“An Ad-Hoc Fallback Position”: Immigration; The Only Time The GOP Cares About The Working Class
Last Monday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor and a presumed GOP presidential hopeful, kicked the hornets’ nest that is the immigration debate.
He told Glenn Beck’s radio show that America needs to “make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, protecting American workers and American wages,” and that this concern should be “at the forefront of our discussion going forward.”
Walker’s comments are significant because they’re something of a reversal for him, but also because they break with the “legal-immigration-good, illegal-immigration-bad” orthodoxy of the GOP establishment.
Lumping both forms of immigration together as equally questionable makes sense from an economic perspective; market forces don’t care about legal formalities like borders. But it takes near-cosmic chutzpah for Walker to say our first concern should be American wages and workers, given that pretty much every policy move by the Republican Party and the conservative movement seems designed to keep lower class incomes as depressed as possible.
By now, the battle lines on this issue should be familiar. First you get the argument from the center left and right that whenever immigrants, documented or undocumented, come to America, they bring added demand to the economy: They gotta eat, drink, put a roof over their head, get health care, and entertain themselves, just like everyone else. Even as they take on work, they increase the economy’s overall ability to create jobs. So claiming immigrants “take jobs from Americans” is wrong.
This is the view of the economics of immigration from 30,000 feet, and it’s right as far as it goes.
But closer to the ground, the terrain becomes more complicated. The U.S. economy isn’t one big market. It’s actually lots of overlapping markets, with different types of businesses and workers participating in each. And sometimes movement between these markets is easy for those workers, and sometimes it isn’t. So it’s possible for big influxes of low-skill, low-education immigrants to decrease wages and jobs for low-skill, low-education natives. You get more workers in particular markets, so wages go down. Meanwhile, the wealth created by those new entrants flows to other parts of the economy, so jobs in that market don’t increase all that much. And the native workers in those markets can’t easily hop to other markets, so they’re stuck with depressed wages and fewer jobs.
You can click through the links for a fuller examination of this phenomenon. But the short version is that it’s possible the second story is true, even if concrete evidence has been hard to tease out.
What this all boils down to is a problem of bargaining power. If you increase the number of workers in a market, but don’t increase the number of jobs proportionally, employers can play workers off one another, driving wages down. That’s why some Republicans like Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — whom Walker is apparently taking his cues from — are opposed to increasing legal avenues for high-skill immigrants. Tech workers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals don’t like seeing their incomes reduced either.
But immigration policy doesn’t occur in a vacuum. There are lots of ways we could increase worker bargaining power, especially for low-skill Americans, while still taking in many more immigrants than we do now.
We could break up the work the economy already provides into smaller chunks that can be distributed to more workers, through things like national paid leave mandates, paid vacation, strengthened overtime laws, and a shortened work week. We could get the Federal Reserve to run much more aggressive monetary stimulus, or even fundamentally reform the way that policy operates, so that the boost the Fed pumps into the economy goes straight to the Americans hardest hit by bad economic times. We could ramp up government stimulus spending, the generosity of the social safety net, or both, which would also create jobs. And we could change laws to make unions more powerful, so they’d be ready and waiting to take on new immigrants as members and fight on their behalf.
Full employment should really be the top line goal, and it’s what the first four of those five policy options aim at. (With an expanded social safety net and stronger unions also acting as a backstop for wages when full employment isn’t reached.) When there are more workers than jobs available, bargaining power is going to go down across the economy. But at full employment, the first story about immigration — about how it just grows the size of the pie, and everyone benefits — is most likely to be true, because employers aren’t able to play the new workers off the old ones.
Fundamentally, the U.S. economy faces a two-stage problem: First, the share of national income going to labor is getting smaller, as more and more is gobbled up by people who own capital. Second, of that share going to labor, a bigger portion is going to elite workers, leaving the working class with less and less. That’s the context in which the question of immigration has to be understood. Full employment and increased bargaining power for all workers would solve both these problems — equalizing shares between workers, and getting them a bigger slice of the pie vis-a-vis capital.
In a sane and decent world, we would open our borders as wide as humanly possible. Because letting other people immigrate to America makes their lives better; much better in many cases. And we would rely on all those other policy levers to keep the wages and jobs of immigrant and native-born Americans alike healthy and robust.
The perversity of the whole immigration discussion amongst conservatives and Republicans is that they’ve already rejected all these other options for increasing worker bargaining power. That the elite GOP establishment still wants more immigration even after that rejection should make their goal plain as day: keep capital’s share as high as possible!
But for anyone on the right that still wants to claim they give a damn about working class Americans, trying to limit immigration is a kind of ad-hoc fallback position to keep wages up.
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, April 28, 2015
“The Media’s Prophecy Is Self-Fulfilling”: How The Media Rig The Presidential Primaries
The primary game, I’m afraid, is rigged. In a perfect world, all contenders would start from the same point, equally able to assemble a compelling candidacy and make their case to the voters. In this world, however, the reporters who cover the race have already decided that only a few candidates are really worth thinking too much about, despite the fact that the first votes won’t be cast in over nine months and even the supposed front-runner garners only 15 percent in polls.
This, from the Cook Political Report‘s Amy Walter, is a pretty good statement of the media wisdom of the moment:
At the end of the day, when you put all the assets and liabilities on the table, it’s hard to see anyone but Rubio, Bush or Walker as the ultimate nominee. Sure, one of them could stumble or come up short in a key early state. It’s also highly likely that someone like Huckabee, Paul, Cruz and even Perry could win in Iowa. But, when you look at the candidate vulnerabilities instead of just their assets, these are the three who are the most likely to win over the largest share of the GOP electorate.
Nothing Walter says here is wrong. And I don’t mean to single her out—I’ve seen and heard other reporters say the same thing, that Bush, Walker, and Rubio comprise the “top tier.” I’ve written some similar things, even predicting that Bush will probably be the nominee. So I’m part of the problem too.
This judgment isn’t arbitrary—there are perfectly good reasons for making it, based on the candidates’ records, abilities, and appeals, and the history of GOP primary contests. But it does set up an unfair situation, where someone who hasn’t been declared in that top tier has to work harder to get reporters’ attention. Or at least the right kind of attention, the kind that doesn’t come wrapped in the implication that their candidacy is futile.
The candidates who aren’t put in that top tier find themselves in a vicious cycle that’s very difficult to escape from. Because they’re talked about dismissively by the media, it becomes hard to convince donors to give them money, and hard to convince voters to consider them. They end up running into a lot of “I like him, but I need to go with someone who has a real shot.” Their more limited resources keep their poll numbers down, which keeps their media attention scarce, which keeps their support down, and around and around. The media’s prophecy is self-fulfilling.
That isn’t to say that it’s impossible for a candidate who isn’t granted a higher level of attention by the press to find a way to break through. It happens from time to time; Howard Dean in 2004 is a good example of someone who wasn’t considered top tier to begin with, but was able to work his way into it. The 2012 Republican primaries were a crazy free-for-all where there wasn’t a real top tier for most of the time; the race was led in the polls at one time or another by five different candidates. Any one of them might have held on if they hadn’t been such clowns.
Nevertheless, the press has now decided that the only candidates who are worth giving extended attention to are Bush, Rubio, and Walker. As I said, there are justifiable reasons for that judgment, and they do it for their internal reasons as well—most news organizations don’t have the budget to assign a reporter to each of ten different candidates, for instance, and if they assign a reporter on a semi-permanent basis to only three or four candidates, then there are going to be many more stories written about them than about the others. However understandable, though, the granting of that elevated status is like an in-kind contribution worth tens of millions of dollars, whether it’s truly deserved or not.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 24, 2015
“Same Dynamics Of Polarization And Bad Ideology As Anybody Else”: No, Governors Are Not Inherently Superior Candidates For President
For a professional political writer, nothing’s more fun than identifying a cliche your less esteemed colleagues are using that never made sense or has stopped making sense and just blowing it up. One that’s overdue for an explosion is the trope about governors making inherently superior presidential candidates. So that was the subject of my latest TPMCafe column.
Once you start looking at the 2016 Republican presidential field from this perspective, the first thing that jumps out at you is how many governors and former governors are struggling with home-state unpopularity or mistakes they made in office or both. It’s entirely possible, for example, that the entire Scott Walker candidacy could be unraveled by his growing problems in Wisconsin, where a lot of people who either voted for him or stayed home are angry at him for his nasty state budget proposals or for his pattern of doing highly controversial things (e.g., making Wisconsin a Dixie-style Right-to-Work state) he disclaimed or didn’t mention when running for office. That’s because his whole electability argument is that he won over swing voters in Wisconsin three times without compromising with the godless liberals. That argument loses a lot of punch if poll after poll starts showing Walker losing his state–by 52/40 in the latest Marquette Law School survey–to Hillary Clinton.
Then you look at Bobby Jindal, who is obviously miserable being, and miserable at being, governor of Louisiana. As a legendary whiz kid, diversity symbol, and rising star in the House, he was probably on the brink of being regarded as presidential timber before he became governor back in 2007. You think it might cross his mind now and then how much better positioned he’d be if he were now a Senator, or even still in the House, where he could pander to the conservative constituencies he is pursuing all day long without having to worry about Louisiana’s budget problems, which he is only making worse?
I won’t go through the whole column, but you get the idea. Perhaps governors aren’t afflicted with Washington Cooties, but they are actually required to do things that people notice, and are subject to the same dynamics of partisan polarization and bad ideology as anybody else. Republicans in Congress can go on and on and on about education vouchers or supply-side economics or privatizing government benefits without any risk of being held accountable for their “vision” being implemented. Governors are living much more unavoidably in the real world.
You can still make the case, I guess, that for this very reason governors make better presidents than, say, senators. But that’s not entirely clear, either. Sometimes governors get a good reputation simply for being in the right place at the right time, like a certain Texas governor who took office just as a national economic boom was gaining steam, and just as a decades-long realignment was pushing the last of his state’s conservative Democratic aristocracy in his direction. So he got to be a “reformer with results,” and his fellow governors had a lot to do with lifting him to a presidential nomination. Was he prepared to be president? Is his brother prepared now? Even though both men have benefited from their father’s vast network of moneyed elites, and from gubernatorial service, that’s really not so clear.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 22, 2015
“There Is A Contradiction In Almost All Their Positions”: Does It Matter If The GOP Presidential Candidates Would Attend A Gay Wedding?
Presidential candidates have to face a lot of tough questions over the course of a campaign, ones that are directly relevant to the problems the next president will face. For instance: “What would you do with the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.?” Or: “Which programs would you cut to reduce the deficit?” Or: “Under what circumstances would you invade Iran?”
There’s another class of questions that is designed to bore deep into the candidate’s heart and reveal what kind of person he or she really is. These are mostly irrelevant or inane.
The question all the 2016 GOP hopefuls are now being forced to answer — Would you attend a gay wedding? — seems to be of that latter kind. But perhaps we can salvage something informative and useful from it.
First, let’s look at how the candidates who have been asked directly have answered:
- Scott Walker: When he was asked, Walker treated it as a question about the past, not the future. “For a family member, Tonette and I and our family have already had a family member who’s had a reception. I haven’t been at a wedding. That’s true even though my position on marriage is still that it’s defined between a man and a woman, and I support the constitution of the state. But for someone I love, we’ve been at a reception.” So…maybe?
- Marco Rubio: He may have been the most straightforward: “If it’s somebody in my life that I love and care for, of course I would. I’m not going to hurt them simply because I disagree with a choice they’ve made.”
- Ted Cruz: The rock-ribbed conservative and defender of traditional marriage wouldn’t say. When radio host Hugh Hewitt asked him, Cruz said, “I haven’t faced that circumstance…what the media tries to twist the question of marriage into is they try to twist it into a battle of emotions and personality.”
- Rick Perry: The former Texas governor said, “I probably would, but I think the real issue here is that’s the gotcha question that the left tries to get out there.”
- Rick Santorum: So far, Santorum is the only one who has put his foot down. “No, I would not,” he said when Hugh Hewitt asked. “I would love them and support them, I would not attend that ceremony.”
One assumes that Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and the rest of the field will get asked the question before long. So is this a “gotcha” question? The answer is complicated.
On one hand, there are few issues on which the personal and the political are more entwined than gay rights. The increasing openness of gay Americans is what has spurred the rapid transformation of public opinion and law on this issue. It becomes much harder to oppose those rights when you have loved ones who are gay. A question like this can help us get insight into the personal feelings that might guide these candidates in the future.
But on the other hand, what a candidate does or doesn’t do in his personal life is ultimately irrelevant. We’re electing a president, not choosing a best man. The important question is what laws and policies they would or wouldn’t change. Unless they’re actually related to him, no gay couple is affected by whether Marco Rubio will come to their wedding. But they may well be affected by the policies he supports, which include allowing certain vendors to discriminate against them.
So when the candidates protest that the real question is about the law and the Constitution, not about their personal feelings, they’re absolutely right. That’s what they ought to be pressed on, so we understand exactly what decisions they’d make if they win.
Having said that, there is a contradiction in almost all their positions (Santorum excepted; he’s the consistent one) that reveals something important: At this moment in history, the Republican Party is in a very uncomfortable place. They all support the idea that marriage is only between a man and a woman; and they all support the idea that state governments should be able to exclude gays and lesbians from the institution of marriage. Yet they also want to show voters that on a personal level, they’re friendly and caring and open-minded and tolerant. We’ve now reached the point where a national figure is expected to have gay friends or family members, and treat them with dignity and respect.
The problem is that the policy position the Republican candidates have taken isn’t friendly or caring or open-minded or tolerant, and focusing on what they would or wouldn’t do personally lets them off the hook. Does a presidential candidate deserve credit for not being a jerk to his cousin who’s getting married? Sure. But what really matters is the decisions he’d make that would affect millions of lives.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, April 22, 2015
“The GOP Primary Is Where Ideas Go To Die”: You Can’t Be A Smart Candidate In A Party That Wants To Be Stupid
So now we have us some candidates, on the Republican side. Who’s the big kahuna? Jeb Bush? He keeps getting called front-runner, and I suppose he is, even though the polls sometimes say otherwise. Scott Walker? Certainly a player. Rand Paul? Pretty bad rollout, but he has his base. The youthful, advantageously ethnicized Marco Rubio? Some as-yet-unannounced entrant who can hop in and shake things up?
Each has a claim, sort of, but the 800-pound gorilla of this primary process is none of the above. It’s the same person it was in 2008, and again in 2012, when two quite plausible mainstream-conservative candidates had to haul themselves so far to the right that they ended up being unelectable. It’s the Republican primary voter.
To be more blunt about it: the aging, white, very conservative, revanchist, fearful voter for whom the primary season is not chiefly an exercise in choosing a credible nominee who might win in November, but a Parris Island-style ideological obstacle course on which each candidate must strain to outdo his competitors—the hate-on-immigrants wall climb, the gay-bashing rope climb, the death-to-the-moocher-class monkey bridge. This voter calls the shots, and after the candidates have run his gauntlet, it’s almost impossible for them to come out looking appealing to a majority of the general electorate.
You will recall the hash this voter made of 2012. He booed the mention of a United States soldier during a debate because the soldier happened to be gay. He booed contraception—mere birth control, which the vast majority of Republican women, like all women, use. He lustily cheered the death penalty. He tossed Rick Perry out on his ear in part because the Texas governor had the audacity to utter a few relatively humane words about children of undocumented immigrants. He created an atmosphere in which the candidates on one debate stage were terrified of the idea of supporting a single dollar in tax increases even if placed against an offsetting $10 in spending cuts.
He is a demanding fellow. And he is already asserting his will this time around. Why else did Bush endorse Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s religious freedom bill in an instant, only to see Pence himself walk the bill back three days later? Bet Jeb would like to have that one back. But he can’t. The primary voter—along of course with the conservative media from Limbaugh and Fox on down—won’t permit it.
Now, as it happens, some of these candidates come to us with a few serious and unorthodox ideas. We all know about Rand Paul and his ideas about sentencing reform and racial disparities. He deserved credit for them. He was a lot quicker on the draw on Ferguson than Hillary Clinton was. But how much do we think he’s going to be talking up this issue as the Iowa voting nears? Time might prove me wrong here, but Paul has already, ah, soul-searched his way to more standard right-wing positions on Israel and war, so there’s reason to think that while he might not do the same on prison issues, he’ll just quietly drop them.
More interesting in this regard is Rubio. I read his campaign book not long ago, along with five others, for a piece I wrote for The New York Review of Books. Rubio’s book was the best of the lot by far. It was for the most part actually about policy. He put forward a few perfectly good ideas in the book. For example, he favors “income-based repayment” on student loans, which would lower many students’ monthly student-loan bills. It’s a fine idea. The Obama administration is already doing it.
Beyond the pages of the book, Rubio has in the past couple of years staked out some positions that stood out at the time as not consisting of fare from the standard GOP menu. He’d like to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to more childless couples. Again, there are synergies here with the current occupant of the house Rubio wants to move into—the Obama administration is taking up this idea.
Now, there is to be sure another Rubio, one who’d feel right at home on Parris Island. He is apparently now the quasi-official blessed-be-the-warmakers candidate, with his reflexive hard lines on Iran and Cuba. Along with Senate colleague Mike Lee of Utah, he also has put forth a tax plan that would deplete the treasury by some $4 trillion over 10 years—for context, consider that George W. Bush’s first tax cut cost $1.35 trillion over a decade—in order that most of those dollars be placed in the hands where the Republicans’ God says they belong, i.e., the 1 percent of the people who already hold nearly half the country’s wealth.
I think it’s a safe bet that we’ll see the neocon Rubio and the supply-side Rubio out on the stump. But the Rubio who wants to make life better for indebted students and working-poor childless couples? Either we won’t see that Rubio at all, or we will see him and he’ll finish fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire and go home. You can’t be a smart candidate in a party that wants to be stupid.
Might I be wrong about the primary voter? Sure, I might. Maybe the fear of losing to Hillary Clinton and being shut out of the White House for 12 or 16 consecutive years will tame this beast. But the early signs suggest the opposite.
After all, how did Scott Walker bolt to the front of the pack? It wasn’t by talking about how to expand health care. It was by giving one speech, at an event hosted by one of Congress’ most fanatical reactionaries (Steve King of Iowa), bragging about how he crushed Wisconsin’s municipal unions. That’s how you get ahead in this GOP. I’d imagine Rubio and Paul and the rest of them took note.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 15, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 