Monthly Archives: November 2016

The Across State Lines Myth

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Michael HiltzikOf all the healthcare reform nostrums in all the world, the most popular among Republicans in the US is allowing the sale of insurance policies across state lines.

The idea has been part of every GOP proposal to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. It was written into GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s platform in 2008 and Mitt Romney’s in 2012, and shows up right there in paragraph two of President-elect Trump’s healthcare policy statement…

Selling insurance across state lines is a vacuous idea, encrusted with myths. The most important myths are that it’s illegal today, and that it’s an alternative to the Affordable Care Act. The truth is that it actually is legal today and specifically enabled by the Affordable Care Act. The fact that Republicans don’t seem to know this should tell you something about their trenchant understanding of healthcare policy. The fact that it hasn’t happened despite its enablement under the ACA should tell you more about why it’s no solution to anything…

As the Georgetown University study team observed, laws allowing cross-state health insurance sales have no organized champions. Consumers aren’t clamoring for them; insurers aren’t interested in them; doctors and hospitals don’t care; and state regulators aren’t inclined to cede their oversight to interlopers from somewhere else. Their only backers are preening political candidates who don’t understand health insurance and hope you don’t, either.

“Selling insurance across state lines” is a slogan, not a policy, and it deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of empty promises.

—Michael Hiltzik
Selling Health Insurance Across State Lines Is a Favorite GOP “Reform.” Here’s Why It Makes No Sense

Image of Michael Hiltzik cropped from one at The Los Angeles Times. Licensed under Fair Use.

Making Voters Care About Policy

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Distracted Much?! Do Voters Care?In the novel Primary Colors, Libby is distraught after McGovern loses in 1972. And she tells Jack that they need to learn how to play dirty in politics. And Jack tells her no, “Our job is to make it clean. Because if it’s clean, we win — because our ideas are better.” I love that line because it so sums up liberal thinking. It also sums up the way things are today. Regardless of what you think of the Democrats, at least they have ideas. The Republicans don’t have any ideas other than that the rich should be given everything they want.

It is well known that when you talk to voters about policy, they overwhelmingly agree with the Democrats. People are in favor in Social Security. They are in favor of Medicare. The same thing holds true with most other things. They agree that global warming is real and that we should do something about it. We need to invest in infrastructure — the people agree with that. The people believe that the rich have had things their way for too long and that the poor and middle classes need to be helped out. Americans agree so much with the Democratic Party that it’s amazing that the Republican Party still exists.

The Republican Party Thrives

Yet exist it does. Not only did the Republican Party just win the presidency (with a minority of the votes), but they control the Senate and the House. They control most of the state governments. For all the talk of the Republican Party dying, they are doing really well. All this talk about the Republican Party dying seems to be based on people like me and the assumption that It should be dying. The voters think otherwise.

And the reason for this is that the voters aren’t interested in policy. And the Democrats are as guilty of this as the Republicans are. We can, if we like, get together in small groups and grouse about how stupid the voters are. And if we do that, we are going to continue to have more glorious victories like 2014 and 2016. The fact that voters don’t care much about policy is not their problem. It is our problem. It is the nation’s problem. As this election shows, it is the world’s problem.

This last election was especially substanceless. There were basically only two things that were talked about. For a small period of time, we talked about the tape where Donald Trump and Billy Bush discussed women in a most vile way and the older man claimed to get away with sexual assault on multiple occasions because he was famous. To me, the most chilling thing on the tape was, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it — you can do anything.” That’s not a boast; that’s just a fact.

Email Distraction

Wall Street - We CareBut that was just a week’s worth of entertainment news. The rest of the time was about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. That was particularly interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that it was a technical matter. It’s the kind of stuff that I make a living writing about. So I know that at most one percent of Americans had even the vaguest idea of what the issue was. And the more you knew, the less you cared. It was truly of no interest.

The second thing about it was that “email server” became “email” — something people knew more about. But again, it was an issue that no one really understood. She wasn’t using the private server for classified correspondence. So why did that matter? That was a question that never came up. Occasionally, there was some discussion that some bit of email had since been classified since it went through the server. But that was the closest we ever got.

The third thing about it was that we weren’t talking about troop movements. We all know that way too information is classified. The fact that things were sent as unclassified but later determined to be classified tells us much. So even if Hillary Clinton had sent classified material, so what? Is there anything there that anyone care about? No.

Voters Do Care

Yet lots of people did care — about “emails.” That is to say they cared about the story. “Emails” is a real life example of a McGuffin. That’s something in a movie that the action revolves around. A good example of this is found in the movie Ronin. Everyone is trying to get their hands on something that is inside a steel case. We never find out what it is because it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that everyone in the film cares about.

In the case of Hillary Clinton’s “emails,” everyone cared because it was constantly implied that it was important. It wasn’t. But how is it that the Democratic Party allowed this to be the story? How is it that no one was interested in the fact that a vote for Donald Trump was a vote for taking health insurance away from 20 million people? I know that voters in the United States care about that. They care about a lot of other things too — substantial things. Yet the election had all the gravitas of the Miss Teen USA beauty pageant.

What Democrats Must Do

The Democratic Party has two options. It can get a hell of a lot better at putting on a good reality television election. Or it can get people to care about the policies that they already care about. Frankly, I think the party has been working more on the former. And the reason is because it isn’t as committed to those popular policies as it claims to be.

This year, the Republicans took away a big issue that really ought to belong to the Democrats: our unfair economic system. Sure, they used it in a xenophobic way that has almost nothing to do with reality. And they won’t do anything to make the lives better of those who continue to suffer under our unjust economic system. But what would the Democratic Party do?

Last time I checked, the Democratic Party was still pretty keen on the latest “free trade” deal. Most Democratic politicians still turn slightly green when they talk about raising taxes. The Senate Democrats are poised to elect as leader a Wall Street apparatchik. It’s not that the Democrats are bad. But they seem much more committed to the thinking of Ronald Reagan than FDR

The first thing the Democratic Party needs to do is to proudly embrace its liberalism. It isn’t enough to be against racism and sexism and homophobia. Because all of those will thrive as long as economic inequality thrives. A vote for Wall Street is a vote for segregation and the glass ceiling and the lynching tree. The question that voters ask is, “Do you care?” And the answer, when it comes to the Democratic Party, is not clear.

Email image altered from You’ve Got Mail by Card Karma. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Richard Rorty Predicts 2016 President in 1999

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Richard RortyMembers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet…

After my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international superrich.

–Richard Rorty
Achieving our Country (1999)
H/T: Ben Mathis-Lilley via Claire

Image of Richard Rorty cropped from one taken from his faculty page at Stanford University. Licensed Under Fair Use.

North Korea and the Nature of Democracy

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Kim Jong-un - North Korea - InternetLast week at the website I edit for, we published, Everything We Know About North Korea’s Bizarre Internet. It was written by Claire Broadley who is kind of the co-editor with me of the blog at WhoIsHostingThis.com. It’s one of the best things we’ve done. In one way, it is hilarious. In another, it is extremely sad. Even though it is about the internet and technology, it provides a great insight into North Korea itself.

My favorite part of it is, “On the majority of North Korean websites, the names of all three Supreme Leaders are displayed larger than the text that surrounds them.” This is actually what led me to add “bizarre” to the title of the article. To give you some idea of this, consider the Kim Il-Sung University. Since “Kim Il-Sung” is one of the supreme leaders, the name is in a larger font. So when “Kim Il-Sung University” is written, it doesn’t come off as a single unit. It’s silly.

Pettiness of Authoritarians

I was so interested in this that I went looking through their HTML and CSS. What I found was that every time “Kim Il-Sung” was mentioned, it was put inside a “span” tag with the class “august.” The “august” class was then defined in the CSS file to be bold and 10 percent larger than the text it was around. It was fun to find this out. But it’s pathetic for three reasons:

  1. Those in power are so insecure that they must deify their current and previous leaders.
  2. They used the word “august.”
  3. It was hand coded so it had to be put in the HTML every time one of the names was mentioned.

But this is hardly surprising. This is the nature of authoritarians. And you don’t even have to go to that level. Look at the state of the aristocracy in England two hundred years ago. Or even the way people treat the royal family today. Or remember when Wall Street banks got their feelings all hurt when Obama talked about “fat cat bankers”? Entitled people are amazingly petty.

It’s hard not to see this all in the context of the recent American presidential election. He seems genuinely ignorant of what a president is. He seems to imagine that he’s going to be Supreme Leader.

What was so sad preparing the article on the North Korean internet is thinking about the millions of people who all have horrible lives just so that one man can feel like he is a god. And it’s all for nothing. Kim Jong-un isn’t the supreme leader of North Korea because he keeps most of the country living near starvation; he’s leader because China backs him. Without China, he would be executed and that would be the end of it.

North Korea vs America

The irony is, of course, that if he allowed as much freedom as the Chinese despots do, not only would the people of North Korea be better off, so would Kim Jong-un. Or he would be in all but one way: he wouldn’t be allowed the delusion that he is a god. He would just be an incredibly powerful man with more money than anyone could ever spend.

It’s hard not to see this all in the context of the recent American presidential election. The president-elect ran for office because he already had everything else. And that’s one of the reasons why he’s so dangerous. He seems genuinely ignorant of what a president is. He seems to imagine that he’s going to be Supreme Leader. And during my life, I’ve seen one political norm after another fall. So in addition to the Republicans getting all that they want — stripping away much of what is left of the New Deal and the Great Society — we will take another giant step toward kleptocracy.

Democracy is about a lot more than voting. In the coming years, we will see just how how much different we are from North Korea.

Afterword

I highly recommend reading the whole article, Everything We Know About North Korea’s Bizarre Internet. I’ve barely touched on it. The article is fascinating — and probably the best work any of us has done over at WhoIsHostingThis.com.

Image cropped from Kim Jong-un by User P388388 on Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

David Cay Johnston on the First 100 Days

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David Cay JohnstonHere is what to expect, even with the sharp divisions between establishment and insurgents:

  • Repeal of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature accomplishment, ending health care for more than 20 million people, many with pre-existing conditions.
  • Appointment of a Supreme Court justice who could provide the fifth vote to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 case that established a woman’s limited right to an abortion.
  • Repeal of Dodd-Frank and other rules that prevent banks from engaging in the kind of practices that sank the economy in 2008…
  • Cutting regulations on coal-fired power plants, pipelines, and fracking for oil and natural gas, making America a pariah in a world where — among other major countries — climate change is accepted as serious science.
  • Smaller budgets for the IRS and the Education and Labor Departments, together with big spending increases for the Pentagon, especially for weapons purchases…

Unclear is whether we will see law enforcement deployed against minorities, immigrants, journalists, and political dissidents. But be wary, very wary, for the man just elected to the White House has again and again said that his personal philosophy is revenge.

—David Cay Johnston
Why Voters Elected President Donald J Trump — and Why They’ll Regret It

Image of David Cay Johnston cropped from the one on his Twitter account. Licensed under Fair Use.

Charter School Spending Big on Politics

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Bill Raden - Charter SchoolYesterday the subscriber-only political almanac California Target Book reported that spending by all independent expenditure committees (IECs) on Sacramento legislative races in the general election had topped $41 million. That brought the year’s total of outside money for state Assembly and Senate seats, including primary races, to $70 million.

But the real surprise of this election was just how much of 2016’s independent expenditure spending can be attributed to a handful of committees tied to charter school groups. According to the California Secretary of State’s Cal-Access website, charter IECs pumped close to $24 million into about 35 Assembly and Senate races, along with school board races in Alameda and Sacramento counties in the north, to Riverside and San Diego counties in the south.

Under state law, an independent expenditure is any campaign spending that is “outside” the control the candidates whom it is benefiting or opposing. An IEC can funnel unlimited amounts of money from corporations, nonprofits, and wealthy donors, as long as it does not coordinate the spending activity with candidates, who are under strict, albeit voluntary campaign limits.

California’s “school choice” movement has always benefited from generous subsidies by a narrow spectrum of big-spending entrepreneurs, many of whom are billionaires. Their wealth has helped give the state the highest number of charter schools in the US, even as their election largess has left it with the nation’s most expensive school board elections.

Capital & Main’s analysis of the latest campaign-finance records for the five largest charter school IECs reveals that those same personal fortunes are at the center of the charters’ apparent attempt to buy some Sacramento political insurance against a growing resistance among both lawmakers and the public to the industry’s unbridled expansion in the state.

The amount spent by charter IECs represents about $40 for each of California’s 581,100 charter school students, and a 300 percent jump from 2014 charter election spending — about 570 percent over 2012.

—Bill Raden
Why California’s Deep-Pocketed Charter School Backers Went for Broke

Image of Bill Raden cropped from one at Capital & Man. Licensed under Fair Use.

Analyze the Election or Go to the Circus

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Analyze the Great DepressionSorry for being away for a whole day. Not very professional of me. I was down visiting my sister. But at the same time, I was working a lot because work is crazy — not that there is really anything unusual about that. I do, however, have a lot on my mind when it comes to Frankly Curious. In particular, I want to write some things about politics. But I want to stay on the subject of practical politics and theory. I am not interested in political news. I don’t need to analyze why we elected a demagogue.

Every time I hear some bit of news about our new president, it makes me ill. I have very much the same feeling that I had when George W Bush won re-election in 2004. I just wanted the next year to come so that we could start the process and move along. Of course, in that case, it was just a matter of four years. I suspect that this nightmare is going to be eight years. I’m not sure that you all know the way I expect things to go. So let me run it past it.

The Bleak Future

I won’t blame anyone for thinking that I’m full of it. Flip on Dancing With the Stars. At least it is reasonably fair.

The first two years will probably be pretty bad. Trump will get a big tax break for the rich that will be bad for the economy. Poor people will have less money to spend. Even with the economy still struggling, we will probably see a recession over the next two years. But it, like all things, will end. And things will be doing fairly well by 2020. And he will be re-elected. Twenty years from now, he will have the same standing as Ronald Reagan now has in the Republican Party.

Those who think that this next four years will be so bad that everyone will understand and turn toward the Democratic Party are fooling themselves. The truth is that there isn’t any rock bottom — for the Republican Party or for the nation. There’s nothing to analyze because the truth is crystal clear. For people of my generation, things getting steadily worse has come to be normal. So people are not going to rise up and demand change.

Irrational Anger Leads to Demagogues

This film was released 40 years ago this month:

Not a damned thing has changed. Of course, listen to what Howard Beale is saying. He’s mad as hell, but he’s not even sure what he’s mad as hell about. Things just aren’t quite “right.” And the truth is that this is what has brought us the new president. The sense that something is wrong without having any concrete ideas about it is what makes demagogues possible.

What America Wants

There’s been a lot of reporting on the fact that this election was all about email servers and grabbing women by the crotch. But really: is that the fault of the media? Isn’t it the case that we, the American people, don’t want to analyze. Hillary Clinton put together all kinds of serious policy papers on how to address problems that we face. But no one was interested in that.

Even if Hillary Clinton had won the election, it wouldn’t have been because she was qualified. It would have been because people liked her. It would have been because people found her opponent abhorrent. We don’t elect presidents on the basis of policy. The rich get the policy that they want. And the poor know that regardless of the policy, they will get screwed. Everybody knows that things will continue on as they have been. So you might as well sit back and enjoy the circus.

Let’s Try to Think — To Analyze

I’m going to do my best to make people see that policy does make a difference. But I won’t blame anyone for thinking that I’m full of it. Flip on Dancing With the Stars. At least it is reasonably fair.

Afterword

I will have something to say Leonard Cohen death later. The one good thing about it is that he died before the election results were in.

Image cropped from one by the great Dorothea Lange. It is in the public domain.

Cervantes on Cervantes

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Cervantes - Probably Fake ImageI wish it were possible, to dispense with writing this preface; for that which I put at the beginning of my Don Quixote did not turn out so well for me as to give me any inclination to write another.

The fault lies with a friend of mind — one of many I have made in the course of my life with my heart rather than my head. This friend might well have caused my portrait, which the famous Don Juan de Juaregui would have given him to be engraved and put in the first page of this book, according to custom. By that means he would have gratified my ambition and the wishes of several persons, who would like to know what sort of face and figure has he who makes bold to come before the world with so many works of his own invention.

My friend might have written under the portrait, “This person who you see here, with an oval visage, chestnut hair, smooth open forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but well-proportioned nose, a silvery beard that twenty years ago was golden, large mustaches, a small mouth, teeth not much to speak of, for he has but six, in bad condition and worse placed, no two of them corresponding to each other, a figure midway between the two extremes, neither tall nor short, a vivid complexion, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very light-footed: this, I say, is the author of Galatea, Don Quixote de la Mancha, The Journey to Parnassus, which he wrote in imitation of Cesare Caporali Perugia, and other works which are current among the public, and perhaps without the author’s name. He is commonly called Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

“He was for many years a soldier, and for five years and a half in captivity, where he learned to have patience in adversity. He lost his left hand by a musket-shot in the Battle of Lepanto: and ugly as this wound may appear, he regards it as beautiful, having received it on the most memorable and sublime occasion which past times have ever seen, or future times can hope to equal, fighting under the victorious banners of the son of that thunderbolt of war, Charles V, of blessed memory.”

Should the friend of whom I complain have had nothing more to say of me than this, I would myself have composed a couple of dozen of eulogiums, and communicated them to him in secret, thereby to extend my fame and exalt the credit of my genius; for it would be absurd to expect the exact truth in such matters. We know well that neither praise nor abuse is meted out with strict accuracy.

—Cervantes (Translated by Walter Keating Kelly)
Exemplary Novels (PDF)

Purported portrait of Cervantes is in the public domain.

Democratic Party Base Can Make Liberals Win

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Democratic Party BaseAs I noted yesterday in an update to Those Non-Deplorables: Still Pretty Deplorable, I feel good right now. I’m ready to fight. And a big part of that will require leveraging the power of the Democratic Party base. So I don’t want to spend a bunch of time talking about the election. In particular, I don’t want to talk about how James Comey’s letter itself probably gave Trump the environment he needed to win. And I don’t want to talk about our media that really wasn’t interested in Trump other than as a shiny celebrity. And I don’t want to talk about how the media has only been interested Hillary Clinton’s email server. Our country has a corrupt bureaucracy and an incompetent media.

But there are two things that I think we need to discuss. The first is that Hillary Clinton got the majority of counted votes. She got almost a quarter million more votes than Donald Trump. I know that that isn’t how our presidential elections are run. But I don’t think Trump’s victory was the result of a keen regional strategy. Instead, he just got the votes he was going to get. And it is certainly the case that all those “I’m in a safe state so I can vote for Jill Stein” people would have had more pressure to vote for Clinton. (If Clinton had received all of Jill Stein’s vote in Wisconsin, she would have won the state. If she had won 25% of Stein’s votes in Michigan, she would have won that state.)

Get Rid of the Electoral College

We really need to start working on getting rid of the electoral college system. In the last five elections, two were won by the candidate who got the least votes. That’s a 40 percent error rate. That’s just not acceptable. And I know: changing the system would require a constitutional amendment. But I think it is very doable. Even conservatives hate the electoral college system. I think they would back such an amendment because they know that they could be the next to be screwed by it.

Check out this CGP Grey video that was made years ago before the most recent outrage:

There’s another reason for doing this. Republicans have started talking about making their states proportional. So, for example, a state that is generally Democratic (but currently controlled by Republicans (like Michigan) could really hurt the Democrats’ chances of winning a the White House.

But mostly, I think the electoral college is just a moral issue. It isn’t fair and it has no justification.

Increase Voter Turnout

With all of the coverage that the presidential race got this year, you would think this would have been a huge year for voting. But you would be wrong. The US population has 10 million more people than it had in 2012. Yet 12 million fewer people voted this year than voted in 2012. That’s a shocking 10 percent decrease in the number of people voting. Neither Clinton nor Trump got as many votes as Mitt Romney did in 2012 — much less President Obama who got 5 million more votes than that.

This, above all else, was why Donald Trump won the election. This is, pretty much, why Republicans ever win presidential elections. High turnout is bad for Republicans and good for Democrats. And this strikes me as something we can do something about. But we need to think about it differently than we have been.

The Democratic Party Base Must Take Control

We need to stop thinking about turnout like it is something you do in the days and weeks leading up to an election. We need to start thinking about the Democratic Party like it were a union. And most of all, we need to work on making the Democratic Party base think that they are the party. Because that is the way it is supposed to be anyway. We all need to own the party. It shouldn’t be about showing up to vote for Clinton (or even worse against Trump). It should be something that we do because we are committed to the party.

And I think that gets at something that is really important. We all know that the Democratic Party base is more liberal than the elites. And that’s especially true on economic issues — the issues that most cross over to the Republican base. There are not only electoral possibilities there; there are also legislative possibilities if the Democratic Party base and the Republican Party base are represented by their elites.

Conclusion

I know that getting rid of the electoral college is a lot of work and it will take a long time. But it’s worth the effort. Working on making the Democratic Party base see itself as the party itself is even more important. And that’s something that we — the Democratic Party base — can do something about. It starts with being proud of being a Democrat. It’s our party and we need to work to make it represent us.

Democratic Party image by FrigeEnterprises. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Those Non-Deplorables: Still Pretty Deplorable

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Trump Supporters: Deplorables and Non-DeplorablesAs I write this, the election has not even started. So I don’t know how things turned out. But it doesn’t really matter to what I want to talk about. Even if Trump lost, he still got over 40 percent of the vote. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll out last Sunday, “The new poll found that, in the four-candidate field, 82% of Republican likely voters supported Mr Trump, while 82% of Democratic likely voters supported Mrs Clinton.” That means that to the “non-deplorables” in the Republican Party, Donald Trump was just another candidate.

Say what you will about Hillary Clinton, she’s a conventional Democrat. A Clinton presidency would not be in any major way different from an Obama presidency. There will be marginal improvements made. Or that’s what I think. If you are a conservative, there will marginal damage done. But it won’t be any big deal. But Donald Trump?! He is a man who not only knows nothing of the job he’s applying for, he doesn’t care about the job. He just wants the job title and to have people hanging on his words for the next four to eight years.

Donald Trump offered John Kasich the effective presidency if Kasich would be his vice-presidential running mate. No intelligent person can think that Donald Trump ever wanted to do the job of the president. And no one can think that he has any actual ideas on how to run the country. But I get it: he won the primary because there are a bunch of angry white men who see their status in this country declining. They hate those “others” who they see as responsible for it: black people, brown people, female people. And they gave the Republican Party their nominee. There weren’t 82 percent of Republicans in May who wanted Donald Trump to be president.

The Non-Deplorables Made Trump Competitive

But there are today! So what’s the difference? When Clinton said that half of Trump’s supporters were deplorables, she was right to back off that claim. The number is more like a third. But I’m actually more forgiving of those deplorables. They’re ignorant. They’re older. And they’re angry. I don’t hold them as accountable as I might for the same reason that I don’t hold a misbehaving toddler accountable. But that still leaves the rest of the Republican Party. These are people who know what Donald Trump is all about. And yet they’ve gotten on board. Trump’s loose lips could create a world war, but these non-deplorables would still rather have a Republican (Clearly: any Republican.) in the White House.

If I had to guess, as you read this, you will know that Trump lost. The non-deplorables will have nothing to answer for. What you will not see is what you did see in 2012: a GOP “autopsy” report. Instead, the elites (the vast majority of whom supported Trump) will just pretend like they lost because they picked the wrong candidate. They will of course point fingers. They will look for ways to change the party rules so that only vile, but standard issue, candidates like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz can become presidential nominees. And just like with the “autopsy,” they will fail. And there are good reasons why.

First, enough of the base is dedicated to authoritarianism that they will generally be able to pick the candidate. Second, the elites are too cowardly to stand up to the authoritarian base. And finally, the non-deplorables are still more interested in winning than they are in doing what is right for this nation.

The non-deplorables are our biggest problem.

Update

It’s after the election and so we know now that Trump will be the next president. (Note: Clinton won the popular vote.) I know that many of you take a personal interest in my health. I appreciate that — really. And if you were afraid that I was suicidal last night, you were right. But this morning, I feel great. I’m ready for this fight. Yes, this is going to be terrible for a lot of people. But what choice do we have but to stand up and fight against those who would destroy our democracy and our weakest people? None. As the song “Rapture” ends, “Get up!”

Image cropped from Donald Trump Supporters by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Bonds Are an Income Stream — Even for Social Security

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Michael HiltzikTime magazine has just published online the latest in the media’s unceasing stream of alarmed reports on Social Security, declaring that the next president will have to face up to “one of the largest financial issues facing the country: shoring up Social Security.”

Unfortunately, Time’s analysis is undermined by a glaring misstatement about the program’s fiscal condition. “Since 2010,” reports the author, Penelope Wang, an editor at large at Money magazine, the program has been “running at a deficit, with tax revenues falling short of the benefits being paid out.”

This is fundamentally incorrect. Social Security is not running at a deficit. It’s recording a surplus and has done so every year since well before 2010… Last year alone, its surplus was $51 billion…

Measuring benefits against “tax revenues,” as Wang does, reflects at best a fundamental misunderstanding of Social Security’s revenue streams. They comprise more than current payroll taxes, which presumably is what Wang means by “tax revenues.” They also include interest on Social Security’s Treasury bonds, which constitute an asset portfolio currently amounting to about $2.8 trillion, and income taxes on Social Security benefits.

It’s fashionable for conservatives and the misinformed to dismiss the bonds as merely “IOUs” from the government, but in fact they’re real assets — as real as the T-bonds in institutional and individual portfolios all over the world — and are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. More important, they represent past payroll taxes paid by millions of American workers, but collected in excess of benefits paid out each year. The excess has been banked by lending it to the government, with interest, in the form of bond purchases. There’s no justification legally, morally or logically for treating those interest payments as somehow illusory or irrelevant to Social Security’s financial condition.

—Michael Hiltzik
How Did Time Magazine Get This Essential Fact About Social Security So Fundamentally Wrong?

Image of Michael Hiltzik cropped from one at The Los Angeles Times. Licensed under Fair Use.

Live Blog: Election Day 2016

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Election DayWell, the time has come. And I figured that I should live blog election day — the whole day. Because I’m going to be obsessing about it anyway. It won’t be like the debate live blogs. I’ll just post things as I find them.

But before I get to that, I want to tell you how I’m thinking the day is going to go. And it isn’t as wonderful as I would hope. Not that I think it is going to be catastrophic.

Presidential Race

The good news this election day is that I think that Hillary Clinton is going to be the next President of the United States. And I think she will win by a clear margin. Her polling average went way down at Real Clear Politics. On 2 November, she was ahead by only 1.3 percentage points. Yesterday afternoon, she was back up to 2.9 percentage points. In a four-way race, she’s up by 3.2 percentage points.

And in the electoral college, Trump’s pathway to victory is ridiculously narrow. If he loses Florida or North Carolina, he loses the election. And yesterday afternoon, FiveThirtyEight had Clinton with narrow margins in both of those states. Really: the only way that Trump becomes president is if he wins every state that is close. It could happen, but I find it really hard to worry about it.

Senate Races

Where I don’t feel good this election day is in the Senate races. This should be a great year for the Democrats. The Republicans are defending 24 seats and the Democrats only 10. And assuming that Clinton does win, the Democrats only have to pick up four seats. That doesn’t sound like much. The Democrats are certain to pick up two seats: Wisconsin and Illinois. There are 5 close races where they could pick up seats: North Carolina, Missouri, New Hampshire, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. But they are only leading in the polls in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and it isn’t by much. Meanwhile, the Republicans are leading comfortably in North Carolina and Indiana — at least according to FiveThirtyEight.

The problem with this is that all these elections are not independent. It isn’t like a random walk. The truth is that the close races will probably all go one way. And that could be great! Theoretically, the Democrats could get 53 seats. But I think two of those are too far gone. So the best we are looking at is 51 seats. If I wanted to be really generous: 52. But it means if things go really wrong, the Democrats could end up with just 48 seats. If the Republicans maintain control of the Senate, they will force a constitutional crisis on the country. Really, they already have by refusing to allow Obama to seat a replacement for Scalia.

Good News

Most of this gloomy analysis comes from FiveThirtyEight. But I do have my doubts about it. When I look at the data they are using, it doesn’t make sense. Taking into account the time when the polls were taken, biases that FiveThirtyEight has calculated, and the grades of the pollsters, I just don’t see where they get some of their numbers.

For example, in Pennsylvania, they give Katie McGinty a 61 percent chance of winning. Since mid-Oct, there have been 19 polls. McGinty has been winning in 16 of them. The median is 2 percent. I think that’s a solid lead. But in North Carolina, they give Richard Burr a 71 percent change of winning, when his median is just 1 percent.

I know that there is more to the FiveThirtyEight model than polls. But these strike me as odd. Meanwhile, Sam Wang gives McGinty a 3 percent advantage, and Burr a 0.5 percent advantage. So it isn’t that I’m crazy. I’m clearly looking at the election the way that Wang is and not the way that Nate Silver and company are.

But I worry, because FiveThirtyEight is really good. They were far more accurate in 2014 (and earlier) than Wang was. If this were all I had to go on, I’d be despairing. But I’m not.

Voter Turnout

We do know that Hillary has a cutting edge get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation. And Trump has almost nothing. I don’t know if this is showing up in the polls or not. I do know that political science tells us that a good GOTV operation can improve a candidates vote total by between 1 and 5 percentage points. So it is still possible that Clinton is going to win really big and drag not just the Senate but the House with her. But I am more a “prepare for the worst” rather than a “hope for the best” kind of guy.

It should be an interesting election day! I’ll see you throughout it.

Image cropped from one by Pete Souza. It is in the public domain.