Irrelevant, really. Fair enough, but irrelevant to the argument, and I do get the impression that you’re not exactly an Obama or Bernie Sanders supporter. 
The Mittster was, however, the anointed representative to lead the nation on behalf of all Republicans railing against undocumented immigrants. It’s surely a magnificent irony that he was hiring them, and hardly an isolated case.
Once again, do NOT ascribe opinions to me that I do not hold. Thanks.
Are you really interested in citations? Because you asked for some previously and I supplied you with 15 of them.
15 citations that do little to back up monstro’s assertion because it’s too vague to mean anything. “Rich people _____.” Which rich people? How many of them? By some of those cites, I and anyone else in this thread with diversified securities investments profits from the war on drugs by virtue of owning some 2587:JP shares in a foreign stock ETF.
the people who own the banks, major stock holders, board of directors, people who own prisons, people who own gun factories and factories for surveillance equipment… in other words the “super” rich.
i’m kind of perplexed. instead of looking at how wrong the war on drugs is, you rather split hairs between the rich and the super rich. this seems to me an odd motivation.
I’m not splitting hairs between the rich and the super rich. I’m pointing out that a claim “The rich do X” is not a meaningful statement. Doubtlessly the war on drugs benefits some super rich people. The majority? A significant minority? Twelve of them? Do they even know it benefits them? And do they engage in significant enough rent-seeking for it to matter? I think they do, but we can discuss that without lumping in the majority of the super rich who do not comprise “the people who own the banks, major stock holders, board of directors, people who own prisons, people who own gun factories and factories for surveillance equipment.”
It is eminently likely that the desperation of the young white underclass is due to our failure to address climate change. When it is clear that we are to be swamped by rising seas, drought, storms and mass extinctions within their lifetime and nothing is being done, what else is there to do but turn to drugs and suicide?
Add in job losses due to overregulation and rampant illegal immigration, toxic air and water due to overreliance on fossil fuels, the Islamic menace, the contempt of the super-wealthy, campus microaggressions, racist affirmation action, out-of-control police violence, vaccine-induced illnesses, the dangers of water fluoridation, chemtrail-induced genocide and sundry other threats, and it’s amazing that any of them are surviving until the age of 35.
The obvious solution is to legalize medical marijuana on a national level, if we have the vision and fortitude.
I tend to think it’s a somewhat delayed consequence of globalism and the decline of US manufacturing capability (and by extension well-paid blue-collar jobs) relative to where it once was.
Where at one point, a young white guy could reasonably expect to graduate from his small town high school and go work in the local factory/steel mill/lumber industry/paper mill, etc… that’s no longer the case. So unless they go the academic route and go to college (not everyone can swing this), they’re kind of stuck in, if not poverty, an underfunded existence, and are in the same boat, and competing for jobs and resources with all the groups they’d always considered lower status- blacks and hispanics, mostly.
This has to take a mental toll on people, and I suspect that’s the root of the issue.
So what I am hearing is that they are pessimistic but not without good cause: the odds of someone without a college education being able to have the middle class (even lower middle class) existence that those without a college education had in previous generations are small, as those middle class jobs have, for a variety of reasons, been hollowed out.
That pessimism/discontent/desperation … however it plays out in each case … is still nevertheless still a problem.
Problem is that addressing the root of that pessimism is dealing with the various factors that are resulting in the hollowing out of the middle class, especially in rural America. Attacking “income inequality” makes for some nice slogans and stump speeches but policies that actually impact it? With actual middle class jobs creation, particularly in rural America, and not just income redistribution (if such was ever actually politically doable)? Good luck with that to both mainstream GOP and Democratic leaders.
An article in today’s NYT further fleshes out the subject, connecting this pessimism-whathaveyou to the Bundy Oregon situation. Jobs paid by the government are keeping people out of abject poverty but that does not stop the government being used as the whipping boy getting in the way of the rebound that would surely occur if government would only stop oppressing them.
I’m digging through BLS looking for labor participation rates for the demographic group in question. BLS has those data, but I’d prefer to not have to scrub the actual survey datasets. Best I’ve found thus far:
For obvious reasons, our politics is bad at dealing with problems that have no easy solution. Globalization and the displacement caused by rapid technological change are good examples. We tend to come up with fake solutions because it is better politics than stating there is no solution (or, even worse, acknowledging that on balance these trends are actually good!). So you get, for example, opposition to free trade treaties or claims that the economic system is “rigged” on one side and opposition to immigration and highlighting of government taxes and other costs on the other. Neither (or at least none of the changes within the realm of political possibility) substantially affects the fundamental dynamics of globalization and technological change in the hollowing out of the American middle class.
Lower middle-class white Americans, on both sides of the aisle, have been sold a bill of goods about whose fault this all is, when the truth is that it’s no one’s fault. Sorry, Bernie Sanders, American tax policy, the minimum wage, and SEC prosecution decisions didn’t make this happen. Sorry Donald Trump, this isn’t the result of immigrants taking our jobs or failing to negotiate with China. It is the result of having to compete with other countries’ labor pools, and having many jobs replaced by technology.
The real policy choices are around how to manage the margins of this fundamental change. We can have marginally more or less skilled or unskilled immigration. We have marginally more or fewer tariffs, minimum wages, unions, etc. But those are all deck chairs when compared to the fundamental forces at work. The truth is that for many decades it will just suck to be an undereducated person who believes he is entitled to a middle class standard of living. In all likelihood, what will disappear is not the increasing disparity but instead the sense of entitlement.
And if that sounds pessimistic, just remember that while things for the not-quite-smart-enough nice guy in Nebraska don’t look great for the next century, things for most people in the rest of the world are really looking up. And even Johnny Nebraska’s overall standard of living–with the possible exception of healthcare–is still probably going to be better than his ancestors’.
I don’t actually think Monstro was saying - all - rich people benefit from the war on drugs. It seems a bit odd that you would think she thought that. She is not an unreasonable person. I think she meant, the people who control things, are rich. Not, that all rich people are involved.
I’m really not interested in talking with you about this. I’m sure there are more than 12 people who benefit from the war on drugs.
gee, I kind of thought that having pretty much all of the real wealth in this country concentrated in the hands of 1% of our citizens was the problem…
It is a symptom of the problem, not the cause of it. The principal cause of it (though there are many) is weaker labor power, which is itself caused by globalization and technological change.
And it won’t be fixed by taxing the rich a little more, or prosecuting Wall Street, or reversing Citizens United, or anything else mainstream politicians are selling.
Well, you certainly (honestly so) seem to know more about it than I do. But, this is the richest nation on earth. It is the richest nation in the history of the earth. I think we could afford healthcare, and education, and food and housing, etc, for everyone. How can the richest nation ever not be able to afford to do that? Particularly when other successful nations do.
I think you’re conflating two concepts: wealth inequality and access to basic goods. It is perfectly possible (and in fact the case) to have both increasing wealth inequality and more widespread access to basic goods.
But better access to education (and healthcare, etc.) isn’t going to change the fundamental forces affecting the lives of the American lower-middle class. Because of advances in technology and competition from abroad, new jobs are increasingly of the high and low-wage varieties, not middle-wage. Even if everyone gets a college education, there’s still a limited supply of programming jobs or management jobs. Better educational access will mean that smart kids from poor rural families (say) will get a better chance at these jobs, but the less smart kids won’t see their fate differ much–something we’re already witnessing as the number of college graduates steadily rises alongside the rates of underemployment of them.
And it is not the case that other countries have cracked this problem. Rising wealth inequality is pretty much a constant across advanced industrialized nations, which is part of the reason we know that it has little to do with domestic policy choices. Even countries like Sweden and the Netherlands have seen rising inequality and even after their sizable wealth transfers through their tax system are taken into account.
Basic income is on the fringes now; but I think one of the Scandanavian countries may actually do some basic real world testing in the next year or two. There has been a lot of back and forth about it so I do not know the current status of the rollout of this policy. It will be interesting to see what kind of data emerges from the initial test cases.
Why can’t we have a system where we have more police, and teachers, and tutors, and nanny and nurses, etc?
I guess an economy where you actually make stuff, brooms, hammers, cars, computers, etc, may be more profitable… but what is preventing us from changing our priorities, except for the fact that we simply… don’t?
That’s certainly one solution (and maybe a good one, such as it is). But even tax policy is somewhat futile resistance to the juggernaut of globalization and technological change. If by some bolt of magic America was able to institute a 10% tax on Wall Street trades, for example, some percentage of companies would just get listed on the FTSE instead (or move corporate HQ, depending on the design of the tax). At 20%, even more companies would. Ditto wealth taxes on billionaires or raising the corporate income tax.
There is almost certainly more money to be wrung from the 1% before they change their behavior to avoid the tax, but it is an approach with diminishing returns. You cannot tax your way back to an economy like the US had in 1960.
And, of course, politically speaking, a massive tax increase is about as much of a political nonstarter in America as any other conceivable policy short of banning Christianity.
We could have marginally more government or government-subsidized service jobs. But the problem isn’t so much unemployment (which is relatively low), but low wages. So, you say, let’s just hire more and pay them more. We could do that, too. But at some point this solution is really no different from having really high taxes and giving the money directly to the poor and lower-middle class. We can do that, but there is a limit to its effectiveness, and even bigger limits to its political possibility (see above).