Trump supporters skew financially comfortable whites whose successful kids left town & other kids are stuck there.https://t.co/OVsHovhJRV
— Al Giordano (@AlGiordano) August 12, 2016
I’m reading Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool — sequel to Nobody’s Fool — and the Trump voters in this Gallup survey are reminding me of Russo characters. (Certainly shifty, worthless developer Carl Roebuck would idolize Donald Trump.) Despite the mealy-mouthed punditry about “economic anxiety,” these Trump supporters would be the first to tell you they’re doing okay, mostly, considering everything. But they’re constantly irritated by a sense that it used to be so much easier for guys like them. Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo, in the Washington Post:
Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump… Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. While there does seem to be a relationship between economic anxiety and Trump’s appeal, the straightforward connection that many observers have assumed does not appear in the data.
According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.
Yet while Trump’s supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead…
This research leaves some mysteries unsolved. Something is afflicting the places where Trump’s supporters live, but Trump’s supporters do not exhibit more severe economic distress than do those who view him unfavorably. Perhaps, Rothwell suggests, Trump’s supporters are concerned less about themselves than about how the community’s children are faring. Whatever it is, competition from migrant labor or the decline of factory work appear to be inadequate explanations.
Trump is giving his supporters a misleading account of their ills, Rothwell said. “He says they are suffering because of globalization,” Rothwell said. “He says they’re suffering because of immigration and a diversifying country, but I can’t find any evidence of that.”
Trump’s support does come from a place of adversity, though, and Rothwell said Trump’s prescriptions — tariffs on imported goods, restrictions on immigration and mass deportation — seem disconnected from his voters’ real problems.
“I don’t see how any of those things would help with their health problems, with the lack of intergenerational mobility,” Rothwell said…
The article is not that long, it’s worth reading the whole thing. To go back to the Nobody’s Fool analogy: Used to be a man who inherited his grandfather’s factory at the heart of an upstate mill town, or created a four-outlet “chain” of diners around the county, or owned all the best commercial property on Main Street could be assured that he was a Personage, someone known to his neighbors, deferred to as the head of the county commission or the local school board. Even the best electrician in South Chesterbrook or the head of the union at the auto-parts plant got respect — people laughed at his jokes, considered his opinions, didn’t roll their eyes and spout guff about diversity and feminism and all that PC crap. But now, if their kids were smart, or lucky, they’ve moved away… and the ones who didn’t leave are harried, bitter, piecing together low-wage jobs and short-term relationships dogged by civil infractions and ‘illegitimate’ offspring. Things aren’t RIGHT. Their world has been broken, or stolen, and they’re sullenly determined to punish everyone who doesn’t agree with their assessments.
Trump is a good enough salesman — or con artist — to have found and tapped a market that’s given him media attention out of all proportion to his chances at election. Although possibly not his chances at destroying the system he’s grifted so successfully.
Trump: "We don't win any more. You people (pointing to the crowd) definitely don't win anymore."
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 12, 2016
Because simply living your life and loving your family is no longer "winning" by Trump standards. https://t.co/1EZSwWBQyr
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) August 12, 2016
How many Trump voters think they'd be winners too if only unseen, all powerful liberal scum didn't cheat them?
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) August 13, 2016
debbie
Has Charley Sheen sued for expression infringement?
(The typo’s too good to fix!)
Mai.naem.mobile
More like Trumpy Dumpy’s supporters are a bunch of racists scared of the changing complexion of this country. I wouldn’t be surprised if seeing more Asians in the NY real estate biz scares Trumpy.
Soprano2
Uh…Annie..wrong spelling of Gallup in the headline.
Chris
Bob Schooley’s quote is the money quote.
This is how middle class conservatives have for decades squared their belief in meritocracy and “if you’re not rich you’re a lazy bum” with their own failure to make it to the big leagues. They would have made it to the big leagues, but some politically correct liberal elitists messed with society so that people like them couldn’t get what they earned, and ever since they’ve been passed over in favor of unqualified blacks and wimminz.
MattF
Middle aged guy, sits at the end of the bar, spouts off. Tolerated but not actually liked by anyone. When one of the regulars mutters that this bar needs a turnstile entrance, you know who he’s referring to.
danielx
All of them.
Peale
All those other groups were failing because of their cultural, genetic or moral inferiority. But the failure of the small town elite can’t fall into any of those categories. Those are the failings of other people, you know.
redshirt
@danielx: Katie?
Baud
Reagan Democrats thought the devil would never collect on his debts.
Frankensteinbeck
(Removed because I’d rather make a different point.)
John B Waldron
A bit off the path. I live in a fairly reliable republican area (not my doing). On one of my walks I noticed a nice house with a Blue Lives Matter sign posted out front right by the street so all could see. Close to the house was a Trump for president sign. I thought “chicken shit.” After Trump decided to go after Hillary with his Second Amendment rights, well the very next day the Trump sign was gone. Maybe I thought it was just temporary, but no it is no longer in the yard. And I think this is an indicator of where Trump presidential run is heading. Oh BTW I live in Anoka, Minnesota an area that brought you one L Bachmann.
Frankensteinbeck
Don’t get distracted by the ‘live in areas of less opportunity’ part. Note that the people with the most opportunity in those areas are the Trump supporters. It’s something besides that lost economic opportunity that motivates them. The very, very obvious culprit is the loss of opportunity to shit on other people and be praised for it.
NorthLeft12
Since when did the majority of people, even the middle class white cohort, actually expect to become rich and master of their own destiny?
Where I grew up it seemed to me that people in our neighbourhood [Canadian suburb all white] just wanted to be comfortable and able to afford some of the good things in life, and see their kids grow up to the same, maybe slightly better, life. Now, it seems people expect to be able to afford all the newest electronics, bigger houses, better cars, eat out regularly, and travel all over. Is that really what people want? Have we become that materialistic and wealth focused?
SFAW
Yeah, when it was only blacks and browns, no big deal.
But now that it seems to be affecting whites, too, well — EGERMENCY!
Sort of like opioid issues.
gf120581
@Frankensteinbeck: In the South, definitely. A big reason why poor or working class Southern whites supported first slavery and then Jim Crow was because it was a system that gave them someone to look down on, as in “no matter how rough we have it, at least we’re better off than those n_____s.” But now that’s not the case. Now a black man sits in the WH, likely to be followed by a woman no less. If you’re a poor Southern male, that destroys any sense of superiority you have.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
Anybody read this article about millennials and the current election. SMDH
redshirt
@NorthLeft12: The 1980’s. “Greed is good”.
SFAW
@NorthLeft12:
See, if you were a natural-born ‘Murican, you wouldn’t be asking those silly questions.
Yes and yes. Well, that, plus being able to stick it to blacks, browns, and LIE-berals.
Mike Dixon
Real life Trump supporter Bruce Willis played Carl Roebuck in the Nobody’s Fool movie. Interesting!
Oldgold
Trumpism on one form or another has long been with us.
In 1964 Richard Hoftader’s seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” made the case that “movements of suspicious discontent” have flourished throughout American history.http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
Baud
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
This is the only thing that is important.
Last polls I saw said we should get between 60-65 percent of the under 30 vote. (Don’t know about turnout.) That’s one of our better percentages, other than black and Latino voters.
Baud
@Mike Dixon: Bruce is a fascist? Good to know.
D58826
And the GOP is now demanding that the FBI’s investigative documents on Hillary’s e-mails be made public. I really wish she did have the green lantern powers to vaporize these people from a distance.
Mike E
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…” is a dead giveaway. Every time I click on a Wash Post link an angel gets curb stomped, I truly believe
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
Bruce Willis has always been a Republican.
Baud
If you are in a good mood and don’t like it, LGM reports that Maureen Dowd has written another execrable column for your raging pleasure.
Gvg
Sounds like they are trying to find a logical explanation for bigotry beyond a need to bully someone else and fear hate toward “other”. In addition it has to be a logic that someone like us can understand, not “he is attractive to other mean spirited scum” and some people are always like that.
Baud
@Amir Khalid: So?
Peale
@D58826: I wonder when she wins if they’ll continue to complain that she wasn’t properly vetted.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@Baud: I know, but still ….
Baud
@Peale: We didn’t have a chance to debate the issues!
Mike in NC
Drumpf is all about white resentment. Period.
Apparently he’s been spending this weekend whining about how unfair the mean media is because they repeat what he says. The system is so rigged against crooked faux billionaires!
lamh36
good morning. sorry to go OT, but an update on my fam in BR area
sis and gran and my dad and fam are all good.
my sisters BF and his fam had to be rescued from his grandmother home by boat.
I have video he shot last night on my Twitter TL.
soon as I get up and going, I’ll share the more detail
Here is one video…BTW this is a street NOT a waterway that’s what the flooding has done.
Baton Rouge Flood Video
khead
Perhaps the Browns will win the Super Bowl.
Baud
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: People got too excited about young people because Bernie was pulling 90% of young Dem primary voters. If we get 65% of young general election voters, that’s real good. But the key is turnout.
Baud
@lamh36: Glad all are safe.
Betsy
@NorthLeft12: I think it’s the result of the loss of a safety net. You can’t rely on social insurance if you don’t believe in the common good. you have to self insure. people ‘s understanding and confidence about the polity and the common good has really been eroded and undermined by conservatives. Without a sense of commonwealth, it’s not enough to be middle class; you have to hope to be wealthy or at least upper-middle class in order to self-insure against the risks we ALL face: togive your kids an inheritance that is their hedge against misfortune, or in order to send them to a college of privilege since an ordinary 4-year degree isn’t a ticket to a good job any more .. or so it’s perceived. People are trying to self insure because weve abandoned or never started the standardccommon insurance programs of other civilized nations. It’s terribly terribly expensive to self insure, whereas if we had a more European social insurance system – for health, for retirement, for disability, for kids that have special needs – we might actually save money and certainly lessen the anxiety .. and people could spend their energy on decent productive ordinary work, instead of get-rich schemes and systems of how to extract the wealth from other people ‘s labor.
Amir Khalid
@D58826:
That’s asking for something no law-enforcement agency ever gives out, isn’t it? Investigation records typically include all kinds of things that are irrelevant to a suspect’s innocence or guilt, matters that might compromise innocent parties, all kinds of stuff that shouldn’t be made public. This amounts to a fishing expedition for things that could embarrass Hillary.
JanieM
@Mike in NC: This idea has been mentioned here in the past day or so, but I like it so much I’m going to repeat it. I wish the media would stop reporting on him. Day after day after day, no articles, no pictures, no outraged tweets, no nothin’. He’d wither into nothingness from lack of the fuel that drives him.
But we’d never know, and wouldn’t that be a blessing?
Baud
@Amir Khalid: Yep. They won’t release it.
lollipopguild
I have a brother-in-law who is a trump supporter. Back in the 80’s he made over $100,000 a year when I was making $20,000 a year. He has a nice house, nice cars and takes month long vacations. All he does is complain about everything and everyone. No matter how much he gets/has he still is unhappy. Many Trump supporters are like him in that nothing will ever be good enough for them. Even when he made $100,000 a year he acted like he was “poor”
Frankensteinbeck
@Gvg:
I see this here on BJ constantly. People hunt for any motivation more rational than ‘mean-spirited shit.’
Joel
Another Thomas Frank-esque bullshit hypothesis debunked.
redshirt
@khead: Let’s not go crazy here.
dmsilev
@Baud: I read that Dowd column yesterday. Pretty awful even by her standards.
lollipopguild
@Betsy: The results of the last 50 years are biting whites in the ass(I am white) and they cannot accept the blame so they have to blame someone else.
D58826
@Amir Khalid: According to the article, generally no they do not release that information. BUT this is Hillary so the normal rules, esp. when they apply to the GOP, are suspended.
Davebo
@Mike E:
Much like “I’m not a racist but…”
Any time you hear that you know there’s some racist shit on the way.
NotMax
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap
Then there’s this slice of the youngsters, some of whom can’t be bothered to get out at all.
Iowa Old Lady
@lamh36: Good lord. I’m glad to hear folks are safe.
D58826
@Amir Khalid:
The have been at that fishing hole since 1992. Only thing they ever caught was a ratty old blue dress.
hamletta
Bruce Willis is a Republican, but he’s not dumb. I haven’t heard about him supporting Trump, so I’m going to assume he doesn’t.
ThresherK
@NorthLeft12: Now, it seems people expect to be able to afford all the newest electronics, bigger houses, better cars, eat out regularly, and travel all over.
I would like to posit that things have become a lot cheaper than when I was a kid. Systems, such as education, housing, healthcare and transportation are much less predictable in costs and outcomes. But when it comes to buying electronics or automobiles, people are just going with what their money can buy. Remember what an 18″ color TV cost ~40 years ago? Or when flying was expensive, so folks vacationed at resorts in the Poconos & Catskills rather than Florida or Carribean beaches?
Sure, there is an entire conversation to have re the two-income middle-class household–necessary compared to when I was a kid. That means less time for household chores. That will lend itself to eating more prepared meals, whether at a Boston Market place or the hot food department of a supermarket.
These changes in American consumer behavior are not “affluenza” or keeping up with the Joneses. I consider them almost a predictable normal response to what the hour of labor buys.
(This is not to ignore a lot of bigger questions, such as labor conditions in China’s iPhones factories, or the resegregation-by-another-name of public schools,or transportation which seems in so many places built to move vehicles than people.)
Kenneth Kohl
@khead: … and, perhaps the Bills will make the playoffs
D58826
@Kenneth Kohl: or the Phillies will be out of last place on may 1st
Peale
@D58826: that and that she was duped by partners in a real estate deal although you wouldn’t know it for all the breathless reporting on whitewater.
gorram
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Not to be rude, but everyone single person they quoted sounds White as hell.
schrodinger's cat
This hypothesis is more believable than the economic anxiety BS peddled by MSM about Trump’s following. As for working class white men, most of the ones I knew personally are Democrats. They were not exactly fond of Democrats but they hated Republicans and their antipathy towards unionization more.
CaseyL
@lamh36: Glad your family is safe!
But, good lord, is Louisiana going to have 500-year floods every few years from now on?
schrodinger's cat
I live near a college town and I have met my fair share of clueless Berners IRL, they are as annoying IRL as they are online. Clueless^n, where n tends to infinity.
Mike E
Synchronized Water Vogue™ now airing on NBC… I’m pretty sure I cannot determine the skills and execution necessary to pick the winners here
Peale
@gorram: I just want to roll my eyes a little. “I feel so excluded from politics” from people who probably have never bothered to show up at the town board budget meeting let alone write their representative.
schrodinger's cat
@lamh36: Good to know that they are all safe. How about you? Did the floods affect you at all?
noabsolutes
Seems like they’re not suffering. While some people are suffering, they’re not the ones voting for him, because those people have good sense. It’s the people who aren’t suffering because of trade policy and labor competition but think they are who are voting for him. Just like it’s not the prevalence of crime that motivates law and order conservatives, but the perception of crime.
MattF
1) It says in the linked article that Trump’s popularity isn’t due to economic factors. 2) There’s a link in the linked article, to another article that says Trump’s popularity is due to economic and racial factors. 3) Therefore… 4) Is there something difficult here?
Mart
Think the pollsters job would be easier if they just asked one question to find Trump voters, do you watch Fox news?
Peale
OT: but right on queue the old fart at the tire store starts complaining that congressmen get vetted but as Secretary of State Hillary wasn’t because she was a First Lady and wouldn’t have gotten the job if Obama looked into her murders.
Baud
@Peale:
Or maybe that’s exactly why she got the job.
Peale
And now we’re onto howBush at least never did anything to harm the country, unlike this one we have now who is spending our kids into debt and you can’t tell me he’s not a Muslim.
Villago Delenda Est
@JanieM: Won’t happen. Networks need him as much as he needs them. It’s all about ratings, which means revenue. In this Mammon worshiping country of ours, selling your soul for money is a virtue, not a vice.
Villago Delenda Est
@noabsolutes: Hence the distorted perception fueled by “if it bleeds, it leads” television news.
Villago Delenda Est
@CaseyL: Climate change is a liberal hoax! (glug, glug).
dmsilev
@Baud: Exactly. We’re going to find out that Hillary wasn’t really in the Situation Room the night bin Laden was killed, but that was because she was on the ground leading the SEAL team.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
This. You need a SecState who knows not only where the bodies are buried, but also how to put them there.
JanieM
@Villago Delenda Est: Duh.
The point was simply that he thrives on it. I personally am going to do my bit by trying to stop clicking on shit about him. Life is too short.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid: Back when I was newly old enough to vote, I got nailed for jury duty. One of the cases I sat on was one involving food stamp fraud (this was back in the late 70’s when you actually had paper food stamps). The case dragged on for two weeks, mostly focusing on setting up the paper trails that were intended to demonstrate the fraud. At long last, the process was concluded and the jury was sent to a room to render a verdict. We had this huge document dump awaiting us, and as we sifted through it, we found an investigation report that outlined some of the foul deeds of the defendant, to include spouse and child abuse. Unfortunately, the report was not something that was entered into evidence, obviously, but the effect was there. The defendant was a scumbag, and the jury was tainted by something that they were not supposed to have seen. Mistrial. Two weeks down the drain.
glory b
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Yep. The only thing I can say is that 70 interviews isn’t exactly enough to be representative. I’ll look at it as a challenge, they’ll vote Dem and we can do our best to make sure they see it aws te right choice!
Doug R
@NorthLeft12: We’ve been sold that we’re entitled to those material things. Inflation keeps chipping away at what extras we can afford, the tech revolution and cheap offshore wages hid how high inflation really was. Higher minimum wage may help with that.
Drumpf supporters are the “successful” in their small ponds, now they’re noticing how small their ponds have become.
Gin & Tonic
@Peale: I wonder why nobody brought up her murders when she was undergoing her confirmation hearing by the fucking US Senate. When the vote was 16-1 in committee and 94-2 in the full Senate.
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: Liberal Media, I think.
Gelfling 545
I don’t know enough Trump supporters to generalize but, though I know people in pretty much every income bracket except the really upper ones, the only ones who support Trump are in pretty secure upper working to lower middle class situations. The really economically insecure in my acquaintance were Bernie supporters. The Trump supporters are the ones who, though they lack for no essentials, just feel they should have more and if that’s at the expense of others who have little, why, that’s ok with them. They also happen to be people with little to no understanding of how our government works.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@lollipopguild:
I have a bro-in-law like that, only worse. He made more like 200K a year, wore underwear twice before throwing it out because, even laundered, “ewwww”. The relationship really changed my sister. She is now a pampered, fragile person whose company I don’t enjoy.
Anyone else lose a good family member to such a relationship?
Peale
@Gin & Tonic: would Gallup mind doing a deep analysis of the rest of us. Those of us who were raised to respect and be polite to the elderly and feel guilty that when we’re listening to the elderly talk in the tire shop, we feel the need to start Hollering and reach for a tire iron? I don’t think this country changed and they are left behind. The elderly changed and expect that we need to go along with it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mai.naem.mobile: Kind of that – more like “How dare those browned skin people come into my terroritory” kind of mentality.
Part of what they are outraged about is how those none REAL Americans(tm) (as in white, male, Republican, Christian) can succeeded threw hard work.
Daulnay
Maybe a few facts and some empathy might help:
For the last 30+ years, there has been no real income growth for the bottom 80% of Americans. The average increase has been zero, so when one group in that 80% sees better times, some of the rest has gotten worse. (That’s how the math of averages works.) Our economy has undergone a significant shift, one that happened before many voters were adults.
People older than 50 remember when America was different, when many people became better off as the economy grew, not just the people at the top. (Of course, back then more of the benefits went to white males than other minorities.) Trump’s message resonates in those communities where economic opportunity has disappeared (says the article). His followers tend to be older people, who were alive before the top percenters started taking all the economic gains. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” makes sense to people who remember actual better times, who remember when many ordinary people could actually get ahead.
There has been some progress over the last 30 years, for minorities and women. But… because of that, and how averages work, that means white males in the bottom 80% have seen an absolute worsening of their economic situation over that time. This is fact, mathematics. Ugly, and feeds the Republican rhetoric that blames others for the problems of white males, but true. Of course, it’s only true because the economic system has changed to give benefits only to the top.
This sense that things have gone wrong isn’t limited to white males. In the latest issue of The Crisis (the NAACP one, not the Catholic one), the executive editor applauds two Baltimore writers for fresh thinking and a new realism: one is TNC, the other is Lester Spence, for Knocking the Hustle, a critique of neo-liberalism.
While it’s gratifying to see the Republican party chewing its own legs off, Democrats must not ignore or wave off the real economic problems in our society. A lot of the comments here dismiss the complaints of Trump’s followers as racism or dismay at being dethroned. Though Trump certainly appeals to those feelings, the ugly economic reality is the fuel that feeds their despair and anger.
Why should Democrats have to worry? Because neo-liberal and Republican policies caused this economic situation, and neo-liberalism’s current champion is Clinton, and neo-liberals. Democrats own this economic problem as much as Republicans.
Barb2
@NorthLeft12:
I wonder how the Prosperity theology fits? During the primary Trump had a meeting with the leadership of Prosperity theology – a loose knit group not associated with a specific denomination. As far as I can determine the membership worships wealth – god shows his favor by bestowing wealth. Mostly these are mega churches, often with satellite churches where the Sunday service is played for smaller crowds on huge TV screens.
It would see that these Prosperity Gospel mega churches have primed their membership for the coming of Trump.
Then the Fox news cult who are being indoctrinated to shun and hate the poor.
Trump has picked up on the desire of a specific group of mostly white middle class who believe they deserve more. The “more” is undefined – fill in the blanks.
redshirt
@Daulnay: So, vote Bernie?
BruceJ
@NorthLeft12:
35 years of wage stagnation, the near wholesale replacement of labor-intensive manufacturing replaced by offshore factories or automation, and the advent of cheap credit in 1979 (one of the most momentous events in US Economic history was the SCOTUS decision Marquette v First of Omaha that ushered in the era of widespread easy credit ) have put in place an economic regime where things that used to be luxuries have become cheaper (sometimes enormously cheaper) and credit was there to mask the fact that you hadn’t really gotten a raise in ten years.
No you couldn’t get ahead, but you COULD get a big screen TeeVee (I can get a 45″ or 50″ Tv for far less, in adjusted dollars, than I could get a 19″ TV in 1979.) a good car (back in the 60’s ‘a new car every year’ was something a lot of folks strived for, and a new car every 5 was something you had to do, because it was falling apart by then. A car reaching 100K miles in 1967 meant it was a clapped-out junker. Today it’s just another used car.) Even housing is cheaper.
Ready credit and falling prices meant that the stagnation was masked for decades…until 2007 when it all collapsed.
So it’s a lot more complicated than a simplistic finger wagging of ‘you’ve all become so materialistic!’ victim-blaming.
Baud
@Daulnay: Empathy belongs for those who vote for Hillary. Everyone else deserves their fate.
Peale
@Daulnay: oh good fucking God pipsqueak. Neoliberalisms greatest current champion? Which industry is she currently talking about deregulating? Name it or sit down.
Baud
@Peale: Forget it. They are invested in their memes. It’s their security blanket.
raven
@West of the Rockies (been a while): Well, my half bother married a Nazi from San Pedro and I haven’t had contact with him for 4 years.
Immanentize
@lollipopguild: I have a hard and fast rule which I bring up where I work all the time:
“In our society, unless you are getting hit on the head with a pipe at this very minute — no one who makes over $100,000 is a victim.”
ETA — and OT — I love your nym, every time I see it, I hear the rough little munchkin singing….
NorthLeft12
@Betsy: Yes, I agree with pretty much all you said. In Canada the Cons who were just booted out of government got into the habit of slyly cutting our decent social safety net, while also loudly proclaiming how it was in danger because we can’t afford these “handouts” anymore. The economy stagnated under their austerian management and people got sick and tired of hearing what they [the government] could not do anymore.
The Canadian social safety net is nowhere near as good as the programs in the EU. Which of course means they are a lot better than yours.
Immanentize
@lollipopguild:
This is the perfect example of the adage that those who are privileged experience equality as discrimination.
glory b
@Peale: Well, an advantage of being African American is that those conversations don’t happen when I’m in line.
redshirt
@Immanentize: I love that user name too. Might be the best on BJ.
SgrAstar
@lamh36: Yiiiiiiiikes! I hope your family and friends stay safe, lamh36.
henqiguai
@CaseyL(#57):
FTFY. And yes.
Karen marie
@NorthLeft12: I blame the marketing of granite counter tops and “impressive foyers.” Oh, yeah, and walk-in closet space the size of a bedroom.
Aimai
@Mart: same thing i thought!
glory b
@Daulnay: Can we stop with the “neo-liberal?” Honestly, if it ever had any meaning, all it means now is “policy/person/idea that I don’t like, but isn’t conservative.”
philadelphialawyer
@NorthLeft12: Yeah.
At a family gathering last week, the Trumpers were loud and proud. Some of them fit the bill of lower middle class whites, but not all of them. And, even among the former group, its not clear what the big gripe is. They all live in single family houses in nice, suburban towns. Their kids (and they tend to have a lot of them….all wearing those stupid red hats) all go to excellent public schools. Schools which are supported by folks with even bigger houses. They all have newish SUVs, pickups or mid size or bigger cars. They all have smart phones. They all have cable or satelliteTV and wi fi. They seem to go on pretty nice vacations. Food on the table, clothes on their back, access to health care. Etc, etc. What have the Blacks, the Latinos and Latinas, the liberals, the feminists, the immigrants and the Muslims actually taken away from them? I know that, growing up, they didn’t have any more than they have now, and a lot of them had less. And, of course, advances in health care, computer, and communications tech mean that they actually have things now that didn’t even exist when they were growing up.
So, what have they lost? What is this big resentment? I think it is easy to say, well, back then, they used to have Black folks to kick around. But is that really what it is all about? Back then, there was de facto geographic racial segregation, and there still is. In point of fact, most of them didn’t really interact much with Blacks, Latinos, etc growing up, and most don’t interact all that much with those folks now, either. As for feminism, many of the Trump women work outside the home, some of them are even professionals. And none of the Trump women that I know want for one second for their daughters to have their opportunities return to the way things were back then. Some of them were even, in their own smallish ways, pioneers…broke the gender barrier in Little League baseball back in the Seventies, for example.
Free floating anxiety? Unappeasible materialism? Just irrational hatred? Beats me. I don’t get it.
RealityBites
@lamh36: glad they are ok. Hope their home wasn’t too badly damaged. Still doing cleanup here in va and wv from our last flood, and it wasn’t as widespread as the br one.
BR
NorthLeft12
@BruceJ:
Yeah, no doubt….but something has changed in the popular portrayal of what is a meaningful life. I guess what I am asking is whether the reality is that people [in general] just want to be secure and comfortable and more than willing to do without the newest doohickeys or fantabulist travel experience, or if there is this drive in more people than in earlier generations to be rich or uber rich?
The people I work with [up here in Canada] and socialize with are more interested in just being comfortable and secure IMO. Maybe I am in a small sheltered existence, or perhaps what I am suggesting is that the whole idea of a society of economic and social climbers is a fabrication of our media and society. Perhaps it is different in the US or other parts of Canada.
philadelphialawyer
@BruceJ: Stuff is cheaper, better and lasts longer. Doesn’t that actually mean that folks are not really living any worse than they were back in the alleged Golden Age? Do you actually need a wage increase every year if the cost of the things you want to buy keeps going down, those things are better than they were before, and they last a whole lot longer?
slag
Exactly how many studies of white guys who blame their problems on the wrong people do we need?
BREAKING: Red staters vote for the economic demise of their friends and neighbors! Film at eleven!
shomi
Yawn, yet more media masturbation trying to paint a circus clown as some sort of “phenomenon”.
Nobody has made any claims about how well off his supporters are as far as I know. It is common knowledge that you do not need to be smart to make good money.
The only claim is that his supporters skew more towards poorly educated with low IQ white people. Usually these clickbait articles kind of avoid some of those inconvenient facts or try to dance around it and bury it further in.
This is why I have no use for polls most of the time. They are always trying to tell a certain segment what they want to hear a lot of the time. It’s not hard to ask leading questions with enough variety to allow people to cherrypick and paint whatever picture they want.
Ruckus
@Betsy:
This is a very, very good way to say this.
If one is worried that their kids and community will have nothing or not enough and they see no way nor time to become wealthy to give them that the only actual way to fix it is to band together and help each other, related or not, racially different or not. There will still be basic human racism, better than, different than thinking. But the wealth part changes, the pressure to not be an overt racist changes for some. That was Sanders entire concept. And it’s valid. To a point. His problem is how not what. And to make it work would have taken us back to a time when everyone had a place rather than an opportunity. And we had that because of racism and lack of opportunity for as many people as there are. We can’t all be wealthy, we can’t all be sports or rock stars, we can’t all be president, we can’t all be highly successful. It’s a numbers game, it’s a reality game. There should be a path for anyone to try, but not everyone will be successful, some of us fail, are in the wrong place or the wrong time. And that’s what the safety net is for. To help those who don’t find success, for whatever reason, to be able to feel a bit normal, to belong. This country was founded on a high ideal, that we would form a new tribe, an all inclusive tribe, instead of an exclusive tribe. It would include anyone who wanted to join. That ideal has been subverted from day one by conservatism which wants to go back to days when they lived in an exclusive tribe.
We can all be successful enough, but we have to do it together.
gene108
@Gin & Tonic:
The do not want to be the next name in The Clinton Body Count. Obviously.
Ultraviolet Thunder
The Trump supporters I interact with most are colleagues. I know them pretty well. Their orientation is mostly classic Tea Party: pro-gun, anti-tax, suspicious of any liberal agenda that reduces the primacy of white men.
However lately they’ve switched from pro-Trump to anti-HRC. Even they have some shame.
Plantsmantx
@SFAW: Exactly like the opioid issue.
mike in dc
If you take away emotional arguments based upon racial resentments, you’re left with rational arguments based upon economic realities and economic self-interest. In which case, taxing people with means to pay for infrastructure and education, regulating industries to reduce worker exploitation and abandonment, etc. become fairly appealing to a broad cross-section of the working class and middle class. I’m beginning to think that it’s not just that conservative politicians exploit racial, gender and xenophobic resentments to win votes. They help engender and perpetuate these resentments and beliefs. They are, in effect, an engine of regress.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
Has anyone else seen a movie called A Face in the Crowd, with Andy Griffith, Walter Matthau, and (I think) Patricia Neal, from the late 1950s? It somehow seems appropos in the age of Trump and Fox News.
Baud
@Ruckus:
Sigh.
Ruckus
@schrodinger’s cat:
And yet some of the white males I know are republican, here in the land of blue California. They are working class white males and they don’t know from unions, other than public worker unions they don’t know anyone who is in a union. And those in a public worker union see their $80-100K salary as not all that much, even with the retirement pension and the health care. And that’s because they also see the expensive cars and houses that they can never afford, even if they are better off than many, including those who don’t belong to a union.
dww44
Am currently in a somewhat heated email exchange with a well-off and educated cousin (a double-first cousin) who sells homes in a large metropolitan area in my red state. Because she had sent me an email about “the pragmatism” of Trump along with her usual emails about the corrupt and evil Hillary, I responded with a question ” Are you voting for Trump? ” She replied that it was none of my business for whom she voted and that Trump was a better gamble than Hillary. Furthermore she was a libertarian and had been a libertarian for years (not a Republican, mind you) and that she didn’t vote for color or sex. (That’s a common rationale that conservatives around here use rather loosely and frequently)
My response,” Okay… you send me all this anti Hillary and pro Trump stuff and then I’m out of bounds for asking you if you’re voting for Trump?” I think she’s embarrassed but she’s so wedded to the idea of the “evil incarnate” Hillary Clinton (h/t to the New Republic) that she would come out and say Trump would make a better President. So she has to hit back because that’s a typical defensive maneuver. Interesting that she never mentioned voting for Gary Johnson, strong libertarian that she is! I would ask her that, but then it would be none of my business!
Gravenstone
@Amir Khalid: This is basically congressional Republicans mirroring Wikileaks; “peripheral damage is unimportant, as long as it supports our cause”.
BR
@dww44:
I think one good response is to say you’re surprised smart people are falling for the obvious con game. And leave it there. And if she asks what con, you can say, ‘oh, I thought it was obvious’…
Baud
@dww44: Did you tell her you were voting for Hillary? If so, how did she react?
dww44
@lamh36: I’ve been watching this unfold with horror and just can’t imagine how folks are dealing with such massive amounts of rainfall in a part of the country that is not only flat but already has a high water table. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort and money for Louisiana to recover from this. Just a couple of state east we’d gladly take some of that rain as we’re in a deficit.
Kathleen
@D58826: I tweeted yesterday that Reich Wing would demand investigation into State Department investigation and that Chuck Todd would dutifully “report” it.
redshirt
@dww44: More anecdota that Libertarian = Embarrassed Republican.
Kathleen
@lamh36: Thank you for that update. I’m glad your family has been rescued.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@philadelphialawyer:
I’m not sure how true that actually is. Yeah, it’s easy to have a car last 10 years, and they don’t rust out any more, but have you tried to keep one for 20 years? Cars in the ’50s and ’60s would rust out, but they didn’t have a bazillion plastic bits that would crumble and disintegrate over the years the way too many cars do now. (I’ve forgotten how many plastic door handles I’ve replaced on J’s Corollas over the years.)
I think many of us have seen refrigerators in our grandparents homes that were 50 years old and still going strong, while we hear stories about unfixable digital refrigerators or dishwashers or ranges…
How about clothes? Levis used to last forever – now they’re seemingly designed to disintegrate after 25 washings. I believe womens’ clothes are even worse (even though they’re almost all dry-clean only).
Have you seen the way they build “McMansions” these days? Chip-board and flake-board and strand-board and plastic windows and … Yeah, they’re efficient and quick to build and strong by some measures, but don’t get them wet or you’ll see them disintegrate.
No time to find a link, but my recollection is that people’s feeling of material well being has little to do with the absolute level of money, but has to do with one’s relationship to peers and those just above you. That’s why the MotUs can feel poor when they’re making millions a year. That’s why a family making $200k a year can feel strapped. Yeah, they won’t go hungry, but they still feel that they can’t do as much for their kids as the Smiths and Joness down the street. That’s why they can worry about retirement. And people who worry about such things are stressed and they take it out on their bodies, their spouses, their kids, and their colleagues.
(Almost) everyone being able to carry a supercomputer around in their pockets means that everyone is expected to have one. So families have $200+ a month cellular phone bills that people 30 years ago didn’t have.
Insurance isn’t getting less expensive. Cars aren’t getting cheaper to own and operate ($0.54/mi is the GSA reimbursement rate this year). Public transit isn’t getting cheaper.
Being able to buy a microwave or TV for < $100 isn't a good metric for the material well-being of the population.
Increasing wages fix a lot of problems, and is a signal to people entering professional and graduate school as to which fields are dynamic, growing, and potentially have a future. Having wages be stagnant for 30+ years is not a good thing, not at all.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
dww44
@Baud: Not in this exchange. Mind you I’ve never been reluctant to confirm that I am and have been a strong Democrat and voted twice for Obama and every Democrat before that. As a side note she’s alternating the anti-Hillary emails with the anti-Obama ones. So it’s doubly bad because i have to pick and choose my battles.
@BR: Good response with the added benefit that it’s concise and succinct, apart from being true.
Shell
Everybody can find a poll that upholds their view.
Baud
@dww44: Out of curiosity, do you know who she supported in the primary?
Ruckus
@Daulnay:
You drove right off the fucking rails at warp speed with this last bit. You don’t like Clinton then come up with a valid and true reason instead of something you pulled out of someone’s ass.
BR
@dww44:
I think it also helps that saying it’s a con and not saying more will make her paranoid (if she’s like the usual paranoid right-wingers).
lollipopguild
@Gin & Tonic: She was using Jedi mind control.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Consumer electronics is an arms race. How frequently do TVs, cellphones, etc get replaced? Sure, they do more than a decade ago but the lifespan is far shorter.
And cable*. That plus Internet and phone can run $200/month.
*I have never paid for TV and never will.
Baud
@BR: You’re a wingnut whisperer.
Shalimar
If Bruce Willis was a big Trump supporter, we assume they would have begged him to take a feature speaking slot at the convention. He would have been a huge step up from “that guy Bruce Willis killed at the 45:37 mark in Die Hard 2,” who spoke early on night 1.
mike in dc
@Kathleen:
If we flip the House they can take their demands for investigations and shove them.
FlipYrWhig
@philadelphialawyer:
What they lost is the feeling of not having to look over their shoulders to see who might be offended by what they say. A/k/a “political correctness.” They now live in a world where people care about black people and Spanish-speaking people and LGBT people and Muslims, and they just want to go back to when boys were boys, girls were girls, black people were deferential, and everyone said “Merry Christmas.” That’s what drives them to vote for Trump. Their vote has zero to do with “economic anxiety.” Economic anxiety is still real and needs to be addressed with policy. But it’s not why they vote. I’d bet that all these same people who love Trump had all the same feelings about social change and media representation in 1989, which was the first wave of publicity about political correctness and the intolerance of intolerance, and 1992, and every election since.
lollipopguild
@Immanentize: Thank you. I try not to do any singing anymore-people’s ears would bleed,
redshirt
@FlipYrWhig: Or, in fewer words: Cleek’s Law.
They hate anything represented by Liberals.
BR
@Baud:
I’ve learned from you all.
Major Major Major Major
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
“First time I’ve felt that way”? It’s his first election without Obama on the ticket. Crybaby.
That said, if this anecdata is accurate, it should be worrying to us. Turning off an entire generation is bad. The big part of course is that ‘if’. And temper that with the fact that 18-25-year-olds are dumber than soap.
FlipYrWhig
@Ruckus: People like Daulnay and Thomas Frank have predicted 10 of the last zero left-populist uprisings.
Kathleen
@a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio): Brilliant and prescient movie. Andy Griffith’s performance is masterful (as is Patricia Neal’s).
BR
@Major Major Major Major:
I think one thing that can cut through the crap and reach below-35 voters is gay rights — the most recent rights that were won, and still a battle, and something that there’s a huge age gap in support. Plus Pence is basically the most homophobic gov. in the country.
catclub
@Soprano2:
Another person confused by the Gish Gallop.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Some generations are simply evil. Hopefully, this one won’t prove to be. But there is another one right behind it.
FlipYrWhig
@Major Major Major Major: The Bernie dead-enders who were being interviewed on the early days of the DNC had similar tales of woe: that they had worked SO HARD for NEARLY A YEAR and it was SO SAD to have ended up with promises instead of an entirely renewed society.
Davis X. Machina
@philadelphialawyer:
Pick any two. They’re not monsters…
BR
@BR:
And to add to that, Pence has been proudly saying that they want to flip the supreme court and undo major rulings like Roe, gay rights, etc. It’s not theoretical.
lollipopguild
@Baud: Baud, you can be our Secret President. Sort of like Secret Probation.
Ruckus
@philadelphialawyer:
It is racism. A better way to say it is, “It is bigotry.” They measure success against someone, something else. They see those with the bigger cars, more expensive houses and know that while they are tapped out (and comfortable) there are some who are not. Fifty-sixty yrs ago there would generally be one or two families who had the better/bigger car, the larger/better house. Everyone else had about the same, except the blacks who had nothing or almost that. Now that golden ring is still out of reach, to them, but all around them are people who seemingly have grabbed that golden ring. It was available to some to grab, but not to those that look comfortable but wish for more, the bigger car/house/whatever. The vast majority of us measure a successful life by what we think it looks like to others. Our perspective is tainted. It is much nicer to be a success than a failure, no matter how the failure was caused. People like success and hate failure, even when they don’t know what or why it is, and almost as much when they do.
philadelphialawyer
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I find most of your quibbles with my statement about things getting cheaper, better and more long lasting to be totally unpersuasive. And, to repeat, the Trump’ers that I know, without question, have all the stuff they had growing up, more of it, and the stuff is better, and then some. And the “then some” is quite a bit. As for keeping up with the Jones’es, why should that be anymore of a thing now than it was before? There have always been Jones’es, after all.
I do think wages should be going up. But where did this notion come from that that should always be the case? Real wage “stagnation” is just another way of saying that living standards are no worse now than they were in the so called Golden Age. But that WAS the Golden Age and now we are living in a Twilight Era, at best. How does that make sense?
I really don’t think it is about the money. Nor do I really think it is all about racism and sexism. The appeal of the “burn it all down” approach to folks who, as I see it, are living pretty damn well and are served pretty damn nicely by “the System” they decry is a genuine mystery to me.
Kathleen
@mike in dc: What really infuriates me is no one in media ever says their investigations are fueled by partisan politics, though a couple of ‘Thuglicans have said it themselves.
lollipopguild
@dww44: Double-first cousin? Are you from Kentucky? (i am.)
Davis X. Machina
@lollipopguild: Our toast shall be ‘To the Baud over the water’.
Baud
@lollipopguild: Can I have a secret garden?
philadelphialawyer
@FlipYrWhig: That just does not jibe with my experience. Being able to make racist jokes without any social cost is just not so important to most of the Trump’ers in my ken to even come close to justifying “burn it all down.” A couple, maybe, but not most of them. And even the male Trumpers don’t want their daughter restricted to old school gender roles. They go to their girls’ softball games. They want their daughters to go to college, and pay for it.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@FlipYrWhig:
Yup. The White Boy’s Club used to run the town. Now there are the other clubs and being Treasurer of the local Rotary doesn’t carry as much status.
Worse, non-whites, non-Christians and non-males want representation on the School Board, City Council and so on. The status of white males is no longer to be taken for granted.
catclub
@lamh36: This is why I have taken out flood insurance for a house in an area that has never flooded. Was it Nashville or Memphis that flooded last time, where houses had never flooded before?
lollipopguild
@Baud: Yes, since you will be the Secret Prez you can do pretty much whatever you want, as long as it’s a secret.
Ruckus
@FlipYrWhig:
I know but I just like telling someone they pulled that out of their ass. Sounds much nicer than saying they are full of shit while meaning the same.
Doug R
@Baud:
Remember she pulled the trigger on the Bin Laden raid.
lollipopguild
@catclub: Nashville. They had floodwater in places that had never flooded before.
Baud
@lollipopguild: Sweet!
I can talk about it with you guys, right?
philadelphialawyer
@Ruckus: Again, not seeing it. Many of the Trumpers in my extended family live in huge houses. They have swimming pools. Multiple vehicles. Smart phones. Nine thousand inch TVs. Etc, etc. They are living the American Dream. The stats show, and the linked article makes clear, that Trump’s support is NOT co related all that well with downscale, “working class” incomes or lifestyles. And even the poorer Trumpers I know are sending their kids to college (most of them, ironically, to public colleges, and the kids then become public school teachers, join unions, become more liberal, etc!). And live in houses no worse than they grew up in, drive better cars than their parents did, have more and better leisure options, etc, etc.
Moreover, most of them, in both groups, are really, at bottom, much more about family than they are about keeping up with the Jones’es in material goods. Ask them how they are doing, and they will immediately talk about their kids, their spouses, their parents, their siblings, etc. NOT their new big screen TV, etc. Their kid getting an athletic scholarship or becoming a certified teacher or CPA is WAY more important to them than the latest i phone.
Suzanne
I can’t find anything deeper to Trump’s appeal to these kinds of people than “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. They hate HRC and the Dems because multiculturalism and globalization haven’t made them richer, and so they go all in for Trump, because he also hates multiculturalism and globalization.
That’s it, that’s all.
Baud
@philadelphialawyer: Let’s not completely jettison that fact that some group of GOP voters are 100% about tax cuts for themselves.
cokane
ppl have been grossly underestimating how much lower income whites vote for Democrats for a long time, it’s a storyline the GOP needs to cling to and for some reason many in mainstream media are happy to oblige
philadelphialawyer
@Davis X. Machina: That’s what I really don’t get. They are NOT monsters. So, why are they buying into this crap?
Litlebritdifrnt
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I agree with Scott here, the very idea that things are cheaper and last longer is clearly horse shit. Appliances are built to break these days because manufacturers know that the rubes are not going to repair them because they have been pre-conditioned to want the newest model being touted by the advertisers.
Brachiator
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
This is a little more complicated. TV, computers and other electronic devices became part of more households at a faster rate than ever before, and more households had extra devices (VCRs, DVRs, music players, as well as TVs) in extra rooms and for other family members.
And devices are not replaced because they break down or no longer work as well, but because people are able to replace them at a reasonable cost.
I remember in the 80s that some liberals were floating the idea that PCs should be subsidized so that poor people could afford them. Today, many working class and poor people have smartphones which are more capable and advanced than PCs ever were. And there are some subsidy programs in some states. But the bottom line is that more people have been able to afford technology without subsidies because prices have quickly come down and quality has increased tremendously.
ETA. I have never been a big cable user either.
philadelphialawyer
@Baud: True. And that explains why many of they are Republicans. But tax cuts are not the leading candidate for what the appeal of Trump, qua Trump, and not as generic “Republican,” is. Many of these folks supported Trump in the primaries, when tax cuts were offered by all the GOP’ers, and when Trump, to the extent that anything he ever says makes any sense, seemed a little less in love than most with the tax cut orthodoxy.
Daulnay
@redshirt:
Vote Bernie? Hell no. But vote out the neo-liberals lower down on the ticket.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@philadelphialawyer: Hey, if it weren’t for quibbling, what would there be to talk about? ;-)
1) Humans measure themselves against their peers and those just above them. “I’m smarter and work harder and bring in more money than Joe in the next cubicle – why don’t I get paid more??”
2) The US economy went though a lot of changes in the last 20 years, and especially since the start of the housing bubble in ~ 2005. This is a nice summary of the various issues (from 2008).
I don’t find terms like “Golden Age” to be helpful. Women, and AAs and other minorities probably don’t think those times were so golden.
If per capita national income and productivity are steadily increasing for decades, as they have in the US, then the economy is fundamentally broken if those gains do not also translate into higher wages. Wages are an important signal to workers, students, employers, and the government about the dynamics of the economy. When wages aren’t rising, something is wrong and it has real consequences.
Stagnant wages do not mean that costs to average working families are also stagnant. It means that workers do not have sufficient power to demand higher wages, and it means that the system has been tilted to shift power to employers at workers’ expense.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
lamh36
Afternoon peeps, been out running some errands.
NOLA area hasn’t had any of the rain. My sister leaves East of Baton Rouge in Ascension Parish (but still right next door to East Baton Rouge Parish).
So far we’ve been dry but the heat is here.
I’m not sure if the weather is moving East or West, but if it moves West, then it may start raining her in NOLA next week. Still, unlike the areas flooding now…NOLA is actually prepared for flooding much as with Katrina, as long as the levies hold and the lake doesn’t max out…
It’s August…which is our rainy and HOT month anyway…so rain is not a big deal, as long as there is no wind or hurricane forces hitting.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Brachiator:
Big subject. I have piles of consumer electronics around here because it’s a hobby and sometimes profession.
Fisher tube receiver from 1962: 100% functional. AV receiver from 2004: 60% obsolete. Tech gets replaced today when it’s dated and not when it’s defective. The new shiny is more attractive and more functional than last year’s model that still works.
lollipopguild
@Baud: Of course! Some of us expect you to give us important and high paying jobs in your Administration. I would like to be named Secretary In Charge of Cookies and Cakes.
Ruckus
@philadelphialawyer:
Having grown up with the crappy stuff, I agree with you. TVs from the 60s? Utter crap and didn’t last all that long. Cars? My first new car was a 1968. Utter crap. The 70s and 80s were not better, not in any way. Yes your phone worked better then, till you got to the end of the cord. The internet didn’t work at all. Some of this is that electronic technology got better and that led to better production tools, which led to the ability to produce products that are much closer to the actual designs which were better because of better design tools. The tools of modern life are better and the products of modern life are better. But that is all relative. Are they good? Yes. Are they perfect? No and nor will they ever be. The first HP calculators were amazing. They actually worked and they were actually accurate, which was a big deal at the time. But they cost hundreds. Today that same computing power is around $10-15 but you have to hunt them down because calculators are everywhere, like in that phone that is worse today than it was then.
Brachiator
@Baud:
I don’t get why this is necessarily a bad thing. While Bernie implied that he would raise taxes on the middle class, mainstream Democrats only promise to increase taxes on the rich.
And even though some liberals say that they would be willing to see their taxes increase to support worthy social programs, I don’t think the Democrats would win the presidential election if the promised across the board tax increases.
sukabi
@NorthLeft12: I think a LARGE part of it is propagated by the idea that we all need to “supersize” our lives, cars, houses, things to be happy. And the economy won’t support that endless quest for MORE, because the folks selling MORE are busy outsourcing jobs, cutting wages and benefits so they can have MORE.
Villago Delenda Est
@Daulnay: No.
Vote out the Rethuglican slime, everywhere. This “neoliberal” crap is purity pony nonsense. “Nach Hitler, Uns” didn’t work out so hot for tens of millions in Europe.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Baud:
Sorry, first rule of secret President Baud is don’t talk about secret President Baud.
philadelphialawyer
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
“Humans measure themselves against their peers and those just above them. ‘Im smarter and work harder and bring in more money than Joe in the next cubicle – why don’t I get paid more??’”
Sure, but my question is why is that any more the case now than it was before? Again, there have always been Jones’es to keep up with, so why is this form of resentment more of a thing now than it was before?
“The US economy went though a lot of changes in the last 20 years, and especially since the start of the housing bubble in ~ 2005. This is a nice summary of the various issues (from 2008).”
No doubt. But, again, the Trump supporters are NOT the Biggest Losers.
“I don’t find terms like ‘Golden Age’ to be helpful. Women, and AAs and other minorities probably don’t think those times were so golden.”
Duh. I was using that term ironically, because that is how the “Trump’ers are middle aged to old white men who want to go back to the way things used to be” narrative sees that era.
“If per capita national income and productivity are steadily increasing for decades, as they have in the US, then the economy is fundamentally broken if those gains do not also translate into higher wages. Wages are an important signal to workers, students, employers, and the government about the dynamics of the economy. ”
Signal/schmignal. Stagnant wages mean that folks are living as well as they did before. So, again, if the “before” was, as THEY see it, “the Golden Age,” why is today the Age of We Are Not Winning Anymore?
“Stagnant wages do not mean that costs to average working families are also stagnant. It means that workers do not have sufficient power to demand higher wages, and it means that the system has been tilted to shift power to employers at workers’ expense.”
I think the stats show that real, inflation adjusted wages are stagnant, not nominal wages, which, of course, are not flat over time. And even inflation adjusted stats don’t really account for technology advance which makes things available that didn’t exist before. Folks, through the way TV and the internet now exist, have access to literally infinite more choices in educational, informational and entertainment options than anyone, no matter how rich, had back in the day. For example.
And, to repeat, it is not the white folks at the very bottom who are driving the Trump bus.
Daulnay
@Ruckus:
The Clintons have been the poster couple and some of the heavy lifters promoting neo-liberals, organizing neo-liberal Democrats and getting neo-liberal Democrats elected over the past 24 years. Until just this year, Hillary was a proponent of the neo-liberal TPP trade agreement. She’s the most prominent neo-liberal in the party, and has been part of the neo-liberal wing since she and Bill came to prominence. You can cover your ears and go la-la-la, but it won’t change history.
FlipYrWhig
@philadelphialawyer: It’s not specifically racist jokes, it’s a sense that the country has gotten weird and sensitive. I’d guess that there is IMMENSE overlap between support for Trump and belief that there is a War on Christmas, or concern about transpeople in toilets. It’s like, “When did everything get so nutty, and why am I supposed to like it that way?” And it can be a psychological toll rather than a material one: you can be sending your daughter to college and still feel like it’s ridiculous that you have to press 2 for Spanish now, and think that the no-bullshit persona of Donald Trump is an apt vehicle to vent about the decline of Normal America. Shorter me: it’s the diversity, stupid.
FlipYrWhig
@Daulnay: You don’t have the remotest clue what “neoliberal” means, buddy.
redshirt
@Daulnay: Who gives a shit when there’s a Republican party that threatens everyone in this world?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@philadelphialawyer:
Tribalism.
Trump is part of their tribe (or so they want to think), and Hillary isn’t. So Trump gets their vote.
They don’t care about his statements or his policies. Or if they do, they’ll just rationalize it away: “He has to say those things – he doesn’t mean them, or he won’t get them through Congress.”
It takes a lot for people to look outside their tribe. Maybe your relations will start to do that, or maybe they won’t. If they do, it will probably be as a result of some “gut reaction” kinda thing, not a careful consideration of their policy proposals.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
sm*t cl*de
There seems to b a lot of ungrounded speculation from the authors, ascribing Stormtrumpers with vicarious concern about neighbours and community. What’s wrong with the possibility that they’re simply racist gobsh1tes and lickspittle authoritarians?
Brachiator
@Ultraviolet Thunder: I was a teen when people touted the superiority of tube receivers, separate amps and pre amps, but I never really cared. Going to college, I had a Yamaha receiver, a Dual turntable with a great cartridge and stylus, and speakers my brother made. Today I listen to all of my music on headphones with my music collection stored on hard drives and in the cloud.
The people I know in their 20s and 30s spend more on gaming systems than on music systems, and don’t know anything about tubes, except of course the Intertubes.
Ruckus
@philadelphialawyer:
No one said it has to make sense. It doesn’t. You may be 100% correct that many Trump supporters are not rabid/overt racists. But they are bigoted. They are bigoted against anyone who wants to give them more equality because to them more equality doesn’t mean they move up but that everyone moves down. They don’t want to regress, they feel and may be correct that they worked hard to get where they are, why should others not have to do the same and why if they worked that hard aren’t they further up the food chain. It all relative and beating others while being beaten at the game by others is a form of bigotry. Both sides of the political spectrum are saying if only you support us……… It’s just that one side is lying and the other is not giving them the answer they want. They want to be bigger/better/richer like those the rest of the world they see. And the only way to be bigger/better/richer is to have a class structure. Which is what we have had and still do, based upon money and skin color. It isn’t that they don’t have it good, it’s that they want it better and they don’t care if others have it far worse. It’s bigotry because they don’t care that minorities in this country have had it a lot worse and don’t want any change in their status trying to fix that.
Brachiator
@Daulnay:
So what is the problem?
Daulnay
@philadelphialawyer:
Average income has not stagnated. There’s been decent economic growth, decent enough to double real income over 30 years. But for the bottom 80%, real income hasn’t budged. If the top %ers hadn’t raked off all of the economic growth, most of us would still be living in a Golden Age. And for the top brackets, it is truly a golden age, as they have gotten all the benefits of economic growth. All. We are not living in a twilight era, we’re living in an era of massive kleptocracy.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: What is it about the word “neo” you don’t understand? It means “bad” and “Clinton.”
redshirt
@Daulnay: I don’t deny that. But the reason is because of Republican dominance over the political sphere over the past 35 years or so. We are just about to break free of that, and yet you’d condemn the very people bringing about this change.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Brachiator:
OT, but most of the nice US tube gear and other quality American made audio that I rehab and sell goes to China, Korea and Japan in that order. 10 years ago it was mostly the Japanese who wanted Marantz, McIntosh, Scott, Fisher, Eico, Heath and other US tube audio. Then the Koreans got into the act and the Chinese.
We buy their new shiny disposable consumer products and they buy our last-a-lifetime 60 year old ‘obsolete’ gear that we put on the shelf 40 years ago.
philadelphialawyer
@FlipYrWhig: Eh, the so cons were not Trump’s biggest fans. War on Xmas folks sound more like Cruz folks, to me. And, as for trans folks in the bathroom, Trump was for it before he was against it. Unlike Cruz. And if you send your daughter to college you are promoting “diversity.” Trumpians, in my corner of the world, are NOT Born Agains, some of them are racists, but not all of them, and I don’t think the racism is what is driving the bus, most of them are not particularly poor, and virtually all of them are living better than their parents did back in the day. Their sense of resentment, to me, is inexplicable. The globalized, multicultural world is not something that has harmed them. I will go further, and reveal a little more about myself…my extended family, while “white,” is comprised of immigrants and their kids and grandkids from southern Europe. These folks grew up with more than one language being spoken in their homes, and many of them can even understand and speak a little Spanish because it is related to the language they grew up with. And many of them still have relatives back in the old country, and go visiting there fairly often. We are not talking about WASPy Ozark Mountain Boys here.
FlipYrWhig
@Daulnay: And under conditions of more equitable distribution of wealth, Donald Trump would still have millions of fans, and they would still be hateful.
philadelphialawyer
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: This sounds more plausible, to me. They are a “Tribe,” one defined by Fox and Rush and so on.
Betsy
@Ruckus: also, the history of slavery in this country gives us a special cultural idea that the way to be x degree more rich is to steal x more labor from x more other people. The culture of slavery strongly suppressed the ordinary drive toward investing in the value-enhancement of labor (both to some extent in the enslaved and in the people who enslaved them) and it made laboring a culturally unacceptable idea. Wealth is seen as a zero-sum game where you seek to control more people and steal more of their fruitfulness, rather than using enterprise and education to enhance the value of your own inputs
sigaba
@Ultraviolet Thunder: Does your Fisher receiver from ’62 have Dolby Surround 7.1 decoding and SMPTE A/85 dialnorm metadata? DOES IT!?!
Daulnay
@Villago Delenda Est:
I think we’re going to have to address the damage that neo-liberal economic policy has done to our economic system. Neo-liberal collusion with Republicans brought us the current broken economic system. Until economic growth benefits more than just the top several percent, we’re going to see more and more people turn to crazy politics.
Instead of attacking people who complain about economic inequity and kleptocracy, how about pressuring your politicians to recognize the problems with neo-liberal economics and fix them? I really, really don’t want to see another Trump in 4 years.
philadelphialawyer
@Daulnay:
“But for the bottom 80%, real income hasn’t budged.”
Which, again, means things are no worse for them than they were before.
Jeffro
@BR: @redshirt:
YES. Well, technically all Embarrassed Republicans are either “Libertarians” or “Conservatives”, but not all Libertarians are Embarrassed Republicans. Some Libertarians are the kind who think they’re just. too. smart. (or ‘complex’ – that’s always a fun one to hear!) to ‘fall for’ one of the two major parties.
FlipYrWhig
@philadelphialawyer: The Trumpiest person I know is a happily married hair stylist and young grandmother and godmother to a little black boy, with a fairly foul mouth and who doesn’t go to church — who watches a lot of Fox News and thinks welfare recipients are living it up and killing cops and that most gay people might in a weak moment become child molesters. She’s not economically anxious, she’s socio-culturally anxious. I think that’s a classic case. I don’t know if she’s typical, but she’s in some way representative.
Daulnay
@FlipYrWhig:
Very doubtful. Most of Trump’s popularity comes from the idiots who bought Ronald Regan’s con job and are just now realizing that somehow stuff hasn’t worked out. If economic conditions were better, most of them would still be loyal mainstream Republicans, not people looking for Il Duce.
FlipYrWhig
@philadelphialawyer: BUT THIS TIME ITS NEOLIBERAL!
philadelphialawyer
@Ruckus: Unconscious racism? That sounds plausible, too. But, again, the GOP in general gives them that, without threatening to burn down the house. Trump has called everything from the Bill of Rights to NATO into question. He is openly appealing to the Second Amendment Solution crowd. All of that, just so they can vote against the lady whom the Black folks seem to like? And it is not like Hillary is proposing reparations, or even affirmative action, either.
Ruckus
@Litlebritdifrnt:
They don’t get repaired because repairing them costs more than they are worth. Your modern washer works just as good but uses less energy and water. Your gas stove doesn’t have pilot lights nor does a modern water heater. Your TV does last longer but is much harder to replace parts in because the electronics that make it work are all built in, which makes it much less costly than trying to make it the same way as it was 40 yrs ago. Things do work better, they do last longer, they do more with less than they did but they can be much harder and more costly to repair. A 2016 car is much better than a 1976 car in every measurable way. But it costs more. Do you want to go back to 1976 cars? I don’t, I owned them, they were crap. From 1968 till 2005 I bought a new car every 2-4 yrs. They are better today. They are also more complex. I have never understood looking back longingly at consumer products as if they were at their best at some distant time ago. Are there crap products today? Sure. Are the crap products of today better than the crap products of 40 yrs ago? Most of the time yes. Same goes for the good products of then and now. Will there always be some standouts of any era? Yes. And example would be Kitchen Aid mixers, the ones that do it all. Come up with a couple more.
Brachiator
@philadelphialawyer:
This is not true.
This is not entirely relevant.
Wages are stagnant and people have been laid off and either failed to find new jobs, or found jobs that paid lower wages and had fewer benefits than their old jobs. Food and housing costs have been rising faster than wages. Wage stagnation reduces available surplus income and this in turn hurts the economy as people have less money to circulate through the economy as spending or investing.
Daulnay
@Jeffro:
I’ve begun to think that Libertarians aren’t so much embarrased Republicans as they are people who believe that corporate government should replace civic democratic government. They don’t really want no governance of society, they just want corporations to have that power.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@philadelphialawyer: Why do you apparently think that expenses for the bottom 80% haven’t increased while incomes have been stagnant?
Family income hasn’t gone into savings – The Personal Savings rate peaked around 1970 and fell through the mid 2000s. If income has been flat and savings are dropping, then more people are living closer to the edge.
Cheers,
Scott.
philadelphialawyer
@FlipYrWhig: Right. It is so split personality. OK for her, a white woman, I presume, to have mixed race grandchildren. But “teh gayz” are some big threat.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@sigaba:
Nope, and next year when that stuff is obsolete it will still be 100% functional.
The point was electronics are made to keep up with changes in tech, not to be durable. They go obsolete when they’re superseded by something faster, more flexible or smaller.
Same thing in industry. I install 6000W welding lasers the size of a home cook stove to replace 15 year old ones the size of a long bed crew cab pickup truck. And the new one uses 15% of the power and cooling. Staying current with phones, TVs, computers, etc has become a treadmill to keep from falling behind, where formerly you bought something of the quality you could afford and used it until it quit.
Ruckus
@Daulnay:
You are the one that is full of shit. You have bought all of the crap that the republicans have been trying to sell you for decades.
And you aren’t worth trying to talk to because you have to pull your pants down to hear.
raven
If we’re so smart how come I gotta drink a gallon of this stuff???
Brachiator
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
I didn’t know this. I am honestly happy to know that there is still a market for these products.
Daulnay
@Brachiator:
This is not true. There is actually more surplus income, it’s just in the hands of the upper several %, mostly the 0.1%. The real problem is that they’re not spending or lending it, they’re just sitting on it. And complaining that returns are too low.
In other words, it resembles the classic Keynesian liquidity trap where increases in the supply of money (wealth) get stuffed under the mattress instead of getting put into circulation. Getting it out of the hands of the 1% and into the working class would help, but we also need to stop fretting about inflation and government deficit spending. We’ve been on the bare edge of a full-blown deflationary depression.
philadelphialawyer
@Brachiator: It is true. REAL wages are stagnant.
And it is relevant. Stuff is cheaper, better and lasts longer. And health care is a million times better. And there is stuff that didn’t exist before. All of that goes to living standards, which is the real issue, not nominal wages.
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
“Why do you apparently think that expenses for the bottom 80% haven’t increased while incomes have been stagnant?”
Maybe because I was responding to someone who said, “But for the bottom 80%, real income hasn’t budged.” REAL income. Expenses have gone up, nominally. As have wages, nominally. But real incomes have not “budged.”
ETA: I might also add that unemployment is under five percent, inflation is under two per cent and the stock market has tripled under BHO. The notion that the US economy is tanking is what accounts for Trump just doesn’t wash. The economy is way, way better than it was when BHO took office. Obamacare is providing health care access to many of these down market white Trumpians. And the much maligned “Food Stamp president” has seen to it that many of them and their kids have enough to eat, too.
Ultraviolet Thunder
Real, inflation adjusted income by quintile. The bottom has been flat or falling while the top three have grown tremendously.
schrodinger's cat
@philadelphialawyer:
I wouldn’t go that far. Consumer goods may have gotten cheaper but higher education and access to good health care has not.
Ruckus
@Betsy:
I like the way you think.
sigaba
@Ultraviolet Thunder: Just speaking as a re-recording mixer and occasional mastering engineer, I find the attitude that engineering from the 60s was sufficient because it “lasts” to be… questionable. The THD on that tube equipment could be terrible, it sounded “good” but a lot of that was even-harmonic nonlinear–
Wait is this an open thread?
Calming Influence
We have 70s wages in 2016 for a huge chunk of the population. But suggesting that the wealthiest Americans might be taking more than their fair share, and possibly one of the reasons your life seems to suck a little more each year is this growing income inequality, is off-limits, the new 3rd rail in politics. In past years with more aggressive and progressive tax brackets, a competent board of directors would plow profits back into a company rather than give a CEO a raise because they knew 70% of that raise would go to the goverment, but none of the profits they put toward increased wages and new equipment would be taxed. Those days are gone.
So we’re directed to blame imigrants, the Chinese, Obamacare, and even the one party that has consistently worked to improve the lives of the average American, while our oligarchs lead lives richer than Russian Tsars.
What our country could use right now is a few angry Russian peasants.
schrodinger's cat
@Daulnay: That is not what a liquidity trap is. You are throwing around economic jargon that you don’t understand.
redshirt
@raven: “Life is suffering”.
Daulnay
@Ruckus:
It’s just basic math. There’s been no economic progress for the bottom 80% for over 30 years. The causes are complex, but a good chunk of it comes from how neo-liberals and Republicans pushed free trade, deregulated, cut regulatory enforcement, and shut down anti-trust enforcement. The pro-business acts of the neo-liberals threw out the regulatory baby with the anti-corporate bathwater. Liberals objected at the time, and we were right. The Clintons and other neo-liberals were wrong. And putting a Clinton at the head of the party isn’t going to convince people that the Democrats recognize this. Neither is calling names.
FlipYrWhig
@Daulnay: I fundamentally and vehemently disagree. These are the same Republican voters they’ve always been, with some leakage by affluent suburbanites, who have been drifting D-wards since… Bill Clinton and the love-to-hate DLC.
schrodinger's cat
Daulnay is a Berner. Using neoliberal as a catchall swear/smear word is the tell.
Brachiator
@Daulnay:
Probably more complicated than you allow. Democracy is a problem for libertarians, with their emphasis on the individual and individual liberties.
They also over emphasize the sanctity of contracts, and simply underestimate the ability of corporations to dominate society.
But this is why libertarianism is more a religion than an economic or political philosophy.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@sigaba:
I know. I have test equipment and I’m familiar with the limitations of tube gear. I’m not saying it’s the current state of the art in terms of performance. My point was that it’s still functional, whereas for instance an AV receiver with RF video switching, or Composite, component, etc, anything but HDMI, is obsolete. Consumer gear gets repalced now because it’s been superseded, not because it’s broken.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: That is the core of Buddhist philosophy, isn’t it?
philadelphialawyer
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: In general, the point of the article and the polling data seem to have eluded you. It is not the poor, who you keep focusing on, who are fueling the Trump movement. So, all this talk about people not working and their wages being “stagnant” and so on is misplaced. You are accounting for what isn’t the case, ie that poor white folks are fed up with being poor and that is why Trump has gotten this far. The median primary Trump voter household income was seventy two thousand dolllars, well above the US average, even for white folks.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
This is fine. It doesn’t automatically make his or her arguments invalid.
redshirt
@schrodinger’s cat: It’s the First Noble Truth, so yes. But you already knew that.
Daulnay
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
I call shenanigans. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
That chart starts at ’67, and including the prosperous years from ’67-’80 will of course cover up all the stagnation since the early ’80s. Things were fine until the 80s when the Republicans and Reagan torched business regulation and cut taxes. That’s when the stagnation started, and it’s a matter of record.
Ruckus
@philadelphialawyer:
Their income hasn’t changed, their costs have. That extra cost is going to those people above them because their wages have not been going up. So the people they use as an example of having made it are making more money and they are not and neither are the people below them. They don’t see change, no matter what they do. They want economic change and that change needs to be positive for them, going upward, not sideways. That upward change can come at the expense of those below them or above them but if it comes out from the above group then their target has moved down and that isn’t acceptable to them.
They have been sold a dream that isn’t real so that the very top can take more from everyone else. They want that dream, fuck reality.
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: Along with, boy this green jello is good!
Gravenstone
@Daulnay: And you can cling blindly to your bullshit “neo-liberal” shibboleth until you die. You’re not persuading anyone here, but you are a fine irritant.
Daulnay
@Brachiator:
Interesting way of looking at it. I think of them more as Marxists, caught in a dogma impervious to reality.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: No but he/she is repeating the exact same argument over and over again and using economic jargon incorrectly. He seems to have no idea what either a neoliberal is or what a liquidity trap is.
According to Daulnay, neoliberals are the people in the Democratic party that he disagrees with.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@sigaba:
P.S. I’ve paid my dues.
Brachiator
@philadelphialawyer:
Something is missing in this analysis. How does this square with claims that a lot of Trump supporters are white males without college degrees?
Daulnay
@Calming Influence:
Instead, we have the American equivalent of angry ’30s Germans
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Ruckus: Kirby vacuum cleaners.
HP LaserJet II printers.
Skil worm-drive circular saws.
John Deere JX75 lawn mowers.
Etc. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodinger's cat
@raven: Can you do jello shots, instead?
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: It kinda does, because the argument is that people are voting for Trump as an inchoate protest against all things “neoliberal.” So you sort of have to know what “neoliberal” means, which isn’t “influenced by globalization” or “pays lip service to liberalism but secretly hates it.”
Brachiator
@Daulnay: Marxism is also a religion. It is wrong and useless as anything else.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Daulnay:
Fine. Post a chart of your choosing from a reputable source.
CaseyL
The visible Trump supporters are nasty pieces of work. While there are a raft of legitimate economic grievances to go around, that doesn’t seem to be what motivates them.
Remember the RW idiots who took over Malheur? In particular, the last four to leave who showed up about halfway through? They were there because it was a Thing: a way to dramatize themselves, to make themselves feel important enough to be killed by Feds. If you listened to the live feed, they sounded very much like kids at a camp out scaring themselves with tales of monsters in the dark. Revolutionaries? Please.
I think that same kind of attitude animates Trump’s supporters. They’re arrested adolescents, with an adolescent’s sense of excited transgression. They can say bigoted things out loud and get cheered for it! They can call women bitches who should be raped, shot, and hung, and get cheered for it! They can reduce the most accomplished people in politics to caricatures, and get lots of “likes” for it!
It’s “revolution” for dummies. Garden variety nastiness dressed up as a meaningful social movement. And I think there’s not much more to it than that.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Agree that this is wrong headed.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: Actually, Marx’s analysis of the problems inherent in a capitalist economy are spot on. Its his solutions to the problems that are problematic.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: The problem that people keep failing to factor into their analysis is that white males without college degrees were already an overwhelmingly pro-Romney, pro-Republican group. It’s silly to expend this much analysis trying to account for why Republicans are Republicans.
Daulnay
@schrodinger’s cat:
Pretty sure you don’t know what one is, or how one works, or you’d understand what I said. My BA, with honors, was in economics. Krugman was one of my professors.
philadelphialawyer
@Ultraviolet Thunder: Actually, your charts show that all quintiles have real income growth over the last half century.
Real Income Growth Since 1967:
by quintile (rounded):
first: 76 per cent
second: 43
third: 23
fourth: 13
fifth: 18
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: Since I don’t drink. . .
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I know of one in my limited range. Worked his entire working career in public works, made over $80K, with a pension plan, paid health care, etc. His wife made even more, their retirement income is over $100K, they own their own house and they feel like they are poor and they want to blame someone.
Daulnay
@CaseyL:
I disagree, I think that it’s a bunch of people who’ve been under economic stress for 30 years, and have become discouraged, desperate, and irrational. They’re as dangerous as the German petit bourgois in pre-Hiter Germany.
Gravenstone
@Daulnay: Oh noes, the numbers don’t support my argument. So of course the number must be wrong. /facepalm
Jeffro
@FlipYrWhig:
My guess is, support for Trump has a lot to do with how much Fox News you watch. And being white and older of course, but I repeat myself.
Someone, somewhere back in the primaries said (approx) “Trump is the perfect candidate for white guys whose lives didn’t turn out like they planned”. That works on multiple levels
philadelphialawyer
@Brachiator: Lots of households make this kind of money without a college degree. Husband and wife work for forty thousand each. Or husband is small business man and works huge hours while wife is a SAHM.
72k a year is not “rich” for a household in the USA, particularly in the high expense regions. But they ain’t the poor folks being focused on in this thread, either.
Schlemazel
@Daulnay:
NOPE! There was a little thing called “stagflation” that President Ford created a program “WIN” (whip inflation now) in the mid 70s to comat. Wages were stuck but prices shot up. It really started under Nixon & (I believe) was the result of the oil embargo & gas going from .25/gal to $1 a gallon. Gas prices stabilized a bit under Carter but the inflation stayed strong (I think one year it was in the mid-to-high teens. OPEC faltered in the 80s so Reagan was the beneficiary of gas prices going down about 50% so prices smoother a bit, inflation was under control but wages were kept down by the constant exportation of jobs.
philadelphialawyer
@Ruckus: Real income is up or flat for all levels.
philadelphialawyer
@Daulnay: Things are no worse than they were in 1967. Spin as you like….
Villago Delenda Est
@Daulnay: Besides the point entirely when the alternative is outright fascism. No one questions that the economic polices of the last 35 years have destabilized the economy and allowed for massive wealth transfers from the 99% to the 1%. It’s just that we have this immediate problem of a fascist at the gates.
Jeffro
@Daulnay:
I haven’t met too many folks like that. Most folks who are pro-corporate power and anti-democratic institutions strikes me as pretty mainstream Romney Republicans (excuse me, “Conservatives”), not folks who’d call themselves Libertarians.
schrodinger's cat
@Daulnay: Liquidity trap is the situation when monetary policy is ineffective.
ETA: OK I reread your response and what you said is one of the consequences of a liquidity trap, not a liquidity trap itself.
philadelphialawyer
@CaseyL: Some of them, yes. But my female cousins in their fifties..wives, mothers, workers, some now grandmothers, don’t fit this bill. Nor do all, or even most, of their husbands.
philadelphialawyer
@FlipYrWhig: Good point.
Renie
Most of the Trump supporters I know are not college educated and are blue collar workers or retired from union jobs (cops, fireman, phone company, etc.) who were always racist and Republican. But don’t see the connection that their union jobs with pensions and the social security they live on is because of Democratic legislation
Baud
TIL that a liquidity trap is not a fancy ivy league economists’ name for a condom.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@philadelphialawyer: You seem to be arguing with things that I haven’t said.
You’ve brought up lots and lots of topics and made many categorical statements.
I have tried to make careful replies on limited topics. I’ve said very little about Trump or his voters. I haven’t addressed “the article”. I’ve mostly been addressing your (IMO) overly broad statements about the economics.
Bringing up additional topics (Obamacare) doesn’t provide clarity as to why you seemingly think that stagnant wages means that people are just as well off.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodinger's cat
@Villago Delenda Est: He is regurgitating Thomas Frank’s hypothesis, but since he took an econ class from Krugman, its all good.
nutella
@philadelphialawyer:
Are they like Trump on this issue? He’d do anything for Ivanka, but he’ll treat any other woman in the world like it’s 1962.
Brachiator
@philadelphialawyer:
No. This is too scattershot to be even interesting.
Stuff is not necessarily cheaper. Look at groceries. There is a trend to decrease the amount of contents while increasing the price. Even if you don’t increase the price, the net price per ounce or item has increased. And there is my famous toilet tissue index. The size of the sheet and the amount of paper has steadily declined over the past 15 years.
And to suggest that living standard is more important than wages, or is the bigger issue is just nuts.
To say that health care is a million times better confuses the argument, because this is not the same thing as talking about health insurance cost or the availability of health care.
Kay
“Successful kids left town and other kids are stuck there” is a flat-out snobby thing to say. It’s possible to look at the reality of these places without being absolutely unbearably smug about it.
Some of the “successful” kids leave town and go to college. some of the successful kids go to college but don’t leave town- they stay and they’re teachers and nurses and managers and small business people- and some of the successful kids don’t go to college at all.
The group of people who don’t leave town yet go to college alone is huge- they go to community colleges or they commute and they live at home because they can’t afford to attend school away, or they don’t want to.
I know this an old trope by the Right this “elite” smear and it’s mostly bullshit but honestly I think liberals set themselves up for it with this “truth-telling”. People are complicated, and so are communities. Scolding these people for their perceived “unsuccessfulness” is as unbearable as David Brooks opining on the “urban poor”.
Jeffro
@schrodinger’s cat:
I chuckled from the sidelines at that one…
redshirt
@Villago Delenda Est:
This is what bugs me most about the Berners. While I can see some of their points and agree with a large percentage of their viewpoints, the fact that they seem to be utterly unconcerned with the danger at our doorstep and in some cases would even welcome it in order to “heighten the contradictions” is appalling to me.
The danger is very, very real, and it’s nearly existential. Policy debates among liberals need to be set aside for the time being until we can be sure we’ve put these monsters in the ground.
Ruckus
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Possibly.
I’d argue on the Skill saw, I’ve used a few which were absolute crap and not in any way worth fixing or saving. Now they may be better crap than the others on the market so in comparison they are good.
Kirby vacuum cleaners. We had one when I was a kid. It worked ok but it didn’t last longer than any others I’ve owned and the $100 Hoover I own now does a better job.
We’ve asked for better products, but what does that mean? Lower cost or better working or easier/cheaper to repair? There are better products on the market in almost every category you can name, but not all products in any category are better or cheaper or easier to repair. We have a larger population than 40 yrs ago, how many of us can purchase products that cost the same percentage of income as they did then? If we don’t create products that people can afford we won’t sell anything and if we don’t sell anything we will put more people out of work. That Hoover vacuum is not worth repairing but neither is the one that costs 2 1/2 times more and works maybe 5% better and lasts 5-10% longer.
We make trade offs in both production and purchasing because that’s what stagnant wages does to the economy.
Daulnay
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
Try this: Charting Wage Stagnation
Take a look at figure 2, and note that the 8% increase from ’73, not ’80. Note the long trough from ’80 to ’08, and also that the only gains over that period were during Democratic administrations, including Clinton’s.
Also notice that the slope of the productivity trend line doesn’t change, and that even though there was some improvement in the Clinton years, it was still a much shallower slope than the productivity line.
Calming Influence
@Daulnay: Good comparison, and equally frightening.
Those who fail to to learn from history should be horsewhipped, and I’d do it if I had a horse.
Renie
@Ruckus: That’s interesting analysis but I don’t think it applies to washers and dryers. I just had to replace both, the washer had lasted me only 6 years but the dryer was almost 18 years old (and I have a family of four). When buying the new ones the guy at the store was honest and said most are now made in China and if they last 6-8 years you are lucky. I purposely stayed away from ones with all the gizmos cuz like you said all the digital parts make for a lot of repairs which add up. I do think a lot of the American made stuff from years ago was better.
Brachiator
@philadelphialawyer:
That was not quite my question. It would, however, be interesting to know more (instead of guessing or speculating) about Trump supporters. income v education, marital status, etc
The lazy image of an angry, uneducated white guy doesn’t tell us much. If most of them are married, I would like to know why their wives are apparently not Trump supporters to the same degree.
Renie
Anyone else here live in the NYC metro area? With so much rain coming from the mid-west why is it passing us and going north? This 90/100 degree weather for the last several days is becoming so oppressive! Can’t even be outside for any length of time.
Kay
I wish someone would study how Trump’s campaign is 100% about Trump’s campaign. It’s remarkable. The goal of Trump’s campaign is to be “Trump’s campaign”- better, the same, like the primary, whatever. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen- they have completely lost the point of this exercise.
Daulnay
@schrodinger’s cat:
Not exactly, what I said (or was trying to) is that the current behavior of the 1%ers (sitting on their money) resembles the theoretical behavior of people in a liquidity trap.
waysel
@philadelphialawyer: Do they all have Fox News and/ or talk radio addiction in common?
Daulnay
@Schlemazel:
What the economic statistics show (take a look at the charts I referenced, read the larger article), is that the long decline started around ’80. There’s a clear rise in wages from the mid to late ’70s under Ford and Carter.
Ruckus
@philadelphialawyer:
OK your numbers are better than mine.
Your own chart above is the essence of the problem. The top quintile growth is 76% and the third is 23%. And you don’t understand my point? That person in the third has made less than 1/3 the progress that the first has. He hasn’t gotten wealthier in comparison to those above him, he has regressed. And he isn’t doing all that much better than the level below him. To him he has been working hard but he has less to show for it. It’s a dream concept, reality is that he is fine, as you state. He is better than so many that it boggles the mind that he can think he is a failure, because he really isn’t. But in his mind he is losing. And he can not understand why. It’s because trickle down is not an economic theory, it is getting pissed on and thinking it is raining.
Kay
He’s enjoying himself on his new job, which is his campaign! It’s like they’re too dumb to get past the first step.
“I am truly enjoying myself while interviewing for jobs, despite what people say about me”
Baud
@Kay: I enjoyed running. It’s a blast.
redshirt
@waysel: I bet Fox News is a very common denominator.
Have you ever known a wingnut not stuck at the teat of that hate machine?
Daulnay
@philadelphialawyer:
The dismantling of our economic and regulatory system didn’t really take off until the Reagan years, even though some of it started under Carter. Choosing where to start measuring matters, of course. Are you really suggesting that it doesn’t?
Kay
I also think it’s a mistake to say “they want manufacturing jobs” back. They don’t care about “manufacturing jobs”. They want decent jobs with consistently rising incomes so they’re not falling back. Not huge gains- just enough to stay even. If you told them “those are service jobs now” they would be happy to do those. It isn’t the sector. It’s the characteristics of the jobs.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Ruckus: Sure, there are trade-offs.
My dad had a Hoover vacuum (a ball-shaped thing that rode on its own exhaust like a hovercraft) that he bought in the ’60s. As far as I know, he still has it and it still works fine. We bought a $200+ Hoover upright from Kohl’s a few years ago that in principle was much better (stronger suction, better exhaust filtration), but it disintegrated the first time we used it (some plastic bits in the motor broke). We returned it. :-/ The last vacuum we bought was a Riccar from a vacuum dealer. It’s been fine (though I did have to replace the impeller), but it cost over $500…
Printers are much more capable now than in the LJ-II days (higher resolution, faster, much more energy efficient), but they’re also much more fragile.
Even when it comes to things as mundane as shoes, it seems like we’re headed the wrong direction. It seems rare for a pair of shoes to last me more than 6 months these days when they would have lasted years 20 years ago (and been resoleable, also too).
I’m all in favor of progress, but too often the bean counters destroy reliability in the quest to squeeze another few pennies out of the cost. HP understood that reliability and preserving HP’s good name was vital to the health of the company. Too many companies these days don’t understand that – they’re eating their seed corn and don’t seem to care.
Cheers,
Scott.
Calming Influence
I think one difficulty in trying to categorize the “average” Trump follower is the failure to recognize that probably significant percentage of them are simply “authoritarian followers”. Regardless of their economic, educational, or social background, some personalities are just attracted to authoritarians. AndTrump is very typically authoritarian.
(google: “Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians”. Read his seminal research online, free.)
Kay
@Baud:
A lot of people do what he does “stupid government, stupid media” but they know on some level that goes nowhere. Not him. He thought that was enough. I just don’t think he’s that smart. That’s the fundamental problem here. He’s pretty average.
Ruckus
@Renie:
Better is a relative term. What is better? Is it the cost? And if it is what would the cost be to build that 1960 washer, in both building and operating costs? Is it how long it lasts? We have a washer dryer in our apt that is 11-12 yrs old. Still works fine and there are 3 adults who use it every week. What it does? A washer/dryer is pretty self explanatory in function but what about power/water usage? Here in the left coast we are in a major drought situation, using too much water is a real issue. Might not be as much somewhere else. So what is better? I think that most consumer products are better in some way than they were 30 or 40 yrs ago. Some of them we didn’t even have then, smartphones for example. Are they better? Offer to take them away and see how that goes. And yet we now have traffic “accidents” because of cell phones. Is that better?
Kay
@Baud:
It’s like those people who say “350 million people and we got these two to choose from!”
It was never 350 million. Let’s be honest about that. It was maybe 100. He never belonged in the 100. I’ll never be an astronaut! That’s okay!
Baud
@Kay: He just throws out memes regardless of the substance behind them. He is the perfect twitter candidate.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Ultraviolet Thunder: Not that I can solder worth a damn, but I notice that my CRT TV from circa 1999 is useless to watch sports in. I swear the folks who produce sporting events are only doing it for modern, big TV’s. All the players and chyrons look a lot smaller on the screen than in 2000. (And I’m comparing standard def signal feed in each case.)
Good conversation about electronics and entertainment $. Also, I read that the last company making VHS machines is quitting that item. There’s a timeline of things which are not strictly obsolete as much as not systematically functional. How long before one cannot buy VHS blanks without a specialty order?
In my defense I got it repaired, by a guy who runs a little shop by himself, about 2006. I haven’t since asked him what he can fix on an LCD TV.
schrodinger's cat
@Daulnay: OK I can agree with that.
Kay
@Baud:
Here’s what I want out of Donald Trump. I want Republicans to lose the bet they made. I want them to get the worst of all worlds, because they made decisions, and those decisions were about risk/damage avoidance. I want them to get the full downside- the Party brand is garbage AND they enrage their base AND they lose the Presidency.
That seems fair to me.
Baud
@Kay: Didn’t they do that in 2008?
Kay
@Baud:
Am I enjoying watching Republican Chamber of Commerce lawyers here realizing they will lose the Supreme Court for a generation? Yes, completely. They’re getting the full extent of the possible catastrophe now.
schrodinger's cat
@Calming Influence: There is a strong correlation between Trumpers and those who believe that Obama is a Muslim.
lollipopguild
@raven: Does the Green Jello come with banana slices?
redshirt
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: It’s probably just my perspective, but I feel like HP used to be rock solid in quality, then sometime around 2005 or so everything went to crap and for the most part has remained there. In 2006 I bought a $1000 fax/printer/copier for an Admin Assistant and it would only receive like 50% of faxes, and after extensive troubleshooting HP said it was too advanced for older fax machines to talk to. Huh.
I returned it for a Ricoh.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: The difference between 2008 and now is that the cray cray candidate is heading the ticket instead of just being the VP.
Baud
@Kay: Yes. People on the left really don’t grok the damage that a conservative court can inflict. It’s really remarkable.
redshirt
@Kay: Your words to FSM’s ears, Kay.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat: I was speaking about the W. presidency.
raven
@lollipopguild: Nothing solid.
Daulnay
@redshirt:
I agree, it’s very real. But not nearly existential — we’re already at existential. However, policy debates cannot be set aside, we have to fix the problems in order to put the monsters back in the ground. Do not mistake what I’m saying — absolutely vote for Hillary! But we’re not going to be able to put the monster down without fixing the cause, the current economic system. That’s going to take dismantling or radically altering the neo-liberal pro-business policies.
Daulnay
@redshirt:
That’s the Carly effect. She merged HP and Compaq in 2002.
J R in WV
@catclub: Nashville had a sudden, completely unexpected flood not long ago. There was a huge rock quarry, and one of the flooding streams overflowed into the giant pit, which filled up in the time it takes me to write about it!
All that equipment, crushers, trucks, loaders, belts, all submerged under a couple of hundred feet of flood water. I saw video from a news copter, the quickness of the huge pit filling up was astounding.
Last June, here in WV, same thing, houses that never flooded, underwater. Rivers running down main street in towns that thought they understood their hydrology. Now in Baton Rouge… A couple of months ago in Texas.
Surprised? Climate change, right?
redshirt
@Daulnay: I agree in the long term – after 2020 and a Democratic realignment that undoes corrupt Republican gerrymandering. By that point, we’ll have a solid liberal Supreme Court, a Democratic President over the past 12 years, and hopefully Democratic Congress. At that point, I’m all for intra-party debates over the issues.
But now, today? HELL NO. We all need to come together 100% and utterly thrash Trump and every Republican running for office. There’s no room for dissension among allies.
Calming Influence
@schrodinger’s cat: Wait, are you suggesting that Obama’s not a muslim?!? Then what was with the terrorist fist bump he gave Michelle?
Ruckus
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
And where are they now?
I don’t disagree that some products are crap. We always had crap products. But today the ability to manufacture cheaper and still good is less per unit than it was. The ability to manufacture better is also there but you are correct that cost cutting can hurt the quality. But not cost cutting can hurt the sales, as not as many of us can afford the greater cost of better in all ways. Something has to give. And this goes along with our other current theme in this thread, wages and what we want vs the cost of that. That cost of production per unit is huge so the number of units must compensate. Companies can not produce at a loss. An issue of the wage theme is that the increase in costs has not gone to the majority of purchasers but to the top tier. Products are better, depending on how you define better.
Daulnay
@redshirt:
Fine. You adopt my positions?
lollipopguild
@Kay: I agree with you 110%. I want to hear them wailing on Twitter.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@ThresherK (GPad):
I don’t watch TV so our 2001 Trinitron has about 500 movie hours on it. lady Thunder got a LCD for her office and watches something on that.
I should have been clearer about old electronics. Audio stuff from the ’60s is still fully functional because AM, FM and phono haven’t changed, and that’s all they did. Later gear that incorporated Video went obsolete rapidly because that complex tech was still evolving. Still is. Obsolescence drives the upgrade replacement cycle instead of durability requiring replacement. And I don’t recall why I started that line of thought in the first place.
redshirt
@Daulnay: Also, I disagree that the current threat is not existential. Were Trump to win, I don’t know what happens to our country after that.
I would not have said the same thing in 2012 about Romney. While he would have sucked, he still would have governed. He wouldn’t have resorted to pure fascism. Trump will and who knows what else.
redshirt
@Daulnay: If they are “Vote against Republicans at every and any opportunity”, yes, 100%.
Daulnay
@redshirt:
Sorry I was unclear. I was disagreeing about the nearly, not the existential. We’re past nearly.
Davebo
@redshirt:
Be honest, gerrymandering isn’t just a Republican thing. Consolidating power crosses political boundaries.
Daulnay
@redshirt:
I agree with voting against Republicans 100%, but Democrats really need to be for things rather than just against Republicans.
redshirt
@Daulnay: That’s the only issue I care about – defeating Republicans.
I’m a proud single issue voter.
ThresherK
@Ultraviolet Thunder: “Obsolecence drives the upgrade cycle”, yep. I have read that AM radio (which isn’t going great guns as a way for broadcasters to make $) may not be analog for much longer anyway.
(And, yes, I did have a crystal radio set kit when I was a tyke.)
redshirt
@Davebo: One side is inclusive, the other exclusive. They are not the same.
lollipopguild
@redshirt: If there is no Trump nuclear war with China or Country to be named later, he will rapidly take the country into national martial law. No more elections. Trump for life.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: It gave us President Obama. This time its like 2008 all over again with an even dumber and uglier version of Palin heading the ticket.
Calming Influence
@schrodinger’s cat: But seriously, again – authoritarian followers. “Just tell me what to believe. ” Rush Limbaugh: “I’ll tell you what to think.”
The things they believe are, in the analysis, inconsequential; it’s their willingness, even eagerness, to believe what they’re told that sets them apart from people who, put simply, try to make up their own minds.
apocalipstick
@Baud:
He was a big support of GW Bush and declared anyone who voted for Gore to be an idiot.
redshirt
@lollipopguild: Exactly. The stakes for this election are unlike any previous.
Davebo
@redshirt:
OK, whatever helps you sleep at night.
muddy
@ThresherK: Want another? I’m guessing yours did not cost like that though!
Chyron HR
@Daulnay:
I don’t think rhythmically chanting “Neo-Liberal” counts as a “position”, per se.
redshirt
@Davebo: Yeah, gerrymandering’s been keeping me up bro.
J R in WV
@Daulnay:
Hillary plans to raise taxes on the top income Americans and use that money in an infrastructure building project that will employ hundreds of thousands of Americans in good-paying union construction jobs, high-tech communications jobs, environmental clean-up jobs, etc.
In what world is this “neoliberal” – however you define that word?
Have you ever spent time reading about Hillary’s plans? They’re at hillaryclinton.com/plans, where you can learn what the difference is between Hillary Clinton and “The Donald”, Trump.
The more you write, the stupider you sound.
Earl
@philadelphialawyer: No, real income is a joke. Look at the cpi calculations. The inflation-adjusted costs of two markers of the middle class — education and housing — have skyrocketed. But hey, you can buy a giant fucking tv and a new washing machine every year, so we’re cool, right?
Also, read _High Wire_ by Peter Gosselin. Massive amounts of risk have been transferred within the last 50 years from society (govt and corps) to individuals in almost every area of our lives. eg retirement: defined benefits retirement plans to 401ks; invest in the wrong thing and you’re fucked. Working: unions have mostly vanished. Republicans plus neoliberal democrats ala Clinton (oh I forgot, she’s been a “progressive” for a least 5 minutes, and has opposed the TPP ever since she decided she wanted to win the election. Said opposition will last about 90 more days) have supervised offshoring millions of jobs, with no real hope for people whose industries have moved. Pick the wrong industry when you’re 18-22, and you can end up 45 years old and utterly unemployable. Education: costs have skyrocketed, and a wave of credentialism requires college degrees for work that comes nowhere close to requiring them. Health care: Obamacare has changed some of this, but even so, costs have massively increased. I’m not doing justice to Gosselin’s thesis; just get the book.
J R in WV
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
I would be interested in a classic McIntosh tube amp.
I have an early solid state Mc, have had it back to the factory twice as power output transistors have burned out, now it’s on the shelf. I have a Pioneer Receiver that sounds good but is really hard to use as the controls aren’t well labeled and the labels aren’t contrasty.
I also have a B&O turntable, was great, cartridges no longer available, of course B&O didn’t use a standard cartridge size/type, they invented their own, and don’t make them any more.
Fortunately, new turntables appear to be coming onto the market. Along with vinyl records!
ThresherK
@muddy: No it did not cost that much. I’ve been to the VCS and I know how they stay in business.
@srv: Worst. Simpsons Analogy. Ever.
J R in WV
@Daulnay:
Well, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about in terms of economics or politics.
Troll, that’s what you are, trying to act like an expert, but who misuses common terms of the art. Go away now, please.
waysel
@redshirt: The power of Fox to breed discontent among those who may have previously been ‘happy enough’ had not really been clear to me ’til today. I’d always pictured their audience as already being diehard RWNJs , but their capacity to sway the previously disinterested is most horrible indeed.
redshirt
@waysel: I don’t think the negative effects of Fox News can be overstated over the past 20 years.
For a test, note how often Wingnuts you’re familiar with use the same phrasing, or harp on the same issue. They’re getting marching orders from Fox and they are loyal soldiers.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Daulnay:
I guess you’re unfamiliar with the term “stagflation”.
Suzanne
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I think what this discussion is not accounting for is a much more developed sense among younger generations to want to express themselves through branding, style, and consumption choices. Especially in the apparel sector, the dollars are going away from established brands and higher-quality items to “fast fashion” and relatively disposable items that mimic those found in luxury fashion magazines. I used to work in marketing, and the big trend there is that middle-class and working-class consumers are much more aware of luxury brands than they used to be, and they want to own something similar stylistically if they can’t afford the real thing. This attitude is not confined to clothes—it very much shows up in cars, home goods, etc. People buy disposable things because they want to replace them with something on trend later and therefore large investments in quality are not worth it sometimes. Clothing stores used to have four seasons of clothes—now they have a new season every six weeks on average. Styles change faster than they used to, as well.
FlipYrWhig
Whoever decided to make the word “neoliberal” this year’s shibboleth needs a swift kick in the cojones.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Suzanne: Ah. Good points. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
waysel
@Suzanne: Yup. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”.
leeleeFL
@Frankensteinbeck: Oh, well played!
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Ruckus:
HP is a bit of a special case. They helped create Silicon Valley. They created lots of the test equipment that EEs grew up with, in addition to popularizing laser printers for PCs. They made their own microprocessors for their minicomputers and were one of the first to get in the IBM-compatible PC business in a big way. They had a very strong internal research lab. Their management decided that research and minicomputers and test equipment were loser businesses, so they decided to try to be a big player in PCs and continue to milk their
printerink business.They spun off their test equipment business (Agilent). Their merger with Compaq didn’t seem to make much sense while costing a fortune. I don’t know how their enterprise business is doing, but their “wide electric green rectangular box” TV ads seem to me to be a waste of money.
What should they have done differently? Dunno. But throwing away HP’s history and all of the benefits of its culture seemed to be very short sighted to me.
You’re right that businesses have to adapt or die, and competing with companies that have 1/10th (or less) of the labor costs of US companies is very difficult. The main thing I would counter that with, though, is that our economic system is the way it is due to choices we make. If we (the US) can have anti-dumping rules for steel and tires, I don’t see why we can’t have them for computers and TVs. Our advantages are a well trained workforce, a modern infrastructure system, a wide variety of raw materials available at low prices, stable laws, ubiquitous banking, low levels of corruption, and a large internal market. Trying to ignore those advantages and reducing production costs to “labor is too expensive” is short-sighted.
People don’t exist to serve some “Free Market Economy”, a country’s economic system exists to serve the people. It’s gotten too out of balance in the US and we need to get it in to better balance. Wages need to rise, taxes on the wealthy need to rise, and we need to invest more in things that will make our people smarter, healthier, more creative, and more productive in the future. Chasing quarterly earnings upside surprises doesn’t do that. Trading stocks and bonds 5 milliseconds faster than the other guy doesn’t do that, sending our most talented mathematicians to Wall Street doesn’t do that. Government has a role to play in helping to guide the economy to benefit the majority of the people.
We have rules about auto production (e.g. parts have to be available for some number of years (10?)). We could have similar rules for lots of things. We could have rules against disposable phones and electronics (to minimize life-cycle waste and power requirements, for example). We have choices. Yeah, prices may go up for some things. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that people wouldn’t be able to afford them. If everyone plays by the same rules, there are still ways to compete for customers and find ways to reduce costs. Ford boomed after raising wages to $5/day. ;-)
My too long $0.02. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodinger's cat
@Ruckus: My anecdata is based on machinists and shop guys in the physics lab. My neighbor who used work as a roofer in the summer and my landlord who had retired after teaching shop in a Community College. This was in upstate NY and Maine.
ETA: The Republicans I knew were the country club kind. Mostly business owners. Many have become Democrats after W years like Mr. Cole. The Rush Limbaugh listening person I know calls herself an independent and used to teach Yoga. I think people are complicated not everyone falls into neat categories and boxes, like the media pretends they do.
GHayduke
@John B Waldron:
Yup. He lost the brother of a friend (republican cop, military) after the Khan debacle.
Tripod
Fuck the good old days.
randy khan
@Shalimar:
Willis gave Hillary $2,700 in June. So probably not a current Trump supporter.
Anne Laurie
@Kay:
I think most of our differences here depend on the angles of our perception. I see the Trump voters defining “successful” as being like Trump — getting out of the ‘neighborhood’, doing something that makes lots of money from the (perceived) VIP category. Not being a good nurse, or a dedicated teacher, or the contractor everyone trusts, but a doctor or an MBA or just that “one guy from our high school” who’s working in Silicon Valley or Wall Street — someone who buzzes through to check on the parents every second Thanksgiving, but apart from a vague impression of affluence nobody’s 100% sure what they actually do for a living. There’s lots of local ways to be successful, but part of the American Dream for the last hundred years at least has been expressed as “How do you keep them down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paree?”… the “best” (luckiest, most ambitious) kids want to get out, to go be with other lucky motivated people, not hanging with the high school gang that remembers all the most embarrassing stories about one’s youth. Maybe part of the curdled Trump Vote is just disillusionment, now that there’s less media/political support of True American Heartland Values — family! faith! community! — and more constant reminders that “everybody” has a reality tv show (or at least a following on Instagram / Twiiter / Pinterest) and yet 99.9% of those “everybodies” are not like US?
To use a different highfaluting metaphor, Trump is Tom Sawyer grown up. When Twain was an immensely popular celebrity writer/speaker, audiences would ask why he didn’t write more about heroic Tom Sawyer’s adult adventures. In his letters, Twain said he hated to keep disappointing them, but he though Sawyer would’ve grown up to be the most successful businessman in Hannibal, MO — someone who never travelled farther than St. Louis, and who never missed a chance to denigrate “troublemakers” like his childhood friends when giving speeches at the local mens’ clubs…