Growing Challenge of Wage/Wealth Gap won’t be resolved without intervention…We first need to fully recognize the increasing wage/wealth gap problem in order to fix it. The GOP’s free market solutions would only ensure it gets worse, while the Dems redistribution ideas only undermine the individual initiative for working hard & taking risks to grow a business. So both parties are way off the mark, with big/bold/new ideas being badly needed to create the opportunity for shared prosperity & upward mobility for all, breaking this highly-destructive trend of an ever-escalating wage/wealth gap.
This Booming Economy Sucks!
A very low unemployment rate & good job creation does not a great economy make. There’s much more to it than that, as we have some serious chronic structural issues that aren’t getting better without some smart intervention & even a foundational restructuring of our economy. An explanation of why this economy isn’t nearly as good as it seems, & why it feels so disjointed is in an article posted here from why-a-great-u-s-economy-doesn-t-feel-so-great:
John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, describes the economy “strong.” CNN says it’s “soaring.” Vice calls it “great,” and the Washington Post labels it “good.” I myself have referred to it as a “boom.” But others wonder how this strong, great economy can be soaring when wages aren’t rising very quickly. Meanwhile, my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Stephen Gandel notes that most Americans’ wealth hasn’t gone up during this boom. Most middle-class Americans keep their wealth in their houses, while the rich tend to put more in the stock market. But stocks have seen the bulk of the gains since President Donald Trump took office. Even real estate isn’t doing so well for ordinary Americans these days, since the foreclosures of the housing bust and tighter lending standards have shifted housing wealth from the middle class to the rich. And that’s just what’s happening recently. Over the longer term, Americans have been suffering from steadily falling mobility. Only about half of 30-year-olds now make more money than their parents did at a similar age.
How can things be booming when average Americans are treading water? The answer has to do with the way economists think about the economy. In both their formal models and their mental ones, economic performance is divided into two very different components — macro and micro. That divide has seeped into popular language and punditry, occasionally causing unnecessary confusion. In simple terms, the basic story economists tell goes something like this: Over the long run, economic prosperity is determined by the march of technology and the quality of human institutions. These combine to drive the growth in productivity, which measures how much output the economy can create for a given set of inputs. They also determine how what the economy produces gets distributed — technology can reward some skills and devalue others, while the government can redistribute wealth and privilege certain occupations over others. Various subfields of economics deal with the gritty details of things that are thought to affect productivity — taxes, public goods, economic development, education, health, research and development, financial markets, etc. Increasingly, these fields — which comprise a majority of what economists study — are grouped together under the name of microeconomics.
In the short term, economists believe, the business cycle can cause fluctuations around the long-term trend. When a financial crisis, tight monetary policy or some other shock causes aggregate demand for goods and services to fall, businesses stop investing and lay off workers. The ensuing recession causes a mismatch — offices and factories sit empty, while workers who could fill those offices and factories stay at home playing video games. The downturn doesn’t last forever, but in the most severe situations it can persist for as long as a decade. The branch of economics which deals with this sort of temporary phenomenon is called macroeconomics. Since the Great Depression, economists have gotten used to referring to macroeconomic conditions as “the economy.” Recessions and booms dominate the public discussion. When a large share of workforce is employed — as the chart below shows — people say “the economy” is good, even if productivity is slow, mobility is stagnant and inequality is increasing.
The job market is so strong that even people on Social Security Disability are re-entering the workforce. But this labor market upswing is relative to a long-term productivity trend that looks increasingly gloomy. That stagnant productivity is probably a major reason wages are rising so slowly — though workers don’t always capture the gains from productivity growth, it definitely helps. Lower productivity also means less wealth available for the government to redistribute. In other words, economists and commentators are calling the economy “great” because that’s what they’re used to doing. They just mean that most people have jobs. This standard terminology ignores the question of how much those jobs pay, or which classes of society reap the gains.
Of course, the macroeconomy and the microeconomy aren’t completely disconnected. An extended macroeconomic boom will tend to push up wages. It can even raise productivity, since it prompts companies to invest in the latest technological advances. So it’s good to keep aggregate demand strong, by not tightening monetary and fiscal policy unnecessarily. But a good macroeconomy isn’t enough. The long-term trends of low productivity and high inequality have to be addressed. Microeconomic policy is much harder than macro, since it requires digging deep into the guts of institutions and industries, and fixing a million little things such as regulations, infrastructure, research, taxes, education and trade policy. There are rarely any big, quick, simple solutions. But the job must be tackled nonetheless, or Americans will eventually realize that a great economy isn’t so great after all.
Trumpian Policies getting way too much credit
The greatest economy ever (as Trump claims)? WRONG! Trump’s policies deserve the accolades? WRONG! Our economy was trending towards lower unemployment rates years before Trump entered the picture. However, Trump does deserve credit for raising deficits. For another accurate depiction of the Trump economy & how current policies are widening the wage/wealth gap, it’s posted here from the-truth-about-trumps-economy:
I keep hearing that although Trump may be a scoundrel or worse, he’s done a great job for the economy. Baloney. Yes, the stock market is great, but 84 percent of it is owned by the richest 10 percent of Americans. The economy is growing, but very little of that growth is trickling down to average Americans. Jobs may be back but they pay squat, especially compared to the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education. Trump slashed taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and he promised everyone else a wage boost of $4,000 but it never happened.Meanwhile, employers continue to cut pension and healthcare benefits. Jobs are less secure than ever. One in 5 jobs is now held by a worker under contract, without any unemployment insurance, sick leave, or retirement savings.
Housing costs are skyrocketing, with a large portion of Americans now paying a third of their paychecks in rent or mortgages. Trump’s budget proposes drastic cuts in low-income housing. Trump’s undermining of the Affordable Care Act is also making life harder. Over the past two years, some 4 million people have lost healthcare coverage, according to the Commonwealth Fund. The costs of college education continue to soar. All Trump has done is make it easier for for-profit colleges to defraud students.And as the climate changes, more Americans are being hit with floods, mudslides, droughts, and wildfires. And what’s Trump’s response? Allow more carbon pollution into the atmosphere and make climate change even worse. So don’t be fooled. Don’t judge this economy by the stock market or economic growth, or even the level of unemployment. Look at actual living standards of average working Americans, and you see an economy that’s getting worse, not better.
Geographic Inequalities & Minimum Wage
Another factor feeding our out-of-proportion wage/wealth gap is what this article calls inequalities of place: amazon-and-americas-real-divide. That problem has again come into focus with Amazon’s announcement of new HQ’s near DC & in NYC. The more prosperous coastal cities need higher minimum wages relative to most places in America, but excerpts from minimum-wage-midterm-elections-labor-employment show the current $7.25 federal minimum wage is really a joke, as workers without a strong voice keep falling further behind:
Facing stubborn company resistance to higher wages in the tightest U.S. labor market in a half century, increasing numbers of cities and states are forcing employers to push up their pay. The big picture: Despite a tightening labor market, wage growth has remained sluggish. Against this trend, 10 large cities have passed $15-an-hour minimum wages, in addition to the state of California. New York has set a $15 minimum for fast-food workers, and Massachusetts for home health workers. In Tuesday’s elections, two red states — Arkansas and Missouri — passed higher hourly minimums of $11 and $12, respectively. By the numbers: Wages have risen by 3.1% year on year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week — well below the 3.5% to 4% they routinely increased during the tight labor markets of the 1990s and 2000s. The backdrop: Labor’s share of national income has plunged since 2000, according to the St. Louis Fed, and wages have been largely flat since. The rise in corporate profit is far outrunning labor income, the Fed branch said. The tipping point for the pushback was the 2016 elections, in which Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders made a $15 minimum his central plank — more than double the $7.25 federal minimum.
Between the lines: Leading economists are not convinced that the hikes — in both red and blue states — amount to a nascent pro-labor public groundswell.
*Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, tells Axios that the economic and public policy environments have become decidedly less favorable for labor.
*”A lot has changed,” Krueger said. “Unions are weaker and the chance of unionization is lower; labor laws, such as an emphasis on arbitration over allowing the courts to adjudicate enforce workers’ rights, have shifted against workers; employer concentration has increased, especially in national markets, etc.”
The bottom line: David Autor, an MIT professor and one of the world’s most respected labor economists, said low unemployment would have to continue for many years to reverse the decades of flat wages.
*“And even if that were to come to pass (which it rarely done),” Autor tells Axios, “it’s far from certain that this would restore the sizable fall in labor’s share of national income since 2000.”
Dalio warns of growing wage/wealth gap
It’s hard to argue with Dalio as seen in this beginning to the article below in streettalk/billionaire-ray-dalio-capitalism-people, but it’s frustrating how leadership seems to have no real ideas & prefer ignoring these entrenched problems causing roughly half the population to struggle making ends meet. How is that possible or even moral in a society overall creating such tremendous wealth? It should really be the #1 focus of the White House & Congress every day when they head to their offices:
Billionaire hedge fund founder Ray Dalio contends that “capitalism is basically not working for the majority of people.” Dalio has spoken about inequality for years. He has warned that artificial intelligence will help to worsen it, Barron’s explained. In a recent speech in Las Vegas, Dalio cited a Federal Reserve survey statistic that 40% of U.S. households could not raise $400 in case of emergency without selling something. Dalio said if he had the power to do so, he would declare the wealth gap and opportunity gap a “national emergency.” If the government “created metrics that literally judged the conditions of people, and then took responsibility for changing those metrics, there’s a lot that can be done in private-public partnerships and so on to be able to change it,” he said. “But I fear that probably will not be done by the next time we have a downturn, and I fear for what that conflict is going to be like,” Barron’s quoyed Dalio as saying. Dalio isn’t alone in warning about the economy’s future. However, JPMorgan Chase’s retail chief predicts that worry over impending U.S. recession might actually cause one. “This late-cycle recession has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” JPMorgan Chase Co-President Gordon Smith said.
Basking in the Election Results
The Dems mitigated a very unfavorable map in the Senate, while on the House side the gains will be a pickup of nearly +40, the biggest Dem gain since the Watergate aftermath! Hear two versions of the same song below. For my Cubs fan buddy trying to echo-bait me, no I’m not a registered Dem, but yes, I vote Dem for now to try saving the GOP by forcing it back to sanity. It’s the message a lot of us center-right conservatives needed to send. And yes, Trumpism proved toxic, as seen in excerpts taken from trump-lost-and-it-wasnt-even-close:
President Trump lost. And it was not even close. On Tuesday, the president and his allies paid a high political price for their preposterous claims about caravans filled with leprosy, Middle Eastern terrorists, Hispanic “breeders” and gang invaders. Those lies cost the hobbled president every bit as much as his vicious attacks on the free press and his foul campaign calls to imprison political adversaries. Despite all claims to the contrary, Trump Republicans faced a bitter reckoning at the polls in dozens of congressional races and hundreds of legislative battles across the United States.
Trumpism proved to be so politically toxic that Republicans likely took their worst shellacking in U.S. House races since the darkest days of Watergate. Trump Republicans lost at least 30 seats in Congress and took a beating nationally. In state legislative races, the tally was even worse, with more than 300 Republican legislators watching their political careers get washed away by the blue wave. Republicans who believed Trump would never pay a price for his misogyny, you were wrong. Historically wrong. When the new Congress is sworn in, more than 100 women will become elected members of the People’s House. That will be the first time in history that so many women will have a hand in running the country’s government, and they will direct our future away from Trump’s dystopian vision. Doesn’t that seem only fitting since their success is owed in part to Trump’s odious attitude toward women?
It is long past time that Republicans in Congress begin worrying more about their country’s well-being than fretting over being on the wrong side of one of Trump’s childish tweets. It is also past time for Republicans to understand that their fear of Trump only enabled the president to act on his worst instincts and in turn fueled their party’s decline. The collective weight of Charlottesville, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Scott Pruitt, the president’s multitude of lies, his thoughtless cruelty, his failed Muslim ban, West Wing chaos, White House corruption and gross incompetence on the international stage was too much for Trump’s congressional quislings and political allies to overcome. Voters decided on Tuesday that if their representatives would not provide a check on the president’s worst excesses, they would use their vote to do it themselves. When the dust finally cleared, Trump had lost. And it was not even close.
More Positive Election Results were a lot more Voter Engagement
Encouraging trends of greater voter participation (analysis-midterm-voting-highest-in-104-years) & demanding political leadership address the concerns of labor are found posted here from workers-won-in-this-election. Workers need a voice a lot more than corporate interests who already have a substantially disproportionate say:
This midterm elections this week that handed Democrats control of the House and governorships of swing states showed that voters demanded action to protect workers and rebalance our economy, and provides an action agenda for new state and congressional leaders as we look towards 2020. While the Trump administration was calling the minimum wage a “terrible idea” and trying to roll back the Affordable Care Act, voters turned out for candidates and ballot measures that championed raising wages, expanding health care, and tackling other worker needs. The midterm elections underscored that a vision for workers is one that can inspire voters, engage them in campaigns, and make them believe that those in office govern with their best interests at heart. It must be the agenda for action by new state and national leaders as we look towards 2020.
Coming Back to Its Senses?
The conservative agenda & mindset had gone way too far, so might be trending back closer to the middle: the-political-pendulum-is-swinging-back-from-conservative-control-in-so-many. There hopefully are some encouraging signs for the GOP in the election results, where a trend towards moderation & voters above all wanting leaders to work together in getting things done, could beat back against the party’s hardcore fanaticism. This despite the ruby-red states continuing to send their extremist nutwings back to DC: dem-wins-leave-behind-a-more-conservative-gop-conference. But the vast majority of the country are rejecting that party of extremism defined by division & demagoguery. So the delusional far-right radicalization embodied by the remnants of the intransigent tea party might be finally repelled into irrelevancy while contained by Dixie regionalism, as seen in excerpts from moderate-republicans-arent-dead-theyre-hiding-in-plain-sight:
Moderate Republicans, always prone to pessimism, had ample reason for despair after Tuesday’s House election results. Many of their favorite representatives went down to defeat, including Mike Coffman in Colorado, Carlos Curbelo in Florida, Mia Love in Utah and Barbara Comstock in Virginia. Moderate GOP factions in the House, such as the Tuesday Group and the Republican Main Street Partnership, may see their memberships cut nearly in half. President Trump claimed at his post-election news conference that these moderates lost because they didn’t embrace his agenda with sufficient enthusiasm. But of course his divisive populism and demagoguery are what turned off the white, college-educated suburbanites (particularly women) who made up the moderates’ base. If suburbanites have become permanently alienated from the GOP brand, then moderate Republicans seem likely to follow the Blue Dog Democrats into political irrelevancy. Yet the picture looks considerably more favorable for moderates below the level of national politics. Two of the most popular politicians in the country right now are Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker, Republican governors of heavily Democratic states who easily won reelection Tuesday. And even in deep-red states, such as Kansas and Oklahoma, there are indications that moderation may be the political wave of the future.
The battle against conservative excesses in Kansas and Oklahoma has mainly taken place within the dominant Republican Party. Although conventional wisdom decrees that moderate Republicans must forever quake in fear over the threat of primary challenges from the right, at the state level moderates are primarying conservatives from the center — and winning. In Kansas in 2016, moderates entered GOP primaries and helped drive dozens of conservatives out of the legislature, then overrode Brownback’s veto of a bill rescinding his tax cuts. In Oklahoma this year, moderate Republican candidates, working with the Step Up Oklahoma coalition, defeated nearly all of the state legislators who had voted against raising teacher salaries. James and Deborah Fallows, authors of the recent book “Our Towns,” traveled extensively around smaller urban areas in heartland America in the course of their research. They discovered that, in contrast to the hyper-partisanship and gridlock at the federal level, local politics retains a penchant for collaboration, reasonable compromise and long-term vision. If there’s any hope for our collective political future, it’s that such pragmatism will percolate up from our local politics to our national politics. And the 2018 midterm results suggest that green shoots of moderation are breaking out, even in the states that many East Coast liberals think are hopelessly addicted to Trump’s brand of divisive cultural warfare.
Rural Challenges
Dems do have a real challenge trying to win back rural white voting blocs: democrats-iowa-kansas-rural-votes-scholten-king. Small towns & rural areas have been facing unique/dire economic circumstances which haven’t been adequately addressed by either party, as seen in this posting from democrats-midterms-rural-ohio-midwest:
The Democratic Party simply cannot write off nonmetropolitan America — and try to overwhelm it with a rising urban and suburban coalition. So how can the party do better? For starters, it needs to try harder. It should come up with a serious agenda to combat what Matt Stoller of the Open Markets Institute calls the “full-on crisis” in rural America. That crisis, he says, includes expensive health care, bad transportation options, job opportunities wrecked by chain stores, a struggling agriculture economy and, of course, the opioid epidemic. Tom Vilsack, the Democrat and former Iowa governor, has come up with a four-pillar rural strategy that’s based around agriculture, as Michael Tomasky pointed out in a Times Op-Ed this week. Smaller cities don’t have all of these problems, but they do have many. I’d add one issue to these lists, which bedevils both rural America and smaller cities: educational opportunity. In a mini-essay about Ohio on Twitter yesterday, Alec MacGillis of ProPublica pointed out that the state’s investment in education has actually declined over the past decade. “Ohio,” MacGillis writes, “has an astonishing array of these small cities and towns — all with handsome old courthouses, coherent downtowns and grand Victorians, and almost all of them in a condition that breaks your heart. And that’s not to mention the truly desperate rural areas of southern [and southeast] Ohio.” It is possible for Democrats to do better in places like Dayton and in rural areas.
On Tuesday night, they got to see a model — in Ohio. Senator Sherrod Brown won re-election with a populist, jobs-focused message that focuses on economic class, not cultural issues. He won Montgomery County by more than 11 percentage points. In Minnesota, Senator Amy Klobuchar, also a Democrat, won re-election by a landslide. In Iowa, Wisconsin and parts of the West, Democrats also figured out how to hold down their rural losses. Labor unions played a role in many of these wins, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie notes. “Midwestern campaigns capitalized on still-existing labor infrastructure to mobilize union members and bring them back into the Democratic fold,” he writes. I understand why talk of rural America often frustrates progressives: Rural America — which is, of course, overwhelmingly white — already has outsize political power in this country, thanks to the Senate, the Electoral College and the privileged role that Iowa and New Hampshire play in presidential elections. But life in rural areas and small cities hasn’t exactly been easy in recent years. In virtually every measurable way — incomes, wealth, education, health, longevity — large metropolitan areas have done better. Democrats should, by all means, continue fighting for the issues that matter to metropolitan America, like civil rights. But there is a clear moral case for devoting more attention to small-town America at the same time. There is also a self-interested political case for Democrats.
Another Debt-Bomb (Pensions) along the same lines as Medicare & Social Security ready to Explode!
We have some tough choices to make. Overall, we not only can’t afford our massive debt, but soon we may not even be able to afford the interest on that debt: national-deficit-midterms-interest-rate-budget-spending-economy-inflation. Public pensions are also facing dramatic shortfalls as seen in this posting from peterreagan/public-pensions-retirement-crisis:
It’s become fairly common knowledge that public pensions are on the verge of either radical overhaul or extinction. Worldwide, pensions are set to reach a shortfall of $400 trillion. This is a larger amount than 20 of the world’s largest economies, according to Sovereign Man. It was even reported that Congress is planning for pension fund failure in the U.S. Not to mention, Philadelphia has considered tapping public utility payments to cover their shortfall. Add it all up, and the situation doesn’t look good for public pension plan payees. Many police, fire, public education, and municipal personnel are (or will be) directly affected.
But even if you’re not drawing a public pension — the majority of us do not — don’t think you’re safe. You might think failure of a state public pension wouldn’t affect you. It’s a reasonable thought, and partly correct. That’s because it likely wouldn’t affect you directly. But the indirect effects may prove to be a burden for anyone in or entering retirement. There are two primary reasons for this. First, according to a recent Washington Examiner op-ed, almost half of Americans have no retirement savings to deal with these indirect effects. And second are “hidden” consequences of failing pension programs at the state level, which may affect every person who pays taxes. Imagine if the police force or firefighters in your city suffered dramatic cutbacks to account for pension shortfalls? Or, if your taxes went up to account for a federal bailout of state pension programs? Neither ripple effect is desirable for any person. But both could happen if pension shortfalls become too much of a burden at the state level.
Monopolistic Fascism
Trump’s persona & autocratic instincts, plus that devout echo-messaging & cult-like following, have put America at risk of fascism. The circumstances around the times are also a key factor, which this entire article posted from fascism-economy-monopoly is a history lesson warning of the curse of bigness, where corporate monoliths dominate their respective industries as they run roughshod over free-market competition, concentrating power, leverage & wealth all in one place. Despot political leaders have been able to capitalize on the sense of frustration such an uneven economy invokes. Our current congressional political leadership assigned to enforce our laws & rein in such abuses, have instead been co-opted to work in cahoots with these monopolizing corporate giants, while our president exploits the situation:
In the aftermath of the Second World War, an urgent question presented itself: How can we prevent the rise of fascism from happening again? If over the years that question became one of mostly historical interest, it has again become pressing, with the growing success of populist, nationalist and even neofascist movements all around the world. Common answers to the question stress the importance of a free press, the rule of law, stable government, robust civic institutions and common decency. But as undoubtedly important as these factors are, we too often overlook something else: the threat to democracy posed by monopoly and excessive corporate concentration — what the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis called the “curse of bigness.” We must not forget the economic origins of fascism, lest we risk repeating the most calamitous error of the 20th century.
Postwar observers like Senator Harley M. Kilgore of West Virginia argued that the German economic structure, which was dominated by monopolies and cartels, was essential to Hitler’s consolidation of power. Germany at the time, Mr. Kilgore explained, “built up a great series of industrial monopolies in steel, rubber, coal and other materials. The monopolies soon got control of Germany, brought Hitler to power and forced virtually the whole world into war.” To suggest that any one cause accounted for the rise of fascism goes too far, for the Great Depression, anti-Semitism, the fear of communism and weak political institutions were also to blame. But as writers like Diarmuid Jeffreys and Daniel Crane have detailed, extreme economic concentration does create conditions ripe for dictatorship.
It is a story that should sound uncomfortably familiar: An economic crisis yields widespread economic suffering, feeding an appetite for a nationalistic and extremist leader. The leader rides to power promising a return to national greatness, deliverance from economic suffering and the defeat of enemies foreign and domestic (including big business). Yet in reality, the leader seeks alliances with large enterprises and the great monopolies, so long as they obey him, for each has something the other wants: He gets their loyalty, and they avoid democratic accountability. There are many differences between the situation in 1930s and our predicament today. But given what we know, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are conducting a dangerous economic and political experiment: We have chosen to weaken the laws — the antitrust laws — that are meant to resist the concentration of economic power in the United States and around the world.
From a political perspective, we have recklessly chosen to tolerate global monopolies and oligopolies in finance, media, airlines, telecommunications and elsewhere, to say nothing of the growing size and power of the major technology platforms. In doing so, we have cast aside the safeguards that were supposed to protect democracy against a dangerous marriage of private and public power. Unfortunately, there are abundant signs that we are suffering the consequences, both in the United States and elsewhere. There is a reason that extremist, populist leaders like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Xi Jinping of China and Viktor Orban of Hungary have taken center stage, all following some version of the same script. And here in the United States, we have witnessed the anger borne of ordinary citizens who have lost almost any influence over economic policy — and by extension, their lives. The middle class has no political influence over their stagnant wages, tax policy, the price of essential goods or health care. This powerlessness is brewing a powerful feeling of outrage.
After the fall of the Third Reich, the Allies broke up the major Nazi monopolies specifically so that they could not be “used by Germany as instruments of political or economic aggression,” in the words of the law used to do so. The United States took its medicine, too: In 1950, Congress passed the Anti-Merger Act of 1950 to curb politically and economically dangerous concentrations. It empowered the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to block or undo mergers when the effect was “substantially to lessen competition or to tend to create a monopoly.” It would be understandable if you assumed that the Anti-Merger Act of 1950 had been repealed. But in fact it remains on the books. It has merely been evaded, eroded and enfeebled by the corroding effect of decades of industry pressure and ideological drift, yielding hesitant enforcers and a hostile judiciary. Consequently, over the last two decades we have allowed successive waves of mergers that make a mockery of the 1950 law, and have concentrated economic power in ways that are dangerous to the polity.
In recent years, we have allowed unhealthy consolidations of hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry; accepted an extraordinarily concentrated banking industry, despite its repeated misfeasance; failed to prevent firms like Facebook from buying up their most effective competitors; allowed AT&T to reconsolidate after a well-deserved breakup in the 1980s; and the list goes on. Over the last two decades, more than 75 percent of United States industries have experienced an increase in concentration, while United States public markets have lost almost 50 percent of their publicly traded firms. There is a direct link between concentration and the distortion of democratic process. As any undergraduate political science major could tell you, the more concentrated an industry — the fewer members it has — the easier it is to cooperate to achieve its political goals. A group like the middle class is hopelessly disorganized and has limited influence in Congress. But concentrated industries, like the pharmaceutical industry, find it easy to organize to take from the public for their own benefit. Consider the law preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices: That particular lobbying project cost the industry more than $100 million — but it returns some $15 billion a year in higher payments for its products.
We need to figure out how the classic antidote to bigness — the antitrust and other antimonopoly laws — might be recovered and updated to address the specific challenges of our time. For a start, Congress should pass a new Anti-Merger Act reasserting that it meant what it said in 1950, and create new levels of scrutiny for mega-mergers like the proposed union of T-Mobile and Sprint. But we also need judges who better understand the political as well as economic goals of antitrust. We need prosecutors willing to bring big cases with the courage of trustbusters like Theodore Roosevelt, who brought to heel the empires of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, and with the economic sophistication of the men and women who challenged AT&T and Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s. Europe needs to do its part as well, blocking more mergers, especially those like Bayer’s recent acquisition of Monsanto that threaten to put entire global industries in just a few hands.
The United States seems to constantly forget its own traditions, to forget what this country at its best stands for. We forget that America pioneered a kind of law — antitrust — that in the words of Roosevelt would “teach the masters of the biggest corporations in the land that they were not, and would not be permitted to regard themselves as, above the law.” We have forgotten that antitrust law had more than an economic goal, that it was meant fundamentally as a kind of constitutional safeguard, a check against the political dangers of unaccountable private power. As the lawyer and consumer advocate Robert Pitofsky warned in 1979, we must not forget the economic origins of totalitarianism, that “massively concentrated economic power, or state intervention induced by that level of concentration, is incompatible with liberal, constitutional democracy.”
Tax Laws
Here’s an interesting take on taxes in excerpts from Republican-War-on-Taxes, which based on our escalating deficits & growing wage/wealth gap despite a general consensus the economy is strong, we’ve got to figure our current tax laws are partly to blame & way out of whack:
All that ails America is a direct result of Republican Policy and it was all by design. Republicans have been attacking taxes as bad, as the enemy of the people and the IRS as some evil empire stealing people’s income and infringing on their liberties and freedoms. They signed Grover Norquist’s Americans For Tax Reform Pledge. His goal was to be able to Drown Government in a Bathtub. This was all by design so they could implement their tax cut frauds which only helped the 1% & Wall Street and hurt everyone else. They made it seem that we all benefitted, however we did not and study after study has proven this as fact. Their real goal was to make government so broke they had to get rid of the social safety nets and anything else that benefitted We The People while pocketing our hard earned tax dollars for themselves & the 1%. Wonder why America’s roads are falling apart? Why education keeps failing? Why they keep claiming we’re always broke, yet find more money to give away in tax breaks for the 1%? Because Republicans stole all your tax dollars meant for those things and gave them to the 1% & Wall Street! Now when Democrats get in control and have to clean up Republicans theft of trillions of your tax dollars they will get hammered by Republicans for raising taxes because Republicans left such a fiscal disaster calling them ‘tax and spend’ Liberals. The problem is that people see it that way and we need to change that. Taxes are good, they help everyone, communities, parks, roads, education, public works, safety, defense, you name it. Republicans don’t like that, they only want to benefit from your tax dollars. They think they deserve it. They are ruining America because of their tax cuts and have the nerve to call themselves Patriots! I think not, they’re more like traitors!
About those Press Conferences
Not only is Trump getting even more rude & contentious with the media, he also reveals his incompetence & cluelessness as seen in excerpts from trump-press-conference-proves-again-he-s-not-fit-for-office. His depth of understanding is like the shallow end of the kiddie pool:
When it comes to actual policy, the less said, the better. Trump was asked one specific question about health care, and good luck to anyone who tries to figure out what his answer meant. He pretty clearly has just as little idea what he’s talking about on most major policy issues as he did when he first started running for president. On Jamal Khashoggi, waivers on Iranian sanctions, North Korea and Russia, he either ducked the questions with non sequiturs or just babbled. Most presidents really do grow in office, or they get better at the job over time. Bill Clinton was awful at presidenting in his first year but eventually got to be pretty good at it. George W. Bush never really mastered the job, but he did improve over time; he certainly put in serious effort to be up to speed on policy details despite entering office with an unusually weak grasp of major policy areas. I’d like to find some sign that Trump is finally getting the hang of this, but I’m just not seeing it. It’s enough to make you think he may just not be capable of the job.
Dealmaking a Lost Art
This very disturbing trend where Congress can’t reach across the aisle, big things don’t get done, so the American people are fed up with all the infighting & gridlock, explored in these excerpts inside congress-is-broken-heres-how-it-happened:
For more than 200 years, Congress operated largely as the country’s founders envisioned — forging compromises on the biggest issues of the day while asserting its authority to declare war, spend taxpayer money and keep the presidency in check. Today that model is effectively dead. It has been replaced by a weakened legislative branch in which debate is strictly curtailed, party leaders dictate the agenda, most elected representatives rarely get a say and government shutdowns are a regular threat due to chronic failures to agree on budgets, according to a new analysis of congressional data and documents by The Washington Post and ProPublica. The study found that the transformation has occurred relatively fast — sparked by the hyperpolarized climate that has enveloped politics since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama and the subsequent dawn of the tea party movement on the right.
During that time, as the political center has largely evaporated, party leaders have adhered to the demands of their bases, while rules and traditions that long encouraged deliberative dealmaking have given way to partisan gridlock, the analysis found. While few of these changes made headlines, taken together they have fundamentally altered the way Congress operates — and morphed this equally powerful branch of government into one that functions more as a junior partner to the executive, or doesn’t function at all when it comes to the country’s pressing priorities. Immigration — a major flashpoint in recent elections — has been formally debated only a few days in Congress over the past five years with no resolution. Efforts to reach a bipartisan agreement on health care markets — an issue both parties considered urgent — stalled.
“That’s why I left. You couldn’t do anything anymore,” said Tom Coburn, the former Oklahoma Republican senator who resigned in 2014. “If this continues, they’re going to evolve, or devolve, into irrelevancy very quickly,” said former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. The election of Obama set off partisan moves, and then countermoves, that drove the institution into ideological corners — followed by the election of Trump and a reverse set of moves. To document this transformation, the Post and ProPublica analyzed publicly available data from the House and Senate, committees, and members of Congress, dating back several decades. Some institutional decline began 25 years ago, but the study showed that the steepest institutional drop came in just the past 10 years.
Misc Important Issues
We’re getting ripped off! I’m talking on drug prices. Plus in America, I believe there’s a dramatic over-reliance on prescription drugs, with lots of side effects while adding significantly to the costs: why-prescription-drug-spending-higher-in-the-us. Dems need to help Main St. over Wall St: dem-led-house-can-put-main-streets-needs-over-wall-streets-wants. Hopefully, the partisan gerrymandering is starting to crumble: the-republican-house-majority-wasnt-the-only-thing-swept-to-sea-in-the-midterms. But what gerrymandering has helped to bring on, our hyperpartisanship, is highly destructive to America & very embedded, so won’t be so easy to change. Our governing leadership is greatly weakened because of the wide divides: midterms-told-a-tale-of-two-weak-parties. Click on its-not-the-economy-stupid & below are excerpts from political-polarization-is-the-critical-threat-to-us-foreign-policy:
It’s not North Korea’s nuclear weapons or Iran’s attempts to get its own that ranks as the most critical threat facing the United States. Nor is it Russia’s influence in U.S. elections or China’s rise as a superpower. Instead, It’s political polarization, according to a new survey of nearly 600 foreign policy opinion leaders by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Texas National Security Network. In the weeks preceding the midterm elections, a period in which news coverage of a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the movement of Central American migrant caravans, and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination sharpened national divisions, nearly three-in-four foreign policy opinion leaders rated political polarization as a critical threat to U.S. national security. Not only was partisanship viewed as the highest threat overall, but it was also consistently high among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, making it nearly unique among the threats assessed in the survey. On the danger partisanship poses to the United States, at least, there is a bipartisan consensus.
While political polarization is a top threat for leaders, it is a lesser, but still substantial, concern for the American public. A July 12-31, 2018 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey of the US public found that 50 percent of Americans consider political polarization a critical threat, behind only international terrorism (66 percent), and North Korean (59 percent) and Iranian (52 percent) nuclear programs. Americans’ concern about polarization is more acute among self-identified Democrats (57 percent) and Independents (50 percent) than Republicans (41 percent). The comparatively greater sense of alarm among foreign policy leaders versus the public about the threat presented by polarization may reflect leaders’ greater awareness of how polarization is eroding America’s international standing and weakening its ability to address various global challenges. As with substance abuse and other addictions, identifying the problem is the first step toward remedying it. The good news is that foreign policy leaders and much of the public express deep concern about rising polarization. As the United States moves on from a highly divisive election, the key challenge facing Americans is to go beyond giving lip service to the problem. This will require rewarding leaders who engage in civil discourse and seek to work across the aisle, rather than employing hateful rhetoric and partisan attacks that sharpen political divisions.
Wipeout!!!
That’s how we can view the election results!: blue-wave. Now that the Dems hold a solid majority in the House, they can hold Trump accountable by exposing so many of his corrupt & lawless actions! This instrumental was a hit in the 1960’s (first link) & even as the bandaged (second link), that drummer can still rock!!!:
Recent Comments