Category: History

Monday Wake Up Call – November 28, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Thanksgiving Day, Brewster, MA – November 2022 photo by Anne Marie

There was plenty of news over Thanksgiving that Wrongo was itching to talk about, but instead, he decided to take a complete break. Here’s something that’s been on his mind.

Despite all of the self-congratulating by Democrats, the Cook Political Report shows that Republicans received some 3.5 million more votes than Democrats in the midterms. Republicans received 54.13 million votes compared to the Democrats’ 50.79 million votes. Republicans did better in 2022 than they did in the 2018 midterms by 3 million votes, while Democrats got 10.3 million fewer votes than 2018, when they won control of the House by 235–199. Much of this is turnout.

Despite this context, the narrative is that America rejected the far Right by defeating election denier candidates. And most Trumpist candidates were defeated by significant margins. Democrats shouldn’t rest on their laurels or assume “the Trump fever has broken”. It hasn’t. America comes out of the midterms with voters evenly divided between the Parties.

Now, there are only four swing states left: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. These four only account for 43 Electoral Votes. Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster points to the striking “continuity among the elections” since Trump emerged as a national political figure:

“We’ve now gone through 2016, ’18, ‘20 and ‘22 – and all looked pretty much alike….And it has locked in the coalitions.”

So we’re not only evenly divided, but we’re also deeply divided politically.

Looking at the Electoral College, the midterms offered some optimism to Democrats when 2024 comes around. The five states that decided the last presidential race did so by flipping from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. Those five (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) moved more toward the Democrats in 2022.

The Dems won six of the eight Senate and governor races across these states, and Dems could notch a seventh victory if Sen. Raphael Warnock defeats Herschel Walker in a Georgia run-off next month.

But Republicans made Ohio, Iowa, and Florida Redder. Each now appears securely in the GOP’s column for 2024 (and most likely beyond). And the Dem’s perennial hope of turning Texas Blue still looks like it’s another 10 years away after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s double-digit victory against Beto O’Rourke. Republicans again won all of Texas’ statewide offices, continuing a Dem shutout that stretches back to the 1990s.

It appears that the offsetting and hardening partisan strengths of each Party could again give the power to decide the presidency to a few hundred thousand voters, in a very few close counties in a few very balanced states.

CNN’s Ron Brownstein says that a 2024 presidential race with just Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona as true battlegrounds would probably begin with Democrats favored in states holding 260 Electoral College votes (including Washington, DC) and Republicans in states with 235. That means Democrats would need to win just one of Arizona (11 votes), Georgia (16), or Wisconsin (10) to reach an Electoral College majority. But that’s far from a certainty.

This division will make for tons of political stress over the next two years. Each Party understands that our nation’s future is now controlled by the choices of a tiny minority of people living in a few contested political districts: White-collar suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix, working-class Latino neighborhoods in and around Las Vegas, and the mid-sized communities in Wisconsin’s so-called BOW counties (Brown County, Outagamie County and Winnebago County).

No GOP presidential candidate will concede Michigan or Pennsylvania just because of the midterm results. But the magnitude of those 2022 Democratic wins show how difficult it will be for a Republican nominee to take them in 2024 – particularly if the GOP candidate supports further restrictions on abortion.

It’s likely that Democrats will target North Carolina to expand their roster, while Republicans will target Minnesota and New Hampshire. But flipping any state will be difficult, depending upon candidate quality.

This shrinking list of competitive presidential states could increase political tensions for the next two years. Time to wake up America! Think about how your indifference to politics and to voting in our elections has put the country on a knife edge. The threat posed to America by the MAGA extremists remains very real.

It’s going to take tremendous effort in every single election until this dynamic shifts. And that could take a full generation. To help you wake up, watch “People Get Ready”, a Curtis Mayfield tune that foretold the turning tide in the battle for racial equality. It hit the top of the R&B charts after its original 1965 release by The Impressions.

It’s been covered by scores of artists, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and here in 2009 by Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles. Beck’s reaction when Stewart comes on stage is priceless. Stewart served as vocalist for the Jeff Beck Group back in 1969:

Sample Lyrics:

People get ready
There’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesels humming
Don’t need no ticket
You just thank the Lord

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 20, 2022

According to the LA Times, come January, more than 80% of Americans will live in states with governments entirely controlled by one of the two major Parties. That means when all the new legislators and governors are sworn in, 39 states will be controlled by the same Party, a seven-decade high.

That means Americans will have to live with greater differences in their schools, workplaces, and doctors’ offices as they move cross state lines. A citizen’s right to carry a gun, to get an abortion, to join a union and the rate a minimum-wage job pays, will now depend almost entirely on whether their state is Blue or Red.

Can’t let Sunday go by without talking about Jack Smith, appointed special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland to carry forward the Trump Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago investigations.

It does have advantages: It makes it simple for the DOJ to refuse Rep. Jim Jordan’s demands for information about the various Trump investigations. You can’t subpoena a special counsel during an investigation.

Second, It ensures the continuity of any prosecution after 2025, no matter who is elected. That’s important since it’s possible that neither the stolen documents nor the coup attempt investigations may be completed by then. And it isn’t the first time a special counsel was appointed when Congress changed hands. Remember that John Durham became a special counsel in December 2020 as Bill Barr was deciding to leave as Attorney General, and the Congress was about to change hands in January 2021. That shielded Durham from political interference in case Trump lost the election. Durham investigated potential criminal misconduct that might have occurred during the Trump-Russia probe without success. His investigation continues today. On to cartoons.

But what’s political?

Investigations are what the people want:

Will the GOP move on?

Elephant tries to let him down easy:

Who’s next?

McCarthy fills the Speaker’s shoes:

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Saturday Soother – House of Representatives Edition, November 19, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Verbena and sunset, Anza Borrego SP, CA – November 2022 photo by Paulette Donnellon

We start Saturday with a reflection on the outgoing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Many think that she ranks as the best House Speaker in modern times.

Wrongo remembers her for standing up to Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel during the debate over the shape of the ACA. There was much concern about how far the Democrats could go with the bill. Emmanuel wanted to tone it down to meet objections from the GOP and from moderate Dems.

Pelosi met with Obama and his aides and said that she wouldn’t support anything but the full monte. That caused the White House’s effort to find a more moderate way forward to crumble. And America made its biggest single step toward providing health insurance to all Americans.

At the end, It was Pelosi not Obama, who made it happen. It was her ability to deliver her caucus that gave Obama et.al a spine.

Wrongo recently learned that when Nancy Pelosi was a teen and her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was mayor of Baltimore, she maintained his “favors book”. That explains much about her effectiveness when she finally got to Congress at age 47. At the point when she took office, she had five kids. Wrangling them, plus learning to keep a “favors book” was probably ideal preparation for being the first woman House Speaker.

This week, control of the US House has passed to the Republican Party. That means two things: First, that Republicans will now say that compliance with House subpoenas is mandatory, even though they purposefully ignored them for the last two years.

Second, Americans should prepare for investigations of the Biden administration by grandstanding GOP Congresscritters. James Comer (R-KY) held a press conference saying that he will be looking into Hunter Biden, his laptop, and his father. Comer, the incoming Oversight Committee chair, has said an investigation into Hunter Biden and other Biden family members and associates will be a priority. His idea is to try and position the president as having compromised national security.

If that seems to echo the FBI/DOJ investigations into Trump, well, that’s purely a coincidence. Be prepared to see absolutely nothing get done over the next two+ years that might improve the lives of the American people.

Let’s spend a minute on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Last March, the WaPo did a story on a security review it had authorized of the disk drive on the “Hunter Biden laptop”. The WaPo asked security experts Matt Green and Jake Williams to review the drive to see what they could authenticate. From the WaPo:

“In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.”

So people had kept adding content to the “laptop,” making it impossible to say what was on the “laptop” when it was originally provided to the Delaware computer repair shop.

More from the WaPo:

“Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.”

But according to the House Republicans:

You should read the entire story of the laptop in the WaPo. It details the laptop’s convoluted journey from Hunter to the FBI, while several other copies of its hard drive were made. They went to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. The WaPo reviewed one of the Republican copies, but not the one in the hands of the FBI.

What would a jury decide if this laptop was Exhibit A? Would they consider it to be tainted evidence? Seems like there are too many unknowns and too many people who had access to it.

But what will the House GOP grandstanders make out of it? Will laptop-gate be legitimatized by the media? And will many citizens fall for it just like they did with Clinton’s email server? The Right has lots of practice at turning complicated stories into political gold.

Time to move on to our Saturday Soother. Here on the fields of Wrong, nearly all of our yard work was completed before the first snowfall this week. Along with everyone in the northeast, our weather turned cold, and winter jackets are now hanging on the hook by the back door.

To ease into Saturday, start by brewing up a hot steaming mug of Villa Betulia Maragesha ($30/8oz.) from Colorado’s Corvus Coffee. The roaster says it has flavors of peach liqueur and strawberry syrup. Maybe that’s why it’s so expensive.

Now grab a seat near a south-facing window and watch and listen to the Adagio movement of the “Concierto de Aranjuez” by the Spanish composer JoaquĂ­n Rodrigo. Written in 1939, it is Rodrigo’s best-known work. Here it is played by Hauser on cello and Petrit Çeku on guitar at the “HAUSER & Friends” Concert in Croatia in 2018, along with Ivo Lipanovic conducting the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra:

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More Midterm Madness

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Thumpertown Beach, Cape Cod, MA – October 2022 iPhone photo by Wrongo

We’re back from a truly delightful time with family and friends on Cape Cod. The next few days will be hectic because we’re leaving again on Sunday, this time for a week in London.

About the November midterms. It seems clear that the polls are tightening in many races. Some of that is natural and to be expected as the political horse races head down the stretch. Some pundits like Amy Walter, think that this demonstrates that the Dems have reached the ceiling for their support in 2022:

“So, basically, what…I’m hearing from…sources in the campaigns is that Democrats may have maxed out that enthusiasm gap they got over the issue of abortion and that growing beyond that is going to be the challenge.”

Robert Hubbell agrees that recent polls have swung towards the GOP, but questions whether these polls reflect the facts on the ground:

“Never before in American history have we faced the elimination of an existing Constitutional right for 51% of the population. Never before have we faced a party whose platform seeks to end the very democracy they seek to rule…”

More from Hubbell:

“Do polling models account for those unprecedented conditions? I don’t know. Do polling models account for the fact that increases in registration among women are driven by outrage over the ruling Dobbs? I don’t know….Polls are not destiny.”

Polling isn’t an exact science. Much depends on how you frame the questions, and who gets asked the questions. One distinction is whether the poll asks the questions of “registered voters” or “likely voters.” Not all registered voters are likely to vote, but all likely voters are registered voters. In some polls Republicans are doing better among likely voters than they are among registered voters, meaning that in those polls, Republicans may be assumed to be more “enthusiastic” than Dems about getting to the polls.

Pundits think that voters’ view of the economy will decide how they vote. Since the 1990s, both Parties have been locked in a battle over which Party voters trust to handle the economy. Democrats have tended to win elections when they had a clear lead on this question, such as during the 2008 financial crisis or in the 1992 election. Otherwise, they’ve either lost, or the elections were very close.

From The Economist: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“According to a new Gallup poll released on October 3rd, 51% of adults now trust Republicans more with the economy, compared with 41% for the Democrats. Though Republicans held the advantage on Gallup’s question for much of the past decade, the gap between the parties’ ratings is now the widest since 1991.”

Sounds terrible for Dems, no? More from The Economist:

“…such a gap should doom the Democrats in this November’s midterm elections. If the average voter trusts Republicans to make them more prosperous, surely they would not deliver Congress back to the hands of the Democrats? After all, what voter casts a ballot against their own personal prosperity?”

But according to a survey carried out for The Economist by YouGov, there are plenty of voters who prioritize other issues. Each week, YouGov asks 1,500 Americans to pick their most important issue from a list of problems. Over a third currently say that either the state of the economy or inflation are their top concerns, followed by roughly 10% each who say it’s health care, climate change or abortion.

Fewer mention civil rights (7%), national security (6%), or crime, immigration, and government spending (5% each). Less than five out of every 100 Americans say it’s either education, or gun control.

The poll shows that while just 4% of adults said that abortion was their primary issue last October, nearly 9% say so today. Among likely voters having abortion as their primary issue, 75% of them say they will vote for Democrats versus just 21% of Republicans.

That’s a much wider gap than the advantage Republicans enjoy on the economy. The Economist notes that if just 20% of likely voters prioritized the economy above all other issues (rather than the 31% who currently say they do), Democrats would be ahead by 7 percentage points and likely keep the majority in both Houses.

Therefore, the outcome of November’s midterms may depend on whether the Democrats can make gains among those voters who mostly care about the economy. We see that the media and many politicians conflate inflation or the Dow Jones stock average with the economy, but maybe they should be covering that Industrial Production in the US is at an all-time high.

Manufacturing is higher than at any previous level with the exception of the end of 2006 through early 2008. And those elusive manufacturing jobs that went to Asia? We’ve added 1.5 million manufacturing jobs since April 2020, reaching a level not seen since December 2008.

But go ahead and vote Republican because of gas prices:

Voting has already begun in a few states, but we really don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms. It will boil down to turnout. Our destiny is in the hands of those who bother to show up and many people don’t believe that their vote even matters.

Stop worrying. Instead, do something to help get out the vote. If you don’t have the money, donate your time. If you don’t have the time, donate your money.

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Can We Become A Representative Democracy Again?

The Daily Escape:

Toroweap Point, North Rim, Grand Canyon NP, AZ – August 2022 photo by Andrei Stoica

Our democracy is teetering. Minority states representing a fraction of the whole population of the country, have an outsized representation in the Electoral College and in the Senate. This has helped ignite an acute threat to American democracy that’s based in Red State America. The NYT’s David Leonhardt quotes Harvard’s Steven Levitsky:

“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,”

One reason is that the more populous states over the past century have grown much larger than the small states. That means the bigger state residents now hold (relatively) less political power in the Senate and the Electoral College than they did in the 1900s.

This was something that the founders understood and agreed on. At the time, there was an alternative discussion about maintaining proportional representation in the House. In the first US Congress, (1789-1791), James Madison had proposed 12 potential Constitutional amendments. We all know that ten amendments were quickly ratified as the Bill of Rights. Another amendment was ratified in 1992 as the 27th Amendment which prohibits salary increases for House and Senate members to take effect before the next election.

The only one of the 12 amendments passed by Congress that wasn’t ratified is the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (CAA). The CAA was designed to let the number of seats in the House grow to meet future population growth.

A majority of the (then) states ratified the CAA. But by the end of 1791, it was one state short of adoption. No other state has ratified this potential amendment since 1792. Here’s the text of the proposed CAA:

“After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.”

The CAA lays out a mathematical formula for determining the number of seats in the House of Representatives. Initially, it would have required one representative for every 30,000 constituents, with that number eventually climbing to one representative for every 50,000 constituents.

But the amendment wasn’t added to the Constitution. Today, Congress controls the size of the House of Representatives. They had regularly increased the size of the House to account for population growth until 1911, when it fixed the number of voting House members at 435. Today, that’s about 761,000 Americans per House seat. Miles away from 50,000.

Delaware leads in the malapportionment with 990,000 people per representative, about 250,000 more than the average state. Rhode Island has the most democratic apportionment with 548,000 people per representative. Both are small, Blue states.

The small Red state Wyoming has 578k/representative. All of the big states are higher than the average: NY has 777k, and CA has 761k, while Florida has 770k and Texas has 768k.

This also impacts the distribution of Electoral College votes, which equal the apportionment of House seats. As a result, the Electoral College is also becoming less representative. David Leonhardt points out:

“Before 2000, only three candidates won the presidency while losing the popular vote (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison), and each served only a single term.”

But two of the past four presidents (Trump and GW Bush in his first term) have become president despite losing the popular vote. Small states represent a fraction of the whole population of the country yet, absent something like the CAA, have an outsized representation in both the Senate and the Electoral College.

This was on purpose. But when the filibuster was added in the Senate’s rules, it changed everything. The filibuster has been part of the Senate in many forms, but in 1975, the Senate revised its cloture rule so that three-fifths of Senators (60 votes out of 100) could limit debate.

With the Senate roughly equally divided, each Party has about 50 votes it can count on, but it needs 60 to pass most legislation. This means that the small states have more power in the Senate than they had before.

Using the 2010 US Census as an example, the US population was 308.7 million. If the CAA was in effect, the number of representatives in the House would be more than 6,000. That’s surely unwieldy, but is there a number of House seats between 435 and 6000 that would be more representative?

Our form of proportional representation needs an overhaul. Some changes to consider:

  • Better proportional representation in the House (via the CAA?) to help make the Electoral College more representative than currently
  • A version of ranked choice voting for all state-wide races
  • Overturning Citizens United
  • Ending gerrymandering by using independent commissions to establish district lines

Since only a few hundred people currently control the democratic direction of our country, can these ever be addressed?

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Monday Wake Up Call – September 19, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Willard Beach, South Portland, ME – September 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Last week, Wrongo wrote about how if you know a little about politics, your issues are guns, abortion, and taxes. We need to think about adding immigration to that list. Blog reader Craig G. asked, “when is enough, enough?” in response to Wrongo’s column on DeSantis sending immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard.

It’s a great question. We tend to think of immigration as an American/Mexican border problem, but it is much, much worse than that. The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees reported in May 2022, that the world, for the first time in history, had 100 million forcibly displaced people either in camps or on the move.

Of those who were on the move, “conflict and violence” accounted for 14.4 million, and “weather-related events” accounted for 23.7 million. The distinction between these numbers is often hard to understand. The civil war in Syria for example, produced large numbers of refugees. In 2021, more than 6.8 million refugees were from Syria, more than any other country in the world. At the same time, another 6.9 million people were displaced within Syria. The Syrian civil war followed the most profound drought ever recorded in what used to be the Fertile Crescent.

About 100 million migrants is huge, more than the population of Germany, Turkey or, Vietnam. But it could get worse as the impacts of climate change broaden throughout the 3rd world. The International Organization for Migration has predicted that we could see 1.5 billion people forced from their homes by 2050.

These numbers are staggering. Now couple them with America’s declining birth rate. Econofact reports that the US birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. They say the decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. So, what if it continues while the number of people knocking on America’s doors continues to grow?

As Craig G. implies, there could come a time when all Americans will agree to limit immigration. Otherwise, a smaller, aging America will be asking what some on the Right are asking today: Who are the “real” Americans? What do we owe recent immigrants?

The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1 says:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

How will we adjust when the majority of our population are from different cultures, different races and speak different languages? The children of first-generation immigrants generally are well-adapted to the broad American culture; for the most part, they sound and act like Americans. If they were born here they ARE Americans. But the first generation migrant has an understandably difficult time.

This has caused the Right and specifically, the Christian nationalists on the right to be stingy about who they say is a true American, despite when many kids of immigrants are born here in America.The 14th Amendment doesn’t require any ideological, racial or language prerequisite.

Our low birth rates mean we can’t replace our population, so our economic growth will slow. If we replace our population with immigrants, we’ll have economic growth, but our culture will inexorably change.

Our history gives us some pointers. Immigration to the US peaked in the 19th century in the decade 1880-89 when it reached 5,248,568. The first decade of the 20th century saw another record with 8,202,388 people entering the country. In 1910, 75% of the population of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Boston consisted of first and second generation immigrants.

Remember that the US population was 62,979,766 in 1890, an increase of 25.5% percent since the prior census in 1880.  Contrast that with today. Stastia says that 710,000 legal immigrants arrived here in 2021, and that we had 11.39 million illegal immigrants living in the US at year end 2018. We’re five times larger today.

Think about it: In 1890, our foreign-born population was 9.2 million. The total US population was 62.9 million. 5.2/62.9 = 14.6% of our population were immigrants. In 2018, out foreign-born population is 44.8 million. 44.8/320 million in US = 14.0%. Is our problem worse today?

Time to wake up America! A tsunami of immigrants will try to move from the 3rd world to the developed world. The numbers will be staggering, beyond anything experienced so far by Europe or the US. Our ability to cope with so many people in motion in some even modestly humane fashion will determine the character of our country over the next century.

To help you wake up, listen to John Moreland perform “Ugly Faces” from his 2022 album “Birds in the Ceiling”.

Sample Lyric:

You’re seeing ugly faces in your dreams
Let me know what it means
We told ourselves we’d tell it true
But I learned how to lie, watching you
This dirty place don’t want you here
Looks like you’re stuck another year
You close your eyes, a scene rolls by
A strip mall under sunburst sky
My back was to a corner, lonely in a crowd
I couldn’t hear you calling, the bullshit was so loud

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Monday Wake Up Call – September 12, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Harvest Moon, Cape Cod National Seashore, MA – September photo by Tom Baratz

With all of the media’s coverage of the comings and goings of the British monarchy, Wrongo’s certain that you missed the reviews of a new book, “Slouching Towards Utopia” by Brad DeLong, an economist from UC Berkeley. Dylan Matthews in Vox quotes DeLong from the book:

“The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.”

Matthews thinks it’s a bold claim. After all, homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years; DeLong’s “long twentieth century” represents 0.05% of that history.

But DeLong says an incredible thing happened during that sliver of time that had eluded our species for the other 99.95% of our history: Before 1870, technological progress was glacial, but after 1870 it accelerated dramatically. More from Vox:

“DeLong reports that in 1870, an average unskilled male worker living in London could afford 5,000 calories for himself and his family on his daily wages. That was more than the 3,000 calories he could’ve afforded in 1600, a 66% increase….But by 2010, the same worker could afford 2.4 million calories a day, a nearly five hundred fold increase.”

DeLong is speaking of the nations of the rich north, not about all nations. He’s saying that food surplus was the key driver of progress. What’s implied is that the greatest difference between the wealthy and everyone else was that the poor were living on the verge of starvation. Those basic economic facts shifted once having enough to eat ceased being society’s most critical status distinction.

Another interesting statistic from the book:

“…the average number of years of a woman’s life spent either pregnant or breastfeeding…has gone down dramatically, from 20 years of a typical woman’s life in 1870 to four years today.”

Most historians present modern history as a long 19th century (from the French revolution in 1789) to the crisis of 1914. Which is then followed by a shorter 20th century ending with the fall of communism. DeLong, by contrast, argues that the period from 1870 to 2010 is best seen as a coherent whole: the first era, he argues, in which historical developments were overwhelmingly driven by economics.

From the Economist:

“…despite the Industrial Revolution…for millennia, technological improvements never yielded enough new production to outrun population growth. Incomes had stuck close to subsistence levels. Yet from around 1870, growth found a new gear, and incomes in leading economies rose to unprecedented levels, then kept climbing.”

DeLong says that economic policy in this period was a duel between the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, who extolled the power of the free market, and Karl Polanyi, who warned that the market should serve man, not man serving the market.

Before WWI, markets generated rapid growth along with soaring inequality. People pushed back, demanding greater political rights, which they used to pursue regulation of the economy and improved social insurance.

After WWII, a mix of a market economy and a generous safety-net made for a happy marriage of Hayek and Polanyi, improved by Keynes, who said that governments should act to prevent economic recessions. This led to a three-decade post-war period of growth unmatched before or since. DeLong calls them the Thirty Glorious Years; from 1945 to 1975, as the US and Europe recovered from World War II.

But when growth sagged and inflation rose in the 1970s, voters supported politicians promising market-friendly, or “neoliberal”, economic growth reforms, like lower taxes and reduced regulation. But those reforms didn’t keep economic growth high. And they also led to even worse inequality. Still, the US and other rich countries pressed on with them, right up to the 2008 global financial crisis, which marks the end of DeLong’s 20th century.

According to a paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distribution that America experienced in those thirty glorious years stayed constant, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in just the year 2018. That’s an amount equal to nearly 12% of GDP.

Price and Edwards say that the cumulative inequality cost for our 40-year experiment in government-supported income inequality added up to $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. And probably equaled $50 trillion by 2020.

That’s $50 trillion that would have made the vast majority of Americans far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.

So, the big unanswered question is: Can we again return to a period where we see both economic growth and equitable growth? It’s highly doubtful. As DeLong says in Time:

“Our current situation: in the rich countries there is enough by any reasonable standard, and yet we are all unhappy, all earnestly seeking to discover who the enemies are who have somehow stolen our rich birthright and fed us unappetizing lentil stew instead.”

The problem here is that our entire culture, economy and even our civilization is predicated around growth and people haven’t known anything else. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride.

Time to wake up America! We need to reimagine capitalism, our taxation policies and our welfare scheme if we are to survive. Expect a rough adjustment.  To help you wake up, listen, and watch Bruce Springsteen perform “Darlington County” live in London in 2013:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 11, 2022

It’s 21 years since the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As Michael de Adder says:

Twenty one years on, America is more at war with itself than with any foreign terrorists, despite having troops deployed in 80 countries. Our society and our democracy are threatened from within in a way that Osama bin Laden could never have managed. And where are we today? Cartoonist Mike Luckovich has a thought:

If ever so briefly after that fateful day. Today we face threats that might end our democracy:

  • We’ve nearly lost our social cohesion
  • We aren’t dealing with income inequality
  • We’re seeing racism grow
  • We see clear threats to the right to vote, or whether our votes will even count if we cast them

In these 21 years, Republicans have moved from being the Party of national security to the Party of grievance and anger. As Elliot Ackerman wrote last year in Foreign Affairs:

“From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The US today meets both conditions.”

MAGA asks the wrong question:

When you have no policies, this is what you get:

Let’s close today with a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter that she wrote back on the first anniversary of 9/11. Carpenter was inspired by an interview with Jim Horch, an ironworker who was among the early responders at the WTC site. Here’s part of what Horch said:

“My responsibility at the site was to try to remove big pieces of steel. The building fell so hard there wasn’t even concrete. It was dust
.I started to feel the presence of spirits
not very long after I was there. The energy that was there was absolutely incredible and
it was more than just the people that I was working with
it was energy left behind
.One day when I was working, I felt this energy and it felt lost and it wanted to go home but it didn’t know how to go home and it came to me to go to Grand Central Station. When I got off the subway, I walked into the Great Room. Into where the constellation is in the ceiling. And I walked around the perimeter and
out of the building. I didn’t feel the energy anymore. I could feel it leave.”

And here’s Carpenter’s “Grand Central Station”:

 

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Saturday Soother, QE II Edition ̶- September 10, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Wrongo isn’t a monarchist. Despite having lived in the UK in the 1970s, most of what he knows about the British royal family comes from watching “The Crown”. Wrongo remembers watching Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation in his parents’ living room on a 10” black & white Dumont TV, one of the first in our neighborhood. We were all impressed with the pomp and circumstance but truly had little frame of reference for the event.

Royalty hasn’t ever been an American tradition. But here in the most exceptional USA, we maintain a love of nepotism and low taxes, so our American betters are easily able to perpetuate their wealth and power, just like the royals.

As we should have expected, in the hours following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, a tsunami of little known royal factoids emerged. Some of them rank as too much information. Wrongo’s favorite so far is that the Queen hired an Orthodox Jewish mohel to circumcise baby Prince Charles. Apparently, the mohel was Rabbi Jacob Snowman (1871-1959).  [hat tip to blog reader Monty B.]

Looking forward, Wrongo isn’t a fan of the new UK prime minister Liz Truss. But she’s getting more than she bargained for, since the first two months of her prime ministership will be dominated by the Queen’s funeral and the media’s interest in parsing the new King’s every word and deed.

Truss now has the added challenge of being the prime minister who ushers out the second Elizabethan era and begins a new Caroline era (so named after Charles I). She will be doing it in the midst of an economic recession, a major energy crisis, and galloping inflation.

According to a poll taken by YouGov, only 12% of UK respondents think she will make a “good” or a “great” prime minister. And 34% of respondents think she will be worse than Theresa May.

Fortunately for Truss, the nation will be focusing instead on Charles III, the man who has been preparing to be King for all of his life. According to YouGov, Charles has a 42% popularity rating with his subjects, while his son William is more popular at 66%.

For years, many believed that Charles would actually predecease his mother. That led some wag on twitter to come up with the gag headline: “Queen Elizabeth Beats Prince Charles To Death.”

Charles’ wife Camilla is now what’s called the Queen Consort. The title Queen Consort means she’s a non-sovereign queen. It’s the title then-prince Charles agreed Camilla would not receive when Elizabeth II gave them permission to marry. But he eventually received her agreement to it a few years ago.

All along, Wrongo thought that a Queen Consort is where you go to hear: Bohemian Rhapsody, We will rock you, Another one bites the dust, We are the champions, Fat bottomed girls, etc.

But if they have Moet & Chandon in a pretty cabinet? Count me in!

That’s enough royal gazing. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we try to escape from the news and gather ourselves for the week to come. Here on the Fields of Wrong, we had a much-needed heavy rainstorm to help our plants and grass survive the current drought. Unfortunately with the weather, we lost a very large limb from a Bradford Pear tree. Nothing would do but to chainsaw it into manageable pieces and take them into the deep woods to rest.

This morning, let’s remember that Queen Elizabeth II created the UK’s modern national myth of a beloved monarch, helped by her longevity and dedication to service. She died in a remote corner of Scotland, a place she loved.

So, grab a mug of hot Bengal Spice tea and your wireless ear buds. Now take a seat in the sun and listen to “The Banks of Green Willow” by the little-known George Butterworth. It is a fine example of the English pastoral idiom, appropriate for a Queen who loved the English countryside.

Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams were close friends, and you may hear similarities in their music. Butterworth was killed in 1916 in WWI during the Battle of the Somme; he was just 31.

Here it is played by the  Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Grant Llewellyn. It’s the second time we’ve featured this piece. This is music that leads to private thoughts, something we all need right now:

And the pastoral images are nice!

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Saturday Soother – August 27, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Super moon over Lake Champlain, Burlington, VT – August 2022 photo by Adam Silverman Photography

Republicans are outraged this week about Biden’s cancellation of student loan debt! Americans now owe a total of more than $1.6 trillion for higher education. From the WaPo: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The result is one of the most significant changes to American higher education policy in decades — and a new cornerstone of the president’s economic legacy. Biden’s decision will dramatically change the financial circumstances of tens of millions of Americans, fully erasing the student loans of roughly 20 million people.”

Student debt played a minor role in American life through the 1960s when Wrongo accrued his $5k of college debt while attending Georgetown. But it increased during the Reagan administration. It then shot up after the 2007-2009 Great Recession as states made huge cuts to funding for their college systems.

But the argument that “tuition has gone up because public support for higher education has declined” isn’t the only one. While it’s valid for some institutions, it doesn’t explain the “arms race” among colleges and universities to add student amenities and layers of administrative staff over the past 10 years.

Over the last decade, revenue at independent (non-religious) private colleges and universities in the US has increased by 148% on an inflation-adjusted (real) per student basis. At religiously affiliated private colleges and universities revenue has increased by 87% in real per-student terms over the last 10 years.

Meanwhile, at public institutions, revenue has increased by just 23.4% on the same basis. However, this is still 36% greater than per capita GDP growth over the same 10 years.

The headline is that our elite educational institutions have gotten obscenely wealthy. And many of our second tier institutions chased after them, causing education budgets everywhere to explode.

It’s become another example of America’s new gilded age.

Opinions differ about the ethics of loan forgiveness for student debt, and that’s understandable. The general thrust of the Republican railing about the educational loan forgiveness is about how unfair it is when one group of Americans is getting a benefit at the cost of other Americans.

This tweet from former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is on point for most of the GOP:

“Joe Biden wants those who didn’t go to school, didn’t take out loans, or already paid off their loans to pay off $300 billion of other people’s debts…..It’s socialism, it’s un-American, and only makes his record-setting inflation worse.”

But it isn’t socialism when our government bails out one group at the expense of another; it happens all the time. No Republican complained about the Trump tax cuts which were directed at America’s wealthy and its corporations. No Republican complained about the bank bailout in 2008. No Republican objected when Trump gave $16 billion to farmers hurt by the Trump tariffs.

Second, despite what the GOP is saying, the $300 billion in loan forgiveness isn’t inflationary. It’s true that it’s money that student borrowers won’t be paying back. But because of the student debt moratorium, they had already stopped payments in 2020, so there’s no change going forward. They simply won’t have to restart making payments on that $10,000 of debt.

It isn’t clear that there will be much impact to inflation or the Consumer Price Index. Since they weren’t making payments, it’s likely they were already spending those funds that might have gone to loan repayments. So no new spending.

We can have a debate about how much higher education should cost per student. We live in a society that is a whole lot wealthier than it was 40 years ago, but many of our students do not come from those few wealthy families.

The political calculus of Biden’s decision will be seen in November. The WaPo reported that a majority of Americans support limited debt forgiveness. Biden’s pollster, John Anzalone said:

“This is a motivator for young people….It’s a huge issue for young people — the support levels for them are in the high 60s.”

Let’s hope they turn out to vote on November 8.

Now, it’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we decompress from another week of body blows to America and find a few moments to gather ourselves for the week to come.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, we had a day of very satisfying brush clearing although we’re still waiting for rain.

Go get a big mug of decaf cold brew coffee and grab a chair in the shade. Now listen to Schubert’s “Impromptu in G flat Op. 90 No. 3”, written in 1827, and played here in 2012 by Olga Jegunova at the Bishopsgate Institute in London:

Schubert really understood how to capture emotion in his music.

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