Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged redistribution

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ome-favorites-of-the-rich.html

policy politics economic culture GOP Democratic party donations voters

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • On economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass.
  • The current popularity of Bernie Sanders and his presidential candidacy notwithstanding, the mainstream of the Democratic Party supports centrist positions ranging from expanded free trade to stricter control of the government budget to time limits on welfare for the poor.
  • The authors, from Stanford, Princeton, the University of Georgia and N.Y.U., respectively, go on to note thatthe Democratic agenda has shifted away from general social welfare to policies that target ascriptive identities of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • “Both Republicans and many Democrats have experienced an ideological shift toward acceptance of a form of free market capitalism which, among other characteristics, offers less support for government provision of transfers, lower marginal tax rates for those with high incomes, and deregulation of a number of industries,
  • Between 1982 and 2012, the Republican share of contributions from the Forbes 400 has been steadily falling, to 59 percent from 68 percent. As membership in the Forbes 400 changes, this trend will accelerate
  • the share of contributions to Democrats from the top 0.01 percent of adults — a much larger share of the population than the Forbes 400 list — has grown from about 7 percent of total campaign contributions in 1980 to more than 25 percent of contributions in 2012. The same pattern is visible among Republicans, where the growth of fundraising dependence on the superrich has been moving along the same trajectory.
  • upscale voters were just as important to the Obama coalition as downscale voters. One consequence of the increased importance of the affluent to Democrats, according to Bonica and the three co-authors on the inequality paper, is that the Democratic Party has in many respects become the party of deregulated markets.
  • “The Democratic Party pushed through the financial regulation of the 1930s, while the Democratic party of the 1990s undid much of this regulation in its embrace of unregulated financial capitalism,” the four authors write.
  • Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern. In a 2014 essay, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” they analyze congressional voting patterns and conclude thatThe majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.
  • “These findings may be disappointing to those who look to the Democratic Party as the ally of the disadvantaged,” Gilens wrote in a 2012 essay published by the Boston Review:In some respects Democrats have in fact served this function in the social welfare domain. But in other domains, policies adopted under Democratic control are no more consistent with the preferences of the less well off than are those adopted during periods dominated by the Republican Party.
  • Gilens, in a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Politics, is critical of both Democrats and Republicans:On important aspects of tax policy, trade policy, and government regulation, both political parties have embraced an agenda over the past few decades that coincides far more with the economically regressive, free trade, and deregulatory orientations of the affluent than with the preferences of the middle class.
  • Most important, in recent years, the Democratic Party has become the political home for those whose most passionate cause is cultural, as opposed to economic, liberalism: decriminalization of drug possession; women’s rights; the rights of criminal defendants; and rights associated with the sexual revolution, including transgender rights, the right to contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage.
  • the party, if its aim is to mobilize those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, whites as well as blacks and Hispanics, will face some bitter conflicts, because these target voters are often the most hostile to the left-leaning social rights agenda.
  • College graduates were 22.9 percentage points more liberal on homosexuality than those without high school degrees, and 24.8 percentage points more liberal in their views on gay marriage.The same class differences have been found in views on abortion, school prayer and the survey question: should women should be the equal of men.
  • For many black and Hispanic voters who hold conservative views on social issues, the Democratic Party’s commitment on civil rights, immigration reform and the safety net trumps any hesitation about voting for Democratic candidates who hold alien cultural and moral views.
  • The same is not true for noncollege whites. Many of these voters hold liberal economic views, as evidenced by the passage by large margins of minimum wage referendums in four solidly red states last year. In the case of these white voters, however, animosity to Democratic cultural and moral liberalism trumps Democratic economic liberalism, as demonstrated by the near unanimous Republican-majority midterm and presidential voting in the poorest white counties of Appalachia.
  • The practical reality is that the Democratic Party is now structurally disengaged from class-based populism, especially a form of economically redistributive populism that low-to-moderate-income whites would find inviting.
Javier E

The American People and the Politics of American Identity - 0 views

www.willwilkinson.net/...-politics-of-american-identity

American ethnicity creed identity conservatism

shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 10 - Cached
  • There is no American ethnicity; the U.S. is a resolutely multicultural (and multilingual) country. The usual idea is that American identity is creedal, or organized around a distinctively American set of ideas and value.s
  • The trouble is that even when there is widespread agreement on nominally common values, conceptions of those values vary wildly.
  • Take the belief in individual freedom. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as freedom from all non-defensive physical force and fraud. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as implying roughly equal voice in the democratic process, which straightforwardly requires the redistribution of resources and state regulation of spending on political speech. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as a condition of robust autonomy or self-governance that requires universal government-financed education and a minimum of material resources necessary to ensure that individuals are able actually to exercise their liberty and are not caged-in by necessity. And none of these are the conception of individual liberty that prevailed among the Founders. Anyway, there was heated disagreement among the Founders, too. Some them took the ideal of individual freedom to be consistent with chattel slavery while others correctly found human bondage obviously at odds with liberty. Some defended a robust conception of freedom of conscience while others wished to ban the practice of certain religions for freedom’s sake. And so on
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • its misguided to appeal to the American creed as the basis of the American identity of the American people. There are multiple conceptions of American creed equally consistent with American history. That’s why movements to glorify, elevate, and honor a particular conception of American identity based on a particular conception of the American creed necessarily  marginalize equally or more historically plausible conceptions and therefore tend to suggest that citizens who favor those conceptions are less or even un-American.
  • The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals.
Javier E

Inequality And The Right - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...inequality-and-the-right.html

income inequality social economic stability justice

shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as
  • To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.
  • it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.
Javier E

2016 Hopefuls and Wealthy Are Aligned on Inequality - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...are-aligned-on-inequality.html

inequality rich influence political

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • There is, however, one group of Americans with whom the Republican contenders and Mrs. Clinton, the likely Democratic front-runner, are generally in step: the wealthy.
  • more than 80 wealthy Chicago-area residents and found that 62 percent felt “differences in income in America are too large” — a figure generally in line with public opinion.
  • Only 13 percent of wealthy interview subjects said the government should “reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes.” Only 17 percent said the government should “redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The views of the rich on other policies that might reduce inequality followed a similar pattern. A mere 19 percent of the wealthy, versus two-thirds of the general public, said the government should “see to it” that anyone who wants a job can find one
  • Forty percent of the wealthy, versus 78 percent of the public, said the government should make the minimum wage “high enough so that no family with a full-time worker falls below the official poverty line.”
  • In general, Ms. Chin has found, the rich regard those who do not succeed in life as “people who didn’t take advantage of the education system,” not victims of circumstances beyond their control.
  • Ms. Chin’s findings, which she is scheduled to present at a conference in April, are even more stark. As she puts it, the rich tend to see inequality “as a story about individual hard work, effort and character.”They recognize that growing up poor puts workers at a disadvantage but argue that a middle-class background presents no barrier to economic success and that growing up wealthy can even be a liability because it robs people of their incentive to work hard.
  • one of the most intriguing conclusions of the recent avenue of research: Wealth seems to shape people’s views regardless of their age, gender, education, marital status — or even ideology and political party. “There is a sense in which wealth seems to trump partisanship,”
  • given the attention candidates of all stripes must lavish on wealthy donors, that might explain why even relatively moderate presidential aspirants are reluctant to propose a prominent role for government in reducing inequality
  • Jeb Bush, arguably the most outspoken potential Republican candidate on the subject, has struck much the same posture as his more conservative rivals. “We believe the income gap is real, but that only conservative principles can solve it by removing the barriers to upward mobility,” Mr. Bush wrote
  • Mr. Rubio is the Republican who has come closest to suggesting an affirmative role for government, proposing that Washington redirect money from programs like food stamps to subsidies for low-wage workers, though he would not increase the total funds available for alleviating poverty. A spokesman said by email that Mr. Rubio “doesn’t think the federal government is very good” at reducing poverty and would like to see those programs reformed. He has indicated that he would cut taxes for the rich rather than raise them.
  • Mrs. Clinton was vague when it came to solutions. She promoted the public-private partnerships that the Clinton Foundation was brokering to expand worker training and noted that her husband’s administration had ushered in “broad-based growth and shared prosperity” through increasing the minimum wage and doubling the earned-income tax credit.
  • Before the well-heeled crowd at Aspen, she said, “We have to have a concerted effort to meet a consensus about how to deal with this.”
Javier E

The Dying of the Whites - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-dying-of-the-whites.html

white despair death rate suicide culture economics

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • To many conservatives, the mortality rate shock is the latest indictment of modern liberalism’s mix of moral permissiveness and welfare-state paternalism: The first undercuts the rootedness, discipline and purpose that marriage and religion once supplied, and the latter eases people into a life of dependence and disability payments that only encourages drug abuse and suicidal thoughts.
  • But if the problem is social liberalism and the welfare state, progressives object, then why is the working class death rate only rising starkly in the United States? In the more secular and socialist territory of the European Union, Deaton and Case are at pains to note, white mortality rates have continued to decline.
  • This buttresses the longstanding liberal argument that the American working class has fallen victim, not to dependency and libertinism, but to a punishing economic climate — stagnant wages, a fraying safety net, and Republican economic policies that redistribute wealth upward
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Hence the European contrast: If we had the same institutions as France and Germany, our working class might still be struggling, but at least it would be protected from immiseration and despair.
  • if economic stress were all, you would expect the mortality crisis to manifest itself more sharply among black and Hispanic Americans — who have consistently higher unemployment rates than their white neighbors, and lag whites in wealth by far.
  • But in fact the mortality rate for minorities in the U.S. continued to fall between 1999 and 2013, mirroring the trend in Europe, and the African-American death rate in particular fell hugely
  • it was only white Americans who turned increasingly to drugs, liquor and quietus.
  • white social institutions, blue-collar as well as white-collar, have long reflected a “bourgeois moral logic” that binds employment, churchgoing, the nuclear family and upward mobility.
  • But in an era of stagnating wages, family breakdown, and social dislocation, this logic no longer seems to make as much sense. The result is a mounting feeling of what the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher calls white “dispossession” — a sense of promises broken, a feeling that what you were supposed to have has been denied to you.
  • For obvious historical reasons, though, Hispanic and (especially) black communities have cultivated a different set of expectations, a different model of community and family (more extended and matriarchal), a different view of success and the American story writ large
  • they may create a kind of resilience, a capacity for dealing with stagnation and disappointment (and elite indifference or hostility), which many working-class white Americans did not necessarily expect to ever need.
  • If this possibility has policy implications, it suggests that liberals are right to emphasize the economic component to the working class’s crisis. But it cautions against the idea that transfer payments can substitute for the sense of meaning and purpose that blue-collar white Americans derived from the nexus of work, faith and family until very recently
Javier E

Donald Trump explains American politics in a single sentence - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-politics-in-a-single-sentence

campaign candidates 2016 election reform crisis politics system political economy

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • On Morning Joe Wednesday morning, Donald Trump explained his — and Bernie Sanders’s — big wins in New Hampshire this way: “We’re being ripped off by everybody. And I guess that’s the thing that Bernie Sanders and myself have in common
  • We’re being ripped off, and Trump and Sanders are the only two candidates who are really saying that. They are speaking to people’s sense that our economic and political systems are cheating them, that they are being failed because the underlying rules of those systems have themselves been rigged.
  • In one sentence, Sanders blamed flat wages and soaring inequality on an economy whose rules have been written to benefit a tiny elite at the expense of everyone else, and tied this directly to a political system whose rules have been written to dis-empower the American people from doing anything about it.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • There are crucial differences between Trump’s and Sanders’s solutions to the problems they’ve identified, of course. Trump says our elites are weak, stupid, and corrupt. Sanders says our elites are being corrupted
  • Trump says the elites are cheating ordinary Americans by helping illegals, major corporations, and China, and vows to break this corrupt system over his knee and get it working again, because he’s not one of those elites
  • Trump is not making a sustained argument for political and campaign finance reform; he’s just saying he’s not a member of the class that is cheating you, and he will come in and bust up that class’s party
  • Sanders, by contrast, is making a sustained argument for political and campaign finance reform. For him, the culprit is not an elite that is actively trying to help illegals and China and allowing the country to slide into ruin out of national security weakness and ineffectiveness. Rather, it’s an oligarchy that has enriched itself by rigging the economy to effect a massive transfer of wealth upwards and to paralyze our political system from doing anything about it, thus corrupting our political classes.
  • While Clinton tends to focus on incremental solutions aimed at boosting wages and opportunity, and mitigating people’s economic difficulties on the margins, Sanders wants to rid the system entirely of its dependence on big money in order to actively reverse the upward redistribution of wealth
  • What both Trump and Sanders share is that they treat the problem as one of political economy, in which both the economic and political systems are rigged in intertwined ways, thus speaking directly to people’s understandable intellectual assessment of what is deeply wrong with our system and why it no longer works for them.
  • The Trump/Sanders indictment of our political economy may end up not having long term potency, after all. But this is the account that both Trump and Sanders have offered for their success, so maybe it’s worth taking seriously.
Javier E

Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419118

GOP conservatism tea party middle-class white election strategy

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • In the 1996 presidential election, voter turnout had tumbled to the lowest level since the 1920s, less than 52 percent. Turnout rose slightly in November 2000. Then, suddenly: overdrive. In the presidential elections of 2004 and 2008, voter turnout spiked to levels not seen since before the voting age was lowered to 18, and in 2012 it dipped only a little. Voters were excited by a hailstorm of divisive events: the dot-com bust, the Bush-versus-Gore recount, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the bailouts and stimulus, and the Affordable Care Act.
  • Putnam was right that Americans were turning away from traditional sources of information. But that was because they were turning to new ones: first cable news channels and partisan political documentaries; then blogs and news aggregators like the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post; after that, and most decisively, social media.
  • Politics was becoming more central to Americans’ identities in the 21st century than it ever was in the 20th. Would you be upset if your child married a supporter of a different party from your own? In 1960, only 5 percent of Americans said yes. In 2010, a third of Democrats and half of Republicans did.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.
  • Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them.
  • Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton).
  • The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.
  • The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.
  • What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite.
  • It’s uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person wasn’t spouting gibberish. The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27 percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving “them.”
  • As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
  • Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.
  • The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.
  • Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership
  • In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.
  • The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”
  • Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.
  • Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.
  • What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans
  • More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.
  • Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”
  • He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”
  • He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
  • Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris Christie’s. He has thrown into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long relegated to the margins.
  • Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.
  • there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.
  • Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.
  • Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections.
  • The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.
  • Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.”
  • Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.
  • Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuitio
  • Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right
  • True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.
  • “The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment.
  • There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature
  • Maybe the more natural condition of conservative parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses? Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it requires uncomfortable change
Javier E

Why Young Democrats Love Bernie Sanders | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...-democrats-love-bernie-sanders

young voters Democratic party progressive 2016

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Just as “socialism” is becoming more popular with young Americans, so is another label that implies a highly different set of economic policies. Americans aged 18-29 are much more likely than older generations to have a favorable view of the term “libertarian,” referring to a philosophy that favors free markets and small government. Indeed, the demographics of Sanders’s support now and Ron Paul’s support four years ago are not all that different:
  • If both “socialism” and “libertarianism” are popular among young voters, could it be that younger voters have a wider spread of opinions on economic redistribution, with more responses on both the “0” and “100” ends of the scale? It could be, but that’s not what the data shows.
  • The cynical interpretation of this is that the appeal of both “socialism” and “libertarianism” to younger Americans is more a matter of the labels than the policy substance. Relatedly, it’s hard to find all that much of a disagreement over core issues between Clinton and Sanders
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But terms such as “liberal” and “conservative” are fairly cynical also, at least in the way they’re applied in contemporary American politics. Rather than reflecting their original, philosophical meanings, they instead tend to be used as euphemisms for the policy positions of the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Those parties’ platforms are not all that philosophically coherent
  • What’s distinctive about both the Sanders and Ron Paul coalitions is that they consist mostly of people who do not feel fully at home in the two-party system but are not part of historically underprivileged groups. On the whole, young voters lack political influence.
  • A young, secular white voter might not have a natural partisan identity, however, while surrounded by relatively successful peers. In part, then, the “revolutions” that both Sanders and Paul speak of are revolutions of rising expectations.
Javier E

Britain faces another political shock. It may matter more than Brexit. - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-a3e6-44daa3d35ede_story.html

crisis capitalism brexit authoritarian democracy

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • whence Britain’s radicalization? One answer is that respectable nationwide averages mask the tough experiences of subgroups. Between 2010-2011 and 2014-2015, more than a third of Britons suffered a fall in household income of more than 5 percent. Those depending heavily on the state have suffered the effects of harsh cuts in government spending. Young workers, who have provided much of the support for Labour’s lurch leftward, have fared worse than old ones. The shocking price of homes has made it difficult for non-owners to live in regions with good job prospects.
  • But the larger explanation is cultural. On the left and the right, there is a sense that society is changing rapidly and unfairly. The right-wing version of this insecurity centers on migration. Between 1964 and 1989, the number of migrants arriving to live in Britain never exceeded 250,000 in a year. But in the two years leading up to the Brexit vote, new arrivals exceeded 600,000 annually. When Conservative populists rant xenophobically about “taking back control,” they are exploiting the backlash from that surge in foreign voices.
  • left-wing cultural insecurity centers on a form of inequality that goes beyond the data on incomes, encompassing ownership of assets and the sense of job stability. The haves can count on a salaried job, a stake in the housing market and perhaps some corporate shares or share options. The have-nots face short-term work contracts, high rents and no prospect of a stake in the profits generated by capitalism.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • When the Labour Party proposes “community control” of companies and a redistribution of their stock, it is tapping into this frustration.
  • For onlookers outside Britain, the radicalization of a once sensible and moderate political culture should stand as a warning. Globalization and technological change, which are about to intensify thanks to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, generate similar insecurities across the mature democracies.
  • What Britain teaches is that when centrists fail to address these challenges, populists of left and right will fill the void.
Javier E

The Content Cycle: Tucker Carlson and Rudolph the Reindeer - 0 views

nymag.com/...-and-rudolph-the-reindeer.html

content media social media social network cycle culture publishing

shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • The Content Cycle, a phrase I did not just come up with right now, describes how content arises from the internet, is absorbed into cable television, and then gets redistributed back into the internet for the cycle to begin anew.
  • Like the water cycle, the Content Cycle provides sustenance and habitation to a multitude of organisms, and in many ways it exists independently of human thought
  • Stage One: Raw Content. The content cycle almost always begins with content that is freely distributed on a large social network.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Stage Two: Aggregation, the joking tweets were gathered by HuffPost for a post in its comedy section, whose different and possibly larger audience allowed the content to remain fresh as it progressed through the cycle.
  • Stage Three: Amplification.
  • In the amplification stage, the raw content (having been processed and decontextualized into a frictionless and shareable content unit in the aggregation stage) is presented to yet another, generally even larger audience — or several audiences — by an influencer or two
  • Stage Four: Cable News. This is where Tucker Carlson comes in. Having been alerted to the presence of usable content — now four stages removed from the original audience, context, and intent of the raw content — by influencers, cable producers can craft a segment for their audiences, which will most likely not have been exposed to this content at any prior stage in the cycle.
  • But an appearance on cable, while in some ways the climax of the content cycle, is not its end. It’s a cycle, after all! And what makes it more efficient than a simple teleological progression is that television is not an endpoint, but a way station, a place to generate and process content anew. This is Stage Five: Reabsorption, in which the content returns to social media.
  • Some people might complain that the Content Cycle is corrosive and demeaning — that it’s cynical and even fraudulent to strip minor joking tweets of any context and to present them to audiences for the sole intent of generating outsized emotional reactions. But you can begin to see from this description how vital the cycle is to our natural media environment. It sustains not just major cable hosts like Carlson, but also HuffPost bloggers; not just aggregation-happy media conglomerates like Verizon Media Group, but also vast social networks like Twitter
  • People like to discuss the ill effects of social media on misinformation, but the Content Cycle demonstrates the deep, almost biological connection between the megaplatforms of the internet and legacy media like television, in a complex ecosystem of aggregation, outrage, performance, and attention.
Javier E

Review of Francis Fukuyama's "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Rese... - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...170234

fukuyama identity politics Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Fukuyama sees citizen identification with their own nation state as an important part of liberal democracy. In contrast to most progressive leaders, he does not view multiculturalism and the celebration of different ethnicities and sexual orientation as a step forward to more personal freedom. Instead, he sees these new demands for individual identity as destabilizing to modern nation states. 
  • Fukuyama states that “demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today.”
  • This demand for recognition of individual identity, whether based on race, religion or gender, has been accelerated by the explosion in international trade and travel and the rise of the Internet and social media. The latter communication tools have “facilitated the emergence of self-contained communities, walled off not by physical barriers but by belief in shared identity.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • To help readers understand the drive for identity in Western Civilization, Fukuyama coins two new terms, both based on the Greek word thymos, which he explains as “the part of the soul that craves recognition or dignity.” His first term isothymia, he defines as “the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people.”His second new word, megalothymia, is “the desire to be recognized as superior.”
  • What actions can liberal democracies take to protect minorities while strengthening their traditional freedoms? Fukuyama proposes the development of “creedal national identities.” In this scenario, individuals would strongly identify with the “core values” in their country rather than on “shared personal characteristics.” 
  • Fukuyama argues that the left has made a serious mistake in abandoning its traditional concerns with demanding economic equality and worker protections in favor of promoting “a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized…blacks, immigrants, women, the LGBT community.” In response, the right in many countries redefined itself as “patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity.”
  • Megalothymia becomes a major problem when an aggressive majority group takes power and seeks to socially ostracize or even exterminate a minority group. Nazi Germany is the ultimate expression of this trend in the 20th century. 
  • In the United States, progressives should “adopt an assimilationist agenda.” This would include “strengthening external borders” while providing a clear path to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented men and women now in the country. He also wants public education to phase-out bilingual education and focus on teaching all students English language skills. He cites the “thirteen different languages taught in the New York City schools” as a divisive factor, weakening a national identity and fostering segregated communities.Fukuyama also proposes universal national service for all young people, as a “powerful way of integrating newcomers into the national culture.”He chastises the Democratic Party and progressives in general for “undermining the legitimacy of the American national story” by suggesting that racism and gender discrimination are “intrinsic to the country’s DNA.”
  • This has allowed the Republican Party and other conservative ideologues to redefine themselves as “patriots who seek to protect national identify.”He advises progressives to return to the traditional working-class issues of economic redistribution and improved government services (e.g. education, child care). 
Javier E

Why American capital will vote R in 2020 - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rican-capital-will-swipe-right

gop rich politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The book’s starting premise is acknowledging the mid-2000s slowdown in labor productivity growth in the advanced industrialized economies. There are lots of debates about why there was a productivity slowdown and whether it can be reversed.
  • This volume asked a different question: What happens to the U.S. political economy if the slowdown is the new status quo?
  • In a polarized political climate, secular stagnation will encourage America’s economic elite to tilt further rightward in the coming decade, even though the Republican Party will continue to drift in a populist direction, supporting new barriers to international trade and migration.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In the past, economic elites might have been comfortable with a market-friendly approach from left-leaning parties. In the future, that comfort will fade, because both the political space for a moderate left approach to governing and the economic growth generated by such an approach appear to be shrinking
  • Between accommodating economic populism from the left and nationalist populism from the right, plutocrats will opt for the latter. Populist nationalism will not generate greater economic growth, but it does lead to redistribution that favors owners of capital.
  • They do like the tax cuts, light regulatory touch and business-friendly judiciary, however. Equally important, they like it a lot more than anything that the left is offering them
  • here are three stories over the past month or so that support the arguments made in the chapter.
  • Mother Jones, connects the contributions made by wealthy donors to the GOP and their push for the 2017 tax cut
  • As Rep. Chris Collins said at the time, “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.
  • From the time the tax bill was first introduced on Nov. 2, 2017, until the end of the year, a 60-day period, dozens of billionaires and millionaires dramatically boosted their political contributions unlike they had in past years, giving a total of $31.1 million in that two months,
  • Second, Ben White wrote in Politico about the wariness that Wall Street feels toward the Democratic presidential candidates. His opening sentence: “Top Wall Street executives would love to be rid of President Donald Trump. But they are getting panicked about the prospect of an ultraliberal Democratic nominee bent on raising taxes and slapping regulations on their firms.”
  • Finally, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer came out with a long story this week on the unholy marriage of Trump and Fox News. An aside in that story was the ways that Murdoch has personally profited from having an ally in the White House:
  • All of this suggests that high-net-worth individuals and cash-rich corporations are very likely to back Trump come 2020
  • In a low-growth environment, it will be very difficult for the Democrats to offer them anything appealing.
Javier E

What Taxing the Rich Could Yield - 0 views

prospect.org/...what-taxing-rich-could-yield

economics rich inequality wealth tax inherited

shared by Javier E on 30 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • IPS, details how the nation’s 15 wealthiest families—some with household names (Walton, Koch, Mars), some perhaps less-known (Duncan, Bass, Stryker)—are worth a combined $618 billion. Overwhelmingly, this is inherited money; the companies from which these families derive their wealth were all started at least a generation ago.
  • The report takes 1982—the first year the Reagan tax cuts on the rich took effect, and the year that Reagan’s Security and Exchange Commission legalized stock buybacks—as its point of departure. In that year, a person needed $75 million to qualify for the Forbes 400. A nice pile of money for sure, but today a person needs at least $2.1 billion, meaning that in the past 36 years, the bar for entry has risen by 2,800 percent. 
  • The three richest families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Marses—saw their wealth grow by almost 6,000 percent since 1982, when the Forbes 400 was first published
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • even these families’ original patriarchs wouldn’t have had capable employees absent the public investment in schools, or been able to move their goods absent the public investment in roads, or been able to protect their property absent the public investment in policing. Nonetheless, Hoxie points out, many rich people then “use their wealth and their economic power to protect themselves and shield themselves from contributing anything for the public good
  • Adjusted for inflation, median wealth in 1983 was roughly $84,000. So, while wealth at the top has exploded, the wealth at the bottom and in the middle has stagnated—and the racial wealth gap continues to grow, too.
  • the wealth of these families allows them to both aggressively protect their fortunes and also lobby to influence policy ... often to protect their fortunes.
  • Together these three families own $348.7 billion, as much wealth as the four million families whose wealth—roughly $80,000—is at the national median. 
  • “Some 10 percent of the world’s wealth has vanished,” Collins tells the Prospect. “Where is that money? It’s in our midst. Real estate, art—all those assets are owned by trusts and entities that don’t require disclosure, so the wealth is still bouncing around—disrupting our local economies and [enabling the wealthy to inflate] housing markets.”
  • One way wealthy families have used their influence and millions has been to lobby against the estate ta
  • That campaign has been notably successful. The GOP tax law doubled the estate tax exemption; wealthy families can now pass on up to $22 million without the estates being taxed. (While inheritances demonstrably reduce the incentive for rich heirs to work, the GOP also pushes forward work requirements in assistance programs as “work incentives.”) 
  • Through their backing of right-wing think tanks, campaigns, and candidates, the Koch brothers, John M. Olin, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the DeVos family have “moved the Republican party so far to the right that Trump could stomp in and grab it,” wrote Klein
  • The IPS report focuses on two redistributive taxes that could have significant effects—taxing inheritances and implementing a flat tax on wealth.
  • “We’re not a society trying to create kings and queens and piles of hereditary fortunes,” says Collins, “but that’s essentially where we’re heading if we don’t intervene to break up these wealth dynasties. And if you think we’re already there,” he adds, the future “will be worse.”
Javier E

Opinion | In Chicago, History-Making Didn't Have to Be So Hard - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...black-women-ranked-voting.html

voting system politics choice ranking

shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Instead of having to bet everything on one candidate, whom you may have serious problems with but strategically vote for to hedge against another candidate, in ranked-choice you pick who you like, then whoever else you like — or can tolerate — in descending order. If no one reaches a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is knocked out, and votes for them are redistributed to whomever that voter ranked as second and so on. The process continues until there’s a winner — why some call it an “instant runoff.”
  • In the end, you ask the voting machines to do a little bit more math, and in return, elections occur in one fell swoop and more accurately reflect the desires of voter
  • Other major cities like Oakland, Calif.; Minneapolis; Cambridge, Mass.; and San Francisco have recently implemented a ranked-choice voting system to great success
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Each side complains that the others tip the scales. Ranked-choice voting can at least even the odds by forcing every candidate to reach out to all residents in the hopes of at least being their second favorite — rather than trying to run up the score in one’s strongholds.
  • Mr. Middlekauff said: “I’ve become more frustrated with politics. Moving to Illinois, I realized, I’ve lost a lot of political power.” He went on, “You don’t have a lot of choices. Things are decided by money.
  • The person who collects the most first-choice votes doesn’t necessarily win, a useful sticking point for critics
Javier E

Opinion | Putting the Ex-Con in Conservatism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rvatism-honesty-crime-gop.html

corruption trump gop

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Their sustained, invariant agenda has been upward redistribution of income: cutting taxes on the rich while weakening the social safety net. This agenda is unpopular: Only a small minority of Americans wants to see tax cuts for the wealthy, and an even smaller minority wants cuts to major social programs.
  • Yet Republicans have won elections partly by denying the reality of their policy agenda, but mainly by posing as defenders of traditional social values — above all, that greatest of American traditions, racism.
  • this sustained reliance on the big con has, over time, exerted a strong selection effect both on the party’s leadership and on its base. G.O.P. politicians tend disproportionately to be con men (and in some cases, con women), because playing the party’s political game requires both a willingness to and a talent for saying one thing while doing another.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The point is that Trumpism was more or less fated to happen. Trump’s crude racism and blatant dishonesty are only exaggerated versions of what his party has been selling for decades, while his substantive policy agenda — slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, taking health care away from lower-income families — is utterly orthodox.
  • Here’s the third implication, which should scare you: The nature of the modern G.O.P.’s game gives it a bias against democracy. After all, one way to protect yourself against voters who figure out what you’re up to is to stop them from voting. Vote suppression and extreme gerrymandering are already key parts of Republican strategy, but what we’ve seen so far may be just the beginning.
Javier E

A Climate-Change Drubbing in Australia - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...bbing-in-australia-11558283558

australia climate change politics history growth

shared by Javier E on 20 May 19 - No Cached
  • look no further than Saturday’s election shocker in Australia. The opposition center-left Labor Party had led in the polls for months but lost as voters rejected its move left on taxes, spending and above all on climate change.
  • Scott Morrison, the compromise choice as Prime Minister last year, managed to unite conservatives around a platform that stressed economic growth, tax cuts and support for the country’s energy producers.
  • Labor leader Bill Shorten promised to raise taxes on the “wealthy,” but his main theme was curbing climate change. Labor promised to cut carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels while subsidizing wind and solar. Mr. Shorten and Labor refused to support a job-producing coal mine in Queensland, and their candidates were routed in the resource-rich province.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The result is another lesson that the politics of climate change isn’t as simple as Western cultural elites claim. Labor thought that droughts, heat waves and brush fires would cause voters to embrace its climate solutions. Young people say they care about the issue, often as virtue-signaling
  • Faced with lost jobs, higher taxes and a higher cost of living, voters in democracies time and again have rejected climate-change policies that wouldn’t in the end matter all that much to the climate.
  • The Liberal-National victory shows again the importance of the economic growth message to center-right politics. Some on the American right want to abandon pro-growth policies in favor of lite versions of the left’s income redistribution schemes
  • The right in Australia won on the sharp contrast with the left on taxes, growth and climate change.
manhefnawi

War of the Polish Succession | European history | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...War-of-the-Polish-Succession

Augustus II Charles III Poland Leszczyński

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • War of the Polish Succession, (1733–38), general European conflict waged ostensibly to determine the successor of the king of Poland, Augustus II the Strong
  • The war resulted mainly in a redistribution of Italian territory and an increase in Russian influence over Polish affairs
  • After Augustus died (Feb. 1, 1733), Austria and Russia supported the election of his son Frederick Augustus II of Saxony as king of Poland
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • who had been their king (1704–09) when the Swedes had temporarily forced Augustus II to be deposed and who also had become connected to France via the marriage of his daughter Marie to King Louis XV
  • Lombardy, which remained a Habsburg possession
  • But when a Russian army of 30,000 approached Warsaw, Leszczyński fled to Gdańsk, and another sejm of 3,000 delegates named Frederick Augustus as Poland’s new king, Augustus III (Oct. 5, 1733). France consequently formed anti-Habsburg alliances with Sardinia-Savoy (September 26) and Spain (November 7) and declared war on Austria (October 10)
  • It provided for Augustus to remain king of Poland. In addition, Don Carlos was to retain Naples-Sicily but had to give Austria both Parma and Piacenza, which he had inherited in 1731,
  • Don Carlos, the Spanish infante, led a Spanish army of 40,000 across Tuscany and the Papal States to Naples, defeated the Austrians at Bitonto (May 25, 1734), conquered Sicily, and was crowned king of Naples and Sicily as Charles III.
  • Leszczyński renounced the crown
  • On Nov. 18, 1738, France and Austria signed the final Treaty of Vienna, in which the provisions of the preliminary agreement were confirmed and in which France also conditionally guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, by which Holy Roman emperor Charles VI named his daughter, the Austrian archduchess Maria Theresa, as the heiress to his Habsburg lands
Javier E

Opinion | Notes on Excessive Wealth Disorder - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...excessive-wealth-disorder.html

wealth rich political power influence

shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • I’d identify at least four ways in which the financial resources of the 0.1 percent distort policy priorities:
  • 1. Raw corruption.
  • 2. Soft corruption.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • the revolving door between public service and private-sector employment, think-tank fellowships, fees on the lecture circuit, and so on.
  • 3. Campaign contributions
  • 4. Defining the agenda:
  • the 0.1 percent has an extraordinary ability to set the agenda for policy discussion, in ways that can be sharply at odds with both a reasonable assessment of priorities and public opinion more generally.
  • Somehow, however, over the course of 2010 a consensus emerged in the political and media worlds that in the face of 9 percent unemployment the two most important issues were … deficit reduction and “entitlement reform,” i.e. cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
  • The bursting of the housing bubble, and the subsequent attempts of households to reduce their debt, had let to a severe shortfall of aggregate demand. Despite very low interest rates by historical standards, businesses weren’t willing to invest enough to take up the slack created by this household pullback.
  • the obvious, Economics 101 move would have been to implement another significant round of stimulus. After all, the federal government was still able to borrow long-term at near-zero real interest rates.
  • The example I have in mind was the extraordinary shift in conventional wisdom and policy priorities that took place in 2010-2011, away from placing priority on reducing the huge suffering still taking place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and toward action to avert the supposed risk of a debt crisis
  • voters tend to place a relatively low priority on deficits as compared with jobs and the economy. And they overwhelmingly favor spending more on health care and Social Security.
  • Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright managed to survey a group of wealthy individuals in the Chicago area. They found striking differences between this group’s policy priorities and those of the public at large. Budget deficits topped the list of problems they considered “very important,” with a third considering them the “most important” pro
  • While the respondents also expressed concern about unemployment and education, “they ranked a distant second and third among the concerns of wealthy Americans.”
  • And when it came to entitlements, the policy preferences of the wealthy were clearly at odds with those of the general public. By large margins, voters at large wanted to expand spending on health care and Social Security. By almost equally large margins, the wealthy wanted to reduce spending on those same programs
  • What happened, essentially, was that the political and media establishment internalized the preferences of the extremely wealthy.
  • Lacombe point out the enduring effects of plutocratic political influence on the Social Security debate: “Despite the strong support among most Americans for protecting and expanding Social Security benefits, for example, the intense, decades-long campaign to cut or privatize Social Security that was led by billionaire Pete Peterson and his wealthy allies appears to have played a part in thwarting any possibility of expanding Social Security benefits. Instead, the United States has repeatedly come close (even under Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama) to actually cutting benefits as part of a bipartisan ‘grand bargain’ concerning the federal budget.”
  • Where do the preferences of the wealthy come from? You don’t have to be a vulgar Marxist to recognize a strong element of class interest. The push for austerity was clearly linked to a desire to shrink the tax-and-transfer state, which in all advanced countries, even America, is a significant force for redistribution away from the wealthy toward citizens with lower incomes
  • The fact remains that the wealthy, on average, push for policies that benefit themselves even when they often hurt the economy as a whole. And the sheer wealth of the wealthy is what empowers them to get a lot of what they want.
  • in the end big money will find a way — unless there’s less big money to begin with. So reducing the extreme concentration of income and wealth isn’t just a desirable thing on social and economic grounds. It’s also a necessary step toward a healthier political system
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 105 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page