Can a Main Stream Party Win Millennial Voters?

Millennials seem to be on the fringe of the political action in 2016. A new survey “The Millennial Economy” by Ernst & Young (E&Y) shows that they are also on the fringe economically, and that they distrust many American institutions.

That may explain why they are disaffected with the current Presidential race. A mid-June survey of 1,200 18-34 year olds was conducted online and via cell phone buy E&Y. It has a margin of error of ± 2.83%. E&Y found that coming of age during an historic economic downturn has severely impacted Millennials:

  • 30% of respondents live with their parents, and it’s 40% if they are still single.
  • Nearly one­-third believe their local community is still in a recession.

Millennial stress levels are high:

  • 78% of Millennials are worried about having good-­paying job opportunities.
  • 74% are worried they won’t be able to pay their healthcare bills if they get sick.
  • 79% are worried they will not have enough money to live on when they retire.

Millennials are the most educated generation in US history, but they are not convinced of the cost/benefit of higher education. Instead of education opening doors, many Millennials feel that student debt has boxed them in. The WSJ reported that among college-educated Millennials, 81% had at least one source of long-term debt, while The Atlantic reports that real wages have fallen for Millennials (and only Millennials) in the past five years, even as education costs have skyrocketed.

E&Y surveyed Millennials’ views of the establishment. They find that Millennials have very little confidence in many of our established institutions, but they are patriotic and supportive of a leading role for the US in the world. This chart is from the study:

millennial-view-of-institutions-png

Millennial men have greater confidence in US institutions than women, with 34% of men expressing confidence in the institutions polled compared to only 25% of women. Overall, Millennials:

  • Had the least confidence in the News Media (73%) closely followed by the Federal Government, Governors, and Corporate America (72%).
  • Had the most confidence in the Military (55%), followed by Colleges and Universities (51%) and Professional Sports (32%).

Millennial men remain more optimistic than Millennial women, although the clear majority of both genders think the country is headed in the wrong direction:

  • Men are nearly twice as likely to believe that the country is headed in the right direction (33%) as women (17%).
  • Hispanic men and black women are the most optimistic group within each gender, with 41% of the former and 27% of the latter believing the country is headed in the right direction.

So the $64 question is: How to win the vote of Millennials? E&Y says that economic uncertainty greatly influences Millennials’ political priorities. They found that Millennials are looking to politicians to alleviate their financial insecurity:

  • 64% of Millennials believe public education should be a top priority for federal tax dollars, a consensus that crosses party lines.
  • Social Security and Medicare were their second priority (46%), while National Security was third at 45%.
  • 47% of Millennials identify as independents.

Finally, as a crib sheet for debate prep, E&Y have this checklist for Millennial hot-button issues:

millennial-vote-checklist

Politicians always play to a checklist. Trump mentioned every battle ground state in the last debate, but fell in the polls. And playing generational politics can result in the candidate seeming completely inauthentic. That has been Hillary Clinton’s problem with Millennials. Al Gore tried it with Social Security in 2000 vs. GW Bush, and it did not work.

Polls show Clinton running far behind where she would hope to be with Millennials. She is winning just under half of Millennial votes, while Obama got over 60% in both of his campaigns.

As we have said, Hillary is not Bernie, and doesn’t stand for what Bernie stood for. So while millennials loved him for it, Hillary will not do as well with them.

Wrongo is concerned about how many young people are considering voting for Gary Johnson. Johnson’s libertarian views are far worse for their interests than anything Hillary stands for.

Johnson certainly would never support the government doing anything with student debt. Yet apparently, many young people will be voting for him, with no apparent concern about how it might help elect Donald Trump.

Perhaps Millennials and the rest of us need to have a busload of faith to get by between here and Election Day in order to survive. Here is Lou Reed live on Letterman in 1989 with “Busload of Faith”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNZm89wLaBw

True to Lou, he sang about a busload of faith, minus the bus, and minus the faith.

Those who view the Wrongologist in email can see the video here.

Sample Lyrics:

You can’t depend on your family
you can’t depend on your friends
You can’t depend on a beginning
you can’t depend on an end

You can’t depend on intelligence
ooohhh, you can’t depend on God
You can only depend on one thing
you need a busload of faith to get by

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Who Moved My Cheese?

Some may remember the book by this name by Spencer Johnson, published in 1998. The underlying message of the book is “Don’t waste time fighting against change: accept that bad stuff will happen to you for no good reason and just keep moving”.

This outdated and simplistic message remains the message of the Democratic Party to the White Working Class (WWC). Donald Trump’s message is different. He offers them nothing but a dream, to limit immigrants working in the US and to cut off the US market from China. And since the WWC knows that more of the same isn’t going to work, they’re voting for Trump.

It is useful to remember that since our “Most Favored Nation” trade deal with China in 1979, we have lost 35% of all manufacturing jobs in this country.

The WWC thinks that the Democrats have not been able to do anything to help them keep their jobs. The reasons for failure can be at least equally shared by the Parties, but since Dems have said for years that they are the party of the working class, they are getting the greater share of the blame for 35 years of no results.

There are two issues that dominate the discussion: Illegal immigration and transition assistance when jobs are lost. Regarding Immigration:

  • The WWC knows that Dems need the political support of the Hispanic community, and that requires Dems to show sympathy with illegal immigration.
  • The WWC believes that illegal immigration has put downward pressure on job opportunities and wages in the trades, in restaurant and hotel work, and in service sectors where immigrants may be overly represented.
  • That’s why Trump’s stance on immigration is so popular with the WWC. They probably know in their hearts that kicking all the Mexican workers out, or building a wall is ridiculous. But the Democrat’s position on immigration is diffuse, and is viewed as “soft” on illegals by the WWC.

Despite anything the Dems say about retraining or “transition assistance”, the WWC knows that someone on job transition assistance can’t earn enough to support a family. Other problems:

  • Identifying the fields/industries that workers can train in that will produce stable, living wage employment is an inexact science. So, demand for retrained workers is often less than the supply for any given job type.
  • Businesses have been very successful at shifting the burden (and cost) of training displaced workers from themselves to society. This is helped along by a corporate critique that public and not-for-profit private schools are failing to maintain standards, and they can’t churn out sufficient grads with qualifications that meet the corporations’ highly specific requirements.
  • Hence the continuing financial opportunities for for-profit technical schools and for-profit universities, (can you say Trump University?)

And Ford Motor Co. just gave Trump a big wet kiss:

Ford Motor Co. says it’s moving all of its US small car production to Mexico…The company is building a new $1.6 billion assembly plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It will make small cars there starting in 2018.

What can the Pant Suit say about this that would go beyond what the Pant Load will certainly say? And if she did, would WWC people believe her?

On the macro level, our current capitalism has turned to technology to produce much of what is needed with far less human labor input than ever before. That leaves job growth (and job opportunity) in only the low-skilled, low-paid “service” jobs; or in highly advanced, specialized jobs requiring very advanced training/skills/talent.

This means that the dogma of Endless Economic Growth, which we have accepted since the Industrial Revolution, is dead. Along with killing that, we need to kill off the current organizing principle of our economic system, where humans exist solely to fulfill the needs of businesses.

Work helps us find our place in society. It is something that we see as having an inherent value, something that fills a basic human need, similar to food and shelter. But our current economic system no longer recognizes that, and our economy provides little opportunity for fulfilling that basic need for a large portion of American citizens, including many in the WWC.

The idea of government deploying under-utilized labor to build and repair our infrastructure, or to re-tool our country to reduce carbon emissions would be a step that might return the WWC to jobs and a place in society. It would cost a ton.

But the idea that the government would create demand is too socialist for most politicians to accept, despite the fact that the rest of the tools just haven’t worked in 35+ years.

Tell me again why Bernie Sanders was a terrible choice.

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Congress Returns to Do (Not) Much

From Roll Call:

After the longest summer break in modern times, lawmakers are required to accomplish a single legislative task before leaving again. But it’s a job far more politically fraught than it is procedurally simple: Assuring normal government operations continue through the end of this budgetary year and into the new one.

That’s right, once again, it’s time to fight about funding the government. And as Booman says,

This ridiculous election season would not be complete without the threat of another government shutdown, and how much money would you be willing to risk betting on Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to find a way to pass a continuing resolution that either the majority of their own caucus would support or that relies (again) on mostly Democratic votes?

The potential stalemate over spending is a headache for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) who would like to avoid a shutdown threat just weeks before the election.

The Tea Party and GOP conservatives want to kick the can ahead for six months with a temporary resolution. But Democrats and some Republicans want to finish the annual budget work in the lame duck session after the election.

Both sides are digging in for a fight.

This could become an object lesson on why Republicans shouldn’t be in the majority. The party with the majority in the House is supposed to produce the bills and along with the Senate, supply the votes to pass appropriations. But, John Boehner couldn’t do it, because the Freedom Caucus and the other conservative R’s wouldn’t work as a coalition with other Republicans and/or Democrats to actually pass spending bills.

Ryan was able to do it last time, but it isn’t looking like those Republican factions will roll over again.

If Ryan and McConnell want to buck their own members on the length of the continuing resolution, the Dems are free to refuse to provide any votes. And the Democrats do not have to protect the sitting president, so they can watch as the GOP twists in the wind.

Fun times on Capitol Hill!

Here are a few links to news you may have missed over the holiday:

Experimental new opioid blocks pain without being addictive or deadly in primates. In monkeys, the drug is a highly effective pain reliever without downsides. It needs more trials, including in humans. Meanwhile, the DEA is attempting to ban a natural, safe herb which has been used for thousands of years to do the same thing.

Holy Labor Day: On Friday, an estimated 150 million workers refused to show up for work in India and instead took to the streets to demonstrate against labor conditions. The unions involved issued 12 demands to Prime Minister Modi, including raising the minimum wage, introduction of universal social security, and a minimum pension.

Is an end to the Asian sweatshop in sight? A recent report from the International Labor Organization found that more than two-thirds of Southeast Asia’s 9.2 million textile and footwear jobs are threatened by automation. Here are the numbers: 88% of those jobs in Cambodia, 86% in Vietnam, and 64% in Indonesia. Will this be good for the workers? Doubtful.

13 Tips for reading election polls like a pro. After Labor Day, the polling deluge will begin. A guide to making sense of it all.

Boeing gets $2B in bonuses for flawed missile-defense system. From 2002 through early last year, the Pentagon conducted 11 flight tests of the nation’s homeland missile-defense system. The interceptors failed to destroy their targets in six of the 11 tests — a record that has prompted independent experts to conclude the system can’t be relied on to foil a nuclear strike by North Korea or Iran. Yet the Pentagon paid Boeing, the prime contractor, $1,959,072,946 in performance bonuses for a Job? Well? Done?

Maybe we shouldn’t complain: The US government is spending money. Money = jobs. Of course, money also = corruption. And isn’t it a good deal if Boeing’s shit doesn’t work?

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Know Your Constitution – Monday Wake-Up Edition

Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers refused to stand for the national anthem at 49ers preseason game vs. the Green Bay Packers on Friday.

Like most Americans, Wrongo stands with hand over heart during the playing of the national anthem. But, for most Americans, playing of the national anthem is largely a ritual, and like most rituals, its true meaning has become vague, with many people simply going through the motions.

Until someone like Kaepernick won’t play along with the ritual. He was protesting what he thinks are wrongdoings against African Americans and other minorities in the US by the police:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

Not surprisingly, some of the reaction to Kaepernick’s silent protest was…not so silent. Nor was it particularly reasonable, or rational. You can imagine the “love it or leave it” crowd’s twitter comments, baked with a generous helping of racism.

But, for those that know anything about the US Constitution, he is exercising his right as an American citizen. As such, his actions are by definition patriotic, for they’re a celebration of what it means to be an American. This tweet captured the right spirit:

FireShot Screen Capture #120 - Alphonso on Twitter-page-001

While refusal to participate in the anthem can call one’s patriotism into question, standing for the National Anthem never has been a requirement. Most stand as a sign of respect for the country they love, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

To insist that others respect this custom in the same way you do, is to deny them their constitutional rights.

Sometimes free speech can be objectionable, or even offensive to some. Perhaps it’s time we all reconsider what the National Anthem actually means, and the rights and freedoms it celebrates.

So wake up you faux patriots, you blind Exceptionalists!  To rouse you from your slumbers, here is the Boss with “Born in the USA”:

Some only hear lyrics discussing economic destabilization, political gridlock, and hollow national pride. St. Ronnie Reagan mistakenly tried to make the song’s message into a jingoist anthem, but the Boss would have none of that.

Perhaps the true meaning of the song is as an anti-war song and a patriotic song, with the message: “Remain proud to be an American, despite some of our terrible actions at home and abroad.”

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 14, 2016

Apparently, President Obama makes a playlist every year for his summer fun time on Martha’s Vineyard. Playlists by politicians are common, and usually are big nothingburgers. Obama has a “Day” playlist and a “Night” list. This year, The Atlantic approves of Mr. Obama’s night playlist, and thinks the day list is a snooze. Guess critics gotta criticize.

Make up your own mind: here is the Obama “Night” playlist.

It was a big week in manufactured news. Trump dominates, but Politico speaks about the Trump campaign thusly: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

What’s bothering people on the [Trump] campaign is that they feel like they’re doing all the right things, but they’re losing every news cycle to Hillary and there’s nothing they can do about it.

It’s doubtful that Clinton has won a news cycle since the convention, but what the Trump campaign is trying to say is that Clinton doesn’t need to win a news cycle as long as Trump “misspeaks” every day. From Karoli Kuns at C&L: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

I think that’s precious, don’t you? Considering that Trump dominates the news for every cycle with his intentional demonization of President Barack Obama and [his] opponent, Hillary Clinton, it’s hard to imagine Republicans wringing their tiny little hands over losing news cycles to her.

Ok, the GOP should keep explaining Trump’s gaffes until America is tired of all the winning.

On to cartoons. Simone Biles gave us a feel-good moment:

COW Americas Great Again

This is the one Burka that Trump likes:

COW Tax Returns

With all of the “resets” and “mansplaining”, the GOP could lose its balance:

COW Balance Beam

This is as understandable as any other explanation by Monsieur big mouth:

COW Trump Backs Up

Trump’s new tax policy is same old, same old. It’s a reconstitution of the standard Republican trickle-down economics that benefits big corporations and a wealthy few:

COW Trump Tax Plan

 

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Hillary Should Grab Populism and Run With It

The biggest change in our politics in the past 20 years is the rise of populism on the left and right. The populists believe that we are led by a selfish elite that cannot—or will not—deal with the problems of ordinary working people, and there is ample evidence that they are correct.

Trump and Clinton say they will bring back jobs that corporations have shipped offshore. They make China the scapegoat for lost economic opportunity, while the real causes are automation and the triumph of the spreadsheet in corporate strategy.

Those jobs are never coming back, and a candidate who says they can negotiate with foreign governments to bring jobs back demonstrates either their naiveté about the true cause of job loss, or a simple desire to BS the American public.

Voters can see through that.

Economic and cultural insecurity are the bedrock causes for populists. Unemployment and stagnant wages hurts working-class whites, while cultural issues are a top issue for older white Americans. The first group sees their jobs threatened by automation and globalization. They join with older whites in seeing immigrants as scroungers who work for less, grab benefits and if you believe Trump, commit crimes.

Both groups also believe that American society is being undermined by diversity and foreign-born citizens.

This is the battle line of the 2016 presidential election. The mediocre economy that has been with us for nearly 20 years has caused real harm. We remain a wealthy country, but certain groups now see their opportunity slipping away. Slow growth, or no economic growth, means only a few elites will do well, and most voters see the self-serving political class as siding with the elites.

So can a candidate unify an electorate that now plays a zero-sum political game?

  • The Pant Load has the better position in this game, since he can exploit pre-existing fears that are based in fact.
  • The Pant Suit must carefully calibrate her message, but she cannot be a “maintain the status-quo” candidate and win.

Clinton would do well to consider what William Berkson said in the WaMo:

If there is one national goal that Americans can agree on, it is opportunity for all.

Berkson makes the point that since President Reagan, Republicans have advocated a simple theory of how to grow the economy: The more you reduce government involvement in the economy and the more efficient markets become, the more the economy grows.

Sorry, but the simplistic theory of free market economics has been drowned in a tsunami of fact in the past 35 years. Berkson says:

Both Democratic administrations since Reagan—that of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—have raised taxes, and under them, the economy grew more rapidly than under the tax-cutters Reagan and George W. Bush.

This opens a path for the Pant Suit. In order to win, she must assure voters that she will deliver more and better jobs. Family income must go up. But how to achieve this?

By advocating a policy of economic opportunity through public investment in infrastructure. It fulfills the promise of opportunity for all, a populist message that has proven to work throughout America’s past. And it allows Clinton to hammer the GOP Congress and Paul Ryan about the lack of any track record for laissez-faire policies, since they have never worked, not even once, as a miracle cure for jobs and income inequality. This would be an open return to Keynesian economics. Here is Eduardo Porter in the NYT:

The Keynesian era ended when Thatcher and Reagan rode onto the scene with a version of capitalism based on tax cuts, privatization and deregulation that helped revive their engines of growth but led the workers of the world to the deeply frustrating, increasingly unequal economy of today.

And led to the low growth economy that drives today’s populist anger.

How to fund that infrastructure expense? More revenue. For the last 40 years, Democrats have been unwilling to counter the conservative argument that higher taxes are a redistribution of wealth between classes. Clinton should argue that current tax policy is really a transfer of resources from tomorrow’s generation to today’s. This is a strong populist message.

Younger Millennials understand this clearly. They already believe Social Security will not be there when they need it. She can win them over if she makes a case for new jobs and new revenues.

When conservatives say that it is unfair for people in their highest earning years to pay more taxes on that income, Clinton can point out that this is a past-due bill that they need to pay just as their elders paid higher taxes that supported the current earners when they were starting out. It was that investment in public resources such as public education and infrastructure, and in research, technology and industry that enabled today’s peak earners to get where they are.

While the strategy opens Clinton to criticism from Grover Norquist and the right about fiscal irresponsibility, it pits Trump against the Tea Party and the GOP. He would need to choose between being a populist or a doctrinaire fiscal conservative. Either way, it will bleed votes from some part of his base.

The strategy could work in down ballot races as well, particularly in the Rust Belt. Maybe working class conservatives will hear her, and not vote against their economic interests for once.

We’ll see if she will move from status quo, to “let’s go” as a campaign strategy.

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More Political Lessons From Brexit

There is a neoliberal aspect to Brexit that has many Brits in the 1% quietly (and tentatively) quite happy. Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, writing in the WSJ, said the Brexiteers:

…think the vote for Brexit was about liberty and free trade, and about trying to manage globalization better than the EU has been doing from Brussels.

Neoliberalism at its finest. You could substitute “No Obama” for “Brexit”, and “Washington” for “Brussels”, and think it was the GOP talking.

Mr. Nelson says that a major problem was that the EU’s centralized, command-type structure makes local issues difficult to manage. He says that regulations issued at the European level, rules promulgated by officials whose names Brits didn’t know, people they never elected and cannot remove from office, became law in the UK. More from Mr. Fraser: (emphasis and brackets by the Wrongologist)

Mr. Cameron has been trying to explain this to Angela Merkel…He once regaled the German chancellor with a pre-dinner PowerPoint presentation to explain his whole referendum idea. Public support for keeping Britain within the EU was collapsing, he warned, but a renegotiation of its terms would save Britain’s membership…Mr. Cameron was sent away with a renegotiation barely worthy of the name. It was a fatal mistake [by the EU] not nearly enough to help Mr. Cameron shift the terms of a debate he was already losing.

The EU took a gamble: That the Brits would not vote to leave. A better deal—perhaps aimed at allowing the UK more control over immigration, a top public concern in Britain—might have stopped Brexit. But the absence of a deal sent a clear message: The EU isn’t interested in reform.

The EU apparently needs fixing, but it won’t be the UK who does it. Cameron tried in a lukewarm way to fix Europe a little around the edges, and failed. A final point from Mr. Fraser:

The question is not whether to work with Europe but how to work with Europe. Alliances work best when they are coalitions of the willing. The EU has become a coalition of the unwilling, the place where the finest multilateral ambitions go to die.

Perhaps. It IS clear that not all regulations are created equal, some are inefficient, and some are just stupid. But, a business environment with fewer government regulations is the wet dream of most business owners, while it often harms consumers. It is also true that the Brexit supporters were able to conflate in the minds of voters all the discontent with UK austerity, benefit cuts, poor quality job creation and wage stagnation along with the EU’s hegemony, into a big ball of emotion.

And it worked.

The inside-the-bubble UK neoliberal view is that the EU was the problem, and the British voters solved that. America doesn’t have an analogue. We could leave NAFTA, but that has none of the earth-shaking possibilities. We could fail to pass the TPP. That would be a yuuge anti-neoliberal event.

There is an economic malaise in blue collar UK. Once an industrial powerhouse, it has become service driven, with finance and lawyering representing a significant portion of its economy. Sounds just like America in 2016.

Let’s link all of this up with our domestic political economy:

  • Income inequality has grown in the US since at least the 1980s.
  • Real median income is the same as in 1996.
  • Our Labor Participation Rate (the share of American civilians over the age of 16 who are working or looking for a job) is about where it was in the 1970s.
  • Despite a rosy headline unemployment rate of 4.7% (which counts only people without work seeking full-time employment), the U-6 rate (includes discouraged workers and all marginally attached workers, plus those workers who are part-time purely for economic reasons) is much higher at 9.7%. In human terms, that is 15.3 million souls who need a job.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both see these things. The candidate who convinces voters that s/he will really address them will win.

Trump is correct when he says if there are millions out of work, how can we permit immigration? He wrongly focuses on Mexicans, but he’s right: We need fewer people pursuing the fewer jobs we will have until at least until 2025, when finally, all the Baby Boomers retire.

America is in a class war, but it’s the working class versus the middle class rather than workers versus billionaires, as Bernie talks about. Joe Six-pack doesn’t hate the billionaire class. Therefore, Trump is acceptable.

The Pandering Pant Load sees this, and has moved to exploit their anger.

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How Brexit Informs The Pant Suit’s Strategy

We are told that the Pant Suit is the candidate of the status quo, while the Pant Load is a wild card who will bring about change, possibly change that causes immediate remorse if he is elected. That’s just what the UK is experiencing. After a weekend facing the realities of Brexit, 3.5 million Brits have signed a petition for a do-over vote on “Remain vs. Leave”.

The pundits say Clinton can’t be the candidate of change because she supports President Obama, and the common view is that her first term would be Obama’s third term. But, if Brexit has relevance for the American election, she must avoid appearing to be the candidate of the status quo.

If the Pant Load can make the election about any kind of change vs. more of the same, Clinton will be vulnerable.

She should run against Trump’s fitness to govern, and the fitness of the Republicans in Congress to govern as well. After all, Republican Congressional leaders decided not to govern in January 2009, and so far, they have not paid a political price for their obstructionism. Of course, Mr. Obama tried to run against the do-nothing Congress in 2014, and the result was that the GOP took control of both houses.

Maybe it would be different this time for the Pant Suit.  As Steve Waldman said about this strategy at the WaMo:

But if it could ever work, it’s now.  The most recent Economist/YouGov poll reported a 9% approval for Congress among registered voters. It is literally the most unpopular Congress in the history of polling.  Clinton can make the attack more effectively than Obama, because it won’t sound as much like blame-shifting.

And she could make running against Congress sound like change. She needs to shift some of her focus away from declaring the Pant Load unfit for office. That is, unless he keeps making more mistakes like his inexplicable PR disaster in Scotland.  If he does that, her speeches will write themselves, and he will keep sliding in the polls.

She should run to enact specific things that Congress has blocked – infrastructure spending, ending tax breaks for corporate off-shoring, and universal background checks for gun ownership. But she needs to distance herself from more from Obama on global trade deals. Consider this from the Detroit Free Press:

CNN’s exit poll, which surveyed 1,601 Michigan Democratic voters as they left their precincts Tuesday, showed that 58% of them believed trade with other countries costs jobs, compared to 30% who believe they create them. And among those who believe trade costs jobs, Sanders won by a large margin, 58%-41%.

Michigan is a key state for Clinton, and she needs to build a firewall in a few other states that Obama won in 2012, but where she now has some trouble, if the June 21 Quinnipiac polls for Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are correct. The polls show Clinton with a clear lead in Florida (47%-39%), but locked in ties in Ohio (40%-40%) and Pennsylvania (42%-41%).

She has to keep the Pant Load from winning both Ohio and Pennsylvania, which right now, look to be toss-ups, meaning Trump could win both. Pennsylvania also has a number of swing House districts and an important Senate race, so Clinton must work hard there, even if it were completely in the bag for her. OTOH, PA elected a Democratic governor in the 2014 Republican landslide, and hasn’t gone red in a presidential election since 1988. This, from Booman:

For starters, Obama won in 2012 with 332 Electoral College votes to Mitt Romney’s 206. If we keep everything the same and award Ohio and Pennsylvania to Trump, the result is 294-244.

So, winning Ohio and Pennsylvania would be a start for the Pant Load, but without Florida, it’s hard to get from 244 to the 270 votes needed to win. In fact, without Florida, Trump would have to win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire and Michigan, while losing Iowa in order to garner a 277-261 victory.

It’s a long way to November, and who knows who will win? It’s difficult to believe it will be close, but we lived through two Nixon wins, so electing someone you dislike and distrust is nothing new for America.

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Brexit: Better for the Pant Load or for the Pant Suit?

Around here, Monday means a wake-up tune. We should have Brexit breakup music, but instead of song, we need to watch this video by Mark Blythe, a Scottish political scientist, and a professor of international political economy at Brown University, about the logic behind voting for Brexit:

Blythe makes more sense in 5 minutes about the EU, why Brexit happened, and some implications for the US, than the entire journalistic class has said using millions of words over the past few days. At 4:01, he says, “As I like to say to my hedge fund friends, the Hamptons is not a defensible [military] position.”

Let’s take a quick look at a few conclusions of the Brexit vote:

  • Rust cities and towns largely voted to Leave
  • Wealthy cities favored Remain
  • Rural areas that have not seen much immigration had seen a lot of austerity
  • Older voters wanted to return to the prosperous 1970s-1980s, regardless of whether that is realistic

Demographically, the most striking difference in voting was between young people and older people. A YouGov poll showed:

18-24: 75% voted for Remain
25-49: 56% voted for Remain
50-64: 44% voted for Remain
65+:     39% voted for Remain

So younger voters wanted to keep the option to be citizens of a larger economic unit, where they might find more and better job opportunity, while older voters wanted out of the EU for a variety of fact-based and fear-based reasons. On either side of the Atlantic, it’s a mistake to think that people know all the facts before they decide. From Seth Godin:

There are two common causes of uninformed dissent…The second (quite common in a political situation), is the tribal imperative that people like us do things like this. No need to do the science, or understand the consequences or ask hard questions. Instead, focus on the emotional/cultural elements and think about the facts later.

Our first Brexit lesson is that America has a huge base that is angry, scared, and possibly, more than willing to jump into the abyss. Sober analysts warned Britons that pulling out of the EU would be an economic and security debacle. But, as Matthew d’Ancona of The Guardian observed:

They heard the warnings, listened to experts of every kind tell them that Brexit meant disaster, watched the prime minister as he urged them not to take a terrible risk…And their answer was: Get stuffed.

Our second Brexit lesson is that nativism, anti-immigration fervor, and elite-bashing are potent tools.

There was a definite scent of “Make Britain Great Again” running through the Leave campaign. The Leavers urged Britain to “take control” of its borders. While we point at Mexico, they pointed at Turkey, which they said would flood the UK with immigrants, even though Turkey may never be a member of the EU.

You can call it racism, you can blame it on the “market” or, you can blame it on the economic circumstances created by the political elites steering the ship.

This resonates in the US because foreigners are a source of marginal cheap labor that corporations use to bludgeon our working class. That anger is partly justified. However, it is misdirected, because people only believe what they want to believe, and because it’s easier for working people to blame foreigners than to blame themselves for repeatedly electing an economic elite that just keeps playing them over and over.

Brexit is an important wake-up for the US presidential election. Britain’s uprising against the European Union is the sort of populist victory over establishment politics that could easily happen here. As the NYT said on Sunday:

Mrs. Clinton shares more with the defeated “Remain” campaign than a similar slogan — her “Stronger Together” echoing its [Remain’s] “Stronger In.” Her fundamental argument, much akin to Prime Minister David Cameron’s against British withdrawal from the European Union, is that Americans should value stability and incremental change over the risks entailed in radical change and the possibility of chaos if Donald J. Trump wins the presidency.

Hillary urges potential voters to see the big picture, while promising to manage economic and immigration upheaval, just as Mr. Cameron did. She is also a pragmatist battling against nationalist anger, cautioning that the turmoil after the Brexit vote underscored a need for “calm, steady, experienced leadership in the White House.”

But we are not the UK, and today, the ABC/WaPo poll has Hillary is up by 12 points, although we still have miles to go before 2016’s election night.

We will have future columns covering our neo-liberal policies, their impact on the American people, and their implications for 2016, over the coming days and weeks.

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The Pant Suit vs. the Pant Load – Jobs, Part Infinity

We are in a time when a presidential candidate’s personality counts for more than the candidate’s policies. Candidates obfuscate on most policy issues and the media lets them get away with absolutely outrageous declarations of near-facts or outright half-truths.

One policy we must make them nail down explicitly is their jobs policy.

The key to making America great again is adding more jobs. Wrongo is a pest on this subject, but without more jobs, growth in GDP is harder to achieve. Tax revenues are more difficult to grow. People who are idle get into trouble.

The Pant Suit and the Pant Load know this, so they will talk from here to November about adding manufacturing jobs back to cities that lost them starting in the 1970’s. Those jobs are never coming back, but both of them are working hard to convince you they can do it. Consider this, from Parallel Narratives:

We’re now being told by folks who know better that all we need to do to bring those jobs back, to resurrect a future we can believe in, or make America great again, is to elect the outsider politician who is not beholden to elite interests like banks, CEOs and politicians. Unfortunately, that horse has left the barn, those jobs are gone for good…

A great example of a politician braying the “I can bring jobs back” mantra was in Sunday’s NYT business section’s column, “Preoccupations.” In it, a young couple had the option to work from home, so they moved from Austin, TX, that hot-bed of tech, to South Portland ME, not so techie. They work for two different firms from two home offices. Then, they are invited to attend a funds-raiser for a gubernatorial candidate: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The candidate raising campaign funds was a hard-working lawyer who seemed genuinely well meaning, but no one had told him that his economic platform of protecting manufacturing jobs and Maine’s traditional industries wasn’t going to fly with an audience of health care professionals, programmers, web designers and researchers…We muttered to each other that this guy didn’t have a place in his platform for people like us, many of whom worked for employers in other states. Our checkbooks stayed in our pockets.

If you hear this kind of BS from the Pant Suit or the Pant Load, your checkbook should also remain hidden.

While the low-wage jobs problem has been around for more than 40 years, America’s politicians are still peddling the same solutions. In fact, a new analysis from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released Monday shows that only 88% of men ages 25 to 54 are participating in the US workforce. The CEA reports that the US has the third-lowest labor-force participation rate for “prime-age men” among the world’s developed countries. We have done so well that, on a percentage basis, Greece, Slovenia and Turkey all have more men working than the US does. Greece! The decline is concentrated among less educated. Here is a chart:

Male Labor Force Part by Edu

More than 95% of men used to work in 1964, regardless of their educational attainment. Today, you better have at least a bachelor’s degree if you want to be sure you will get a job.  But it is worse than that. The CEA said:

In recent decades, less-educated Americans have suffered a reduction in their wages relative to other groups. From 1975 until 2014, relative wages for those with a high school degree fell from over 80% of the amount earned by workers with at least a college degree to less than 60%.

Clinton and Trump would have you believe that the problem is bad trade deals with China, the TPP, or immigration. Trump in particular, is saying that the political elites have knowingly caused this all at the expense of the American worker. There is a modicum of truth to that, but it is the American corporation and the American tax code that is closing out US jobs, and hammering the middle class. American corporations now pay about 11% of our total US taxes, down from about 30% of US taxes in 1960, as jobs (and markets) have moved abroad.

What are the Pant Suit and/or the Pant Load going to do in the face of advancing automation now facing us not just in manufacturing, but also in the service and knowledge industries?

It is time to make the candidates talk about this on the campaign trail.

The basic policy choice we have is to put people to work, or to continue to allow the profit motive to dominate. If the profit motive remains supreme, we will continue our relentless drive to reduce labor costs — by eliminating jobs, or by paying workers less for the same work.

To date, our leaders have chosen the latter path, and we have reaped the results. We have become a land of spreadsheets and flags.

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