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The Wall

Friday, January 4th, 2019

White evangelicals are getting a lot of attention in the larger press these days. That’s because they appear to be the most loyal demographic of Trump’s support.

I’ve posted on this topic before. Most recently, I speculated that it was Trump’s support of Christian Nationalism that could explain at least some of it.

I’ve also posted about the revisionist history that is a popular by-product of the fundamentalist belief that the founders intended this be a Christian nation. In fact, reliable historical accounts prove that their intent exactly the opposite. They realized that this experiment with democracy would fail if religion become politicized. Just as they distrusted the ability of a king to reflect the best interests of the people, they also believed the best way to get religion out of politics was to create a government with no religious preference.

So let’s dig into the question a little bit more to see if we can figure out why the white evangelical support for Trump is unwavering even as his support from other groups erodes.

White Evangelicals
The first question we need to address is why it appears to be specifically WHITE evangelicals rather than evangelicals in general, or even whites in general.

According to surveys, white evangelicals are more conservative than the larger white population on things like welfare, climate change, and immigration. 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016. 59% of whites in general voted for Clinton. This may be the result of a fundamental fear of demographic change in general and racial resentment in particular.

Twice as many white evangelicals oppose climate change spending compared with other non-white evangelical groups. Twice as many white evangelicals oppose raising taxes on the wealthy compared with other non-white evangelical groups. White evangelicals are significantly more conservative on racial issues like Black Lives Matter or apologizing for slavery. 50% of white evangelicals believe that immigrants hurt the economy. Less than a quarter of non-white evangelicals share that belief. White evangelicals have the most negative attitudes toward immigrants of all US religious groups. That is in spite of the fact that most conservative white evangelical leaders strongly favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Here’s the answer that researchers have come up with.

My research indicates white evangelical conservatism correlates strongly with their perceptions (of) anti-white discrimination, even after taking into account economic status, party, age and region. Fully 50 percent of white evangelical respondents to our 2016 survey reported feeling they face discrimination that’s comparable to, or even higher than, the discrimination they believe Muslim Americans face. Those who hold this perception are more likely to hold conservative attitudes on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, tax policy and health-care reform.

This racial resentment is exacerbated by the rapid growth in non-white evangelical membership.  While 66% of evangelicals are still white, their numbers are declining rapidly.

The number of white evangelical Protestants fell from about 23 percent of the US population in 2006 to 17 percent in 2016, and only 11 percent are under 30, according to a survey of more than 100,000 Americans.

A Wall
67% of white evangelicals support building a wall. That is compared with 39% of the larger population. Here’s some additional research.

“For white evangelicals who see the sun setting on white Christian dominance in the country, the wall is a powerful metaphor,” said Jones, who has spent many years analyzing the attitudes of religious voters, and published the book “The End of White Christian America.”

Jones added that this metaphor embodies a white evangelical view of the world “as a dangerous battleground” made up of “chosen insiders and threatening outsiders,” as well as an “embattled minority trope that is rooted deep within southern culture,” such as the “Lost Cause theology following the Civil War,” and in “evangelical culture generally.”

Trump’s wall is a metaphor for the belief that Trump will protect white evangelicals from the demographic and cultural changes that they feel threaten their way of life.

On this score, historian John Fea has noted a longtime strain in white evangelical culture of “racial and religious fear” built on anxiety over immigrants, secularization, modernization and demographic change. While white evangelicals are not a monolith, Fea argues, many believe Trump is God’s vessel for “delivering them from the ‘captivity’ of the Obama administration,” so there’s little Trump could do that would “lead white conservative evangelicals to abandon him.”

As Stewart points out, some leading evangelical figures have even talked about this in wall metaphors. One such figure, who appears in the film, has declared that “America has become a nation without walls,” and that Trump will “restore the crumbling walls that separate us from cultural collapse.”

Walls appear deeply ahistorical as responses to the actual challenges to national sovereignty mounted by the facts of 21st-century globalization, Brown writes, but their overtones of long-vanished historical times are key to what makes them reassuring.

Walls have long been a metaphor for cultural strength and rebuilding community. Here’s how David Barton of the revisionist history WallBuilders movement describes it.

In the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, the nation of Israel rallied together in a grassroots movement to help rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and thus restore stability, safety, and a promising future to that great city. We have chosen this historical concept of “rebuilding the walls” to represent allegorically the call for citizen involvement in rebuilding our nation’s foundations. As Psalm 11:3 reminds us, “If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do?”

King Cyrus
There is a belief spreading among white evangelicals that Trump is a modern day version of King Cyrus.

This has been prompted by the release of a new movie, “The Trump Prophecy,” which tells the tale of a former firefighter who experienced an epiphany in 2011 that Trump would be elected president.

Analyzing the film, Katherine Stewart, a journalist who covers the Christian right, notes that it positions Trump as a modern-day “King Cyrus,” the 6th-century B.C. king of Persia who freed Jews from captivity in Babylon. As Stewart notes, Cyrus is the “model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the faithful,” and in the eyes of white evangelicals, Trump plays that role. In this telling, Trump is a savior figure for “Christian nationalism,” so his personal failings and misconduct are beside the point. Indeed, Stewart notes, his autocratic and anti-democratic conduct is a virtue, since it is being marshaled toward that end of rescuing evangelical culture from extermination.

Summary
To be clear, this is not an economic issue.

Economic anxiety isn’t a primary reason for white evangelicals supporting Trump. They fear losing racial status. White evangelicals’ belief that they’re the targets of discrimination – more so than other groups — influence far more than simply their votes for Trump.

While facts don’t support this fear, it remains an issue of belief just as strong as any other evangelical interpretation of the Bible. The problem is that you simply can’t argue belief.

So it doesn’t matter what the Mueller investigation turns up. Even if there is evidence that Trump committed treasonous acts, this particular group of supporters will continue to believe that God is working out His plan through Trump.

I believe that God IS working out his plan through Trump, but that His plan has no more to do with politics now than it did 2000 years ago when some questioned whether or not Jesus planned to overthrow the Romans.

As a result, I believe that the white evangelical group will face the same reckoning that every other group that confused politics with piety have faced throughout history. Unfortunately, pride goeth before the fall. Where there is great pride, as in the expectation of white privilege, the fall will be also be great.

God’s plan is simple. As the Bible tells us, God is no respecter of persons, or wealth, or influence, or privilege. His plan is that we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. The best way to secure that salvation is to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, provide clothes to the needy, care for the sick, and visit those who are imprisoned. God will judge all of us the same way. He doesn’t need our help separating the sheep from the goats. He doesn’t need a wall to carry out his plan. He doesn’t need a King. He certainly doesn’t need a president. He just needs us to love each other, listen humbly for His direction, and follow the leadings of Truth.

 

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, Religious Conservatism, Trump | 9 Comments »

Tinkerbell Effect

Monday, October 15th, 2018

via GIPHY

This is a term which describes things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them. One of the areas where is it used fairly widely is with money. Money has no intrinsic value. It only works because everyone using it believes that it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

Populism at its core is built on the Tinkerbell Effect. Populists believe that “crowds” are self-validating. Whatever the crowd believes must be fact because everyone in the crowd shares the same belief.

Science, while it studies the “wisdom of crowds”, has never accepted the claim that belief should replace proof regardless of how popular any particular belief might be.

The modern era began with the introduction of the scientific method in the 17th century. That method requires all assumptions to pass a series of rigorous tests in order to gain credibility. The scientific method created the concept of objective truth. It freed reality from being narrowly defined by popes or potentates. Instead it handed the responsibility of understanding the world to a select group of highly decentralized critical thinkers around the world – experts in their particular fields. These groups are self-selecting based on their areas of interest. Anyone can join, regardless of race, color, creed, or nationality. They simply have to prove through their publications that they have sufficient understanding of the subject matter to be taken seriously by their peers.

When Galileo improved the Lippershey telescope to provide ultimately 30x magnification, he was able to confirm the Copernican helio-centric theory of the solar system. This was a direct challenge to the Biblical claim supported by the Catholic Church that the universe revolved around the earth.

Galileo championed the idea that all of the laws of nature are mathematical. That meant that natural outcomes should not only be predictable, but also repeatable by anyone with a comparable understanding of the underlying mathematics. In other words, you didn’t have to be Galileo to see the moons of Jupiter transit across the face of the planet. You only had to have the same telescope that Galileo had and understand what those dots moving across the image of Jupiter actually represented.

This ushered in a new age where scientists could reliably explain all natural phenomena. Reality was no longer dependent on opinion or dogma. Instead there was (and is) an unbiased group of experts who could not only separate fact from fiction, but were eager to test new ideas even if they questioned accepted theories. This group almost by definition is constantly pushing the boundaries of understanding while simultaneously strengthening those theories that survive rigorous testing.

This group earns the right to test all theories about reality through the professional credentials they acquire, the reputation they have with their peers, and their own success in producing original work that can be duplicated by other experts in the field.

By definition, these experts also know more about their subject than any random crowd regardless of its size.

Therein lies the rub.

Populist movements, including the one in this country, strive to take back the right to determine what is fact and what is fiction. They reject any and all outside groups who suggest that any but their own trusted group can dictate their beliefs.

Here’s why all of this is important.

Trump’s lying is not a character flaw or pathology. It is not a “salesman” characteristic. It IS a deliberate strategy to weaken our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. Steve Bannon summarized this strategy when he said, “The way to deal with [the media] is to flood the zone with s**t.”

Trump’s singular success as a politician has been his ability to create an alternate reality in which he and his supporters live. He has been successful because he is exploiting a weakness in our democracy. That weakness is the power that we invest in the chief executive. An untrustworthy chief executive in our system can acquire a lot of power very quickly. The only checks to that power are congress, the courts, and voters. A free and independent press is supposed to inform the voters so that their choices are fact based.

Trump’s strategy is to delegitimize the press, create an alternate reality where he is the only arbiter of truth, and demonize all those who oppose him. Because he is the President, he has the power to accomplish that. Facts are no longer relevant in this discussion because Trump’s supporters reject experts as biased elites and the press as “the enemy of the people”. Democrats are “traitors” and “evil people”. All those who oppose Trump, in the minds of his supporters, should be “locked up”. The Republican Party has long since abdicated any role in checking the President’s power. Those who might provide leadership have either died or been drummed out of the party. The courts are slowly being bent to Trump’s will too as his appointments flood positions that a Republican Senate majority had kept open during the Obama administration.

The only reliable check that remains is voters. That fact isn’t lost on Trump and Republican either. Trump has already built the narrative that any vote that doesn’t go his way must be the result of a rigged system or voter fraud. Republicans have stepped up their efforts at every level of government to suppress the vote from those who generally vote for Democrats.

This brings us to the current crossroad.

Our country appears to be split.

We have conservatives who vote based on a set of ideological beliefs that they share regarding government, taxes, the free market, and personal responsibility. Whether smaller government actually increases human freedom is never questioned. If tax cuts and deregulation don’t result in faster economic growth, at least they are giving individuals more control over their own property – which seems to be good enough. Conservatives believe that people choose to be poor and that any attempt to mitigate the circumstances surrounding poverty discourages people from putting in the work that would improve their condition. There is no data to support this view either, but put that hasn’t stopped Trump from blaming the poor, immigrants, and people of color for the country’s problems.

Republicans were concerned about debt and deficits when a Democrat was in the White House. Now that Republicans control all branches of government, they are running up deficits and increasing the debt at an historic rate.

Liberals on the other hand are focused these days on achieving a pragmatic balance between the market and the state. They view government as tool to constrain corporate excess. Decisions on each specific issue of government involvement are the result of extensive evidence-based study and a good faith attempt to produce outcomes which benefit the most people. If liberals have a religion it is the belief that science will always produce the best answer. One of the potential outcome of this philosophy is a technocracy where all power as well decision-making is concentrated in a small group of supposed experts. China claims that this is their form of government, but it looks a lot more like an oligopoly because the Chinese “experts” who have the power are also personally benefiting from their decisions. While that isn’t the case in this country, there is a deep suspicion among conservatives that those who are making decisions based on their academic credentials MUST somehow also be benefiting personally from the positions that they are taking. There is no proof to support that claim, but conservatives still insist that “experts” can’t be trusted. This leaves conservatives free to insist that their beliefs are more credible because they are based in “common sense”.

From an ideological perspective, however, modern liberalism in this country may not be well equipped to deal with the anti-state anti-intellectual radicalism that has become the Republican Party. The pragmatic Clintonian Democrats come off as passionless technocrats rather than true believers. This more than anything else explains the rise of the Bernie Socialists. Democratic Socialism is on the rise because it brings a new vision of the expanded role of the state that can match the populist fervor that swept Trump into office. Both the Democratic Socialists and the populists share a deep distrust of what they view as the establishment. They both want to tear it down and build something new.

The populist challenge is they have failed to dislodge the Republican establishment. Instead the Republican establishment has figured out how to ride this populist wave. The result is that the power of establishment has increased. The only difference is that this establishment is speaking in populist terms rather than traditional conservatism. The policies, however, are the same as they have always been.

All indications are that the Democrats will regain control of the House and make significant gains at the state level.

What will that mean for the next two years?

If past is prologue, the path forward is pretty obvious.

Regardless of the election outcome, Trump will double down on his authoritarian tactics. He will try to end the Mueller investigation. He will increase attempts to suppress the 2020 vote. He will refuse to comply with court orders limiting his power. He will refuse to cooperate with congressional investigations. The resulting constitutional crisis will have to be resolved in a Supreme Court where Kavanaugh could be the deciding vote. Whatever the Supreme Court decides will only increase divisions between those who believe in their own views and those who seek the objective reality.

He will crack down on protests and try to further weaken the influence of the press. He may cause an international crisis in an effort to boost his status as a “war” president. He will almost certainly continue his misguided trade war.

Finally, the recession that we have all been waiting for will arrive. Trump will fumble the response and deepen the crisis rather than resolve it. Trump will use the crisis to impose even more draconian immigration enforcement in an effort to blame the failure on Muslims, Hispanics, and the poor. Violence against all of those groups will increase.

Next up a different take on this whole picture.

Posted in Bias, Economy, Immigration, Politics, Religious Conservatism, Science, Trump | 31 Comments »

Fleeing to Another Country

Saturday, July 7th, 2018

 

Fleeing to another country is the ultimate act of parental desperation.  Yet somehow those parents who are seeking asylum in this country are being cast as the villains in Trump’s twisted passion play.

Instead of embracing this situation with the compassion that we as a country normally exhibit when when people are in need, politics have overwhelmed the immigration discussion.

Here are a few facts in an effort to bring some reason to what otherwise seems dominated by emotion.

  1. Illegal immigration is at the lowest point in recent history. Border patrol apprehensions were 1.6M in 2000. Now they are a little over 250K. That’s a 6x reduction.  Even more important is for the last four years we have deported more people than entered the country illegally.  As a result, the number of illegal immigrants in this country has been going down.
  2. Our constitution and laws guarantee those seeking asylum the right to a fair hearing on their claims within a reasonable period of time.
  3. There are legal limits to the amount of time the government can hold a child.
  4. Numerous credible studies find that immigrants (regardless of status) reduce violent crime in the communities in which they settle. The numbers Trump uses have been widely debunked.
  5. Many of the mayors of border cities have said that illegal immigration is not currently a problem for them.

Here’s what has changed.

In past administrations, 90% of those seeking asylum presented proof of a “credible fear” of harm if they returned to their home country. Those people (mostly families) were released in the US while awaiting their hearing. In the current administration, the rates of release have dropped to single digits.  As the asylum seekers go up, those crossing in search of work has gone down.

The result is that a “zero tolerance” plan that may have been designed to discourage young single men from crossing the border to look for work,  has created a humanitarian disaster by traumatizing families and abusing children.

Most asylum seekers flee their country with their whole family. Those who have chosen to criticize the parents for putting their children at risk, clearly misunderstand the law AND are unwilling to admit that they would do the same thing if their family were similarly threatened.

The lawbreakers in this case are the Trump administration. They ignored asylum claims because it was politically inconvenient. Instead, they treated all those who cross the border as criminals. Once they committed to putting everyone who crossed the border in jail including those who presented themselves seeking asylum, they committed to family separation. It’s also because they wanted to use those separated children as leverage to coerce those in jail to drop their asylum claims in return for the promise of being reunited with their children.  Court documents indicate this promise was also a lie.

3000 children were separated from their parents by the time that Trump was forced to stop the practice. Courts found against the administration and ordered the Trump administration to quickly reunite children and their parents. The relevant child protection agencies finally had to admit what lawyers and immigrant activists had been saying from the beginning.  No records have been kept which can be used to reunite children with their parents.  For children under 5, the Trump administration has been forced to resort to DNA testing to even have a clue to who the parents might be.

The reason no records were kept was because the agencies charged with placing these children either with relatives or in suitable foster care were never setup to reunite parents with children.  They were setup during the Obama administration to deal with the flood of unaccompanied minors who started crossing the border in 2014.  While there were efforts to reunite these children with their parents, those parents were generally not being held in US jails awaiting an immigration trial.  No efforts were made prior to the implementation of the “zero tolerance” policy to add a layer of record keeping to the processes that were already in place.  These agencies and the Trump administration ignored all the warnings they received when they first announced their intentions to treat everyone as a criminal.

There are only two conclusions at this point regarding this policy. The first is that the Trump administration are incompetent liars. They put a policy in place with no understanding that it would separate so many children from their parents. They lied about their planning and ability to reunite those children with their parents. It was only after a judge intervened that the truth about the scale of this monstrous effort became clear.

The second conclusion is that the Trump administration are cynical liars. They knew that they were going to create a problem for which they had no solution, but they didn’t care. They felt that it was a controversy that would help motivate their base to rush to their defense when the truth came out about the abuse they had visited on innocent children. So they lied about virtually everything that they had done and then sat back as the media, those shocked by these actions, and the rest of the world reacted to what they were seeing.

Those who support Trump responded exactly as Trump had hoped. They blamed the media for bias. They repeated all Trump’s lies about secure borders, laws passed by Democrats, crime, and that old standard law and order. They blamed Democrats for criticizing something that Obama also did. They blamed the parents for putting their children in harm’s way. They blamed liberals for wanting an open border and lawlessness in return for increasing the ranks of illegal voters. They claimed it was all a conspiracy put up by the media and liberals to make Trump look bad.

The only person they didn’t hold accountable was the ONLY person who caused this calamity and the only person who eventually was forced to stop it – President Trump.

Objecting to this program is not advocating for open borders or lawlessness. Instead it is holding the current administration accountable for failing to abide by all the laws concerning immigration.

Those trying to defend these actions on the basis of politics, media bias, or parent-blaming should themselves be ashamed of what they have allowed themselves to become.

Posted in Immigration, Politics, Trump, Trump | 3 Comments »

The State of the Union is Fantastical

Wednesday, January 31st, 2018

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President Trump’s first state of the union speech was just as remarkable as his first year in office.

David Graham from the Atlantic had a good summary.

The reality is somewhat less rosy: By a wide margin, Americans believe that the nation is on the wrong track, and the president’s approval rating is historically low. Trump has struggled to push his agenda through Congress, just squeaking a big tax cut in at the end of last year. That presents three challenges for the president, and his speechwriters: How do you boast about victories you haven’t had? How do you present new proposals when many of the old ones are still on the table? And how do you handle the Russia story that seems to consume most of politics each week?

The answer from Trump was simply to conjure his own reality, outlining a set of some accomplishments, delivering the standard list of policy proposals, and ignoring the Russia probe altogether.

This president is not often good at hiding his emotions, but he did so Tuesday. As a result, not only was the picture he painted of America removed from reality, but Trump himself was also practically unrecognizable. The speech somehow managed to render Trump the one thing he almost never is: boring.

One has to go no further than his claims of economic success to reveal the gulf between reality and fantasy that exists in the White House.

Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs, including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone.

Only 1.8M new jobs were created since he took office according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instead of citing the real figure, he chose to cite a figure that included three months where jobs could only be attributed to Obama.  It’s also because during his first full year in office, the 1.8M new jobs was the slowest job growth since 2010. The reason is that employers are having a hard time finding workers, which is what he also could have said.  Instead he left the impression that this was an extraordinary accomplishment.

Of those jobs created during his time in office, 184,000 were in manufacturing which would also been a good number compared to the 16,000 jobs lost in 2016. But that doesn’t mean that manufacturing is in good shape. Total manufacturing employment is still down by more than 1M workers compared to 2007.

After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.

Wages did grow from 2014 through the third quarter of 2017, but the rate of growth has slowed and in Q4 wage growth actually declined (from $353/wk to $345/wk)  So why didn’t he mention that?

African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded, and Hispanic American unemployment has also reached the lowest levels in history.

During Trump’s campaign, he claimed that more than half of African American youth were unemployed. The real number was 19.2%. African American unemployment fell from a high of 16.8% in 2010 to 7.7% last January. Since then it has fallen to 6.8%.  Why didn’t he just say that?  It is still really good news, and given his past campaign exaggerations, would have indicted a new respect for the facts.

Unemployment claims have hit a 45-year low.

That statement was true on January 13th. Last week the number went up. That’s still a good number, but it is only a six week low, not a 45-year one.  Why not simply say that they hit an 45-year low two weeks ago.

The stock market has smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion in value. That is great news for Americans’ 401(k), retirement, pension and college savings accounts.

Only about 50 percent of Americans own stocks directly or through retirement funds, according to a Gallup survey. And most of the value in stocks is held by the top 10 percent. And the bull market in the US is actually weaker than market gains in the rest of the world. So the truth is that the US markets are just part of a larger global trend, and if anything Trump has discouraged investment in US markets rather than encouraged it.

BTW, the markets fell more than 1% on Monday as money moved from stocks to bonds. This is generally an indication that at least some traders think that this market may be near its peak. Almost $360B is stock market wealth (using Trumps calculus) disappeared as a result.

Just as I promised the American people from this podium 11 months ago, we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history.

This claim is just wrong and has been widely debunked. Depending on how you count, it ranks 8th in terms of size. Both of Obama’s tax cuts were larger.

Our massive tax cuts provide tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses

More wrong. This tax plan benefits large corporations and wealthy people. According to Moody’s, three-quarters of the $1.1T in individual cuts go to people earning more than $200K/year in taxable income. Those represent only 5% of all taxpayers. The same report warns that this plan will have negative consequences on federal and local government finances.

We slashed the business tax rate from 35 percent all the way down to 21 percent, so American companies can compete and win against anyone in the world. These changes alone are estimated to increase average family income by more than $4,000.

More voodoo math. As FactCheck.org points out, if every household averaged a $4,000 increase in income, that would add up to $500B/year. Corporate taxes collected last year only totaled $300B. Even if all corporate taxes were eliminated and all of that money flowed directly into individual income, it still couldn’t add up to the increase Trump claimed.

The real numbers, according to the Tax Policy Center, are closer to $1,610. That’s $135/mo. Most people are smart enough to realize that they are not the ones getting a big break.

Since we passed tax cuts, roughly 3 million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses — many of them thousands of dollars per worker.

Less than 2.5% of the work force have received one-time bonuses.  That’s why the remaining 97.5% know that this wasn’t a good deal for them.

Since we passed tax cuts … Apple has just announced it plans to invest a total of $350 billion in America, and hire another 20,000 workers.

Apple DID give workers bonuses because of the tax plan. They do plan to repatriate $38B in overseas profit as a result of the plan. They did not say that their $350B five-year investment plan was the result of the tax plan. The capital part of that plan seems in line with past levels of annual investment.

The foundation of REAL economic growth is productivity. Productivity requires a large percentage of the population to be employed in doing things that make money. It is very difficult to increase productivity when you have a large growing retirement population. The only way to do that is to add as many new workers through immigration as you have retiring. You can’t simultaneously support lowering immigration, increasing retirement, and have a high growth economy. Japan already proved that it can’t be done.

The other end of productivity is businesses investing in new plants, new technologies, etc. That’s how you increase productivity without adding new workers. That investment is also NOT currently happening because businesses are able to make money without making those investments.

Another gauge of a healthy economy is the saving rate. Savings rates go up when people have more disposable income. The rate of savings is going down, which suggests that households are strapped for cash or they are drunk on spending. Neither is good. The first suggests that the cost of living is rising more rapidly than wages. The second suggests that any boost that the economy may be getting from consumer spending is short lived.

Finally, the government has a role in economic development too. That’s to stimulate the growth of new emerging industries. Trump is failing there too. That’s because of the stake in the ground that Trump planted regarding coal. First he has failed to keep the promise that he made to coal workers. Second his wrongheaded tariffs on solar panels is costing jobs in a rapidly growing sector of the industry while failing to make any difference in the coal industry which is in decline.

The problem with short term incentives like tax breaks and repatriation is that they are candy rather than substance. Bringing $38B of profits back to this country from Apple will make it appear as if something got made in this country. Unless Apple invests that money in making more stuff in the United States than it may have otherwise made, it will not be reflected in any increase in either jobs or productivity. If Apple just uses the money to buy back their stock and increase their dividends, any economic boost will be short lived and perhaps make the next stock market correction that much more severe.

When the President bases policy on false beliefs, the country will pay the price.

Adding $1.5T in additional debt now is a REALLY bad idea according to the IMF.

The I.M.F. warned against assuming that the current economic cycle would go on indefinitely, however, particularly given the towering debt of the United States and other countries. By borrowing so much, the government can crowd out other investors and drive up interest rates. At the same time, giant deficits crank up pressure to cut government spending on health care and housing, policing and schools. With less money to go around, spending dries up and consumer demand — the economy’s primary engine — slows.

This was the SAME warning that Republicans used during the Recession. It turned out not to be true, because that’s when the government SHOULD be spending money to get the economy going again. That deficit spending worked. The economy recovered. And NOW is the time to increase taxes in order to make investments in the future industries that will support the next generation of businesses and employment. That’s because a growing economy can support a higher tax rate.

Cranking down on immigration at a time of low unemployment and baby boomer retirement is another REALLY bad idea.

A single immigrant can bring in unlimited numbers of distant relatives

This was Trump’s big lie from his speech.  Politifact labeled is Mostly False.

We should be welcoming immigrants AND their families. New family formation is the bedrock of the consumer economy. Immigrants who bring in family members provide their own support system for those immigrants.  That means they will have places to live, jobs, churches, mosques, and people like them who will help them make the peaceful transition to becoming citizens. This family process that includes a path to citizenship is why we don’t have the same problems with domestic terrorism that we’ve seen in England, Germany, and France.  There is no good reason to scrape the family immigration system.

Trading citizenship for 1.8M Dreamers for cutting LEGAL immigration in half (from $2.1M to $1M) is a bad deal for the economy.  Dreamers are already here and already have jobs.  Reducing the ability for immigrants to bring in their family members will just reduce the number of legal immigrants.  I have no problem making our immigration system more merit-based, but the number of legal immigrants should be set by the number of unfilled jobs in the economy.  Right now that number is 6M.  What is wrong with expanding the H1B program which is merit and employer based until the number of unfilled jobs is reduced?

The only reason we can’t do that is because Trump has told the country that immigrants are dangerous.  He did that again last night.  Canada on the other hand has built their economy on merit-based immigration and has already told the world that if the US doesn’t want you, you are welcome to come to Canada where their political culture realizes the economic value of skilled immigrant workers.

The REAL problem we are dealing with in this country is the disconnect between reality and fantasy.

Until we have a government willing to tell the truth, we are going to struggle for any sort of reliable and unified plan for growth and stability.

Posted in Economy, Finance, Immigration, Politics, Trump, Trump | 22 Comments »

Really?

Monday, January 22nd, 2018

via GIPHY

“What we have just witnessed on the floor was a cynical decision by Senate Democrats to shove aside millions of Americans for the sake of irresponsible, political games,” Mitch McConnell – 1/20/18

The problem with this statement is that it is the Republicans who are playing cynical games. These games mask a radical shift in the position of that party regarding immigration.

This all started when Trump rescinded the executive order known as DACA in September, 2017. Rather than work out a legislative compromise, he simply tossed a ticking time bomb into what was then the tax debate. If Congress didn’t act is six months, he threatened to end the program. He said that he took that action in order to encourage Congress to act. That’s the same reason Obama cited when he signed the executive order. Trump also said that his preference was action to protect the “Dreamers”. He spoke very sympathetically about them.

We’re going to show great heart. DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me. I will tell you. To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have,” Trump said at a press conference in February.

“But you have some absolutely incredible kids — I would say mostly. They were brought here in such a way. It’s a very — it’s a very very tough subject. We are going to deal with DACA with heart. I have to deal with a lot of politicians, don’t forget. And I have to convince them that what I’m saying is, is right. And I appreciate your understanding on that,” Trump said.

“But the DACA situation is a very very, it’s a very difficult thing for me because you know, I love these kids,” he added. “I love kids. I have kids and grandkids and I find it very, very hard doing what the law says exactly to do.”

In fact the NYT reported that his aides were imploring him to dial it back.

Why?

We’ll get to that in a moment.

First let’s go through the timeline.

In September, 2017 Trump made a deal with Schumer and Pelosi which setup this particular confrontation. The Democrats agreed to a three month raise in the debt ceiling and some hurricane relief in return for a deal on DACA. Republicans were upset with this deal because they thought Trump didn’t get much for delaying a confrontation with Democrats three months. As a result of that and pushback from anti-immigrant factions in his party and his base, Trump reneged on the dinner deal he had with Schumer and Pelosi.

The Democrats said that they were not going to approve another increase in the debt ceiling without some movement on DACA. Graham and Durbin hammered out a bi-partisan deal which was EXCACTLY what Trump had asked for in September. All it required was Trump’s approval and there would have been no shutdown. Trump blew that deal up too because Tom Cotton convinced Trump that his base wants NO DACA deal effectively moving the goalposts again.

The Democrats kept their promise to the DACA dreamers and refused to support another extension of the debt ceiling.

Schumer at this point put another deal on the table over the weekend offering to include approval of money for a wall in return for DACA relief. Trump was ready to make that deal too until Kelly, Miller, and GOP leaders blew that deal up.

This gets to the core of the problem.

87% of voters support allowing those who qualified under the DACA program to remain in this country including 79% of Republicans.

A majority of voters also oppose building a wall, but 70% of Republicans support it.

67% of voters support shutting down the government in order to force renewed CHIP funding.

Yet during the process Republican language regarding DACA Dreamers changed. They were no longer “incredible kids”. Now they were just part of the larger “illegal immigrant” population committing crimes, harming low skilled US workers, and committing terrorist acts. Instead of “great people who have done a great job” they became “criminals on parole”.

What DACA has exposed is the dark secret of Trumpism. Immigrants are the problem. It doesn’t matter how they got into the country. They are no longer welcome.

If the dreamers are just another species of criminal alien, then Democrats had better give up a lot — cuts to legal immigration and changes to family-based migration — to gain their protection. But it remains unresolved whether Trump and Republicans are willing to legalize the dreamers at all — whether they actually do or do not view them in sufficiently sympathetic terms. If they can’t get to Yes — if no reasonable set of concessions is enough — it will be because treating the dreamers as fundamentally different from other undocumented immigrants is a Rubicon they cannot cross.

Further evidence is the Cotton Perdue proposal to cut LEGAL immigration by 50%. This isn’t strengthening our borders or reducing the number of people who manage to get here illegally. This is effectively using “merit” or “skills” to reduce the number of immigrants we admit. One has to look no further than the proposal that only those who pass the “merit” screening would be admitted. The “merit” visa includes no provisions for family unless they can also pass the same screen. We admit 1.2M immigrants legally every year. 140,000 come through the merit program that is currently employer sponsored. Only 70,000 of those are the actual employees.

At this point there is likely going to be a lot of partisan scorekeeping.

Here’s my take.

  1. CHIP gets funded for six years. Republicans delayed funding CHIP because they knew that they would need something to trade. Keeping 9M kids hostage for political purposes will be something Democrats will remind voters in 2018. Republicans traded this for Democrats keeping the government open for another three weeks.
  2. Schumer and McConnell have a deal to put a bill on floor to address DACA by Feb 8th. This will be another important test of whether government can work to address an issue that has broad bi-partisan support.
  3. Trump, the great dealmaker, was not only put out to pasture on this deal, he and his anti-immigrant advisor Stephen Miller were both exposed as hazards to dealmaking. With approval ratings already in the dumper, it’s hard to tell what affect this will have.
  4. If a DACA bill passes, it will almost certainly be the Senate that passes it. It is unclear what the House will do. If the House doesn’t act on it, and deportations start in the months before the November election; a bad situation for Republicans will only get worse.
  5. A lot of Democrats are going to be very angry about this deal. You can tell who, by looking at those senators that voted against it. What happens in the next couple of weeks will determine if that is anger that will affect Schumer’s position. If McConnell doesn’t deliver on his promise, the shutdown post February 8th could be very ugly.
  6. What will also be ugly are the xenophobic arguments that will surface over the next couple of weeks. We’ll see how far right the Republican base has really moved. Is this still the party of “incredible kids” or has this become the party that wants to shut immigration down completely. If it is the later, Trump has to take the blame for his rhetoric and his playing footsy with White Supremacists and Neo-Nazi’s. You can also bet that Democrats will use the racist xenophobic statements that are certainly going to show up to ramp up voter registration in places like Texas and Arizona.
  7. The shutdown itself will be old news by the 2018 election. Republicans lost a government shutdown in 2013 and still won big in 2014.

The bottom line is nobody looks good in a shutdown, but there is an opportunity for moderates who engineered this compromise to also start driving bi-partisan legislation through a polarized Congress. Trump will probably sign whatever makes it to his desk. I’m not sure his knows how to spell veto.

Unfortunately Trump’s confusion, lack of control, flip-flopping, and fundamental inability to personally resolve a fairly minor domestic crisis is going to concern our allies and embolden our enemies. When even he agrees that standing down is the best thing that he can do for the good of the country – our future is at best cloudy.

Posted in Immigration, Politics, Terrorism, Trump, Trump | 1 Comment »

Our Failing Naked Emperor

Friday, October 6th, 2017

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One of the defining characteristics of the Trump campaign and administration is the utter disregard for the facts.  There was some hope by Trump supporters that once he transitioned from campaign mode to presidential mode, he would also abandon his strategy of habitual fabrication.  That hope died with the inauguration.  Trump’s inaugural crowds were factually smaller than Obama’s, but no one in the Trump administration and no one in the Republican establishment were willing to call Trump out as a liar.  Instead we’re dealing with this interesting situation where he, his administration, and his supporters blame media bias for every report that details yet another Trump lie.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the emperor is still naked.

That “nakedness” is finally causing more than embarrassment.  This “strategy” has made it more difficult for Republicans to govern.  We are now 9 months into a legislative session where Republicans control all branches of government, and the ONLY enduring evidence of this control is Gorsuch’s SCOTUS appointment.  Even that has an asterisk because McConnell had to remove the 60 vote filibuster in order to get it done.

The fundamental operating principle of this administration is that Trump can never fail, he can only be failed.  As a result, any form of failure must either be a lie or someone else’s fault.  I won’t try to go into the psychology of this particular form of egotism.  We’ll save that for another day.  At this point, let’s just look at the consequences of never admitting that you’ve been wrong.

One example is the recent failure to pass healthcare which Trump blamed on the filibuster rule in the Senate.  The FACT was that the healthcare reform bill wasn’t subject to a filibuster.  It only required a simple 50 vote majority to pass because of reconciliation rules.  It failed to get 50 votes because several Senators from the President’s own party refused to vote for it.  McCain refused to vote for it because Republicans bypassed the normal committee process where all interested parties would have an opportunity to comment and all points of view could be considered.  Paul refused to vote for it because it wasn’t conservative enough.  Collins refused to vote for it because she feared it would have resulted in the loss of healthcare insurance coverage in her state.  The bill died before it could ever get a vote, so we don’t know how many others would also have voted against it.

Another example is his regular rant about the biased media and fake news failing to report on his accomplishments.  The problem is, just like the inauguration, there isn’t much there.  Worse yet, Trump’s own obsession to dominate every news cycle makes it difficult for even his modest accomplishments to get much play.  Instead he regularly distracts from his legislative agenda by picking fights and fanning the flames of the culture war.

A third example is the Republican establishment who, in Trump’s description have let the Russian investigation get out of control and secretly oppose his agenda.

What is true is that Trump’s agenda, if in fact he truly has one, is failing because he hasn’t provided the policy to support his bold promises.

Healthcare failed three times because he had promised to provide better coverage to more people at a lower cost.  None of the bills that were proposed accomplished that, even though Trump at one point or another supported all of them.  Instead they were thinly (and in the last case not so thinly) veiled attempts to dismantle Medicaid.  As those realities became apparent to more people, opposition mounted and the bills failed.

Tax reform will suffer a similar fate.  Though Trump promised a bill that would benefit the middle class and not reward the wealthy, the bill that is currently being considered does what every other Republican tax initiative has done.  The bulk of the benefits go to the wealthiest 1% of the country.

This is not the result of a conspiracy of the Republican establishment to undermine Trump.  If anything, Trump has passively allowed Congressional leadership to fill in the blanks on his promises.  The problem is that the bills in their final form were not even close to what Trump promised, and he didn’t seem to care.

The cause is years of Republican bad faith campaigning.  Republicans promised that they could replace Obamacare with something better if they only had the majority to implement their ideas.  They never actually proposed any new ideas.  Instead they were content to demonize liberal Democrats.  When voters finally gave Republicans a chance to prove they could do better, they failed.

The same thing will be true about taxes.  Trickle down tax cut plans that were supposed to make life better for the middle class have failed spectacularly at the state level and nationally.  But here it comes again in even a worse form than what was passed during the Bush years.

Republican voters are unhappy that the party isn’t delivering on Trump’s promises.  Trump used this anger to get himself elected.  But voters haven’t stopped there.  They continue to elect bomb throwers at the state and local level.  Newly elected Senator Moore in Alabama has said he shares Rand Paul’s view regarding healthcare reform and would have joined him to vote against that bill.  Moore will likely make it more difficult rather than easier to get Trump’s agenda through the senate.

The bottom line is that Trump lies have painted the party into a corner on many issues.

The claims that Obamacare is failing make it more difficult to pass bipartisan legislation that most agree would solve the current set of problems.  Passing that legislation would force Trump to admit that Obamacare isn’t failing and can be improved with a couple of simple tweaks.  If that’s true, then why the continued effort to tear it down and replace it with something that kills Medicaid and takes coverage away from millions of people?

Claims that we have to build a very expensive wall across our southern border to protect our country from the threat of illegal immigration makes it more difficult to pass a bill to address the plight of “Dreamers”.  Trump’s base perceives a dreamer deal to be a loss for Trump in the fight to kick illegal immigrants out of the country.

The obsessive insistence by Trump that the various Russian investigations are a hoax, fake news, and a politically motivated witch hunt makes it nearly impossible to make any progress on preventing future Russian election hacking.  That’s because Trump simply can’t acknowledge the obvious fact that Russians did attempt to disrupt the 2016 election and continues to be engaged in social media meddling.  Trump’s war with the legit press in this country has given Russians all of the cover they need to continue their REAL fake news activities.  The latest example is coverage of the Las Vegas shooting where Russian sources promoted stories that the shooter was an anti-Trump liberal jihadist who had secretly converted to Islam.

Trump’s various lines in the sand regarding Korea have only encourage Kim Jong Un to become more aggressive.  In other administrations, tough talk in public is cover for behind the scenes diplomacy that ultimately resolves the issue.  That doesn’t work in Trump-world where he has to win and is willing to undermine his own Secretary of State’s efforts to defuse this dangerous escalation.  Tillerson became the person who failed Trump on Korea.

Trumps pathological need to always be right was on public display in his response to the hurricane devastation in Puerto Rico.  While people were suffering because of the logistics challenges of getting aid from the ports out to the people, Trump was picking a fight with professional athletes.  When the mayor of San Juan called him out on it, he suggested that it was her fault and a cultural failing of the Puerto Rican people that there weren’t enough truck drivers willing to leave their struggling families to get supplies off the docks.  Doesn’t the army have truck drivers?  I thought that disaster relief was all about sending a bunch of people into an area to do those things that the local population couldn’t do for themselves.  We fill in the gaps until the local population can get back on their feet and take care of their own needs themselves.

During his tour of the island, he told those without shelter, food, clean drinking water, sanitation, and medical services that they should be grateful that it wasn’t a real disaster like Katrina.  The implication being that if it were a REAL disaster like Katrina, the government would have been better prepared and would be providing more help.  But the government WASN’T prepared to deal with the aftermath of Katrina and it wasn’t prepared to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.  That’s Trump’s fault.

We all know how the story of the naked emperor ended.  It will be interesting to see when and how truth ultimately takes down this naked President.

 

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, scandals, Trump | 28 Comments »

The Great Erosion

Wednesday, May 31st, 2017

Nixon left office with a 24% job approval rating.  I’ve often wondered what sort of people would still support a President after his spectacular abuses of power were revealed.  Based on recent analysis by FiveThirtyEight, I now have a better understanding.

Nate Silver makes a good argument that Trump has already lost significant support among those who voted for him, and that may only be the beginning.

His analysis tracks the changes in the “strongly approve” portion of those supporting Trump’s job performance.

While Trump continues to enjoy strong approval among those who self-identify as Republicans, the nature of that support has changed.  Those who “strongly approve” has eroded from a high of 30% to current levels of 22%.  In addition, those who “strongly disapprove” outnumber those who “strongly approve” by a 2-1 margin.

The cause of this erosion in base is the first failure to pass healthcare reform followed by an even worse bill that added removing protections to those with pre-existing conditions to a bill that will reduce the rolls of the insured by 23M.

What’s important about this erosion is that it is entirely in line with what NBC polls predicted several months earlier.  They identified a “floor” of approval for Trump at 22%.  The rest of his support was conditional on accomplishments.

The erosion reflects approximately 8% of those who were previous strong supporters, now becoming “somewhat approve”.  But the “somewhat approve” and “somewhat disapprove” numbers have been fairly constant.  The “strongly disapprove” number spiked with the release of the travel ban and has stayed high.  So where did the 8% where were strong approvers ultimately go?

What appears to be happening is that the erosion is in the segment of Trump voters who were reluctant supporters to begin with.  It is those voters that are making the slow journey through the stages of grief from “somewhat approve” to “strongly disapprove”.

The result is that the 22% of voters who supported Trump during the primaries, continue to stick with him.  Everyone else is up for grabs.

That’s why the midterms are going to be an interesting test.

We’ll find out how many of these “reluctant supporters” are going to be willing to vote if their choice is between a candidate who represents a President who has disappointed them and a party that they don’t identify with.  What may make that vote easier for some are those House Republicans who will be defending their vote for a healthcare bill that most of these “reluctant supporters” did not support.

We’ll also find out if Democrats are going to be able going to turn out across the country in the numbers that we’ve seen in the couple of special elections.

If so, Trump may be in trouble because 23 of the seats won by Republicans in 2016 were in districts that Clinton won.  The Democrats only need 24 seats to reclaim a majority.  The special elections in Kansas, Montana, and (soon) Georgia are all much closer than anyone would have predicted.  The result is that ALL of those seats will be in play for the Democrats in 2016 too.

In any normal electoral cycle, gaining 24 seats would be a heavy lift but recent history (Republicans gained 63 seats in 2010) certainly indicates what’s possible when some parts of the electorate are unhappy.  And there are A LOT of people who are unhappy.

Here are some of the reasons why.

The House passed a healthcare reform bill, with Trump’s help, that only 17% of voters supported. His threats to undermine the existing ACA have caused BCBS of NC to request approval of a 22% rate increase.  His budget proposal eviscerates pretty much every discretionary dollar not spent on defense in order to fund a huge tax cut for the wealthy.  Trump’s executive immigration order has been struck down twice by the courts.  We’ll see how his court nominee affects that vote when it gets to the SCOTUS.  The investigations into obstruction of the Russian investigation will continue to produce bad news over the next 18 months.  Trump is considering pulling out of the Paris Accord which is supported by 70% of the public.  North Korea will continue to improve their missiles that could reach the west coast within a year.  Trump trusts China to help with North Korea, but China has their own agenda.  Russia and Syria will continue to deteriorate.  Nothing of substance is going to pass Congress because those who are up for reelection in 2018 won’t want to take any more hard votes.  And Trump will continue to be Trump.

He has no one to blame but himself.

Posted in Healthcare, Immigration, Politics, scandals, Science, Trump | 7 Comments »

The Perils of Trump

Monday, February 13th, 2017

Trump nation-tracker-overall-1

Trump has become one of the most unpopular President’s in history in the shortest time on record.

Because he lost the popular vote by such a wide margin, he didn’t enter office with much support outside his party. That support is now gone.

Whether Trump’s approval rating will drop further depends largely on independents and Republicans — he has almost no support to lose among Democrats. If those voters do sour on him, that could pose a threat to Republicans in the midterm election in 2018. The incumbent president’s approval rating historically serves as a good predictor of how many seats his party will lose at midterm.

Based on recent studies, we can make some predictions of where future erosion could occur.

His core support represents about 22% of the population. These folks are going to support Trump no matter what.

The next group are going to support him based on what he delivers. These represent another 22% of the population. These first two groups, the “believers” and the “conditionals” make up the 44% of the population (more or less) that approve of Trump’s performance so far.

The “conditionals” are interested in an improved economy, cleaning up Washington corruption, defeating ISIS, and building the wall in that order. If he fails to do any of those things, he will lose their support.

Let’s look at the challenges that Trump has with this group of “conditionals”.

Trump’s economic plan has a big problem. There aren’t enough workers to support the growth that he has promised. Worse than that, Trump is also expected by this group to put a tough immigration plan in place. Immigration is the easiest place to find the workers that Trump’s economic plan REQUIRES.

Here’s the math. We currently employ 152M people. Trump wants to add 25M more jobs. He needs that job growth in order to deliver the 4% a year GDP growth that he has promised. He’ll get 8M from population growth. If we are able to return to historical highs in workforce participation, he’ll get another 8M. That still leaves him 9M short.

There are only two places he can find those extra jobs. Either immigrants are going to fill them or he’s going to have to figure out how to convince baby boomers to come out of retirement.

The problem is that he can’t fill them with immigrants because one of the other things that the conditionals are going to hold him accountable for is keeping immigrants out and deporting those who are here illegally. That leave seniors. 19% of those 65 and over, work today. In order to hit his numbers, that percentage has to increase to 32%. Even that won’t get the job done, because 7M jobs are filled today by undocumented workers. If you deport all of those workers in addition to keeping new workers out, Trump’s plan adds only 9M new jobs. That’s not nearly enough to hit his GDP numbers. It barely keeps up with the jobs that population growth will require.

Trump is left between a rock and a hard place. Investments to grow the economy without increases in both productivity and workforce are going to spike inflation as demand exceeds supply. That’s going to lose him the support of the conditionals who will have a harder time buying a house, paying their adjustable mortgage, buying a car, and paying their bills. If he reneges on his immigration plan, he will lose the support of the conditionals even if it does help him keep his economic promise.

Trump has already lost the last two groups (curious and resister). He won’t get them back because their views are diametrically opposed to his base and the conditionals. They don’t want a wall.  They want to keep Obamacare. etc.

The only logical result is a continued erosion of the “conditionals” as Trump fails to deliver on his promises.

Most presidents lose ground during their first two years. The average decline since World War II is just short of eight points, according to a compilation by Marquette University political scientist Charles Franklin. If Trump follows that pattern, he could end up with an approval rating in the high 30s — perilous territory for congressional candidates running in swing districts.

If he survives all of the other challenges that currently seem to surround his administration, the historic patterns leave him in very dangerous territory. Bush II lost control of both the house and the Senate in 2006 because the country was tired of the Iraq War. His approval ratings were in the 30’s.

House members are already dealing with tea-party-like disruptions at their local town halls. Republicans are already backing away rapidly from any immediate action on Obamacare replacement because of fears of the impact that might have on the 2018 elections. Trump hasn’t even started to try to get his agenda through Congress, and the news cycles are dominated by stories of disarray, conflict, and foreign intrigue.  By way of comparison, by the third week of the Obama administration stimulus legislation was already being debated.

The closer that we get to the 2018 elections, the less likely it will be that at least House Republicans are going to be willing to take controversial votes. If healthcare reform remains undone, some voters are going to hold him accountable for NOT making the healthcare changes he promised. Other voters are going to vote for Democrats to PREVENT him from making the changes that he promised.

There is no clear path for Trump to improve his situation.

There are only many opportunities for it to get worse.

Posted in Economy, Healthcare, Immigration, Politics, Trump | 48 Comments »

What Happened?

Tuesday, December 20th, 2016

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We elected Trump president.

He is by all objective accounts the least qualified person ever elected to this office.  Yes he is a businessman and by all appearances a very wealthy person.  We have elected business people to this office in the past, but never one with absolutely no government experience.  We have also elected wealthy people to this office in the past, but never one who claims to be as wealthy as this guy.  As a result, we have no idea how he will perform because we have no previous history to use as comparison.  The closest we can come is Herbert Hoover, and that didn’t work out so well.

In as a dispassionate way as possible, I’d like to figure out why and then perhaps lay out just a few of the challenges that he and we will face.

Change

Republicans began this race with a significant advantage.  US voters simply don’t like to give any particular party more than 8 years in the White House.

The Clinton campaign understood this challenge.  As it became clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee, they crafted a strategy to highlight the risks of electing someone with so little government experience.  They framed this election as a choice between change and risk.

Here’s an example of how Clinton discussed this choice.

Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different – they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.

He is not just unprepared – he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.

As proof of how effective her message was, Clinton won these points.

  • Just 38 percent of voters said that Trump was “qualified” to be president (52 percent said the same of Clinton).
  • Just 35 percent said Trump had the “temperament to serve effectively as president” (55 percent said Clinton had the right temperament to be president).
  • One in three voters said Trump was honest and trustworthy (36 percent said the same of Clinton).

But she still lost the popular vote in the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida.  That’s because the desire for change was stronger than the perceived risks associated with that change.  Four in 10 voters said the most important character trait in deciding their vote was a candidate who “can bring needed change” to Washington. Of that group, Trump won 83 percent to Clinton’s 14 percent.  In effect, all that Trump had to do is demonstrate that he was NOT part of the establishment in order to win this election.  For the change voters, particularly in the key battleground states that I listed, all of his objective weaknesses were strengths.

Demographics

I had thought that the Obama victories spelled the end of white angry male politics.

I was wrong.

Clinton still did well with emerging demographics.  The white male voter segment is getting smaller in every election including this one.  That vote increased 2% from 2012-2016.  In comparison the black vote increased 6%.  The Asian vote increased 16% and the Hispanic vote increased 17%.  The problem for Clinton was that most of those votes were in states like California rather than the battleground states where Trump was able to eke out narrow victories.

Clinton won 55% of the young vote, but they weren’t as large a percentage of the total vote in 2016 as they were in 2008 or 2012.  Clinton also improved as a percentage of 65+ voters over those who voted for Obama in 2012, though Trump won that demographic by roughly 10%.

Issues

The country continues to become more liberal as demographics change.

The vote on immigration this election was almost evenly split.  That is a dramatic improvement over the negative view of immigration a decade ago.  74% of Americans now believe that there should be a path to citizenship for undocumented workers.  61% oppose building a wall.

Large majorities of all voters support more aggressive actions on gun control including expanded background checks, keeps guns out of the hands of those with mental health issues, barring those on no-fly lists from purchasing guns, tracking gun purchases in a national database, banning the sale of high capacity ammunition clips, and even restricting the sale of assault-type weapons.

65% of voters are concerned about climate change and believe it is a real issue.

60% support same sex marriage and LGBT rights.  A majority also oppose “Freedom of Religion” laws.

Where We Go From Here

There are a number of issues that could easily derail a Trump presidency.  The basic challenges remain that he is deeply inexperienced AND that he has chosen to surround himself with others who can only be generously classified as outsiders.

He was certainly elected to “shake up” Washington.  But Washington isn’t going to welcome change.  The same is true with the rest of the world.

So here’s my list of the challenges that Trump is going to have to navigate to survive his first term and get re-elected in 2020.

China, Russia, Iran, Israel, and ISIS

The One China policy has allowed Taiwan and China to peacefully coexist for decades.  Trump upset that policy with one phone call.  China’s response was to grab some of our stuff.  Escalation is not a good formula here.  Trump is already talking about killing the TPP.  That agreement was crafted to provide the other Pacific Rim countries an alternative to accepting China’s trading rules.  If China controls the rules of trade in the Pacific, they will also have tremendous economic leverage over those countries.  That will make it more difficult for the US to oppose Chinese aggression in the region.  What will Trump do if China threatens Taiwan?

It would be great to have better relations with Russia.  But Russia has been aggressively expanding its sphere of influence in border countries by intervening in their elections and annexing territory.  What is Trump going to be willing to give (or take away from) Russia that will cause them to change their behavior?  Trump is in dangerous territory if it turns out that there were contacts between his campaign and Russian hacking during the election.  Trump is also in dangerous territory if ongoing Russian hacking expose the inner workings of the Trump administration in the same ways that it exposed the inner workings of the Clinton campaign.  What leverage does this give Russia?  Russian reactions to the assassination in Turkey could lead to a military escalation early in Trump’s administration.  Turkey is our NATO ally.  How will the Trump administration respond?  Trump also has real estate holdings in Turkey.  How will Trump respond to actions that threaten some of his properties?

Trump has said that he will move the US embassy to Jerusalem.  That move would signal the end of any two-state solution.  It will also give Israel free reign to continue their economic and military persecution of Palestinians.  How will the Trump administration respond to an Israeli crack down on a Palestinian uprising that resulted in a large number of Palestinians being killed?  How will a Trump administration respond to an increase in military actions by Israel’s neighbors in reaction to a brutal military crackdown of a Palestinian uprising?

That leads naturally to Iran.  Israel has every right to fear Iran, and Iran has every right to fear both Israel and the US.  Iraq used to be the balance to Iran, but our invasion of Iraq upset that balance and caused Iran to start their nuclear weapons program.  They’ve stopped that development because of their interest in joining the global economy.  But if Trump figures he can get a better deal and is also seen as a close ally of Israel, this whole deal could come apart.  What will Trump do to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?  What will Russia, Iran’s close ally, do if the US or Israel take some aggressive action against Iran because of their resumed nuclear program?

ISIS will continue to attack around the world.  He has been curiously silent, for example, after the Berlin attack.  After Trump’s inauguration, I predict that his named properties will become targets.  This isn’t planned, but random.  How is Trump going to respond?  The reality is that there is little he can do.  He can attempt to bomb them, but if anything that will only increase the domestic terrorism that is now the bulk of ISIS action.  He will fail to be effective and ultimately voters will hold him responsible.

Conflict of Interest, Deal Making, Obamacare, Infrastructure, Tax Reform, and Republicans

Trump has a serious conflict of interest problem.  There are no indications that he is going to take steps to effectively insulate his business and his family from the potential benefits that would accrue to those businesses from his office.  Even worse, he also needs to insulate himself from the APPEARANCE of conflict regarding foreign contributions.  Just one example is the fact that he owns hotels.  Every time someone employed by a foreign government stays in one of his hotels, he is in potential violation of the constitution.  Congress and the American people will let him slide for a while, but he is taking grave risks against some future event that will paint him as corrupt.  I’m not sure how many of those events he is going to be able to survive, since he was elected to clean up the corruption.

Deal making is also going to be very difficult for him because that’s not how government business is done.  Deals are done politically, not financially.  It is ok to trade influence.  It is not ok to trade money.  There are a large body of regulations which prohibit favoritism in government contracting.  Trump could easily run afoul of these laws in his attempts to personally negotiate the country’s business.  The difference here is that, rather than a political backlash, he will get sued by whatever corporations felt that they were disadvantaged by one of Trump’s deals.  How many of those suits will have to occur before Congress decides that they have had enough?

It is going to be very difficult to replace Obamacare.  Collin Powell famously said of Iraq, “if you break it, you own it.”  The same is true of Obamacare.  If Republicans repeal it without a plan to replace it, even if that repeal is delayed until after the 2018 elections, the exchange structure could easily collapse.  If that happens, millions of people will either lose their insurance, or see their premiums rise dramatically.  This could easily turn into a daily drip-drip-drip of bad news, much like the financial collapse of 2008.  That bad news and the inability of the Trump administration to do anything about it, will result in a big 2018 backlash and the beginning of the end for Trump.  He will say that he did what the voters elected him to do, but voters are going to blame him because he promised to make it better.

Trump hired a budget hawk for his OMB director.  This budget hawk is going to have to figure out how to fund the massive infrastructure bill that is the foundation for Trump’s jobs program.  It is going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.  The infrastructure bank idea is an invitation to crony capitalism and will only work in big urban areas where investors have an opportunity to monetize their projects.  It isn’t going to help those vast under served rural areas where many Trump voters live.  The cuts to other federal spending that would be required to pay for this, if it isn’t financed through debt, will result in MORE job loss and hardship for those rural voters rather than less.  Their life will get harder, unemployment will go up, and they will vote for a different change in 2018 and 2020.

Tax Reform will be another give away to the rich.  This may turn out to be the least controversial of the programs that Trump takes on.  But it is also fraught with danger for Trump.  If Trump voters weren’t already sensitive to a cabinet filled with billionaires all getting big tax cuts, they will be.  If Trump hasn’t divested himself from his businesses, you can bet that the benefits that his family gets from Tax reform will be front page news and Trump’s hypocrisies will dominate social media.

Republicans are the most interesting piece of this puzzle.  Just as they rallied around Trump as it became obvious that he was going to win, they will abandon him if he appears to falter.  They will determine if they can mold him in their image.  When that fails, they will see if they can maneuver him politically to carry out their agenda.  When that fails, they will see if they can trip him up and get him out of the way, so that they can replace his agenda with theirs.

Summary

I will be surprised to see Trump complete his term.  I think that foreign intrigue will reveal his fundamental weaknesses and terrify voters.  Hopefully, we will avoid a conflict.  If not, it will go badly.  If he avoids foreign conflict, he will fumble Obamacare and the repercussions will cost him at least his senate majority in 2018.  The house will eventually impeach him for conflicts of interest and the post 2018 senate will confirm that impeachment making him the third president to go through an impeachment trial, and only the second one to lose.

I would prefer that this not be the script for the next four years, but Trump is sowing the seeds of his own destruction as we speak.  He is not taking the steps to insulate himself from potential conflicts of interest.  He is secretive and combative rather than transparent.  He trusts in his own ability to communicate with the public directly, but the public will soon be able to see for themselves whether the results match his promises.  He is picking fights with his intelligence agencies which makes him even more vulnerable to bad information.  His cabinet of outsiders will likely agree with him rather than oppose him.

We will face a challenge as a country too.  That’s because Trump will try to blame his failures on others.  We have to be vigilant to prevent Trump and his followers from using domestic turmoil to distract us from his administration’s failures.  He should have every opportunity to prove me wrong, but if he fails, he alone should be held responsible for the consequences of his failures.

 

Posted in Bias, Economy, Environment, Finance, Healthcare, Immigration, Politics, Terrorism, Trump | 3 Comments »

The Enemy Is Us

Wednesday, August 31st, 2016

big pogo

I’ve spent some time writing about the absurdity of Trump.

Now I’d like to spend a little time digging into the two fundamental dangers of his campaign.

First a couple of basic assumptions.

Trump is NOT a conservative in any conventional sense of the word.

Though he managed to capture the Republican Party nomination, his views do not reflect very much of what could be considered Republican Reagan-inspired orthodoxy. He ran against that orthodoxy and the “elites” who represent the Republican establishment.

Trump did not create the pool of white disaffected conspiracy-theory addled voters who support him. He has just become the most recent populist to capture their attention by calling out the establishment, regardless of party, who failed to deliver on the decades of promises that this group feels were made to them.

Conspiracy theories are part of our DNA. They were the source of legend and myth. They are independent of party. Conservatives have been the group that has recently brought them into politics in a dangerous way.

The danger of those who believe in self-serving conspiracy theories is that they are easy prey for those who may seek to turn them against the very institutions that provide them the only opportunity for relief. The best example is the past 8 years of Republican obstructionism. That obstructionism prevented passage of a more robust jobs creation program based on the big infrastructure investments that both candidates are talking about in this campaign.

That obstructionism was based in part on the effective campaign to delegitimize Obama. Though there was no basis in fact for any of those claims, Republican leadership became enablers of this strategy through their silence. As a result, significant percentages of Republicans still believe that Obama was born in Kenya and is Muslim. This made it much easier for House and Senate Republicans to effectively grind government to a halt for six years.

This same scorched-earth policy is being created for Clinton. She’s an historic liar, she should be jailed, she is too ill to be President, and the only way that she could be elected is if the elections themselves are rigged.

The fundamental concern of those unhappy with the direction the country is taking is that government is not working for them. The danger of this conspiracy-dominated strategy is that it erodes faith in the fundamental institutions of government rather than just the party that is in charge. Those fundamental institutions are what are SUPPOSED to work for all citizens. When a significant percentage of the citizens feel that not only elected representatives, but government itself is biased against them; the seeds for violence are being sown.

That brings us to a second danger. That is violence and the extremist in our society that advocate it.

Just like we have always had a segment of our society that believes conspiracy theories, there is also a segment of our society that supports violent overthrow of the government. These segments are also typically racist, nationalist, and libertarian.

The difference is that the hate speech associated with these groups was always relegated to the political fringe. Until recently, political leaders across the political spectrum rejected this bigotry outright.

Over the past eight years, racial hate speech has crept into the mainstream political conversation under the guise of political criticism of an African American president.

In this campaign; racial, religious, and even disability hate speech has been used by Trump. His excuse is that it is “straight” talk. He claims to take pride at speaking off the cuff and rejecting political correctness. His enablers add that he can’t be expected to show the sort of sensitivity that “professional” politicians display.

As a result, the violent extremists are moving from the lunatic fringe into the political mainstream. Right wing tribalism now provides them a cover to spread their hate and lies. Within the Republican Party, you can talk about topics that would have been embarrassing even during the Bush II administration. You need no better example of this legitimizing of the radical right than the appointment of Steven Bannon as Trump’s campaign manager. This guy has been one of the champions of the alt-right. His past history alone would have disqualified him from being involved in any previous Republican campaign. Now he is able to pass with barely a whimper.

Regardless of the outcomes of this election, we are dealing with a new reality. This reality is pick-up trucks with Confederate flags and rifle racks in the cab. It is open carry red-necks looking for confrontations at Black Lives Matter rallies. It is a rise in terrorist acts inspired by white supremacist groups rather than ISIS. It is a full-throated attack on the pluralism that is at the core of our democracy. It is a return of the cancer of white supremacy that has plagued this country from its founding.

My hope is that this is the first step to finally confronting and rejecting bigotry and racism in this country as acceptable behavior by any citizen.



Posted in Healing, Immigration, Terrorism, Trump | 27 Comments »

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