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The Perils of Trump

Monday, February 13th, 2017

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

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

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 »

Trump’s Huge Boomerang

Saturday, August 27th, 2016

Boomerangs have a wonderful property. Aboriginal Australians designed them as weapons that would come back if they missed their target. That works in hunting a bird. It is counterproductive in politics. Your attacks on your opponent should not end up coming back to wound you.

If this were just a one-time event in the Trump campaign, you could excuse it as just coincidence. But it has happened so often that you have to start treating as a feature rather than a bug.

Here are just a couple of examples.

“What is being uncovered now is one of the most shocking political scandals in American history,” Trump said on Thursday. “A secretary of state sold her office to corporations and foreign governments, betraying the public trust.”

This is in reference to a recent release of emails while Clinton was Secretary of State and Trump’s claim that donors to the Clinton foundation were getting special favors from Clinton in return for their donations. I’m not going to dig into the accuracy of these claims. They have already been fairly widely debunked by organizations like PolitiFact and CNN.

The boomerang is the fact that Trump himself donated to the Clinton foundation and got nothing in return. When confronted by Bill O’Reilly, here’s what he said.

And I have to tell you this, in all fairness, I thought that money was being put to very good use. I assumed it was being put to whether it’s Haiti or all of the different things that I heard about. I didn’t know about the private airplane rides all over the place and if you look at the kind of expenses that they charge and the way they lived, I had no idea that, but I will say, that as far as the foundation’s concerned, I assumed it was being put to good use, and so did everybody else that gave, and there were a lot of people that gave. They never really did anything for me, but I will say this, if I think they probably would have liked me, and, you know, whether you give here or give there, I got along with everybody, Bill.

Trump claims to be the best negotiator in the world. He claims that he will be able to get Mexico to foot the bill for a wall designed to keep Mexican’s out of this country. He claims that he will be able to renegotiate our trade agreements with China. He claims to take no prisoners and feels no remorse. Yet, if his claims about Clinton’s method of soliciting donations are true, he ended up being a chump. Many other people got a better deal that he did when they gave money to the Clinton foundation.

One of Trump’s other recent claims is that Clinton isn’t fit enough to be President.

“To defeat crime and radical Islamic terrorism in our country, to win trade in our country, you need tremendous physical and mental strength and stamina,” he said in Wisconsin. “Hillary Clinton doesn’t have that strength and stamina.”

He supported these claims using faked videos and out of context photographs. All of these were quickly and widely disproved, but remain a part of Trump’s basic stump speech.

Trump’s own claim to health, however, is based on one bizarre letter from a gastroenterologist who has dubious credentials. A gastroenterologist treats patients with some intestinal distress. They don’t generally treat healthy people. There are a lot of questions about the letter itself too, but the physician explains a lot of the strange terminology with the excuse that he wrote it in less than 5 minutes to satisfy a request by the Trump campaign.

The result is that the spot light has turned back to Trump’s health. If elected, he will be the oldest President ever to serve. He father died from early onset Alzheimer’s disease. He also received a medical draft deferment because of bone spurs. There is no mention of either condition in the physician’s letter. Ultimately the specious questions regarding Clinton’s health have lead back to a heightened awareness that Trump is the one with unanswered questions.

Then there is immigration. Trump made his mark on this issue, but it has also been his undoing since the end of his campaign. Clinton has effectively used this issue to paint Trump as a racist crazy person.

As Trump’s polling numbers began to head south, he brought in a new team and attempted to walk back some of his comments regarding mass deportation. His failed to thread the needle between those who support mass deportation and those who think it is crazy and racist. As a result, instead of revealing a “kinder, gentler” Trump, he seems even more uncertain and unstable.

Worse yet, his biggest supporters including Sarah Palin and Anne Colter are warning him that any wavering from his original plan will come at great cost.

All the while Clinton suffered the worst week of her campaign since Comey met with Congress. Instead of letting Clinton flap in the breeze, Trump continued his misguided attacks. So far, Clinton has only had to duck and wait for the inevitable. Trump wounded again by his own attack.

Posted in Immigration, Politics, Trump | No Comments »

Dangerous Territory

Tuesday, June 7th, 2016

Let’s start by saying that there is no place in a democracy for violence.

It is the dark underbelly of our most cherished institution. We are supposed to rely on our vote rather than the threat of violence in order to effect change.

That said, we have a history of political violence in this country.

The original Boston patriots were a violent group. One of the reason the rest of the original colonies were reluctant to join the revolution was their fear that after defeating the British, the Boston militia would turn on the rest of the colonies.

The Jim Crow south was built on violence and intimidation. A white minority imposed a social order on the black majority by taking away their votes and setting up a legal system that was rigged against them. The latest version of that scheme was on display in Ferguson, MO.

The anti-war movement was galvanized by the Kent Massacre where unarmed students were gunned down by National Guard troops. That single event did more than hours of news footage from Viet Nam to ultimately create the political will to end the draft and the war.

This time around, however, it is different.

MLK organized marches in the south for the specific purpose of raising awareness in the rest of the country to the institutional racism that governed the south. The images of the peaceful protestors being attacked by police spoke far more eloquently than any speech about the injustice of racism. Those protests also reflected a confidence in the how the country would respond when they realized what was going on. Our government responded with civil rights legislation.

The anti-war movement protested the morality of sending kids to war who didn’t have an opportunity to vote on that policy. Our government did eventually respond. The war ended. The draft was abolished. The voting age reduced.

This time around, however, the presumptive Republican nominee for the office of the President says that he is going to deport 11M people who are here illegally and restrict and monitor the activities of Muslims.

We’ve always had extreme candidates run for President. Strom Thurmond and George Wallace are just a couple of examples of candidates who supported legalized segregation. None of these extreme candidates ever had a chance to become president.

Trump does.

When the potential President of the United States says that he plans to forcibly deport members of your family, how are you going to react?

When the potential President of the United States says that he plans to spy on your place of worship and keep track of your activities in a database just because of your religion, how are you going to react?

If you have trust in democracy and the courts, you may plan to vote for whoever runs against this guy in the fall; send them some money, or even volunteer to work on their behalf.

If you don’t trust that in the current institutions of our government, but you do trust in the decency of the majority of people in this country, you may take to the streets to peacefully express your opinion in the hopes that other voters will understand the depth of your concern.

If you don’t trust in the current institutions of our government and distrust the basic decency of the majority of the people in this country, you may get frustrated and angry. That anger and frustration may drive you to confront those who you feel intend to harm you. That’s when the fabric of society starts to fray.

We enter into very dangerous territory when groups feel as though the only choice they have is to physically confront those that disagree with them. But what other way do we have to demonstrate to the larger population that Trump and his supporters are violent?

The dangerous territory is when this violence is used to justify violence.

The dangerous territory is when those who advocate violence are able to win an election because they claim that this tactic is the only effective response to violence.

The dangerous territory is when that violence is directed as a class of people whose only sin is who their parents were or how they choose to worship.

We’ve been in dangerous territory before. Adams passed a blatantly discriminatory Alien and Sedition act in 1798. The country tolerated slavery for 200 years and segregation for another 100 years. The Justice Department under Wilson tried to create a list of all German aliens (sound familiar?). 4000 were imprisoned. There was at least one documented incident of a lynching in Illinois. FDR interred the Japanese during WWII. We had a massive clandestine domestic spying program. We tortured suspected terrorists and are still holding some a decade later in a prison on foreign soil without any plan to try them.

We will survive this period too, but it will require work and will likely cause wounds that will take some time to heal.

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, Terrorism | 10 Comments »

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Thursday, April 28th, 2016

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters round you have grown and accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth savin’, then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen and keep your eyes wide the chance won’t come again and don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin and there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’. For the loser now will be later to win. For the times they are a-changin’.

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call. Don’t stand in the doorway. Don’t block up the hall. For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled. There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls. For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land and don’t criticize what you can’t understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly agin’. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand. For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn. The curse it is cast. The slow one now will later be fast. As the present now will later be past. The order is rapidly fadin’ and the first one now will later be last. For the times they are a-changin’.

Bob Dylan 1964

We baby-boomers LOVED this song. It was our declaration of independence. We are the children of the greatest generation. But in our youth, all we could see was the hypocrisy of discrimination and the stifling effects of social conformity. We celebrated individuality, freedom, and creativity.

Now we are the ones who are, at least in part, the rapidly fading order. Millennials finally outnumber us. We are also rapidly becoming a diverse racial country where whites are no longer the dominant race. For some, that is welcome. For others it is terrifying.

These tectonic demographic shifts drive our politics in ways that aren’t always obvious to those who feel the ground shifting underneath their feet. These shifts are, none the less, a reliable prediction of where politics are moving in the future.

In order to provide a sense of context, here is an historical example.

Republicans under Abraham Lincoln forced the south to bend to the will of the federal government and free the slaves. Whites in the south joined the Democratic Party and newly enfranchised blacks voted Republican. The resurgent Democratic Party forced the government to remove federal troops who had been enforcing southern reconstruction. This allowed the rise of Jim Crow laws and the end of black political power. Those white politics continued pretty much unchanged until the 60’s, Democrats supported civil rights legislation and again imposed a new order on the south. Blacks had been moving away from the Republican Party for decades because that party failed to support black interests (e.g. Teddy Roosevelt’s disbanding of a black army unit). Democrats earned black votes in response to Democratic support of civil rights legislation. Nixon’s southern strategy completed the transition of Dixiecrats to the Republican Party.

Let’s look at some of the other important growing demographic segments to see which parties they are aligned with and why.

Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans
All of these demographics are SIGNIFICANTLY younger than the white population. The implications are obvious. As the white population ages, the these groups will gain more political power.

It should also be obvious to even the casual observer that all of these groups have good reasons to affiliate with the Democratic Party. Republicans have chosen to be the party of white people. That choice was not lost on these groups. Both Trump and Cruz promise to deport 12M undocumented workers. Those opposed to that are going to vote Democratic. The Republican Party largely blames the poor in this country for their condition. Those who oppose that view are also going to vote for Democrats.

The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman accurately described the Republican problem.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of all white voters and won election in a 44-state landslide. In 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney carried 59 percent of all white voters yet lost decisively. What happened? African Americans, Latinos, Asians and other non-whites — all overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning groups — rose from 12 percent of voters in 1980 to 28 percent in 2012.

Women
Regardless of how you feel about abortion, from a political perspective 54% of women are pro-choice. Republicans are aggressively pro-life. According to Gallup, 70% of women have an unfavorable view of Trump. Even with Clinton’s negatives among women at 50%, she has a 20 point advantage. If Trump continues to attack her in the run up to the presidency in the same ways that he attacked women during the primaries, it is likely that his negatives will go up and hers down.

Highly Educated Professionals
These people are naturally liberal because they value science. Republican positions on climate change only exacerbate this Democratic advantage.

Young People
Young people are very supportive of LGBT rights and many carry massive college debt. Republicans oppose LGBT rights and oppose any efforts to reform higher education financing.

Evangelicals
Carter woke up evangelicals. Reagan and Schafly converted them to Republicanism. Lately, however, evangelical leaders have moved away from the narrow social issues and embraced a larger set of concerns about helping the poor. They remain an area of support for Republicans, but the religious zealotry of right wing conservatism has taken over from the pulpit-lead politics of previous decades.

Working Class Whites
Republicans have an advantage with low information white voters. Trump has mobilized them because they have felt that their previous Republican votes did not deliver the change that was promised. They are looking for someone to materially change their current tenuous condition. Their wages have stagnated. Their job prospects are grim. What investments they had have not recovered from the 2008 financial collapse. They have determined that the game is rigged against them and they want someone to blame. This all fits well with the Republican emotional approach to politics. The problem is that this group, while passionate, is a declining demographic and in 2016 may represent 10% of the voting population.

Conclusion
The next election will be a contentious one. Assuming that there are no bombshells between now and November, Clinton should win with relative ease regardless of who Republicans run. That is going to be incomprehensible for Republicans because Clinton IS in many ways the devil of their religion. It was just as incomprehensible for them that a white country elected a black man twice, but they blamed that on Romney and McCain not being conservative enough and the government bribing 47% of the population.

The facts tell a different story. Too many of the growing demographic groups currently have natural affiliations with Democratic policy positions for any Republican to win. The real question is what choice the Republican faithful, in the face of yet another national failure, will make – start swimmin’ or sink like a stone.

Posted in Abortion, Bias, Environment, Immigration, Politics, Religious Conservatism | 45 Comments »

Belgian Dip

Saturday, March 26th, 2016

Donald Trump showed remarkable, if momentary, insight regarding the root causes of the recent terrorist attack in Belgium.

This all happened because frankly there is no assimilation

While this isn’t the only reason that ISIS targeted Belgium. It is the primary reason why Belgian residents have been involved in the last two major ISIS attacks in Europe.

The unemployment rate for Belgians of North and sub-Saharan African descent is between 40 and 50 percent. Last year, the BBC reported that of Antwerp’s 2,600 police officers, only 22 are non-white. In 2011, Belgium became the first country in Europe to ban the veil nationwide.

Like most of Europe, Belgium does not provide a path to citizenship for their immigrant population. Instead many Belgian born Muslim languish in a guest worker status with few jobs and few alternatives. It should not be surprising that Belgium has supplied between 400-500 fighters in the Syrian war.

Belgium is also a mess politically. They don’t have the public safety infrastructure to track the activities of these fighters when they come back home. By comparison, the US has maybe a dozen residents who have left the US to fight in the Middle East and have returned. The FBI has all of them under close surveillance.

In this country, however, assimilation does not face the same barriers, even for those who are here illegally. The result is a US Muslim population that is generally well integrated into their communities and happy with their circumstances.

According to a 2011 Pew Research poll, only 20 percent of American Muslims surveyed would prefer to “be distinct” than to “adopt American customs.” Half say that many of their friends are non-Muslim. Almost 80 percent rate their community an “excellent” or “good” place to live. Crime rates in Muslim communities are generally low and the children of Muslims, like most US immigrants, marry outside their community and are indistinguishable from any other US citizen.

Yet politicians like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump call for bans on all Muslim immigration and increased internal surveillance of all Muslims already here include those that are US citizens.

A 2014 study found that Muslim immigrants in states that experienced more anti-Muslim hate crimes were less likely to intermarry with non-Muslims and learn English.

Our ability to peacefully assimilate Muslims along with every other immigrant demographic IS one of the major factors in insulating America from the domestic terrorism we see in Europe.

The net result of raising the level of Islamaphobia in this country is that our country becomes less safe.

Ted Cruz’s proposed response to Brussels would have a similar effect. The day of the attacks, he called for police to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods.” Asked what that meant, Cruz cited a program in New York that, according to The New York Times, allowed to the NYPD to designate “entire mosques as suspected ‘terrorism enterprises,’” and thus “collect the license plate numbers of every car in mosque parking lots, videotape worshipers coming and going, and record sermons using informants wearing hidden microphones.” What Cruz didn’t mention is that an NYPD official himself admitted the program didn’t yield a single terrorism investigation. What it did was alienate law-abiding Muslims. As a Newark-based FBI special agent noted, the program led “people [to] pull back cooperation” and thus impaired “our ability to have our finger on the pulse of what’s going on around the state.”

The New York police chief said that he had hundreds of Muslim officers on the staff and if Ted Cruz has a campaign stop in New York, part of the squad assigned to protect him will likely be Muslim.

Embracing peaceful Muslims in the same way we embrace any other peaceful immigrant population, is our strongest weapon against ISIS ideology.

Persecuting Muslims, treating every Muslim as if they were a terrorist and subjecting individuals to a higher level of scrutiny and regulation just because of their religion will re-enforce the ISIS message that the West really does want to destroy Islam.

Posted in Bias, Immigration, Politics, Terrorism | 38 Comments »

Trump and the Crazy Train

Friday, August 14th, 2015

There is certainly one thing that you can say about Trump – he is entertaining.

What people aren’t talking about is the fact that ALL of the Republican presidential candidates are in one way or another just as crazy as Trump.

Trump represents an interesting populist anti-establishment uprising that has surprised the party establishment, the media, and Trump. He is also the natural evolution of the “money votes” economy. Rand Paul was on the right track when he said that Trump is “used to buying politicians”. He has simply taken the next step of by passing the middle man and representing his own interests. Whether he is able to translate this into a nomination is yet to be seen.

He gained momentum by demonizing undocumented workers. He fanned the flames of xenophobia by claiming that Mexico was deliberately sending their most dangerous citizens to us to deal with.

All of the rest of the candidates were dragged along to support Trump’s claim that there is a crisis at the border. Rubio tried to distance himself from his previous support of a path to citizenship. Walker also changed his tune. Christie called his previous support a “garbage idea”. Even Trump had flipped from his earlier support of path to citizenship. Only Kasich, Hackabee, Carson, and Paul have resisted the urge to jump on the “we’re being overwhelmed with criminals” bandwagon.

The problem is that fact checkers call this claim false. Illegal immigration peaked in 2007 and has actually declined since. Deportations hit an all time high in 2013 of 400K. Most of those were convicted of crimes in this country. More robust border enforcement has not only dramatically reduced illegal immigration, but it has also discouraged undocumented workers from leaving this country for fear that they won’t be able to get back in. The result is a fairly stable population of undocumented workers in this country of 11M. Their children, at least those born here, will automatically be citizens. If these trends continue, within thirty years the number of undocumented workers will drop by 50% without any other actions on our part.

So the only value in building a bigger wall is that it will likely provide some jobs for those that the wall is intended to keep out.

How about abortion?

Trump flipped from his previous support of abortion.

Rubio lied about never supporting exceptions to abortion.

Bush questioned whether, “we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”

Huckabee said he would ignore the Supreme Court and declare that a “baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.”

Santorum, who has built his political career on his opposition to abortion, took the opportunity to question Carson’s character because Carson used fetal tissue in his medical research. “When you start to see some of these cracks, I think it may show whether the person is really someone who’s going to take on an issue and be strong on it when they get into the very difficult position of being President of the United States.” An interesting attack from the guy who recently failed a significant test of character when he had to choose between politics and his religious faith on the topic of climate change.

How about healthcare?

Trump flip flopped in his previous support for single payor.

All promise to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better. NONE have said what that something better would be other than some discussion that health savings accounts would be nice.

How about the use of our military in the Middle East?

Rand Paul is the only one who would not put “boots on the ground”.

Fiorina lied when she claimed that the US wasn’t arming the Kurds. We are doing it through the Iraqi government.

How about the economy?

Jeb promises that he can deliver 4% growth off into the future based on his experience in Florida and his belief in supply side economics. The reality is that he presided over a huge real estate bubble in Florida. When it burst, shortly after he left office, 900K of the 1.3M jobs he claimed to create vanished. Funny the same thing happened to his brother’s supply-side experiment.

Many economists think that 4% is just out of our reach because of the demographic headwinds of the baby boomer retirement. You really have to believe in the fairy dust of supply side economics to project that we would touch 3% as a result of government policies.

Christie claimed some big job numbers, but his state ranked 44 out of 50 in job growth.

Walker did not elaborate on his failure to deliver the 215K jobs he promised would appear as a result of the massive tax cuts he gave business. Instead he talked about job growth and job participation numbers. What he didn’t say is that these were the same numbers that existed prior to his election.

Huckabee solves everything with a consumption tax. One of the advantages of that tax is that even “illegals, prostitutes, pimps, and drug dealers” would be paying this tax. He claims that tax will generate 6% growth. I have to admit that 6 is better than 4 which is certainly better than 2, but just changing the tax policy won’t do it. You have to get more workers which just isn’t going to happen unless there is also a radical change in immigration policy which is not part of Huckabee’s plan. Even if you got more workers, you would also have to have a significant change in productivity because wages would have to track this growth in order to get more money into the economy. Huckabee hasn’t even thought of this because his consumption tax shifts most of the tax burden to the poor. All he has thought about is that 6 is better than 4.

Then there is Doc Carson, who suggest that we should all tithe 10% of income instead of pay taxes. When asked whether or not it would work, he said that if it worked for God, it will work for us.

Summary

In this context it isn’t surprising that Trump is having the success that he has been having. The reality is that the only half-way serious candidate in this train full of clowns is Kasich. Not surprisingly he is the most moderate of the bunch and as a result, the least likely to get the nomination.

This speaks volumes about what the Republican Party has become. This is no longer the party of George HW Bush or even Ronald Reagan. It has become the party of paranoia and extremism as the old white angry men, who have been the party’s backbone, struggle with the reality that they are no longer in control. They failed to defend marriage from the onslaught of gay rights. They failed to prevent the rollout of what they see as another big entitlement program in Obamacare. Black people are demanding justice. Hispanics have discovered the power of the ballot box. Even the Pope disagrees with their abortion obsession. And women are no longer content with staying home and raising children. They not only demand a career, but also equal pay for equal work.

These guys are growing tired of the effort required to hold back the flood of scientific evidence supporting human-caused climate change. Their dam has sprung so many leaks that they are running out of fingers to plug them. Coal-based electrical generation is not only polluting, it is expensive. The most economical and highest performance car is all electric, made in this country, and sold direct over the internet. The world is changing under their feet and there appears to be little they can do to prevent it except perhaps support someone who is willing to give voice to their fears and frustrations – Donald Trump.

Posted in Abortion, Bias, Economy, Environment, Finance, Healthcare, Immigration, Politics, Science | 38 Comments »

Teddycare

Sunday, March 8th, 2015

Ted Cruz is trying to position himself for a run at the 2016 Republican nomination for President.

He has already endeared himself to the Tea Party based on his government shutdown strategy.

As with many who need to retain their conservative bona fides while attempting to appeal to a broader audience, Ted has a problem. His actions and words are often at odds with one another.

In an attempt to distance himself from the last Republican who ran for President, Ted said this at a recent Koch Brothers event.

The central narrative of the last election, what the voters heard was, ‘We don’t have to worry about the 47%.’ I think Republicans are and should be the party of the 47%.’

Just as a reminder, the 47% reference here was Romney’s description of those dependent on the government and, as a result, unlikely to vote for him.

Here’s what Ted has done to help the 47% over the last couple of years.

Government Shutdown
This was an effort to defund Obamacare which provides insurance for a large percentage of the 47%. The government shutdown took a $24B bite out of the ecomony and , according to Mark Zandi from Moody’s, slowed the recovery that we are now experiencing by at least two quarters. It also furloughed thousands of federal employees without pay, though they were eventually paid. Federal contractors also furloughed thousands of employees without pay. They never received their lost pay. Small businesses suffered delays in payments and frozen SBA loans which caused them to lay off workers too.

He later defended his action saying:

As a result of that fight, millions of Americans rose up and demanded we stop the disaster that is Obamacare. Together, we elevated the national debate. And now, the misguided healthcare law is more unpopular than ever.

Immigration Reform
Ted also opposes any immigration reform that would provide a pathway to citizenship. He supports deportation of Dreamers.

Minimum Wage
He opposes any increase in the minimum wage.

Each of these positions makes life for the 47% worse. So it does call into question how he plans to become a champion of the poor and middle class.

Now he wants us to believe that he can provide a reasonable alternative to Obamacare. He remains convinced that “every last word of Obamacare must be repealed”. His alternative is designed to address the 7.5M that could lose coverage if the Supreme Court strikes down subsidies for those who have purchased insurance through the federal website.

The administration has done absolutely nothing to prepare for an upcoming Supreme Court decision that could leave millions of Americans unable to afford insurance thanks to this failed law.

Republicans must offer the American people alternatives that lower costs and break the status quo that favors big government and big health care business over hardworking Americans.

Before we dig into this just a couple of points about how insurance works.

Insurance companies make money by spreading the risk of a claim over a large population of insurance customers. The larger to pool of people unlikely to make a claim, the lower the rates for everyone in the pool. Obamacare works because it adds WAY more healthy people to the insurance pool than sick people.

This “pool” business model also introduces a bit of counter intuition with regard to competition. The bigger the pool, the lower the cost. That means that competition actually increases insurance company costs because the pool now has to be split among competitive companies. The number of insurance companies that any particular state can support depends on that state’s population. Increasing the number of choices for consumers (by allowing buying outside state boundaries) will actually reduce the number of in-state choices consumers have, particularly in smaller population states.

Here are the major points of Teddycare.

Allow people to purchase health insurance across state lines
His claim along with other Republicans is that increased competition would lead to lower premiums. This is disputed by experts. That’s because the cost of insurance is driven by the cost of healthcare, and not the marginal costs to operate their companies.

Eliminating state boundaries will return us to a world where healthy people can get very cheap insurance that they never use and ill people, if they can find insurance, won’t be able to afford it.

Insurance is regulated on a state by state basis rather than nationally. Allowing consumer to buy insurance from any state they choose will encourage at least some states to compete for that business by weakening their regulations. We’ve seen the same thing in credit cards where most companies are headquartered in Delaware or South Dakota where consumer protection laws are weak.

Repeal the individual mandate
Obamacare was able to implement requirements to insure everyone (healthy or sick) by requiring everyone (healthy or sick) to purchase insurance. This increases the pool of healthy people enough to actually offset the costs to offer the same plans to sick people. The result that we’ve seen is that the the rate of premium increases we saw before Obamacare have now slowed.

Eliminate the marketplaces
This reduces the ability for consumers to easily shop for plans on an apples to apples basis. Plans are complicated and even with the requirements that a marketplace impose, comparisons are still difficult. Remove the marketplace and very few consumers will be able to make informed decisions. They will instead have to return to insurance brokers who will help drive the cost of insurance up.

Remove the subsidies
Subsidies also widen the pool and make sure that care is being provided at the lowest cost location, a physician’s office rather than the highest cost location, the ER.

Eliminate protections against pre-existing conditions
Insurance companies will simply refuse to offer coverage to the very sick. The very sick will exhaust their own resources, declare bankruptcy and qualify for Medicaid. Tax payers foot the bill.

Eliminate parents’ ability to carry their kids on their insurance until age 26
Kids who age out of their parents’ plans will simply not purchase insurance. Rates go up because the pool is less healthy

Allow insurance companies to cap lifetime benefits
For the first time in our history, bankruptcies because of medical costs went down in this country because of Obamacare. This will cause them to go back up again.

Ted Cruz isn’t offering an alternative to Obamacare. He is simply returning us to the insurance system that existed before Obamacare. This was the system that was failing the 47% and threatening to bankrupt the country with out of control increases in healthcare costs. This was the system that left many people one serious illness or accident away from financial ruin. This was the system where the most vulnerable in our society had the least protection. This was the system where tax payers where forced to carry the burden for 30M uninsured.

I doubt that this will ever be introduced as a piece of legislation because it then can be scored by the CBO. That will reveal it as the fraud that it really is.

That does seem about right for the party that wants to “lower costs” for “hardworking Americans”. That’s really the code word here. We’re not talking about the 47% anymore. We’re talking about the 85% who have insurance and have been brainwashed into believing that extending care to another 27M people must be costing them something.

That’s what Teddycare is all about, fear mongering and Big Lies. One thing you CAN say about Ted Cruz, he is consistent.

Posted in Bias, Economy, Healthcare, Immigration, Politics | No Comments »

No One Is Satisfied With This Recovery

Sunday, March 1st, 2015

Republicans blamed slow economic growth on Obama in 2014. They won an election on that claim. They also trumpeted their mandate to reverse the policies that they said were preventing stronger economic growth. Then a strange thing happened. The public realized that things weren’t nearly as bad as Republicans claimed. Obama’s popularity rebounded and Republicans were left flat footed. If Obama’s policies were in fact controlling economic growth, the strong fourth quarter economic growth meant that Obama DID know what he was doing.

Republicans could no longer deny the reality that the economy was growing. Nor could they prevent Obama and Democrats from taking the credit, since they had successfully convinced voters that they deserved the blame.

The rest of this post looks at the first of several pivots in messaging that Republicans are attempting.

Rather than insult the intelligence of the voter, Republicans are claiming that Obama’s “recovery” is tepid and has not benefited the middle class or the poor. Thus the statement by Mike Camp, recently retired Republican congress person from Michigan that “No one is satisfied with this recovery.” The fact is that the wealthy are just fine with this recovery because times have rarely been better for them. But now Republicans claim to have finally found religion and are shocked at how poorly everyone else has been doing.

The remarkable hypocrisy in this statement is that until this pivot occurred, Republicans condemned the very concept of income inequality as class warfare. Now Republicans at every level have decided that the concentration of wealth in the top 1% of wage earners is not only a problem, but evidence of failed Democratic policies.

The reality is that concentration of wealth at the top was the deliberate construction of Republican tax cutting plans that started with Reagan. This is the first step to prosperity described in various terms as Supply Side Economics, trickle-down economics, and supporting the job creators. The idea was that if those at the top got to keep more of “their” money. They would invest more of that money back into the economy. The resulting growth would more than offset any loss in tax revenue.

The problem is that it never happened. What happened instead is that these tax policies made the problem worse. The wealthy invested their money in electing more Republicans, government spending and tax revenues went down, unemployment went up, employers were able to freeze the wages of workers because of increased competition for scarce jobs, republican controlled states reduced the power of unions, and businesses were able to find a new normal where profits increased because of reduced costs even though top line sales were flat.

The middle class was squeezed out of the consumer economy and any significant participation in corporate profits. Instead we had a wealth-based economy where demand was driven by the stock market.

The GOP, however, doesn’t seem embarrassed by their hypocrisy. Those who predicted doom and gloom if taxes were raised on the “job creators” are now saying, “Sure, unemployment is down and growth is up, but it doesn’t really count if only ‘job creators’ are enjoying the real prosperity.”

One of the key actors in this theater of the absurd is Paul Ryan. He has been one of the most vocal defenders of the Republican notion that lower taxes and lower government spending would unleash pent up demand and power a golden era of economic growth. He is now accusing the Obama administration of practicing the very economic policies Ryan advocated in 2012 and blaming Obama for the outcome.

The Obamanomics that we’re practicing now have exacerbated inequality…They’ve exacerbated stagnation. They’re made things worse. The wealthy are doing really well. They’re practicing trickle down economics now.

This is the same guy who advocated sweeping budget reform that would have dramatically reduced government spending for the poor, converting Medicare into a voucher program, and privatized social security.

The Republicans are clearly trying to run away from their past history, blame the President for doing what they were proposing, while failing to propose what they would have done differently.

Here are a few examples.

Obamacare is working. It is a great benefit to the uninsured and under insured. It has slowed the overall growth of healthcare costs, and loosened the grip that corporations have on their workers because of the lack of affordable healthcare alternatives. Republicans continue to promise to repeal this law without offering any viable alternative.

Stimulus and the Fed. These are the two forces which prevented the great recession from becoming the great depression. Republicans opposed both but offered no viable plan on what they would have done differently.

Financial and auto industry bailouts. Both very successful. Both opposed by Republicans. Their claim is that we should have “let it burn”, putting more people of work, further depressing wages, but providing both industries an opportunity to rebuild.

Minimum wage. Obama supports it. Republicans oppose it.

Infrastructure investments. Obama supports it. Republicans oppose it.

Immigration reform. Obama supports it. Republicans oppose it.

College Finance Reform. Obama supports it. Republicans oppose it.

Summary
Republicans don’t really have any new ideas. There isn’t some big bold plan to boost the income or opportunity for the poor and the middle class. The reason why is that the only viable way to make dramatic changes is to increase government spending for the middle class and the poor financed by increased taxes on the wealthy. Since this party is backed by the wealthy, there is precious little else of substance that they CAN do. So what Republican are really going to try to do is suggest that their smaller government, smaller taxes, weaker unions, and stronger corporations policy IS in fact also middle class friendly. How? By giving everyone a chance to become wealthy, since those are the only people for whom the current system is working.

Posted in Bias, Economy, Finance, Immigration, Politics | 31 Comments »

Spiritual wickedness in high places