He’s not a Democrat. That is the sole qualifier for a surprising percentage of Americans. 
So Trump is the “poster Boy” for Liberalism’s failure over the past years. Got it.
Rather he’s the poster child for Elitism’s disinterest in the working class for the last 40-50 years. That’s only a “failure” for the country as a whole if one believes the interests of the working class are primary. Beyond that, Trump’s only a good solution if one believes the working class correctly understands where their true interests lie, and that Trump will implement those things, not just use the working class for his own ends. Much as the other elites have done to various degrees.
It’d help if we knew whether you meant “Liberalism” in the sense of “US Democrats” or in the more traditional economic sense of the term. Your tendentious manner implies the former, but what I diagnosed was the latter. Which implies you might not know the difference between them. Protip: It’s huge.
And, as I said, the US Left has been far, far *less *detrimental to the working class than the US Right has been over the same timeframe. And whatever amount of benefit the US Left has provided to the working class in the last 20-ish years is vastly less than what they would have done absent massive absolutist stonewalling from the US Right.
So even IF we assume the US Left has failed the working classes, a sizeable portion of the “blame” came from their simple inability overcome the US Right’s abject predations upon the working class.
Much of which was caused by the working classes voting for Rightists.
Doesn’t follow fallacy.
Imply as you wish, despite apparently knowing exactly what I mean when I say it.
Like I instructed a poster early on, we’re talking current events here. There’s an election in a few weeks. Get off the history spiel, it’s a bit repetitive.
No argument there. But we’re ALSO not talking the GOP or the “right” or whatever symbolism you wish to apply. It’s Trump for Chrissakes. They HATE him.
yada, yada, yada, yada, yada ad infinitum. Let’s just talk Trump on that topic now, OK?
So where are we now? Today? Even Recently? And history repeats itself? Aha!
Trump isn’t the first politician to act like this. He just co-opted Lepageism.
Several good ideas in here. A few bad ones, too.
You have to decide on a definition of a “booming economy” first. If you have massive poverty while the rich become insanely richer, that’s not a “booming economy.”
One off those “big picture” concepts I like to deal in, which applies here, is what too many people are purposely refusing to say about their economics proposals.
That is, that there are natural and logical consequences to what choices you make, and there are always negatives to simply be accepted.
For example, a decision to insist on all health care, being based (as the current Republicans have promoted for years) on market forces alone, requires that everyone accept that only illnesses and patients who bring profits to the private companies, will be attended to. Wealthy people will get higher quality care than everyone else. In it’s most thorough form, so-called “free market” health care, would require us to accept that if your disease isn’t cost-effective to deal with, you will be ejected from the system, and you will die.
In the case of simply raising wages artificially (which I am NOT opposed to, I just don’t think it should be the one reason why wages rise), the problem is that JUST raising wages, is like squeezing a sealed balloon. It gets smaller where you squeeze, and bigger somewhere else.
What I think needs to happen instead, is that wages (and other things) need to be decided upon, based on ACTUAL costs, rather than the false, artificially lowered costs that businesses calculate now, to determine profits.
The REAL cost of an hour of labor, can’t be decided by “market forces.” How much it costs to have a viable worker to perform a task, doesn’t rise or fall because there are more or fewer people willing to take the job. But most modern hyper-capitalists, want to ignore that, and have employers pay whatever they can sucker people into working for.
Raw materials and production costs are also falsely priced in most economic systems.
The REAL cost of mining, for example, includes the labor, and the machinery, and the access to the mine and so on. But it ALSO includes cleaning up the mine afterwards, avoiding destruction of other parts of the environment, AND management of the lifetime need for the material being mined.
We suffer right now, from the fact that all sorts of “booming industries” of the past, only “boomed,” because they managed to hide all of their REAL costs, by either charging the rest of the country tax monies, or by handing off the associated consequences and costs to the next generation, or to the rest of the planet.
By paying ONLY enough for labor now, that the wage earners can barely eke out a living day to day, the cost of caring for them after they can no longer work, gets dumped on to the next generation. Not to mention, that the entire cost of making sure that FUTURE workers are available, is ALSO shoveled away from the people gathering in “profits,” and onto the backs and out of the pockets of the rest of the existing workforce.
Costs are real things. Ignoring them as real consequences.
Another Big Picture “hide the consequences” trick being foisted on us all these days:
the idea that if wages are driven down, and benefits packages reduced for being “too opulent for profitability,” that the economy will rise, and “lift all boats.” In answer to the fact that cost of living must fall for this to work, the proponents say correctly, that the cost-of-living VENDORS (i.e. the people supplying housing and food and so forth to us) will have a pure economic incentive to find ways to lower our real cost of living accordingly.
What they carefully avoid admitting, and often actively hide, is that there is a TIME FACTOR involved with all “market adjustments.” Yes. It is true, that if landlords find that no one can afford to pay rent anymore, they will eventually lower the rent so that people can afford it again. However, they wont do that right away, the moment that wages fall. That can only happen in centrally managed economies, where rents can be ORDERED to fall, in proportion to the wages. What happens in the real world, is that competing landlords shovel the people who’s wages fell, onto the streets, and bring in people who’s wages have not fallen yet. A LONG time of having lots of people on the streets will occur, before the pressures to lower rents will bring things back into line.
The proponents of this “free market” approach, pretend there is no time delay. They carefully refuse to say out loud, that what we will have to accept as the necessary part of a transition to lower cost of living in Free Markets, is a long period of massive homelessness.
Same thing with the other basics of life, such as food.
No. Government Priming, means that the government hands money to people out of the tax revenues. What I am referring to, is seeing to it that the people who are the primary CUSTOMERS (i.e. the working classes), are paid a real fair wage by having their actual cost of providing labor, recognized as a part of calculating wages. In addition, real costs of production need to be recognized, as opposed to the various government assisted bits and pieces we have now.
The modern Republicans seem to want the worst of both bad ideas: they want to reduce costs to business owners even further, by giving them big tax cuts, and pay for the cost of the government assistance that the businesses get, by increasing the tax burdens on the customer class. They disguise that slightly, by claiming to have no tax INCREASES, while causing FUNCTIONAL tax increases, by cutting the government programs that DID once bring some money back to the Customer classes.
@igor: Astute analysis. Agree completely.
Socialization of costs and privatization of profits has a very long history in human affairs. What might be different now is there’s a well-developed body of law and practice to max-perform this particular tactic.
Much like the stock & mortgage market in 2007 today one gets the distinct feeling of being aimed towards a cliff while the elites have the accelerator jammed to the floor.
Connecting back to the OP …
Here post-election but pre-inauguration it seems likely that the working classes, even the very highly paid working classes, have been sold a massive bill of goods in both Congress and the executive. We shall see.
Yeah, it was sold to them, and they bought it, but now we get to pick up the tab.
Gotta be careful about who “them” is. One heck of a lot of upper-middle and above folks voted for Trump, their local R congresscritter, or both. It’s not *all *about the strawman knuckle dragging white racist dump truck drivers.
Those semi-upper crust folks will probably be picking up the tab too if the next 4 years unfold as I suspect they will.
There are also a couple tens of millions of plausible D voters who abstained. I’d sure like to have a word with them too.
I assume you have a cite for that rather surprising assertion?
There are plenty of people who coulda voted for trump, and not get disappointed, as he will do what they expect him to do. Most of those are very wealthy people that can buy more influence in a trump admin then they could else-wise. They will probably do well. Many of them are already on his cabinet, in fact.
The “them” to me are the ones who voted for trump based on his rhetoric. They are the ones who voted for trump, and are surprised they are going to lose the ACA. They are the ones who are expecting him to personally rehire them in their old job at a higher wage than they were laid off at. They are the ones that think that they will be better off in this state of affairs. They are the ones who will be most disappointed and devastated by the policies that are actually put out.
Then there are those single issue voters. Trump is not likely to ban guns, and it is likely that he will appoint SC justices that will look disfavorably upon Roe v wade. Those voters will be happy while they sit, hungry and in the dark in their crumbling homes, because they will know that they got to keep their gun, and that some women out there isn’t taking the easy way out of the consequences of being sexually active. Their lives will be miserable, but they will be okay with that, because they will be looking to ensure that others have lives even more miserable than their own.
Then you got your deplorable arrangement basket. Those people will ignore what trump says if they don’t want to hear it, and trumpet it to the roof if they do.
Surprisingly, if your highlight SB’s words, and search in google, you come across several cites for that question.
[QUOTE=k9bfriender]
Surprisingly, if your highlight SB’s words, and search in google, you come across several cites for that question.
[/QUOTE]
I also found this article which discusses it. It’s a more nuanced question and answer than just straight ‘who has more wealth’, as some of your articles also go into. It’s also not a question that can definitively be answered…yet. We don’t know what economic changes will impact the Gen-X/Y folks because they haven’t happened yet and so we don’t know what their earning potential will be in the end. There could be another internet/dot com boom (and perhaps bust) that starts up next year or in 5 years or 10 that will change the outcome one way or the other. So, anyone saying that the current generation has been definitively proven to make less than their parents is talking out of their ass as it hasn’t happened yet. That said, the current trend is certainly that the current generation makes less at this point in their lives than their parents did. But, as the articles linked to touch on this might not reflect on how ‘happy’ they are compared to their parents or grandparents…perhaps having more wealth or making more money isn’t everything. And having access to some of the technologies widely available today certainly impacts ‘happiness’.