Donald Trump Has Been a Mirror, Held Up to Us Americans

Several friends posted about an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer  by a former career member of the U.S. military who comes from a military family.  At first glance given its headline the piece is upsetting since it appears to be a thank you to Donald Trump.  However, reading the column,  the piece is in reality a condemnation of Trump and those who created the pathway for his election.  Put simply, Trump embodies what is wrong with America and has made the nation's shortcomings painfully obvious to anyone not living under a rock or who is not a white supremacist and/or evangelical extremist.  Thus, the piece thanks Trump for making it clear what needs to be done to undo the stain he and principally the Republican Party have done to harm so many Americans and to usher in a national decline.  Between the GOP efforts to bring about a new Gilded Age and and its and Trump's attacks on science and objective facts, America faces not only racial strife but also a class struggle against the greed driven very wealthy.  Here are column highlights:

Of my 57 years drawing breath, I’ve spent 51 of them directly or indirectly serving this once great nation. So, as you might imagine, I found myself on Nov. 8, 2016, more than a little dismayed at the news we had elevated Donald J. Trump to the nation’s highest office — a man so clearly unfit to lead America.

But over time I’ve come to appreciate Trump in ways I did not expect. Now, I am thankful that we elected Trump. Because Donald Trump is exactly what America needed. Trump is a mirror, a warning, and ultimately a catalyst for change. Reflected in Trump is all that is wrong with the United States: the injustice of our broken social contract, the crassness of our politics, and the cruelty of our economy. Trump is also the shock that a mature democracy needs for action. To use a timely metaphor, Trump and his supporters are a virus, and they have activated our democratic antibodies. What we are seeing in the streets is the body fighting the infection.

What we are seeing in our current moment is not only a race war but a class war. America must confront systemic racism to move forward, but it also must acknowledge that we have created a permanent underclass of all colors (though mostly Black and brown). We are a society where your melanin content and your zip code determine your future.

Beginning with Newt Gingrich in 1994, Republicans stopped trying to govern and instead began accumulating power. McKay Coppins writes in his profile of Gingrich in the Atlantic, “… few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise.” Effective governance requires compromise, trust, and mutual respect. Gingrich’s new version of Republican had no interest in that. He destroyed the bipartisan structures for governing and even resorted to name-calling and conspiracy theories — over the line at the time, but in hindsight presaging Trumpism.

A straight line can be drawn from Gingrich’s “Contract with America” to the tea party in 2009. Another outsider movement characterized by distrust of government, expertise, and experience, the tea party helped elect a rogues’ gallery of loathsome lawmakers — I’m looking at you, Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Texas). Trump’s dystopian vision of America is the ultimate flowering of the outsider, populist, anti-government thinking that has metastasized in the Republican Party over the past decades.

Under both political parties, America has rolled back regulatory guardrails and created a volatile economy that values the wrong things. . . . Over the same period, we dismantled the meager social safety net we had. We have reduced access to food aid, job training, and unemployment insurance. Meanwhile, the cost of health care and higher education has skyrocketed, placing both out of reach for many Americans.

Now for the good news.

Everything wrong with America is manifested in Trump. The hunger for power, the vile derision of people who don’t look like you, the cruelty, the privilege, the gleeful ignorance, and mendacious narcissism. Our revulsion at Trump is causing Americans to ask: How did we get to this place? And how do we get out? That will take time and hard work by well-intentioned people from every corner of American society.

What is happening in our streets is how open, progressive societies improve — fitfully, imperfectly, frustratingly, sometimes tragically. But we do improve. So, thank you, President Trump. Thank you for showing us what we were becoming and helping us find the courage to confront it. We are going to be OK.

Col. Curtis Milam served 26 years on active duty and has over 4,000 flight hours in the C-130. He has served tours at the Pentagon, NATO HQ, and the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, Hungary.

The Trump virus must be exterminated and his supporters must be marginalized to the point where they can do no more damage..

Economic Change Rattles America and Europe

One constant throughout history is that change over time is guaranteed and that changes in technology and industry are constant, often at the expense of many classes of people who find their economic world turned upside down as industries and economic ways of life they thought unchangeable begin to die and wither away.  The resulting angst and financial distress are causing convulsions across the developed world, especially in rural areas that have not embraced and/or been able to change see their social and economic reality crumble.  The first glimpse of the danger posed by the phenomenon was the British Brexit vote that was sold to many on the deliberate lie that the exit from the European Union would allow the recapture of a glorious past.  The reality is that Brexit will constitute a form of economic suicide for many Britons, especially those in rural areas.  Next we saw the convulsion in the United States that put the thoroughly corrupt and unfit Donald Trump in the White House.  Now, we are seeing convulsions in France where those left out of the new economic model are violently protesting.  I totally understand the fear and anxiety of those reacting to change, but trying to resist the inevitable is not the answer and, indeed, threatens long term economic and political stability - and sets the stage for dangerous demagogues - as a column in the New York Times notes.  Here are excerpts:

Ever since World War II, the liberal global order that has spread more freedom and prosperity around the world than at any other time in history has been held up by two pillars: the United States of America and the United Nations of Europe, now known as the European Union.

Both of these centers of free markets, free people and free ideas are being shaken today by rural and beyond-the-suburbs insurgencies of largely white working-poor and anxious middle classes, which have not generally benefited from the surges in globalization, immigration and technology that have lifted superstar cities like London, Paris and San Francisco and their multicultural populations.

Having just seen the shocking sight of Parisian stores boarded up right before Christmas to protect against rioting along the Champs-Élysées by some of France’s yellow-vested protesters; after being told in Rome a few days earlier that Italy, a founding member of the E.U., could conceivably shuck off both the E.U. and the euro one day under its new bizarre far-left/far-right governing coalition; after watching Britain become paralyzed over how to commit economic suicide by leaving the E.U.; and after watching President Trump actually cheer for the breakup of the E.U. rather than for its good health, it is obvious to me that we’re at a critical hinge of history.

The core challenge for both the U.S. and the E.U. is the same: These rapid accelerations in technology and globalization have brought many more immigrants into many more remote corners of their societies — public housing in Paris today is dominated by immigrants — at the same time as many long-frozen social mores have changed — like acceptance of gay marriage and transgender rights — and as average work no longer returns an average wage that can sustain an average middle-class lifestyle.

The middle classes that powered the growth of the U.S. and the E.U. in the 20th century were built on something called a “high-wage, middle-skilled job.” But robotics and artificial intelligence and outsourcing and Chinese imports have wiped out a lot of middle-skilled routine white-collar and blue-collar work.

Now there are high-wage, high-skilled jobs and low-wage, low-skilled jobs. But high-wage, middle-skilled jobs are vanishing, leaving a considerable cohort of people with stagnant incomes and burning resentments at the globalized city slickers who they think look down at them and have mastered the nonroutine skills required for a high-wage job today.

When you simultaneously challenge all these things that anchor people — their sense of home, their job security, their prospects for growth and the social norms that, for better or worse, defined their lives — and then amp it all up with social networks, you can get a really ferocious blowback, as France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, saw across his country.

It is going to take extraordinary leadership for the U.S., Britain and the E.U. to come up with a strategy for these grievances.

It has to balance the need for economic growth and redistribution, the need to take care of those who have been left behind without burdening future generations, the need for free-flowing borders to attract new talent and ideas, and the need to prevent people from feeling like strangers in their own homes.

But that leadership is not present. I get why a slim majority of U.K. citizens voted for Brexit — as it was sold to them. They were told they could curb all the stuff they didn’t like — such as a flood of 2.2 million foreign E.U. workers — and still keep all the stuff they liked — mainly Britain’s free access to the E.U. market — and give up nothing. But it was all a lie.

And to now watch the Conservative Party hacks who pushed that lie, led by Boris Johnson, continue to demand that their prime minister deliver this fantasy Brexit in the face of the reality that it’s impossible — and in the face of how bad even the second-best option will be — is to watch a once-sane country write a suicide note in a moment of irrationality and then argue endlessly over how to carry it out — death by hanging, poison or a gunshot to the head. They’ve got to reconsider. Disconnecting in a connected world is nuts.

Macron, by contrast, dared to do the right things to unlock growth in France, at the right time, “but he did not understand the difference between being right and doing it right,” a French economist, Ludovic Subran, told me. And he did not understand how his policies differently affected “the beer drinkers and the wine drinkers.”

Macron pushed through four vital structural fixes that fostered growth: pro-investment tax reforms, reduced pensions for the bloated railway union, relaxed labor rules to make it easier to fire and hire workers, and big new public investments in skills and education for the most disadvantaged.

To save his presidency, a shellshocked Macron busted his budget and canceled the fuel tax hike, raised the minimum wage by 100 euros ($114) a month and scrapped a planned tax on pensions under 2,000 euro ($2,272) per month. But because the Yellow Vests have no leader, no one knows what happens next.

“France today has a leader with no followers and an opposition with no leader,” said U.S. foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.

And the reason that matters is France and Germany were always the two adults whose partnership and adherence to the E.U. budgets and standards were the cement that held the whole E.U. pillar together.

I think the countries that will thrive in this era are the ones that have the most nimble cities, with the most nimble local leaders, who build adaptive coalitions of businesses, educators and social entrepreneurs, who can compete locally, regionally, nationally and globally.

In this world, highly centralized countries will fare much worse than decentralized ones. That’s the real shift France has to make, and, if it can’t, watch out for falling pillars. France matters.

Dominique Moïsi, one of France’s top foreign policy analysts, put it to me like this: At a time when America, which was always the European Union’s life insurance policy against predatory threats from the East and was the world champion of democracy, begins to withdraw from the world; when Russia returns with a vengeance to global politics; when Germany turns inward and Italy rebels against E.U. spending limits and moves closer to autocratic Russia; when so many roads now lead to Beijing; and when the U.K. is hellbent on suicide, “suddenly what happens in France goes beyond France. We are the last barrier protecting the European idea. If Macron fails, it can bring the end of Europe.”

Frighteningly, lurking among those feeling dispossessed is the same sort of nationalism and xenophobia that gave rise to WWI and WWII.  All that is lacking for now is a dangerous demagogue ready to light the fuse. 

Upward Mobility is Now a Myth in America

For many Americans it has been taken as gospel that upward mobility is the norm in America and that each generation can expect to achieve a higher status than that of their parents.  Perhaps that was true once upon at time, but it is no longer the case except in increasingly rare instances.  Indeed, a number of studies have found that Europe - derided as "Old Europe" by many "conservatives" - offers younger generations more chances at upward mobility than can now be anticipated in America. Now, downward mobility is what terrifies even middle class and upper middle class families. What happened?  A number of things, not the least of which has been decades of Republican warfare against labor unions, state right to work laws, and policies that enable big corporations to reap huge profits while workers are treated as disposable and easily replaceable trash.  Wages have stagnated even as the cost of living has soared.  Hardest impacted are Milennials who even with college degrees often cannot secure high paying jobs.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the growing myth of upward social mobility in today's America.  Here are some highlights:

It’s an axiom among many Americans that each future generation will live better than its predecessor. New technologies, greater efficiencies and a can-do spirit will reward us with higher living standards. There might be periodic stumbles, but the long-term trajectory is up. And the people most guaranteed to enjoy this bountiful future are the children of today’s upper-middle class.

That’s the conventional wisdom. Ditch it.

If you are an upper-middle-class parent, as I am, you must have noticed that the real world isn’t playing according to script. Among many young Americans, there is downward mobility. The children aren’t achieving what they (and their parents) expected. Even when they have (and many have), the gains could be eroded in the future. The trajectory is not inevitably up. Parents worry about their children’s fate.

Partly, this reflects the memory of the 2007-2009 Great Recession and its huge job losses. But it’s more than that. Compared with their elders, many younger Americans are doing worse. Despite today’s strong economy, they’re falling behind.

 

We know this from an important study by Raj Chetty and fellow economists from Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley.  . . . .

 

What they reported is fascinating. About 90 percent of children born in 1940 ultimately exceeded their parents’ incomes. That is, almost everybody. . . . . However, for children born in 1970, only 61 percent earned more than their parents, and for those born in 1980, only 50 percent did.

 

That’s a sea change. It suggests that we’re already at the point where many in the present and next generations of younger Americans won’t live as well as their predecessors. If current trends continue, that certainly will be true.

You can see the consequences among millennials, those born from 1981 to 1996. Their squeezed incomes have forced them to rearrange their lives. They’re marrying later, buying homes later, having children later and — to save money — living longer with their parents. What’s also surprising is that the biggest losers seem to be the children of the middle and upper-middle classes, precisely those who are supposedly most protected against adverse changes, . . . .

“This seems to have become steadily harder to achieve for those born into middle-class families in particular from 1950 onward.”

Their explanation is simple. Those in middle and upper-middle classes have more to lose than, say, the poor. The incomes of the poor can’t drop much lower; indeed, with small gains, they can pass their parents’.

The result: The higher the parents’ incomes, the less likely that their children will match them. This is even true for the richest 1 percent of families, says economist Aparna Mathur of the American Enterprise Institute.

Just what has caused the slowdown in incomes is a tangled tale with the usual suspects: poor schools that produce poor workers; income inequality that stifles consumption spending; weak housing construction; inadequate innovation;  . . . .

[T]he broad trends seem reliable. The paradox is apparent. Today’s strong economy notwithstanding, there’s an underlying worry about the future.

Economic anxiety is increasingly an equal-opportunity affliction. No one can escape it. The poor worry about staying poor. The lower-middle class worries about paying bills or losing jobs. Now upper-middle class parents have joined the crowd, because their own well-being is often judged by how well their children are doing. That is the stubborn source of their angst.

New York Daily News Resoundingly Endorses Clinton

As readers may recall, Bernie Sanders' interview with the New York Daily News editorial board was more or less a disaster and showed that once Sanders wanders from his favorite sound bites about breaking up the biggest banks, he suddenly is weak on policy and details.  After Sanders' fiasco interview, it's not exactly surprising that the Daily News opted to endorse Hillary Clinton for the presidential primary in New York next Tuesday.  Here are highlights from the endorsement:

Despite the addition of an overly impressive-sounding 14 million jobs and a halving of the unemployment rate over the past six years, American businesses are generating far fewer positions than needed.

Too many are part-time or low-wage. Salaries are largely stagnant. At near-record proportions, millions of American adults have simply checked out of the labor force.

In real and painful terms, families have gotten the shaft. Take the typical household — the one whose paychecks are dead center. In 1999, that family pulled in $57,843. By 2014, its income had fallen to $53,657 — a real-dollars drop of $4,186 a year that could have been spent for housing, medical bills, college tuition, retirement saving and you name it.

Still worse, the middle class is steadily withering. Four decades ago, the backbone of the U.S.A. commanded almost two-thirds of the national income. Today, it clings to just 43% while the top tier has roared ahead to claiming almost half, along with wealth that is fully seven times larger than the holdings of the entire middle class.

At this severe breakpoint, the central challenge confronting the next President is clear: She or he must ignite and rebalance the United States economy in favor of the many while also extending an extra helping hand to ease burdens that have grown too heavy for some.

On April 19, New York Democrats will have unusual say over the party’s nominee. They have in Clinton a superprepared warrior realist. They have in opponent Bernie Sanders a fantasist who’s at passionate war with reality. By choosing Clinton, Empire State Dems would powerfully signal that the party has gotten real about achieving long-sought goals.

Clinton is unsparingly clear-eyed about what’s wrong with America while holding firm to what’s right with America.

She fully understands the toll that adverse economic forces have taken on the country.

She is supremely knowledgeable about the powers a President can wield to lift fortunes in need of lifting.

She possesses the strength and the shrewdness to confront the tough politics of advancing an ambitious Democratic agenda in the White House.

Still more, she is a cauldron-tested globalist who had the spine to give Obama a thumb’s up for taking out Osama Bin Laden and who is far the wiser about the use of American power, having served as secretary of state and seen the consequences of the war in Iraq.

These truths about America’s most well-known public figure are long past debating among Democrats, above all in New York, the state Clinton represented in the U.S. Senate.

Here then the moment has arrived to reckon, instead, with truths about Sanders and his programs:

Subjected to meaningful scrutiny for the first time, the senator from Vermont proved utterly unprepared for the Oval Office while confirming that the central thrusts of his campaign are politically impossible.

America's Shrinking Middle Class

On the campaign trail this political season one hears much of about the decline of America's middle class and what should be done to stop the financial hemorrhaging and slide of many from once somewhat comfortable middle class status.  As the image above shows, out of twenty one (21) advanced countries in the world, America now places last in terms of the percentage of the national wealth that it holds.   Things did not used to be this way.  The irony is that the Republican solution is more of the very policies that have so ravaged the middle class: continued attacks on labor unions, efforts to slash the social safety net, massive wealth transfers to the 1% and corporations, and opposition to increasing the minimum wage.  Yet, through appeals to religious extremism and racism, too many Americans are duped into voting for those who are their true threat.  A piece in Business Insider looks at the bleak picture. Here are excerpts:

A study from the Pew Research Center in December showed that middle-class Americans are no longer in the majority. Whereas in 1971 middle class Americans totaled 80 million, and lower- and upper-income classes combined equated to 51.6 million, the 2015 data looks far different. As of last year, 120.8 million adults were in the middle class but this figure now takes a back seat to the 121.3 million combined lower- and upper-income households. Aggregate wealth for middle-class households is also shrinking according to Pew's research, from 62% of all wealth in 1970 to just 43% as of 2014. 

However, one report released last year highlighted a middle class statistics so shocking that you'll probably do a double-take.

The 2015 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report is now in its sixth year of examining and analyzing wealth across the world in order to get a better understanding of wealth creation, consumption, saving, and asset allocation. Every year Credit Suisse picks a specific wealth topic to focus on, and in 2015 it was the middle class.

Now here's where things get interesting . . . Credit Suisse also looked at what percentage of wealth the middle-class comprised within a country. Of the 21 countries individually examined . . . As a percentage of total country wealth, the U.S. middle class accounted for the lowest share of wealth among developed countries, such as Germany and France, as well as emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil.

Why do U.S. households have so little net wealth relative to the total wealth of the country as a whole? It looks to be a number of factors at play.

First, the housing bubble from late last decade really sapped the net worth out of middle-class households. Although home prices have recovered from their lows, some areas have recovered slower than others. The housing price collapse is still fresh in many Americans' minds, and many fear overreaching on home prices even in today's growing economy.

Secondly, access to credit is arguably easier in the U.S. than in many other regions of the world. During the housing boom in the mid-2000s, this was a great way for middle-class families to grow their wealth. However, the housing bubble, combined with high debt levels, have chipped away at middle-class household wealth.

A third issue? Stagnant wage growth. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income has actually dropped by roughly $5,000 since 1999 to a median of $51,017 as of 2012. Pew Research pointed out that in spite of nominal wage growth of 727% between 1964 and 2014, in constant 2014 dollars (meaning when taking inflation into account) real wage growth has totaled just 7.8% over 50 years. College tuition, medical care, and even fuel costs have risen at a faster pace, thus diminishing the buying power of the middle class.

Fourth, there's quite an income gap between the richest Americans and the middle class in the United States. According to CNN, the U.S. has 42% of the world's millionaires, and basically half (49%) of all people with $50 million or more in assets. 

Finally, near record-low lending rates aren't helping. The middle class, which was hammered by the stock market decline during the Great Recession, has few avenues of safety to turn to with CD and money market rates losing to an already reduced inflation rate.

The piece goes on and looks at things middle class families can try to do to improve their circumstances, but sadly fails to look at the systemic problems and failed policies that are accelerating the economic and financial downfall of the American middle class.

The Killing of Middle America

I frequently note that the Republican Party has turned duping working class whites into voting against their own best financial and social interest into an art form.   The GOP wants to kill unions - the cornerstone of Middle America's financial security in the 1950's through at least part of the 1970's - completely, to slash the social safety net, kill efforts to raise the minimum wage, slash regulations so that large corporations and businesses can loot the economy even more thoroughly, and, of course, give massive tax cuts to the wealthy.  The result of the GOP agenda is literally killing less educated middle class whites who are seeing longevity fall.   A piece in Salon looks at the phenomenon and the slow suicide these people are committing by allowing themselves to be duped through plays on religion, race and other prejudices to vote for their real enemies.  Like the author, I have lost friends who refuse to see that their own so-called conservatism is destroying their future.  Here are column highlights: 

I have a friend I grew up with in white, working class rural Nevada. He was one of the coolest guys I knew, and I admired him. We reconnected a few years ago, and he has become a rightwing warrior, filled with rage and spouting a startling amount of hate for Mexicans, Muslims, the government and most especially Barack Obama. He has advanced little in his career, and because of my public embrace of liberalism, we aren’t friends anymore. I still check his Facebook page on occasion, because I want to understand what happened to him, and what happened to people like him, with whom I share a common past, but a very different present.

A recent, shocking study has laid bare the cost of his (and many others) nonstop, futile outrage. Middle-aged, white people between ages 45 and 54, and specifically those with a high school education or less, have seen increased sickness and early death. This is the only demographic to see this kind of increase in mortality anywhere in the first world. They are dying sooner than they should in a merciless war they’ve declared on themselves.

The much-covered study has generated plenty of chattering among fancy people about underlying causes, from economics to failing masculinity, demographics and divorce, to a growing powerlessness among the white working class, but I think most of the answers have failed to nail it. Middle-aged white America is reaping the fruit of two decades of outrage and hate aimed at minority groups, government programs, unions and anyone who dares to point out the dysfunction of “wholesome, Christian” America. They vote against any program that aims to tackle our social or financial problems as a society, instead opting for the same bootstrap, libertarian, anti-government rhetoric that has failed us since the days of Ronald Reagan. In short, they are committing suicide en masse via the voting booth.

[T]he elevated death rates are being driven by a small subset of the white working class.  . . . . There is no better example of extremism and hopelessness of the white working class than the current standard bearer in the GOP primary. Donald Trump leads with less-educated, working-class white people—the same group that is driving the increased mortality overall. Like a half empty bottle of Scotch, they are reaching for Trump out of desperation, outrage and xenophobia, because they have no idea what else to do. Their jobs are gone, wages are flat and the very idea of building a middle class life with a high school education is folly these days. Thus they have turned to ever more extreme rightwing politics, and with every win things only get worse.

The saddest part is working class America benefits the most from an activist, effective and liberal government, something they fight hardest against.  . . . . It’s not all their fault. They’ve been fed a steady stream of total nonsense that both enrages and distracts them from reality. . . . . From coffee cups at Starbucks to the removal of Confederate Flags to Syrian refugees, it doesn’t even matter so long as we fit in our two minutes worth of hate. It’s all an elaborate stage production, manufactured by Fox News, talk radio and rightwing politicians, that fills the lives of the working class with terrorists, feminist, atheists and gay people, convenient groups used to distract from who is really screwing them over this week. The votes of the working class have been neutralized or co-opted with tidy scapegoats, the Second Amendment, Jesus and white victimhood.

As a voting bloc white America turned the reins of society over to angry assholes, out-of-control corporations and pandering politicians thinking their community would be spared, but once the beast was unleashed, it was never going to be satisfied.

Jeb Bush and the GOP's Lazy Worker Dogma

Thankfully, Jeb Bush's statement that American workers need to "work longer hours" to improve their financial straits remains in the news and the target of pundits and economists.  Born with a silver spoon - or perhaps even a gold spoon - in his mouth, Jebbie is utterly clueless about the lives and travails of average Americans.  He's only too happy to jump on the band wagon of GOP dogma that always blames the victims of a system skewed toward the wealthy rather than admit that it is the system that is the problem.  Of course, since Jebbie and those of his ilk benefit from the skewed system, admitting systemic problem is the last thing that he/they want to admit.   A column in the New York Times again looks at just how wrong Jebbie and his plutocrat buddies are in their analysis.  Here are excerpts"

Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in just about every other wealthy country; we are known, among those who study such things, as the “no-vacation nation.” According to a 2009 study, full-time U.S. workers put in almost 30 percent more hours over the course of a year than their German counterparts, largely because they had only half as many weeks of paid leave. Not surprisingly, work-life balance is a big problem for many people.

But Jeb Bush — who is still attempting to justify his ludicrous claim that he can double our rate of economic growth — says that Americans “need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.”

Mr. Bush’s aides have tried to spin away his remark, claiming that he was only referring to workers trying to find full-time jobs who remain stuck in part-time employment. It’s obvious from the context, however, that this wasn’t what he was talking about. The real source of his remark was the “nation of takers” dogma that has taken over conservative circles in recent years — the insistence that a large number of Americans, white as well as black, are choosing not to work, because they can live lives of leisure thanks to government programs.

You see this laziness dogma everywhere on the right. It was the hidden background to Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent remark. It underlay the furious attacks on unemployment benefits at a time of mass unemployment and on food stamps when they provided a vital lifeline for tens of millions of Americans. It drives claims that many, if not most, workers receiving disability payments are malingerers. . . .

It all adds up to a vision of the world in which the biggest problem facing America is that we’re too nice to fellow citizens facing hardship. And the appeal of this vision to conservatives is obvious: it gives them another reason to do what they want to do anyway, namely slash aid to the less fortunate while cutting taxes on the rich.

Given how attractive the right finds the image of laziness run wild, you wouldn’t expect contrary evidence to make much, if any, dent in the dogma.

What Mr. Bush seems to admire most, however, is a more recent book, “Coming Apart,” which notes that over the past few decades working-class white families have been changing in much the same way that African-American families changed in the 1950s and 1960s, with declining rates of marriage and labor force participation.

Some of us look at these changes and see them as consequences of an economy that no longer offers good jobs to ordinary workers. This happened to African-Americans first, as blue-collar jobs disappeared from inner cities, but has now become a much wider phenomenon thanks to soaring income inequality. Mr. Murray, however, sees the changes as the consequence of a mysterious decline in traditional values

The point is that Mr. Bush’s clumsy call for longer work hours wasn’t a mere verbal stumble. It was, instead, an indication that he stands firmly on the right side of the great divide over what working American families need.

There’s now an effective consensus among Democrats — on display in Hillary Clinton’s planned Monday speech on the economy — that workers need more help, in the form of guaranteed health insurance, higher minimum wages, enhanced bargaining power, and more. Republicans, however, believe that American workers just aren’t trying hard enough to improve their situation, and that the way to change that is to strip away the safety net while cutting taxes on wealthy “job creators.”

[W]hile Jeb Bush may sometimes sound like a moderate, he’s very much in line with the party consensus. If he makes it to the White House, the laziness dogma will rule public policy.

Failure of Conservative Economics Should Discredit Their Bankrupt Ideas Forever

As noted in the prior post, the Republicans have no economic policy other than the same failed voodoo economics that have gutted the middle class and shifted obscene amounts of wealth to the super rich.  More of the same failed policies will only intensify the problem and, yes, it worries me that my children's prospects are worse than mine were at a similar age, and mine were worse than those of my parents.  As noted in other posts, upward social mobility is now higher in "Old Europe" than in America.  A piece in Salon argues why the GOP's economic policies are bankrupt and need to be discredited for all time.  Here are highlights:

On April 30, 2012, Edward Conard, a former partner for the financial management company Bain Capital and a multimillionaire who retired at age 51, sat across from Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show,” to promote his new book. Conard smiled and stared intently through his black-rimmed glasses as Jon Stewart, the liberal host of the comedy show, held up his book and described its contents. Conard’s book argued that America’s economy would be stronger if people like Conard were even richer and the country had even higher levels of economic inequality.

Stewart was puzzled by Conard’s argument and joked that it didn’t seem right because inequality in the United States was approaching the level in countries with “kidnapping-based economies,” generating laughter in the audience. 

Tax cuts for the rich and less regulation of business supposedly provide incentives for the wealthy to invest and work more. Enabling “job creators” to get richer helps us all, the theory goes.

Conard’s former boss at Bain, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican Party nominee for president, ran on a platform of supply-side policies, as have virtually all Republicans since Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Fortunately, these flawed ideas are beginning to be challenged. Academics have begun to rethink their views about the decline of the middle class and progressive politicians are finally starting to openly contest the logic underlying supply side after years of failing to do so. It is about time because our economy is suffering deeply from a financial crash caused in large part by high levels of inequality. And though we may not have a kidnapping-based economy, as Stewart joked, the American middle class is so weakened that we are experiencing the kinds of problems that plague less-developed countries, including high levels of societal distrust that make it hard to do business, governmental favors for privileged elites that distort the economy, and fewer opportunities for children of the middle class and the poor to get ahead, wasting vast quantities of human potential.

A strong middle class is not merely the result of a strong economy—as was previously thought—but rather a source of America’s economic growth. Rebuilding the middle class would provide the stable base of consumer demand necessary to increase business investment and job creation. It would also enable the country to fully develop the human capital of its people, increase the social trust that makes transactions possible, and balance political power to produce a government that works for the whole country, not just those at the top.

The United States was founded as a middle-class country. On the eve of the American Revolution, America’s carpenters, shopkeepers, and farmers enjoyed a higher standard of living than workers in other parts of the world. Further, economic inequality was lower in the United States than any place else. In an era of kings and peasants, America’s middle class stood apart.

The strength of America’s middle class ebbed and flowed over time, especially as industrialization took hold. But after World War II, America returned to its roots and built a mass middle class that was the envy of the world, with rapidly rising incomes and decreasing inequality.

Yet, over the past three to four decades, middle-class America has come undone. The American middle class was already hurting when the Great Recession struck and is now in deep trouble. While there’s no official definition of the middle class, it’s not hard to see that it is in decline. By most every measure, most Americans are struggling.

First, there is the basic level of income earned by the typical American. Median household income—meaning half make more and half make less—was lower in 2013 than it was in 1989. This means that middle-class households now earn less than they did two decades ago.

The miniscule gains that households have made have largely come because women have increasingly entered the workforce—meaning families are working longer hours, as they run faster and faster to stay in place. Indeed, the hourly wage earned by a typical man is less than it was in 1973.

Median incomes for male workers now in their thirties are about 12 percent lower than the income was for their fathers’ generation at the same age.

While incomes have been stagnant for most Americans, the cost of middle-class basics like healthcare and gas have risen much faster than inflation, and some basics like housing and college have risen at double the rate of inflation over the past four decades. It costs a lot more to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, but no matter their efforts most families have not been able to earn much more income. Not surprisingly, debt levels have jumped sharply—the average debt of middle-class families has nearly doubled since 1983.

In contrast to the middle class and the poor, incomes of the rich, especially the very rich, have grown by astronomical amounts over the past three decades: in 2007, the year the Great Recession started, the top 0.01 percent, the richest one in ten thousand, earned in today’s dollars the equivalent of about $38.8 million, compared to $6.4 million per year in 1979.

The rich now make so much more than the middle class because they captured the vast majority of the economy’s gains over recent decades. The share of the nation’s income going to the top 1 percent has approximately doubled over the past three decades, while the share of income going to the middle 60 percent of income earners has fallen precipitously and is now stagnating near the lowest level ever recorded since the government began keeping track of the statistic.  

After 30 years of political dominance, it is obvious that supply-side economics has failed in a number of ways and is thus vulnerable to a challenge from middle out. Supply side helped fuel the Great Recession of 2007–2009 by destabilizing consumer demand and encouraging the deregulation of Wall Street—costing the United States 8.7 million jobs and trillions of dollars in reduced economic growth.

[G]rowth was weaker after President George W. Bush cut taxes for higher earners than it was after President Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich.

Moreover, trickle-down’s supposed growth mechanisms haven’t occurred the way the theory predicted. Savings, investment, employment, and productivity didn’t increase after trickle-down policies were enacted, as a host of studies have shown. And budget deficits skyrocketed when tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves, contrary to the claims of trickle-down proponents.

There's considerably more to the article that deserves a full read.  The take away?  That voodoo economics theories need to have a wooden stack driven through their heart.  And through the heart of the GOP.

The 99% and American Insecurity

As the Republican Party's presidential candidates begin to disingenuously talk about their "concern for working Americans," "American workers," and/or the middle class, they conveniently ignore the reality that their party's policies have exacerbated the dire straits that most Americans face.  Worse yet, they and their wealthy supporters have no clue how most Americans live and just how financially insecure most in the 99% are in fact.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reality and the clueless mindset of the wealthy.  Here are some excerpts:

America remains, despite the damage inflicted by the Great Recession and its aftermath, a very rich country. But many Americans are economically insecure, with little protection from life’s risks. They frequently experience financial hardship; many don’t expect to be able to retire, and if they do retire have little to live on besides Social Security.

Many readers will, I hope, find nothing surprising in what I just said. But all too many affluent Americans — and, in particular, members of our political elite — seem to have no sense of how the other half lives. Which is why a new study on the financial well-being of U.S. households, conducted by the Federal Reserve, should be required reading inside the Beltway.

Before I get to that study, a few words about the callous obliviousness so prevalent in our political life.

I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. According to the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of conservatives believe that the poor “have it easy” thanks to government benefits; only 1 in 7 believe that the poor “have hard lives.” And this attitude translates into policy. What we learn from the refusal of Republican-controlled states to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the bill, is that punishing the poor has become a goal in itself, one worth pursuing even if it hurts rather than helps state budgets.

Take, as a prime example, positioning on Social Security. For decades, a declared willingness to cut Social Security benefits, especially by raising the retirement age, has been almost a required position — a badge of seriousness — for politicians and pundits who want to sound wise and responsible. After all, people are living longer, so shouldn’t they work longer, too? 

Meanwhile, the reality is that living longer in our ever-more-unequal society is very much a class thing: life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot among the affluent, but hardly at all in the bottom half of the wage distribution, that is, among those who need Social Security most. . . . A majority of Americans over 65 get more than half their income from Social Security, and more than a quarter are almost completely reliant on those monthly checks.

Washington still has no clue about the realities of life for those not yet elderly. Which is where that Federal Reserve study comes in. . . . . 3 in 10 nonelderly Americans said they had no retirement savings or pension, and that the same fraction reported going without some kind of medical care in the past year because they couldn’t afford it. Almost a quarter reported that they or a family member had experienced financial hardship in the past year.And something that even startled me: 47 percent said that they would not have the resources to meet an unexpected expense of $400 — $400! They would have to sell something or borrow to meet that need, if they could meet it at all.

[W]hile things could be worse, they could also be better. There is no such thing as perfect security, but American families could easily have much more security than they have. All it would take is for politicians and pundits to stop talking blithely about the need to cut “entitlements” and start looking at the way their less-fortunate fellow citizens actually live.

What continually strikes me is that the GOP and much of its base claims to support and value Christian beliefs, yet in fact, they don't give a damn about others, especially the poor and unfortunate.  Indeed, they are modern day Pharisees.  Hence why I am no longer a Republican and why in many ways I don't want to be called a Christian.  Christianity as defined and practiced by the far right is truly something foul and ugly.  

The Latest Bush Lie: Jeb's a "Reform Conservative"

The country has still not fully recovered from the disaster of the last Bush presidency and yet we see another member of the Bush clan seeking to hold the nation's highest office.  One has to wonder why Americans are running screaming from the mere thought of another Bush in the White House.  Now, Jeb Bush is describing himself as a "reform conservative" much as his idiot brother sought to call himself a "compassionate conservative" - compassionate that is unless you are gay, a woman, minority and, of course an Iraqi civilian. Slate looks at Jeb's effort to dupe Americans yet again.  Here are highlights:

On Wednesday, [Jeb] Bush addressed the Detroit Economic Club, in what many saw as a coming-out party for his nascent presidential campaign. In the wind-up to the speech, Dana Bash and Jeremy Diamond of CNN reported that Bush would offer up something called “reform conservatism,” which they described as similar to the “compassionate conservatism” of his older brother, George W. Bush. For reasons that will soon become clear, the comparison made me wince a bit. I couldn’t exactly blame Bash and Diamond for not being fully up to speed on reform conservatism, as the term is used almost exclusively by a handful of nerds.

According to Davis, the really distinctive thing about the reformocons is that they prefer middle-class tax cuts over the rate cuts for the rich favored by many supply-siders. Last summer, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne offered an extended critique in Democracy Journal. For Dionne, reform conservatism is the anti–Tea Party. Whereas the Tea Party represents (in his view) “extreme opposition to government,” reformocons are (also in his view) people that the left can do business with, if only they would acknowledge how much they have in common with Barack Obama. 

So what do the reformocons believe, exactly? Are they the GOP’s answer to the New Democrats, a moderate faction devoted to making their party more electable by dragging it to the center? Or are they clever marketers trying to rebrand Reaganism for the 21^st century? The simplest answer is that reform conservatives are garden-variety free-market conservatives who believe that a well-designed safety net and high-quality public services are essential parts of making entrepreneurial capitalism work. This separates them from more emphatically libertarian conservatives for whom the first priority is to eliminate as many government programs as possible.

Instead of defending the welfare state in its current form, reformocons look at the goals of programs like Social Security and Medicare and then try to find better, fairer, more cost-effective ways of achieving them. They believe a few other things as well. To the extent possible, social programs that help those who fall on hard times should be geared toward helping them achieve economic self-sufficiency, rather than letting them become permanently dependent. The tax code should encourage savings and investment. 

Though Bush spoke movingly about the challenges facing the tens of millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, he never really reckoned with the fact that America’s economic woes began long before Barack Obama became president and that the bloated government he rightly criticizes is very much a bipartisan failure. What I really wanted was for Bush to demonstrate that he understood why so many Americans had lost their faith in the Republican Party, and why he deserved their trust. He failed to do that. Instead of offering an agenda worthy of a future president, he offered compassion for those who’ve missed out on the fruits of America’s sluggish economic growth and a series of minor tweaks that are better suited to a governor or a mayor than to the next president. To be the candidate of reform, he’ll have to do better.

My reformocon homework assignment for would-be GOP presidential candidates is simple. Don’t just tell us what you’re against. Tell us what you’re for, and be specific. You don’t like Obamacare? I don’t either. Got anything cheaper that will cover at least as many people? Not a fan of stagnant wages? Neither am I. Walk me through how deregulation or corporate tax reform or a bigger tax benefit for low-wage workers might help. Think our immigration system is broken? Me too! On what basis should we choose who does and does not get to become an American? Republicans have been trying to get by on government-bashing swagger and vague, poll-tested generalities for too long. The time has come to put some meat on the bone.

Don't expect Jeb Bush to deliver what the author asks for.  It's all a ploy so that he and his family can fool the American people yet again. 

Obama to GOP: Put Up or Shut Up on the Middle Class

Over the last 10 years the actions and policies of the Republican Party have been to oppose anything Obama and the Democrats want in order to try to trash Obama.  The result has been that the obstructionist policies of the GOP slowed the economic recovery and killed programs and policies that would have benefited the middle class. Now, as if they have total amnesia as to their past actions, Congressional Republicans are disingenuously claiming to be concerned about the plight of the middle class.  Thankfully, Obama is having none of it and has called themGOP out and demanded that they either out up or shut up.  A piece in Politicususa.com has details.  Here are highlights:

President Obama is putting Republicans on notice. The president told Republicans today that he wanted to see their ideas for helping the middle-class. In other words, it is time for Republicans to put up, or shut up.

The president said:

At a moment when our economy is growing, our businesses are creating jobs at the fastest pace since the 1990s, and wages are starting to rise again, we have to make some choices about the kind of country we want to be.

Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we build an economy where everyone who works hard has a chance to get ahead?

That was the focus of my State of the Union Address – middle-class economics. The idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. 

This week, I will send a budget to Congress that’s built on those values.

The president short remarks contained a challenge to Republicans. Obama wants to know if Republicans have any ideas to help the middle-class. The president will be unveiling his ideas when he releases his budget proposal on Monday. Obama wants to know what the Republicans are going to bring to the table besides their usual chorus of no. Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader McConnell have already shot down the president’s proposed middle-class tax cut. 

The term middle-class has become the new “jobs” buzzword for Republicans. It wasn’t long ago that Republicans thought that they could boost their approval ratings by adding the word jobs into everything they said and did. A plan to cut taxes for the wealthy became a bill to aid job creators.

Obama isn’t going to sit back and let Republicans fill the air with empty talk. The president is challenging Republicans to back up their words with actions. In the days and weeks ahead, President Obama will likely sharpen his language and call out congressional Republicans. His weekly address was a warning shot that Republicans better be ready to put up or shut up when it comes to rebuilding the middle-class.

I suspect we will see/hear a lot of hot air but no actions.  Talk is cheap and that's all the GOP will offer the middle class.

The New Gilded Age: Middle Class Shrinks Further

The GOP policies of aiding the wealthy, blocking funding for infrastructure repairs, and the destruction of labor unions continue to bear fruit and the American middle class continues to shrink.  It's all in keeping with the GOP's apparent desire to bring back the worse aspects of the Gilded Age when the wealthy lived like aristocrats and the rest of us were the peasants and serfs.  The shortsightedness, of course, is that as the middle class shrinks, the purchasing power that drives the overall economy shrinks.  Not that Republicans seem to care given all of the political bribes contributions they receive from wealthy and vulture capitalists.  The New York Times looks at the alarming trend.  Here are highlights:

The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.

Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.

But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom.

The definition here starts at $35,000 — which is about 50 percent higher than the official poverty level for a family of four — and ends at the six-figure mark. Although many Americans in households making more than $100,000 consider themselves middle class, particularly those living in expensive regions like the Northeast and Pacific Coast, they have substantially more money than most people.

However the lines are drawn, it is clear that millions are struggling to hang on to accouterments that most experts consider essential to a middle-class life.

“I would consider middle class to be people who can live comfortably on what they earn, can pay their bills, can set aside something to save for retirement and for kids in college and can have vacations and entertainment,” said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project . . .

Even as the American middle class has shrunk, it has gone through a transformation. The 53 million households that remain in the middle class — about 43 percent of all households — look considerably different from their middle-class predecessors of a previous generation, according to a New York Times analysis of census data.

In recent years, the fastest-growing component of the new middle class has been households headed by people 65 and older. Today’s seniors have better retirement benefits than previous generations. Also, older Americans are increasingly working past traditional retirement age. More than eight million, or 19 percent, were in the labor force in 2013, nearly twice as many as in 2000.

The growing prominence of older people in the middle class reflects, in part, the way Social Security and Medicare — originally set up as safety nets to protect seniors from falling into poverty after retirement — have provided a substantial cushion for them against hard times.

Married couples with children — who make up a category that is shrinking over all — are diminishing even faster as a share of the middle class. In the late 1960s, about 45 percent of all households included married adults and their offspring. But among middle-class households, more than 60 percent had that traditional family arrangement.

Today, married couples with children at home make up just a quarter of households.

The most recent recession put a halt to the advances of even that generally successful group. Its share in the middle class has fallen by three percentage points and the share earning less than $35,000 has increased.

“In the Great Recession, we lost a lot of middle-income jobs and we gained a lot of low-paying jobs,” said Michael R. Strain, resident scholar at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute.

According to a New York Times poll in December, 60 percent of people who call themselves middle class think that if they work hard they will get rich. But the evidence suggests that goal is increasingly out of reach. When middle class people look up, they see the rich getting richer while they spin their wheels.

“The middle has basically stayed the same; it hasn’t improved,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard University.

What is the most frustrating to me is how the GOP continues to use religion and racism to sucker idiot voters to vote for Republicans even as the GOP pushes policies that will harm those very same voters.  Thus, if one wants upward social mobility, nowadays, one needs to move to Europe.