Sunday Musing July 9 2017

Whoa, there was a lot to think about in today's NYT op-ed section.  I will have to email RedStateVT one of them because I don't think he reads this blog anymore and I know he is not blogging anymore. It is a piece on what has become of conservatism written by a Conservative.  I found it fascinating for its insight into what is necessary to win elections and have sufficient support to enact policies.  Trump won the election but didn't campaign on the GOP policies that they want to enact and now they cannot implement them because democracy does work, albeit in a very messy manner.  In this author's mind one problem the GOP has is that they won the tax issue in the 1980's and cutting services further undercuts this issue for the GOP today.  So he thinks Conservatives need to find a positive message to unify around.

I don't take a great deal of comfort in that so I will go to my Indivisible Meeting today.

Link to "Can Conservatives Find Their Way"

I would like to point out that Democrat's need to find that positive message as well.  Donald Trump won the election because he gave a sufficient number of voters in a sufficient number of states hope.

This is exacerbated by the rise of Consumerism which has a distasteful side effect of something I know RedStateVT and I agree on.  The rise of the Kardashian culture.  A fashion columnist  highlights the similarity between consumerism and politics today.  Trump mastered that.

Link to Politics as a Consumer Decision

And finally a writer discusses the interaction of class and racial identity when it comes to personal decisions and certain realities that are confused in the political discussion as well as in the lowest personal level of navigating society.

Link to "Who Do We Think of as Poor"

This author has some fascinating facts that the GOP needs to ponder as they develop policies for their rural voters

"It’s tempting to say I thought anyone who worked couldn’t be poor. That’s naïve. Real wages for the two-thirds of Americans without a four-year degree have dropped since 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile the cost of a degree has roughly doubled over the past three decades. Today, half of American jobs pay about $37,000 or less each year, a quarter pay about $23,000 or less, and a family of four qualifies for SNAP at $32,000 or less. No wonder just over half of all SNAP families work, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. In America, “real” poverty is not about a lack of work, but a lack of compensation."

"It’s also tempting to say I balked at food stamps because of the culture in which I was raised: rural, white and working class, in a state that went to Donald Trump. Most poor families I knew as a kid avoided food stamps; they believed in bootstraps, not getting help. But to say this was only about independence is to claim an innocence I didn’t entirely possess."

"The truth is there was a shameful idea woven into my conceit of self-reliance, something so ingrained in American culture I’d never thought to say it out loud: I didn’t really think I was supposed to get food stamps because I was white."

"Having an implicit belief that poverty didn’t really happen to white people did me more harm than good, and nearly prevented me from seeking help I needed. It also ignored reality. While it’s true that blacks and latinos disproportionately live in poverty, if you analyze who gets food stamps, they are most likely to be white."

The author goes on to highlight "that urban poverty is dominated by people of color while rural poverty is dominated by white people."  But most people in the media who cover poverty are urban and college educated.  This skews their coverage in certain ways that focus the poverty issue as a problem of color and while I know the Democrats don't see it that way, it has an effect on voters.

"Covering poverty as if it is predominantly a black issue is a problem. It’s a problem because it can suggest that black suffering is a natural fact rather than a manufactured problem we should correct. It’s a problem because it fosters resentment against communities of color from economically struggling whites, who have some reason to feel their hardship is played down. And this all creates a political problem: the obliteration of the common ground that being poor can help illuminate across racial lines."

Politics is a bloody complicated process as every voter has a different mix of issues that will drive their voting decision.  It is the politician's and political parties task to discern which mix of issues will gain them sufficient support to govern and implement policies.  I believe this is something that both the Democrats and Republicans have lost sight of and that is why we have a President Trump.  The Electoral College matters and Congress matters.  

As much as I hate to say it because the Electoral College gave us both Bush II and Trump, the founder father's of this country really believed in the power of collective majorities made up of individuals and that is what they empowered in the Electoral College and Congress.

Lots to think about in today's paper.

P.S.  Somewhere in the last few days I read an article on Legislative District Reform.  It basically promoted the idea that a certain number of Legislators be elected on a wider basis than the gerrymandered districts that promote partisanship.  In many states that would force certain politicians to focus on the middle of the political spectrum more than they do now.  The article has a path to create this process, but I don't recall it.  Since what I am really feeling sorry about in all these articles today is the decline in the class of professional politicians who focus on the middle, I think this idea might have merit.

Sunday Musings 1/17/16

It was 20 years ago that I realized my time as an employee of a sell side firm was coming to an end because I had an a**hole of a boss who believed that no one older than him should work for him.  He actually had the nerve to say that to me.  So I started to network around and see what I could find with another firm.  That led to my going over to the buy side where I would last for 5+ years until I caught up in one of those inevitable corporate downsizings.  Which led to a period of unemployment but eventually I found a job in Vermont and became friends with RedStateVT as we shared observations of dysfunctional clients, while not being able to see the dysfunction in our own firm, which ultimately led to both of us being retired too young (for our ideal long term financial health).

I muse on that because we saw a play last night about the stresses globalization and Moore's Law (technology advances at an ever increasing rate) put on a work force and the different ways people react to that and how their humanity may come through.  And the play left me pondering this morning the state of our politics, the anger people feel at things they do not control, and how that can come to manifest itself with varying degrees of humanity toward our fellow man.

As I have said before, there is only so much politicians can do for people whose skill sets get left behind by globalization and technology. Society by virtue of its need to compete much always focus on the young (educate and keep them healthy) and encourage those older workers to achieve the best they can and live an honorable life within their means recognizing that they must bear responsibility for decisions they made earlier that have ramifications later on.  That was the moral of the play last night while it also explored why even these unfortunate souls deserve some support from society if they are working to be deserving of that support.

And it is that latter point that is so underdeveloped in our political discourse.  Neither party is really addressing what can society afford and how should we spend it and how do you make people happy when they have to downsize their economic needs and objectives.  If you can't get a $25 an hour job, you take a $15 an hour job, downsize your lifestyle, and find ways to be joyous.  But at the same time, the minimum wage cannot be so low that hard working people without an education cannot afford the basic necessities of life including health insurance.  That is why the Heritage Foundation, when they had a soul, designed Obamacare the way they did.

In a similar manner we are not having an honest discussion of the real problem with guns because the two sides speak past each other and do not give.  The ease of access for the criminally minded and the mentally deficient is the real problem, not 7 vs 10 bullets in a gun magazine, and as one liberal columnist pointed out this morning, not concealed weapons with a carry permit.  And how do the criminally minded get so many guns, straw man purchases in places where there are no background checks.  And how do the mentally deficient get guns, well that is a huge problem as no one has a sanity problem until they have exhibited the sanity problem and that is frequently after they already have their semi-automatic weapon.  Maybe there should be an age restriction on use of semi-automatic weapons, along with background checks on obtaining them.  It seems to be angry frustrated older teens and early 20's who shoot up movie theaters and commit acts of terrorism.  Technology with thumb print recognition systems would seem to be a place where some effective gun control policy could be created in the middle if the NRA were isolated politically.

In conclusion, once again as I write on a Sunday, I am left feeling very discouraged about our political discourse and see little hope of it improving after November.  The anger on the right is encouraging anger on the left with the result that we will not have Clinton vs. Bush III in November, we may well have Sanders vs. Cruz or Rubi and then one can only hope that Michael Bloomberg decides to run (I think he needs to make that decision very soon).  And without Bloomberg in the middle, calm rational people will have a very hard choice to make and while I would vote for Bernie in that case for the 1st time (having never voted for him while I lived in Vermont),  I am not at all sure Bernie can win Florida, Ohio or Virginia with his European Socialism.

The New York Times some years ago had a game like graphic where you could pick and choose policies to balance the budget over 5 years.  If you value the need for infrastructure, defense, providing some level of humanitarian support for all ages, controlling the percentage of GDP the government takes, you had to control the growth in Social Security and Senior Health Care (Medicaid 's worst growth is in paying for Long Term Care of people with dementia who spend down what they have saved and they have no more) and no politician wants to talk about this.  They are just going to let us spin into a crisis.

While I promised myself I wouldn't go there, the problem is not Heritage Foundation/RomneyCare/ObamaCare. That is trying to keep the cost of health insurance and the health of people under 65 affordable and effective.  The problem is dementia and the use of Medicaid to pay for it.  My mother had dementia for over 20 years and my father paid for her care until he hit the minimum wealth allowed and my mother went on Medicaid.  Her final Medicare bill was $400,000 for care that should have never occurred because of her DNR, but it did.  And I don't know exactly what Medicaid actually paid because I never saw those bills, but at $150 a day for the 10 years of her institutionalization that was another $550,000.  And now those dementia care costs are somewhere between $200 and $500 a day.  So a dementia patient can cost society close to $1 million each and if over time (the favorite government accounting technique) 30 million people end up with dementia (10%) and they end up on Medicaid, that is a potential cost of $3 trillion.

That is not trivial, and I wish our political discourse would allow a coherent holistic discussion of the demands on our budget and a balanced approach to giving ourselves a budget surplus when we have full employment and an affordable deficit when we are in a recession.  Right now we are nearing full employment, have a budget deficit of 2.5% or so, and political Armageddon between liberals and tax cutting conservatives.

Oh, and what happened to that a**hole younger boss who made me leave the sell side, he returned to N.C. ran for Congress as a Conservative GOP and lost.  So now he is on some Board of Directors enjoying the income of being a pal of rich people who appoint him to their Board's.