinton weighed in on the trade debate Sunday during a campaign stop in Iowa. Or maybe she didn’t. Or she did, but not in the way people thought she did. Confused or frustrated yet? You’re not alone. Between TPP, TPA, TAA, TTIP, and any other number of letter t-laden acronyms, it has become difficult to pinpoint what, specifically, lawmakers are actually talking about as this process moves forward. That’s a problem.
Trade policy is complicated. Congressional procedure is complicated. Politics are often deliberately made complicated by lawmakers or candidates who see limited benefit in weighing in on thorny or increasingly complex issues. The ongoing fight on Capitol Hill over trade combines them all—a mix of policy, procedure, and 2016 politics. That means it’s probably worth breaking down a few top-line points on all three.
The policy
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is the name of the 12-nation trade talks that are currently ongoing. There is no deal, though Obama administration officials say they are closing in on one. President Barack Obama has made reaching a deal on TPP one of the top goals of his second term and a cornerstone of his foreign and domestic policy agenda. It is also a top priority of Republican leadership in the House and Senate. Many Democrats, stung by past major trade agreements, are skeptical of the direction of the negotiations. But it’s important to note, again, there is technically no deal … yet.
Think about negotiating with 11 other countries. They’ve all got their own politics, their own legislatures, and their own powerful industries. How could you possibly get all 11 to agree on the same principles, let alone a specific trade deal? It’s not easy. So it would make sense to create a mechanism to try and streamline the process, right? Meet the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA). TPA is not the trade deal (again, that’s TPP). It is, more or less, a procedural mechanism designed to ease the passage of any deal. TPA, also known as “fast-track,” doesn’t prevent lawmakers from voting on a final deal, but it does prevent amendments. Obama administration officials say explicitly they need TPA to reach a final agreement on TPP. Other nations, as Obama’s team explains it, simply don’t trust that the U.S. can get a deal through Congress untouched without it. (This is a serious point of disagreement between Obama and Democrats opposed to the trade deal.)
While TPA is not (repeat: is not) the actual trade deal, it does require legislation and a vote. Democrats opposed or who are wavering on trade see that bill as one of the last points of leverage should Obama actually finalize a deal. If TPA passes and Obama’s team reaches an agreement on TPP, there’s little confidence within the ranks of those opposed to a deal that momentum could be halted at that point. For a unified labor movement, progressive activists, and Democrats opposed to the deal, that has painted TPA as a must-kill item on the agenda.
The procedure
Last week House Democrats chose to vote to sink their own priority, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), in order to slow down Obama’s (TPA). So what the heck does this have to do with TPA? Well, nothing really. Except that program, used to provide aid to U.S. workers displaced due to trade, is expiring. Democrats, who are overwhelmingly supportive of the program, saw an opening in the TPA legislation and it became the vehicle to extend (and actually expand) the program.
House Democrats opposed to the underlying trade negotiations quietly settled on a strategy to deliberately kill their own priority in order to re-set the broader trade debate. That meant voting against TAA, even in the wake of (and perhaps because of in some cases) personal lobbying from Obama. In an interesting twist, House lawmakers actually had the votes to pass the TPA measure separately, but without TAA attached, that goes nowhere for the moment.
Obama and Republican leaders are now left with trying to find another route to get TPA to the president’s desk. One possibility is swinging a huge number of Democrats who just a few days ago voted against TAA. That seems unlikely, save for an epic weekend of lobbying by the White House legislative affairs team. But House and Senate leaders can get quite crafty when it comes to passing bills they badly want to move. So it’s safe to say there’s more to be written in this story.
The politics
The procedure and the policy have presented a political conundrum on the campaign trail for Clinton. She was Obama’s secretary of state when negotiations on TPP started and was supportive at the time. But the party continues to hold a general distrust for trade deals. As Clinton presses for a “better agreement” and leaves the door open to eventually supporting a final deal, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley have made attacking the trade deal a central point of their campaigns. Both weighed in to oppose TPA.
Clinton, for her part, has held her fire, instead broadly focusing on the need for a strong final deal on the TPP. There’s a reason. Read through the previous sections above. Does that sound like a process a presidential candidate would want to explain on the campaign trail? No. Especially not when the underlying issue is so divisive among the most activated members of the party, as it is for Democrats. Clinton, on Sunday, was talking about the broader trade negotiations, not the specifics of the fast-track legislative process. That, it appears, is something that her team has decided there is simply no benefit to weigh in on. As Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday: “The back and forth that’s happening right now is about procedures and parliamentary this and that.”
Conclusion
This stuff is complex, and that’s even before one gets into the specifics of TPP itself—an enormously important negotiation that touches on just about every sector of the U.S. economy and more than 40 percent of the world’s. That, in a nutshell, is exactly why figuring out what each lawmaker or candidate means when they say something on the issue, matters. No matter how many times they use the letter “T” in the acronyms.
By: Phil Mattingly, Bloomberg Politics, June 14, 2015
“The Insecure American”: Members Of Our Political Elite Seem To Have No Sense Of How The Other Half Lives
America remains, despite the damage inflicted by the Great Recession and its aftermath, a very rich country. But many Americans are economically insecure, with little protection from life’s risks. They frequently experience financial hardship; many don’t expect to be able to retire, and if they do retire have little to live on besides Social Security.
Many readers will, I hope, find nothing surprising in what I just said. But all too many affluent Americans — and, in particular, members of our political elite — seem to have no sense of how the other half lives. Which is why a new study on the financial well-being of U.S. households, conducted by the Federal Reserve, should be required reading inside the Beltway.
Before I get to that study, a few words about the callous obliviousness so prevalent in our political life.
I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. According to the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of conservatives believe that the poor “have it easy” thanks to government benefits; only 1 in 7 believe that the poor “have hard lives.” And this attitude translates into policy. What we learn from the refusal of Republican-controlled states to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the bill, is that punishing the poor has become a goal in itself, one worth pursuing even if it hurts rather than helps state budgets.
But leave self-declared conservatives and their contempt for the poor on one side. What’s really striking is the disconnect between centrist conventional wisdom and the reality of life — and death — for much of the nation.
Take, as a prime example, positioning on Social Security. For decades, a declared willingness to cut Social Security benefits, especially by raising the retirement age, has been almost a required position — a badge of seriousness — for politicians and pundits who want to sound wise and responsible. After all, people are living longer, so shouldn’t they work longer, too? And isn’t Social Security an old-fashioned system, out of touch with modern economic realities?
Meanwhile, the reality is that living longer in our ever-more-unequal society is very much a class thing: life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot among the affluent, but hardly at all in the bottom half of the wage distribution, that is, among those who need Social Security most. And while the retirement system F.D.R. introduced may look old-fashioned to affluent professionals, it is quite literally a lifeline for many of our fellow citizens. A majority of Americans over 65 get more than half their income from Social Security, and more than a quarter are almost completely reliant on those monthly checks.
These realities may finally be penetrating political debate, to some extent. We seem to be hearing less these days about cutting Social Security, and we’re even seeing some attention paid to proposals for benefit increases given the erosion of private pensions. But my sense is that Washington still has no clue about the realities of life for those not yet elderly. Which is where that Federal Reserve study comes in.
This is the study’s second year, and the current edition actually portrays a nation in recovery: in 2014, unlike 2013, a substantial plurality of respondents said that they were better off than they had been five years ago. Yet it’s startling how little room for error there is in many American lives.
We learn, for example, that 3 in 10 nonelderly Americans said they had no retirement savings or pension, and that the same fraction reported going without some kind of medical care in the past year because they couldn’t afford it. Almost a quarter reported that they or a family member had experienced financial hardship in the past year.
And something that even startled me: 47 percent said that they would not have the resources to meet an unexpected expense of $400 — $400! They would have to sell something or borrow to meet that need, if they could meet it at all.
Of course, it could be much worse. Social Security is there, and we should be very glad that it is. Meanwhile, unemployment insurance and food stamps did a lot to cushion unlucky families from the worst during the Great Recession. And Obamacare, imperfect as it is, has immensely reduced insecurity, especially in states whose governments haven’t tried to sabotage the program.
But while things could be worse, they could also be better. There is no such thing as perfect security, but American families could easily have much more security than they have. All it would take is for politicians and pundits to stop talking blithely about the need to cut “entitlements” and start looking at the way their less-fortunate fellow citizens actually live.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 29, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 