The headline: “Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump.” Immediately, I bristled.
Here we go again.
“Ordinary” Americans. We know what that’s supposed to mean. Plain people. Malleable people. Nothing-exceptional-about-them people. Every four years, these white working-class voters become objects of curiosity like pandas at the zoo.
These are the people I come from. Many of their children grew up to do the same kind of work their parents did — but for less money and benefits and with fewer job protections. Make that no job protection — unless they’re in a union, which is increasingly unlikely. As NPR reported last year, nearly a third of American workers belonged to a union 50 years ago. Today 1 in 10 are union members.
I wonder how many of my fellow liberals in the pundit class have ever stepped foot in a union hall. We all talk about the importance of organized labor, but how many of us union kids are left? It matters, I think, in telling this story. If you don’t know any working-class voters, then it’s much easier to portray them as angry, racist and xenophobic — lemmings slogging their way toward the cliff’s edge, dragging their expired lives behind them.
Earlier this week, I shared on Facebook a photo of an abandoned union hall tweeted by MSNBC reporter Tony Dokoupil. “It’s like touring the Titanic,” he wrote.
The room was dark and still, but folding chairs still circled a dozen or so round tabletops, as if the union’s annual Christmas party were just around the corner. My father was a utility worker, and the union hall was the one place where I could always count on seeing my parents relaxed and happy. They danced and laughed and let us kids eat as much dessert as we wanted. We were a boisterous collection of families celebrating our bigger family. Even as children, we understood why we were sticking with the union.
This Trump phenomenon has made me testy, I fear. “Why start off angry?” my mother would say if she were alive. “There’s already enough of that in the world.” She was your typical working-class mom, believing each of us had the power to change the world with kindness.
That headline I hated topped a Guardian story I appreciated by Thomas Frank, the author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” In the story, which is gaining traction on social media, Frank takes to task the many liberals who cast white working-class Trump voters as mere reflections of his darkest inclinations.
The problem, Frank writes, is that too few of us are actually asking these voters what is on their minds.
“When people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it,” Frank writes. “I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.
“Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his ‘attitude’, the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, ‘immigration’ placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: ‘good jobs/the economy’.”
This is not to say that many of them are not also racist, sexist and xenophobic. Just as with any other demographic group, there is the worst among them, and we have seen too many of them at their ugliest.
But most of them know that their current appeal to presidential candidates and the gawking media is as fleeting as it is intense. They know what’s coming.
Win or lose, Trump will continue to enjoy a privileged, high-profile life, leaving behind the ordinary Americans who thought he meant it when he said, “I love you people.”
They will return to the same stack of bills and low-paying jobs and the stress that is unraveling their lives. They will keep their prayers simple: May the car last another season; may the baby’s cough not turn into a prescription for antibiotics; may love prevail.
Forgotten again by the media, the ordinary Americans will say goodbye to loved ones and bury their dead. They will bow their heads, maybe recite the prayers of their childhood. They will close their eyes tight and try not to think about how broken dreams have a way of sucking the life out of you long before you die.
By: Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist and Professional in Residence at Kent State University’s School of Journalism; The National Memo, March 10, 2016
March 12, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Unions, White Working Class | AFL-CIO, Economy, Immigration, Jobs, media, Organized Labor, Pundits, Racism, Sexism, Xenophobia |
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The financial transaction tax is not an idea whose time has just now come; it simply has returned. From 1914 to 1966, our country taxed all sales and transfers of stock. The tax was doubled in the last year of Herbert Hoover’s presidency to help us recover from the Great Depression. Today, 40 countries have FTTs, including the seven with the fastest-growing stock exchanges in the world. Eleven members of the European Union (including Germany and France) voted for a financial transaction tax to curtail poverty, restore services and put people back to work.
This is no soak-the-rich-idea. Rather than asking the Wall Street crowd to join us in paying a 6 to 12 percent sales tax, the major FTT proposal gaining support in the U.S. calls for a 0.5 percent assessment on stock transactions. That’s 50 cents on a $100 stock buy versus the $8.25 I would pay for a $100 bicycle.
Even at this minuscule rate, the huge volume of high-speed trades (nearly 400 billion a year) means an FTT would net about $300 billion to $350 billion a year for our public treasury. Plus, it’s a very progressive tax. Half of our country’s stock is owned by the 1 percenters, and only a small number of them are in the high-frequency trade game. Ordinary folks who have small stakes in the markets, including those in mutual and pension funds, are called “buy and hold” investors: They only do trades every few months or years, not daily or hourly or even by the second, and they’ll not be harmed. Rather it’s the computerized churners of frothy speculation who will pony up the bulk of revenue from such a transaction tax.
An FTT is a straightforward, uncomplicated way for us to get a substantial chunk of our money back from high-finance thieves, and we should make a concerted effort to put the idea on the front burner in 2016 and turn up the heat. Not only do its benefits merit the fight; the fight itself would be politically popular. One clue to its political potential is that the mere mention of FTT to a Wall Street banker will evoke a shriek so shrill that the Mars rover hears it. That’s because they know that this proposal would make them defend the indefensible: themselves.
First, the sheer scope of Wall Street’s self-serving casino business model would be exposed for all to see. Second, they would have to admit that they’re increasingly dependent on (and, therefore, making our economy dependent on) the stark-raving insanity of robotic, high-frequency speculation. Third, it’ll be completely ridiculous for them to argue that protecting the multi-trillion-dollar bets of rich market gamblers from this tax is more important than meeting our people’s growing backlog of real needs.
Unsurprisingly, then, Koch-funded operatives and other defenders of privilege are rushing out articles that amount to Wall Street gibberish: “FTT would hurt poor pensioners, farmers, long-term investors, job creation, liquidity … and blah, blah, blah.” There’s nary a mention of who will really be pinged: Wall Street’s gamblers and thieves. After all, to concede that they’ll be hurt, even a little, would elicit a coast-to-coast shout of, “Yes!”
A major push is being made under the banner of the “Robin Hood Tax.” This campaign offers a remarkable democratic opening. It widens America’s public policy debate from the plutocrats’ tired, narrow-minded mantra of defeat: “We’re broke. Big undertakings are beyond us. Shrink all expectations for yourselves, your children and your country’s future.” Instead, a new conversation can begin: “Look under that rock. There’s the money we need to invest in people. Let’s get America moving again!”
A sales tax on speculators can deliver tangibles that people need but Wall Street says we can’t afford — infrastructure, Social Security, education, good jobs, health care for all, etc. Just as important, it can deliver intangibles that our nation needs but Wall Street tries to ignore — fairness, social cohesion, equal opportunity, etc. It’s a gift for America’s future that literally would keep on giving. For more information and to join the fight, go to http://www.robinhoodtax.org.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, March 2, 2016
March 4, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Financial Transaction Tax, Plutocrats, Wall Street | Buy and Hold Investors, European Union, Financial Industry, Jobs, Koch Brothers, Progressive Taxes, The 1 Percent |
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Since the seventh anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – the “stimulus” – was this week, it was a good time to ask, “Who Do You Want In The White House When The Next Recession Comes?”
On Friday, Ed Dolan, writing in Nouriel Roubini’s EconomMonitor, answers: Definitely not Marco Rubio.
Dolan fleshes out the argument that our post made earlier this week about the kind of economic decision-making any rational person would want to have in the White House in the event of an economic downturn. And he concludes that in the case of Rubio (and other Republicans, for Dolan notes Rubio’s views are “widely shared” within the GOP), “the federal government would be legally bound to allow the economy to drift rudderless onto the rocks.”
That’s because Rubio – and for that matter all of the Republican presidential candidates – don’t have a firm grasp of Economics 101.
If you remember your basic college econ course, you’ll know that the first line of defense against a recession is fiscal policy. When the economy goes into a slump, spending rises on unemployment compensation, food stamps, and other benefits. At the same time, tax receipts, which are linked to income, decrease. Because the spending increase plus the tax decrease automatically cushion the slump, economists call them automatic stabilizers.
If you’re a true Keynesian, automatic stabilizers aren’t enough. You add some discretionary fiscal stimulus in the form of road projects and maybe a temporary tax rebate. If the timing is right, that softens the recession even more and speeds the recovery.
But Rubio, as Dolan notes, is a staunch supporter of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. (So is Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson and John Kasich.)
It sounds like a sensible idea, until you think about it. But then, you see that the idea of balancing the federal budget every year is nuts. It would mean that when the economy went into a slump, pulling tax revenues down, Congress would have to enact across the board emergency spending cuts to keep a deficit from emerging. The cuts would quickly hit jobs and household budgets. Consumer spending would fall, firms would cut output to fight ballooning inventories. Without the automatic stabilizers, a mild recession would turn into a tailspin.
But Rubio would not stop there, Dolan goes on to write. Rubio also wants to constrain the ability of the Federal Reserve to stimulate job creation – one half of its dual mandate to keep both unemployment and inflation low.
Here is what [Rubio] said about the Fed in this week’s South Carolina town hall:
That’s not the Fed’s job to stimulate the economy. The Fed is a central bank, it is not some sort of overlord of the economy. They’re not some sort of special Jedi Counsel that can decide the best things for us.
The Fed is a central bank. Their job is provide stable currency and I believe they should operate on a rules based system. They would have a very simple rule that determines when interest rates go up and when interests rates go down.
So just what is this “simple rule” Rubio is talking about? He provides the details elsewhere. His rule would replace the Fed’s dual mandate with a single mandate to prevent inflation. The Fed would be required to raise rates to stop inflation during a boom, but it would be barred from doing anything when unemployment soars during a recession.
That is why it behooves us to ask pointed questions of the presidential candidates about what they would do if the U.S. faced an economic downturn on their watch. Chances are, if they are reading from the same economic playbook that Marco Rubio uses, they would turn the next recession into the next Great Depression.
By: Isaiah J. Poole, Editor of OurFuture.org, Campaign For America’s Future, February 19, 2016
February 22, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Balanced Budget Amendment, Economic Policy, GOP Presidential Candidates, Marco Rubio | Automatic Stabilizers, Depression, Economic Recovery, Federal Reserve, Fiscal Discretionary Stimulus, Inflation, Jobs, Recession, Wage Stagnation |
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America’s two big political parties are very different from each other, and one difference involves the willingness to indulge economic fantasies.
Republicans routinely engage in deep voodoo, making outlandish claims about the positive effects of tax cuts for the rich. Democrats tend to be cautious and careful about promising too much, as illustrated most recently by the way Obamacare, which conservatives insisted would be a budget-buster, actually ended up being significantly cheaper than projected.
But is all that about to change?
On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three who served under Barack Obama, one who served under Bill Clinton — released a stinging open letter to Bernie Sanders and Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has been a major source of the Sanders campaign’s numbers. The economists called out the campaign for citing “extreme claims” by Mr. Friedman that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”
That’s harsh. But it’s harsh for a reason.
The claims the economists are talking about come from Mr. Friedman’s analysis of the Sanders economic program. The good news is that this isn’t the campaign’s official assessment; the bad news is that the Friedman analysis has been highly praised by campaign officials.
And the analysis is really something. The Republican candidates have been widely and rightly mocked for their escalating claims that they can achieve incredible economic growth, starting with Jeb Bush’s promise to double growth to 4 percent and heading up from there. But Mr. Friedman outdoes the G.O.P. by claiming that the Sanders plan would produce 5.3 percent growth a year over the next decade.
Even more telling, I’d argue, is Mr. Friedman’s jobs projection, which has the employed share of American adults soaring all the way back to what it was in 2000. That may sound possible — until you remember that by 2026 more than a quarter of U.S. adults over 20 will be 65 and older, compared with 17 percent in 2000.
Sorry, but there’s just no way to justify this stuff. For wonks like me, it is, frankly, horrifying.
Still, these are numbers on a program that Mr. Sanders, even if he made it to the White House, would have little chance of enacting. So do they matter?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes, for several reasons.
One is that, as the economists warn, fuzzy math from the left would make it impossible to effectively criticize conservative voodoo.
Beyond that, this controversy is an indication of a campaign, and perhaps a candidate, not ready for prime time. These claims for the Sanders program aren’t just implausible, they’re embarrassing to anyone remotely familiar with economic history (which says that raising long-run growth is very hard) and changing demography. They should have set alarm bells ringing, but obviously didn’t.
Mr. Sanders is calling for a large expansion of the U.S. social safety net, which is something I would like to see, too. But the problem with such a move is that it would probably create many losers as well as winners — a substantial number of Americans, mainly in the upper middle class, who would end up paying more in additional taxes than they would gain in enhanced benefits.
By endorsing outlandish economic claims, the Sanders campaign is basically signaling that it doesn’t believe its program can be sold on the merits, that it has to invoke a growth miracle to minimize the downsides of its vision. It is, in effect, confirming its critics’ worst suspicions.
What happens now? In the past, the Sanders campaign has responded to critiques by impugning the motives of the critics. But the authors of the critical letter that came out on Wednesday aren’t just important economists, they’re important figures in the progressive movement.
For example, Alan Krueger is one of the founders of modern research on minimum wages, which shows that moderate increases in the minimum don’t cause major job loss. Christina Romer was a strong advocate for stimulus during her time in the White House, and a major figure in the pushback against austerity in the years that followed.
The point is that if you dismiss the likes of Mr. Krueger or Ms. Romer as Hillary shills or compromised members of the “establishment,” you’re excommunicating most of the policy experts who should be your allies.
So Mr. Sanders really needs to crack down on his campaign’s instinct to lash out. More than that, he needs to disassociate himself from voodoo of the left — not just because of the political risks, but because getting real is or ought to be a core progressive value.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 19, 2016
February 22, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Bernie Sanders, Economic Policy, Gerald Friedman, Progressives | Alan Kruger, Christina Romer, Conservatives, Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Growth, Jobs, Middle Class, Republicans, Social Safety Net, Voodoo Economics |
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Taking it for granted that when you’re shopping alone, you probably won’t be followed or harassed.
Knowing that if you ask to speak to “the person in charge,” you’ll almost certainly be facing someone of your own race.
Being able to think about different social, political or professional options without asking whether someone of your race would be accepted or allowed to do what you want to do.
Assuming that if you buy a house in a nice neighborhood, your neighbors will be pleasant or neutral toward you.
Feeling welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.
What is white privilege? It’s the level of societal advantage that comes with being seen as the norm in America, automatically conferred irrespective of wealth, gender or other factors. It makes life smoother, but it’s something you would barely notice unless it were suddenly taken away — or unless it had never applied to you in the first place.
In 1988, the professor Peggy McIntosh used the paper White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack to describe it as a set of unearned assets that a white person in America can count on cashing in each day but to which they remain largely oblivious. The concept has been percolating in academic circles ever since and is nearing widespread use among young people on the political left. Yet as Post reporter Janell Ross noted earlier this week, it’s also a term that many Americans “instinctively don’t trust or believe to be real,” despite reams of evidence to the contrary. Black children– 4-year-olds! — comprise 18 percent of preschool enrollment but are given nearly 50 percent of all out-of-school suspensions. Job applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called in for an interview. Black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than white defendants for the same crime.
Why does such a fraught piece of academic lingo matter now? Because people are finally beginning to talk about what it means in their own lives. At a time when minorities are becoming more vocal about the ways in which their experiences in America differ from those of their white counterparts, the term might be finally entering the mainstream. On Monday night, at a forum for presidential hopefuls held in Iowa, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton was asked by an audience member to explain what white privilege meant to her, and how it had affected her life. Her response? “Look, where do I start?”
Yet for every instance in which white privilege is acknowledged, there is an inevitable backlash.
Commentators quickly jump in to remind us that “not all white people are privileged,” a clear (and perhaps willful) misreading of the term. Obviously not all white people are wealthy, and yes, there are minorities who have achieved this and other marks of status. But white privilege is something specific and different – it’s the idea that just by virtue of being a white person of any kind, you’re part of the dominant group, which tends to be respected, assumed the best of, and given the benefit of the doubt. That just isn’t the case for people of other races, no matter how wealthy, smart or hard-working they might be.
Others denounce the term as a weapon used to guilt, shame, and silence, pointing at presumably well-meaning students told by holier-than-thou faculty and classmates to “check their privilege.” Yet while the term can be used to silence, that’s more the fault of a rude terminology-wielder than of the concept itself. All sorts of normally harmless words have been deployed to guilt people and suppress speech — “unpatriotic” and “elitist” come to mind. A reminder to acknowledge one’s privilege is just a reminder to be aware — aware that you might not be able to fully understand someone else’s experiences, or that the assumptions you were brought up with may be blinding you to certain concerns. That awareness that is key to any sort of civil discussion, about race, class or anything else.
Before everyone gets too defensive (and let’s be honest — it’s probably too late), a few notes of clarification: Pointing out that white privilege exists isn’t the same as accusing every white person of being a racist. Acknowledging that you might benefit from such privilege isn’t equivalent to self-hatred or kowtowing to detested “social justice warriors.”
The thing about white privilege is that it tends to be unintentional, unconscious, uncomfortable to recognize but easy to take for granted. But it’s that very invisibility that makes it that much more important to understand: Without confronting what exists, there’s no chance of leveling the field.
By: Christine Emba, Editor of In Theory; Opionins Section, The Washington Post, January 18, 2016
January 18, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
African Americans, Minorities, White Privilege | Black Children, Criminal Justice System, Hillary Clinton, Janell Ross, Jobs, Peggy McIntosh, Race and Ethnicity |
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