What Democrats don't seem to realize is that many working class people view receiving benefits such as SNAP as shameful. They are called the working class for a reason. The New Deal Democratic programs focused on jobs, often public works jobs that built infrastructure. They deliberately didn't focus on handouts.
Yes totally agree…working class people are hard working people who just want the opportunity to provide for their families. They do not want handouts which is what I believe the Democrats are referring to when they say “voting against their own interests “. I have always found this phrase to be condescending at least the way I take it.
If I were writing a book explaning the working class, this would be in chapter one. It's one of the most fundamental truths about working class attitudes, yet policy people are ignorant of it. Hand outs are disrespectful and imply that you are incapable of taking care of your family.
Will never stop getting a kick out of authors attempting to understand why Dems have lost the working class and then, in the next breath, referring to them as the "less educated". It pairs well with Dems noting they are unfairly blamed for the rise in energy costs, as if Americans did not notice a difference at the gas pump when Biden announced his intended fossil fuel national suicide.
Finally, wages are tied to the cost of living. Those earning $80K a year are not vacationing in Maui or dining in Beverly Hills. However, they are probably more likely to be homeowners in many Trump areas, then the young in the Silicon Valley, earning far more. Likewise, depending on the state, their public schools may well be more highly rated than those in some Blue bubbles, like much of CA.
Oil and gas reached all time production highs in spite of Biden, not because of him. Gas prices averaged a more than a dollar a gallon cheaper, during Trump's first administration, when compared to Biden's.
Biden took office and informed the world the US planned an attempted energy suicide. Oil and gas soared. The additional petrodollars, caused by Biden's announcement, financed Putin's visit to Ukraine.
Alright, let me see if I've got this. Anything good that happened on Biden's watch (best in world GDP growth, strong real wage growth, record long period of low unemployment, record US gas and oil production, etc) is IN SPITE of Biden, while anything bad (transient inflation) is his fault. OK got it!
I'd be interested in a link to when he "informed the world the US planned an attempted energy suicide" but I know the substantiating your opinion with facts is not your strong suit.
Agreed, and we know that intelligence and education are not synonymous with wisdom. To truly attain wisdom, they would need to abide in the Bible. I believe this lesson will be learned, collectively, eventually.
Nothing irks me more than the claim that people aren't voting in their own interests. As if voters are simpletons. At the most micro level people do understand when they don't make enough to live. All that data in the world won't pay the bills. The income gains at the bottom turn out to be a result of stimulus checks and transitory. The employment increases turn out to be wholly amongst the foreign born.
Republicans are silent on min wage and Democrats do nothing. Entitlements are great but they shouldn't be something to aspire to. I follow an obscure NYT economics journo who was visiting an elderly family member last week. The elderly fellow, of mixed racial background, was making $86 dollars an hour in today's dollars, in New Orleans as a bricklayer in the 70s.
Currently nationwide that union job pays $29, in high paying cities $40. So jobs pay a third to half of what they used to. Good jobs. Sucky jobs are much worse.
People wonder why minority people can vote Republican when the right side of the Republican Party harbors racists. I'll tell you want, black and Hispanic guys need a good paying job just as much as the next fellow. The Biden team, whoever was in charge, opened our borders to many millions of low wage laborers. When there is an overabundance of labor the pay goes down.
I keep reading about how deportations will destroy businesses and drive up prices, what I never hear about are the wages offered. Imagine if you will any job advertising even $40 an hour. Wages need to go way way up.
You make excellent points, but Dems cannot address US wages without admitting the purposeful importation of 10 million unvetted, mostly low skilled workers, has a negative effect on US wages. Many desperate migrants are willing to accept 3rd world wages and working conditions, without complaint, and many US employers are ready, willing and able to exploit them.
So why did Dems do it? Why now do they fight the deportation of every murderer and child rapist? Why has no Dem acknowledged this was one of the worst policies in US history? Why is no Dem supporting humane return, that would send non criminal migrants home with seed money, that would aid the development of their home countries, while saving US taxpayers the greater expense of deportation?
The only rational reason is, Dem Party leaders desire open borders. For years Dems claimed they could not stop the border onslaught without comprehensive legislation, that codified into law 2-3 million migrants a year. Trump stemmed the flow in a matter of weeks, using long existing law.
Dems leaders support open borders and if not banning fossil fuels, rendering them so expensive, only the wealthy can enjoy them. Dems can focus group until they are Blue in the face. They can pay consultants tens of millions of dollars to "shape" their messaging, but Americans have eyes. Without major immigration and Climate policy changes, the rest is just noise. And only real Blue hope is a Trump implosion.
Great article. While a lot of the abundance talk can have working class appeal, the parts about clean energy need to be paired with support for more oil and gas drilling. Let deep blue metro areas embrace EVs and renewables, but that's not mutually exclusive with helping rural and outer suburban Americans afford transportation and electricity through older means.
I live in the Denver Julesburg basin, a large oil field. Drilling is way down due to an abundance of cheaper oil. Currently the USA is producing more oil than any other country. We have plenty of oil for now and prices are relatively low. There are really no hindrances to oil and gas production.
I’m mainly thinking of what stance Democrats should take on drilling. They should promise to let it continue if they win elections, not restrict drilling like many greens want.
On this, and so many issues, I'm not asking Democrats to become Republicans, but there should be some moderation. Take trans rights for example. You can certainly be for equal rights for transgender people, without supporting biological men in women's sports, and without allowing life altering surgeries for minors.
Democrats are dodo brains that ignore and reject the science of evolutionary psychology that describes human nature and the human needs hierarchy. Democrats are demographically and economically-filtered self-anointed elites that believe they are The Elect... the people chosen to provide care for the lower 80% that Democrats truly see as lessor people... people that if given the freedom to choose, will choose wrong every time. Democrats, controlled by our Ivy League credentialled professional management class, have lost perspective and lost their minds pursuing luxury beliefs... because we have over-educated too many without enough real productive and accountable responsibilities. How does an elite pursue self-actualization if not to "save the people" while making up manufactured activism causes like Trump-Russian collusions, COVID death fear, climate crisis and gender ideology absurdism?
Trump voters are voting for a return of the American Dream.
What is the American Dream? It isn't cheaper Chinese crap goods at Walmart. It isn't more welfare and SNAP benefits. It isn't government run healthcare. It isn't Universal Basic Income. The American Dream isn't a flood of immigrants that take jobs and reduce wages from the law of supply and demand. The American Dream is not to reward our rent-seekers, gamblers and looters of Wall Street at the expense of everyone else. The American Dream is not to give up our national sovereignty to the cretins at DAVOS and the WEF. The American Dream is not to concede world power to Marxists and the CCP. The American Dream is not a massive government bureaucracy of regulations. It is NOT to see the nation deeper and deeper in debt, with crashing American life expectancy, crumbling infrastructure, massive homeless, suicides and opioid deaths exploding. The American Dream is not violent resistance riots, antisemitism, and anti-American brainwashing hatched from our taxpayer-funded universities. The American Dream is not a free press that has become a propaganda arm of the Democrat party. The American Dream is not attacks on our God-given rights of free speech and right to protect and defend ourselves that is codified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The American Dream is not to see the weaponization of our judicial system for the benefit of Democrat politics. The American Dream is not to see billions of waste, fraud and abuse funneled through our government to benefit our elite political class and foreign people.
The American Dream is none of those things... it is generally the ability of an average American to be free to pursue his own self-interest without causing harm to others... for an American family to earn a reasonably good living while residing in a familiar and reasonably safe and secure community where they can be surrounded with family and friends.
Democrats seem to have developed some mass psychosis that prevents them from seeing these transparent and easy to understand truths... truths that a man like Donald J. Trump easily noted as a political advantage. As long as Democrats stay stuck on this level of stupid, MAGA Republicans will continue to dominate.
"The American Dream is not to see billions of waste, fraud and abuse funneled through our government to benefit our elite political class"
Let us not be naive and pretend that 'a man like Donald J. Trump' is particularly concerned about this item--he is using his office to leech off the system and benefit himself and his family on a scale heretofore unseen amongst American presidents. (which is saying something, given that there are some pretty terrible precedents)
MAGA Republicans are making quite the unforced error in not calling it out--they're forgetting that we're still in an era where Americans are by and large in a "throw the corrupt bums out!" state of mind. Quiet acquiescence to massive acts of corruption will not work out well in the long term for them anymore than it did for the Democrats.
The naivete is all yours here. Trump has been stating the same for over 35 years... about the US citizens getting ripped off by globalism and the US-funded global order. You have TDS and thus are incapable of seeing the truth.
Merely labeling the information elucidated in the links above (a small allusion to much more documentation elsewhere) as clear-cut evidence of massive corruption, and therefore concluding that Trump is massively corrupt, is not TDS--it is a simple exercise in impartial observation and reasoning.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood in a family of traditional Democrats. What exasperates me is the total lack of overall understanding of the lives of working class people. Who are they, what motivates them, what do they want, why don't they like us? It's as if we're the subject of anthropological study and not your fellow citizens. And why the constant disrespect for people who choose a life of labor? Less educated, Walmartians, rural, hidebound, religious, and deplorable yet when we locked down who were the essential workers? Who carried out the fundamental tasks necessary for a nation to keep functioning while the tremulous and masked laptop class hunkered down in their safe zones? I don't remember any national expression of appreciation toward those men and women but I do remember millions of unskilled people pouring across the border. There was no thank you, just a big fuck you. Message received Democrats and they're not coming back.
It is remarkable to have watched liberals become increasingly snotty toward rural America in the past 25 years. Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Missouri, and Montana used to send Democrats to the Senate, but no more. Same for Ohio. At the presidential level, these states are now solid red, and we're seeing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota wavering.
Okay, Democrats, I get it. Flyover country bores you. But it feeds you and it elects you. Or at least it once did. Oh well.
I worked safely in my home office during COVID, only leaving the house to go to the grocery store for my family. The workers at the grocery store showed up in person every day.
I thank God for these people who kept my family fed during this time.
There are times when I think that everyone on welfare, if they are able bodied, should have to work farmers' hours to get their benefits. In the cities, cleaning up parks would be one thing, and from 7 a.m. to sundown. That would reduce the welfare burden. Give something for nothing, and the recipient tends to assign a value of $0 to what they get.
I am strongly in favor of SNAP, but those cards should have chips, passwords, and recipient names, and require a photo I.D. for redemption. There are some people who cannot get to the store and send a family member or relative, but that can be accommodated by allowing two or three names on the card.
Where we live, there is a trade in those cards at 50 cents on the dollar, the cash going for narcotics. Also, the states that put deposits on bottles and cans should stop it. This creates a perverse incentive to buy a pallet of bottled water, dump it in the parking lot of the grocery store, and redeem the containers for the deposit, with the cash going for drugs.
SNAP (electronic food stamps) are very worthwhile. No one in this country should go hungry. I bake a dozen loaves of bread a week for the local food bank, and grow vegetables for donation. The food bank is well-run, but there is SNAP fraud in grocery stores. The "progressives" should be the first to want to reduce it, because there'll be more resources for people who need it.
What could make the biggest difference fastest between Dems and Repubs? Quit talking about the other side. The Democrats are about retribution, lawfare and lies about Republicans. You want my attention. Become grownups and talk about policy. Schumer, Bernie, AOC and the whiners like them need to go. Until that happens, you are a different side of the same coin. Both parties will screw you just in different ways. Biological men should not compete against biological women and they can’t get pregnant. They can have their own life with their competition leagues and their own restrooms. Do you have any idea how ground breaking that would sound and gain instant attention from millions? Obviously not. The Dems have reaped the whirlwind. How ironic is that.
I wouldn't count on "mishandling" the economy. Personal income is up for the first time in forever; the jobs numbers BEAT expectations; Biden-era inflation is cut in half; eggs/gas are down; US GDP has been revised up to almost "superb" range; the trade deficit was cut in half; tariffs are bringing in a spectacular amount of money; and tax cuts for the working class are around the corner. By December, you'll see about 1.5% inflation, a trade surplus, almost $500 billion a month in tariff revenue; and investment in the US that we haven't seen in decades.
I warned Democrats not to hitch their star to the economy. Only I didn't think it would turn this fast.
Meanwhile, here are some more of those pesky voter reg numbers: NM saw a net 500 GOP gain (large D lead there, bu chip, chip, chippin' is how Rs took FL and NC); NC now sees the overall D lead down to just 24,000 from 175,000 just a few years ago---but the active #s show a GOP lead of 83,000; AZ at GOP +324,000 and IA continues to show net GOP gains. So to be clear, IA, NC, AZ, OH, and FL are not "swing states" any more.
Two more sets of data just came in. PA Rs regained the weekly voter reg lead for the first time in the five weeks of the Dem primary, so that single holdout for Ds is now gone, and NJ saw Rs shave another 500 off the D lead. Long way to go, but the important thing is the NATIONWIDE TREND everywhere, which is 100% trending to the GOP.
Minsky you are wasting your time trying to inject facts into this discussion. Schweikart I will bet you $100 that you are wrong on the $500 billion a month in tariff revenue and another $100 about the trade surplus by Dec.
Many of the elitist Democrats say the working class votes against their interests. What arrogance to think they know better. That attitude alone is why many have stopped voting for Democrats. Also, while economics is very important, people do vote on the basis of other things. For example, I will never vote for someone who advocates men in women sports. That's why to me, Jared Golden is such a disappointment, right on so many things, but got that one wrong.
They're only "unpopular, regressive tax cuts", as the author puts it, if you believe government knows better how to spend your money than you do. And if you do believe that, then you may be guilty of the same ignorant arrogance the Democratic Party practices.
I pay a lot of taxes, so I pay attention, I also used to have a payroll.
My back of the envelope figuring, for a couple making $140,000K, maxing their IRA which is not itemized, you'd still be far better off taking the standard $27,000 standard deduction for married filing joint, than you would itemizing. If you had a $20,000 real estate tax maybe, or huge out of pocket medical expenses.
It's just real hard for a working class person to make enough to take advantage of tax deductions. Most of us don't make enough money.
The taxes are skewed to advantage high income. the changes in tax law would do very very little for the working class, and a heck of a lot for double incomes grossing $200,000 and up. For people making a half a million or more, living in CA, NY, or places like that, the savings are considerable.
I'd be happy if government spent no more money, we'd save the equal of our entire military budget if we simply paid off our debt. Plenty to use money on without spending it.
I agree with your last graph. Otherwise it's not clear to me why the constant drumbeat about "regressive" federal income taxes when the revised index would seem to represent the very definition of progressive.
Democratic spokesmen always sound like they are running against Romney. Trump is an entirely different sort of challenge. He has appropriated the Democratic economic policies of yesteryear that the writer describes. He was more or less forced into increasing the SALT deductions by the thinness of the Republican margin. This transfers money from poor to rich but the real point is to make life comfortable for politicians in high tax jurisdictions. Even in a high tax jurisdiction, the working class doesn't pay 40k in SALT or itemize at all. So call his bluff and introduce a bill eliminating the deductions entirely. Put the money into increasing the standard deductions or the child credits. You could probably get enough Republican support to break a filibuster. I would bet against a veto but it would be a clarifying moment in any event. Or you could impose sanctions on TBTF. Republican base voters don't love banks.
The author suggests that, “If Trump severely mishandles the economy, Democrats may have an opportunity to turn their newfound appreciation of disinvestment and regional inequality into a compelling political narrative.”
Why wait? Start handling well the states and cities Democrats now control. Reverse the out migration of residents. Make it an ‘all of party effort’ to turn around a blue state or blue city.
Increase public safety, increase student academic performance, reduce red tape for projects, improve customer service for public services, evaluate all programs and improve them.
Democrats need to roll up their selves, adopt a culture of continuous improvement, and the votes will follow.
Those are all good ideas, but it appears many rulers in the Dem Party have very little interest in public safety. We spent 25 years in CA. Areas that were so safe 20 years ago, parents would leave the car locked, with a sleeping toddler inside, while they grabbed a forgotten item in Trader's Joes, are now so constantly crime ridden, a car is broken into in 5 minutes, if anything is inside it. Forget running multiple errands. If the dry cleaning is hanging in the backseat, while you hit the grocery, it's gone.
Suburbs where tiny 50 year old starter homes are $2 million bucks and up, now offer free community center classes on how to park at the grocery store, so your catalytic converter is not stolen, why you grab a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. No one attempts to stop the omnipresent shoplifting. They simply lock up everything like it is nuclear material, rather than arresting and incarcerating thieves. The result is 20 minutes to buy toothpaste.
In many Blue States, if you are not apprehended standing over a dead body with an obvious murder weapon, there is virtually no chance of pretrial incarceration, and many will not even request token bail. Moreover, on the off chance of an actual conviction and ordered prison time, so many prisons have been closed, convicted criminals can be released years or decades early, due to overcrowding. Nothing short of a revolution within the Party, that purges Progressives will bring a return to sanity.
Rhonda, my sympathies to you and your loved ones. I have family in CA and it is unbelievable how the Democrats could take a paradise on earth and turn it into the top state for residents leaving.
Thank you, but we bailed with millions of others. You either have the gene that allows you to ignore the omnipresent homelessness and crime, or you don't. We are the latter.
It is hard to imagine for those who have never personally experienced the decline, how fast things can go so wrong.
About the homeless, or as the "progressives" now say, "houseless" or "people experiencing homelessness" or some other dodge, an acronym: CATO. Not the libertarian think tank.
Crazy, Addicted, Transient, Out of Luck.
These aren't mutually exclusive, of course, but I think from observation that only 10% or 20% are out of luckers. I have a personal track record of generosity toward those people. The rest? Not so much, especially the addicts and the transients.
The way to handle all of this is to set up pole barns on vacant land. There is always vacant land. In by 9, out by 9. No drugs, alcohol, or weapons. Triage at the door: screamers to one side, normals to the other side. Dogs go to the shelter unless they are guide dogs.
Want to eat? Then join the cleanup crew the next morning. Send buses to pick people off the street starting at 8 p.m. Think you'll pitch a tent in a park, under a freeway, or on the sidewalk? Watch your tent and its contents loaded into garbage trucks.
When I was young, California had an innovative and largely corruption-free state government, and was a national example of a well-run state. It took a long time to reverse that, but reverse it they did. Today's California government is a tragic mess, and that has coincided with the state falling into one-party rule.
It was the California Promise. We all wanted to go there. My dad traveled for business, and each of his sons were given the choice to accompany him to Miami or to Los Angeles. My two brothers picked Miami, but at the age of 11 (the summer when Apollo 13 landed on the moon), I chose California.
What a trip! We landed at LAX in the smog, and drove to Malibu where I had barracuda for lunch. Exotic for a Midwestern kid. Then we drove along Mullholland Drive, and being susceptible to car sickness, I puked on the lawn of a hotel in Century City, which made for years worth of family laughter including my own.
We stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, and I rode the monorail to the park for the week. You would get a ticket book food for rides ranked from A through E in ascending order. My favorite was the Space Mountain indoor roller coaster (which did not make me vomit), an E ride, and Tomorrowland. On Santa Monica Blvd., there were signs showing what speed to drive to hit all green lights.
My father, who'd been everywhere, said California drivers were the best in the country because they did so much driving on the freeways. To me, California was a dream, and then we returned home and a couple weeks later they landed on the moon. Peak America, peak California. Wow!
Today's California is as beautiful as it ever was, but what a decline. I lived there for eight months in 1984, a half-block from the Venice boardwalk, and saw the Olympic marathoners run past the intersection at the other end of the block. I loved walking to Santa Monica and back, and on later business trips, the Santa Monica Mall.
In 2013, on a return vacation trip, it had fallen so far -- including the driving, which shocked me -- that I decided never to return to L.A., and I didn't. Today, the Santa Monica Mall is mostly empty, inhabited by more junkies than shoppers. The indoor shopping center went bankrupt. Last year, I drove to Berkeley for a friend's 40th wedding anniversary, and stayed in Walnut Creek rather than risk having my vehicle vandalized or stolen in San Francisco.
Gasoline was $6.50 a gallon, the tolls were high, and the roads were in need of maintenance. Oakland, never glamorous, is now largely a no-go zone. Even the small towns up north have been invaded by tweakers. California will always be beautiful, but I no longer recognize he state that I once loved at the cellular level. Thanks so much, "progressives." What a fine demolition job you people have done.
That's really the ticket, but the reality is the opposite. Democratic cities have been in decline for a decade, and it really accelerated in the last 5 years. Blaming their failures on the Republicans simply won't cut it.
OK OK OK, Democrats are off message and need to pay more attention to more equal growth across the country and your policy responses are – – – infrastructure investment, antitrust enforcement, and vocational training? As a progressive economist who studies cities and metropolitan areas, those are awfully weak steps to won’t make much difference in the distribution of jobs and income. Workers want their jobs to be preserved, not go back to school. And there are strong economic reasons, not just bad Democratic messaging, why growth metros attract capital and higher skilled workers in a virtuous upward spiral. And we need much more unionization across the board . A lot more flat out redistribution is going to be needed to preserve some of those declining areas. And if you aren’t going to hurt the poor in cities, that can only come by much more aggressive taxation of the super wealthy. Your policy triangle is not going to solve this problem.
Yes, rural and exurban areas want antitrust enforcement, vocational training, and infrastructure investment. Workers are in fact willing to go back to training - not necessarily academic school - and they’re already doing it.
What would help even more would be support of remote work, rural internet initiatives INCLUDING satellite internet that is available NOW, and repurposing declining rural colleges as job training centers. Unionization does not, to me, appear to be the key.
“Growth metros” have been losing, not gaining, population, especially when workers have a choice. https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america. When workers have options, such as remote work, domestic migration is out of larger cities, not into them. Only immigration is keeping those “superstar” cities from continuing to lose population, and most are down from 2019.
The exurban and rural areas that are receiving that inflow are thriving, with secondary businesses popping up organically from increased population, especially from well to do remote workers providing a more solid economic base.
You cannot credibly sing “agglomeration or bust” when remote works well, and when the same jobs are targeted for AI automation and overseas outsourcing, neither of which are agglomerated. It’s not logically consistent. Attachment to agglomeration theory has become practically a religious belief and shows a stubborn effort to ignore modern communication and collaboration technology or to consider that many workers do not want to live in big cities.
We’re not asking for more redistribution. We’re asking you to stop actively sabotaging us. Stop seeing a remote worker having workday lunch in an exurb as a theft from a city. Start seeing it as an exercised preference and the market at work.
Support and encourage remote work and stop complaining that lunchtime and shopping economic activity from those workers has moved further out. Stop taking prime agricultural land and forests for solar farms and battery banks - put them on parking garages and industrial rooftops and parking lots, closer to where the power is needed. Antitrust the overly concentrated meat processing industry, which hurts farmers and BTW is an industry where union representation IS needed. Relax the endless over-regulation that tried to make it an EPA matter to do minor grading in damp areas and that blocks on-shoring by making manufacturing approval a decade-long process. We all want clean air and water, but you can have that and economic growth.
The progressives just can't understand that the "deplorables", 'bitter clingers", and others they despise don't just want another government program, as others have said here, a majority of them regard dependency as shameful, and able bodied people who exist in idleness on welfare as cheaters and thieves from safety net programs. Yes, they very much want the social programs to be there if they are needed, for helping them through injuries, illnesses, times between jobs, and other unavoidable interruptions to their income, but they do NOT want those programs to be given to lazy bums who won't work. So they show up on surveys as supporting the welfare state, but the nuance of having it there when they need it, but hoping they don't, is not captured in the survey because the questions aren't asked (or the survey sponsor doesn't want to know). Also, the progs are reading from an old script, the Trump Republican party is not planning to dismantle the safety net, which they realize is important to working people, they want to cut out the fraud and make sure it goes only to those who need it, which much of the working class supports strongly. The progs don't care about fraud, really, it supports their constituents and contributes to the erosion of social norms, which they like - though they won't actually say so, this is an integral part of queer theory.
What the working class really wants is meaningful work they can do with pride, making things, repairing/maintaining things, producing basic materials for America. The progressives hate all of that and don't want any of it done in America, it messes up their precious environment - though it's perfectly OK to pave over thousands of acres for solar panels and kill millions of birds with wind turbines. One of the many paradoxes that progressives need to believe to be in the club.
And yes, the cultural extremism of the progressives also is very repellent to normal people, and especially to the working class for whom family, community, and behavioral norms needed to get along with a wide range of other people are very important. Working people live and work in much closer proximity to others than rich elites do, and can't escape the consequences of that. Everyone has to coexist without too much conflict on a work crew or factory floor, something elites wouldn't understand.
Fairness is also a very important value. Men in women's sports and private spaces is fundamentally unfair. Elevating some identity groups over others is unfair. Blaming whites, many of whom don't have very much themselves, for all the bad that other identity groups suffer is very unfair. The progressives want to dismiss all this as irrelevant but it's not, their identity politics poisons everything in society and in some ways it is central to the lives of working people, many of whom are forced to lose resources to some "other" because of the "other's" identity, not any inherent merit, which they see as fundamentally unfair. It happens not only to whites but to others who aren't high enough on the progressive's victim list.
No one wants to be poor but the Democrats have for decades preserved poverty and poor people as a constituency they can continually use to expand government and funnel billions to their shadow-government NGO's in the name of social programs supposedly to help people. Very few would need big government if they weren't poor, and so no more NGO's and social programs. Can't let that happen. So they make sure that none of the anti-poverty, anti-homeless, or job-creation programs actually work, but suck up lots of money that goes to Dem operatives, consultants, think tanks, and others who recycle it back into Dem campaign donations. See how that works? They are having major meltdowns over the restructuring of the Deep State because this Deep Corruption is being exposed.
I'm not "working class," but for all my many flaws, economic snobbery has never been one of them. Same for entitlement of any kind. I was raised to work. Between the age of 10 and when I retired, I never went more than a couple months without some sort of job, well before I snagged a series of good white-collar positions.
I still have the two covid checks I was sent, uncashed. I regarded them as an insult. I understand that some people needed the money because the powers that be stupidly shut down the economy for a while, but I resented them.
I am not working class either but I'm not very far removed from first generation immigrant grandparents who were able by their hard work to send their children, my parents, to college. They always found jobs, somehow, and kept up standards of decency and good values. Bravo to you for not cashing the covid checks, I thought were insulting also.
It bothers me to see "progressives" lampooning conservatives in flyover country for their cultural conservatism, without looking harder.
Let's take one lightning rod at the moment, boys on girls athletic teams, and giving transgenders legal rights as members of the opposite sex. Resistance to this absurdity is commonly called bigotry, hatred, and "transphobia," but I differ. Now, it's a big country, so there certainly is some of that, but the real objections lie elsewhere.
"Progressives," are you listening? No? Then drop the smugness and listen for once.
I start by noting that homo sapiens is a mammal, and that all mammals are sexually dimorphic. This is seventh-grade biology. A man cannot change into a woman, or vice versa. To declare otherwise is rightly seen as bizarre and laughable, and not only by fang-dripping wingnuts. Two issues arise. One is that "progressives" are preaching this to kids in various ways, and that meets with well-founded fear and resentment. Stay away from the children, god damn you.
The other issue is this: If the "progressives" are willing to call a man a woman, can they be trusted on matters of far more immediate and substantial concern? I think that's really where the rubber hits the road. Rural, conservative Americans tend to have more literal lives than the urban "progressives" who think they are smarter, better, and more sophisticated, but really aren't.
If you want to be trusted, "progressives," Job #1 is to avoid being stupid. The sun rises in the east. Everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. And taking pills and getting cosmetic surgery cannot change the male human mammal into a female, or the female human mammal into a male. This is not a front-burner issue here, but it is starkly symbolic of just how little regard for facts and common sense we see among progressives.
Recall Orwell's "1984," where Winston Smith is tortured into declaring the 2 + 2 is 5, and that he loves Big Brother. Well, guess what? Where I live, 2 + 2 is 4, and we'd prefer that Big Brother not try to tell us otherwise.
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger announced her support for the so-called "right to work" law, further cementing the party's brand as anti-working class.
What Democrats don't seem to realize is that many working class people view receiving benefits such as SNAP as shameful. They are called the working class for a reason. The New Deal Democratic programs focused on jobs, often public works jobs that built infrastructure. They deliberately didn't focus on handouts.
Yes totally agree…working class people are hard working people who just want the opportunity to provide for their families. They do not want handouts which is what I believe the Democrats are referring to when they say “voting against their own interests “. I have always found this phrase to be condescending at least the way I take it.
If I were writing a book explaning the working class, this would be in chapter one. It's one of the most fundamental truths about working class attitudes, yet policy people are ignorant of it. Hand outs are disrespectful and imply that you are incapable of taking care of your family.
Will never stop getting a kick out of authors attempting to understand why Dems have lost the working class and then, in the next breath, referring to them as the "less educated". It pairs well with Dems noting they are unfairly blamed for the rise in energy costs, as if Americans did not notice a difference at the gas pump when Biden announced his intended fossil fuel national suicide.
Finally, wages are tied to the cost of living. Those earning $80K a year are not vacationing in Maui or dining in Beverly Hills. However, they are probably more likely to be homeowners in many Trump areas, then the young in the Silicon Valley, earning far more. Likewise, depending on the state, their public schools may well be more highly rated than those in some Blue bubbles, like much of CA.
Oil and gas production reached all time highs under Biden
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-BIDEN/OIL/lgpdngrgkpo/
The problem is not what you don't know, it's what you think you know that is wrong- Mark Twain
Oil and gas reached all time production highs in spite of Biden, not because of him. Gas prices averaged a more than a dollar a gallon cheaper, during Trump's first administration, when compared to Biden's.
Biden took office and informed the world the US planned an attempted energy suicide. Oil and gas soared. The additional petrodollars, caused by Biden's announcement, financed Putin's visit to Ukraine.
Alright, let me see if I've got this. Anything good that happened on Biden's watch (best in world GDP growth, strong real wage growth, record long period of low unemployment, record US gas and oil production, etc) is IN SPITE of Biden, while anything bad (transient inflation) is his fault. OK got it!
I'd be interested in a link to when he "informed the world the US planned an attempted energy suicide" but I know the substantiating your opinion with facts is not your strong suit.
Biden was senile throughout his term.
Agreed, and we know that intelligence and education are not synonymous with wisdom. To truly attain wisdom, they would need to abide in the Bible. I believe this lesson will be learned, collectively, eventually.
Nothing irks me more than the claim that people aren't voting in their own interests. As if voters are simpletons. At the most micro level people do understand when they don't make enough to live. All that data in the world won't pay the bills. The income gains at the bottom turn out to be a result of stimulus checks and transitory. The employment increases turn out to be wholly amongst the foreign born.
Republicans are silent on min wage and Democrats do nothing. Entitlements are great but they shouldn't be something to aspire to. I follow an obscure NYT economics journo who was visiting an elderly family member last week. The elderly fellow, of mixed racial background, was making $86 dollars an hour in today's dollars, in New Orleans as a bricklayer in the 70s.
Currently nationwide that union job pays $29, in high paying cities $40. So jobs pay a third to half of what they used to. Good jobs. Sucky jobs are much worse.
People wonder why minority people can vote Republican when the right side of the Republican Party harbors racists. I'll tell you want, black and Hispanic guys need a good paying job just as much as the next fellow. The Biden team, whoever was in charge, opened our borders to many millions of low wage laborers. When there is an overabundance of labor the pay goes down.
I keep reading about how deportations will destroy businesses and drive up prices, what I never hear about are the wages offered. Imagine if you will any job advertising even $40 an hour. Wages need to go way way up.
You make excellent points, but Dems cannot address US wages without admitting the purposeful importation of 10 million unvetted, mostly low skilled workers, has a negative effect on US wages. Many desperate migrants are willing to accept 3rd world wages and working conditions, without complaint, and many US employers are ready, willing and able to exploit them.
So why did Dems do it? Why now do they fight the deportation of every murderer and child rapist? Why has no Dem acknowledged this was one of the worst policies in US history? Why is no Dem supporting humane return, that would send non criminal migrants home with seed money, that would aid the development of their home countries, while saving US taxpayers the greater expense of deportation?
The only rational reason is, Dem Party leaders desire open borders. For years Dems claimed they could not stop the border onslaught without comprehensive legislation, that codified into law 2-3 million migrants a year. Trump stemmed the flow in a matter of weeks, using long existing law.
Dems leaders support open borders and if not banning fossil fuels, rendering them so expensive, only the wealthy can enjoy them. Dems can focus group until they are Blue in the face. They can pay consultants tens of millions of dollars to "shape" their messaging, but Americans have eyes. Without major immigration and Climate policy changes, the rest is just noise. And only real Blue hope is a Trump implosion.
Great article. While a lot of the abundance talk can have working class appeal, the parts about clean energy need to be paired with support for more oil and gas drilling. Let deep blue metro areas embrace EVs and renewables, but that's not mutually exclusive with helping rural and outer suburban Americans afford transportation and electricity through older means.
I live in the Denver Julesburg basin, a large oil field. Drilling is way down due to an abundance of cheaper oil. Currently the USA is producing more oil than any other country. We have plenty of oil for now and prices are relatively low. There are really no hindrances to oil and gas production.
I’m mainly thinking of what stance Democrats should take on drilling. They should promise to let it continue if they win elections, not restrict drilling like many greens want.
On this, and so many issues, I'm not asking Democrats to become Republicans, but there should be some moderation. Take trans rights for example. You can certainly be for equal rights for transgender people, without supporting biological men in women's sports, and without allowing life altering surgeries for minors.
Oil and gas production reached all time highs under Biden
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-BIDEN/OIL/lgpdngrgkpo/
The problem is not what you don't know, it's what you think you know that is wrong- Mark Twain
In spite of his advisors who ran the government while he was lost in his closet.
OK so he gets the credit for picking competent advisors instead of Fox TV hosts
Democrats are dodo brains that ignore and reject the science of evolutionary psychology that describes human nature and the human needs hierarchy. Democrats are demographically and economically-filtered self-anointed elites that believe they are The Elect... the people chosen to provide care for the lower 80% that Democrats truly see as lessor people... people that if given the freedom to choose, will choose wrong every time. Democrats, controlled by our Ivy League credentialled professional management class, have lost perspective and lost their minds pursuing luxury beliefs... because we have over-educated too many without enough real productive and accountable responsibilities. How does an elite pursue self-actualization if not to "save the people" while making up manufactured activism causes like Trump-Russian collusions, COVID death fear, climate crisis and gender ideology absurdism?
Trump voters are voting for a return of the American Dream.
What is the American Dream? It isn't cheaper Chinese crap goods at Walmart. It isn't more welfare and SNAP benefits. It isn't government run healthcare. It isn't Universal Basic Income. The American Dream isn't a flood of immigrants that take jobs and reduce wages from the law of supply and demand. The American Dream is not to reward our rent-seekers, gamblers and looters of Wall Street at the expense of everyone else. The American Dream is not to give up our national sovereignty to the cretins at DAVOS and the WEF. The American Dream is not to concede world power to Marxists and the CCP. The American Dream is not a massive government bureaucracy of regulations. It is NOT to see the nation deeper and deeper in debt, with crashing American life expectancy, crumbling infrastructure, massive homeless, suicides and opioid deaths exploding. The American Dream is not violent resistance riots, antisemitism, and anti-American brainwashing hatched from our taxpayer-funded universities. The American Dream is not a free press that has become a propaganda arm of the Democrat party. The American Dream is not attacks on our God-given rights of free speech and right to protect and defend ourselves that is codified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The American Dream is not to see the weaponization of our judicial system for the benefit of Democrat politics. The American Dream is not to see billions of waste, fraud and abuse funneled through our government to benefit our elite political class and foreign people.
The American Dream is none of those things... it is generally the ability of an average American to be free to pursue his own self-interest without causing harm to others... for an American family to earn a reasonably good living while residing in a familiar and reasonably safe and secure community where they can be surrounded with family and friends.
Democrats seem to have developed some mass psychosis that prevents them from seeing these transparent and easy to understand truths... truths that a man like Donald J. Trump easily noted as a political advantage. As long as Democrats stay stuck on this level of stupid, MAGA Republicans will continue to dominate.
"The American Dream is not to see billions of waste, fraud and abuse funneled through our government to benefit our elite political class"
Let us not be naive and pretend that 'a man like Donald J. Trump' is particularly concerned about this item--he is using his office to leech off the system and benefit himself and his family on a scale heretofore unseen amongst American presidents. (which is saying something, given that there are some pretty terrible precedents)
MAGA Republicans are making quite the unforced error in not calling it out--they're forgetting that we're still in an era where Americans are by and large in a "throw the corrupt bums out!" state of mind. Quiet acquiescence to massive acts of corruption will not work out well in the long term for them anymore than it did for the Democrats.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/22/nx-s1-5406209/trump-meme-coin-dinner-crypto
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-family-net-worth-crypto-investments/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vietnam-approves-1-5-billion-183500461.html?guccounter=2&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmVkZGl0LmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHwqfkwn4FrNPqNyd6aH4lZAjMIBjSMmFXkDVNcDuo9ie3YBOm_Qx9mwP-iTh-04seLPo-otAGI7zF-ExiSWl1rY0zzzZB85BVXgoPAw6wMmSGzSe98U2Ac02uv4SHeJ9wTEN6z-0VzFtYkmlDLk5Gd7M8ie4IHXn5WsXvwcIuuU
https://apnews.com/article/trump-qatar-deal-conflicts-saudi-arabia-emoluments-7379bee2e307d39bd43b534a05ae3207
The naivete is all yours here. Trump has been stating the same for over 35 years... about the US citizens getting ripped off by globalism and the US-funded global order. You have TDS and thus are incapable of seeing the truth.
Merely labeling the information elucidated in the links above (a small allusion to much more documentation elsewhere) as clear-cut evidence of massive corruption, and therefore concluding that Trump is massively corrupt, is not TDS--it is a simple exercise in impartial observation and reasoning.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood in a family of traditional Democrats. What exasperates me is the total lack of overall understanding of the lives of working class people. Who are they, what motivates them, what do they want, why don't they like us? It's as if we're the subject of anthropological study and not your fellow citizens. And why the constant disrespect for people who choose a life of labor? Less educated, Walmartians, rural, hidebound, religious, and deplorable yet when we locked down who were the essential workers? Who carried out the fundamental tasks necessary for a nation to keep functioning while the tremulous and masked laptop class hunkered down in their safe zones? I don't remember any national expression of appreciation toward those men and women but I do remember millions of unskilled people pouring across the border. There was no thank you, just a big fuck you. Message received Democrats and they're not coming back.
It is remarkable to have watched liberals become increasingly snotty toward rural America in the past 25 years. Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Missouri, and Montana used to send Democrats to the Senate, but no more. Same for Ohio. At the presidential level, these states are now solid red, and we're seeing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota wavering.
Okay, Democrats, I get it. Flyover country bores you. But it feeds you and it elects you. Or at least it once did. Oh well.
I worked safely in my home office during COVID, only leaving the house to go to the grocery store for my family. The workers at the grocery store showed up in person every day.
I thank God for these people who kept my family fed during this time.
There are times when I think that everyone on welfare, if they are able bodied, should have to work farmers' hours to get their benefits. In the cities, cleaning up parks would be one thing, and from 7 a.m. to sundown. That would reduce the welfare burden. Give something for nothing, and the recipient tends to assign a value of $0 to what they get.
I am strongly in favor of SNAP, but those cards should have chips, passwords, and recipient names, and require a photo I.D. for redemption. There are some people who cannot get to the store and send a family member or relative, but that can be accommodated by allowing two or three names on the card.
Where we live, there is a trade in those cards at 50 cents on the dollar, the cash going for narcotics. Also, the states that put deposits on bottles and cans should stop it. This creates a perverse incentive to buy a pallet of bottled water, dump it in the parking lot of the grocery store, and redeem the containers for the deposit, with the cash going for drugs.
SNAP (electronic food stamps) are very worthwhile. No one in this country should go hungry. I bake a dozen loaves of bread a week for the local food bank, and grow vegetables for donation. The food bank is well-run, but there is SNAP fraud in grocery stores. The "progressives" should be the first to want to reduce it, because there'll be more resources for people who need it.
What could make the biggest difference fastest between Dems and Repubs? Quit talking about the other side. The Democrats are about retribution, lawfare and lies about Republicans. You want my attention. Become grownups and talk about policy. Schumer, Bernie, AOC and the whiners like them need to go. Until that happens, you are a different side of the same coin. Both parties will screw you just in different ways. Biological men should not compete against biological women and they can’t get pregnant. They can have their own life with their competition leagues and their own restrooms. Do you have any idea how ground breaking that would sound and gain instant attention from millions? Obviously not. The Dems have reaped the whirlwind. How ironic is that.
I wouldn't count on "mishandling" the economy. Personal income is up for the first time in forever; the jobs numbers BEAT expectations; Biden-era inflation is cut in half; eggs/gas are down; US GDP has been revised up to almost "superb" range; the trade deficit was cut in half; tariffs are bringing in a spectacular amount of money; and tax cuts for the working class are around the corner. By December, you'll see about 1.5% inflation, a trade surplus, almost $500 billion a month in tariff revenue; and investment in the US that we haven't seen in decades.
I warned Democrats not to hitch their star to the economy. Only I didn't think it would turn this fast.
Meanwhile, here are some more of those pesky voter reg numbers: NM saw a net 500 GOP gain (large D lead there, bu chip, chip, chippin' is how Rs took FL and NC); NC now sees the overall D lead down to just 24,000 from 175,000 just a few years ago---but the active #s show a GOP lead of 83,000; AZ at GOP +324,000 and IA continues to show net GOP gains. So to be clear, IA, NC, AZ, OH, and FL are not "swing states" any more.
Two more sets of data just came in. PA Rs regained the weekly voter reg lead for the first time in the five weeks of the Dem primary, so that single holdout for Ds is now gone, and NJ saw Rs shave another 500 off the D lead. Long way to go, but the important thing is the NATIONWIDE TREND everywhere, which is 100% trending to the GOP.
Again, usual corrective needed.
Larry: "US GDP has been revised up to almost "superb" range"
Reality: "The Bureau of Economic Analysis revised its estimate of first-quarter gross domestic product to show the economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.2%, compared with the previously reported 0.3% drop.": https://www.barrons.com/articles/us-gdp-economic-growth-report-tariffs-e2b14f5b
Larry: "Personal income is up for the first time in forever"
Reality: Personal Income has been declining since February, after rising all the way up to December 2024: https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/personal-income-and-outlays-april-2025
Larry: "tariffs are bringing in a spectacular amount of money;"
Reality (and the bigger picture): CBO estimates 'Big, Beautiful' Tax Bill will reduce revenues and increase deficits by
2.3 trillion over the next decade: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/house-reconciliation-bill-would-increase-budget-deficits-2-3-trillion-over-decade-cbo
Larry: "a trade surplus"
If you *really* want one of those you have to know how they work, Larry, and both you and Trump have shown quite clearly that you don't.
Minsky you are wasting your time trying to inject facts into this discussion. Schweikart I will bet you $100 that you are wrong on the $500 billion a month in tariff revenue and another $100 about the trade surplus by Dec.
Thanks for your smugness. It was only to be expected.
I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is
Many of the elitist Democrats say the working class votes against their interests. What arrogance to think they know better. That attitude alone is why many have stopped voting for Democrats. Also, while economics is very important, people do vote on the basis of other things. For example, I will never vote for someone who advocates men in women sports. That's why to me, Jared Golden is such a disappointment, right on so many things, but got that one wrong.
They're only "unpopular, regressive tax cuts", as the author puts it, if you believe government knows better how to spend your money than you do. And if you do believe that, then you may be guilty of the same ignorant arrogance the Democratic Party practices.
I pay a lot of taxes, so I pay attention, I also used to have a payroll.
My back of the envelope figuring, for a couple making $140,000K, maxing their IRA which is not itemized, you'd still be far better off taking the standard $27,000 standard deduction for married filing joint, than you would itemizing. If you had a $20,000 real estate tax maybe, or huge out of pocket medical expenses.
It's just real hard for a working class person to make enough to take advantage of tax deductions. Most of us don't make enough money.
The taxes are skewed to advantage high income. the changes in tax law would do very very little for the working class, and a heck of a lot for double incomes grossing $200,000 and up. For people making a half a million or more, living in CA, NY, or places like that, the savings are considerable.
I'd be happy if government spent no more money, we'd save the equal of our entire military budget if we simply paid off our debt. Plenty to use money on without spending it.
I agree with your last graph. Otherwise it's not clear to me why the constant drumbeat about "regressive" federal income taxes when the revised index would seem to represent the very definition of progressive.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/
Democratic spokesmen always sound like they are running against Romney. Trump is an entirely different sort of challenge. He has appropriated the Democratic economic policies of yesteryear that the writer describes. He was more or less forced into increasing the SALT deductions by the thinness of the Republican margin. This transfers money from poor to rich but the real point is to make life comfortable for politicians in high tax jurisdictions. Even in a high tax jurisdiction, the working class doesn't pay 40k in SALT or itemize at all. So call his bluff and introduce a bill eliminating the deductions entirely. Put the money into increasing the standard deductions or the child credits. You could probably get enough Republican support to break a filibuster. I would bet against a veto but it would be a clarifying moment in any event. Or you could impose sanctions on TBTF. Republican base voters don't love banks.
The author suggests that, “If Trump severely mishandles the economy, Democrats may have an opportunity to turn their newfound appreciation of disinvestment and regional inequality into a compelling political narrative.”
Why wait? Start handling well the states and cities Democrats now control. Reverse the out migration of residents. Make it an ‘all of party effort’ to turn around a blue state or blue city.
Increase public safety, increase student academic performance, reduce red tape for projects, improve customer service for public services, evaluate all programs and improve them.
Democrats need to roll up their selves, adopt a culture of continuous improvement, and the votes will follow.
Those are all good ideas, but it appears many rulers in the Dem Party have very little interest in public safety. We spent 25 years in CA. Areas that were so safe 20 years ago, parents would leave the car locked, with a sleeping toddler inside, while they grabbed a forgotten item in Trader's Joes, are now so constantly crime ridden, a car is broken into in 5 minutes, if anything is inside it. Forget running multiple errands. If the dry cleaning is hanging in the backseat, while you hit the grocery, it's gone.
Suburbs where tiny 50 year old starter homes are $2 million bucks and up, now offer free community center classes on how to park at the grocery store, so your catalytic converter is not stolen, why you grab a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. No one attempts to stop the omnipresent shoplifting. They simply lock up everything like it is nuclear material, rather than arresting and incarcerating thieves. The result is 20 minutes to buy toothpaste.
In many Blue States, if you are not apprehended standing over a dead body with an obvious murder weapon, there is virtually no chance of pretrial incarceration, and many will not even request token bail. Moreover, on the off chance of an actual conviction and ordered prison time, so many prisons have been closed, convicted criminals can be released years or decades early, due to overcrowding. Nothing short of a revolution within the Party, that purges Progressives will bring a return to sanity.
Rhonda, my sympathies to you and your loved ones. I have family in CA and it is unbelievable how the Democrats could take a paradise on earth and turn it into the top state for residents leaving.
Thank you, but we bailed with millions of others. You either have the gene that allows you to ignore the omnipresent homelessness and crime, or you don't. We are the latter.
It is hard to imagine for those who have never personally experienced the decline, how fast things can go so wrong.
About the homeless, or as the "progressives" now say, "houseless" or "people experiencing homelessness" or some other dodge, an acronym: CATO. Not the libertarian think tank.
Crazy, Addicted, Transient, Out of Luck.
These aren't mutually exclusive, of course, but I think from observation that only 10% or 20% are out of luckers. I have a personal track record of generosity toward those people. The rest? Not so much, especially the addicts and the transients.
The way to handle all of this is to set up pole barns on vacant land. There is always vacant land. In by 9, out by 9. No drugs, alcohol, or weapons. Triage at the door: screamers to one side, normals to the other side. Dogs go to the shelter unless they are guide dogs.
Want to eat? Then join the cleanup crew the next morning. Send buses to pick people off the street starting at 8 p.m. Think you'll pitch a tent in a park, under a freeway, or on the sidewalk? Watch your tent and its contents loaded into garbage trucks.
When I was young, California had an innovative and largely corruption-free state government, and was a national example of a well-run state. It took a long time to reverse that, but reverse it they did. Today's California government is a tragic mess, and that has coincided with the state falling into one-party rule.
It was the California Promise. We all wanted to go there. My dad traveled for business, and each of his sons were given the choice to accompany him to Miami or to Los Angeles. My two brothers picked Miami, but at the age of 11 (the summer when Apollo 13 landed on the moon), I chose California.
What a trip! We landed at LAX in the smog, and drove to Malibu where I had barracuda for lunch. Exotic for a Midwestern kid. Then we drove along Mullholland Drive, and being susceptible to car sickness, I puked on the lawn of a hotel in Century City, which made for years worth of family laughter including my own.
We stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, and I rode the monorail to the park for the week. You would get a ticket book food for rides ranked from A through E in ascending order. My favorite was the Space Mountain indoor roller coaster (which did not make me vomit), an E ride, and Tomorrowland. On Santa Monica Blvd., there were signs showing what speed to drive to hit all green lights.
My father, who'd been everywhere, said California drivers were the best in the country because they did so much driving on the freeways. To me, California was a dream, and then we returned home and a couple weeks later they landed on the moon. Peak America, peak California. Wow!
Today's California is as beautiful as it ever was, but what a decline. I lived there for eight months in 1984, a half-block from the Venice boardwalk, and saw the Olympic marathoners run past the intersection at the other end of the block. I loved walking to Santa Monica and back, and on later business trips, the Santa Monica Mall.
In 2013, on a return vacation trip, it had fallen so far -- including the driving, which shocked me -- that I decided never to return to L.A., and I didn't. Today, the Santa Monica Mall is mostly empty, inhabited by more junkies than shoppers. The indoor shopping center went bankrupt. Last year, I drove to Berkeley for a friend's 40th wedding anniversary, and stayed in Walnut Creek rather than risk having my vehicle vandalized or stolen in San Francisco.
Gasoline was $6.50 a gallon, the tolls were high, and the roads were in need of maintenance. Oakland, never glamorous, is now largely a no-go zone. Even the small towns up north have been invaded by tweakers. California will always be beautiful, but I no longer recognize he state that I once loved at the cellular level. Thanks so much, "progressives." What a fine demolition job you people have done.
Apollo 13 did not land on the moon, but flew around it.
You're correct. It was Apollo 11. It was almost 56 years ago. I got that one mixed up. Oops.
That's really the ticket, but the reality is the opposite. Democratic cities have been in decline for a decade, and it really accelerated in the last 5 years. Blaming their failures on the Republicans simply won't cut it.
OK OK OK, Democrats are off message and need to pay more attention to more equal growth across the country and your policy responses are – – – infrastructure investment, antitrust enforcement, and vocational training? As a progressive economist who studies cities and metropolitan areas, those are awfully weak steps to won’t make much difference in the distribution of jobs and income. Workers want their jobs to be preserved, not go back to school. And there are strong economic reasons, not just bad Democratic messaging, why growth metros attract capital and higher skilled workers in a virtuous upward spiral. And we need much more unionization across the board . A lot more flat out redistribution is going to be needed to preserve some of those declining areas. And if you aren’t going to hurt the poor in cities, that can only come by much more aggressive taxation of the super wealthy. Your policy triangle is not going to solve this problem.
Yes, rural and exurban areas want antitrust enforcement, vocational training, and infrastructure investment. Workers are in fact willing to go back to training - not necessarily academic school - and they’re already doing it.
What would help even more would be support of remote work, rural internet initiatives INCLUDING satellite internet that is available NOW, and repurposing declining rural colleges as job training centers. Unionization does not, to me, appear to be the key.
“Growth metros” have been losing, not gaining, population, especially when workers have a choice. https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america. When workers have options, such as remote work, domestic migration is out of larger cities, not into them. Only immigration is keeping those “superstar” cities from continuing to lose population, and most are down from 2019.
The exurban and rural areas that are receiving that inflow are thriving, with secondary businesses popping up organically from increased population, especially from well to do remote workers providing a more solid economic base.
You cannot credibly sing “agglomeration or bust” when remote works well, and when the same jobs are targeted for AI automation and overseas outsourcing, neither of which are agglomerated. It’s not logically consistent. Attachment to agglomeration theory has become practically a religious belief and shows a stubborn effort to ignore modern communication and collaboration technology or to consider that many workers do not want to live in big cities.
We’re not asking for more redistribution. We’re asking you to stop actively sabotaging us. Stop seeing a remote worker having workday lunch in an exurb as a theft from a city. Start seeing it as an exercised preference and the market at work.
Support and encourage remote work and stop complaining that lunchtime and shopping economic activity from those workers has moved further out. Stop taking prime agricultural land and forests for solar farms and battery banks - put them on parking garages and industrial rooftops and parking lots, closer to where the power is needed. Antitrust the overly concentrated meat processing industry, which hurts farmers and BTW is an industry where union representation IS needed. Relax the endless over-regulation that tried to make it an EPA matter to do minor grading in damp areas and that blocks on-shoring by making manufacturing approval a decade-long process. We all want clean air and water, but you can have that and economic growth.
The progressives just can't understand that the "deplorables", 'bitter clingers", and others they despise don't just want another government program, as others have said here, a majority of them regard dependency as shameful, and able bodied people who exist in idleness on welfare as cheaters and thieves from safety net programs. Yes, they very much want the social programs to be there if they are needed, for helping them through injuries, illnesses, times between jobs, and other unavoidable interruptions to their income, but they do NOT want those programs to be given to lazy bums who won't work. So they show up on surveys as supporting the welfare state, but the nuance of having it there when they need it, but hoping they don't, is not captured in the survey because the questions aren't asked (or the survey sponsor doesn't want to know). Also, the progs are reading from an old script, the Trump Republican party is not planning to dismantle the safety net, which they realize is important to working people, they want to cut out the fraud and make sure it goes only to those who need it, which much of the working class supports strongly. The progs don't care about fraud, really, it supports their constituents and contributes to the erosion of social norms, which they like - though they won't actually say so, this is an integral part of queer theory.
What the working class really wants is meaningful work they can do with pride, making things, repairing/maintaining things, producing basic materials for America. The progressives hate all of that and don't want any of it done in America, it messes up their precious environment - though it's perfectly OK to pave over thousands of acres for solar panels and kill millions of birds with wind turbines. One of the many paradoxes that progressives need to believe to be in the club.
And yes, the cultural extremism of the progressives also is very repellent to normal people, and especially to the working class for whom family, community, and behavioral norms needed to get along with a wide range of other people are very important. Working people live and work in much closer proximity to others than rich elites do, and can't escape the consequences of that. Everyone has to coexist without too much conflict on a work crew or factory floor, something elites wouldn't understand.
Fairness is also a very important value. Men in women's sports and private spaces is fundamentally unfair. Elevating some identity groups over others is unfair. Blaming whites, many of whom don't have very much themselves, for all the bad that other identity groups suffer is very unfair. The progressives want to dismiss all this as irrelevant but it's not, their identity politics poisons everything in society and in some ways it is central to the lives of working people, many of whom are forced to lose resources to some "other" because of the "other's" identity, not any inherent merit, which they see as fundamentally unfair. It happens not only to whites but to others who aren't high enough on the progressive's victim list.
No one wants to be poor but the Democrats have for decades preserved poverty and poor people as a constituency they can continually use to expand government and funnel billions to their shadow-government NGO's in the name of social programs supposedly to help people. Very few would need big government if they weren't poor, and so no more NGO's and social programs. Can't let that happen. So they make sure that none of the anti-poverty, anti-homeless, or job-creation programs actually work, but suck up lots of money that goes to Dem operatives, consultants, think tanks, and others who recycle it back into Dem campaign donations. See how that works? They are having major meltdowns over the restructuring of the Deep State because this Deep Corruption is being exposed.
I'm not "working class," but for all my many flaws, economic snobbery has never been one of them. Same for entitlement of any kind. I was raised to work. Between the age of 10 and when I retired, I never went more than a couple months without some sort of job, well before I snagged a series of good white-collar positions.
I still have the two covid checks I was sent, uncashed. I regarded them as an insult. I understand that some people needed the money because the powers that be stupidly shut down the economy for a while, but I resented them.
I am not working class either but I'm not very far removed from first generation immigrant grandparents who were able by their hard work to send their children, my parents, to college. They always found jobs, somehow, and kept up standards of decency and good values. Bravo to you for not cashing the covid checks, I thought were insulting also.
It bothers me to see "progressives" lampooning conservatives in flyover country for their cultural conservatism, without looking harder.
Let's take one lightning rod at the moment, boys on girls athletic teams, and giving transgenders legal rights as members of the opposite sex. Resistance to this absurdity is commonly called bigotry, hatred, and "transphobia," but I differ. Now, it's a big country, so there certainly is some of that, but the real objections lie elsewhere.
"Progressives," are you listening? No? Then drop the smugness and listen for once.
I start by noting that homo sapiens is a mammal, and that all mammals are sexually dimorphic. This is seventh-grade biology. A man cannot change into a woman, or vice versa. To declare otherwise is rightly seen as bizarre and laughable, and not only by fang-dripping wingnuts. Two issues arise. One is that "progressives" are preaching this to kids in various ways, and that meets with well-founded fear and resentment. Stay away from the children, god damn you.
The other issue is this: If the "progressives" are willing to call a man a woman, can they be trusted on matters of far more immediate and substantial concern? I think that's really where the rubber hits the road. Rural, conservative Americans tend to have more literal lives than the urban "progressives" who think they are smarter, better, and more sophisticated, but really aren't.
If you want to be trusted, "progressives," Job #1 is to avoid being stupid. The sun rises in the east. Everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. And taking pills and getting cosmetic surgery cannot change the male human mammal into a female, or the female human mammal into a male. This is not a front-burner issue here, but it is starkly symbolic of just how little regard for facts and common sense we see among progressives.
Recall Orwell's "1984," where Winston Smith is tortured into declaring the 2 + 2 is 5, and that he loves Big Brother. Well, guess what? Where I live, 2 + 2 is 4, and we'd prefer that Big Brother not try to tell us otherwise.
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger announced her support for the so-called "right to work" law, further cementing the party's brand as anti-working class.
Right to work is not anti working class.