Category: Inequality

The Economic Value Of College Is Collapsing

The Daily Escape:

Thor’s Hammer, Queen’s Garden Trail, Zion NP, UT – September 2023 photo by Michelle Strong

We all believe that college graduates make, on average, a lot more money than high school graduates. Economists call the gap that exists between the incomes of college graduates and high school graduates the college wage premium.

But, Paul Campos points out that in recent decades the growth in the college wage premium has been largely caused by declining wages for high school graduates, because wages for college graduates have been almost completely stagnant. For example, here is the Congressional Research Service’s (CRS) median hourly wage in 1979 and 2019, (40 years apart) for someone with a Bachelors degree (in 2019 dollars):

1979: $26.42

2019: $28.85

But it’s worse than that: Over the last 20 years of that 40 year period, the median hourly compensation of people with four-year college degrees increased by a total of $0.31, or 31 cents, just over a penny per year.

From Campos:

“The flip side of all this is that wages have declined for people who have gone to college but either not gotten a degree, or not gotten more than a two-year associate’s degree, falling from $22.86 in 1979 to $20.00 in 2019. And the decline has been even sharper for those with high school diplomas or less — thus driving up the “degree premium” for several decades’ worth of college graduates whose own compensation has not actually gone up, even as the cost of their degrees has gone through the roof.”

Here’s a chart from the CRS:

For both high school and no high school diploma categories, wages have fallen in absolute terms. So as college costs have risen, the college wage premium has stayed about the same because wages for the less educated have fallen dramatically.

As the NYT explains, the college wage premium has one important limitation:

“…It can tell you how much college graduates earn, but it doesn’t take into account how much they owe — or how much they spent on college in the first place.”

The NYT explains how a group of economists devised another way to look at the relative value of a college education: The college wealth premium. The wealth premium is the measure of how much more wealth college graduates can expect to accumulate as opposed to those with no more than a high school degree: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Then the researchers looked at the wealth premium, and a different picture emerged. Older white college graduates, those born before 1980, were, as you might expect, a lot wealthier than their white peers who had only a high school degree. On average, they had accumulated two or three times as much wealth as high school grads of the same race and generation. But younger white college graduates — those born in the 1980s — had only a bit more wealth than white high school graduates born in the same decade, and that small advantage was projected to remain small throughout their lives.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“When the researchers looked at young Americans who had gone on to get a postgraduate degree, the situation was even more dire. ‘Among families whose head is of any race or ethnicity born in the 1980s and holding a postgraduate degree, the wealth premium is … indistinguishable from zero,’ the authors concluded. ‘Our results suggest that college and postgraduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment.’”

This means that Millennials with college degrees are earning a good bit more than those without, but they aren’t accumulating any more wealth. We all know why:

“The likely culprit…was cost: the rising expense of college and the student debt that often goes along with it. Carrying debt obviously diminishes your net worth through simple subtraction, but it can also prevent you from taking important wealth-generating steps as a young adult, like buying a house or starting a small business.”

Since 1992, the sticker price has almost doubled for four-year private colleges and more than doubled for four-year public colleges, even after adjusting for inflation. Over the last 15 years, more young Americans have borrowed to cover those rising costs. From the NYT:

“In 2007, total student debt stood at $500 billion. Today it is $1.6 trillion….Among student borrowers who opened their loans between 2010 and 2019, more than half now owe more than what they originally borrowed.”

When you factor debt into the equation, the financial benefit of a college education begins to look very different. The NYT reports on Douglas Webber of the Federal Reserve, who found that the premium now varies much more than it used to:

“The “downside risk” to enrolling in college, he argues, has become “nontrivial.”

When you look at Webber’s data, higher education is a financial gamble that can still sometimes produce a big windfall, but it can also bring financial disaster:

“If your tuition is free and you can be absolutely certain that you’re going to graduate within six years, then you enter college with a 96% chance that your gamble is going to pay off, meaning that your lifetime earnings will be greater than those of a typical high school graduate.”

But going to college isn’t free. If you’re paying $25,000 a year in tuition and expenses, Webber calculates that your chance of coming out ahead drops to about 66%. At $50,000 a year in college costs, your odds are no better than a coin flip: Maybe you’ll wind up with more than the typical high school grad, but you’re just as likely to wind up with less.

Americans can count, so they are aware that college education has become a financial gamble. They understand that going into high five-figures of debt (that doesn’t go away in bankruptcy) in order to earn a 5-figure salary doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In 2009, 70% of that year’s high school graduates went to college. In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million US undergraduates. It’s been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021. The percentage going straight to college is now 62%.

This tracks polling. In 2019, the percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41% from 74%. About one-third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among Gen Z, 45% say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

But, education is an essential pillar of our democracy. The rejection of higher education by so many should be extremely concerning for the future of our nation. You should read the NYT article. Here are Wrongo’s conclusions:

  • Colleges and universities are pricing themselves out of the market. Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered.
  • Turning higher education into a revenue-maximizing enterprise for the benefit of these institutions is a social disaster.
  • Higher education’s leadership has zero accountability for their role in making a college education so expensive.
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Two Writers Who Speak To What America Needs

The Daily Escape:

Wukoki, Wupatli National Monument, AZ – September 2023 photo by David Erickson

September is underway, and we’re about to have a negotiation about government spending. But that doesn’t mean that the news this month will be any less stupid than last month’s. Also, as the Republican presidential candidates demonstrate every day, we don’t actually know whether the GOP is a dying Party or, the rising single Party of an authoritarian state.

Unless and until the traditional press presents these as the stakes, it is very unclear which it’ll end up being. With this as an introduction, Wrongo wants to introduce two writers who are attempting to break through our chain of bad policies and the bad ideology that threatens our democracy.

First, from Wesley Lowery in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“We find ourselves in a perilous moment. Democracy is under withering assault. Technological advances have empowered propagandists to profit through discontent and disinformation. A coordinated, fifty-year campaign waged by one of our major political parties to denigrate the media and call objective reality into question has reached its logical conclusion: we occupy a nation in which a sizable portion of the public cannot reliably tell fact from fiction. The rise of a powerful nativist movement has provided a test not only of American multiracial democracy, but also of the institutions sworn to protect it.”

Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. He goes on to say:

“In 2020, I argued that the press had often failed this test by engaging in performative neutrality, paint-by-the-numbers balance, and thoughtless deference to government officials. Too many news organizations were as concerned with projecting impartiality as they were with actually achieving it, prioritizing the perception of their virtue in the minds of a hopelessly polarized audience…”

Lowery also says that news organizations often rely on euphemisms instead of clarity in clear cases of racism (“racially charged,” “racially tinged”) and acts of government violence (“officer-involved shooting”). He says that these editorial decisions are not only journalistic failings, but also moral ones:

“…when the weight of the evidence is clear, it is wrong to conceal the truth. Justified as “objectivity,” they are in fact its distortion.”

Lowery concludes by saying:

“It’s time to set aside silly word games and to rise to the urgent test presented by this moment.”

Second, Bob Lord is a tax attorney and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He also serves a senior advisor on tax policy for Patriotic Millionaires. At Inequality.org, he proposes a graduated wealth tax on the rich:

“The United States is experiencing a level of wealth inequality not seen since the original Gilded Age. This yawning gap between rich and poor has unfolded right out in the open, in full public view and with the support of both political parties.

A malignant class of modern robber barons has amassed unthinkably large fortunes. These wealthy have catastrophically impacted our politics. They have weaponized their wealth to co-opt, corrupt, and choke off representative democracy. They have purchased members of Congress and justices of the Supreme Court. They have manipulated their newfound political power to amass ever-larger fortunes.”

More from Lord:

“In well-functioning democracies, tax systems serve as a firewall against undue wealth accumulation. By that yardstick, our contemporary US tax system has failed spectacularly….Our nation’s current tax practices allow and even encourage obscene fortunes to metastasize while saddling working people with all the costs of that metastasizing.”

Lord along with the Patriotic Millionaires propose new legislation, called the Oligarch Act (Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms). It is being brought forward by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Summer Lee (D-PA). The Lees have developed a graduated wealth tax tied directly to the highest wealth in America. The Oligarch Act propose a set of tax rates that escalate as a taxpayer’s wealth escalates:

  • A 2% annual tax on wealth between 1,000 and 10,000 times the median household wealth.
  • A 4% tax on wealth between 10,000 and 100,000 times the median household wealth.
  • A 6% tax on wealth between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times the median household wealth.
  • An 8% tax on wealth exceeding 1,000,000 times the median household wealth.

Per the US Census Bureau, the median household wealth in 2021 was $166,900. So the first tier 2% wealth tax would kick in at $166,900,000, and so on.

This would affect only very high levels of household wealth. To put that in perspective, according to the Federal Reserve, the wealth level that puts you into the top 0.1% of households in 2019 Q3 was $38,233,372. So if enacted, this Act would touch a really small number of outrageously wealthy households. Also, their taxable amount would be peanuts by their own standards.

The legislation would also require at least a 30% IRS audit rate on households affected by the new wealth tax. One recent estimate indicated that the richest Americans dodge taxes on more than 20% of their earnings, costing the federal government around $175 billion in revenue each year.

The immediate argument is that this tax will never pass as long as the filibuster is intact. And here’s how the work of both authors comes together. We see the “it will never pass” objection from journalists and pundits who try to appear savvy in the ways of DC. On any cable news show, someone is sure to jump up to say it.

The paradox is that if you look at the Congressional Record and flip to the special orders section and extensions of remarks, you’ll notice they’re filled with speeches and statements on behalf of recently introduced bills which the sponsors know will never pass as written. So why do they do it?

Because the point of introducing a bill is not just to pass it in the current session of Congress. It never has been. There is a tradition going back to the earliest days of Congress of introducing bills to make arguments and advance debate. Many famous members of Congress (think Ted Kennedy, Thaddeus Stevens, John Quincy Adams) sponsored or backed multiple bills they knew were not going to become laws.

They did it because they knew that debates over bills that will become laws don’t occur in a vacuum. They happen in the greater context of the debate in Congress over issues which are influenced by every other bill under consideration. And of course, you’ve gotta start somewhere.

Jumping to the conclusion “it will never pass” isn’t being savvy, it’s a sign you’ve missed the point. And it’s a sign of the vapidity of so many journalists and pundits that it’s the first thing out if their mouths. It’s never a good idea to take cues from the stuffed shirts on Fox, CNN and Meet The Press.

This graduated wealth tax is a good start and sets a precedent: There is an amount of wealth that is ruinous to democracy. Taxing it is a necessary condition for preserving democratic governance.

It is true that Congress, as it is presently constructed, will not pass this, or other badly needed legislation. A genuine revolution in thinking will be required. Both Wesley Lowery and Bob Love point us toward fresh thinking about how we start dealing with what we consider to be intractable problems.

Wrongo still has hope for the younger generations who are suffering the consequences of all this government sanctioned selfishness.

Change is coming.

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Monday Wake Up Call- April 17, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Woodenshoe Tulip Festival with Mt. Hood in background, WA – April 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

If you drink beer, you know that Bud Lite is terrible. Wrongo shares this opinion with the GOP, but for different reasons.

Wrongo hates the taste. Conservatives hate Bud Light because of a recent Bud Light promotion featuring influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman. Mulvaney posted a sponsored video on her Instagram account announcing that Bud Light had sent her a customized beer can with her face on it.

Bud sent the can to Mulvaney in celebration of the first anniversary of her transition.

Some on the Right are calling the brew a “Woke Mind Virus”. But shouldn’t the real focus be on the MAGA Mind Virus? The Right has created a kind of Bud-lash fever: Some have machine gunned or crushed cases of the beer with heavy equipment. Then a person or persons moved on to making bomb treats at a Bud plant in Van Nuys, CA. Several Budweiser facilities across the nation have also been targeted with bomb threats.

Many on the Right call for a boycott of the bestselling beer in the country. If that sounds ludicrous, it’s because it is. It’s also indicative of where we are in America today.

Trans issues are front and center in the GOP-inspired culture war. Anti-trans sentiment is on display by many on the right, targeting children’s health, sports, drag shows, and health care. It’s seen throughout Conservative media. Anti-trans legislation is growing. And it’s even entering the mainstream. From Vox:

“Mainstream publications like the NY Times increasingly follow the lead of anti-trans agitators, treating what should be understood as a fundamental human rights battle more like a semantic “debate,” fixating on terminology and labels and medical minutiae, instead of humanizing trans and nonbinary people and their experiences.”

Vox reports that this has created a contentious situation at the Times. In February, contributors and members of the Times’s staff posted an open letter protesting the paper’s escalating bias toward anti-trans talking points.

But the Bud-lash fever may be breaking. The Daily Beast reported that on Saturday, the Twitter account for the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) removed a fundraising post that trashed Bud Lite. Apparently, they realized that Anheuser-Busch isn’t some progressive company. In 2022, they gave the NRCC $464,505. The NRCC has decided that they like political donations more than they hate trans people.

Bud’s partnership with Mulvaney also triggered a nearly $5 billion drop in the Anheuser-Busch stock value as of last Wednesday.

On Friday, Anheuser-Busch released a tepid statement from its CEO, Brendan Whitworth, saying he is “responsible for ensuring every consumer feels proud of the beer we brew”:

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

The company cancelled an event in Missouri last week, citing safety concerns for its employees. Wrongo is against banning TikTok. Here’s a TikTok video of Bud Lite cans being crushed by a steam roller. Where else would we see news like this?

Boycotts are a tradition in America, so like all the others, this one will fade away. The difference with this one is how wound up Conservatives get about something as trivial as a one minute video that pitches Bud Lite.

Time to wake up America! These clowns will try to take you down in a hail of gun fire, saying it’s for God and Freedom, (loosely defined). They just can’t abide sharing the country (or political power) with people who aren’t just like them.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to “All I Ask of You” from the musical “Phantom of the Opera” which had its last Broadway performance yesterday. It opened on Broadway in January of 1988. Since then, Phantom has played almost 14,000 performances (the most in history) to more than 20 million people, grossing over $1.3 billion. An estimated 6,500 people have been employed by the production – including over 400 actors.

Here the song is performed by Michael Ball and Sarah Brightman (the original Christine) at London’s Royal Albert Hall Celebration for Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the play:

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Saturday Soother – March 11, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend NP, TX – March 2023 photo by Rick A. Ludwig. Cliff on left is in Mexico, the one on the right is in US. The Rio Grande is in the middle.

Signs that we’re starting to think about the 2024 election are everywhere. Wrongo wants to connect a few dots regarding Biden’s recent efforts to move the Democratic Party more to the middle on crime and immigration while staying left on financing the country’s social and military needs.

Biden proposed a budget to reduce the deficit, protect Medicare and Social Security, and raise taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. From the NYT:

“In a speech in Philadelphia on Thursday, Mr. Biden said that his budget was designed to ‘lift the burden on hard working Americans’ and drew sharp contrasts with the proposals that Republicans have offered, which the president argued would threaten the nation’s social safety net programs and benefit the rich.”

This contrasts with Biden’s right-leaning position on the recent DC crime bill. Since DC is controlled by the Congress, it’s legislation can be vetoed by the US Senate. Also from the NYT:

“The Senate…voted overwhelmingly to block a new District of Columbia criminal code that reduces mandatory minimum sentences for some violent offenses, with Democrats bowing to Republican pressure to take a hard line on crime in a move that underscored the rising political potency of the issue ahead of the 2024 elections.”

By an 81-to-14 vote, with 31 Democrats voting with the Republicans, the Senate passed the Republican-written measure to undo the District’s law. It now goes to Biden, who after initially opposing it abruptly changed course and said he would sign it.

So, Biden’s tacking left on spending but to the center-right on crime. He’s making a series of calculated moves to position his Party to compete successfully in 2024. Still, it’s disappointing that Biden and 31 Democrats joined with the Right to deny DC residents the right to govern their own city.

But this shouldn’t be surprising. Last year, Biden and the Democrats turned their backs on labor during their contract battle with the railroads.

Here’s Nick Catoggio in the Dispatch: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“[Biden has]…begun to tiptoe toward the center lately on another major Democratic liability, immigration…..Centrist analysts…have warned Biden and his Party that their political viability depends on escaping the…“cultural bubble” in which an unsecured border is treated as a civic good.”

And last week Biden changed his immigration policy. He’s requiring asylum seekers to seek refuge in nations they pass through rather than waiting to do so in the US.

These new policies bring Biden closer to public opinion. Among Democrats, a plurality want to see the number of asylum applicants increased rather than reduced. Among the overall public, it’s the opposite. Biden is tilting toward the latter.

Biden wants to be seen as strong on crime. Democrats walk a fine line of being against crime but not wanting to wholly support the police. Doing that would risk looking anti-Black in cities that are so important to their political success. Dems support compassionate justice and not retributive justice, so they get tied up in knots when violent crime increases, which is rising in America. The problem of course is that the descriptor “violent” isn’t consistently applied.

Biden’s idea is to try to win more votes from people who are not fanatic MAGA types. That means picking off White suburban voters, Asian voters and Hispanic and Black voters, all of whom are concerned about crime.

Tom Sullivan points out that while the moderate-to-conservative White population is in slow decline, their votes remain significant, and that Democrats shouldn’t ignore them over the next two years:

“Sadly, Democrats often do. Campaigning in concentrated urban areas that tend to vote your way is simply easier and more cost-effective. What it means for largely rural states like North Carolina is that while it remains possible to elect a Democrat like Roy Cooper as governor, Democrats’ urban focus bequeaths him a Republican-dominated legislature…”

Sullivan says the Democrats need to start acting like the big-tent party that they used to be.

And that’s what Biden is attempting to do.

Time to say “enough” to war-gaming the 2024 election. It’s time for our Saturday Soother. The daffodils have sprung through the snow, a sure sign of spring. We turn back the clocks tomorrow night, another win for those who hate dark days.

So, it’s time to take a few minutes to center yourself. Start by sitting in a comfy chair and watch and listen to Lili Boulanger’s “D’un matin de Printemps” (On a spring morning). She wrote this piece in 1917 when she was 23. Boulanger battled bronchial pneumonia throughout her short life, dying a year later at age 24. Here, it is played by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Cristian Măcelaru.

Listen and think about her writing this during the darkest days of her life:

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Monday Wake Up Call – February 20, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Oatman, AZ on Route 66 – February 2023 photo by Laurel Anne Lindsay

Some of you may have heard about a study called “The Hidden Tribes of America” by the group More in Common. It’s trying to understand the forces driving political polarization in America today. They classify the American electorate into seven distinct groups, they call “Tribes”.

But their key conclusion is that most people don’t belong on the far left or far right: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…the largest group that we uncovered in our research has so far been largely overlooked. It is a group of Americans we call the Exhausted Majority…representing a two-thirds majority of Americans, who aren’t part of the Wings….most members of the Exhausted Majority aren’t [simply] political centrists or moderates. On specific issues, their views range across the spectrum.”

More:

“But while they hold a variety of views, the members of the Exhausted Majority are also united in important ways: They are fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and society….. [they] are so frustrated with the bitter polarization of our politics that many have checked out completely….. they aren’t ideologues who dismiss as evil or ignorant the people who don’t share their exact political views. They want to talk and to find a path forward.

This chart from the study graphically illustrates the seven tribal groups of the American populace. As you can see, there is a left-wing group that is about 8% of the US population. And there are two right-wing groups that equal about 25% of Americans. That leaves four groups in what the authors call the “Exhausted Majority”. They are 67% of the American populace.

Here are some demographic characteristics of the seven groups:

  • Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.
  • Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.
  • Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.
  • Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic,
  • Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.
  • Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.
  • Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising,

Wrongo identifies as one of the Traditional Liberals, their description rings true.

The authors say that in their research, this tribal membership predicted differences in Americans’ views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan groupings. You can read or download the whole study here.

An “Exhausted Majority” may be a positive political development. Wrongo spends nearly every day thinking that there are just two opposing camps. And that they each view each other with fear and loathing, refusing to listen to anything that doesn’t fit their existing narrative. As we’re entering the next presidential campaign, it’s good to know that Wrongo’s view of our polarization might be well, wrong.

Is the “Exhausted Majority” merely a new response to our dysfunctional politics? Wrongo isn’t alone in thinking that what’s wrong with our country will take decades to overcome. Faced with that, people start to look for quick fixes, or a way to stop listening to the wrangling. And you don’t have to be unaligned with either Party to share this sense of exasperation.

The people described in the “Exhausted Majority” are similar. It’s also true that for most people, politics isn’t the be-all-end-all of their lives. They’d prefer that the business of government didn’t require their involvement. They’re trying to get their kids educated, and to keep them safe. They prefer to see political compromise happen without needing to be involved.

But if you can walk away from politics when it frustrates you, then you’re in the lucky minority:

  • There are large numbers of parents who have discovered that their child is addicted to opioids.
  • There are many people who had lost their health insurance when they were laid off.
  • Many sent their daughter to college in the South only to learn that she no longer has any reproductive rights.
  • Many are worried that books are being taken from public school libraries.
  • Some fear that they may lose the right to vote.

These people can’t simply throw up their hands and walk away. Only political action will help them. We all know that the political radicals are irredeemable. We also know they make the most noise, but they’re a minority.

The fed-up people on both sides and in the middle have to find a way to take the country back from the radicals, instead of allowing ourselves to be herded into existing opposing camps.

Time to wake up America! We can’t simply drop out. There’s too much at stake. Democrats need to find candidates and a message that can motivate an additional 5%-15% of the “Exhausted Majority” to vote with them. To help you wake up, watch, and listen to the RedMolly band play a very nice cover of Richard Thompson’s “Vincent Black Lightning 1952”. It’s a surprise how beautifully it adapts to a bluegrass idiom, and the dobro work makes it:

“Vincent Black Lightning” is one of the most perfect songs ever written. We saw Thompson perform it live at Tanglewood last summer.

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Monday Wake Up Call – February 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sea smoke, South Portland, ME looking towards Portland Head light – February 2023 photo by Benjamin Williamson Photography

On Saturday, Wrongo and Ms. Right went to a dinner party with friends and two generations of family. The after dinner talk turned to how quite a few of the kids and grandkids weren’t planning on having children.

We tossed around ideas about why they were unlikely to procreate, and somethings stood out. First, they see climate change as an existential threat that society is unwilling to solve, even though the technology already exists. Why bring a kid into that?

Second, society seems broken. Our group meant that we face simultaneous crises, layered on top of each other.  This situation involving simultaneous global challenges, for which we have few solutions, is called Polycrisis.

And a crisis in one global system can spill over into other global systems. They interact with each another so that each new crisis worsens the overall harm. The Polycrisis environment weakens every individual’s sense of security and their place in the world.

One impact that seems related to the simultaneous climate, health, economic and geopolitical challenges are the effects on children. The needs for special education and special services for the very young has never been greater in America. It’s forcing big changes in public school budgets across the country.

No one is really sure why this is happening.

Wrongo isn’t proposing a solution, just suggesting we need to think more about how the problems of declining birth rates, coupled with the growing issues our young children are facing, might be interrelated.

Noah Smith an economist, has an interesting newsletter about how we define community:

“In the past, our communities were primarily horizontal — they were simply the people we lived close to….Increasingly, though, new technology has enabled us to construct communities that I’ve decided to call vertical — groups of people united by identities, interests, and values rather than by physical proximity.”

Smith says that in the past few decades, Americans became disengaged from their local communities, hunkering down in their houses, and failing to interact with the people around them. That led to a well-documented decline in Americans’ participation in civic organizations, local clubs, etc. Our neighbors can also be stifling and/or repressive because they impose uncomfortable community norms on us.

We’ve always had Smith’s vertical communities: “the Jewish community”, “the LGBT community”, and many others. But in the past, an identity grouping wasn’t a true community. We all have identities that connect us with faraway people — other Irishmen, other Taylor Swift fans.

Prior to the internet, we couldn’t have much contact with them. These loose vertical communities weren’t efficient ways to exchange ideas. Before email, text and streaming video, getting the word out was very slow, and our horizontal communities would decide whether what we wanted to share was worthwhile.

Now, we’re no longer isolated. The internet brought us a world of human interaction: social media feeds, chat apps, and so on. Suddenly we’re surrounded by people through their words, their pictures, and their videos.

Now we organize much of our human interaction around virtual vertical communities. Former occasional connections became Facebook groups, subreddits and personal networks on Twitter. And like our small towns back in the day, vertical communities use social ostracism to punish those who deviate from consensus norms.

But vertical communities can’t provide things like public education, national defense, courts of law, property rights, product standards, and infrastructure that we all depend on.

These require a government to administer them. And governments are organized horizontally; mostly defined by lines on maps. But what if we socialize, cooperate, and fall in love with the people from our vertical community? What if we grow apart from the people next door and the relationship is irreparable?

We see this every day in America when citizens go to a PTA meeting and discover a bunch of strangers saying things that they despise.

Wrongo isn’t saying that vertical communities are another enemy. But they can and do exacerbate the polycrisis by making truth harder to see. And by making effective action more difficult.

If you doubt this, remember how powerful the anti-vaxx vertical was at the height of the Covid pandemic. Today’s vertical communities are strong enough to keep our government from getting much of anything done. How can we work together with neighbors when we share few common bonds?

America today is a predatory society. We predate on politics, ideas, values, and culture. Biden’s trying to change this, but can he succeed? How many of us are trying to help? Changing a society that’s this broken, one that’s moving deeper into vertical communities will be a very heavy lift.

Time to wake up America! What can we do to maintain what Lincoln in his first inaugural address said:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

To help you wake up, listen and watch the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 2022 cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” with Larkin Poe (Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell) on vocals and a fabulous slide guitar solo:

Sample of Lyrics:

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Just crying out that he was framed

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Monday Wake Up Call, MLK Jr Day – January 16, 2023

The Daily Escape:

It’s MLK day, so let’s talk about a topic that was near to his heart: economic inequality. Since 1980, economic inequality has been increasing between the top 1% and the bottom 90% of Americans. It’s become so great that today, America now faces the same level of economic inequality that existed before the Great Depression.

Here’s a chart from Elise Gould and Jori Sandra of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) showing the percentage change in annual wages by income group for the last 40 years:

From the EPI article: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The level of earnings inequality that existed in 1979 could have simply continued…to today. Instead, we have seen a growing concentration of earnings at the…very top of the earnings distribution, while the bottom 90% has experienced meager gains. Wages for the top 1% grew more than seven times fast as wages for the bottom 90% between 1979 and 2021. The top 1% now amasses a record share of total earnings, while the bottom 90% share of earnings has hit a historic low.”

Slow growth in real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages for the vast majority of workers has been a defining feature of the US labor market for most of the last 40 years. Only for about 10 years after 1979 did workers see consistent positive wage growth: in the tight labor market of the late 1990s and in the five years prior to the pre-pandemic labor market peak in 2019.

While some low-wage workers have experienced high wage gains after America reopened from Covid, the truth is that most haven’t even kept pace with where they were in 1979.

Today is Martin Luther King Day in America. We mostly celebrate Dr. King’s birth rather than acknowledging what he was arguing for when he was killed. His focus at the end was on both economic justice, and voting rights. Perhaps more than any other leader in American history, King could see the different strands of political and social injustice. He was able to tie them together to form a coherent narrative, one that was capable of leveraging dissent for concrete policy change.

Those were the enduring lessons of Dr. King’s life.

There’s less than three months between the observance of King’s birthday and his death. The way each is recognized by politicians reveals the contradictions in his legacy. Most politicians extol the virtues of racial equality, while most ignore King’s criticisms of economic injustice.

From his April 30th speech in Atlanta: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

“A true revolution of values will…look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just’…this business of…injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane….cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

As the EPI report above shows, over the last four decades, policies promoted by the GOP have reduced the opportunities for most workers to achieve wage growth at rate similar to the top 10%.

Time to wake up America! Develop your narrative, one that fights against economic injustice and for voting rights. Add any other issues that are pertinent to you. Take your narrative to your neighbors. Then work to get out the vote.

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 topped the R&B charts after its 1965 release by The Impressions. It’s been covered by scores of artists, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and by Rod Stewart and the late Jeff Beck, who died last week. Early in their careers, in 1969, Beck and Stewart performed together in the Jeff Beck Group. Here’s Beck’s official music video for “People Get Ready” featuring Rod Stewart:

Jeff Beck was one of one as a guitarist. There was no one better. He had the mindset of a jazz musician playing blues rock. His guitar sound wasn’t anything like traditional jazz guitar. He didn’t cut his teeth playing the old jazz standards, but he could improvise something fresh every time. OTOH, Wrongo didn’t love Beck the recording artist.

Rod Stewart has a secret hobby; he builds model trains. He would take his trains on tour with him, requesting an extra room so he could work on them while staying in hotels. Stewart recently unveiled his 1,500 square-foot replica of post-war Chicago and New York railway systems that took him 23 years to build.

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Monday Wake Up Call – November 14, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Bison at Grand Teton NP, WY – October 2022 photo by Kerry Key

As we peel the onion of the midterms we learned something from Massachusetts that’s worth thinking about:

“Massachusetts voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that will increase taxes on those earning more than $1 million a year…. The state’s constitution currently requires all income be taxed at uniform rates. The $1 million threshold will be adjusted each year to reflect cost-of-living increases.”

Fifty-two percent of voters approved the amendment which will add a 4% tax on annual incomes above $1 million, on top of the state’s current 5% flat income tax. It takes effect in 2023, and will fund public education, roads, bridges, and public transportation.

It’s expected the new tax will affect roughly 0.6% of Massachusetts households, according to an analysis from Tufts University. The new tax also applies to “one-time millionaires,” including people who make more than $1 million in taxable income from selling their homes or businesses. It’s estimated to bring in roughly $1.3 billion in revenue during fiscal 2023, according to Tufts.

Supporters applauded the new tax as a necessary step to address MA’s income inequality gap. The Economic Policy Institute ranks Massachusetts as the sixth-worst state in the country when it comes to income inequality.

It is true that the US is one of the most economically unequal nations in the developed world. Most of the income and wealth gains of the last decade have gone to the richest 0.1%—households with annual incomes of $2.4 million and wealth of at least $32 million.

So it isn’t surprising that a similar idea has floated around DC for some time. In October 2021, Biden introduced a “millionaire’s surtax,” bill that would raise taxes on all forms of income, including wages, capital gains, and dividends. It would have imposed a 5% tax on incomes above $10 million and an 8% tax on incomes above $25 million, raising $230 billion over 10 years from the wealthiest 0.02% of Americans.

Naturally, it didn’t pass.

So the effort moved to the states, with success in 2022 Massachusetts and failure in California, where its millionaire’s surtax was defeated, 59%-41%.

In some ways, the millionaire tax debate is emblematic of the nation’s deep political divide. Republicans everywhere only want to see taxes go down, and Democrats are seeking to raise them to fund long term problems like battling climate change and adding better infrastructure.

The GOP asks: If climate change is an existential issue affecting us all, does it make sense to address the issue by taxing only a handful of households? Your answer may be different from Wrongo’s who sees the question as a way to deflect the discussion into an endless loop of “whataboutism” regarding who pays taxes.

Republicans have refused to support carbon use taxes. They’ve refused to support cap-and-trade carbon taxes. Most of them deny that climate change is happening and refuse to pro-actively plan to moderate greenhouse gas emissions, here or anywhere else. So they aren’t engaging in a serious discussion when they ask the question.

Although efforts to raise taxes on millionaires have stalled in Washington, they haven’t gone away. That will happen if Republicans control the House in January 2023.

Time to wake up America! Deficits can grow to the sky at the national level but states have to balance their budgets yearly. That’s why some states are making the choice to raise taxes on millionaires, the very people who have gained the most in the past 50 years. Raising taxes is a must in most states for the remainder of this decade.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to Molly Tuttle channel Grace Slick while covering the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit“. Tuttle was just named the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year, so you’re seeing “White Rabbit” done as bluegrass, performed in October 2022 in Portland, ME:

Tuttle is an amazing performer. You can learn more about her here.

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Democracy Fatigue

The Daily Escape:

Fall arrives in Ouray, CO – October 2022 photo by Gary Ratcliff

Why is authoritarianism growing at home and abroad? There is a relatively new notion called democracy fatigue: Political passivity and disgruntlement that stems from the exhaustion of seeing endless politicking, but never seeing change that makes lives better.

We’ve had a constant barrage of existential crises: Covid, climate change, Russian imperialism, immigration, inflation, and growing economic insecurity. With needing to act on all of these (and a few more), the ideals of political compromise and letting everyone have their say, seem sadly dated.

On the American Right, many joke that what would make things better is a ‘benign dictatorship.’ Because democracy doesn’t get things done. Politicians everywhere are taking the opportunity to go with “the big lie”. It’s become about lying until your ideas are accepted as fact. From Heather Cox Richardson:

“After World War II, political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained that lies are central to the rise of authoritarianism. In place of reality, authoritarians lie to create a “fictitious world through consistent lying.” Ordinary people embraced such lies because they believed everyone lied anyhow.”

And distrust of democracy is growing. From Hal Gershowitz:

“…in the US, Germany, and Japan, somewhere between 20% and 40%…would embrace “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliaments and elections.”

Hal reminds us that last April In France, Emmanuel Macron managed to once again defeat right-winger Marine Le Pen, but by a much narrower margin than in their last face off in 2017. Elsewhere:

  • In traditionally liberal Sweden, a coalition of right-wing parties, anchored by the far-right Sweden Democrats, took control of Parliament.
  • Hungary’s uber authoritarian, Viktor Orbán secured his fourth consecutive term as Prime Minister.
  • And most recently, in Italy, a coalition led by far-right leader Giorgia Meloni won and will put together Italy’s first far-right government since World War II.

Beyond these are the far-right British National Party, and the Norwegian Progress Party. While these are fringe parties, they can exert influence on whatever party leads in parliamentary democracies.

Freedom House, founded in 1941 and primarily funded by the US, also paints a bleak picture. It publishes an annual assessment of “Freedom in the World” which notes that authoritarianism is having a great run. Freedom House says in 2020, the number of countries  they listed as “no longer free” grew to the highest level in 15 years. Countries registering declines in political rights were also the highest in 15 years.

They note that a total of 60 countries suffered declines over the past year, while only 25 improved. As of today, some 38% of the global population live in Not Free countries, the highest proportion since 1997. Only about 20% of the world’s population now live in Free countries. The balance (41%) live in Partially Free countries.

The rise in authoritarianism may be due to the fact that in a sea of uncertainty, people are looking for a life raft. So they are willing to listen to and vote for those who articulate the importance of “traditional” values, and to assure them that the purported attack/assault on those values is a threat to them and their families.

The longing for benign dictatorship continues among America’s technology elites, whose denigration of politics flows from a Silicon Valley ideology that mixes libertarianism with authoritarian rule. They seem to want politics to work the way their products do: With elegant solutions implemented by smart, creative makers.

Their message is that surely, there’s a right way to get the job done: Fill the potholes, build the roads, keep our streets safe, get our kids to learn reading and math.

But whose potholes should get filled first? Should we keep our streets safe through community policing or long prison sentences? Should teachers be given merit pay, are small classrooms better, or should we lengthen the school day?

All of these issues can engender deep political fights. That’s because politics is disputes about values, not technical solutions. One person’s “right” is not another’s because people prioritize different values: Equity versus excellence, efficiency versus participation, security versus justice, short-term versus long-term goals.

Trump’s continuing control of the Republican Party is due to his ability to exploit grievance. His “America First” message continues to resonate with millions of voters who view the Democratic Party’s policies as an assault on America’s traditional values.

For the upcoming midterm elections we need to remember that constitutional democracy is not a gift from the gods.

It can be wrested away if we fail to uphold our democracy by voting this fall.

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Saturday Soother – September 24, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Joshua Tree NP, CA – September 2022 photo by Bart Aldrich

This week, Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the Ken Burns program on the Holocaust on PBS. The three-part series is about how America responded to the Holocaust. An overriding theme in the film is that America’s aversion to immigrants framed much of our response to what Germany was inflicting on Jews throughout Europe.

You will not find a better or clearer narrative about the unfolding of the ideas and events that led ultimately to the Holocaust. Learning about America’s response in the run up to WWII is something we all should confront. It’s part of the ongoing conversation of what sort of country we believe the US to be, versus the kind of country it actually is.

From Tom Teicholz in Forbes:

“There are many revelations in the film. Burns, Novick and Botstein explore at length the connections between the American Eugenics movement, American genocidal policies towards Native Americans, and Jim Crow laws and Hitler’s policies and Nazi laws.”

Granted, the Germans didn’t need to learn racism or xenophobia from Americans. They did quite well on their own. They had already figured out how to export that to their African colonies. But, it’s true that here in America, we had the genocide of the Native Americans: Round them up, confine them, eliminate a major food source, and kill as many as you can. Genocide against Black people: Forced servitude, rape, and murder.

One thing that was beyond the scope of the film is why there was so much ambivalence by Americans to Hitler, and why we didn’t take in more European refugees. They show that until the late 19th century, America was a nation that welcomed immigrants. Then as the country grew and rates of immigration increased, by the turn of the 20th century, nativist sentiment was at an all-time high. Even Progressives, who prided themselves on helping the less fortunate, generally favored anti-immigration policies.

Ultimately, the US government’s anti-immigrant legislation normalized xenophobia in America. Nationalism and fear of immigrants has apparently been with us ever since. The film says that Hitler copied our tactics (!) and took them to a new extreme while the world watched.

On the last night (of 3), the film reminds us of the irony that Russia benefited from Roosevelt’s “Lend-Lease” arms program to help defeat the German invasion in WWII. A supreme irony now is that Russia’s complaining about our 2022 version of “Lend Lease” where the US is sending weapons to Ukraine to use against Russia.

We’re often inconsistent in our policies, but here we are in 2022 with a similar interest: The continued existence of an attacked sovereign nation. Only this time Russia is the aggressor, not Germany.

The last five minutes of the film provides a montage of the rising white supremacism and antisemitism in the US (including a clip of the marchers at Charlottesville in 2017) that, regrettably makes “The US and The Holocaust” all too relevant to today. It’s a very difficult history, but it’s also important that it is not forgotten.

Despite what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia, or with Trump’s many legal quagmires, let’s shut down the politics and posturing for this week. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

Here on the fields of Wrong, the lawn has greened up from several decent rainstorms over the past few weeks. The bluebird houses are coming down for the winter. As we bid farewell to summer, leaves are beginning to turn color and fall. The summer classical music venues that we love have ended their seasonal programs. Wrongo wore a down vest this morning.

Time to grab a mug of Ethiopia Nano Genji Bergamot coffee ($25.50/12 oz.) from Sacramento, CA’s Temple Coffee. The roaster says it has flavors of tangerine and ginger with a long finish.

Now grab a seat by a south-facing window, put on your wireless headphones and listen to Van Morrison perform “When the Leaves come Falling Down” from his 1999 album “Back on Top”. We usually feature classical music on Saturdays, but this effort by Van the Man is very mellow and features wonderful fall photos:

The string section in the tune is by the Irish Film Orchestra.

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