The Trump Wage Slump - Big Business is Part of the the Problem

Following up on the previous post, two columns in the New York Times look at the problem facing far too many Americans: stagnant wage grow coupled with rising prices that combined put them in a worse financial situation with each passing month and year. The Trump/GOP tax cut did little for most working Americans and the pro-big business policies of Congressional Republicans and Trump/Pence offer no relief in sight. The first column looks at the wage stagnation problem. Here are excerpts:

Paul Ryan tried to brag about the economy last week, and it didn’t go so well. . . . If the Trump economy were so wonderful, why would the speaker of the House feel the need to traffic in disingenuousness? Because the Trump economy isn’t actually so wonderful. For most Americans, it is downright mediocre, and it has deteriorated somewhat since President Trump took office, despite the healthy G.D.P. and unemployment statistics. . . . hourly wages are suffering through a Trump slump.

[Trump] deserves some blame for it. Worst of all, he is doing virtually nothing improve the situation, instead enacting policies that will ultimately hurt workers’ ability to earn a decent paycheck.

[N]ominal wages — that is, the numbers people see in their paychecks, before taking inflation into account — are growing. . . . Over the past year, the average hourly nominal wage has risen 2.7 percent.

There are two problems, though. First, 2.7 percent isn’t a great growth rate for nominal wages. It was rarely so slow in the entire second half of the 20th century, for example. These days, though, most workers don’t receive their fair share of economic output. An outsize share instead flows to corporate profits and the rich.

Second, nominal wages by themselves can’t buy a higher standard of living. Prices matter, too. When the prices of good and services are rising faster than nominal wages, people end up with less buying power. And that is exactly what’s happening now.Add it all up — faster inflation plus mediocre nominal-wage growth — and you get a stagnation in real wages. Welcome to the Trump wage slump.

[T]here is no reason to think that most Americans are on the cusp of truly healthy pay increases. They face too many obstacles: Companies that are larger and more powerful than they used to be; unions that are weaker; and, thanks in large part to Trump, a federal government that keeps siding against workers, be it on overtime pay, work rules, health care costs, for-profit-college scams or tax cuts.

Right now, Trump is presiding over precisely the wage growth that he deserves: zero.

The second column looks at the growing flirtation with socialism by some who have been left behind by the GOP/Trump give all the gifts to the rich and big business agenda.  If big business finds such flirtation disturbing, they need to look in the mirror as to a good part of the cause.  Here are excerpts:

I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.

You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.

Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.

And so it is here. As I noted recently in The Daily Beast, the kind of capitalism that has been practiced in this country over the last few decades has made socialism look far more appealing, especially to young people. Ask yourself: If you’re 28 like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congressional candidate who describes herself as a democratic socialist, what have you seen during your sentient life?

You’ve seen the United States go from being a country that your parents — or if you’re 28, more likely your grandparents — described as a place where life got better for every succeeding generation to a place where for millions of people, quite possibly including you, that’s no longer true.

As that happened, you’ve seen the rich get richer, and you’ve perhaps noticed that the government’s main response to this has been to keep cutting their taxes . . . . You witnessed the financial meltdown of 2008, caused by big banks betting against themselves. Capitalists might want to consider how all that looked to a young person who came from a working-class family and who probably knows someone who lost a job or even his house, while some of the bankers who helped create the mess walked away with golden parachutes, like that of Countrywide Financial’s Angelo Mozilo, which The Times valued at $88 million. . . . .You’ve watched corporations horde profits, buy back their stock and not reinvest in their workers the way they once did as they move jobs to Central America and Bangladesh.

Back in the days when our economy just grew and grew, we had a government and a capitalist class that invested in our people and their future — in the Interstate highways, the community colleges, the scientific research, the generous federal grants for transportation and regional development.

And, funny thing, during all this time, socialism didn’t have much appeal.

So, back now to our 28-year-old. She was born in 1990. She will probably remember, in the late ’90s, her parents feeling pretty good about things — median household income did go up under Bill Clinton more than they had under any president in a long time, even more than under Ronald Reagan. But ever since, the median income picture has been much spottier, hardly increasing at all in inflation-adjusted dollars over 18 long years. And those incomes at the top have shot to the heavens.

So if you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.

But I understand completely why it’s happening. Given what’s been going on in this country, it couldn’t not have happened. And if you’re a capitalist, you’d better try to understand it, too — and do something to address the very legitimate grievances that propelled it.

Sadly, I suspect the last thing the vulture capitalists

Trump/Pence's Ultimate Betrayal of Its Base

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman hits a home run in a column in the New York Times that looks at the ways the Trump/Pence regime - and the Republican Party as a whole - has betrayed and continues to betray its white working class base.  A base that seems willing to believe any lie so long as its racial animosities are pandered to. The latest betrayal is the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.  While Kavanaugh may provide an anti-gay, pro-Christofascist vote on the Court to the delight of evangelical Christians, he will likely do nothing but harm them economically and help lock in the wage stagnation that has harmed so many working Americans even as corporate profits have soared and the wealthy have claimed a growing percentage of all wealth in America.  Here is Krugman's column:

By now, it’s almost a commonplace to say that Trump has systematically betrayed the white working class voters who put him over the top. He ran as a populist; he’s governed as an orthodox Republican, with the only difference being the way he replaced racial dog-whistles with raw, upfront racism.

Many people have made this point with respect to the Trump tax cut, which is so useless to ordinary workers that Republican candidates are trying to avoid talking about it. The same can be said about health care, where Democrats are making Trump’s assault on the Affordable Care Act a major issue while Republicans try to change the subject.

But I think we should be seeing more attention devoted to the way Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court fits into this picture. The Times had a good editorial on Kavanaugh’s anti-worker agenda, but by and large the news analyses I’ve seen focus on his apparently expansive views of presidential authority and privilege.

I agree that these are important in the face of a lawless president with authoritarian instincts. But the business and labor issues shouldn’t be neglected. Kavanaugh is, to put it bluntly, an anti-worker radical, opposed to every effort to protect working families from fraud and mistreatment.

The most spectacular example is his opinion that Sea World owed no liability for a killer whale attack that killed one of its workers, because she should have known the risks. He has declared the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps control the financial fraud against working families that played a major role in the 2008 crisis, unconstitutional. He’s taken an extremely expansive view of the rights of business to suppress union organizing.

This is all, by the way, the opposite of populism. The public strongly supports worker protections. The ongoing campaign to take them away is an act of conservative elites, people who have made their careers by carrying water for business interests, and is being implemented in effect by stealth under the noses of voters who thought Trump was on their side.

And this betrayal matters much more for workers than, say, Trump’s trade bluster. There’s growing evidence that wage stagnation in America – the very stagnation that angers Trump voters — isn’t being driven by impersonal forces like technological change; to an important extent it’s the result of political changes that have weakened workers’ bargaining power. If Trump manages to install Kavanaugh, he’ll help institutionalize these anti-worker policies for decades to come.

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 GOP Adds Class Warfare to the Mix

Other than bellicose demagoguery that has played to the religious extremism and racism that now defines much of the Republican Party base, for at least the last five years, the GOP has offered little to its rabid grassroots base.  No alternative to Obamacare has been offered, no plan to rebuild the nation's infrastructure has been unveiled, and other than warmed over trickle down economics from the 1980's no proposals have been offered to address the stagnation and/or decline in working class wages even as the wealthy has seen their incomes skyrocket.  A piece in the Washington Post suggests that the GOP's failure to deliver anything for the non-wealthy is in large part the cause of Donald Trump's popularity.  Here are column highlights:

Trump, the billionaire, is the GOP’s working-class hero.

Among Republicans without college degrees, Trump had 46 percent to 12 percent for Cruz, 11 percent for Carson and 8 percent for Rubio. But Republicans with college degrees split very differently: Cruz 22 percent, Carson and Rubio tied at 19 percent, and Trump at 18 percent. This 28-point gap in Trump’s support tells an important story: Republicans may condemn class warfare, but their presidential contest has taken on all the characteristics of a class war.

But Trump’s enduring strength among the most disheartened members of his party — and the divided loyalties of upscale Republicans — suggests that it is wishful thinking for the Republican powers that be to say they are sure he will never be nominated.

But the most striking aspect of Ryan’s speech is that for all its emphasis on progressives relying on old ideas (they “are stuck in the past,” he said) and conservatives supposedly being more in tune with changing times, his arguments were rooted in the nostrums Washington Republicans have been offering for decades. The angry Republican working class rallying to Trump to express its disillusionment with the status quo will find little in Ryan’s homily to make it reconsider.

Republicans are having trouble taking on Trump not only because they welcomed his support in the past and not only because they have often embraced (in a less colorful and direct way) many of the themes he is accenting, but also because they have delivered next to nothing to their loyal white, working-class supporters.

Many of the Trumpians are inclined to blame the troubles they are experiencing on immigration and on those they see as mooching on public assistance. The country’s changing demography angers and frightens many in their ranks.

But how long does Trump have to stay at No. 1 in the Republican polls before establishmentarians in both parties recognize that the underlying economic causes of his supporters’ discontent are legitimate and deserve a response?

The class war is on the GOP’s doorstep, and the party — including Ryan — simply doesn’t know what to do.

Wages Stagnant For 40 Years - But Not Because of American Workers

Jeb Bush thinks that American workers need to work longer hours to increase their stagnant wages. Scott Walker seeks to destroy labor unions so that workers are at the total mercy of their employers, be they private or public.  In fact, most of the Republican presidential candidates support policies that support the creation of a new Gilded Age while throwing average Americans in the gutter despite sound bite lip service to the contrary.  A piece in Think Progress looks at the stagnant wages that have plagued American workers for 40 years even as worker productivity has soared.  The take away?  Wages are stagnant, but not due to the laziness or actions of workers.  Here are excerpts:

Americans keep working harder and producing more economic growth. But they’re not getting rewarded with any extra pay for it, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

After the end of World War II, the country experienced decades of steady economic growth that also translated into steady increases in pay for the workers who were fueling it. As the report’s authors write, “For decades following the end of World War II, inflation-adjusted hourly compensation (including employer-provided benefits as well as wages) for the vast majority of American workers rose in line with increases in economy-wide productivity.” 

But that link was severed starting in 1973. Between then and now, productivity, or the amount of economic output generated by an average hour of work, grew 72.2 percent. On the other hand, pay for the typical worker rose just 9.2 percent. 

Compensation for the median worker, or the person making exactly the middle of compensation, adjusted for inflation, grew just 8.7 percent between 1973 and 2014, or a 0.2 percent annual rate. Yet net productivity grew at a 1.33 percent annual pace in the same time. Things have gotten even worse since 2000: net productivity has grown 21.6 percent since then, yet inflation-adjusted compensation for the median worker grew just 1.8 percent.

What this means is that just 15 percent of the extra growth workers generated between the early 1970s and the present has translated into higher wages and benefits for them. Since 2000, just 8 percent of productivity growth has gone back to workers.

And it means that stagnating wages aren’t workers’ fault. . . . The paper notes that there are three dynamics that can explain the divergence between growth in productivity and growth in wages and benefits: growing inequality in compensation, or skyrocketing pay for those at the top of the economy compared to everyone else; a greater share of income going toward corporate profits and not wages; and the increase in consumer prices that means wages don’t stretch as far. The first two basically indicate growing income inequality, and together they account for more than two-thirds of the divergence between productivity and pay between 1973 and 2014.

[I]ncome inequality has resulted from deliberate government policy choices, “policy decisions made on behalf of those with the most income, wealth, and power that suppressed wage growth.” Research has consistently shown that the government is more responsive to the desires of the rich than everyone else. The policies Mishel points out are those that undercut labor standards, such as allowing unemployment to remain too high, failing to raise the minimum wage, letting overtime protections erode, and the corrosion of collective bargaining rights.

[A]ny proposals that increase economic growth without also finding ways to make sure that growth translates into higher wages won’t benefit the vast majority of Americans. Otherwise, the current break between productivity and pay will simply continue.

Hillary Clinton Offers Her Vision of a "Fairness Economy"

As noted in a prior post, while the Republican 2016 presidential clown car occupants preach an economic/tax plan that will aid the wealthy and vulture capitalists while further harming working Americans, Hillary Clinton has announced her vision for a "fairness economy" where wealth disparities would be less shocking and fewer Americans would be kicked to the gutter by the Republicans and their Christofascist party base.   The New York Times looks at Clinton's proposed economic policy and agenda.  Here are story highlights:

In the most comprehensive policy speech of her presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday presented her vision of a “growth and fairness economy,” an economic agenda intended to lift middle-class wages, expand social services, and increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans to combat a widening gap between rich and poor.

Clinton said “the defining economic challenge of our time” is raising incomes for the vast majority of Americans whose wages have remained virtually stagnant for 15 years as the costs of housing, college, child care and health care have soared.

The widespread feeling that the economic recovery has not benefited large parts of the population has helped frame the 2016 presidential race. But crafting an agenda that addressed income inequality without vilifying the wealthy has been a central challenge of Mrs. Clinton’s early candidacy, and for weeks she pored over policy briefings and academic papers and fielded advice from 200 policy experts who often offered divergent opinions.

Clinton decided to criticize by name three of her potential Republican rivals, adding Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin to the speech in addition to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. And considerable hand-wringing went into deciding how forcefully to speak about criminalizing financial industry executives before an audience made up largely of her Wall Street donors.

In the end, Mrs. Clinton did forcefully denounce fraud and manipulation of currency in the financial sector and said there could be “no justification or tolerance for this kind of criminal behavior,” language that some of her top Wall Street backers had been told of in advance. But Mrs. Clinton also appealed to the private sector and Wall Street to work with government to help lift middle-class wages through long-term investment in employees rather than short-term focus on quarterly results.

That vision may not appease the restless left of the Democratic Party and it may not assuage concerns among moderates and independents that Mrs. Clinton is a tax-and-spend liberal. But aides said the speech — even with all of the disparate voices that had weighed in to draft it — presented the clearest encapsulation yet of what Mrs. Clinton’s economic doctrine would look like, and the way in which it would be both similar to and distinct from the policies of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and President Obama.

[T]he message she will carry throughout the campaign, rested entirely on what economists refer to as “the great wage slowdown,” a problem that has persisted through recent administrations, both Democratic and Republican. It has only worsened as globalization and new technology put added pressures on middle- and low-income earners, and has been exacerbated by the rising costs of housing, education and retirement.

The problem has led to widespread frustration; two-thirds of Americans said they thought the distribution of money and wealth in this country should be more even, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in late May.

In her speech, Mrs. Clinton blamed Republicans, pointing to Mr. Walker, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio, specifically, for “trickle down” policies that “give more wealth to those at the top, by cutting their taxes and letting big corporations write their own rules.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics who has written extensively about inequality and is now an adviser to Mrs. Clinton, said “the speech showed a clear understanding that our economy is not working for most Americans” and that “we need to fundamentally rewrite the rules.”

To that end, Mrs. Clinton called for closing corporate loopholes, eliminating the “carried interest” loophole that allows some financiers to avoid paying millions in income taxes, and expanding the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill.

[S]he stopped short of endorsing policies championed by Mr. Sanders and others in the liberal wing of the party, including breaking up the big banks and a financial transaction tax, or a government fee on the sale or purchase of certain financial assets. 

Clinton did express her concerns about the emergence of a potentially bigger problem, so-called shadow banking, the system of hedge funds and algorithmic traders that has thrived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis with little to no government regulation. “Too many of our major financial institutions are still too complex and too risky,” Mrs. Clinton said. 

[T]he economic vision Mrs. Clinton presented on Monday placed a strong emphasis on the issues she has long advocated, including helping women in the work force by advancing “fair scheduling, paid leave and earned sick days,” providing better access to early childhood education and addressing rising health care costs.

Hillary and the GOP's Missing Economic Plan

One of the things that drives me to distraction is the way in which the Republican Party cynically uses appeals to religious extremism and racism to sucker voters into voting Republican even though the GOP's economic policies are downright harmful to the financial interest of these simple minded voters.  Positions against gays and immigrant bashing lead still too many voters from looking beyond such bigotry to the poisonous policies that are waging war on the middle class and working Americans.  A piece in the New York Review of Books looks at the economic policies backed by would be GOP presidential candidates versus likely positions to be taken by Hillary Clinton or some other Democrat nominee and anyone rational - which, of course now excludes 50% or more of the GOP base - ought to be fleeing the GOP unless they are a member of the 1%.  Here are excerpts:

So here we are, in the protean stages of the 2016 campaign, and already it seems that we can say, with all the requisite qualifiers, that the issues palette should be reasonably favorable to the Democrats. As matters are shaping up so far, the sense of many people I speak to is that the election appears destined to be about the condition of the middle class, the issue of wage stagnation, and the recognition (finally) that the American economy has been working far better for those at the top than for those in the middle or, obviously, on the bottom.

The salient basic numbers are these. Since 1979, compensation for the top 1 percent has grown 138 percent, while median wages have increased just 6.1 percent. Worker productivity has grown 63.5 percent in this time, and if wages had kept pace with productivity, the annual median wage today, instead of being around $35,300, would be $54,400.

All this has been known for a long time, and groups like the liberal Economic Policy Institute have produced dozens of papers documenting the problem. But middle-class wage stagnation, and the inequality that has resulted as compensation at the top has surged, has never been the central economic preoccupation of Washington. It is becoming so now.

This is happening for a number of reasons, some of which have percolated up by design, others by accident. Certainly, President Obama has taken up the theme of middle-class incomes with considerable energy. Various Democratic-minded think tanks in Washington push the notion as well.
Washington seems to have agreed, around the arrival of the New Year, that the recovery is on and that we have entered a new economic phase. A new phase brings a new set of questions, and the one being asked most insistently these days is: Yes, all the indicators are positive, except wages, where growth has remained sluggish. What are we going to do about that?

The Democrats will face their own drama with regard to these economic questions. What will the presumptive nominee Clinton propose along these lines? How bold will she be? Those desperate for Senator Elizabeth Warren to run are petitioning her not only because they adore Warren, but because they fundamentally don’t trust Clinton to embrace aggressive middle-class populist policies. This is a real concern, and Clinton is apparently going to make us all wait for a while, perhaps until the summer, before she starts issuing ideas about policy.

But here’s the difference between Clinton and the Republicans. She, like virtually all Democrats, accepts the basic fact that wages for median workers have been more or less stagnant since 1979. She probably accepts the idea that this stagnation, alongside rising inequality, is the greatest economic challenge we face. She probably accepts the standard set of reasons that economists offer about why this has happened—globalization, technological change, immigration patterns, a decrease in workers’ bargaining power, the rise in high-end compensation, and various federal tax and wage policies. And finally, she probably accepts that the solutions to the problem are chiefly economic solutions—changing tax policy, giving workers greater “voice,” taking steps to ameliorate the negative effects of globalization, and so on.

The extent to which Republicans accept any of this is far from clear. In six recent books by announced or likely GOP presidential contenders—except Paul Ryan, who surely wrote his book thinking about a run but has apparently decided against it—one hardly encounters the word “wages.” In only one of them, Marco Rubio’s American Dreams, is there anything resembling what you’d call a discussion of wage stagnation. This lasts for all of four paragraphs . . .

To the extent that any of them discuss wage stagnation, they discuss it only as yet another blight visited on America by Barack Obama, completely ignoring the longer historical trends.  Even when Republicans acknowledge the wage problem, they don’t see it as resulting from chiefly economic factors. To them, the main culprits are moral decay and culture, notably the decline of the two-parent family—a father and a mother, it nearly goes without saying.

Here is Santorum on how the American Dream is to be restored:

Conservatives are often criticized for their romanticized view of the good old days prior to the culture shock that was the 1960s. Having said that, let’s make no mistake about it—the greatest threat to the average American’s achieving his dream today is a dysfunctional culture. To heal our nation, we must promote the ideals upon which American culture has thrived for over two centuries—ideals based on timeless truths.

When people don’t see structural economic factors as the problem, they’re hardly likely to hit upon plausible economic solutions.

What instead bursts through the verbiage of his book is Ryan’s irritating combination of serene rectitude and almost total lack of self-awareness. A favorite Ryan dyad of recent vintage was “makers and takers,” his phrase to describe those who contribute to society and those who take advantage of federal largesse. He seemed happy about this slogan. But then one day in 2012, a man challenged him: Who are these takers you speak of? “Is it the person who lost their job and is on unemployment benefits? Is it the veteran who served in Iraq and gets their medical care through the VA?” Apparently, none of this had ever occurred to Ryan. . . 

The great conservative preoccupation, as noted, is culture. If you are a candidate and you want the conservative base to lend you its ear, you must thunder that America’s most pressing problem has to do with values.

Carson seems to have loaned his rhetorical axe to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor whose deplorable book God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an extended pander to the resentful, conservative, evangelical, and probably southern American who doesn’t want liberals who think they’re better than he is telling him what to do. One would call it a dog whistle, except that we Yankee dogs can hear the whistle loud and clear, which is presumably as the author intends.

[Scott] Walker has written a different kind of book from the others. It’s an advertisement for himself, a kind of auto-bildungsroman about his victory over the forces of darkness in passing Act 10, as the anti-union bill was known. The chapters carry dramatic titles—“Bring It On,” “This Is War!,” “You Can’t Recall Courage.” He compares himself to Ronald Reagan.

The Republican Party has spent many years ignoring wage stagnation and dismissing talk of inequality as, in Paul Ryan’s recent phrase, “envy economics.” An interesting dividing line will emerge in this field between those who emphasize these concerns and those who don’t; but even those who are willing to discuss the stagnant situation of the middle class will need to present fresher and less ideologically constrained prescriptions than are on display here.