We are all Slave now.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

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



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?



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....



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.



No, you didn't.



No.



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.



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



Rest assured that I have not said that.



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.

Honest to god, do you and Sebby have jobs?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Honest to god, do you and Sebby have jobs?

I can't speak for him, but I am so happy that I do not bill my time by the hour.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Further to the exchange GGG and I had yesterday about the first President Bush's legacy, this is good.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Honest to god, do you and Sebby have jobs?

I don’t bill hours (flat fee), and the majority of work I do now is business development and consulting.

I’m hoping to have run off the last of the litigation files by March.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

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.

The post cites 72k as an average:

“In fact, Silver parsed the data to discover the average Trump voter makes $72,000 per year — a middle-class income solidly above the typical American.”

ETA: Bizarrely, it then states the following:

“As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data.”

WTF?

ETA: Median income in US was $50k for 2014, average was $75k. https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/...prodType=table

Median Trump voter is thus right at natl average. We can’t compare median and average, but it’s clear Trump voters are not generally affluent.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The post cites 72k as an average:

“In fact, Silver parsed the data to discover the average Trump voter makes $72,000 per year — a middle-class income solidly above the typical American.”

ETA: Bizarrely, it then states the following:

“As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data.”

WTF?

You find this baffling? Someone from USA Today was imprecise, the ambiguity of which was immediately cleared up in the latter language, which is a quote of Nate Silver, who would not be imprecise in this way, who told you that the "average" in question is median. I mean, income data is pretty much always presented as median, so that should have been your assumption as to which "average" was being referenced, but nonetheless.

Not that it makes any real difference, though, because even if the data was the mathematical mean, it still would not give you sufficient information about the distribution of incomes within the sample to conclude that the mean income is indicative of typical incomes within the group.

Anywho. No one said that Trump's supporters are all affluent. Ty said his support was not among the poorest, which is true. The available data suggests that in relative terms, Trump voters are significantly more affluent overall than the country in general, but yes, that could just be because Trump himself was part of the sample.

As a mere result of population and income distributions, of course he wasn't elected on the back of a lot of rich people's votes. His supporters are undoubtedly mostly middle and upper middle class, both because that's where his message plays and because there's a lot of people those terms apply to.

But GGG ultimately had it right. It's not income or class, its education etc.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

ETA: Median income in US was $50k for 2014, average was $75k. https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/...prodType=table

Median Trump voter is thus right at natl average. We can’t compare median and average, but it’s clear Trump voters are not generally affluent.

I'm back to needing you to demonstrate you understand math. Median Trump voter income was $72k. Median US income was $50k. And yet you said that quoted language above.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

But GGG ultimately had it right. It's not income or class, its education etc.

what's education? dumb people voted for trump?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Further to the exchange GGG and I had yesterday about the first President Bush's legacy, this is good.

I wish I could remember the Republican Party the Bush fans now mourn. But I can't.

I grew up in an area where our most prominent politicians were people like J. Gordon Liddy, which for you youngun's is kind of Roger Stone on steriods, and Bill Buckley, who was not just the happy elitist his fans remember but also a deep seated racist and bigot of the first order. The GOP has long held sway among the Trumpers.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

what's education? dumb people voted for trump?

That was intend as just a reference to what GGG said (quoted below) but I meant college degree:

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.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

That was intend as just a reference to what GGG said (quoted below) but I meant college degree:

How about Jill Stein voters? the ones I know, 100% have a college degree; some 2 (hi Sebby!).

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

How about Jill Stein voters? the ones I know, 100% have a college degree; some 2 (hi Sebby!).

Those are just dumb people.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

How about Jill Stein voters? the ones I know, 100% have a college degree; some 2 (hi Sebby!).

If there is a way to distinguish really dumb college grads, I think you'd cover most 3rd party voters. Maybe IQ test them?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Atrios on media bias, another excellent point:

Centered
Someone on the twitter box put the political press's view of Republicans well: they're always the protagonists of the story. They can be up, down, good, bad, evil, but they're still always the main characters of the story. It is their fortunes that the reader/reviewer is made to care about, love them or hate them. It is their fortunes which are tied up, by implication, with the fortune of the country itself.

When Democrats win, the focus remains on Republicans. Obama did manage to break through this, some, but not nearly as much as he should have, especially when Democrats ran everything for two years and the heroes of the story were...the Tea Party.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

If there is a way to distinguish really dumb college grads, I think you'd cover most 3rd party voters. Maybe IQ test them?

you have adder on ignore?