One of the primary drivers of the campaign was an attempt to control the influx of refugees from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. And yet, the areas with the most immigrants, like London, tend to be much more in favor of remaining in the E.U., according to the center’s report.
.. The GOP, in putting Trump at the top of the ticket, is endorsing a brand of populism rooted in ignorance, prejudice, fear and isolationism. This troubles me deeply as a Republican, but it troubles me even more as an American. Enough is enough. It’s time to put country before party and say it together: Never Trump.
.. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if a divisive character such as Trump were president during the 2008 financial crisis, at a time when leadership, compromise and careful analysis were critical. The only reason we avoided another Great Depression was because Republicans and Democrats joined together to vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program — a vote that they knew would be politically unpopular but in the best interest of our country... First, we need to maintain the United States’ fiscal strength by reforming entitlements. There’s no example of a nation continuing as a great power if its fiscal strength is lost. Anyone, whether Republican or Democrat, who has studied our entitlement programs and can do basic math knows they are unsustainable in their present form. If not fixed soon, they threaten our nation with a debt burden that would undermine the retirement security of young Americans and future generations. It doesn’t surprise me when a socialist such as Bernie Sanders sees no need to fix our entitlement programs. But I find it particularly appalling that Trump, a businessman, tells us he won’t touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid... According to thePeterson Institute for International Economics , the average American household income is roughly $10,000 higher because of the postwar expansion of trade... Instead, we need to fix the programs that help U.S. industries and workers transition to new and better jobs. We need better training, new education programs and a more robust safety net. The policies Trump endorses would destroy, not save, U.S. jobs... I will not vote for Donald Trump. I will not cast a write-in vote. I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and our place in the world.
Satyajit Das about his new bookThe Age of Stagnation
In Extraenvironmentalist #91 we first speak with Satyajit Das about his new bookThe Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth is Unattainable and the Global Economy is in Peril which questions the assumption that never ending economic growth is possible, or desirable. Das questions the ability of political leaders to enact the tough structural changes needed to avoid social chaos in a low growth world. Then, in the second half of our show we speak with Michael Hudson about his book Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. Hudson describes how debt deflation is imposing austerity on the U.S. and European economies, siphoning wealth and income upward to the financial sector while impoverishing the middle class.
Separate productive and unproductive economic activity
German Economic Miracle (debt writedown)
Cult of Measurement (to be gamed)
The debt and entitlements will have to be written down (savers punished)
Budget Policy and the White Racist Vote
But among white people, the big issue is that ethnocentricity drives attitudes about social welfare spending. And not in a totally unambiguous way.
When it comes to programs targeted at the poor, ethnocentrism correlates with stinginess (you may have to take my word for it that that’s what this math means
But when it comes to programs targeted at the elderly, ethnocentrism correlates with generosity:
.. Now to be clear—there’s no particularly good reason for people to react like this. Blacks and Latinos benefit from Social Security and Medicare and most of the people on food stamps and Medicaid are white. But the politics are what they are. And so the point is that if you were to try to rework the GOP coalition to be less white-centric
Why Marco Rubio is insisting that his massive tax cuts will pay for themselves, explained
Conservatives hate taxes, they dislike deficits, and they’re scared of spending cuts. Dynamic scoring is the answer.
The basic idea here is that massive tax cuts boost growth so much that they pay for themselves, and so there’s no actual trade-off between lower taxes and balanced budgets. In this telling, eating your cake leads your body to burn calories so fast that it’s like you end up thinner than you started!
.. As Jonathan Chait wrote, the skeptical reception Rubio’s plan got among many on the right spoke to a problem almost without precedent in the modern GOP: Rubio had designed a tax cut “so gargantuan that nobody in the party actually believes it.”
.. While Rubio gives some lip service to deficit reduction — he later tells Harwood that balancing the budget will require entitlement reform, not just tax reform — he clearly cares a lot more about the tax cuts than about the deficit reduction, just as Bush did.