Tag: rebuild the middle class

In Pursuit of the Pursuit of Happiness

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People say that one of the unique components of the American experiment was the explicit enumeration of “the pursuit of happiness” in the founding document of the country.  And that’s true but I think the more important situation is that to a much greater degree than elsewhere it actually was captured.  I’d say that the capture of happiness is the much discussed “American Dream.”

And I’ll go further; I’ll say that without the happiness there isn’t anything worth discussing about America.  The essence of this country is that it delivered on the dream.  People who came here and put in the effort found actual happiness.  And what was that happiness?  In the last hundred and fifty years it was middle class status which means the wherewithal to raise a family above the poverty line.  The definition of poverty has shifted over the centuries.  Of late it means being able to afford shelter, food, clothes, education, communication, entertainment and transportation costs for a family of four.  And nowadays that’s quite a bit.

But the general idea is that you make enough money to bring up your kids to be able to walk among equals in the town you live in.  And that is the definition of happiness for normal human beings.  And except for economic catastrophes like the Great Depression that expectation was within reach of even penniless immigrants who arrived here without even a command of the English language.  But that situation is no longer the case.  The younger generation are of the opinion that a middle-class lifestyle for them is an impossibility.  And I contend that is why Donald Trump has twice been elected president.

It’s not as if Gen Z likes his looks or rhetoric.  He’s the ultimate example of the man to whom they’d say, “Okay boomer.”  His views on women and foreigners are considered uncouth by the young.  But he’s promised to fix the economy so that they can afford to be grown-ups and move out of their parents’ basements.  So, the real question is; can he do it?

Boy, I wish I knew the answer to this one.  Sure, I want the answer to be yes.  But it’s a lot easier to move an industrial base to a new country when labor costs are effectively zero than it is to rebuild it in a place where labor costs and environmental regulations are huge negatives.  It may be that he won’t get enough time to rebuild it.  But that is the bet.  Donald Trump says he can restore the American Dream; restore the chance for a middle-class lifestyle for the majority of Americans.

I find it an amazing thing.  A man that everyone claims is just a flim-flam man and an opportunist has recognized that our present disastrous state is the result of the failure of the most fundamental characteristic of America; happiness.  And diagnosed its remedy as restoring the means of a middle-class lifestyle to the common man.  I think a case could be made that he’s the only one in politics who isn’t an opportunist.

We All Better Hope He Can

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“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”

This to me seems to be a wise policy.  Based on the fairly frequent bubbles and panics occurring in our economic environment I’m fairly convinced that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing.  So, I’ll assume that’s what the problem is.  The people running the economy just don’t know what they’re doing.  And maybe, all things considered, they’re doing as good a job as is possible.  After all, human society is a dynamic system with an enormous number of factors contributing to the output of goods and services and a big random universe throwing everything from hurricanes and droughts to wars and plagues at us in an almost completely random manner.  Alright, I’ll grant that too.  It’s a maelstrom of causes and effects.  So then, what’s a leader of the United States to do?

I believe there is some guidance that can be used.  All the way back to Aristotle and all the way up to our own nation it has been observed that the most successful, stable and the most pleasant nations to live in are the ones with the largest middle class.  Not the one with the most billionaires and certainly not the one with the most poor people, but the one with the largest number of people who work for a living and live well enough to keep their families well-fed, well-clothed and with enough money to do something for fun every now and then.  When the majority of the country can be described in that way you are living in as close as life on Earth can come to a paradise.

And up until about the 1970’s that was a reasonable description of post-WWII America.  People thought they were well off and that their children would be even more prosperous in the future.  But since the 1970’s the proportion of Americans who felt this way has been steadily shrinking until now only the elites feel this is true.  The working class has slipped out of the middle class and the white-collar jobs that were the hallmark of the upper middle class are disappearing from the United States through automation and through off-shoring of the manufacturing industries that used to provide both blue-collar and white-collar jobs for the majority of the nation.

Well, all of this is old news.  We all know all about it.  Now we see Donald Trump trying to use tariffs to get American (and foreign) corporations to manufacture their products here and thereby provide Americans with relatively high value employment.  I applaud Trump for doing this.  He needs to do as much of this as possible.  In fact, this will need to be the policy of the United States government for the foreseeable future.

But this is just a band-aid.  Forcing these companies to bring some part of their manufacturing capacity back here is a small part of what’s needed.  America needs a “Marshall Plan” to identify the industries and infrastructure that will produce a re-invigorated middle class.  All the super-geniuses who have created artificial intelligence and advanced automated systems need to put their supposedly infallible business acumen to the problem of how to engineer an economic order where the maximum percentage of Americans are prosperous and usefully employed.  Call it a Marshall Plan or a Manhattan Project or just a survival plan.

The free-traders or the globalists or whatever you want to call the people who deindustrialized America from the 1970’s on have demonstrated how to destroy the middle class.  Now it’s the federal government’s job to undo that process using the levers of power they control; taxation, tariffs and the anti-trust laws.  But as I said it’s not enough to just bring back the old industries.  Innovation will always drive prosperity.  Silicon Valley currently represents that innovation.  What must be done though is to force the innovators to reckon with the dislocation that their innovation can cause to the lives of regular people and come up with a way to make change work for all of us.

A hopeful sign is that Donald Trump has enlisted Elon Musk into his administration.  Granted, right now Musk is entirely a disruptor of the established order.  But he is also capable of building up new constructs.  The challenge is to see if Trump and Musk can produce a vision that includes the restoration of the American middle class.  I hope he can.  We all better hope he can.

Rebuild the Middle Class

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In the comments to yesterday’s post was this one by TomD:

“For a number of years, I saw leftism coming and attributed it to a politically motivated elite with a brilliantly executed long focus political motive. There’s probably at least some of that but the revelations of last few weeks lead me to think that what we have been observing with such dismay over the past decade or so is coming from a much baser motivation: greed.

The revelations coming from DOGE seem to imply a very large and intricate network of NGO’s lavishly endowed from scantily controlled government disbursement programs. Apparently, the amount of money disappearing into these dark and uncontrolled conduits is well into the $trillions.

Everybody close to government is getting RICH and they do not want the trails to become illuminated.”

I think a lot of us who were just plain old patriotic Americans, or what they now call civic nationalists, assumed that the Left really was sincere with all the craziness they preached and that the waste and inefficiency were symptoms of their myopia and unwillingness to use meritocratic selection when populating the federal government with useless people of all imaginable types.

But just like TomD I’ve finally gotten it through my thick skull that for the most part all these people in government are just plain crooks stealing us blind.  And I include almost all the Republicans in that category too.  All they want is a way to cash in on their positions in the machine that prints money and hands it out to those in the know.

I suppose that I should be philosophical about all this.  After all, greed is what makes capitalism work supposedly.  And I suppose if they were just wetting their beaks but still doing their jobs to keep this country healthy, rich and strong I’d be inclined to say, “Well, that’s just human nature.  They’re just good old boys picking up some crumbs from the floor of the bakery.”

But it’s nothing like that.  They’re like Mitt Romney’s company Bain Capital.  They’re selling off the assets of a company (America) and sending the employees home without jobs and without their pensions.  They’re liquidators.  It’s a giant going out of business sale with us as the former employees forced to take temporary employment, boxing up the equipment as it’s shipped off to China and elsewhere.

But for as long as the Merry Go Round keeps turning, they get paid by skimming off of the proceeds from the sales of what’s still left.

Eventually, our bodies will be all that’s left.  And the only use for those will be as cannon fodder for the forever wars that still bring in value to the people running the show.  And that’s why Ukraine and the Middle East and Taiwan are always in the news and why we still have to hear about how important democracy is.  They need our sons to suit up and fly to the desert and die in the heat.

And that’s why we should hate these people with all the hate we can manufacture.  To them we’re cattle and that’s all.  They feel not the least kinship toward us and we should not have the least compunction about them failing, losing their jobs or anything else.  Hearing about how NGOs are laying off people means less than nothing to me.  In fact, I’m overjoyed to hear about some Harvard graduate who was making mid-six figures working for a George Soros “open society” NGO shocked and dismayed to be out of work and stuck with a huge mortgage on a five-million-dollar house in Northern Virginia.

Compare his plight to a family that’s been living for the last two hundred years in Ohio or Pennsylvania while the industries that were located there systematically relocated to China and left the working class more and more desperate and poor.  Trump has looked at what is going on and clearly seen the liquidation game for what it is.  If the rest of his team are smart, they’ll see that their only hope (and ours) is to continue this process to force the corporations to invest in us.  To quote a mythical small town American, “this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”

Call it populism, nationalism, whatever -ism you care to.  This used to be a great nation.  A balance has to be struck that allows for a prosperous middle class.  Instead, the masters of the universe think they can settle into a feudal system with them at the top and us as the serfs.  I think it’s time we let them know that if this is going to be feudalism then we might as well bring the time up to the French Revolution and make a big old bonfire out of their cool stuff.

Enough is enough.  Empty out Washington, slash the federal budget, lower our taxes, stand pat on the nuclear arsenal, fix all the broke stuff, bring back our jobs, fill up the prisons and rebuild the middle class.