New Study: The Affluent Are in Denial About Their Class Privilege

Race is a continuing problem in America that has no easy solution.  Another growing problem is soar wealth disparity where a small portion of the citizenry owns much more of the nation's wealth than the vast majority of the rest of us combined.  The Republican Party's reverse Robin Hood agenda and efforts to usher in a new Gilded Age with modern day equivalents of the robber barons of old has only served to exacerbate the problem.  Nowadays, one has a far better chance for upward social mobility in Europe than in America and a number of studies have labeled Canada as the new home of the American dream.  What's amazing as the concentration of wealth has intensified and millions of Americans struggle to get by financially is that the wealthy refuse to see their privilege and the advantages it grants to them.  With luck and hard work some will still live the American dream, but many will not no matter their efforts.  A piece in Salon looks at the willful denial of so many of the wealthy.  Here  are excerpts:

Income is correlated with right-wing politics, meaning wealthier people tend to be slightly more conservative. While there is no singular reason for this, both history and observational anecdotes suggest that those with wealth and privilege tend to distort the reason they were so successful, chalking up their success to right-wing ideological canards like "hard work" — rather than admit they were helped by other social factors. (President Trump is a great case study, as he exaggerates the degree to which his father helped him build his empire: during the first 2016 presidential debate, Trump bragged that his father gave him "a very small loan in 1975," which he built "into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars." That "small loan" was actually $60.7 million.)

Now, a new social psychology study has uncovered the extent to which this tendency appears to be pathological among the moneyed elite. Titled "I ain't no fortunate one: On the motivated denial of class privilege," the new study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that those who were posed questions about their class privilege responded by "increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy." 

Dr. L. Taylor Phillips, a professor of management and organizations at New York University Business School, and co-author Dr. Brian S. Lowery, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, wrote in their study. "Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals' efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others."

The authors emphasized that, in the United States, people are conditioned to believe that we live in a meritocracy and to attribute success or failure primarily to one's talent and hard work. When members of the upper-middle or upper class are confronted with evidence that class privilege plays a major role in determining socioeconomic status, their self-regard is challenged. To maintain their sense of self-worth, they will exaggerate their own hardships or focus on the amount of work they do — even though class privilege does not preclude the reality of non-class related hardships and many people work very hard without achieving socioeconomic mobility.

All of the studies found that, when participants who came from class privilege were confronted with that fact, they tended to focus on their personal hardships and work ethic in order to protect their self-regard from facing the reality that much of what they owned was given to them through luck and systems of oppression rather than individual merit.

She said that the individuals studied will specifically claim that they work harder at their jobs and will point to struggles from their lives to make the claim, "'Oh, you say I have this privilege and that's unfair, but actually look at these other things in my life, they kind of counteract or they kind of balance it out. It's all a wash.'"

Dr. Phillips also connected this mindset to a tendency toward classist and racist beliefs. . . . Dr. Phillips explained, summarizing the mentality as arguing that "'I'm here in this position, someone else's in this different position. Rather than because the system is unfair or because I've benefited from something unfair, which would then threaten my self regard, instead it's easier for me to claim that there's actually some sort of difference between us that makes this all fair. . . . It's actually because this group is worse in some way, or this individual person is worse in some way.'"

In the study, Phillips and Lowery emphasize the importance of the meritocracy myth in creating these delusions.

"The ideology of meritocracy is woven deeply into the cultural fabric of American society," the authors write. "The very 'American dream' that attracts and attaches so many to America suggests that if one works hard enough, they can succeed, no matter their class or background. As a result, systemic inequity is a tricky subject for American psyches: while most Americans subscribe to meritocratic ideologies that abhor such inequity, many also benefit from inequities. To resolve this tension, we find that the class privileged specifically claim hardship and effort because these are symbols of merit: they help cover privilege in a cloak of meritocracy."

Until one admits they system is stacked in favor of the wealthy, real solutions will be difficult to achieve.

Few Voters Think Trump Cares About "People Like Me"

I continue to be shocked by how lacking in intelligence many Americans appear to be - like the supposed 49% who think Donald Trump is doing a "good job" handling the coronavirus crisis.  How can this be when some news outlets are beginning to cease coverage of his press conferences because they are so filled with lies and untruths.  Meanwhile, Trump wants to end social distancing perhaps by the end of net week to spur on the economy even though medical experts say this could lead to a large number of deaths. The only positive news is that Americans as a whole are coming to realize that Trump cares nothing for what these citizens would describe as "people like me."    A piece in the Washington Post looks at this realization that is long, long overdue.  Trump may pander to the racism and/or religious extremism of his base, but he cares nothing about them as living, breathing people.  Here are article highlights:

As both a presidential candidate and president, Donald Trump has been said to have a special connection to “ordinary Americans” or “average Americans” while his “elitist” opponents are said to look down on them.

Of course, Trump’s fame and wealth make him as much an elite as, say, the party’s previous presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. But Romney was widely derided as an out-of-touch plutocrat, a characterization that squared with decades of polling on voter beliefs about the class interests of GOP politicians. Trump, by contrast, was called “the people’s billionaire” and credited for his populist appeal, . . . .

But three years into his presidency, most Americans do not perceive Trump as particularly concerned about the middle class, the poor or people like them. They do see him as concerned about the wealthy, however. In fact, Trump is perceived no differently than Romney was at the end of the 2012 presidential campaign. Instead, it is Trump’s likely Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who is more widely perceived as sympathetic to the middle class. A president who once seemed ready to remake the GOP brand has been recast in its image — and that could have consequences for his reelection.

One way to show how voters perceive the interests of politicians is to ask Americans how well different leaders are described by the phrases “cares about the wealthy,” “cares about the middle class,” “cares about the poor” and “cares about people like me.” When respondents were asked these questions about Romney in a YouGov survey conducted right before Election Day in 2012, 88 percent said that “cares about the wealthy” described Romney somewhat well or very well.

By contrast, 56 percent of Americans thought that Obama cared about the wealthy. Compared to Romney, more said that Obama cared about the middle class (57 percent), the poor (61 percent) and “people like me” (54 percent). In 2016, it looked as if Trump might be different than Romney. . . . . But as of today, Trump does not look much different than Romney did. In a March 2020 Democracy Fund-UCLA Nationscape survey, the vast majority of Americans (83 percent) said that Trump cares about the wealthy — many more than said he cares about the middle class (45 percent), poor (38 percent), and “people like me” (40 percent). Indeed, 74 percent of independents and even 23 percent of Republicans said that Trump did not care about “people like me.” If anything, Americans may see Trump as less in touch with ordinary Americans than Romney was. Meanwhile, many fewer Americans view Biden and especially Sanders as sympathetic to the wealthy (61 percent and 41 percent, respectively). More Americans describe them as sympathetic to the middle class, the poor, and people like me. These differences in how Americans perceive Democratic and Republican candidates reflect broader images of the two political parties. Early on, it appeared that Trump could change the GOP’s image. In his speech announcing his candidacy, he famously promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, which are crucial to many Americans of modest means. But Trump has governed much like a traditional Republican. The tax law he signed gave the largest tax breaks to the wealthy. His administration has proposed changes that could reduce the number of poor people eligible for Medicaid and for food stamps. He has even flirted with cuts to Medicare and Social Security, . . . . Today Trump embodies the GOP’s long-standing image as the party of the rich. The likely economic devastation caused by the coronavirus complicates Trump’s ability to claim, as he did in his State of the Union address barely two months ago, that we were in the midst of a “blue-collar boom.”

And Trump’s struggle to communicate sympathy for people with the virus or fearful of its effects makes it difficult for him to project a different image as a leader. Democrats were already arguing that, as Biden put it, Trump has “no empathy” for the middle class. That line of attack may be even more tempting if the virus and ensuing recession continue to wreak havoc in the lives of ordinary Americans.

[P]erceptions of the presidential candidates’ empathy are no magical predictor of who will win the election. . . . . But public perception of Trump matters whether he wins or loses in November. The apparent fragility of his populist image shows how even politicians who appear to be “outsiders” flouting the norms and orthodoxies of their political party struggle to escape long-standing party stereotypes.

Voodoo Economics May Be Catching Up with Trump/GOP

The stack market - actually the bond market - has been showing signs that the economy is slowing and that a recession might well begin in 2020 or before.  Recently job growth and GDP figures have been revised downward and manufacturers and consumers are feeling the adverse effects of Trump's insane trade wars with China and other nations.  And then there are America's farmers who have been dealt the double blow of Chinese tariffs and the impacts of climate change, particularly in the Mid-West, even as the GOP denies climate change is occurring.  To what ought to a shock to no one, the Trump/GOP tax cut for the wealthy and huge corporations - which only scattered crumbs for everyone else - has yet again proven that huge tax cuts for the top income brackets (i) do not pay for themselves, (ii) explode the deficit, and (iii) do not strengthen the economy overall. These three realities have been known since the days of Ronald Reagan, yet the GOP continues to live in a fantasy world.  A column in the New York Times looks at the slowing economy and the efforts of Trump and the GOP to shift blame from themselves.  Here are excerpts:

Almost four decades ago then-candidate George H.W. Bush used the phrase “voodoo economic policy” to describe Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes for the rich would pay for itself. He was more prescient than he could have imagined.

For voodoo economics isn’t just a doctrine based on magical thinking. It’s the ultimate policy zombie, a belief that seemingly can’t be killed by evidence. It has failed every time its proponents have tried to put it into practice, but it just keeps shambling along.

[W]henever tax cuts fail to produce the predicted miracle, their defenders come up with bizarre explanations for their failure.
 My favorite until now came from Art Laffer, the original voodoo economist and recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Why did George W. Bush’s tax-cutting presidency end not with a boom, but with the worst economic slump since the Great Depression? According to Laffer, blame rests with Barack Obama, even though the recession began more than a year before Obama took office. You see, according to Laffer, everyone lost confidence upon realizing that Obama might win the 2008 election.
 Trump has gone one better. As it has become increasingly clear that the results of his tax cut were disappointing — recent data revisions have marked down estimates of both G.D.P. and employment growth, to the point where it’s hard to see more than a brief sugar high from $2 trillion in borrowing — Trump has invented ever more creative ways to blame other people. In particular, he’s now claiming that the promised boom hasn’t arrived because his opponents are hexing the economy with bad thoughts: “The Democrats are trying to ‘will’ the Economy to be bad for purposes of the 2020 Election.”
 [B]laming the Fed for the tax cut’s fizzle won’t wash. For one thing, the Fed has actually raised rates less than in previous economic recoveries. Even more to the point, the Trump economic team was expecting Fed rate hikes when it made its extravagantly optimistic forecasts.
 The Trump tax cut was supposed to create a boom so powerful that it would not only withstand modest Fed rate hikes, but actually require such hikes to prevent inflationary overheating. You don’t get to turn around and claim betrayal when the Fed does exactly what you expected it to do.
 Since the Fed is unlikely to oblige, what else might Trump do? Officials have floated, then retracted, the idea of a cut in payroll taxes — that is, a tax break for ordinary workers, rather than the corporations and wealthy individuals who mainly benefited from the 2017 tax cut. But such action seems unlikely, among other things because top administration officials denounced this policy idea when Obama proposed it.

Trump has also suggested using executive authority to reduce taxes on capital gains (which are overwhelmingly paid by the wealthy). This move would have the distinction of being both ineffectual and illegal.

What about calling off the trade war that has been depressing business investment? This seems unlikely, because protectionism is right up there with racism as a core Trump value. And merely postponing tariffs might not help, since it wouldn’t resolve the uncertainty that may be the trade war’s biggest cost.

The truth is that Trump doesn’t have a Plan B, and probably can’t come up with one. On the other hand, he might not have to. Who needs competent policy when you’re the chosen one and the king of Israel?

Funny how the last GOP administration engaged in massive tax cuts and George W. left the country with the largest economic meltdown since the Great Depression.  The GOP truly never learns. 

Today's Republicans Are the Real Extremists

As long time readers know, I grew up in a Republican household and had both parents and grandparents who were Republicans for the majority of their lives.  I followed in their foot steps and became a party activist, served on the Virginia Beach City Committee and even incorporated that body (as Virginia SCC documents available online confirm).  Yet before the end of my parents' life times they and the rest of my family fled the GOP.  It's not that we had change.  Rather, it was the Republican Party that had changed drastically as a result, in retrospect of the Party's embrace of Christofascists and white supremacists. The end result has been a GOP that is extreme and bears no resemblance to the GOP of the 1950, 1960's or even the 1980's under Reagan.  Yet, many Republican "friends" continue to close their eyes to the reality that the GOP they remember is no more and that the party for which they continue to vote has become both extreme and something ugly, especially under Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer.  A column in the New York Times makes the case that the real extremists today are Republicans, not the Democrats they target for abuse and perhaps even violence.  Here are excerpts:

All of Donald Trump’s major policies have failed substantively, politically, or both. His one big legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut, remains unpopular. His attacks on Obamacare have only enhanced public approval of the program. His fearmongering has cemented majority opposition to his proposed border wall.

But while today’s G.O.P. can’t do policy, it commands a powerful propaganda machine. And this machine is now dedicated to a strategy of portraying Democrats as extremists. It might work — but it shouldn’t, because Democrats aren’t extremists, but Republicans are.

The attack on Democrats has largely involved demonizing two new members of Congress, Representative Ilhan Omar and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Omar is Muslim, and the usual suspects have gone all-out in using an out-of-context quotation to portray her, completely falsely, as sympathetic to terrorists.

It’s surely not an accident that these two principal targets are both women of color; there’s a sense in which supposed concerns about extremism are just a cover for sexism and white nationalism. But it’s still worth pointing out that while both Omar and AOC are on the left of the Democratic Party, neither is staking out policy positions that are extreme compared with either expert views or public opinion.

Take AOC’s famous advocacy of a 70 percent tax rate on very high incomes. Economists who knew anything about public finance immediately recognized that number as coming from a widely cited paper by Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, two of the field’s leading figures. You don’t have to agree with their analysis to recognize that AOC, far from showing her ignorance, was actually drawing on solid research.

Nor does the public find the idea outrageous. An overwhelming majority believe that people with high incomes pay too little in taxes, and polls show wide support for AOC’s proposal.

Republicans, on the other hand, really are extremists. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in 2012 — long before the rise of Trump — the modern G.O.P. is “ideologically extreme” and uninterested in “facts, evidence, and science.” For example, major figures in the party routinely dismiss global warming as a hoax perpetrated by a vast global conspiracy.

Or consider the views of Stephen Moore, who Trump is trying to put on the board of the Federal Reserve.

He’s a former editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a former chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a fixture at conferences like FreedomFest. Given this background, it may not be surprising that he’s a firm believer in failed economic doctrines, especially the insistence that tax cuts for the wealthy have magical effects.

What’s coming out only now, however, is the extent of Moore’s political extremism. Many of his past statements — like his assertion that “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy” — sound like a liberal caricature of conservatism. But it’s not a caricature; Moore shows us what the right actually thinks.

I mentioned that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the rich pay too little in taxes. Moore, on the other hand, wants to eliminate income taxes and replace them with sales taxes, which would dramatically shift the tax burden away from the rich and onto the middle class.

He also wants to privatize Social Security, a program that is both hugely popular and the bedrock of retirement security for American workers. Moore would convert it into a 401(k)-type system. He is also fiercely hostile to Medicaid, which covers 65 million Americans.

Finally, Moore has proposed, in advance, a purge of the institution Trump wants him to join, calling for firing “hundreds” of Federal Reserve economists “who are worthless.” These would, presumably, be the economists who considered low interest rates and monetary expansion valuable tools in fighting the Great Recession, at the same time Moore was predicting that these policies would send inflation soaring. Guess who was right.

So even if you cherry-pick left-leaning Democrats, a look at their actual positions shows them to be not at all extreme. At the same time, pillars of the right-wing establishment hold views that are utterly at odds with both evidence and public opinion. Republicans are the real extremists.

Again, this is why I ceased to be a Republican two decades ago.

Mid-West Flooding: Climate Change Meets a Degraded Infrastructure

The Mid-West remains a bastion for Trump and the Republican Party yet now, the failed policies of the Trump/Pence regime and the GOP are coming home to roost.  Years of inadequate infrastructure spending and denial that climate change is real is colliding head on with some of the worse flooding ever and the aging and sporadically repaired levees are failing in record numbers. The GOP aversion for taxes ignores the reality that infrastructure such as roads and in this case levees, do not miraculously spring out of nowhere and that taxes are needed for the same. Go to France or the UK and you see far better maintained roads and public transit.  They pay more in taxes, but they get something in return (and that doesn't even consider their far better healthcare delivery for the majority of the population, not just the wealthy).  A piece in the New York Times looks at the ongoing disaster in large parts of the Mid-West. One can only wonder what botched disaster relief Trump/Pence will deliver and when voters will wake up to the reality that allowing their votes to be swayed bu appeals to racism and hate is actually against their own economic interest.  Here are article excerpts: 

On the river-specked Midwestern prairie, the thousands of miles of levees are an insurance policy against nature’s whims that, at their best, keep cropland and towns dry, floodwaters at bay and the agriculture-driven economy churning. But the levees are aging, subject to uneven regulation and, in many cases, never designed to withstand the river levels seen in the last decade. 

Many of the levees, usually earthen and topped with grass, were built by farmers decades ago and are now managed by a patchwork of local government agencies known as levee districts that often do not coordinate or even follow the same rules. With increased flooding in the past few years, the levees are being tested more frequently than ever before, straining the finances and expertise of some of those districts. The levee situation has become so grave that the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s levee system a D grade in 2017, suggesting $80 billion in investment over 10 years. According to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees infrastructure on the Missouri River and some of its tributaries, at least 62 levees had been breached or overtopped in the Midwest in March, and hundreds of miles of levees had sustained damage.

“Our levees are big and they’re good,” Mr. Ideker said, but they were no match for this new normal. “Every event seems like it’s higher. It’s higher water. You build the levee higher. And the next time you build it higher. You can’t keep up with it.”

The situation has been exacerbated by wetter rainstorms, which are expected to worsen over time and have been attributed to climate change.

“There are layers that come together when big events like this happen — it’s never just one thing,” said Barbara Mayes Boustead, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who contributed to a 2018 federal report on climate change.

“We’re seeing more water in the river, but we haven’t improved the infrastructure,” said Mr. Waters, who farms along the Missouri River east of Kansas City, Mo. “Basically, when it comes to levees and flood control protection, we’re still driving on gravel roads and we’re trying to handle interstate traffic.”

But building ever-higher levees is not a panacea: Keeping water out of one area only means it will go somewhere else.

In the early 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers and towns along the Mississippi River followed a “levees only” policy that meant building higher and higher walls, leaving the river no way to release its power. That strategy failed spectacularly in the Great Flood of 1927, which inundated 27,000 square miles and displaced one million people. In the aftermath, officials built a more complex Mississippi River system that included a network of spillways and flood ways, as well as other tools, along with the levees.

In the areas hardest hit this past month, where levees are shredded and livelihoods shattered, many blame the Corps. In recent weeks, politicians from some of the flooded states have become vocal critics of the river management plan and called for the prioritization of flood control.

The devastation to the levees has left much of the Midwest with nothing to hold back the waters from even a relatively minor flood, which forecasters have warned is possible in the weeks ahead. As water recedes, at least for the moment, and the conversation shifts to recovery, many in the river bottom said they planned to stay and rebuild, hopeful that policies might change. Others said these levee breaks were probably their last.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be here,” said Rhonda Hunziger, the mayor of Craig, Mo., population 230, where residents piled sandbags through the night in a spirited but futile attempt to save their town from the Missouri River after surrounding levees burst.

Depending on what the insurance company decided, Ms. Hunziger said this could be the flood that forced her to higher ground. “I have lived with floods my whole life,” she said while staring out at the brown-hued water covering her nearly empty town. “And I am about ready to get off the bottom.”

Trump is Harming America More than Any Foreign Adversary

Traveling in France and the United Kingdom, the husband and I have found ourselves repeatedly having to explain that we neither voted for Donald Trump nor do support literally any of his policies. The French and British by huge majorities despise Trump and cannot understand what would make Americans vote for such a foul individuals.  Rather than get into a discussion of the racism and religious extremism that motivates today's GOP base, it is easier to say that we are working to defeat Republicans and elect Democrats to block Trump's toxic agenda.  It would be hard to stress how much damage Trump has done to America's image across the globe. The other irony is that there are distinct parallels between the decline and fall of ancient Rome and the decline of Great Britain and what is currently taking place in America.  In both of the aforementioned empires, bad domestic decisions aimed at showering wealth on the rich and maintaining privilege combined with a failure to invest in the future in terms of social policies and modernizing infrastructure played major roles in the collapse of empire. We see the exact thing happening now in America under Republican misrule.  While the UK has done much to rebuild its infrastructure, the Brexit vote motivated by racism and animus towards non-Christians will likely wreck havoc on the UK economy and reverse past UK economic promise.  Joe Scarborough has a column in the the Washington Post looks at the damage being done.  Here are excerpts:

Cataclysmic events often bring with them violent and abrupt endings to settled ages and long-established norms. Those absorbing the impact of these historical aftershocks rarely grasp the epochal changes in real time.

Who could have imagined during their commute home on the night of Nov. 21, 1963, that an event in Dallas the next day would shake the postwar order guaranteed by America’s victory in World War II? Even after Lee Harvey Oswald’s shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository, could anyone have foreseen the collapse of such an ordered age soon overtaken by the anarchy of Vietnam, the murders of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the race riots, Chicago, Kent State, Watergate, postindustrial rot and the cultural chaos set loose across the country by these events?

And could even the most insightful observer have foreseen — while staring at the billowing smoke set against New York’s brilliant September sky — the avalanche of strategic blunders set in motion by Osama bin Laden’s attack on the United States?

On Sept. 10, 2001, the United States dominated the world stage in a way no other country had since the height of the Roman and British empires. NATO’s long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union ended with Russia in ruins. The Japanese economic miracle, predicted by some to turn America into little more than a granary for Japan, had flatlined. And a rising China was still struggling with a multitude of internal security concerns and was eclipsed on the world stage by the Pax Americana. The United States deployed a dazzling display of both soft- and hard-power assets across the globe.

On the eve of bin Laden’s attacks, America’s gross domestic product was nearly 10 times China’s and 40 times Russia’s. The U.S. military machine was unparalleled, with the Pentagon spending more on national defense than the next 15 countries combined. And despite those staggering outlays, Washington was running a $125 billion surplus.

Seventeen years later, endless wars abroad and reckless policies at home have produced annual deficits approaching $1 trillion. President Trump’s Republican Party will create more debt in one year than was generated in the first 200 years of America’s existence. And while the United States has been mired in endless wars and bloody occupations over the past 17 years, China has used that same period to aggressively develop economic partnerships across Asia, Europe, Latin America and Africa. Perhaps that is one reason China will soon overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy.

Any discussion of policy failures since 2001 must begin with George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq even though no evidence linked Saddam Hussein’s regime to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. . . . . That war cost nearly 5,000 American lives, $2 trillion and inestimable damage to America’s credibility across the globe.

The excesses of Bush’s military adventurism led to his successor, President Barack Obama, placing the United States in a defensive crouch for the better part of eight years. The commander in chief defined his foreign policy approach this way: “Don’t do stupid [stuff].”

Sixteen years of strategic missteps have been followed by the maniacal moves of a man who has savaged America’s vital alliances, provided comfort to hostile foreign powers, attacked our intelligence and military communities, and lent a sympathetic ear to neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe.

For those of us still believing that Islamic extremists hate America because of the freedoms we guarantee to all people, the gravest threat Trump poses to our national security is the damage done daily to America’s image.

“America is an idea. Strip freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law from what the United States represents to the world and America itself is gutted.”

Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team 6 before he accomplished that goal. Other tyrants who tried to do the same were consigned to the ash heap of history. The question for voters this fall is whether their country will move beyond this troubled chapter in history or whether they will continue supporting a politician who has done more damage to the dream of America than any foreign adversary ever could.

House GOP Seeks to Cut Medicare, Social Security to Balance Budget After Massive Tax Cuts for Wealthy

While much of the American public is focused on the horrors and deliberate cruelty taking place on America's southwest border, House Republicans are conspiring to unleash cruelty on those who rely on Medicare and Social Security to survive.  The pretense for harming countless lives?  The need to cut the federal budget deficit which is hemorrhaging red ink in the wake of the $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion with a "T") tax cuts for the very wealthy and large, rapacious corporations.  It has been Paul Ryan's sick and morally bankrupt dream to destroy the social safety net for years, and now the massive give away voted in by Republicans is being grotesquely used to harm the poor and the elderly.  While Catholic bishops are condemning the Trump/Pence family separation policy, they might also want to bar Ryan from the sacraments given his utter disregard for the poor, the hungry and the sick. Trump cruel border policy did not arise out of thin air.  The GOP has been pushing a cruel agenda for many years.   A piece in the Washington Post looks ate the GOP's manufactured crisis and those whom they seek to harm.  Here are excerpts:

House Republicans released a proposal Tuesday that would balance the budget in nine years — but only by making large cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security, . . . .

The House Budget Committee is aiming to pass the blueprint this week, but that may be as far as it goes this midterm election year. It is not clear that GOP leaders will put the document on the House floor for a vote, and even if it were to pass the House, the budget would have little impact on actual spending levels.

Nonetheless the budget serves as an expression of Republicans’ priorities at a time of rapidly rising deficits and debt. Although the nation’s growing indebtedness has been exacerbated by the GOP’s own policy decisions — including the new tax law, which most analyses say will add at least $1 trillion to the debt — Republicans on the Budget Committee said they felt a responsibility to put the nation on a sounder fiscal trajectory.

Democrats have little interest in addressing it except as part of a larger deal including tax increases — the sort of “Grand Bargain” that eluded President Barack Obama.

The House Republican budget, titled “A Brighter American Future,” would remake Medicare by giving seniors the option of enrolling in private plans that compete with traditional Medicare, a system of competition designed to keep costs down but dismissed by critics as an effort to privatize the program. Along with other changes, the budget proposes to squeeze $537 billion out of Medicare over the next decade.

The budget would transform Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor, by limiting per capita payments or allowing states to turn it into a block-grant program — the same approach House Republicans took in their legislation that passed last year to repeal the Affordable Care Act (the repeal effort died in the Senate, but the GOP budget assumes that the repeal takes place).  It also proposes adding work requirements for certain adults enrolled in Medicaid. Changes to Medicaid and other health programs would account for $1.5 trillion in savings.

Social Security comes in for more modest cuts of $4 billion over the decade, which the budget projects could be reached by eliminating concurrent receipt of unemployment benefits and Social Security disability insurance. . . . And the budget proposes $230 billion in cuts from education and training programs, including consolidating student loan programs and reducing Pell Grant awards.

The budget also relies on rosy economic-growth projections . . .

Democrats were quick to criticize the GOP proposal while contending that Republicans were opening themselves up to election-year attacks by releasing it at all.

“The 2019 Republican budget scraps any sense of responsibility to the American people and any obligation to being honest,” said Rep. John Yarmuth (Ky.), the top Democrat on the Budget Committee. “Its repeal of the Affordable Care Act and extreme cuts to health care, retirement security, anti-poverty programs, education, infrastructure, and other critical investments are real and will inflict serious harm on American families.”

The farce is that the GOP pretends to be the party of "family values" and "Christian values" yet other than slavishly prostituting itself to hate-filled anti-abortion, anti-gay Christofascists, NOTHING in the GOP agenda is family friendly or remotely in keeping with the Gospel's social message.   

Race Baiting Is The GOP's Midterm Strategy

With no popular legislative successes and trade policies emanating from the White House that will likely harm the economy and particularly damage Trump stronghold regions of the country, the Republican Party, led by the master of hatred, is falling back to race baiting and racial resentment as the principal means to try to motivate their base to go to the polls in November. The problem is, of course that the tactic seems to be more effective in motivating Democrats and decent, moral people - which excludes evangelical Christians - to mobilize to resist the hate driven message. Ed Gillespie tried a similar approach in Virginia in 2017 and it did not end well for Republicans: Gillespie suffered a 9 point loss and the GOP lost 15 seats in the House of Delegates. Yet the GOP still believes that the message of huge tax cuts for the wealthy and race baiting will resonate with a majority of voters. A piece in Slate looks at the disgusting GOP strategy lead by the foul occupant of the White House. Here are article highlights:

It’s still too early to know if a “blue wave” will carry Democrats to victory in November, but Tuesday’s results bode well for the prospect. Democrats advanced competitive candidates in California’s “top two” elections and flipped a state Senate seat in Missouri that had long been held by Republicans. New polling gives Democrats a 10-point lead in the congressional generic ballot, bringing their average lead to roughly 8 points, and the same poll shows Democrats with a substantial enthusiasm advantage heading into the summer.

The sense that Republicans are behind in the race for a House majority might explain why President Trump has recently turned up the heat on racial resentment. There were his broadsides against MS-13 as “animals,” part of a broader attack on illegal immigration that, taken together, collapsed the distinction between violent criminals and otherwise law-abiding migrants. This week, Trump brought debates over sports, racism, and police violence back to fore when he pointedly disinvited a delegation from the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House gathering, accusing the NFL players of disrespecting the country for kneeling during the national anthem.

Never mind that no Philadelphia player has knelt in protest during the anthem. Reality is less important than the goal at hand: to stoke cultural anger and racial resentment, and hope that it brings GOP voters to the polls. It’s a national version of what Ed Gillespie tried in the closing days of the Virginia gubernatorial election: running on Hispanic gangs and “ungrateful” football players and hoping to stem a loss by enraging enough white people to blunt Democratic enthusiasm.

In other words, race baiting. A number of Republican strategists think this might work. “Trump’s habit of ignoring the economic message preferred by House and Senate Republicans in favor of the culture war tropes that propelled him to the White House is increasingly seen as an asset,” reports David Drucker for the Washington Examiner . . . conservative analysts and consultants, including Bill Whalen of the Hoover Institution, who says Trump “very cleverly tapped into this issue.”

Clever might be stretching it. At the start of the year, Republicans thought they would be running on tax cuts. . . . But when put to the test, it failed. Backed by outside groups and party organizations, Republican Rick Saccone touted those tax cuts in the tight race to hold a heavily Republican House district in the Pittsburgh suburbs. Voters weren’t interested, and opponent Conor Lamb, a Democrat, made ground by tying Saccone to “tax cuts [that] go to the wealthiest 1 percent.”  By Election Day, Republicans had stopped talking tax reform, and Saccone had pivoted to a Trump-like message of brash resentment.

The same was true of Gillespie in Virginia, who turned to racial and cultural flashpoints after his chief economic idea—large upper-income tax cuts—fell flat with voters throughout the state. In an ominous sign for Republicans, 42 percent of voters say they are “less likely” to vote for a candidate who supports the president’s tax bill.

In the absence of popular accomplishments or a broad economic message—the party’s other agenda item, Obamacare repeal, is similarly unpopular—racial resentment is all that’s left. With Trump at the lead, that’s where Republicans are headed . . . . it’s also true that this strategy hasn’t worked. Gillespie floundered and Virginia Republicans nearly lost their hold on the state’s House of Delegates. Saccone, running in a deep-red district, couldn’t close the gap. And Republican voters haven’t been motivated enough to stop Democrats from winning dozens of special elections in districts across the country that were previously held by the GOP.

So far, “Trumpism” has only worked for Trump. Perhaps Republicans will successfully use his appeal to retain their House majority. But voters have suggested that what they want is less of Trump, not more. Mimicking his approach may help tip the scales in the other direction.

As I have argued before, Democrats need to emulate the coordinated ground game that Ralph Northam used so successfully in Virginia.  I continue to hope November brings a blood bath for Republicans. 

The Great Unmasking: the Falsity of Today's "Conservatives"

I left the Republican Party and the so-called conservative moment nearly two decades ago as it became increasingly homophobic, racist, and dishonest - a trend that, in my view, directly correlates with the rise of evangelicals within the Party. Over the intervening years, things have only gotten worse with Donald Trump exemplifying the conservative movements descent into indecency and moral bankruptcy.  Since Trump occupied the White House, pretty much everything conservatives have claimed to stand for over the years has been shown to be a lie as deficits have ballooned, free trade is under attack, and we witness a meddling in the market to benefit specific industries, and the environment is trashed. Meanwhile, white Christian religious extremists and white supremacists are ascendant.  A column in the New York Times looks at this unmasking of today's false conservatives.  Here are column excerpts:

If there is any lasting benefit from the Trump era — which is by no means a sure thing, since democracy may not survive the experience — it will lie in the Great Unmasking: the revelation of just how much bad faith pervades modern conservatism.

Some of us, of course, knew this all along, and are not surprised. Conversely, many centrists and much of the news media simply refuse to face up to the asymmetry of our politics and will persist with bothsidesism even as one side drives us into the abyss. But one can at least hope that the constant revelations of past hypocrisy will have some impact.

These revelations come on many fronts. Flag-waving super-patriots who called Democrats unpatriotic are perfectly OK when Republicans actively collude with foreign dictators. Pious invokers of fiscal responsibility and hysterical debt alarmists are perfectly OK with tax cuts that explode the deficit. Professors who denounce campus political correctness as the greatest threat we face to free speech collude with right-wing activists to conduct opposition research on left-wing students.

Rather oddly, some of the few people on the right who really seem to believe what they were saying are foreign policy neoconservatives. They misled us into a disastrous war; but they appear to have been sincere about their national security concerns, and are among the few Republicans who remain steadfast in their Never Trumpism.

Over the past 40 years or so conservatives have become ever more strident in their attacks on environmental protection. They questioned the science; they insisted that any attempt to limit emissions would greatly damage economic growth; they denounced government intervention and declared the sanctity of free markets.

But none of it was sincere. Climate skeptics have repeatedly given the game away, for example by touting new studies that they insisted would refute global warming, then rejecting those studies when they confirmed it. Economists who tout the limitless ability of markets to cope with change suddenly proclaim them utterly incapable of adapting to a carbon tax.

And now all that talk about free markets is revealed as the sham it always was.

Ten years ago the big debate was whether we should adopt a comprehensive strategy to limit greenhouse gas emissions. For a while it seemed possible that we’d adopt a cap-and-trade system that would in effect place a price on carbon. That effort failed . . . however, technology has been coming to our rescue. The single biggest source of greenhouse emissions, the thing we really need to stop, is coal-fired electricity generation (which has lots of other public health costs too.) And a funny thing happened: coal-fired power became uneconomical. Instead of building new plants, we’re retiring old ones.

Partly this was the result of cheap natural gas thanks to fracking. Increasingly, however, we’re looking at the effects of the technological revolution in renewables, which has produced spectacular declines in the cost of wind and solar power.

So is the Trump administration accepting this market verdict? Of course not: as with trade, it’s abusing powers granted to defend national security on behalf of destructive policies that have nothing to do with security. In this case, it’s planning to force clean energy to subsidize dirty energy.

Why? Probably the main reason is sheer corruption: coal moguls are key Trump backers, and he’s trying to reward them. But there’s also, I suspect, the sheer mean spiritedness that characterizes modern conservatism: “Liberals want clean energy? Hah! We’ll show them!”

[I]t’s yet another demonstration of the pervasive bad faith of the conservative movement. Nothing they said about their reasons for opposing climate policy were sincere, and now they’re perfectly willing to ditch all their supposed principles to keep the coal fires burning.

43% of American Households Struggling to Afford Basic Middle Class Life

The United Way has compiled a new study that ought to be shocking news for the wealthiest nation in the world.  It is even more shocking in the context of the Trump/GOP tax cuts which gave little of no meaningful tax cut relief to average Americans while showering lavish tax cuts on the 1% and large corporations - corporations that have not shared their huge tax cut windfall with employees in the form of salary increases and/or improved benefits. A piece in CNN looks at the shocking findings which are compiled on a state bay state and county by county basis.  Here are story highlights:

The economy may be chugging along, but many Americans are still struggling to afford a basic middle class life.

Nearly 51 million households don't earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to a study released Thursday by the United Way ALICE Project. That's 43% of households in the United States.

The figure includes the 16.1 million households living in poverty, as well as the 34.7 million families that the United Way has dubbed ALICE -- Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This group makes less than what's needed "to survive in the modern economy."

"Despite seemingly positive economic signs, the ALICE data shows that financial hardship is still a pervasive problem," said Stephanie Hoopes, the project's director.

California, New Mexico and Hawaii have the largest share of struggling families, at 49% each. North Dakota has the lowest at 32%.

Many of these folks are the nation's child care workers, home health aides, office assistants and store clerks, who work low-paying jobs and have little savings, the study noted. Some 66% of jobs in the US pay less than $20 an hour.

As noted, if one goes to the study itself, a state by state report is available.   Here's a summary for Virginia:

ALICE – Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed – defined: Despite being employed, many households earning more than the Federal Poverty Level still cannot afford housing, child care, food, transportation, and health care.

• In Virginia, there are 859,079 ALICE households, while another 342,112 households live below the poverty level. In total, 39 percent of Virginia households earn below the ALICE Threshold.

• Households with income below the ALICE Threshold – including both ALICE households and those living in poverty – make up between 22 and 66 percent of households in the 95 counties and 38 independent cities in Virginia.

• Nearly one third – 32 percent – of senior households in Virginia qualify as ALICE, more than triple the 9 percent of senior households in poverty.

• The racial and ethnic makeup of ALICE and poverty-level households nearly mirrors the overall Virginia population: 70 percent of Virginia households are White, while 61 percent of ALICE households and 58 percent of poverty-level households are White.

• There are 890,549 families with children in Virginia, and 37 percent of them have income below the ALICE Threshold.

• Reflecting the changing household composition across the country, “other” households – single and cohabiting households younger than 65 with no children under 18 – account for 48 percent of the state’s households with income below the ALICE Threshold.

• Several demographic groups in Virginia are more likely to fall into the ALICE population, including women, LGBT individuals, people of color, those with lower levels of education, those with a disability, undocumented or unskilled immigrants, younger veterans, formerly incarcerated people, and immigrants facing language barriers.

As disturbing as the Virginia figures are - Virginia, an increasingly blue state, ranks among the top ten wealthiest states yet has 39% of its household earning less than the ALICE threshold - in Louisiana, a red state,  23 percent of all Louisiana households are ALICE and another 19 percent live in poverty.  Altogether, 42 percent of all Louisiana households cannot afford basic expenses – housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, and taxes. 

What is dumbfounding to me is who working class whites have shifted to supporting Republicans.  even though GOP policies are harmful to their own financial best interests.   Here in Virginia, Medicaid expansion would aid 400,000 Virginians in working class families who are struggling.  Yet Republicans oppose Medicaid expansion.  It is disturbing that GOP calls to racism and religious extremism outweigh simple economic sense for many in the GOP base.  Denigrating others and/or feeling superior to others do not pay the bills.  This ought to be a no brainer.

The Ongoing GOP Effort to Take Away Health Care for Millions

America stands alone among developed nations when it comes to not having a national health insurance system. America also stands alone in terms of the high level of claimed religiosity of its citizens, especially those comprising the Republican Party base.  Yet, America's healthcare system - if one can even call it a system since it is mostly driven by corporate greed - treats less well of Americans as basically disposable garbage, left to depend on the most expense, least cost effective means of meeting their healthcare needs.  The result is millions without coverage and Americans paying many times more than those in any other developed nation.  And Republicans want to make the system even worse as the go about sabotaging the remaining aspects of the Affordable Health Care Act - even as they mouth claims of supporting "Christian" values.  One has to wonder if they have ever actually read the New Testament teachings on caring for the less fortunate.  A column in the New York Times looks at the ongoing sabotage.  Here are highlights:  

Republicans still hate the idea of helping Americans get health care. So instead of releasing the kraken, they’ve brought on the termites. Rather than trying to eliminate Obamacare in one fell swoop, they’re trying to undermine it with multiple acts of sabotage — while hoping voters won’t realize who’s responsible for rising premiums and falling coverage.

Which is why it’s important to place the blame where it belongs.

The first thing you need to understand is that Obamacare has been a highly successful program. When the legislation was passed, Republicans insisted it would fail to cut the number of uninsured and would blow a huge hole in the federal budget. In fact, it led to major gains in coverage, reducing the uninsured rate to its lowest level in history, at relatively low cost.

[I]nsurers found that the people signing up were sicker, on average, than they expected, leading to higher premiums. But as of last year, the markets appeared to have stabilized, with insurers generally profitable.

Nobody would claim that Obamacare is perfect; many Americans remain uninsured, and too many of those with coverage face troublingly high out-of-pocket expenses. Still, health reform delivered most of what its advocates promised and caused none of the disasters its opponents predicted.

Yet Republicans still want to destroy it. One reason is that much of the coverage expansion was paid for with taxes on high incomes, so repeal would be a way to cut taxes on the wealthy. More broadly, conservatives hate Obamacare precisely because it works. It shows that government actually can help tens of millions of Americans lead better, more secure lives, and in so doing it threatens their low-tax, small-government ideology.

But outright repeal failed, so now it’s time for sabotage, which is taking place on two main fronts.

One of these fronts involves the expansion of Medicaid, which probably accounted for more than half the gains in coverage under Obamacare. Now a number of Republican-controlled states are trying to make Medicaid harder to get, notably by imposing work requirements on recipients.

What is the point of these work requirements? The ostensible justification — cracking down on able-bodied Medicaid recipients who should be working but aren’t — is nonsense: There are very few people meeting that description. The real goal is simply to make getting health care harder, by imposing onerous reporting and paperwork requirements and punishing people who lose their jobs for reasons beyond their control.

The other front involves trying to reduce the number of people signing up for private coverage. Last year the Trump administration drastically reduced outreach — the effort to let Americans know when and how to get health insurance.

The administration is also promoting various dodges that would in effect let insurance companies go back to discriminating against people in poor health. And when Congress passed a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, it also eliminated the individual mandate, the requirement that people sign up for insurance even if they’re currently healthy.

Preliminary evidence suggests that these efforts at sabotage have already partially reversed the coverage gains achieved under Obama, especially among lower-income Americans. (Curiously, all the coverage losses seem to have happened among self-identified Republicans.) But the worst is yet to come.

You see, G.O.P. sabotage disproportionately discourages young and healthy people from signing up, which, as one commentator put it, “drives up the cost for other folks within that market.” Who said that? Tom Price, President Trump’s first secretary of health and human services.

Sure enough, insurers are already proposing major premium hikes — and they are specifically attributing those hikes to G.O.P. actions that are driving healthy Americans out of the market, leaving a sicker, more expensive pool behind.

So here’s what’s going to happen: Soon, many Americans will suffer sticker shock from their insurance policies; federal subsidies will protect most of them, but by no means everyone. They’ll also hear news about declining insurance coverage. And Republicans will say, “See, Obamacare is failing.”

But the problem isn’t with Obamacare, it’s with the politicians who unleashed this termite infestation — who are doing all they can to take away your health coverage. And they need to be held accountable.

Yet more evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party, especially the evangelical Christians who make up a core constituency. To call them modern day Pharisees is far too kind.  Republicans need to be voted out of office in November, 2018.