Republicans are going to try to claim inequality as their issue in 2016

I've said this a bunch of times already but I'll keep saying it until somebody notices. Somebody besides Trumka, that is.

While he tussles with Obama on trade, Trumka simultaneously praises and mocks the Republican candidates for discussing income inequality. “I like the fact that they’re adopting our language and recognizing that inequality is a problem and that falling wages are a problem, even though their policies are what got us here and even though the policies they’re pushing will make things worse,” he said.

In a wide-ranging interview, Trumka praised Hillary Clinton, now the official presidential frontrunner for the Democratic party. Nonetheless, Trumka – who has headed the 56-union federation since 2009 – said labor would press her, like every other candidate, to spell out how she would raise wages for America’s badly squeezed workers.

“I find Hillary a wonderful, independent woman who is very, very smart,” Trumka said. Then in an unmistakable effort to nudge her to the left, he added: “There are people like that I wouldn’t necessarily vote for if their policies are bad. It’s about policy. It’s about what are you going to do to raise wages. It’s about what are you going to do to change the rules to help everybody and not just those at the top.”

During the mid-terms, Republican candidates began trying out some language meant to cast themselves as the party most concerned with income inequality in contrast to an elitist Democratic party run from Wall Street.   If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, this message (however hypocritical) will certainly connect with many voters. 

Meanwhile tomorrow is Fight For $15 Day.  Might be a good time to go out and count the number Republicans out agitating for actual working people.  Because when they start to co-opt the rhetoric next year, it will be helpful to remember when they weren't backing it up.

Collections racket

Last night the post-Serpas NOPD celebrated yet another Checkpoint Thursday.  Hope everybody's brake tag was up to date.

Here's another brilliant segment from the John Oliver show nobody watches except in the form of Youtube clips.



Last year Matt Taibbi published a pretty good book that treats this sort of thing to an extent.  I'd recommend that as well.

Always attack the powerless

You'll never go out of business.

In other words, while they don’t quite say it this way, the GOP budgets are rooted in the idea that one of the primary obstacles to economic opportunity and mobility is that there is too much government-engineered downward redistribution of wealth. It’s reasonable to surmise that the GOP presidential candidates implicitly share this analysis. As Paul Waldman writes, many of the candidates have flirted with the idea of a flat (i.e., less progressive) tax. Ted Cruz sees the repeal of Obamacare and a flat tax as pivotal to restoring opportunity for our children. Scott Walker is flirting with the party’s most prominent supply siders. Even Jeb Bush, who is said to be the most moderate of the bunch, tacitly premised his big economic speech on the idea that the primary driver of inequality is dependence on the federal government.

The 2016 GOP electoral strategy, believe it or not, will try to make inequality a central issue. I pointed out back in November that we actually saw a preview of this during the 2014 midterms.

Why do Republicans consider inequality a winning issue for their party?  Well, for one thing the polling says so.

People Think The Economy Is Rigged To Favor The Wealthy

Q: Do you think the U.S. economic system (generally favors the wealthy) or (is fair to most Americans)?

Generally favors the wealthy	71%
Is fair to most Americans	24%

People Think Republicans Will Fix This

Other polls show something ironic: People trust Republicans more than Democrats to fix this and make the economy favor regular people again.

An October 13 Gallup poll: “On the No. 1 issue, the economy, Republicans have more than doubled their April lead over Democrats, to 11 percentage points.”

That's easy to do when Democrats, as cozy as they are with the 1% themselves (see President Obama's support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for the latest example)  present no true alternative.

No one is blaming the super-wealthy for everyone else's diminishing standard of living. And if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for President, we can rest assured that no one will. But inequality is a real and growing problem.  So there's an opening for somebody's rhetoric to connect with voters around the issue. 

And as we've seen time and again, the Republican strategy of blaming the poors; that is blaming " downward redistribution of wealth"  is primed to be a big winner once again.  This is certainly the case in Louisiana. Take a look at this release from the  LSU public policy survey, for instance.

The public doesn't understand much about how the budget works. About 40 percent of people surveyed thought Louisiana spent more on food stamps and welfare than education, health care, prisons and transportation infrastructure. Less than one percent of the state budget goes to welfare and food stamps.

Louisiana is not exactly on outlier in this regard.  The pitiful edifice that remains of our so-called welfare state costs almost nothing compared to the the billions of dollars spent on the upward redistribution of wealth that takes place through manifold tax, trade, and labor policies all over the country.   But as long as no one is complaining about that, voters are perfectly willing to accept whatever scapegoat they are offered.  And Republicans are as eager as ever to make that offer.

BTW Public schools still failing

Maybe it seems like a small thing, but you really should appreciate the occasions when the big city papers admit this.

Nearly 10 years after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans’ infrastructure, the city still faces myriad problems, including a failing school system, broken-down streets and federal consent decrees mandated for the city’s jail and Police Department. But topping the list, according to New Orleans City Council members, are two issues: an income inequality that continues to crush the city’s poorest residents and violent crime.

It's taken a while for them to notice but the school system, even after all the "reform" and privatization, is still failing. That's progress.

Here's a recent article by Kristen Buras.  She wrote a book about the charterization movement in New Orleans. (You don't need to buy it. $125, yikes!) The new system still fails to serve its students.  But, in another way, it can be considered a success.

The CEO of Future Is Now, a charter operator in New Orleans, was paid a salary of $250,000 when John McDonogh High School, seized by Future Is Now despite community resistance, posted a performance score of 9.3 on a scale of 150. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that taxpayers received their money’s worth.

In 2012, students from various historic high schools in New Orleans that had been taken over and chartered issued a list of demands to the Recovery School District.

“A lot of money has come to New Orleans for education reform,” they protested, “but none of it benefits the children.”

Buras is speaking Monday evening at Tulane if you're interested.  

Anyway, thanks again to the Advocate for noting that the system is still failing even as an aside to a story about something else. 

That something else, by the way, was a public forum on crime and inequality held by three city councilmembers.  I don't know if they invited the others or not but Jason Williams, Nadine Ramsey, and Jared Brossett are the most vocal councilors regarding inequality.  It's probably just a coincidence that they are the three shortest tenured on the council.... right?

“Affordability is a big issue in this city,” Brossett said, citing rising property taxes and rents, which worsen the burden created by low wages paid in several industries in the city. Together, these issues make the cost of living in Orleans Parish the highest of any parish in the state, he said.

“Income inequality — I don’t need to tell y’all this. It’s vast. I mean, we were compared to Zambia, as far as income inequality,” he said. “That is ridiculous, as we are part of one of the richest and strongest nations on this planet.”

The impetus behind Brossett’s proposal, added Councilwoman Nadine Ramsey,was a disparity between white and African-American workers in New Orleans that seemed to be getting worse over time.

“It’s always interesting to me to read in magazines and news articles and in press releases about all the wonderful things that are going on in our city,” Ramsey said. “But we all know that this economic boom is not being shared across the board in all of our communities.”

This is going to be an important year with regard to these sorts of issues. It will be interesting to see if anything comes out of talks like this one.

Penalizing low wage workers

The most right wing city government in our lifetime has already obliterated the traditional civil service wall between politics and service delivery.  Now they are moving on employee pensions.  Like any right wing outfit, they'll tell you they're operating out of a sense of fiscal responsibility, but really they are about punishing people for not being wealthy enough. 

The actuary said Social Security integration could be appropriate, but it wouldn't save the city much money and it would penalize low-wage workers.

The city, like any private employer, pays for half of a worker's Social Security costs, so it's not unreasonable for the city to deduct those contributions from an employee's pension package, the actuary said, but doing so would represent a "radical change" in the plan's structure. It might not be legal to apply it to current employees, he said.

The actuary also noted that Social Security's benefits are proportionately more generous at the low end of the wage scale, so the workers who benefit most from the current system are those at the bottom rung of the employment ladder. If pension benefits were reduced as a function of Social Security payments, as Head's scenario would do, low-paid workers would take the biggest hit.

The move also would provide relatively little budget relief, according to his analysis. The most aggressive of Head's scenarios would apply Social Security integration to all employees with less than 15 years service. That would improve the fund balance by .3 percent and save the city $1.5 million in 2014, and more over time as the share of employees covered by the new plan increased.

Not sure if Stacy Head actually cares about saving the city money as much as she cares about penalizing low wage workers so you can see why she likes this option.

Next time, try a little

The most important bit of polling data from the 2014 midterms:

People Think The Economy Is Rigged To Favor The Wealthy
Q: Do you think the U.S. economic system (generally favors the wealthy) or (is fair to most Americans)?

Generally favors the wealthy	71%
Is fair to most Americans	24%

People Think Republicans Will Fix This
Other polls show something ironic: People trust Republicans more than Democrats to fix this and make the economy favor regular people again.

An October 13 Gallup poll: “On the No. 1 issue, the economy, Republicans have more than doubled their April lead over Democrats, to 11 percentage points.”

And sure enough, these numbers were reflected in the results of the actual election. On the same night that voters in multiple states voted to raise their minimum wage they also turned control of the US Senate, as well as a handful of governorships over to a slate of candidates who would allow people to be paid in ebola waste if they could.

So what gives?  

Ultimately, stressing individual issues such as the minimum wage hike and pay equity wasn’t enough to get past that — even if they are quite popular — because these voters want to hear a more comprehensive message about how Democrats would move the economy forward. Pollster Celinda Lake, who polled on multiple races, says the broader failure to articulate this — from the President on down — led these voters to opt instead for vague promises of a change in direction.

“We have a huge problem: People do not think the recovery has affected them, and this is particularly true of blue collar white voters,” Lake said. “What is the Democratic economic platform for guaranteeing a chance at prosperity for everyone? Voters can’t articulate it. In the absence of that, you vote for change.”

“Our number one imperative for 2016,” Lake concluded, “is to articulate a clear economic vision to get this country going again.”

"What is the Democratic platform" with regard to economic inequality?  If you're asking that question at the end of a campaign, then you know the Democrats haven't even shown up for it.

Probably out of frustration, Jared Berstein writes out here a draft of the speech every Democrat should have been giving this year but none of them did. Here is some of that.

Yes, the economy has been growing and unemployment has been falling. No question, GDP is up, and solidly. But it’s hard to see much of that in your paycheck. In fact, most of the folks getting the growth don’t depend on paychecks; they depend on portfolios.

“Why is it that so little GDP growth is reaching average folks? Because there aren’t enough good jobs, because the trade deficit is too large, because finance is booming compared to manufacturing, because there’s too much outsourcing and offshoring and part-timing and subcontracting … and far too little ability to bargain for a fair slice of the growing pie – a pie you’re helping to bake!

That line I have in bold there is particularly powerful.  It's basically straight out of Picketty and it speaks directly to people bearing the insult of an administration cheering some encouraging top line economic numbers even as those numbers mean nothing of value to most people.

It's a shame Democrats didn't push this during the campaign because... wait a minute, I did hear something very similar to that uttered by a candidate this year. Who was..

Oh yeah. It was Bill Fucking Cassidy during the first Louisiana Senate debate.

When asked about inequality, Cassidy's first sentence was, "Under this President income inequality has increased. If you own stock under this President you have made a lot of money."

Cassidy went on to say he would fix this by getting rid of Obamacare which, we know makes zero sense, of course, but that isn't the point.  The Democratic message was so weak and devoid of substance this year that a Republican who opposes minimum wage increases and wants to raise the retirement age can pretend to care about income inequality more effectively than his Democratic opponent and get away with it. 

Look. This isn't happening because voters are stupid.  It's happening because they've been abandoned. The Democratic party is bloated and arrogant and run by corrupt elitists who expect to win simply because they represent the closest thing to an acceptable option and voters would be complete idiots if they didn't just naturally understand that.

And of course today you'll find any number scolding lectures directed at people who weren't motivated to vote for any of these terrible Democratic candidates.  But if you don't make the case that you give a shit about the voters, the voters will not give a shit about you.  If Bill Cassidy's awkward dishonest schtick comes closer to hitting your core message than you do, you're really not even trying. Next time maybe try a little bit.

Chart party

Maybe not so festive, though.



The worst thing about this chart is it is a cliche.  Everyone knows about it.  No one has the motivation or the means to do anything about it.

More fun charts here. 

Also.. apologies to Jon Bois.

Art thou but a dagger of the mind?

Here's a decent Atlantic article on the Scottish referendum. There are lots of blurred interests at work here. But a common interpretation of the Scottish independence campaign paints it as a populist revolt against, not only the conservative Cameron government, but the crushing caste system of global finance capitalism and the impotence of the current political framework to do anything about it.

In the 1990s, Tony Blair’s “New Labour” turn—which included sidelining unions and embracing private enterprise (and invading Iraq)—alienated left-leaning Scots. Today, the Yes Scotland side attracts many a fallen Labourite (though the Labour Party officially backs the ‘no’ vote). A recent Guardian/ICM poll shows that 42 percent of Scots who voted Labour in the last general election will vote ‘yes’ on Thursday.

This figure reflects a conversation I had over and over again in Glasgow this summer, while reporting on the independence campaign. “I voted Labour most of my life, but I don’t believe the Labour Party is a socialist party anymore,” a retiree named Andy Callahan told me. Saffron Dickson, a 16-year-old ‘Yes’ campaigner, said, simply: “Labour broke my dad’s heart.”

However fanciful the ‘Yes’ side’s economic vision might be (and the ‘No’ team has spent two years arguing that what ‘Yes’ says ain’t so), the cause of independence has undeniably appealed to the working class. This referendum is not a proxy class war—but class is an important indicator of Yes/No allegiance. In general, the poorer the Scot, the more likely she is to vote ‘yes.’ The Economic and Social Research Council found that 46 percent of low-income Scots support independence, compared with 27 percent of high-earners. It’s no secret that the Highlands high rollers are largely voting ‘No.’ “The buggers are out to get us!” one “pre-eminent” duke told the Tatler, referring to ‘Yes’ campaigners. Mark Diffley, director of Ipsos MORI Scotland, has described the relative wealth of a voting district as “the variable that really explains what’s going on.”

The Yes Scotland campaign argues that the Scots and English are inherently the same, but have alas gone their separate ways. Scots maintain free university tuition, free personal and nursing care for the elderly, and a wholly public healthcare system. The English “cosset bankers or project [their] might around the world with nuclear missiles and foreign wars.” ‘Yes’s underlying conceit is that it’s England that has changed—and Scotland that has stayed true to Britain and Britishness.

This should be a familiar gripe to American liberals and/or working class persons. What remains of the social welfare state is crumbling.  Both political parties are thoroughly corrupted by Wall Street.  What recourse do we have, then?  In Louisiana, like Scotland an oil-rich region embroiled in frequent disputes with the national government over the spoils of those riches, we've flirted with a similar secessionist cri de couer.  You can only complain about a system that perpetually crushes you for so long before destroying the system itself becomes a viable option.

This is what's motivating the Scots. 

What distinguishes the current moment is that discontent with the way things have been going is so high as to test many people's tolerance for the governing institutions as they currently exist.

The details are, of course, different in each country.

In the case of Britain, a Labor government led by a Scottish prime minister (Gordon Brown) and his Scottish finance minister (Alistair Darling) supported the financialization of the British economy, with the rise of global mega-banks in an increasingly cosmopolitan London as the center of the economic strategy.

Then, in 2008, the banks nearly collapsed and were bailed out, and the British economy hasn’t been the same. Their failures ushered in a conservative government in 2010 that is even less aligned with the Scots’ preferred policies, bringing an age of austerity when the Scots would prefer to widen the social safety net.

So it's easy to sympathize.  On the other hand, it's easy to worry. Apart from just the intervening financial chaos, the long term result of the divorce would likely be a poorer Scotland and an even more conservative rump UK. It's difficult to understand how anyone is better off in such a situation. 

Independence may be romantically appealing.  It's a catharsis for people who feel like they're going to remain underfoot anyway so they might as well break the whole edifice apart.  But the prospects of building a better nation from a third of the ashes of the one you've destroyed are not good.  Seems like a dismal set of choices to me. Either way, people are going to suffer.

The bad news is this is all nihilism.  The worse news is the nihilism might be rooted in reality.  

Excellence in recovery

This has been passed around a bit over the weekend. 

When people tell you that they love the new New Orleans, what they mean is that they love that the poor were kicked out and social services were eliminated so they can make more money.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell.  There's more.

New New Orleans

New Orleans is now ranked second in the US in income inequality.

Inequality is growing nationally, but the speed of growth in New Orleans is faster than that in many other cities. New Orleans' Gini coefficient rose 5.39 percent since 2008. Only 14 of the 50 cities included on Bloomberg's sortable list saw inequality grow faster.

The Gini coefficient for the United States as a whole was .4757, according to Bloomberg, which updated its figures in April. According to the CIA, which hasn't updated its figure for the United States since 2007, when its Gini Coefficient was .45, America ranked 41st for income inequality, between Uruguay and the Philippines.

Update:

That, more or less, is the great failure of post-Katrina New Orleans.  Sure, there's growth and "vibrancy" resulting from massive investment in rebuilding.  But the benefits of this growth have accrued into the hands of a small and isolated caste for the most part.  This needs to be examined more thoroughly.

For example, here is a problem we were discussing on the parallel internet a few weeks back.

Offering a direct view of City Park, this just-listed 4,137-square-foot house has hit the market for, ahem, $700,000. The listing is straight-up with the fact that "a total renovation is needed to restore this home to its former glory."

Housing prices are out of control.  But who are the buyers? Not anyone I know.. or know of.. or can even imagine I might know anything about right now.  Every personal story I come across has to do with friends or acquaintances being priced out of neighborhoods not buying into them. So, who is buying in?

We can talk about our pet theories of gentrification all day long.  Are the majority of these huge sale prices investment properties? Are they full time homes or vacation rentals?

One reason I'm interested in the Airbnb trend is, in some cities, it encourages a practice where investors buy up the housing stock and put it to use in the tourist trade (although unlicensed and untaxed). It sounds like this is happening here but I really wish someone would dive into explaining the extent of it.

Anecdotally I hear "a lot of people are moving here." And that's fine but please also tell me where these people are getting $700,000 to blow on fixer-uppers.  I've heard some say "doctors" and "film people" are buying houses but there's little I can do to confirm these guesses.

New Orleans is not exactly a city of millionaires. Or at least it hasn't been.  So what is actually going on? The housing market suggests there is money coming into the city from somewhere.  Where?

Boomtown

New Orleans ranks number 2 nationwide in income inequality.

Keep flipping those houses, I guess. What could possibly go wrong?