We are all Slave now.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

And now to the most important point: the Trump voter is not rich. I believe the Trump voter had an average income of $65k or $75k. That is a person who is treading water. (Average income in the country is something like $59k...

I'm going to need you to prove that you understand how averages work.

A person making $65-75k makes enough not to receive transfers via most safety nets, but barely enough to survive in most locales.

Again, I'm gonna need you to prove that you understand what a median is and how it differs from the mode.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

I'm going to need you to prove that you understand how averages work.



Again, I'm gonna need you to prove that you understand what a median is and how it differs from the mode.

Actually, if this is your best reply (and it doesn’t do what you think it does... at all), burden of competence remains with you.

ETA: Average income for non-1% is $50k: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/inco...ed-states.html

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

I'm going to need you to prove that you understand how averages work.

Do you think 1%ers voted heavy for Trump? I'm not sure I believe they did.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Do you think 1%ers voted heavy for Trump? I'm not sure I believe they did.

2/3 of Trump voters below $100k. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/why-trump...ou-might-think

You know any crazy rich folks who voted for Trump? I do. Maybe about 1/6 of the crazy rich folks I know. Most working in Koch Bros type industries.

But fuck all that... Any where in this country, is $75k household income affluent, even well off? Maybe the bowels of Mississippi?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Do you think 1%ers voted heavy for Trump? I'm not sure I believe they did.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ons-by-income/

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

2/3 of Trump voters below $100k. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/why-trump...ou-might-think

But Clinton won among the under 100K, so probably 75-80% of voters are in that group.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ons-by-income/

Avg Trump voter: 72k

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...lass/83972800/

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

But Clinton won among the under 100K, so probably 75-80% of voters are in that group.

Biggest percentage of trump voters are aspirational middle class. Their gripe is that they are getting squeezed. Cost of the American dream is quickly outpacing their income. Borrowing up to their eyeballs to get by.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Biggest percentage of trump voters are aspirational middle class. Their gripe is that they are getting squeezed. Cost of the American dream is quickly outpacing their income. Borrowing up to their eyeballs to get by.

You forgot "white".

In general, Trump voters are a little better off than Clinton voters. But the Demographic characteristics that really distinguish them, where you see a real difference between the two candidates, aren't really income. It's religion, education, color, sex and age - those are all more important than income. Show me a white male evangelical without a college degree, and the odds are very high they are a Trump supporter. Show me a black woman... well, I don't need to go further.

There is this fantasy of the stressed out self- defined middle class middle American Trump supporter that is just total and complete bullshit when you go by the data. If you look at middle class voters as a whole, they split slightly for Clinton. It's the old white dudes who are full of shit, think Jesus loves them but not you, who like to yell at people to get off their lawn and speak english in the grocery who are Trump supporters. The assholes. The morons.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

You forgot "white".

In general, Trump voters are a little better off than Clinton voters. But the Demographic characteristics that really distinguish them, where you see a real difference between the two candidates, aren't really income. It's religion, education, color, sex and age - those are all more important than income. Show me a white male evangelical without a college degree, and the odds are very high they are a Trump supporter. Show me a black woman... well, I don't need to go further.

There is this fantasy of the stressed out self- defined middle class middle American Trump supporter that is just total and complete bullshit when you go by the data. If you look at middle class voters as a whole, they split slightly for Clinton. It's the old white dudes who are full of shit, think Jesus loves them but not you, who like to yell at people to get off their lawn and speak english in the grocery who are Trump supporters. The assholes. The morons.

Absolutely. But the suggestion Trump voters are largely economically comfortable or even affluent is just silly.

Being a fantasizing moron and struggling are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they often go hand in hand.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ons-by-income/

1 exactly and add in the really smart third party voters, there is more anti-Trump than Trump.

2 these numbers are nonsense. Who would tell an exit poll how much you make?

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Actually, if this is your best reply (and it doesn’t do what you think it does... at all), burden of competence remains with you.

ETA: Average income for non-1% is $50k: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/inco...ed-states.html

You've written two posts now characterizing the median income Trump voter as the typical Trump voter. Which is not how math works.

And now you've added a citation that further contradicts the point you were trying to make.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Do you think 1%ers voted heavy for Trump? I'm not sure I believe they did.

Why do we care? We're talking about a tiny slice of voters.

But what I think is that you can't observe that the median income of Trump voters was 40% greater than overall median incomes and take that as evidence that the typical Trump voter had the median income. Because, again, not how math works.

The math is telling us that the mid-point of Trump voter incomes is substantially higher than the mid-point of all incomes, thus the set of Trump voter incomes contains a greater number of higher incomes.

To actually answer your question, I'd guess that group voted for Trump, yes, mostly because I'd guess that group generally votes GOP and didn't not vote for Trump. Perhaps not heavily, though.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

No. Do you ever get tired of being wrong about Trump being a cause, rather than a symptom?

It's not either/or, and he is absolutely a symptom. Symptom of what, is the question.

I understand the status quo delivers for you and me, so you'll make any argument in favor of the following, as it allows you to feel like you've done something to help the losers while giving up nothing yourself:

1. Redistribution;
2. Expanded safety nets;
3. Regulation that doesn't harm the economic sectors in which you operate.

1. Definitionally, redistribution is taking money away from you and me to give to your "losers," so it actually *is* giving up something.

2. Expanding safety nets in a way that actually expands the safety nets for "losers" doesn't just *feel* like doing something, it is doing something.

3. On regulation, that's not what I think or what I've said, but if you need to pretend it is so that you can say something stupid and think you are responding to me, knock yourself out.

I think the issue here is that your "losers" are well enough off that they don't benefit from things we think of as redistribution or the safety net (e.g., SSDI), and they don't think of the things they benefit from (home mortgage deduction, defense spending, subsidizing roads over mass transit) as redistribution or a safety net. They see a government that talks about helping people who aren't well off, but isn't helping them, and they want some of that too. They feel entitled to this, so they feel aggrieved.

Instead of pretending that redistribution, the safety net and regulation don't do anything, your better argument is that what the government does in those areas doesn't do much for the concerns of your "losers." That's the issue, right?

Now on to substance... You seem to be advocating for inequality without populism.

No. I wasn't advocating for anything. I was saying that your explanation of Trump & populism as a symptom of inequality doesn't work, because you see lots of places where there is worse inequality and no populism. Your model is underdetermined. I was trying to point to other things that lead to populism (and Trump).

Because you missed the point, I'm just going to omit a lot of what you said next, until you got to....

And now to the most important point: the Trump voter is not rich. I believe the Trump voter had an average income of $65k or $75k. That is a person who is treading water. (Average income in the country is something like $59k, and $50k is so low that people at that level pay no Fed income taxes.)

A person making $65-75k makes enough not to receive transfers via most safety nets, but barely enough to survive in most locales. These people are the pitchfork carrying populists. And they have good reason to be so. The system is built to hook up those of us at the top of the income ladder, and deliver via the safety nets to those at the bottom, but provide nothing for those in the middle treading water.

I'm mostly with you here. Although I think you are missing something important, which is that Trump voters' incomes look better when you compare them to the averages where they live, rather than the country as a whole. Coastal cities and suburbs are doing better, have higher incomes, and do not strongly support Trump. Hardcore Trump voters tend to come from exurbs and rural areas where the average income is lower.

We have an economy that is doing very well for cities with well trained workers. People in the hinterlands feel left out, and worry about their future. You are describing facets of that, but the slogan you keep using, "inequality," is not the right word for what you are trying to describe, in part because the people who feel inequality the most -- the poorest -- don't tend to be Trump fans. His supporters are people in the middle. If you want to explain populism, you need to grapple with that, instead of repeating that populism is a disease, etc.

I understand why you'd see what I wrote as a bromide.

No, you didn't.

You've probably never thought about the working poor in that doughnut hole I just described. You've focused on the destitute and absorbed the false argument that Trump voters are largely well off to affluent. This causes you to think the current populism is just greedy xenophobes.

No. eta: That is very much *not* what I said in the post you responded to. I suggested that populism comes when people feel that the major political parties are not speaking to their concerns, and turn somewhere else.

Any model of the current populism needs to assume that the populists are the working poor, the middle class that is treading water.

The working poor and the middle class are two different things, and when you use them as synonyms, you unintentionally show that you have some concept of the lower class as being poor people who don't work. Presumably they just laze around, eating Cheetos all day and being poor, and then at night they go off to commit crimes. Seriously, there's this implicit status consciousness to what you say that implies that what defines the people you care about is that they are more deserving than the faceless poor below them. You talk about inequality, but it's very important to the kind of people you talk about that they are more equal than the poor, who don't deserve help. They care about equality for themselves but not for others, which actually is more like a form of inequality than a reaction to it.

It is our perverted economic system - the one you advocate, in which winners take all and then "manage" the collapsing middle class - that is the problem.

If you really think this, how do you explain that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and the GOP lost it even worse in 2018? Either there are a lot of people winning in the current economy (in which case it's not winner take all) or there is a lot of false consciousness in blue places.

If you defend the current status quo, be it under Obama, Bush, or Trump, in which we prop asset prices, hemorrhage jobs via labor arbitrage and automation, and respond to the collapse of the middle class with "let's just kick the can," you are part of the problem. You are the cause of Trump.

If I ever say those things, we can talk about them here. Until then, why don't we just stick to what I *am* saying.

And your response, to assert that Trump is problem -- that he caused this populist uprising around the world -- makes the situation all the more problematic.

Rest assured that I have not said that.

Today's populism, the fragmentation and nationalism, is our fault. Yours, mine, and everyone else who ignored the losers in a global economy. If this sounds like a bromide to you, it's only because I must keep repeating it as, like the insane, you hear it over and over again and offer the same vacant retorts to it.

It's a bromide because it says nothing. If it's everyone's fault, it's no one's fault. If you really want to find fault with someone, you need to narrow it down a little.

And please think a little more critically about what you are saying. The economy has been global for a *long* time, and there have always been losers as a result. I just read the Lords of Finance, about the economy in the 1920s (good book, very well written). The UK pegged the pound to gold too high, and as a result industries in the UK got crushed by foreign competitors. Ninety years ago, shipbuilders in Liverpool were losers in the global economy. Foreign capital rushed into the NYSE, and companies like GM and RCA saw massive valuation increases -- which is to say, they raised capital from international investors and used it to hire people in places like Detroit. Those GM workers were winners in the international economy. The economy is always changing, creating new winners and losers. But the populism we have seen in the last ten years is different from the decade before. I'm not saying the global economy has nothing to do with it -- quite the opposite. I'm saying that bromides like "globalization" don't explain much.