“There’s an elephant in the room,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said yesterday at a Wisconsin rally, shortly after asking said elephant to stay away from said rally.
A couple of tweets on Massachusetts angles to get things started.
NPR reporter Asma Khalid thinks Charlie Baker’s in a pretty good place right about now.
And Commonwealth Magazine’s Michael Jonas wonders about our well-compartmentalized idolatry of Tom Brady.
Please share widely!
…there were I imagine several “elephants” in the room by definition, right?:)
And she managed to do it without redounding back to HRC, so props for that.
I hope she has a better answer on the Iran deal.
I also really hope she doesn’t overplay the hot mic stuff. I’d much rather hear a positive vision for the country.
It is way past time for Clinton to take up turning the Congress blue. At this point even the Senate is in doubt.
She is on track to enter the white house as the most unpopular president in modern history. For no good reason, I might add. All the GOP will need to do is what they did to Obama, and reap their rewards in the mid-terms.
We are horribly crippled by the legacy of wasserman-schultzism, but the situation is astonishingly fluid and I will not say even now that we could not retake both chambers, given the right deployment of resources. Warren and Sanders should redouble their efforts for a blue Congress, for starters.
Clinton herself should take aim at the gridlock party, enumerating all of the problems that have festered while the GOP refused to act. She needs to negate the argument that “we need a check on Hillary” both by presenting a positive message and by showing what we’ve lost by gridlock. She can link gridlock to Trumpist tendencies in the party.
The argument is that today’s GOP has abused its opposition status to the point of really hurting America.
Easier said than done I know! But it’s going to be a hard four years; better get started now.
On certain issues, she has “a public and a private position.” “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least,” said Clinton. “So, you need both a public and a private position.”
So one never knows, does one? My hunch is that’s part of her unpopularity and that seems like a pretty good reason, eh?
i.e., that “you never know” with her and that’s why she’s unpopular: No, I don’t think so.
Clinton is as transparent as most political leaders and more so than many. So while the criticism may be legitimate, I don’t see how it explains why, say, Barack Obama (who still favors the PTT) gets away with it while she does not.
Frankly I think you know pretty well what we are getting with her, which is why you are so critical. For the record, I share some of those criticisms. But it does not explain her unfavorability ratings.
Perhaps the unprecedented media drumbeat has taken its toll. Thank you for telling us what to think, corporate media overlords!
Has always been for it and she has, and has not, like so many things in her past. People like people they can depend on, rely on, and not have to wonder if the answer they are getting to a serious question is their public position of their private one. The media loves her, don’t kid yourself. The media is corporate and she, at least so far, has been very accommodating to the corporate world.
I see what you are saying, but I do not think so. She’s been a lot more consistent on these issues than McTrumpface, for instance.
So I think that “inconsistency” is just another thing that people apply to her as a sort of excuse to express something more fundamental. The same people tolerate the grossest inconsistencies in others. But something is going on below the surface, which is why so much small-bore stuff sticks to her, and why so many wacko conspiracy theories persist.
To be blunt, I really think its because she is a woman on a man’s world, usurping what has been a man’s role. There, I said it.
So you are right, it’s not the media per se, but I do not agree she is “loved” by the press. To the contrary, she has been treated with remarkable unfairness.
Mind you, I am not saying that you don’t have grounds to be critical! Just that is not what is going on with her.
My wife has been saying the same thing for some months now.
Trump is a bad man, a very bad man…..
We got that. No argument.
Does that give Hillary carte blanche once sworn in? I fear it will. How many times here in BMG have I had to read that what Bill Clinton did or what Obama did that was anti-labor / pro-1% was “Okay” because….the Republicans would have done worse?
Nobody — absolutely nobody — here has suggested that Ms. Clinton will or should have “carte blanche” if elected.
Interesting that once again your contribution is a thinly-veiled attack on Ms. Clinton.
has to come from somewhere? That’s carte blanche #1 of many you have made over the past few months, accompanied by reminders to us all that as bad as things might be, “The Republicans would be far worse”
Your constant attacks on my character whenever I dare question her policies, past, or public statements is rather “carte blanche” as well, no?
It doesn’t sound as though you understand what “carte blanche” means.
I also did not attack your character (unlike your repeated comments about me). I instead criticized your comment, fairly I think.
And there you go again….
It logically impossible to have more than one “complete freedom”.
The phrase “That’s carte blanche #1 of many you have made over the past few months …” simply doesn’t make any sense.
John, did you mean to post this in reply to what I wrote? Because it doesn’t seem to follow.
I can’t figure out where the “media love” thing comes from. The bastion of liberal media, the NYT, can’t get enough of rehashing Whitewater and Monica.
Some of us tried to say, weeks ago, that Mr. Trump is himself sexist, abusive of woman, and dangerously predatory. He has pandered to certain voters who actually LIKE such attitudes from the very beginning. We should remember that while the current outrage is about his attitudes towards women, his attitudes towards blacks and immigrants are equally offensive. Ms. Clinton called out his misogyny in her “Mirrors” ad, and in her accurate characterization of a portion of Mr. Trump’s supporters as “deplorable”. They are.
Some of us here have been trying to say this for some time. Some of us here counter each such comment and post with allegations about and attacks on Ms. Clinton. In his shameful and embarrassing non-apology “apology”, Mr. Trump attempts the same dishonest false equivalence — he pivots from his own gross misconduct to attack Bill Clinton (as if that is relevant to today’s events). Some of us here have made exactly the same pivot to a false equivalence time and time again.
The attitudes towards women revealed in both Mr. Trump’s “hot mic” episodes and in his lengthy and even more crude exchanges with Howard Stern are shameful in anyone. His defenders, like Mr. Giuliani, claim that “all of us have said such things”. Nope. Sorry. Perhaps Mr. Giuliani has felt such things, but a great many of us have not.
We see Mr. Trump revealed as a crude, bullying, misogynist sexual predator. The contrast between his incredibly offensive comments about the woman in question, followed by his manner as he actually interacts with her, is terrifying. His duplicity, his fraud, his utter absence of anything like respect or common decency, is transparent.
This man must not be president. Those men and women who embrace these sexist attitudes of this man are a toxic component in our electorate. The public figures like Mr. Giuliani who continue to defend him are themselves frauds, hypocrites, and — yes — liars. NOTHING that Hillary Clinton has said or done in an entire lifetime as a public figure remotely compares to what we see in these tapes. When I characterize Mr. Giuliani as a “liar”, it is his specific allegations against Ms. Clinton that I refer to. He knows they are false, they have been shown to be false time and again, and Mr. Giuliani repeats them anyway.
Ms. Clinton has been correct and accurate about this sexual predator all along. Some of us get that. Some of us apparently do not.
Not sure who the comment is directed to. I’ve consistently condemned Trump while arguing that sympathy for the percentage of his supporters who aren’t deplorable is needed to build an actual governing majority. I share Trickle Up’s and JimC’s sentiments that we need to focus on down ballot races. We need to build a bigger bench.
Those of is critical of her aren’t voting for Trump, we’ve just been underwhelmed by her message, delivery, and have concerns about what a Clinton presidency will look like. I’ve defended her as a progressive from critics here insisting she’s a crypto Republican.
What I won’t do is deny the reality that she will ultimately be elected due to the implosion of her rival, my the popularity of her own message, which won’t have the kind of coattails we need to actually pass laws. Four years is a long time for the GOP to drown her in gridlock and bullshit investigations while regrouping from this travesty to actually pick an electable opponent. Trumps nomination is a civic cancer that I won’t celebrate, his very candidacy has made this country and its politics substantially worse which will make real progress that much harder to achieve
Maybe it’s more blissful to be in the Amen Corner for Clinton, and I largely have been since the debate, but I also am under no illusions things will get better under her unless we have a governing majority. What will she do to achieve that? What will you do? How do we make our local supermajority reflective of our actual values?
In my view, her “mirage” ad and follow-up statements have done much more than simply attack Mr. Trump.
There have been complaints that millennial women are somehow struggling to relate to her. In my view, her willingness to name and speak to our society’s contempt for women time and again — going all the way back to her days in Arkansas during her husband’s come-back after losing the governor’s office, are an inspiration to women of every age. I cast her “Mirrors” ad in that light.
I agree with you that demographics will continue to drive her leftward, not rightward. The embarrassing claims by Mr. Trump’s surrogates are driving voters away from the GOP ticket and towards the Democratic ticket. I think those claims are happening because of her skill in provoking Mr. Trump to reveal who he really is — and to reveal his surrogates for what they are.
In my view, Ms. Clinton is modeling appropriate behavior for strong women everywhere and of every age. She aggressively promotes her agenda at every opportunity. She insists on maintaining a data-driven and pragmatic stance towards the issues that face us. She skillfully deflects the insults of Mr. Trump, while using them to highlight his own unsuitability for the office he seeks.
We are in the midst of a crisis in our relationship with Mr. Putin and Russia in Syria. Ms. Clinton shows us, in her handling of Mr. Trump, why she is so clearly the only candidate able to effectively face a brutal and bullying antagonist.
Regarding your final question, my focus has been on doing all in my power to persuade millennial voters — the peers and colleagues of my children — of the importance of voting and of voting for the down-ballot Democrats even if they feel they need to blank their vote for president.
…it’s over and she fears that the terrorists will attack, and “what about those emails and Benghazi?” Best I could come up with was “relax, we’re just deciding what member of the 1% is going to keep things as that are”…and I changed the subject to “How do you think Brady will do today?”
When I encounter these claims, I engage the Trump supporter in a dialog about who the “terrorists” really are, about what did and did not happen in “those emails”, and what did and did not happen in Benghazi. I remind them that we are already in a cyber war, and that our chief adversary is Russia and Mr. Putin.
I remind the Trump supporter that our most immediate antagonist regarding ISIS and Syria is Vladimir Putin. I remind him or her that it is Mr. Trump who apparently has the deep ties to Russian organized crime. I remind the Trump supporter that Ms. Clinton has never praised Mr. Putin as a “great leader” or claimed that he is a “stronger leader than Barack Obama”.
I remind the Trump supporter that the cyber attack on America is real and ongoing, and that it is the Donald Trump campaign that is the most obvious beneficiary of those attacks. I point out that whatever was or was not compromised on Ms. Clinton’s email server was finished nearly a decade ago. The current email issue is with Russian attacks on Democrats, and Russian attacks on state election and voter tracking systems. Ms. Clinton’s email server is a dated and irrelevant distraction from the actual cyber attacks going on today.
I remind them that a GOP congress has squandered tens of millions of dollars on a government witch-hunt about Benghazi that has discovered absolutely nothing that wasn’t already known before it began. It is a case study in the abuse and waste of public resources for partisan political purposes.
These bogeymen — “terrorists”, “emails”, “Benghazi” — are fabrications and smokescreens that have little or no relevance to what is actually happening. Virtually every knowledgeable person agrees that electing Donald Trump would dramatically worsen our ability to fight terror.
Some of the Donald Trump supporters that I’ve had this conversation with (it has happened many times here in Gaithersburg MD over the past two weeks) stay engaged with me. They thank me afterwards for talking with them in actual realities. Several of them have said that they were seeking a change in direction, and had been trying to ignore Mr. Trump’s obvious flaws. They weren’t aware of Ms. Clinton’s website, and had not seen her videos about “regular” women.
One or two Trump supporters got up and left the bar in a huff, one of them after claiming that Bill Gates started Apple (he had slammed the Clinton Foundation, and I asked him if he thought the Gates Foundation was better or worse). The bartender thanked me afterwards — he said the individual in question had been “driving away business” all night.
They are driven by fear, ideology, and ignorance. Too many hurdles for me to try and clear with casual conversation.
I recognize that some of them are, as you suggest, driven factors such as those you cite.
I assume that the particular man or woman I’m talking to is not, and invite them to have a conversation with me. I aim to establish common ground between us first, so that we can then explore our differences while standing together.
Most of the time it works. I learn a bit more about their fears and ideology, and I like to think that they learn a bit more about the real Hillary Clinton.
I’m talking about the ones with bumper stickers and Gadsen Flag underwear…
No use in talking to them
I’m talking about men and women I’ve been meeting in hotel bars and restaurants. I see neither their cars nor their underwear.
I agree with you that the segment you mention is not worth engaging.
It’s why Massachusetts is a punch line in much of the nation. Fly Over Country, you would call it.
But this entire election season has been a long, dismal slog proving me wrong.
Not really, more like 45% of it at best. You have to face the fact that the country is far more socially tolerant, diverse, and frankly liberal than it was when Reagan and Bush won landslide elections attacking Massachusetts liberals.
Now there is a valid point to be made about the NIMBY suburban liberalism around here that I have sought to address. The folks that are fine with METCO, but would fight to the death against Section 8 housing in their hamlet. The folks that will march for gay marriage and choice, but are a shade uncomfortable with BLM and definitely don’t like Occupy. Fine with their state rep who votes repeatedly for DeLeo’s agenda, but can’t stand DeLeo. Etc. Rampant hypocrisy there.
But in most of the country people tend to appreciate our economy and cultural tolerance. I work with people from Texas happy to get out of that state and come here, my friends in Illinois are asking me for job recommendations here. Anyone under 30 I’ve met from Iowa, Indiana or Missouri has no intention of ever moving back there.
The global economy is ‘flying over’ a lot of these states for a reason. Maybe when they stop passing anti gay, anti trans, anti immigrant, anti woman laws and tolerating racist policing companies like Apple and Amazon will want to do business there again. Maybe when they start investing in education and healthcare like Pittsburgh did, a regional hub of start up potential, they won’t experience the Rust Belt malaise so many similar communities are undergoing.
All those miners Trump-Pence keep extolling are living in a cultural morass far worse than the inner city blacks and Mexicans the keep attacking. Drug addiction, family breakdown, no economic opportunity. They would be wise to take the $30 billion bailout and investment package Hillary proposes over continuing to vote for a free market that has long left them behind.
I’ve been in Gaithersburg MD since late September.
The exchange between johntmay and I is about supporters of Donald Trump that I am meeting in local MD hotel bars and restaurants. We are not discussing Massachusetts.
Most of these discussions have been courteous, friendly, and frank. We have different perspectives and we share those perspectives. A handful — two or three at most — are, as noted above, living in a different world. They are unable or unwilling to hear any other point of view. One man’s response to the nauseating tapes of last Friday was to say something to the effect of “Oh come on, are you saying she wasn’t hot? Are you some kind of fag?” Then he left. Men like the latter are not worth engaging.
We are talking about Maryland in 2016, not Massachusetts in 1984. Please try to keep up.
Probably not the place for personal updates, but I do hope all is well with you and your family. And it’s a lovely part of MD, though definitely that state has it’s conservative pockets and you’re certainly in one.
We are doing as well as can be expected given the circumstances.
I am reminded, several times a day, of why I chose to live in Massachusetts more than forty years ago. I can’t wait to come home.
It’s not a punchline in the South. Here’s what I mean: yes, you’ll occasionally hear a joke about MA, just like you will about MS or TX or NY or AK. But here’s my experience: I went to a large, land grant state university in North Carolina, a member of the ACC. About 4 times a year Boston College hosts a large, public, southern university for a football game. Their fans travel — FSU, Clemson, Georgia Tech, NC State, Virginia Tech, Louisville. I can’t help myself — I start conversations, and offer any assistance I can since I’ve lived locally over 15 years. They all live in the South, they’ve all come up for the football game, and they all love their visit. They love the food and the T and the pace and the museums. I lived in the South for four years. I know the difference between politeness and genuine excitement. These fans didn’t consider Boston a punch line before they came up, and they certainly don’t afterwards.
Maybe you mean the prairie? Big square states? Farm country? I spend a fair bit of time in Omaha Nebraska and Springfield Illinois for work. Folks I talk with there — at local eating joints and bars, in a professional setting, in the hospitality industry — consistently get excited by Boston. Stories about the time they visited and enjoyed it, about how they really want to visit to see XYZ, etc. It’s remarkably common.
So look, I can’t speak for Western Mass, the Gateway Cities, or down Cape, but I can say this: in my considerable experiences in both the South and the middle, I’ve never gotten anything but positive, genuine responses to Boston. Never.
MA is a “laughingstock” only among the GOP True Believers, because we elected Ted Kennedy repeatedly, and Mike Dukakis ran for President and lost. Kind of like the anti-Mississippi or Indiana.
If you have a life, and therefore conversations, outside the realm of party politics, this has been a non-issue for decades.
Like this old Simpsons bit:
https://youtu.be/WmOiX-LBKYU
But that Simpsons bit is over 20 years old now.
Bad embed. Mea culpa.
In the preview, it was there. I thought this was a thing that was fixed.
It is actually quite challenging to provide a way for participants in a community like this to embed videos that doesn’t also provide an open door for spam and unwanted advertising.
As a result, only the editors have the ability to do video embeds, in both posts and comments.
Boston is still the punchline of jokes sometimes. There are a couple of sit-coms about life in America, from a black families perspective. Ever watch the Carmichael show? Their view of Boston
When Maxine says she wants to visit a particular food truck because the chef nearly made it onto Top Chef: Boston, Jerrod says, “You don’t go to Boston for the food, you go there for the enthusiastic racism.”
And recently on Blackish
Rakowski? You got a white bully? No offense.
None taken but FYI he’s from Boston.
Oh Boston.. Yeah the original home of the scary white guy.
These are national shows. The home of the most progressive, Democratic
people in the country and this is the perception?
The most accurate criticism I hear about Boston is that we think we’re the center of the universe. Seems like your comment reinforces this.
Let me remind you, once again, that I’m here in Gaithersburg MD (a suburb of Washington DC) and NOBODY — I mean NOBODY — has said anything remotely similar to what you’re conveying.
What’s been happening is that I’ve been here while the Donald Trump campaign self-destructs. Nobody here is talking about Massachusetts.
People here — both former supporters of Donald Trump and others — are talking about Donald Trump and his toxic behavior.
Everyone is talking about Sideshow Donald and what an embarressment his campaign is for a national party. I thought he would flame-out in the primaries and it’s sad that the media helped to put us in this position. If Hillary doesn’t win the electoral college in Reaganesque numbers it’s a comment on the weakness of her campaign and the basic distrust of Washington for the average voters.
I’ve come to believe the urban/rural split which is how I saw the country evolving is more a urban/inner-city/rural split. Blacks in inner-city Baltimore have more in common with West Virginia coal miners than they might think. Distrust of Washington and federal authority. If someone could just get them to talk together.
Assuming he loses in a historic shellacking, perhaps the Republican Party decides to drop the birthers, the KKK in camo, and all the nasty bits that are part of it and Trump’s core support.
What fills that vacuum?
My hunch is a pro-labor sort, but one who tells labor that she/he will “work with our friends on Wall Street…” or some such thing “to create a better America!”
Paul Ryan could be that guy and he’s already laid the groundwork when he said “But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized something. I realized that I was wrong.”
However, if President Clinton beats him to it, that’s a horse of a different color. If she does, that does not leave much to fill the vacuum.
My son (22) and I were discussing this yesterday. We envision a historic shift, perhaps analogous to when the Whigs collapsed.
We envision today’s GOP collapsing entirely, today’s Democratic Party moving rightward to advance the political agenda of what we used to call the “Rockefeller Republicans”, and a new progressive party emerging to advance what we now call the “Elizabeth Warren agenda”.
If we can find a way to marginalize the “deplorables” — the target of the “Southern Strategy” practiced by the GOP since the Democrats kicked out our southern racists in 1968, I think it might be a huge step forward.
I also wonder if perhaps we might find a way to create a multi-party system more like the parliamentary approach practiced in Europe. I actually don’t know very much about any of this, I’m just thinking out loud.
I would very much like to see a real and effective dialog about the urgent and difficult challenges that face us (particularly wealth distribution), a dialog that we might perhaps be able to separate from the toxic poisons of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia.
I suspect the GOP will re-find its unity sometime in mid-January.
The infrastructure is there, and the system is geared toward having two main parties. They’ll have some tussles over who gets to control the machinery, maybe. But once HRC is President, I would imagine that the GOP policy from and after 2009 will remain: stonewall everything.
I also hope that Dems understand this time that the gains they may get in Congress have a two-year lifespan, and use them accordingly.
I don’t see the GOP becoming a pro-labor party. Paul Ryan still wants to abolish Medicare outright in order to cut taxes. That’s not going anywhere. Maybe they try to be “pro-labor” on free trade: we’ll make American business bloated and unprofitable, and THEN we’ll cut social services and grouse about uppity black people, but we’ll do it tastefully this time. “Merica!
They’re not even divided over Trump. They just fear his electoral effect.
The national GOP is already refinding its unity, today’s polls say that 67% of GOP voters want GOP candidates and officials to support Mr. Trump.
The GOP has been pandering to racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and pure ignorance for decades. As Mr. Obama said, they are now reaping what they have sowed. Meanwhile, the demographics of America has left the party behind.
I predict that in January, and for decades to come, being labeled a collaborator (and yes, I use the word intentionally) with Donald Trump will be a mark of shame and will be difficult or impossible to overcome.
As I’ve written before, I don’t see being “pro labor” as a viable strategy for the current era from either party, because for better or worse we have intentionally designed “labor” out of our economy. Nobody — not Elizabeth Warren, nor Bernie Sanders, nor Donald Trump, nor any other candidate or official living, dead, or unborn — is going to bring back those millions of well-paying jobs, especially manufacturing jobs in the heartland. It simply isn’t going to happen. Each factory built today requires several orders of magnitude fewer workers to produce the same volume of goods as even twenty years ago. That is the simple reality that isn’t going to change.
Humanity cannot afford to use the coal that would be produced by Donald Trump’s deceitful promises to restore the coal mines of West Virginia and elsewhere.
Hillary Clinton is either lying or is ignorant when she talks about making America a global leader in PV solar panel production. We might assemble panels here, but the plain fact is that China has dominated the world’s production of the semiconductors used in PV panels for a very long time, and there is NO indication that the US is making any effort at all to challenge that dominance. While China has been investing billions of government dollars in subsidizing its PV production industry, the GOP has been successfully paralyzing US government assistance because of the failure of a single failed Massachusetts venture (Solyndra) that lost a few hundred million dollars.
America has demonstrated, for decades, that we lack the heart, mind or stomach to do the things we need to do to lead the world in pretty much any technology today. While China is investing tens and hundreds of billions, we are whining about losing tiny fraction of that. This is not the behavior of a world leader. The US is now contracting with foreign semiconductor suppliers for military parts, because we are no longer able to provide our own parts at competitive cost.
The world has left America behind. Decades of right wing driven reductions in government research, federal spending, federal investment and so on — combined with the cries of “socialism” whenever a suggestion is made that the federal government directly subsidize any industry — have squandered the dominance we once enjoyed.
When Donald Trump tells his supporters that he will “make America great again”, he is making empty promises to desperate men and women who he has spent the last thirty years defrauding. It is the pure drivel of the carnival barker.
I suggest that a new consensus will form based on finding ways to more fairly distribute the enormous wealth and resources of America, ways that:
1. Do not depend on how hard or how long somebody works
2. Provide a livable minimum income for every American
3. Reestablish the values and priorities that have been uniquely American for centuries.
When politicians and Democrats and people on BMG make the case that wages are low because we do not have “manufacturing jobs”, that’s just a red herring. The better wages had little to do with the manufacturing, it had to do with labor policy, trade policy, tax policy. If Democrats are not willing to do anything about labor, trade, and tax policy, we might as well just call ourselves socially liberal Republicans.
I do agree with the end of your post.
I would have said that huge changes to the Conservative Party in the UK were unlikely as well. But that seems to be exactly what is happening: on the one hand, an embrace of a more left-wing economic policy (no free trade, opposition to globalization, distrust of the financial sector, and at least the possibility of government intervention in the workplace to bolster wages and worker rights) coupled with a right wing social and cultural policy (rejection of “cultural diversity,” immigration, minority civil rights, and a forthright embrace of ethnic nationalism).
Of course they can do this because Labor is going full-on “nationalize the means of production and empower the proletariat mode” complete with government-owned railways and coal mines.
The social liberal/economic conservative consensus that drove the middle wing of both parties, successfully, for several decades is looking a little bit deceased. That was the domain of both Blair and (Bill) Clinton. If the Sanders campaign is indeed the harbinger of a more solidly ideological leftist Democratic Party, then the vacated center might similarly allow the GOP to evolve in a Trumpy fashion– i.e., to leave aside the supply side, no-regulation economics in favor of more populist and interventionist policies, while embracing cultural ethnic nationalism.
Thatcher and Reagan both utterly conquered the economic left. Both Clinton and Blair revived their respective parties by co-opting many policies through which Thatcher and Reagan effected their conquest, and choosing to fight on more favorable ground. Both Clinton and Blair now seem unloved by their party, despite returning them from the wilderness. In UK, the rejection of Blair seems to have cemented Labor as a minority party once again.
But if the Tories can toss Thatcherism overboard, I suppose there is no reason that Reaganism can’t suffer the same fate here.
DEAR GOP : Refusing to help solve problems isn’t leadership, obstructionism isn’t governance, and wanting our President to fail isn’t patriotism.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Massachusetts is about as “Democrat” as a state can get and yet we have one of the highest rates of wealth disparity in the country.
… since median household income in the CommonWealth is higher (and which is rising) than the median household income of the country as a whole (which is falling). This indicates that Massachusetts might not have a particular extreme between the very rich and the very poor, rather it indicates that we may have a very solid middle income tier alongside some higher-than-normal incomes. Having more professors and lawyers (like Connecticut, New York, and DC who are ‘worse’ then us in this respect) might account for the disparity. Not, perhaps, ideal for the CommonWealth and a more equitable distribution would be welcome but neither is it particularly a harbinger of Dickensian squalor.
Which might mean that ” as Democrat as a state can get ” is doing something right… or, at least, not completely falling down on the job…
.
Wealth is not income. Wealth concentration is not income concentration.
There are several rather well-defined thresholds at play here. There is a ceiling to what any individual can actually consume. There are only so many expensive meals, luxurious vacations, or even lurid escapades that someone can consume. Beyond that ceiling, attempts to consume only convert one asset into another. Yachts, real estate, automobiles, airplanes — those all have actual cash value after they are acquired.
Each portfolio is managed to produce yield. When the inflation-adjusted yield from a portfolio exceeds the consumption ceiling for an individual, the value of that portfolio increases. It is impossible for it to do anything different (leaving aside transactions that decrease the cumulative value for the moment).
It is because of this that it is crucially important to distinguish wealth concentration from income concentration. The very wealthy manipulate their income to conform to their personal priorities. Efforts to manage income concentration have little or no effect on wealth concentration.
It is wealth concentration that is our most pressing problem. When we discuss differences between the very rich and the very poor, we really should be talking about wealth rather income differences.
We know that wealth distribution is “scale-free” — the degree distribution is linear when plotted on a log-log scale. This means that a single individual with a gazillion-dollar net worth is balanced by a gazillion individuals with one-dollar (or negative) net worth. That distribution has a much fatter “tail” than the Gaussian (“normal”) distribution that too many of us assume.
In fact, the presence of several dozen extraordinarily wealthy individuals in Massachusetts — because of their extreme wealth and the scale-free nature of wealth distribution — actually is a harbinger of Dickensian squalor.
… I just work with what I’m given… In a reply to johntmay who used that link which was about income disparities… I responded in kind.
Fair enough.
I don’t mean to be argumentative or oppositional, I just want to emphasize the difference between wealth and income concentration.
In my view, wealth concentration is the more urgent issue. It is wealth concentration that will create American nobility if we allow it. Our most important bulwark against wealth concentration is the gift and estate tax (at both the federal and state level), and we have been weakening that for decades.
The GOP continues to aggressively advocate for removing the gift and estate tax altogether. Doing so will be a disaster.
The reality is that wealthy people in communities where wealth disparity is low live better lives than wealthy people where wealth disparity is high. High rates of wealth disparity, as we see in Massachusetts, unquestionably drive up our rates of social illness. It adds stress to all of our lives. Even John Henry, as wealthy as he is, lives in stress. Why else would he have a “safe room” installed in his fortified, multi-million dollar home in a gated community?
John Henry’s address is Sargent Road, which is a private road although I’ve been in that neighborhood in car, bike, and on foot without ever being questioned by anyone.
The back of John Henry’s land abuts Cottage Street, a public road, and his home is separated by a 3-4 foot stone wall.
Fortified? Not hardly.
“safe room”
I don’t need to explain any of John Henry’s actions to point out the hyperboles in your post.
Okay, I was mislead by someone who told me he lived in a gated area, but he still has a “safe” room. Why does he need one? What is he afraid of? Zombies, the Walking Dead?
increased crime, divorce, drug addiction, the whole lot.
… every problem begins to look like a nail…
I don’t disagree with you. But you took to this tangent with a link to income disparity which, as s’tom pointed out, isn’t the same thing as wealth disparity. Nor is it enough to say that ‘with wealth disparity comes many social ills.’ If, for example, your sample size includes myself, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet the wealth disparity is extreme but the social ills you describe don’t obtain (speaking for myself, not knowing if either Gates or Buffet have an addiction…) The social ills you describe are simple symptoms of poverty. Wealth disparity might be one variable, perhaps even the governing variable, but wealth disparity does not cause poverty.
Wealth disparity matters much more so within a community than between communities, that’s a point that you miss. Wealth and poverty are both relative terms, so no, one does not “cause” the other.
What about our clerks at Dunkin Donuts, our dishwashers at the Olive Garden and our night restock crews at Walmart? Are they doing that much better here than in Red States?
As of now, they make at least $10 per hour. Increasing to $11 per hour in January 2017. And our lowest paid workers also benefit from the SEIU (and others) “Fight for $15” efforts. A fight that has already resulted in $15 starting rates for some jobs and intends to increase pay to $15 an hour the pay for all worker (either through collective bargaining, public pressure or another increase in the state minimum wage).
Meanwhile, according to Walmart’s well-marketed 2016 raise press release, new associates will get $9 an hour. (http://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2016/01/20/more-than-one-million-walmart-associates-receive-pay-increase-in-2016 )
Clerks at MA Dunkin Donuts also will be making $11 an hour (at least), compared to the national average of below $10. *http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Dunkin’_Donuts/Hourly_Rate )
The dishwashers at Olive Garden are a similar gap: (http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Olive_Garden_Restaurants/Hourly_Rate )
To be clear, all of these workers deserve more. To me, $15 an hour ($30,000 for a 40 hour a week worker) is the bare minimum that any worker should be paid. $10 an hour is poverty wages.
But (thanks almost entirely to our relatively high state minimum wage and the relatively strong union presence in our state), the lowest wage workers in Massachusetts are already doing considerably better than their counterparts in other states. Particularly the Red States.
P.S. We also have more progressive state tax policies (an actual income tax; Earned Income Tax Credit; etc) than any Red State. This also helps ensure our low-income workers do a little better than their Red State counterparts. Again, I’m for more progressivity still (including a millionaire’s tax) but this is a factor worth accounting for when comparing the fate of low income workers in Massachusetts compared to the average Red State.
Housing. Housing is not cheap in this “Blue” state. That kind of wipes out all the good stuff you mentioned.
… are here expressly for the purpose of attending the professors class. Sometimes, no doubt, the professor will stop at Dunkins for a cuppa, or will eat at the Olive Garden…
The pity is not that people sometimes have to work low paying jobs… the pity lies in the notion that this is the peak of their working career. The antidote for that is education, administered by teachers and/or professors.
and pours the coffee if we’re all at high paying jobs?
… Unless you want to do it?
I’ve stocked shelves before. Every job in which I’ve done it was viewed as temporary. In the grocery store in which I worked the entry level people would stock and cart and all that. You either moved on to another job or moved up through ranks, cashier, assistant manager, manager… . Although, I’ve had managers who stocked shelves themselves, right alongside the entry level people. But stocking shelves wasn’t the only thing to do. A modern grocery store, or a warehouse, is a marvel of operations: inventory, cash management, personnel. And there is high turnover. That’s not, per se, a bad thing if the turn has some other over to go to…
Coffee is a much more intensive process that just pouring. People have been drinking tea for much longer than they have been drinking coffee… because all you have to do with tea is to pluck the leaves and dry them, somehow. Coffee requires roasting and grinding the beans before application of hot water and mixing with adulterants. Coffee houses in England and America in the 1800’s were actually big deals. Not only were they cast as deliberate alternatives to ale houses, they involved a great deal of skilled labor and dedicated equipment. Only relatively recently have we streamlined the processes of roasting and grinding so that you can walk into any dunkin donuts and, from your point of view, the only thing the counter personnel has to do is to pour. But there is a great deal of work to do at a coffee house and there is no reason a willing person can’t make a decent career of it. That, in any event, is the hope of many a Starbucks barista. Probably the worst thing to happen to coffee houses was the invention of the styrofoam cup, and other travel receptacles, because that changed them from the ale-house alternative (and, really, what’s the difference between a barista and a bartender under that model? and bartenders can make good money) to a drive-thru afterthought. Really a pity, if you think about it.
That aside, this is not about you, or me. Sure, a lot of people with good paying jobs used to stock shelves and so on, but to think that all of us can reach that level is simply not supported by the data.
Today, I am doing work similar to work that I did back in 1974, only today, I have added responsibilities. Back then I was making $45K a year full time with benefits. Today, I’m making about $15K, part time, no benefits.
But again, this is not about you or me.
The truth is that wages for labor have been stagnant for over 40 years and no amount of education or job training is going to change that. Household income in 1997 was $57,900 and by 2015, it was $56,600, all while output has grown dramatically.
We need to stop believing in the myth that anyone can “make it” in America and that all low wage jobs are pathways to success. The barista and the stock clerk and the all the rest need to be paid a wage that will in the very least fully support them, with enough left over to save for a rainy day AND retirement.
Pre 1980 (even pre 1990 for me anyway) $45K a year was big money. I’m always interested in the “living wage” disparity between different areas of the state/country. It’s why a national minimum wage of $15 seems excessive to me. Where were you living in the 70’s ?
In 1973, $45K was enough for a young man to support himself providing that health care was a benefit. I was living in Rochester NY.
You think that $15 is excessive? How can a wage that can’t even support one citizen working 40 hours a week seem “excessive”?
I knew hundreds of guys working in central Mass who were supporting families on less than $40K. You were making management level money, at least if you lived in Worcester.
Hillary thought 15 was excessive also, at least at one point. Not sure where she is on that this week.
Can a kid out of high school in Massachusetts make close to $40K a year, including health insurance (with zero deductible and no co pays, just like I had)?
Hillary thought $15 was too much. One of a few reasons I supported Bernie. However, at a recent speech, Hillary has said that a high school diploma and 40 hours a week HAS to be enough to support a citizen.
I’m not sure how anyone could oppose that.
would be to find jobs that someone with a HS diploma, only, and no trade are qualified to do. Requiring $40k/year doesn’t do much if there aren’t any jobs anyway.
If a business is paying a wage that will not sustain a worker, not provide enough in wealth for that worker to feed, house, clothe himself and allow savings for a rainy day, and retirement, along with health insurance, who is filling in the gap that allows so many people to work for less and provide this business with labor?
Really? “a national minimum wage of $15 seems excessive to me.” Really?
In what part of America in 2016 do you think anybody can live on $15/hour?
If I recall, the stats on people who were actually in minimum wage jobs showed that, in very significant percentages, they are white, young, and working part-time. It is a little misleading to set the number based on what adult, working full time and supporting self and family needs as a “living wage.”
In 2014, 77.2 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.7 percent of all wage and salary workers.
So, more than half of us.
Their average age is 35, and 88 percent are at least 20 years old. Half are older than 30, and about a third are at least 40.
waiters and waitresses, kinda skews the stats.
I know for sure. Other parts of the country I would imagine also. Do you at least concede there is a huge difference in costs depending on where you live?
I’m going to an open house in Oxford, 3 bedroom, 1 1/2 bath, 7 minutes to the Mass Pike. <$170,000. What would that be in Boston?
Yes, and in those expensive areas, a wage higher than $15 is needed.
There is just no way that hourly non-exempt jobs are ever going to return in a way that sustains our economy or the people working at them. It isn’t going to happen.
We need a guaranteed national income. We need to clawback wealth from the top 1% — and especially the top 0.1% — and distribute it among the rest of us. Wealth, not income.
We need to return the gift and estate tax to something approaching 90% for estates in excess of something on the order of $20M. That is not going to put anybody in the poor house. Few families today have more than five children, and twenty million spread across five children is a very comfortable legacy for each. I really don’t think people realize just how wealthy the uber wealthy are.
For Phillip Ragon, barely making the above list with a net worth of $1.8B, my proposal would mean that his successors will inherit about $178M after the 90% tax. That is a LONG way from destitute. For Abigail Johnson, the wealthiest person in Massachusetts at $13.8B, her successors would inherit about $1.318B under my proposal.
These two individuals alone would contribute $14B in taxes under my proposal. I understand that not all of this would come to MA. Still, suppose we assume an arbitrarily chosen and generous annual figure of $100,000 per person as a livable wage. These two wealthy individuals ALONE could pay ONE HUNDRED FORTY THOUSAND men and women $100K per year under my proposal.
The approach I like best is a flat monthly stipend distributed to every taxpayer. I do not think it should be adjusted for regional cost of living, because the result will be to encourage people to move to areas that are already overcrowded. I do not think it should be adjusted for other income, because the result will be punish people for being successful. The resulting annual income will be most meaningful for poor people living in poor regions — that strikes me as precisely the place where our government should be stimulating the economy.
I want both parties to stop lying about “jobs” and labor. Neither party can deliver on these promises. We create more than enough wealth for all of us in America.
Our challenge is to distribute that wealth more fairly.
Which is another way of saying that “jobs and the economy” is never going to cut it…..but “jobs and the economy” seems to be the only thing that politicians offer, on both sides of the aisle. The Republicans have done a much better job in convincing the rest of us that the estate tax is a horrible idea, that it will rob our children, punish the successful and reward the idle masses. Democrats are trying, but corporate media is not on their side with this one.
In a recent news report, it reports that Hillary Clinton wants to cut the exemption for the “death tax” from $5 million today to $3.5 million, with a 45 percent tax on amounts between that and $10 million. She’d set a 50 percent rate on assets over $10 million, 55 percent over $50 million and 65 percent on amounts exceeding $500 million for an individual, $1 billion for married couples. Meanwhile, Donald Trump wants to get rid of the estate tax entirely.
And the headline reads:
How Hillary’s plan to raise the estate tax could hurt small biz
and midway though the report is mentions: Though there is little evidence many businesses have gone under from estate taxes, it’s a hot-button issue
Democrats need to do a better job on illustrating the realities of an estate tax, not the myths.
…if a diary I posted some time ago is still accurate.
Link
Interesting that she went national and not the Globe. OK not super-interesting … but a little interesting.
Emails are the most valuable commodity in politics these days. My guess is she wants Markey’s job, though I know everyone at BMG thinks she can beat Baker, maybe she is starting to believe the hype.
I suppose it’s just projection, but my own interpretation is that Ms. Healey, like myself, understands that the Boston Globe is now little more than a publicity arm for the Boston Red Sox.
The audience that Maura Healey targets in this excellent piece is more likely to read the Huffington Post than the Boston Globe. I further note that unlike the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post does NOT put a paywall between her piece and her audience.
I don’t see this as a choice between a national versus a state audience, I think she gets both with the route she chose.
More than anything else, this choice underlines the irrelevance of today’s Boston Globe.