Real World Event Discussions

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SECOND

Friday, August 10, 2018 5:05 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, with all due respect, I have to point out that . . .

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy

You'll like this better since it blames Hillary and oligopolistic firms. "America is an oligarchy" - Signym:

The Democrats first step is to tell a clear and accurate story of what has gone wrong in the country economically, something they utterly failed to do in 2016. With Barack Obama still president, Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton, felt compelled to tell voters that they should feel good about the economic progress of the previous eight years, even though, as they knew, wages had barely budged.

Into that vacuum stepped Donald Trump, who had a simpler story: Average Americans were suffering from long-term downward mobility because elites and Washington had abandoned them to the depredations of immigrants and China, and he would put things right. The particulars were wrong, and dishonest, but the overall portrait of generational decline hit home for much of the country.

In 2019 and 2020, the burden of defending the status quo will be reversed. That will give Democrats an opportunity to finally take the lead on telling the story of the deeper trends that actually explain the past two decades of wage stagnation. The most important part of that story is the concentration of corporate power. With more and more industries controlled by fewer and fewer big firms, corporate managers face little pressure to raise wages, since many workers, especially in rural America, have nowhere else to go. Combine that with the continuing decline of unions, the erosion of the real value of the minimum wage, and the spread of employment contracts with anti-worker provisions—like mandatory arbitration and noncompete clauses—and you have an economy in which workers have little or no bargaining power. A growing chorus of economists now thinks that this phenomenon—more than trade, and certainly more than immigration—is the best explanation for why real wages aren’t rising even after nine years of economic expansion, near-record-low unemployment, and record corporate profits.

But most Americans don’t know any of this, because their leaders haven’t bothered to tell them. They may have seen firsthand the number of potential employers in their hometown shrink because of corporate mergers, or they may have been turned down for a raise even though their company is making huge profits. They may have tried to expand their small business, only to be blocked by market barriers erected by larger corporations. But most folks perceive such setbacks as private tragedies. They don’t know that millions of fellow citizens are suffering them, too. Nor do they understand that their plight is not some inevitable result of “the market.” Rather, it is the consequence of choices made in Washington—especially the decision, beginning in the Reagan administration, to abandon tough antitrust enforcement and instead green-light wave after wave of corporate mergers and anticompetitive practices to the point where a handful of oligopolistic firms have enormous power not only over markets but also, through their lobbying and campaign cash, over the machinery of government itself. Finally, they don’t know that these conditions can be changed—that, in fact, the American economy produced broad-based prosperity for much of the twentieth century with strict rules that made markets more competitive.

The advantage of centering policy debate around this narrative is that it’s both true and new. It counters the GOP’s scapegoating of immigrants and foreigners, and it allows Democrats to transcend their tired role as advocates of increased welfare spending.

More at https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/winning-is-not
-enough/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pag

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, August 10, 2018 7:02 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, with all due respect, I have to point out that . . .

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy
You'll like this better since it blames Hillary and oligopolistic firms. "America is an oligarchy" - Signym:

The Democrats first step is to tell a clear and accurate story of what has gone wrong in the country economically, something they utterly failed to do in 2016. With Barack Obama still president, Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton, felt compelled to tell voters that they should feel good about the economic progress of the previous eight years, even though, as they knew, wages had barely budged.

Into that vacuum stepped Donald Trump, who had a simpler story: Average Americans were suffering from long-term downward mobility because elites and Washington had abandoned them to the depredations of immigrants and China, and he would put things right. The particulars were wrong, and dishonest, but the overall portrait of generational decline hit home for much of the country.

In 2019 and 2020, the burden of defending the status quo will be reversed. That will give Democrats an opportunity to finally take the lead on telling the story of the deeper trends that actually explain the past two decades of wage stagnation. The most important part of that story is the concentration of corporate power. With more and more industries controlled by fewer and fewer big firms, corporate managers face little pressure to raise wages, since many workers, especially in rural America, have nowhere else to go. Combine that with the continuing decline of unions, the erosion of the real value of the minimum wage, and the spread of employment contracts with anti-worker provisions—like mandatory arbitration and noncompete clauses—and you have an economy in which workers have little or no bargaining power. A growing chorus of economists now thinks that this phenomenon—more than trade, and certainly more than immigration—is the best explanation for why real wages aren’t rising even after nine years of economic expansion, near-record-low unemployment, and record corporate profits.

But most Americans don’t know any of this, because their leaders haven’t bothered to tell them. They may have seen firsthand the number of potential employers in their hometown shrink because of corporate mergers, or they may have been turned down for a raise even though their company is making huge profits. They may have tried to expand their small business, only to be blocked by market barriers erected by larger corporations. But most folks perceive such setbacks as private tragedies. They don’t know that millions of fellow citizens are suffering them, too. Nor do they understand that their plight is not some inevitable result of “the market.” Rather, it is the consequence of choices made in Washington—especially the decision, beginning in the Reagan administration, to abandon tough antitrust enforcement and instead green-light wave after wave of corporate mergers and anticompetitive practices to the point where a handful of oligopolistic firms have enormous power not only over markets but also, through their lobbying and campaign cash, over the machinery of government itself. Finally, they don’t know that these conditions can be changed—that, in fact, the American economy produced broad-based prosperity for much of the twentieth century with strict rules that made markets more competitive.

The advantage of centering policy debate around this narrative is that it’s both true and new. It counters the GOP’s scapegoating of immigrants and foreigners, and it allows Democrats to transcend their tired role as advocates of increased welfare spending.

More at https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/winning-is-not
-enough/

The Joss Whedon script for Sereni

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SIGNYM

Friday, August 10, 2018 8:07 PM

Quote:
Into that vacuum stepped Donald Trump, who had a simpler story: Average Americans were suffering from long-term downward mobility because elites and Washington had abandoned them to the depredations of immigrants and China, and he would put things right. The particulars were wrong, and dishonest ...

I really appreciate how SECOND's favorite articles make breathless leaps into unsubstantiated declarations! (not)

SECOND, please follow this link. I can't just copy the "image location" here (because it isn't just an image, it's an interactive chart), but this is the FRED's chart of "all employees manufacturing" 1940-2017. The chart also shows the recessions as gray vertical bars.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

Now, if you look at THE DATA you will see that the biggest jump in manufacturing occurs April 1939 to Jan 1944, which makes sense because that was the war effort. It drops significantly (by about 3 million jobs) in the short recession after peace was declared in 1945, but continues to rise in uneven sawtooth fashion (slower rises and quick drops during each recession) until it reaches an absolute peak in Aug 1979. After that, it drops during the recession of 1981 but plateaus and holds more-or-less steady until ...

If you look at the chart carefully, you'll see that EVERY SINGLE drop in manufacturing employment occurred DURING a RECESSION, but immediately popped back up again (sometimes to a higher value and sometimes to a lower one) as soon as the recession was over, with two exceptions. The first occurred in towards the end of 1990, which was kind of a gentle "sag" in the chart, not too significant, with a loss of about a half-million jobs (out of about 17.5 million). The next one, which was VERY significant, occurred late 2000 to late 2007, with a loss of about 3.5 million jobs. The was a third loss of about 2.5 million jobs beginning late 2007 (The beginning of the Great Recession) but like most other job losses, this one appears to show some recovery as soon as the recession is technically over, even tho it also results in a net loss of 1 million jobs. (Overall, a net loss of about 7 million jobs from peak-to-present.)

So there are some general trends one can see, but one of the BIG ones was the permanent loss of manufacturing jobs beginning in late 2000, which began during a recession but never recovered after the recession was over ... a structural change, as opposed to a financial one.

Any thoughts as to what happened in late 2001-early 2002, when manufacturing should have been recovering?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

SECOND

Friday, August 10, 2018 9:17 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So there are some general trends one can see, but one of the BIG ones was the permanent loss of manufacturing jobs beginning in late 2000, which began during a recession but never recovered after the recession was over ... a structural change, as opposed to a financial one.

Any thoughts as to what happened in late 2001-early 2002, when manufacturing should have been recovering?

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy

Many have complained about the decline of the manufacturing sector in the United States. As this graph shows, how recently this decline started depends on what you look at. If you look at the number of people employed in that sector, the decline started only a decade ago. If you look at the share of manufacturing in total employment, the steady decline has been ongoing for decades.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ws8

For a nice overview of the evolution of employment in the manufacturing sector, see this article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jecper/v28y2014i1p3-26.html

Quote:
Abstract
The development of the US manufacturing sector over the last half-century displays two striking and somewhat contradictory features: 1) the growth of real output in the US manufacturing sector, measured by real value added, has equaled or exceeded that of total GDP, keeping the manufacturing share of the economy constant in price-adjusted terms; and 2) there is a long-standing decline in the share of total employment attributable to manufacturing. The persistence of these trends seems inconsistent with stories of a recent or sudden crisis in the US manufacturing sector. After all, as recently as 2010, the United States had the world's largest manufacturing sector measured by its valued-added, and while it has now been surpassed by China, the United States remains a very large manufacturer. On the other hand, there are some potential causes for concern. First, though manufacturing's output share of GDP has remained stable over 50 years, and manufacturing retains a reputation as a sector of rapid productivity improvements, this is largely due to the spectacular performance of one subsector of manufacturing: computers and electronics. Second, recently there has been a large drop in the absolute level of manufacturing employment that many find alarming. Third, the US manufacturing sector runs an enormous trade deficit, equaling $460 billion in 2012, which is also very concentrated in trade with Asia. Finally, we consider the future evolution of the manufacturing sector and its importance for the US economy. Many of the largest US corporations continue to shift their production facilities overseas. It is important to understand why the United States is not perceived to be an attractive base for their production.

If you dig into that paper, they tell you the obvious:

Quote:
Even though Edwards and Lawrence (2013) argue that trade does not explain the post-2000 drop in manufacturing employment, they do show that the trade deficit does have a large jobs component, and its elimination would raise manufacturing employment by about 25 percent. During the boom years, Americans were relatively indifferent to the consequences of large trade deficits, but in the future, the United States cannot afford ongoing trade deficits of 3 percent and more of its GDP. Because of the domination of manufacturing in tradables, much of any adjustment will have to be concentrated in that sector. We now turn to a discussion of the future of US manufacturing and policies that would assist in reducing manufacturing trade deficits.

Reducing the trade deficit to zero would increase manufacturing employment by, maybe, 25%. Since manufacturing employment is around 13 million, call it 4 million mor

SECOND

Friday, August 10, 2018 11:23 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm not sure if you artfully removed the things that Mr. Glastris says in his article that you know would get opposition here, or if you removed what you actually didn't agree with.

I'm cutting 'n' pasting. Probably none of the good ideas will come to pass, but these do explain why things go wrong:

Nowhere is distrust of government more of a dilemma for Democrats than in their abiding crusade to achieve universal health care. The political challenge of any such plan is to convince voters, the vast majority of whom already have insurance, either through their employers or Medicare, to accept some risk of disruption so that other people can have it too. Clinton and Obama both pushed universal health care legislation in their first two years in office, and both efforts caused the Democrats to be crushed in the next midterms. Americans hate disruption.

Democrats are again gearing up to another futile fight for universal health care. This time, many are rallying around a single-payer system in which all Americans, including the 150 million who now have private insurance, would be covered under a government plan. Whether you agree with single-payer or not, it is the most disruptive way to achieve universal coverage short of full nationalization. It’s almost the perfect example of a policy you don’t push in a low-trust-in-government environment unless you don’t mind losing the next election. To the extent that Democrats might want to risk disrupting the health care system, (and pissing off millions of voters) they should instead address the rapidly rising cost of private insurance. That is the biggest emergency in health care right now, and it’s the one that directly affects the lives of the great majority of voters.

That doesn’t mean Democrats can’t advance the cause of universal coverage. But they would be wise, for instance, to champion a “Medicare buy-in” option for people between fifty-five and sixty-five years old, or go even further with what journalist Steven Waldman calls a “universal public option”: give every individual who lacks health insurance the choice (and subsidies if they need it) to buy into Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA. The beauty of these ideas is twofold. First, they build on existing government programs that voters already know and (mostly) trust. Second, they empower individuals, not the government, to make the choice with their own money.

That second feature, not coincidentally, ought to be a guiding principle of other big new ideas Democrats want to push. Obviously to me, the GOP will be opposed to all this. That's why all will fail.

More at https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/winning-is-not
-enough/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Friday, August 10, 2018 11:29 PM

Quote:
Reducing the trade deficit to zero would increase manufacturing employment by, maybe, 25%. Since manufacturing employment is around 13 million, call it 4 million more jobs.

A significant number of jobs!

Quote:
What that will cost in higher prices for the manufactured goods, the paper does not say, but all 333 million Americans will be paying to employ an extra 4 million.

As opposed to paying unemployment and other government benefits.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

SECOND

Saturday, August 11, 2018 1:07 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Reducing the trade deficit to zero would increase manufacturing employment by, maybe, 25%. Since manufacturing employment is around 13 million, call it 4 million more jobs.
A significant number of jobs!

Quote:
What that will cost in higher prices for the manufactured goods, the paper does not say, but all 333 million Americans will be paying to employ an extra 4 million.
As opposed to paying unemployment and other government benefits.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy

Paul Krugman warned to not get carried away with over-estimating the cost of a Trumpian trade war. He wasn't willing to risk his reputation by giving a dollar value. The closest he would go is a formula:

Quote:
Real income loss = 0.5*tariff rate*reduction in imports

This formula suggests only moderate costs even from a major trade war. Suppose that worldwide tariff were to rise to 40 percent, and world trade were to fall by 15 percent of world GDP, a 50% reduction. Even so, world real income would fall only 3 percent.

www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/opinion/supply-chains-and-trade-war-very-wo
nkish.html

When he plugged numbers in, the result was 3% loss of real income.

When I plug numbers in for America, 3% of $21 trillion US GDP is $630 billion. If we end up at a full-out trade war, that is a lot of money per year for creating 4 million extra manufacturing jobs. But it's only $158,000 per job per year. Is it a bargain? Depends on if it is your job.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

1KIKI

Saturday, August 11, 2018 1:38 AM

"3% loss of real income" doesn't equal loss from total GDP.

You're comparing apples to blue. If you want to calculated the cost of the extra jobs, I suggest you calculate 3% of total US income.

THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt. "Trump better be innocent of any wrong doing, anywhere, anytime."

SECOND

Saturday, August 11, 2018 1:54 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
"3% loss of real income" doesn't equal loss from total GDP.

You're comparing apples to blue. If you want to calculated the cost of the extra jobs, I suggest you calculate 3% of total US income.

THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt. "Trump better be innocent of any wrong doing, anywhere, anytime."

Personal income was $17 trillion in 2017. www.statista.com/statistics/216756/us-personal-income/

Corporate profits for the first quarter of 2018 were $2 trillion. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-profits

Seems to me that $21 trillion is a little on the low side for an estimate of real income for, say, 2019. The trade war, once it starts, doesn't end exactly on Dec 31, 2018.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

1KIKI

Saturday, August 11, 2018 2:16 AM

If you can find where Krugman got his figures then you'll know what his '3% of real income' meant. And not to harp, but 'profits' aren't 'income' either. Though what businesses consider 'income' is subject to interpretation. "The real issue is what goes into that income number. ...About the best you can do is try to compare apples to apples — from one quarter to the next, or one company to another. But even that takes a bit of digging." nbcnews 'Income' for families and individuals is much easier to determine, since we have fewer categories for exclusion.

THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt. "Trump better be innocent of any wrong doing, anywhere, anytime."