I have MSNBC on in the background and they are talking a lot about where the DUMB candidate thinks he has an opening in traditionally blue states among blue collar voters. This has been one of the greatest frustrations of this campaign. WHAT THE HECK ARE THESE PEOPLE THINKING? The Democrats are consistently the ones who would be better for them. DEMOCRATS want rising wages; DEMOCRATS believe in family leave; DEMOCRATS want to save entitlements and benefits; DEMOCRATS consistently get endorsements from unions (for good reason IMO); and yes, DEMOCRATS are much more likely to take into account the concerns of this constituency when it comes to trade.
The DUMB candidate has stiffed people matching this description for his entire career. HE has sent much of his business overseas, and HE has avoided paying taxes that would ultimately help these people in so many ways. The GOP in general is clearly not friendly to working people either. Why in the world do these voters not fall into our laps given the alternative?! One thing MSNBC was saying is Dems have become the party of professionals, but why are these mutually exclusive? The pattern is consistent – the Democratic Party gives voice to those who haven’t always had one, whether minorities, women, or laborers. I’m not sure what message they are looking for from us that we aren’t already giving.
Thomas Frank and any of his books and Thomas Edsalls magnificent biweekly columns in the New York Times. Add on top of that Charles Murray with ‘Coming Apart’ and Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids” which tackle the cultural causes and effects of income inequality. I haven’t read Hillbilly Elegy but it’s a more personal narrative tackling the economic, social and spiritual collapse of the authors hometown ravaged by drugs.
Rick Pearlstein’s trilogy on the rise of the conservative movement also touches on these issues, Before the Storm focuses on Goldwater, Nixonland on the Silent Majority and use of white working class populism to win over unionized urban white ethnics, and then the Invisiivle Bridge which discusses the rise of Reagan Democrats through the prism of the 1976 primary campaign against Ford. All really profound reads that examine these topics in great depth.
These authors have many different perspectives and answers to your question. Frank points out in his first seminal work, ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?’ how cultural wedge issues ended up convincing WWC voters to vote against their economic interests to vote for cultural conservatism. His recent follow up “Listen Liberal” shows how big finance has captured the Democrats and turned it into a party of cultural rather than economic liberalism.
Edsall analyzes the polling and economic trends in his column. Basically, both parties used to have a mix of culturally liberal/conservative and economically liberal/conservative views and have now starkly realigned on cultural issues on the left and right pushing economics to the periphery. The workers who were male breadwinners that had middle class low education jobs have been displaced via automation, outsourcing, and low wage immigration which has put down award pressure on their wages while unionization has been made a lot harder at the state level. Meanwhile, that same demographic feels left out of the meritocracy due to feminism and affirmative action.
Democratic racial tolerance is a good thing, as is affirmative action and immigration from a perspective of social justice and human rights. These have not been economically beneficial to the old base of white male workers, and we have to concede this fact without conceding ground.
This campaign you’ve heard almost nothing about the economy in the media since class conflict doesn’t sell papers and threatens their bottom line. You’ve seen a lot about Black Lives Matter, Kapernick and the anthem, police as enemies or as vanguards to be protected, the role of women, consolidating gay rights and abortion rights, etc.
These have drowned out the economic conversation which has largely been waged on Trump’s turf of trade and the false perception protecti Nuns alone will restore prosperity.
The Democrats do a great job of talking about being champions for the poor, minorities, women, and gays. They have not focused nearly as much on messaging towards broader based class politics. Sanders did in the primary and was criticized for it by cultural liberals. Whether it was his earlier accommodation on guns or downplaying racial issues in the beginning of his campaign. Granted, by being champions for those other groups they will always lose a third to a half of that demographic which viscerally dislikes the notion of advancing equality at “their expense” and it’s difficult to shake that perception.
Even a simple thing like the CPA in Chelsea has divided along racial lines more than class lines. It’s a 60/40 Hispanic community but closer to 50/50 when It comes to voters. Hispanic property owners tend to want the higher taxes to pay for services the city needs. White property owners feel alienated from the city and that they “lost it” to immigrants and will not budge no matter how much you sell the idea. Anytime I see a white voter over 50 on my walk list I know it’s not going to be a win.
…is why does any of what you say have to be zero sum, either by perception or reality.
They grew up with McGovern, lost badly, and then decided the best thing the Democratic Party could do was sell out to big money. We’d all benefit, they said.
They were wrong. And now blue collar workers have nowhere to go. They don’t love Republicans, but they feel betrayed by us.
Look, when the Dems are portrayed to be these two (fair or foul), you’re just not going to find that white men who bring one of these to work every day and might still use their dad’s one of these to keep their American canned macrobrews cold on the weekend aren’t identifying. The same is true if Democrats are portrayed to be these folk or these hombres or even these hippity-dosthese hipitydoos.
When you feel like your family and families like yours are losing ground, it’s hard to team up with people who seem to be nothing like you. Far easier to join up with someone who portrays those people as “the other.”
these hombres and
these hippitydoos
In tough times we should turn TO each other rather than turn ON each other. Don’t know why that isn’t more obvious.
….a poster here said he would be ashamed to have their votes. It it hard to turn towards, much less work with, a person or movement with that attitude.
For many years I said that both sides have the same ultimate goals of a safe, prosperous, and productive society, but differed as to how to reach that goal. Now, I am afraid that the goal has become secondary to ensuring that it is YOUR preferred technique that is used even if your opponent’s might actually work better.
… Even if that portrayal of what went down was 100% accurate (and I don’t grant that for even a micro-second) the response of “Fuck you, I’m voting tangerine Mussolini” remains a suspect response: somebody helped them to that conclusion, and maybe would have done so whatever the actions of the boomers.
It’s very simple: they are angry and they are afraid. They are angry that they are no longer the privileged class they once so clearly were and they are afraid that turnaround is to be fair play: that the black and the brown — and the estrogen based life forms — are going to do to the white what the white once did to them. This is the substance of their nightmare fantasia and the essence of their anger and their fear. They are neither angry nor afraid as a consequence of actual object of fear but because they have been taught this by manipulative and feckless ‘idealogues’ and as a consequence of how they view humans and the ‘right order of things.’
That’s why McGovern lost. That’s why the second coming of McGovern (BIll Clinton) was pilloried exorbitantly and unfairly. That’s why they vote for the gold-plated Idi Amin. Irrational hatred leads to irrational decisions.
That’s a novel description of him.
…novel at all. I had meant to put that in quotes to (try to) get across the notion that the this was how the Right viewed it. In fact Newt Gingrich actually used the term “Countercultural McGovernicks’ in the ’94 race to paint a picture of the first 2 years of the Clinton Administration, to gin up fear amongst his base. You should look up the results of the 94 House races to see if it worked at all.. .
… Heady times. I know, I was there. Where were you?
petr, I don’t care where you were. Why do you personalize every argument? If I said I spent 1994 in a sensory deprivation tank, it wouldn’t matter.
Further, we weren’t talking about 1994. Clinton was elected in 1992 and won reelection in 1996 despite facing impeachment because he connected with regular voters (and lots of Wall Street cash).
Yes, Newt Gingrich was able to get some Republicans excited in 1994. It worked for a while, until they turned on him. Rahm Emanuel used resentment of the war to get us the House in 1996, and then we lucked into the Senate. But then we lost them again.
We should control both Houses, all the time. We care more about government, we ARE closer to most Americans’ concerns. But there is a consistent disconnect with the people who make decisions. They chase money, they alienate voters … we lose seats.
… It does matter, frankly, if you are going to act like you spent ’94 in that manner, first by attacking the boomers (like you aren’t one of them) and challenging me on something you now hint you should have known.
I made a statement. You said the statement was ‘a novel description’ I replied that it was not at all novel, since I had not been the first to make it.
Telling you that you are mistaken is not personalizing the argument. It is you being mistaken and me telling you that you are mistaken.
… without me being mistaken.
… the same discussion?
I said something. You commented on that statement with an inaccurate characterization of that statement. You were mistaken. You disagreed with me about a factual matter upon which I corrected you.
How is that you are the one to disagree and be mistaken about it and somehow you get to grab the high ground such that I am the one, apparently, who has to amend my behaviour?
truly dizzying
I think we can disagree without you being mistaken… That case, however, is not this case.
And then I responded to two things:
Your tendency to personalize things, which I find really annoying. Maybe it’s just me.
1994. I don’t know why you brought up 1994, but you did, so I replied to that.
If we go by the strictest definition of ‘baby boomer’ my older brother is a boomer but I am not. Under looser definitions, I’d be considered a boomer also (as well might you). So I’ve always considered myself a boomer. I’m 49. I’ll be 50 in a few months. So when you fulminated against ‘boomers’ I don’t think it inaccurate to consider it was you drawing first blood on the personalizing things… As well, not understanding the connections the Republicans (and others) made in ’94 regarding Bill Clinton and George McGovern caused me to think you might not have been there…
George McGovern was invoked (by you) as a way to explain what happened to the Democratic party. I noted “the second coming” of McGovern (Bill Clinton) to explain some of what happened to the Republican party… and when you made your mischaracterization of that term I noted that in 1994 Newt Gingrich was aggressively fulminating against ‘McGoverniks’ (BTW, did you know that Bill Clinton, with help from a young Hillary Rodham, ran McGoverns campaign in Texas in ’72?)
I think it’s important to know what happened. I don’t disagree that McGovern was a turning point, but the extent of the turn to ‘sell out to big money” on the part of ‘boomers’ is something I not sure of… I don’t disagree that Bill Clinton got in bed with big money… But I also don’t think it was venality so much as hubris: I think Bill Clinton thought he could make deals with ‘big money” and stay in control. I wonder, maybe, that Hillary still thinks that. I still don’t know that ‘big money’ has all that much control, either…. I don’t know that anyone has.
This approach steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the reality of the biases, prejudices, and — yes — ignorance of conservative voters, including conservative white working class voters.
It is true that GOP has, for decades, actively courted and pandered to this demographic. The platforms and candidates rely on dog-whistles, lies, stereotypes, scapegoats, and hypocrisy to actively attract these voters. What do YOU think the infamous “southern strategy” IS, after all?
What do you think caused the collapse of steel industry jobs in Pennsylvania during the 1980s (during the Reagan era, I might add, while the GOP controlled all three branches of government)? Shall we blame that on baby boomers? Yet the complaints from steel industry workers then were identical to the complaints we hear from white working class voters today.
The sad truth is that our economy has left them behind. That is most emphatically NOT the fault of baby boomers, it is the fault of ALL of us. Neither the GOP nor the Democrats are going to change that.
In a similar vein, the fishing industry of New England is dead, because we killed the habitat that it depended on. Shall we blame that on baby boomers? Neither party is going to change that, the industry is dead.
The warning signs for manufacturing have been published and talked about for decades, as have the warning signs for the fishing industry. Some workers paid attention to them, others did not. Those workers who bought the Fox News lies hook, line, and sinker (how’s that for mixing a metaphor?) have nothing but themselves to blame. The collapse of American manufacturing is the predicted result of decades of American investment. It has nothing to do with trade deals, import/export balances, or any of the other symptoms offered up. Like global climate change, it is a hard and painful reality. We do nobody any favors by pretending otherwise.
I fear that what you mean by “alienating voters” is the steadfast refusal of the Democratic party to embrace these disgusting tactics and strategies.
Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew used “hard hats” and the “silent majority” to muster opposition to Democrats and “libruls”. White working class voters ate up those lies. Fast forward four or five decades, and the GOP is using “illegals” and “libruls” in exactly the same way to seduce exactly the same demographic.
Surely we need to ask questions like “what makes white working class voters susceptible these manipulations” while we’re attacking baby-boomers with ageist rubbish.
Why do you disconnect “the economy” from the largest population group with the largest share of the wealth?
All the trends you mentioned are real, and the single biggest factor is an oversize generation making sure it gets what’s coming to it.
The fishing industry and the steel industry are quite different cases. But steel was an early victim of globalization. And while it has merits as well, as its heart globalization is the pursuit of new markets and cheaper labor. Capitalism run amok. The other options to blame are millennials: too young, seniors: too old, GenXers: smaller, and generally less successful. So yes boomers get more blame. There are more of them, and sorry but these changes overlap their working years.
Also back to the original subject: The Democratic Party could have been a lot more protective of American workers, say by penalizing companies for jobs shipped overseas (or better yet, rewarding jobs kept here). It’s true that the party couldn’t solve everything, but does ANYONE believe we did enough?
I invite you to show evidence why “the single biggest factor is an oversize generation making sure it gets what’s coming to it” causes harm to white working class voters. Is there demographic data to show that the “white working class voter” demographic was affected differently from the baby boom than other demographics?
It seems to me that you are picking a fact (the size of the baby boom) and asserting a correlation between that fact and the behavior of white working class voters, yet providing no evidence or even a theory about the cause of that correlation.
I think you miss the point in ascribing the 1982 collapse of the US steel business to “globalization”. Are you familiar with what brought about that collapse? I ask because at the time it was blamed on all sorts of scapegoats — “librul” environmental laws, “illegal” Japanese steel, “hippies” and “communists” (go figure, I’m just saying I heard it frequently while living temporarily in Pittsburgh in 1982).
It seems disingenuous to me to use a label like “globalization” to describe a scenario where the entire US steel industry was obsolete, so that Japanese steel had a 40-45% cost advantage. From the above link:
Here is how the above 1982 study attributed the collapse (emphasis mine):
Was this the fault of baby boomers? I don’t think so. I’m quite sure that the investment decisions of the US steel industry in 1980 were NOT being made by thirty-somethings.
The collapse of the US steel industry was not the result of “capitalism run amok”, it was instead the result of executives choosing to maximize their own returns at the expense of everything else (sound familiar?). The evidence of that was as available to steel workers as it was to everyone else. When the collapse was underway, in the small towns surrounding Pittsburgh in 1982, the ripple effects of the collapse were catastrophic and equally predicted — none of those towns were ready either.
The mills laid everybody off. The towns in the area were dependent on local property taxes to pay police, fire, and schools. None of the residents could pay any of their bills, so the properties went into foreclosure. There was nobody to buy the properties, and so the property tax revenues of the area dried up. The towns had no income, and so they had to lay off police, fire, and teachers. Was THAT the fault of “baby boomers”?
The sentiment I heard most often from steel workers of the time was something along the lines of “My grand-daddy worked in the mills, my daddy worked in the mills, and I worked in the mills. The poobahs that run the mills could solve this problem anytime they wanted to — they owe me a job.” That came from people my own age (I was 30 at the time). That attitude — that it was the fault of “management” — was the result of three generations of good union work. Those workers were born and raised in a culture where the overriding dynamic was “management versus workers”, and so when talking to a worker about a problem it was obvious to the worker that “management” was the issue.
Aside from the details, I see little difference between those complaints then and the whining I hear from disaffected working-class whites today.
Regarding your last question, I believe that the Democratic party did all that was humanly possible in the face of decades of unprecedented GOP obstructionism, hyper-partisan nonsense, and thinly disguised racism and sexism.
I think that “blue dog” Democrats, elected to “help” Barack Obama, proved to be singularly unhelpful. We called them “Democrats”, but they did not share Democratic values and either did not help or actively hurt our party’s efforts to do more.
I therefore see little to be gained from some sort of outreach effort that necessarily entails “softening” (as in hiding and shrinking from) our party’s opposition to racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
I think this is much larger than “the baby boomers”, and I don’t think the bromides that we toss around will do much to change it.
I think we are, in fact, talking about the forces of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and demagoguery — forces that are as old as humanity and certainly as old as democracy. I think our strongest tools against these forces are education, information, and prosperity. I think we have lost ground in the fight over the last five decades.
During the last five decades, who has supported efforts to expand education? Who has opposed them? Who has worked to expand information, especially, to working class voters, and who has voted to restrict it? Who has worked to actually (I’m not talking about dishonest campaign lies) increase the prosperity of working class Americans, and who has worked to decrease it? What party supports increasing minimum wage, and what party opposes it? What party supports strengthening and extending overtime laws, and what party opposes it? What party supports equal pay for equal work, and what party opposes it? What party supports making college more affordable, and what party opposes it? What party TODAY supports lowering taxes on the working class, and what party promises to raise those taxes?
I blame the loss of ground on the GOP — not baby boomers.
Here is the difference I see: in the 80s, US companies were getting their clocks cleaned by Japanese companies. That forced us to work harder, innovate, and get better.
In today’s economy, we can’t do that because there are no more US companies. There are global companies. If we figure out how to work harder, innovate, and get better, it doesn’t matter – the capitalists move those improvements to the third world where they can pollute and exploit labor. It is a race that we can no longer win.
There are two visions on how to run our economy. One vision is for the US to be the “high-end service provider to the world”, which would entail writing off 30-40% of our population who cannot play in that arena. The pluses are that we get cheaper prices for everything and a worldwide economy. You can mitigate the effects in two ways: either via transfer payments (Clinton’s approach) or via tough love (Republican approach).
Trump voters didn’t want either of those things. They don’t want welfare, but they are sick of the devastation their communities have seen. They want something else, and Trump promised it to them.
I feel comfortably saying this because I live in Springfield. I have seen similar arrogance on this very site. We were once a proud city. We were ravaged by deindustrialization. Much of it was due to what Tom described – northern plant owners who moved their jobs to the south in the 70s and 80s because the south was weaker on unions and on environmental concerns. But we had a second wave of deindustrialization, occurring in the late 90s’ and early 2000s – that one was made up of massive global companies buying our manufacturing plants and consolidating them elsewhere in the country, or existing global companies moving production to China.
Want some examples? Spalding Sports used to make golf balls in Chicopee. They employed a thousand workers – many in the factory, but many in the office. They didn’t make golf balls by hand – they made them with automated machines. I was there when they automated some of the work – they eliminated piecework, where women used to place a golf ball in a machine which then cut the mold line off, then put the ball in a bucket. Our region was able to handle that minor automation pretty well because they still had a big factory and warehouse right here. They had executives, bookkeepers, computer guys, janitors, truck drivers, warehouse managers, etc. The plant was recognized as the lowest-cost golf ball plant in the world.
That facility is largely gone. The factory they built in Gloversville NY is closed. Production is moved to China, with only a handful of machines still running to sell to high-end clients who want “made in USA” golf balls.
I can tell you about a friend who used to own a restaurant near that plant, who used to get a decent lunch and dinner crowd from the workers. That restaurant, in business for 30 years, is now closed.
I can tell you about Moore Drop Forge which, after being bought by Danaher tools, moved its Craftsman wrench production facility to Mexico. I can tell you about Milton Bradley which moved its board game manufacturing to China and its white-collar jobs to Rhode Island. I can tell you about a dozen paper-based companies such as National Blank Book or Westvaco that moved elsewhere. I can tell you about a company that will surely do the same – Lenox Saws, which was just purchased by Stanley. You might recall that Stanley used to make all their tools in New Britain CT, but now make them all in China.
A thousand workers here, a thousand workers there, and across the country you wind up with millions of people impacted negatively by this economic path we are on.
I don’t think that Trump can achieve what he promised, but I do believe that the goal is achievable if we, as a country, wanted to. Yes, we would have to pay a little more for our goods – but I think people would be OK with that provided that people were working, rather than paying more in taxes to let people not work.
I agree with most of what you write here. In particular, I agree that Donald Trump and his collaborators (I won’t call them “Republican” any longer, that’s a lie) can’t possibly deliver what they’ve promised.
Maybe I’m over-tired (I didn’t get much sleep last night), but I don’t see a goal described in your comment. In your final paragraph, can you clarify what you think is achievable? What is the “goal” you have in mind?
I see no evidence AT ALL that “people would be OK with [paying more for our goods] provided that people were working, rather than paying more in taxes to let people not work.” I remember the UK trying to keep the British automobile industry alive, and pursuing a similar strategy. It failed miserably. What you are suggesting amounts to asking people to pay more for products of lower quality. It won’t fly, people won’t do it.
I also fear you posit a false dichotomy. I don’t propose to ask any working-class or middle-class person to “pay more in taxes to let people not work”. I propose, instead, that the estates of people like Abigail Johnson (CEO of Fidelity and the wealthiest person in MA right now) be forced to pay SIGNIFICANTLY more than they do right now upon her death. I propose that Ms. Johnson, along anyone else whose net worth is in excess of, say, $10M or so, be taxed significantly higher on capital gains and, for that matter, on the annual increase of her net worth.
Our consumer economy is dying because we are starving it to death by allowing the top 1% (people like Ms. Johnson) to horde essentially ALL of the wealth being generated. That problem isn’t solved by taxing workers more and I’ve never proposed that.
I reject your characterization of the GAI as “paying more in taxes to let people not work”. America is filled with hundreds of millions of people who are UNABLE to work, because there are no skilled jobs for them to do. I reject that premise that my twenty-something children with four-year college degrees can live anything like the life you and I have lived if only “people would [] pay a little more for our goods”.
Nope. People won’t do it, and it wouldn’t help if people did do it. All that would happen is the 1% that already owns the wealth-generation capacity would pocket even more than they do now.
Suppose we attempt to pursue the path you propose. How will the handful of people (mostly white men) who control Spalding Sports, Moore Drop Forge, Milton Bradley, National Blank Book, Westvaco, Lenox Saws, Stanley, or any other company, be persuaded to do anything but put the increased sales revenue into their own wallets? How will the laws that force those companies to “maximize shareholder value” be changed to allow the scenario you describe to actually benefit anyone except shareholders?
I have felt for a long time (and said as much here) that the most immediate threat to American democracy and freedom comes from our own right wing. The walls have collapsed, and the barbarian hordes are sweeping across America.
I think things are going to get MUCH worse before they get any better. I think the American empire has collapsed. America’s golden era has ended, the “end times” are here.
I think we are entering another Dark Age. The Vandals didn’t have nuclear weapons. Today’s barbarians do, and have threatened to use them.
I think that the goals would go something like this:
1) We first acknowledge that we can have products that we consume made in the USA – understanding, of course, that the factories of today won’t resemble the factories of 1950.
2) We acknowledge that this will cause certain goods to be priced higher, but we acknowledge that “lowest price” is not a winnable strategy (because if we believe in “lowest price” as a philosophy, then we should bust unions and remove minimum wages, and perhaps even go down the Libertarian path of zero regulation, let the consumers decide.
3) Having acknowledged that we are on this path, we examine our trade deals, and we acknowledge that part of the pricing difference between local and global production is due to laws that we enacted to protect our country, and acknowledge that the prices are lower because other countries do not follow the same laws – therefore it would be a reasonable approach to price in tariffs equal to those external costs. That wouldn’t mean that all production shifts back to the US – but it would mean that the pricing differences wouldn’t be as great, and that would cause some production to move back to the US. Another thing would be to stop the currency games, both on the US side and on the Chinese side. A strong dollar makes our goods cheap, but also constrains our exports.
The problem I have is that in every discussion, the following points are asserted as some kind of natural law:
1) That we send work overseas because no one in the USA wants to do it.
2) That the low prices of goods produced abroad is a paramount goal of ours (if that was true, then we should be trying move *all* work to other countries – which obviously doesn’t work, does it?)
3) That the time between 1942 and 1970 was an anomaly created by the “fact” that the US was the world’s sole manufacturer. That is patently false – it didn’t take Europe 30 years to rebuild its factories, they were rebuilt in 2-3 years, and exports were a much smaller percentage of our GDP then as compared to now.
4) The latest one I have been seeing is that we shouldn’t even bother trying to attract manufacturing because factories are 100% automated these days, and moving one here would not create a single new job but would cause costs to go through the roof.
On occasion I will go through a box of stuff of mine that I packed away pre-2000. That is just 16 years ago. Much of the stuff is made in the USA. Some is made in Hong Kong, Japan, or other higher-wage Asian countries. That was just 16 years ago! Think back to 1995 – was everyone miserable because everything cost so much? I remember this as a time when people felt more stable, young people felt like they had a future. I remember being in college and people were being prepared to work at making things – not at financial gimmickry.
I don’t agree with your opinion that people would not be willing to pay a little more for their goods to have an economy with more opportunities, and I’d also like to point out that this is the very same argument that liberals make when suggesting that we raise the minimum wage – that people will be OK with the extra they will have to pay for their services.
I also don’t understand your point that somehow, if we made more products in the USA, that this would somehow enrich the people that control those corporations. I think that a parallel way of encouraging this behavior is through the tax code – our tax system encourages quick-profit activities instead of long-term investments. Look at all the hot companies being formed – they strive to have US market penetration in a couple of years and then global penetration in a couple more. How long did it take McDonald’s to get to your community? I think that was because the tax structure wasn’t conducive to someone earning a billion dollars, so no one even tried to grow that quickly. “Entrepreneurs” today want to build their company, sell in five years, and cash out.
The point that I think most Hillary Clinton supporters missed is that people are hurting, and Trump offered them a better message. Instead of implying to them that they were deficient (by promising to focus on education and training), he told them that the system was deficient. I believe that it is, because the old system was still in place less than 20 years ago, and it worked pretty well. I don’t think many Trump voters are thrilled with a CEO that gets a $500 million bonus – so why are we allowing that kind of stuff to happen? Because “markets”?
Your on the front lines of a hallowed out city in our own state the government in Boston has totally abandoned. And I think there are many places like that in the heartland. Boston has access to world class universities, waterways, and substantial global trade. Akron, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Scranton, and Green Bay do not. Duluth does not. So it’s time we rebuild our hallowed out cities starting here at home, and working on it across the country bringing jobs, investment, and infrastructure back.
Clinton and to a lesser extent Obama was too afraid to endorse a New Deal style jobs program, Trump just accepted his presidency with a bold call for just that. Straight from the Bernie playbook. The people want jobs, they don’t want handouts and they don’t want to feel bad about themselves. They don’t want to be lectured on privilege and social justice when their kids are dying from heroin and their marriages are collapsing due to economic strain. Time to refocus on leaving no family behind.
You wrote “Our consumer economy is dying because we are starving it to death by allowing the top 1% (people like Ms. Johnson) to horde essentially ALL of the wealth being generated.”
I attended the Massachusetts Democratic Convention in Springfield a couple of years ago where wealth and income disparity was alleged to be the focus of the day. It clearly was not, apart from using the words as decorative talking points to pepper a speech intended to rally the troops in support of one or another candidate.
There was little talk about raising taxes on the wealthy.
There was one, just one, breakout session conducted by Senator Dan Wolf who, at least to me, spoke openly about how it’s the fault of the people we send to Beacon Hill who have facilitated this problem and have no interest in fixing it. He was joined by a panel of experts who chanted the familiar line that “education and job training” will fix this.
I left that convention knowing that the Democratic Party, as it exists in my state, has no real interest in attacking the problems of the working class and it is too tied to wealthy special interests. I mean to change that.
I was shocked at the list of Western MA communities that voted for Trump over Clinton. In Massachusetts – not Ohio. Although many are described as “the hilltowns” which are more rural in character, many suburbs of Springfield voted for Trump too – with significant population.
Look at these communities – I know most here won’t be familiar with them, but I think you *should* familiarize yourselves with them because they are significant:
Tolland: Trump 63%, Clinton 33%.
Russell: Trump 59%, Clinton 34%
Blandford: Trump 58%, Clinton 37%
Southwick: Trump 57%, Clinton 36%. An exurb of Springfield.
Wales: Trump 56%, Clinton 37%
Chester: Trump 55%, Clinton 35%
Hampden: Trump 54%, Clinton 39%. An exurb of Springfield.
Brimfield: Trump 54%, Clinton 39%.
Holland: Trump 54%, Clinton 36%
Montgomery: Trump 54%, Clinton 38%
Huntingon: Trump 52%, Clinton 39%
Agawam. Trump 51%, Clinton 43%. A suburb of Springfield
Palmer: Trump 51%, Clinton 41%. A city of 13,000 people.
Ludlow: Trump 50%, Clinton 44%. A suburb of Springfield
Ware: Trump 50%, Clinton 43%. A city of 10,000 people.
Monson: Trump 50%, Clinton 42%. An exurb of Springfield
East Longmeadow: Trump 49%, Clinton 45%. A suburb of Springfield, among the more wealthy in the county.
Wilbraham: Trump 49%, Clinton 46%. A suburb of Springfield, 2nd wealthiest town in the county
Granby: Trump 47%, Clinton 45%.
Westfield: Trump 48%, Clinton 44%. One of the region’s larger cities.
Orange: Trump 46%, Clinton 45%
Monroe: Trump 45%, Clinton 43%
I just want to point out to people here that not all of the state is happy. The economy in western MA is still lousy for many, and almost non-existent for the larger cities.
Many of the communities I profiled two years ago for the 2014 post mortem are on that list. It’s time we reach out to the entire state and let people know the government has their back.
Pushing 50 in fact. And for my entire life factories have been shutting down. Seemed like every other movie in the early 1980s (back in my teen years) dealt with a factory that was closing. How many waves of Raytheon layoffs rocked MA in the late 1900s? The manufacturing we still have requires fewer people to do it because of automation.
So I confess to being less sympathetic than I probably ought to be when the folks who jumped into the meat grinder are surprised it’s trying to turn them into hamburger. I still believe in social programs to help those people. I’d like to see our government encourage more manufacturing where it can. Yet we don’t have a primarily blue collar economy, haven’t for a long time and won’t in the future. That’s a world that pre-dated me and, as I said at the top, I’m not young anymore.
The guy outside jackhammering the road is blue collar. So are the guys (and gals?) building the commercial space down the street. Strictly speaking, so is the DPW guy picking up trash, the custodian, the firefighter, and the guy working on my building’s elevator right now.
Blue collar is far more than manufacturing and mineral extraction.
And that’s where our efforts should be focused when it comes to helping the current blue collar, transitioning their skills to more stable forms of employment.
What bugs me is the monomania on manufacturing.
The TOP THREE are retail operations and very stable operations with jobs that require skills.
The only “skills” that American laborers need to add/improve are the skills to become part of the group of Americans that write the rules, set the terms, and enforce how the economy will operate.
It’s got more to do with tax policy, trade policy, and labor policy.
Imagine a guy inspecting plates, removing excess material, arranging them in a carrier that takes them through a chemical process that transforms them from something of little worth to something worth more.
One guy works in a plating plant that makes chrome hubcaps and the other works in a restaurant kitchen, keeping the dishes clean for use. Both do the same job. Why does the former make more than the latter? The former is employed in an environment where labor is organized and is allowed to be part of the decision making process in the company AND in the government that writes the rules, and the latter is not.
So how does the hubcap manufacturer get to cut wages? He can only relocate to an area where labor has little or now power.
It has nothing to do with “manufacturing”.
Obviously, referring to “baby boomers” as a monolithic entity is not exactly statistically or demographically rigorous. But there is a grain of truth in what he says.
Baby boomers were OPPOSED TO WAR, so long as it was they who could be drafted. Once Vietnam ended, their opposition to war was more or less forgotten.
Once they hit their prime earning years, they were steadfastly opposed to taxes. Nowadays, its HANDS OFF MY MEDICARE.
They let Reagan pretend that Social Security was general revenue in order to conceal deficits, even though it was then and is now plain that the money will have to be returned to Social Security from the general budget eventually. Have you any doubt that they, now that they aren’t in their earnings years, will suddenly find that payroll tax hikes are OK after all, so long as COLA to existing retirees continue?
These are all fair points. I still argue, though, that the baby boom has not been monolithic about any of these.
Some of us were adamantly opposed to the “volunteer” (I prefer the term “mercenary”) army. Many of us argued that we all became more warlike when those wars were fought by other people’s children.
Some of us argued that the problem with the draft was not that it existed but that only the poor and minorities were affected by it. Some of us argued that we should reinstate the draft, and make it apply to ALL demographics. I confess that while my children were at an age where they were vulnerable, we made sure that we had an escape plan in hand).
During our prime earning years, I think the split between in favor of and opposed to raising taxes was pretty even within the baby boom. I think many boomers have been arguing that we should lift the income ceiling on payroll taxes since at least the Reagan years.
So I agree that there is a grain of truth in the assertion — and only a grain. I think a more rigorous statistical analysis that compares these attitudes in other demographic groups might be more helpful in identifying trends.
I think that if we could somehow reverse the historic levels of wealth and income concentration that we see today, so that ALL demographic groups had access to more wealth, we would see many of these distinctions disappear.
I think that the 1% would much rather see us continue to argue about whose fault it is that nobody can afford to put a roof over their heads than to ask why the 1% have so much and everyone else has so little.
And cultural wedge issues serve as a distraction to that end. It’s ok that Rahm Emmanuel is shutting down schools exclusively in black neighborhoods cause he stood up to Chik Fil A on gay issues and is Barack Obama’s homeboy. It’s ok for the state of MA to spend next to nothing on the MBTA, but we can spend hundreds of millions luring GE.
Apple is a corporate saint because he boycotts IN and NC over LGBT issues, but not because it brazenly outsources to corporations and nations that abuse workers rights and human rights, let alone, don’t pay living wages or allow for unions. Jeff Bezos saved the Washington Post and advances cultural liberalism, while also being an avowed union buster and opponent. So these are the contradictions President Clinton has to smooth over into a broad based, class oriented coalition. Otherwise, the risk is that a smoother talking and more competent Trump without his baggage can be successful instead.
I won’t argue more than a grain. And the grain isn’t particularly germane to the point of the thread.
The baby boom is only relevant to the extent that they were the ones in the drivers’ seat (or clamoring to get into the drivers seat) when certain changes happened that have nothing much to do with the fact that the baby boom is large, and probably would have happened anyway even if it were not.
Those changes are that the party embraced New Left positions, which absolutely alienated many Old Left constituencies, as it was intended to do. It is dumb to debate whether this is a good thing or a bad thing in 2016, as it has been an established fact for nearly 50 years. Personally, I do not regret it.
But the Democratic “base” changed steadily after 1972, from the union hall to first the campus, and then to the places where people educated on the campus go. The Democratic Party has been in significant measure a party of educated, professional, middle class people during that time.
Even if you set aside the “Southern Strategy” and the reasons that it was successful (i.e., a chunk of old Dem base of working class is implacably hostile to the rights of virtually anyone who isn’t white working class) the shift opened a broad cultural rift that is not easy to bridge. That is the rift that stomv artfully highlighted above. The only politician that I have ever seen bridge the gap with any success is Bill Clinton in his prime.
An unintended consequence of the change of the base to an educated base is that the party became a LOT more comfortable with middle class professions like law and finance. To a certain extent, the Banker and his Lawyer stopped being The Man and started being the guy who lived down the hall freshman year, and once dated your girlfriend’s roommate. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Dems became buddies of Wall Street in the decades after 1972.
…were ever the privileged class. They once formed the backbone AGAINST the privileged class in the New Deal era.
Whatever, just whatever.
I guess we baby boomers are omnipotent and omniscient, ensuring that we inflict our moral bankruptcy on all those who come after us — making sure that NONE of those younger men and women can do anything at all to educate themselves or form their own opinions.
I suggest that the very first step in discovering the truth is to examine the subject population itself. Talk to them. Ask them where they get their information and who they turn to and respect for political analysis. For example, I think you’ll find that a HUGE portion of them get their “news” from Fox.
Is that the fault of baby boomers?
Not that the Democratic Party spends more time chasing big money than it does paying attention to blue collar voters?
Granted, demographic trends have worked against them too, like technology. But Dem leaders ought to drop their Google-colored glasses and get out among blue collar workers.
And yes, Boomers are the dominant population group, so they get the most blame. The boomers’ obsession with success overrides their sense of community. No, they’re not the only generation that does that, but they did do damage to the Democratic Party by moving its focus toward Goldman Sachs and other firms like it.
Look at the most recent Democratic cabinets, and you will see many Wall Street veterans.
I agree! Unions are one of the last vehicles where this happens. They have done a great job keeping PA and WI blue and were decisive for Obama in Ohio. The IEBW and SEIU lent us some canvassers this weekend and all were whip sharp organizers and bilingual to boot. That’s the future of the movement. The next Sanders will be a Latino SEIU member, and she’ll win the presidency!
I’m a boomer.
I was told, starting from childhood, that I was responsible for what happened to me. That message was reinforced when I entered the workforce as an engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation in 1974. Every new engineer for Digital was explicitly told, in our employee handbook, that the company standard was “Do what’s right” — if we knew that our management was telling us to do the wrong thing, we should do the right thing and trust that management would eventually get it right. Some of us made mistakes — none of us was punished for that attitude.
So yes, it’s true. I feel strongly that it is MY job to look out for myself and my loved ones. I look suspiciously at the media, because along the way I was taught (first in college, then again in the workforce) how to look very closely at how to identify bias, recognize propaganda, and how to sift through those looking for objective fact. Those were not difficult habits to acquire, nor are they difficult to put into practice. Those habits cause me to immediately reject Fox News, alongside supermarket tabloid. I’m not very receptive to arguments that this information is unavailable to “WWC” voters — in my view, those voters make their own choices about where they get their information, and their opinions (and, sorry, but ignorance) reflects those choices.
There was a time when Polaroid was a high-flying Massachusetts employer. It soon became evident that instant photography was a dying technology. It took on the order of a decade for that reality to actually transpire. In my view, the workers at Polaroid had plenty of time to see what was happening and do whatever was necessary to adjust to that change. Some did. Some didn’t. I have little sympathy for those “caught” by the final demise of Polaroid — they had a VERY long time to avoid the issue, and chose to ignore the inevitable.
Studies like this 2014 Pew study provide objective evidence that conservatives “are tightly clustered around one main news source” — and that source is Fox News. The data shows that there ARE “striking differences between liberals and conservatives”. I invite you to explain how we baby boomers cause this.
I have a somewhat different explanation for the undue influence of big money on government. I think big money worked for decades to acquire that influence. I think big money bought both political parties. I suppose we can lay that at the feet of “boomers”, but I don’t find that helpful. The hedge fund managers that I know (and I do know a few) are very much millennials, and they remain very interested in keeping as much influence as possible. When I was doing venture-funded startups in the 1980s and 1990s, the senior management of the VC firms that dominated my world were MUCH older than me.
I agree that big money has too much influence. It has too much influence over the Democrats, and too much influence over the GOP. I fail to see how pointing fingers at “boomers” is remotely helpful in changing that. Since we remain a significant voting block, I would think it would be more constructive to identify ways we can solve the problem.
Similarly, regarding your final sentence, surely it is more accurate to observe that most cabinets — of either party — have many Wall Street veterans. I invite our historians to describe how far back that goes — I suggest it’s certainly been true since at least the LBJ administration. Surely you agree that the cabinets of Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, and George W. Bush included many Wall Street veterans.
It seems to me that your criticism of the Democrats and of baby boomers is misplaced.
I didn’t mean to offend you. Sorry.
What it comes down to for me is: the GOP should be for management, we should be for labor. That means labor at all levels. Obviously that’s a generalization, but it should be obvious to any voter, when the choice is a career public servant and a CEO, who’s on their side.
How many times do I have to post this sad reality? Have we have all Republican presidents for the past 45 years?
In 1997, the median household income was $57,000 and the GNP was about $11 Trillion. In 2015, the median household income was $56,600 and the GNP was over $16 Trillion.
Have we had no Democratic presidents from 1997 to 2015?
You really expect a majority laborers to align with either party?
Why?
…and it’s gotten them no where. Now they hear someone that thinks and talks like they do. They are done listening to people who are recognizably “smarter” than they are, but they only thing this college educated bozo are better at is screwing thing up.
After watching all the “smart people” fuck things up, why shouldn’t they vote for someone just like them…but richer?
…that they are lazy and need to work harder to get a better job. Democrats tell the working poor that they lack the education and skills in order to make a decent living.
My question to both parties (and Democrats in particular) is this:
If all the working poor worked harder and went to night school to get a better job that allowed a decent living……….
……WHO is going to do all the JOBS that these people are already doing?
Who is going to work the registers and stock the shelves at Walmart? Who is going to clean the hotel rooms from 11:00 AM- 4:00 PM at the hotels and motels? Who is going to cook the food at Burger King? Who is going to replenish the bananas and pineapples at the food markets?
Who?
Are you ready to promise the people who replenish the bananas and pineapples at food markets that society will raise their wages enough for them to own their own home?
I’m pretty certain that there will always be people to do those jobs you describe. One of the reasons to raise the minimum wage and punish employers who exploit them is to make their lives as easy as possible (and not more so). Nevertheless, someone with no education who is pushing a broom or cleaning hotel rooms and wants a higher income had better go to night school, because he or she is VERY unlikely to improve their lot any other way.
That’s just a fact, my friend. It’s been true for at least the full extent of recorded human history. Are you asserting that we now know a way to end poverty?
Tell us all, please, how should the Democratic Party view broom pushers? And, as I am presently trying to support myself and my wife on the wages of a banana replenish-er, the only job I can find at this point despite having a 4-year degree and 40+ years experience in assorted fields of work…how should my wife and I expect to live?
Human history is filled with horrors, yes, we know. We can do better than that.
I don’t know what you should do. I submit that you, more than anyone else, are best able to answer that question.
I didn’t say “let them starve”. I said, instead, that the poor will always be among us. I enthusiastically accept our obligation to provide for the poor as best we can. I am not proud enough to claim that we can eliminate poverty.
It seems to me that you are arguing that the existing of the poor proves that the Democrats have betrayed us. I think that argument is bullshit.
This is a serious question. You seem to think that it’s “natural” for some people to work 40 hours a week and still be poor. How so?
The demand is yours, not mine.
I didn’t say it’s “natural”, I said that humanity hasn’t found a solution to the problem you are so passionate about in thousands of years of trying. You haven’t offered a solution, you’ve only clarified the depth of your passion.
Many of us share your passion. Such emotion, without the rigor and discipline of finding a way forward, is empty sentimentality.
you agree to be in cahoots with Wall Street insiders and giving hush hush speeches because, as you put it “the money has to come from somewhere”, any words after than regarding your hopes of a solution are worse than empty, they are condescending.
You, sir, have helped end the American empire.
Your relentless and sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton have elected Donald Trump. You are a Collaborator.
Just about everyone here, and every prominent Democrat, believes that wages should be higher and are happy to accomplish that legislatively.
When you pray, move your feet. Democrats believe that wages should be higher and are happy to accomplish that legislatively but have not done anything about it of note, according to the economic history of the USA in the past 45 years. Believe is one thing, do is another. Frankly, I am sick and tired about what people believe.
… Under the laws of the conservation of beverages there are people in this world who don’t drink coffee because I regularly drink their share. Oh, they want to drink it, but they can’t, because I do. If I were to divorce (heaven forfend) there are at least two Dunkin Donuts and one Stahbarks, that would be part of any custody hearing. I could list half of Colombia Coffee bean farmers as dependents on my taxes.
And because I purchase and drink vast quantities of coffee, I am intimately acquainted with a vast array of Dunkins’, Stahbarks, Dippins, Cumbies, Peets, StahTwentyFah, roadside diners, gas stations and corporate cafeteria. If it sells coffee in the CommonWealth, I’ve been there.
Because I am intimately acquainted with so many different purveyors of caffeinated motivation I have a view to both the makeup of the staff and the turnover rate thereto applied. Stahbarks has the whitest staffing overall and the least turnover. Dunkins has an extreme rate of turnover and the white people who work at Dunkins are almost universally female, a large contingent of which are middle-aged and older. Of the remainder of Dunkins employees, they are minority, transient and often heavily accented. Personally, I like Stahbarks coffee the best (besides what I make myself) but I dislike the feeling I sometimes get: that, by purchasing coffee there, I’ve somehow interrupted their day. With rare exception the Dunkins Employees are solicitous and gracious, if often overly zealous with the amounts of sugar they put in my coffee.
So here’s the thing: if there is a high rate of turnover now, absent this utopia of education and corporate ladder-scaling you envision, and that rate of turnover is satisfied with new staff every so as-necessary, what’s going to be different? The world turns. Somebody works right now, briefly, at Dunkins, then moves on. The position is filled for another, possibly brief, span. This is the way it is now. What’s going to change under a wider, more encompassing, scheme of ambition,education, and pursuit of a professional career? Somebody works at Dunkins while going to night school, etc, and they move on. What’s the difference? And what’s going to happen when the go-getter who started out slinging coffee works his/her way up to assistant manager, store manager, regional supervisor and, possibly, franchise owner?
I mean, your argument is just a speeded up version of the question: who’s going to fill all these positions when people retire? Well, who? Whoever is next, that’s who.
You’ve just supported the fact that capitalism is a failed notion. It’s high tome to move on.
… I’m game. Let’s do it. Whither?
Please note, under previous economic modalities the poor faced malnourishment and starvation, when not actually worked to death. Under our present iteration of capitalism the biggest issues faced by the poor are obesity and unemployment.
I’m all for giving capitalism the old heave-ho… none more so… but you are to take care to have some perspective, so as to add a little more righteous heave to your ho.
I’m reluctant to say it, but this exemplifies what I mean by unwilling or unable to pursue or maintain a rational argument.
I accept that people feel this way, I suspect everybody feels this way at one time or another. I suggest that some of us layer a certain discipline on top of this feeling.
I know for a fact that kicking the front panel of my pedestal computer after it has once again screwed up a Windows Update is NOT going to help and will almost certainly hurt (both the hardware and the foot). I *feel* very passionately that that is the next step. If I ignore the discipline and my knowledge and kick it anyway — and break it so that none of the buttons work at all — whose fault is that?
If certain things are going to be fucked up and only “smart people” have been in control, then it is irrational to conclude that dumb people will not fuck them up. If six white male drivers have been killed by attempting to traverse a certain curve at 50MPH, it is irrational for a black female to believe that she can attempt the same feat and not die. The premise is irrational, and it is precisely the sort of irrational thinking that most educated men and women have learned to avoid.
It’s all well and good to reach out to people who are suffering and do what we can to ease their pain. I think it is a prescription for disaster to set national policy on the basis of whatever those suffering people believe is the source of their distress — especially when all the facts point elsewhere.
I think the job of every voter, every candidate, and every official is deal with FACTS, as best we can — and to explicitly avoid pandering to the sort of undisciplined passion that you summarize here.
thoughtfulness we dedicate to politics, we’d still be wearing animal skins, living in caves, and hunting mastadons.
(And no, that’s not a shot at people voting for Trump. The vast majority of society is guilty).
Yup, take this test. Walk up to any ranking Democrat, you know, the inside track types, the up & coming sort and ask them how much should a full time employee at Dunkin Donuts expect to make in a year. Odd are the person you are speaking to is a lawyer, or a realtor, or public school administrator and they will tell you that when they had that sort of job, it was while they were attending school and working towards their degree and that such jobs are just stepping stones to jobs that are meant to sustain an individual. In other words, they are out of touch with reality, at least the reality that many of us live in.
By “full time employee at Dunkin Donuts”, presumably you mean a counter worker, as opposed to the franchise owner or store manager.
What do YOU demand for the annual income of a counter worker at DD with, say, five years experience who works 40 hours per week?
You see, I think that the “lawyer, or a realtor, or public school administrator” that you cite are just as much in touch with reality as you, maybe more so. I think that many of them worked jobs like that in high school or college (I punched a clock as a janitor one summer), and learned from that reality that it’s no way to live.
I think some men and women see how bad life can be when the wrong decisions are made and do all in their power to make the right decisions.
I’m not saying that everyone trapped in those jobs created their own problems. I am saying that providing a way out of those dead-end jobs is about the best society can do.
I’ll just agree with Adam Smith and say that the income be at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation without unfair subsidies paid for by taxing other in order to support “Dunkin Donuts”.
…the DEMOCRATS are the ones who favor raising wages, while Republicans have to muster all the will power they have to keep from blurting out that they think there shouldn’t be a minimum wage at all.
I’ll answer Tom’s question by quoting our senior Senator, $22 an hour is the ideal minimum wage since it is a true living wage. I am finally getting paid that rate right now, albeit temporarily, and it has substantially decreased my insecurity.
I’ll likely have to move back to Chicago after this gig since I haven’t found permanent employment in time that could pay for rents in Greater Boston while I simultaneously support my wife for her last year of nursing school and help her family stay in their home since her father lost income due to salary reductions in the Methodist Church. It’s a very tight time for us.
A payroll error delayed the delivery of my volunteers stipend for one week leading one of them to skip a semester’s worth of classes to help their family pay the rent. They are mortgaging their long term earning potential via education to stop the bleeding high rents are causing.
Rahm Emmanuel and Robert DeLeo are just two of the Democrats I can think of that opposed increasing the minimum wage until pressured by labor and other advocates to make paltry incremental lifts that might take us to $15 in a few years. Jeff Bezos and other high profile Democratic donors from the tech sector oppose it. The culture war is over, the left has won. It will take the right a cycle or two to adjust its message to suit that reality. We have a short amount of time to reconfigure our coalition toward economic and class based concerns. The right under Trump already is.
A $22/hour minimum wage will not go very far for a single person who wants to live in the greater Boston metropolitan area. That’s a monthly gross of $3,667. The “first ratio” now used by banks to determine housing affordability is 33% of monthly gross — $1,210. Things are perhaps a little easier for a married couple where each works full-time, but of course that approach falls apart when and if children enter the picture.
We should remember that most owners of DD franchises are themselves firmly stuck in the 99%. Raising their labor costs by a third (from $15/hour to $22/hour) will surely be passed on to their customers. We’ll see the price of that morning donut and cuppa go up another buck or two. The morning trip to DD that used to cost less than a buck and now looks more like a fiver will be a sawbuck or even a twenty.
In my view, the only sustainable long-term solution is a guaranteed annual income provided by the government, with hourly wages layered on top of that. The hourly wages paid by the employer for the counter agent at Dunkin Donuts can be $15, and that employee can still have a reasonable income. I think the only sustainable answer is to clawback that extra 33% from the one percent, so that they keep less of the obscene gains they’ve been receiving for the past decade or so.
The time when we can use labor — whether hourly work for non-exempt workers, or salary for exempt workers — to allocate the wealth generated by that labor is past.
Today’s society requires a new paradigm. Neither the GOP nor the Democrats are taking any steps at all (that I can see) to admit that reality.
Tom you have been like a canary in the coalmine. It is a different economy and it’s never going back, no matter how much Hillary or Donald promise to get the rust off the rust belt. Throw in the dramatic regional differences ($22 an hour is good money in Charlton, it’s great money in Alabama) and it’s more difficult.
the wealthy class that makes the rules will not allow it. In Denmark, McDonald’s workers get paid vastly higher wages, and yet, McDonalds still wants to operate there.
In Denmark, they refuse to accept the “laws” of economics as written by and for the rich.
Nope, sorry.
You’re cherry-picking factoids rather than looking at reality.
Reality is that we have made labor-based metrics, no matter how high the meter rate, irrelevant for the primary wealth-generators of our economy. That means that the owners of those wealth generators will continue to keep that newly-generated wealth no matter how much a government demands that McDonald’s workers get paid.
We have to stop looking at labor and start looking at how wealth is generated and who owns that wealth. Then we need to ask how much of that wealth they can keep.
We are in a post-labor economy, like it or not. The “consumer economy” of Henry Ford and the industrial era is dead. Mr. Ford needed those workers to make his wealth. He realized that he could form a closed cycle by paying them enough so that they could buy the product they manufactured. Workers liked the opportunity to buy things. Owners liked the opportunity to profit from the labor of those workers.
Today’s counterparts to Mr. Ford do not need those workers. The old bromides, promises, and conflicts are largely irrelevant today.
And have promoted it here. It’ll be awhile before we see it, though many of those tech donors actually like it, some conservatives like it, and people my age and below seem to like it. Folks like my dad hate it, he only took SSD after working his ass off for over 35 years despite a severe physical disability he got as an 18 year old. How do we convince him it’s not something for nothing? That’s the 64k question. But I’ve long felt it’s an ide awhile time has come, and it’s the inevitable alternative to rolling back globalization or automation.
…is the wrong paradigm entirely. Yes, you will think like that if you see life as a series of transactions. The argument should be it’s an investment in the dignity of every human being. My hesitation is how we pay for it in such a way that doesn’t feel completely Robin Hood.
Today’s Democratic Party is to the right of most Americans,and only moves left when facing an existential threat on the left, from FDR Democrats.
…but actually work for very few of them. Yeah, I know, same old reply that “the Republicans are even worse”…
I think you’re just running more ragtime here.
I’m not asking you to quote Adam Smith, I’m asking you what you think that counter worker should make. Is $31,200 enough (that’s $15/hour for 52 weeks)? How about $64,400 (arbitrarily chosen at twice minimum wage)?
Do you think the rate in, say, Franklin MA should be the same as Boston, Brookline, or Somerville? How about in Dover? How about Pittsfield?
Come on, dude. Instead of waving your hands, be specific.
What is it that you demand?
We be more like Germany , for starters. I demand democracy in our economy, not just in our government. I demand Mitbestimmung. and more.
Your first link is more than a decade old. I have family in Germany, they are not nearly so optimistic as you. More recent reports like “‘Massive’ rich-poor gap in German society” suggest that the situation in Germany is not Nirvana and in fact may not be significantly different from the situation here (emphasis mine):
I agree with you that Germany is doing many things right. My point is that NOBODY is meeting the perfectionist standard that you demand here.
And so does Denmark and so does Canada, and my hunch is that their left leaning citizens have more of a backbone than ours. When we on the left agree to align with the bankers because the money has to come from somewhere, well, we’ve lost before we started.
But I have hope, real hope, especially after watching Hillary Clinton over the past few weeks, that she will find her backbone and we will agree to use ours.
I’m ready.
Most people, unless they try to get cute and talk about market forces, would say “those people deserve the minimum wage”. No one would say that they deserve to be in the middle class.
Should a bus driver be in the middle class? A delivery driver? Someone working at Radio Shack? An auto mechanic? A clerk at a department store? A garbage collector? A used-car salesman?
I bet that time and time again, the answer is going to be “no”. There has been a pervasive attitude in this country that the middle class is now reserved for people who went to college and are professionals. This idea has been eaten up by Democrats to the point where although they may have sympathy for the person driving a bus and making $11/hour, their solution for that person is that they should “go back to school” and “learn some skills”.
My answer to your questions is that no full time worker in any job should be struggling to make ends meet.
Late weighing in here, but I’ve been busy. Anyway, my two cents:
As someone who grew up in a 60s union household in a lower-middle-class Detroit suburb, my reaction to the question is: “It’s OBVIOUS, isn’t it?” In those days, there was no question which party catered to the working class. So it might be difficult to explain it as it in just so ingrained in who I am.
Anyway, yes, there are racism aspects to it, and the rise of right-wing media has played a part, but it really comes down to the actions and accomplishments of the Democratic party. Then, the party didn’t even have to point out why blue collars voters should be with them because they knew based on what the Dems had done for them.
Maybe an example would help. When Obama took over in 2009, his team (cabinet and those formulating the stimulus) could have included significant labor representation. I don’t know if we have anyone with the status of Walter Reuther around anymore, but just including labor leaders in the discussion would have been good, both for the optics and the results.
And then if the stimulus had included significant public works projects that would have made a quick, significant dent in the unemployment situation, notice would have been taken.
Instead, we got something that looked like a compromise between a Dem president and Rep congress. Or vice versa. A quick turnaround for the Wall Streeters and a continued long slog for the working person.
So, exactly how does that make a strong argument for the Dems vis-a-vis blue collar workers? It doesn’t matter so much that “we stand for this and that” if the result is more of the same.
People got frustrated and worried. Think in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy. If people think their ability to put a roof over their heads and food on the table are in jeopardy (whether those fears are justified or not), someone who confidently says he can fix it is going to attract attention.
I understand your perspective.
In my view, the rub is in your final phrase. In your summary of the role played by Barack Obama, you said nothing about the administration that preceded him.
My point is that the guy who says “he can fix it” has been doing just the opposite his entire career. The other men and women from the same party who make that claim have been leading the charge to take away the roof and food.
The fundamental paradigm is broken. Whatever distinction there was between “blue-collar” and “management” (the fundamental divide during the era of “big labor”) is long gone. Men and women in “management” are getting screwed as badly as men and women working on a line.
Even while we think in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy, it still does no good to replace one liar who says he or she will “fix it” with another.
Until we find a way to return the share of national wealth currently held by the one percent back to the rest of us, we are just pissing into the wind.
things will get better when America becomes a majority-minority country in most states, and the basket of deplorables wake up and see the earth keeps on spinning. At that point, I think most of the people in the basket will want out.
And, of course, many of Trump’s voters aren’t long for this world, and their children and grandchildren are markedly different in ideology and behavior.
Big effort needs to be put into registering minorities, protecting the vote and getting people to vote for their first and second time — so they’ll keep voting. If latinos were registered and voted at the rate white people do, Trump would be down double digits right now.
Finally, we also need to recognize new generations of angry voters who can be easily swayed to vote against their interest could be created if we can’t make the economy work for everyone.