Out of Touch

Anything stand out here?

How about this?

Anyone remember a Curve named Laffer?

Modern Conservatives champion union-free workplaces, de-emphasis of higher education, and regression of the tax rates.

They also champion a return to the glory days of America, which they imagine mostly like the 1950's (about 1945-1965, the Boomers' Baby years).  Oddly, when you look back at that time, you will note the high levels of union membership, the greater opportunities for the less-educated to work, and the highly progressive tax rates.

And do you all remember the Laffer Curve?  Well, turns out it works if you hold it upside down!  (It's a joke, it's a joke!  Take a breath, take it easy!)  If it didn't seem unrealistically simplistic to the point of moot in the first place, well, here you see what 'just plain wrong' really looks like.

Of course, a lot of our debt is not due right now, and so we borrow a lot, at very low interest rates.  Funny thing, interests rates...

Gee...

Conservatives also champion the fighting of inflation - it's what brought Ronald Reagan into office in 1981, and we've been living out the legacy of that "Reagan Revolution."  Inflation is the bane of wealthy, though it shows they could use some education themselves, as they are not diving into pools of gold like Scrooge McDuck.  Monetarism had been chosen to steer the economy in a new direction, with less inflation, permanently.  Interest rates would be leveraged against inflation.  And though conservatives claim to champion economic growth, monetarism seems to have thoroughly stifled it.

It seems to me that today's conservative wants it two opposing ways - they want a return to America's glory days, but they want economic policies that simply disallow that.  It seems to me, as long as we continue down this path - as long as we continue to disenfranchise workers to the point of them literally walking out of the workforce, as long as we devalue education while allowing it's costs to far outpace inflation, as long we we just keep borrowing and cutting taxes - we will see America stagnate, and the great promise of the American Dream reduced to the inescapable class systems of the Old World that we fought to disavow to become America in the first place.

JMJ

Insecurity and Distraction

A couple days ago, Sean Spicer, our WH Press Secretary, was confronted in an Apple store by an admittedly "impolite" critic of the President, a young woman of Indian descent, born here, no discernible accent, seems like her heart's in the right place, who asked him some annoying and rude questions, saying Trump is a "fascist" and so forth, and at one point Sean Spicer said this:  "It's such a great country that allows you to be here."

Now, I understand how annoying it can be to visit one of those telecom stores.  My wife and I have a scheme for dealing with it.  We play sane shopper/insane shopper.  They can either deal with her quickly and give us the best deal they have, or, I act like a silly lunatic in the store, creating distraction and chaos, and getting the other customers to join in, without actually bothering anyone, just creating General Disarray, but forcing the salesperson to hurry up and get us the hell out of there.  Learned it from my Dad.  I am fun to shop with.

So, I can imagine being confronted in one of these stores, and getting a little flustered with the lady asking the rather crude, lumpy questions about Russia and Treason and Fascism, but Spicer's response was very telling...

Yesterday, Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa long known being a One-Trick-Pony (immigrant-bashing), tweeted, "We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."  And he doubled down... 

And King himself refused to back away from the tweet. On CNN Monday morning, King said, "I meant exactly what I said," and that he'd "like to see an America that's just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same, from that perspective."

There have been large shifts in the demographics of the world over the past couple-thousand years.  We are still in the midst of this shifting.  The US is a very recent product of this shifting.  We are a country made up mostly of immigrants.  During certain periods in our history, we had unprecedentedly high levels of upward mobility, and most always more than the rest of the world.  We absorbed new, usually rather poor, immigrants as the last wave moved up.  Now that upward mobility is down, below that of Europe, irony, the Right blames the immigrants and minorities, irony of ironies, for that lack of upward mobility.  In case you don't know, immigrants and minorities, pretty much by definition, only hold so much power.  They are not politically capable of holding back those above the mobility-ladder from them, and it is not in their interest to hold down themselves.

The Grown-Up Question raised here should be, "How do we increase upward mobility?"

Well, here's how not to do it...

The Congressional Budget Office projects that 14 million people will lose coverage by 2018 under the Republican ObamaCare replacement bill.

“I’ve been telling you why don’t we wait, just let (Obamacare) implode and let’s not take the blame,” Trump said to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price,... “I’ve been telling you that as an option. It’s not an option I like, frankly, but it’s certainly an option.”

..both the new president and some of his closest allies have expressed both a strong opposition to net neutrality and a profound ignorance of what the concept actually means.

 America's infrastructure is close to failing.

And it just goes on...

You can blame immigrants and minorities if you like, but if you don't want to have the babies, and you don't want to build the roads, and you don't care if you can get proper health care, maybe you should just get the fuck out of the way and let someone "else's" BABY take care of things.

JMJ 

Anti-Trump Uber Alles

Malczewski's Meduza, ca.,1900

With the rise of Donald Trump many on the Left, like myself, have been hoping and praying that successful business folks of our particular political bent need to try to get to get close to him, to get in his ear.  But there seems to be a belief among Trump's critics, and though I am a critic I do not share this belief, that to get close to Trump is like coming into the gaze of the Medusa, turning anyone into stone, or maybe dumb as a stone, or maybe just a stone-thrower...

When Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber, announced he would be departing Trump's economic advisory board the other day, under severe pressure from peers and employees, and a loss of 200,000 subscribers, it became clear the Left will simply not allow any engagement with the new President beyond opposition.  This is a 'Uuuuge' mistake.

I have a little familiarity with Chinese culture.  There is nothing worse that can happen to a Chinese person than to be ascribed an "outsider," to be without friends or kin.  Why?  Not as a matter of pride or dependence on incessant socializing, but because they understand the inter-connectivity of society, that without some connection to that network, one is helpless to accomplish anything.  It is probably why communism, which has failed miserably most everywhere else, has been much better to the Chinese (not that I am personally a supporter of communism!).

When you Google "Trump Malleable" you get page after page of articles and opinions for or against an aspect of Trump's personality that seems well-known and accepted - he is not an ideologue, he is malleable.  By now, this should be clear to everyone.  Well, you can't form clay if you're not within distance to put your hands on it, and we're not going to influence Trump by standing at a distance and shouting at him to stop doing whatever someone else has convinced him to do.

When I was a younger man, in the NYC area, I remember hearing Trump on the Howard Stern radio show.  He was pretty much a regular.  He was very different from the man we think we see today.  On Thursday, Stern, who knows the President well, said of Trump to CNN...

"I personally wish that he had never run, I told him that, because I actually think this is something that is gonna be detrimental to his mental health too, because, he wants to be liked, he wants to be loved," Stern said. "He wants people to cheer for him."

"I don't think it's going to be a healthy experience. And by the way, he's now on this anti-Hollywood kick. He loves Hollywood. First of all, he loves the press. He lives for it. He loves people in Hollywood. He only wants hobnob with them. All of this hatred and stuff directed towards him. It's not good for him. It's not good."

The key there is "he wants to be liked, he wants to be loved," and it's not something new said of Trump.  He can see his conservative moves just anger people and fail.  He will see this continue.  If we are going to avert another Great Recession or Great Depression, or worse, people on the Left, people with popular heft and power, need to get in Trump's ear, and we need to trust them and support them in their efforts, not shout at them for trying.

JMJ

Well, here we are.  The day after Trump's inauguration, huge, mass demonstrations, the day after he orders a make-shift ban on immigration from the tiredest, poorest, huddledest, wretchedest places on the planet, more huge, mass demonstrations.  Again, I can not thank our new President enough for what he has done for liberalism in just his first nine days.

A Brooklyn federal judge blocked part of the order.  GOP leaders are squirming.  The order does little to address it's ostensible aim, and seems to be nothing but a political distraction, and a very poorly planned one at that.  But while this goes on, along with the ongoing silly drama of The Wall, Net Neutrality is doomed, and we can expect rightwing assaults on our healthcare, education, pollution, and consumer protections with the aid of his cadre in the cabinet, and a drooling GOP Hill.

Though he may mobilize the Left for the future, the damage that's being done now will take a loooooong time to undo.  Let's hope his distractions are the GOP's undoing come the next couple of election cycles.  The good things Trump says he wants to do would only be doable then anyway.

JMJ