[y66]

Strange that kenberg's congressman, Jamie Raskin, who got his law degree at Harvard (magna cum laude) and taught constitutional law at American University, was not among the 7 impeachment managers named by Pelosi today.

[y66]

From Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg:

Quote

The most disappointing feature of the most recent jobs report is that wages did not grow very much, even though the U.S. economy is at or near full employment. For 2019, wages grew at 2.9% — but, since inflation is about 2%, real wage growth is about 1%. That’s hardly impressive. The last decade was the second-slowest for payroll growth since the 1940s.

If the roots of this slow wage growth were better understood, there might be better ideas about how to boost it. Unfortunately, there are few easy fixes, and at this point there is not much the Fed can do about it.

For large groups of U.S. workers, wage growth has been slow for decades. Inflation-adjusted average hourly wages, for instance, have seen only marginal improvement since the 1970s. Of course, those numbers are somewhat misleading because they do not pick up the growing dollar value of employer-supplied health care benefits, or of unpriced internet services, such as time spent on Facebook. Still, if the past numbers are unimpressive, it shouldn’t be surprising that the current numbers are too. The productivity performance of the American economy has been subpar for a long time.

A further reason for sluggish wages is that employers have more options. To keep wages from rising past a certain level, employers will consider either automating or outsourcing the work abroad, or perhaps importing comparable goods. So to some extent global wage growth — which has been robust — has substituted for domestic wage growth.

A closely related reason for slow wage growth has to do with changes in the composition of firms. The growing, dynamic firms in the U.S. economy are those with low labor costs as a low share of revenue. This is easiest to see in the rapidly scaling tech firms, where software enables the company to reach and serve the entire world with relatively few workers. Highly labor-intensive firms (nursing homes, say) find it harder to grow at the same pace, and so labor’s share in the U.S. economy has tended to fall for that reason.

Yet another reason for sluggish wages is that more companies have been experimenting with options and equity rewards, to encourage workers to add more value. Much of the compensation in Bay Area start-ups, for instance, comes in the form of equity. The substitution of equity gains for labor income is all the more potent in a bull market, as there is now.

What then to do to spur wage growth? Since most of these forces are long-term and structural in nature, they are not easy to change.

One possible ploy is to encourage more business investment, so as to boost wages and worker productivity. That is good economics, but it is not easy to pull off. Interest rates already are low, and the aging of the world population will reverse the “savings glut” and make capital more scarce over the next several decades.

Another strategy is to increase societal and governmental support of science, to boost discovery and raise the long-term economic growth rate. That too is a good idea, but it takes a long time for scientific breakthroughs to translate into higher living standards.

The main effective remedy for sluggish wage growth, then, may be reduce the cost of living through lower prices for homes and apartments, health care, and higher education. If workers demand higher wages at the bargaining table, employers might respond by outsourcing or automating. But if workers get higher net real wages because housing costs are falling, employers are less likely to respond with internal adjustments.

In other words, the frontier areas for overcoming wage stagnation are several-fold. First is a greater freedom to build, so that housing supply can rise and prices can fall. That also would enable more upward mobility by easing moves to America’s more productive (but also more expensive) regions. Second are steps to lower the cost of medical care through greater competition and price transparency. Third, American higher education is hardly at its optimum point of efficiency, innovation and affordability.

If those sectors displayed some of the dynamism and innovativeness that marks America’s tech sector, the combination of declining prices and rising quality could give living standards a boost. And since rent, health care and tuition tend to be higher shares of the incomes of poorer people, those changes would help poorer people the most.

To repeat: It’s a hard problem. But there’s a pretty simple principle that should guide policy: The longer that wage stagnation continues, the more urgent these microeconomic issues become.

Increase housing supply, reduce healthcare costs and reduce the cost of higher education as part of a strategy to increase the standard of living of lower income workers? Good ideas but surely Mr. Cowen is joking if he thinks we don't also need to increase workers' share of total income by some combination of (1) implement policies that increase the bargaining power of workers; implement policies that increase competition which would spur innovation, reduce prices and decrease the bargaining power of monopolies; (3) rollback the Trump tax cut, which has not spurred innovation, and provide a worker tax credit to everyone making less than $40,000 a year; and (4) provide high quality child care.

[y66]

From The Case For Elizabeth Warren by Ezra Klein at Vox:

Quote

Warren went from being a public school teacher in 1970 to a Harvard Law professor in 1995. She published The Two-Income Trap in 2004. She was named to the TARP oversight board in 2008. She became director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010. She won her Senate seat in 2012. And now she’s a few good breaks in the primary away from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020. She has had an extraordinary, once-in-a-generation political rise, and it speaks to her once-in-a-generation combination of political talents.

That isn’t to say Warren would be ready for everything the presidency could throw at her on day one. While her foreign policy experience compares favorably to that of, say, Obama or Bill Clinton when they ran for president — she serves on the Senate Armed Forces Committee — she doesn’t have Biden’s longtime relationships with foreign leaders. But then, no president is ever fully prepared for the job, because no human being can possibly hold expertise on everything the US presidency requires.

What Warren’s career has shown, however, is a crucial meta-ability given the vast challenges posed by the presidency: She has repeatedly proven her ability to master complex topics, comprehend impenetrable systems, run tricky bureaucracies, recruit and retain excellent staff, build unexpected alliances, persuade the public of what she’s learned, and turn those learnings into power and policy.

The case for Warren, then, is clear: She is simply the best person for the job.

re: the Medicare-for-all debate

Quote

Even within the context of the current system’s limits, Warren shows unusual attention to political economy. Her path on Medicare-for-all has been telling in this regard. She began by endorsing Sanders’s bill and, in key debates, explaining and defending it with force and specificity.

In fielding the questions and attacks, she recognized that a few were particularly potent: How will you pay for it? Will you raise middle-class taxes to do so? And how will you pass it, given Democratic opposition in the House and Senate, and polling data and past experience that suggest the public won’t trust the government to change the health care system that dramatically, that quickly?

So first, Warren came out with a plan that showed how she’d pay for it without raising middle-class taxes, at least if you bought her economic assumptions. Second, she came out with a sequencing plan: First, she would pass a bill, using the 51-vote budget reconciliation process, to expand Medicare’s benefits and open the program to everyone over age 50; expand Medicaid eligibility; strengthen the Affordable Care Act; and create a public option with generous benefits, universal eligibility, automatic enrollment, and free coverage for anyone under the age of 18 or making less than 200 percent of the poverty line.

Warren’s reasoning here was clear and compelling: Unlike Medicare-for-all, this could plausibly pass quickly, and the immediate benefits people received would build confidence in, and support for, passing the remaining pieces of Medicare-for-all in the third year of her presidency.

Warren’s careful navigation of the Medicare-for-all debate has widely been considered a misstep for her campaign, as her admission of the political realities alienated single-payer diehards who don’t want to admit the need for any initial compromises, while her endorsement of Sanders’s underlying bill and her specificity on financing opened her up to attack from the moderates. But what’s actually happening here speaks to Warren’s strengths: She’s developed a more politically realistic proposal and path than what Sanders offered, and a more ambitious and compelling vision than what the moderates have proposed.

The truth of the Medicare-for-all debate is that it is extremely unlikely any president will pass a single-payer bill, but Warren is the only candidate to propose an even glancingly plausible strategy. As has been a hallmark of her campaign thus far, she’s taken the systemwide barriers to passing single-payer seriously, and has worked to come up with answers. Presidential campaigns reward uncut political optimism pumped right into the electorate’s veins, but carefully navigating a system designed to frustrate change is what a president actually has to do.

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2020-January-15, 17:58, said:

From The Case For Elizabeth Warren by Ezra Klein at Vox:


re: the Medicare-for-all debate

Browsing through this, i linked over to
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/two-income-trap-elizabeth-warren-book

Very interesting. A person writing out some thoughts without worrying about whether it will win an election for her. Very interesting.

[cherdano]

 kenberg, on 2020-January-15, 20:11, said:

Very interesting. A person writing out some thoughts without worrying about whether it will win an election for her. Very interesting.

You can relate to that?

[barmar]

 y66, on 2020-January-15, 11:39, said:

Strange that kenberg's congressman, Jamie Raskin, who got his law degree at Harvard (magna cum laude) and taught constitutional law at American University, was not among the 7 impeachment managers named by Pelosi today.

As has been said many times, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one.

And Schiff was Harvard Law.

[kenberg]

 cherdano, on 2020-January-16, 07:50, said:

You can relate to that?

Oh, I dunno. But people speak differently when they are saying what they think rather than running for office.

[y66]

Evan Osnos at the New Yorker summarizes the phase 1 trade deal with China thusly:

Quote

With a Presidential election a year away, Trump’s trade war was becoming a political liability. The Chinese side was in no rush to resolve it. In September, an American billionaire investor told me that he had advised the President to show progress, if he wanted a strong economy on Election Day. “You have to have a deal done by the end of the year,” the investor said. “If you get a deal in March or April, by then the economy’s already gone.” The next month, negotiators abruptly announced what they called “phase one” of a trade deal. The terms, finalized in December, called for both sides to cut tariffs; China also agreed to buy more farm exports, energy, and manufactured goods from the U.S., in return for which Trump would suspend upcoming tariffs. On Twitter, Trump had hailed it as “the greatest and biggest deal ever made for our Great Patriot Farmers in the history of our Country.” But the truce did not resolve the core disputes, such as technology transfer, and, outside the White House, it was mostly seen as the end of a wasteful stunt. “Trump was looking for any possible excuse not to put on the tariffs that he had threatened,” Kroeber said, “so he got a promise from the Chinese to buy soybeans and some other stuff, and he packaged this.”

The end of a wasteful stunt or a temporary truce in an era of increasing tension between a superpower on the rise and a superpower led by a buffoon for whom strategic thinking and diplomacy are anathema?

[Winstonm]

When the courts, aided by the Justice Department, and the U.S. Senate, due to power divisions not partisanship, both allow a criminal president to rule without constraints, what part of this country is left to save - or even worth saving? Is it time to scrap this experiment in self-governance and start over?

I think it's important to understand where we are. First, we have decimated the antitrust laws to the point where only a few corporate entities control what is consumed - this is not much different than the company stores back in the coal mining heydays. Second, we have eliminated the Fairness Doctrine and thereby allowed unfettered propaganda to be broadcast 24/7 as "news". Third, we have stripped the public schools of their money, thereby ensuring generation after generation of poorly-educated lower classes.

And then we elected president a demagogue conman who is intent on raiding the treasury for his personal wealth concerns and doing whatever it takes to stay in power.

The U.S. is broken and broken in a huge way - which is why Trump's populism con worked. Had he been even half the populist he professed to be, he would have been hailed as a great president. Instead, he is nothing but a crook and mobster wannabe.

And this is the power of the liberal message from the likes of Warren, Sanders, AOC, and others who are more genuinely populist - their message is: it is not time to go small. It is time to go big or go home.

Personally, I think they are correct. The only way out of this morass is to energize the liberals to fundamentally change the way this country works, while waiting for the con sold to the old white Christian coalition to collapse as that older generation dies out.

[PassedOut]

‘You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals

Quote

Hanging prominently on one of the walls is The Peacemakers, a painting that depicts an 1865 Civil War strategy session with President Abraham Lincoln and his three service chiefs — Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. One hundred fifty-​­two years after Lincoln hatched plans to preserve the Union, President Trump’s advisers staged an intervention inside the Tank to try to preserve the world order.

By that point, six months into his administration, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed by gaping holes in Trump’s knowledge of history, especially the key alliances forged following World War II. Trump had dismissed allies as worthless, cozied up to authoritarian regimes in Russia and elsewhere, and advocated withdrawing troops from strategic outposts and active theaters alike.

Trump organized his unorthodox worldview under the simplistic banner of “America First,” but Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn feared his proposals were rash, barely considered, and a danger to America’s superpower standing. They also felt that many of Trump’s impulsive ideas stemmed from his lack of familiarity with U.S. history and, even, where countries were located. To have a useful discussion with him, the trio agreed, they had to create a basic knowledge, a shared language.

So on July 20, 2017, Mattis invited Trump to the Tank for what he, Tillerson, and Cohn had carefully organized as a tailored tutorial. What happened inside the Tank that day crystallized the commander in chief’s berating, derisive and dismissive manner, foreshadowing decisions such as the one earlier this month that brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran. The Tank meeting was a turning point in Trump’s presidency. Rather than getting him to appreciate America’s traditional role and alliances, Trump began to tune out and eventually push away the experts who believed their duty was to protect the country by restraining his more dangerous impulses.

This article is a long, sobering read. No sensible person would work under the command of a stupid jerk like Trump for a single minute, but folks in the military have no choice. On so many levels, our serious electoral mistake needs correction.

[kenberg]

 PassedOut, on 2020-January-17, 11:31, said:

'You're a bunch of dopes and babies': Inside Trump's stunning tirade against generals


This article is a long, sobering read. No sensible person would work under the command of a stupid jerk like Trump for a single minute, but folks in the military have no choice. On so many levels, our serious electoral mistake needs correction.

Putting a "like" beside this seems inadequate.. Yes, who would work for Trump, who discuss anything with trump, who would go to dinner with trump, etc etc etc. Way beyond conservative or liberal. He is awful.

Al that being true, and largely undisputed, the Dems still need a good candidate. Who is electable? A good candidate. If that is not the correct answer, we are in deep stuff..

[y66]

re: the way out of the morass

I’m not for revolution yet. I don’t consider the goals of the GND revolutionary but that’s not how a lot of voters see it. I suspect that a big part of the way out is for more people in leadership positions in the Democratic Party to figure out how to engage voters in useful ways 365 days a year -- not just every four years -- and get them on board with their agenda *before* putting out election eve policy positions that scare a lot of voters off.

[Winstonm]

If we're not careful, the free market will kill us all.

Quote

Shrinking investment and a lack of innovation in the development of new antibiotics is "undermining efforts to combat drug-resistant infections," the World Health Organization warned on Friday, citing two of its new reports.

Quote

"Unlike drugs that treat chronic conditions and are taken for years, antibiotics save lives, but are taken for just a week or two, diminishing their profitability for drugmakers," the NYT's Andrew Jacobs writes.

[y66]

From Dwight Garner's NYT review of “A Very Stable Genius” by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig whose book excerpt appears in the WaPo story that passedout linked:

Quote

The essence of irony, Henry Fowler wrote in “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” is that it “postulates a double audience” — one that’s in on the joke, and another that isn’t. The title of Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s new book, “A Very Stable Genius,” is thus savvy marketing. It’s possible to imagine both Donald J. Trump’s detractors and his admirers eagerly grasping a copy.

The admirers will not make it past the table of contents. Among the chapter titles: “Unhinged,” “Shocking the Conscience,” “Paranoia and Pandemonium” and “Scare-a-Thon.” This verbiage makes Rucker and Leonnig’s book sound like one more enraged polemic. It isn’t. They’re meticulous journalists, and this taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic tenure in office to date.

Rucker is The Washington Post’s White House bureau chief; Leonnig is a national investigative reporter for the newspaper. Both have won Pulitzer Prizes. Their newspaper’s ominous, love-it-or-hate-it motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” “A Very Stable Genius” flicks the lights on from its first pages.

Rucker and Leonnig have composed their book, they write, out of a desire to step out of the churning news cycle and “assess the reverberations” of Trump’s presidency. The result is a chronological account of the past three years in Washington, based on interviews with more than 200 sources.

It reads like a horror story, an almost comic immorality tale. It’s as if the president, as patient zero, had bitten an aide and slowly, bite by bite, an entire nation had lost its wits and its compass.

The result of Rucker and Leonnig’s hard work is a book that runs low to the ground; it only rarely pauses for sweeping, drone-level vistas and injections of historical perspective. This is not Garry Wills or Joan Didion. They do break news, some large and some small.

An example of large news: They report that in the spring of 2017, Trump implored Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, to help him jettison the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump whines to a group of aides. Nearly every line from Trump, in “A Very Stable Genius,” is this venal.

Another example: While visiting Pearl Harbor, according to John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, Trump seemed to have no idea what had actually happened there. Throughout he is misinformed and confused while at the same time utterly certain of himself.

An example of small but nonetheless piquant news: Administration lawyers came up with a nickname for Matthew Whitaker, the former acting attorney general. They called him Mongo, after the illiterate galoot played by Alex Karras in the Mel Brooks movie “Blazing Saddles.”

There’s a brutal scene early on, during the initial staffing of Trump’s White House, concerning Michael Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser. Despite warnings about Flynn — the authors describe his “Islamophobic rhetoric, coziness with Russia and other foreign adversaries and a reliance on flimsy facts and dubious assertions” — Trump’s team made it clear he could have any job he wanted in the administration.

The authors write: “‘Oh, General Flynn, how loyal you’ve been to my father,’ Ivanka said in her distinctive breathy voice, adding something to the effect of ‘What do you want to do?’”

Before Trump had met with NATO allies, he kept glancing at Reince Priebus and pleading in front of others, in fanboy tones, “When can I meet with Putin? Can I meet with him before the inaugural ceremony?”

The authors build several stirring scenes around Tillerson’s experiences as secretary of state, and the disturbing behavior he witnessed. They provide the fullest picture to date of a now notorious July 2017 meeting in “the Tank” of the Pentagon during which military leaders and Trump’s national security team, alarmed by “gaping holes in the president’s knowledge of history and the alliances forged in the wake of World War II,” tried to give him a gentle lesson on American power.

The meeting ended after Trump exploded, saying, among other things, “You’re all losers, you don’t know how to win anymore,” and “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

At a later meeting in the White House Situation Room, Trump began speaking, not for the first time, about his desire to make a profit from the deployment of American soldiers. Tillerson had finally had enough. The authors describe the moment. The secretary of state stood, facing away from the president and toward officers and aides in the room.

“I’ve never put on a uniform, but I know this,” the authors quote Tillerson saying. “Every person who has put on a uniform, the people in this room, they don’t do it to make a buck. They did it for their country, to protect us. I want everyone to be clear about how much we as a country value their service.”

Trump grew red in the face, but saved his fire for later. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later called Tillerson, his voice unsteady with emotion, to thank him. There aren’t a lot of moments in “A Very Stable Genius” in which people do the right instead of the expedient thing. Some of these scenes may make the reader unsteady with emotion as well.

There’s a lot more here, amid the peeling wallpaper of the American experiment. Trump considered awarding himself the Medal of Freedom. He informed the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, wrongly: “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.” Photographs emerged of Colbie Holderness, one of the former White House staff secretary Rob Porter’s ex-wives, with a black eye. She said Porter gave it to her. Trump had another explanation. The authors write: “Maybe, Trump said, Holderness purposefully ran into a refrigerator to give herself bruises and try to get money out of Porter?”

There are grainy details of a physical altercation between Kelly and Corey Lewandowski. There is the belittling, by nearly everyone, of the acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney (“He’ll take whatever I offer him”; “Mick just wants to be liked.”). There is commentary about Robert Mueller’s failure to press the president for a face-to-face interview during his investigation. There are descriptions of Mike Pence as “a wax museum guy,” able to blithely absorb any amount of insanity without comment.

In his memoir “A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures,” the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee wrote that Richard Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, was “a small-bore man, over his head, and riding a bad horse.”

These words apply, one thinks while reading Rucker and Leonnig’s more than competent book, to nearly every adviser and staffer now in Trump’s orbit. The authors write: “The ineptitude came from the very top.”

[Winstonm]

 y66, on 2020-January-18, 13:55, said:

From Dwight Garner's NYT review of “A Very Stable Genius” by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig whose book excerpt appears in the WaPo story that passedout linked:

Both demoralizing nad terrifying at the same time. Terrifying? Just watch a Trump rally and know those people simply do not care.

[y66]

How 17 Outsize Portraits Rattled a Small Southern Town

Quote

Newnan, Ga., decided to use art to help the community celebrate diversity and embrace change. Not everyone was ready for what they saw.

[y66]

Lauria Schwab at The New Center argues that America’s democracy is dysfunctional, that our primary election system is a major contributor and that it's time to let parties decide who represents them, not primary voters.

[awm]

 y66, on 2020-January-19, 07:54, said:

Lauria Schwab at The New Center argues that America’s democracy is dysfunctional, that our primary election system is a major contributor and that it's time to let parties decide who represents them, not primary voters.

This seems like a terrible idea! Letting parties choose their candidates is a fine idea in a multi-party system with proportionate representation or ranked-choice voting, but a terrible idea in a country that really has a two-party system with first-past-the-post voting.

If you need more evidence, in the UK the parties decide their leaders. And they ended up with two staggeringly unpopular candidates in Corbyn and Johnson.

The problem is that many voters feel left behind by both parties. We need a government that does more to solve the problems of the non-super-rich. Given that so many districts are uncompetitive and any attempt at a third party will only hurt the 2nd choice of its voters, letting the parties choose their candidates is basically the end of democracy.

The article complains about the very unpopular Trump and Clinton in 2016, but Clinton *was* the party’s choice. And while Republican “superdelegates” wouldn’t have chosen Trump, there was a good chance they’d have chosen Jeb Bush, the brother of the last (very unpopular) Republican president. It might’ve avoided the current disastrous Trump presidency, but the stench of oligarchy and corporate money wouldn’t have been great for the long term health of the US.

[Winstonm]

 y66, on 2020-January-19, 07:54, said:

Lauria Schwab at The New Center argues that America’s democracy is dysfunctional, that our primary election system is a major contributor and that it's time to let parties decide who represents them, not primary voters.

Actually, this is a reversion. Parties did at one time choose candidates in smoke-filled back rooms. The advantage to that idea is that a small group of powerful people can eliminate demagogues like Henry Ford from making it onto the ticket - the disadvantage is that a small group of powerful people can just as easily decide that the popularity of Henry Ford makes his nomination imperative.

Our problem is not system. Our problem is the people, both voters and those who are voted into power. More democracy got us Donald Trump on the Republican ticket. Less democracy is not guaranteed to keep another demagogue off the ticket.

[y66]

Clinton was the party’s choice in 2016 but she was not the choice of a unified party. That cost her a lot of votes.

I suspect the solution is to strengthen party organizations *and* strengthen the role that voters play in shaping the party’s agenda by figuring out how to engage a representative sample of voters in ways that provide useful two-way feedback 365 days a year in every state vs once every four years in states that dominate the primaries.

Surely it's possible to create apps that help interested voters, candidates and parties understand in real time how much better or worse off they are likely to be under various policy scenarios.