I happened to come across a short piece by Lydia Polgreen about the "Fast Cars" duet at the Grammys featuring Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs. In a throwaway sentence at the end she said this about Chapman:
She was a poet of the despair wrought by the cruel economic vision of the Reagan years. What might she have to say about the intervening decades of hurtling down that same track?
The Reagan era wasn't a great time for the working class or the poor. But why this casual acceptance of lefty doom mongering about the years since then? It's obviously never a great time to be poor, but the last couple of decades haven't been so bad. Incomes are up:
Social welfare spending has skyrocketed:
In the bottom quintile of earners, market income averages $22,000. After taxes and benefits, it's $46,000. Not bad. As a result of this, poverty has also declined:
And we're generally more tolerant these days:
It's not all roses and sunshine these days for the poor and oppressed, but it's not the Reagan era either. Buck up.
It's a great song, no matter who does it.
The idea that "we're" more tolernat these days is nuts. The old neuroticizing and othering function of moralism is still working its ugly old magic. In the US, it fundamentally goes back to the anti-War movement and the "counterculture", which made a virtue of hating "the squares", who were plenty hateful themselves.
But nobody has been able to get over it, and instead it was transmitted to their children. Overall, however, I'd say the right has done a better job of getting sane than the left, which just becomes more extreme. Now Progressives are hyper-irrational, with their overreaction to Covid, their refusal to teach kids phonics because Bush supported it, and now defund, open borders, and recklessly transitioning kids.
Not only have Progressives become extreme bigots, claiming their hateful race/sex/orientation essentialism proves they have the epistemic authority to impose left-authoritarianism on the rest of us; now they've even become the nation's largest group of Antisemites. Go figure.
I say this with all sincerity. I think you’re insane.
I'm not inclined to let myself get gaslit by a compulsively dishonest fanatic, sorry.
But I'm sure you'll have plenty of luck gaslighting and abusing those closest to you, your friends and family, to the extent they exist.
Of course, you'll never be able to admit the character of your behavior to yourself or others. Such a broken class of people...
Insane seems to be generous.
No gaslighting required. You seem pretty much cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
If the venting makes you feel better, know that your state or municipality probably has a free mental health hotline.
More than 20 Palestinians have died for every Israeli killed on 10/7. But protesting the continuing slaughter makes one an anti-Semite? Over a million Americans were killed by Covid-19, but advocating for masks and vaccinations is ‘overreaction’. Your perspective on reality is extremely distorted.
You apparently think the Israelis should just let themselves get killed; of course that's Antisemitic. Similarly, you are neurotically blind to the great damage done by social distancing.
You're the one with a severely distorted view of reality, mediated by a focus on this or that body count. Your scare-numbers are occurring in the context of a larger world, a context you are clearly desperate to ignore.
Smarter trolls, please.
So the left bigotry is against the squares? What an odd group to make protected.
But that may be the most serious comment you made. I can see why you might have wished more people died from Covid so that you were less inconvenienced (assuming you would have been lucky enough to be one of the people who didn't die) but it is hard to see that as a matter of intolerance. Meanwhile on a night when Republicans killed a measure to increase funding for border security you are pushing the canard that the Democrats are for open borders?
And if you are looking for the anti-Semites you could look at who thinks good people march with neo-Nazis chanting at Jews "You will not replace us" not at the people who think that Palestinians civilians should not be starved and slaughtered.
Of course the reason that Drum is right about the increase in tolerance is that while there still exists a depressing number of people who think that Palestinian life has no value, the numbers of people with your view is declining.
I’ll just point out two things:
1. Your post is a collection of strawmen that misrepresent my opinions
2. The Palestinians don’t want peace, they want Israel gone. You may feel that’s justified, but Israeli policy is driven by the reality that the Palestinians just was the Jews dead, and that there’s nothing Israel can do to change that.
So what exactly is your job at Fox News?
One thing we can agree on ... one of us is an idiot. If I thought it was me, then I wouldn't think it was you. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe you're wrong, but if it's me, then I'm wrong in a very obvious way.
You are describing behavior of immature people. There are immature people that identify as progressives, and there are immature people that identify as conservatives. Likewise, there are mature people that identify as adults, and there are immature people that identify as their children.
You, jemmy, see people acting like children on the left, and ignore people acting like children on the right. And you're ignoring the fact that the mature people with real power are Democrats whereas I'd be embarrassed if I thought that, when I was five, I had acted like any Republican I'm aware of with real power in 2024.
Biden is likely to be the last mature Democrat for a while. I hope I’m wrong, but the leftist brainrot is very advanced. Just look at the way you guys argue. I’m an idiot? Jeez, talk about proving my point for me.
To elaborate, yes, the GOP base has plenty of psychos. But they’ve also moved way to the left on economics and foreign policy, even as their culture has crapped itself.
The left, on the other hand, has no crosscurrrents. It’s just frothing groupthink, namecalling, strawmen, irrationality, and authoritarianism. Look, pretty much all the responses to my comments are equivalent to shouting “fake news”, and the party’s adults are one-by-one leaving the room.
But you won’t be able to admit the problems on “your side”. The tribalism is in effect and you are lost, lost people.
Having lived through the Reagan years, we're definitely more tolerant these days. Maybe not the Fox-viewing octogenarians, but the younger generations are a totally different story. When I tell them of how it once was socially acceptable (in a northern city) to talk about not wanting to send your kids to school with "the monkeys", and other such things, they have a hard time believing this country once was like that. Is bigotry gone? Of course not. Is it greatly reduced? I'd say yes.
It wasn’t lefty doom mongerers who thought the Reagan years were cruel. It was the 1988 Republican presidential nominee, George Bush, who campaigned on the promise of “a kinder, gentler nation.” He knew the country had taken a harsh right turn and we needed a course correction.
From the New Deal on, there had been some bipartisan agreement on helping those in need. Reagan made it OK to tell the less fortunate: you’re on your own.
Of course, it was cruel. It may have been other things too, but it was the turn that led down the road to Trump, where the cruelty is the point.
Yes, there was a time when the term "compassionate conservative" didn't get you laughed out of the room.
Even if low incomes are rising faster than high incomes, Gini has increased. Even if social welfare has increased, it has gone down in red states. Even if tolerance has increased, the intolerance is out in the open.
You also need to correct for population increases--though federal social welfare spending would only drop by ca. 200 billions in 2022.
The question is, how much would raising the federal minimum wage would lower the transfers?
Federal social welfare spending increases are almost entirely Medicaid and Medicare related. That’s nice and all, but the average person enrolled in either program receives nothing of substantial value from either program unless/until they’re really really sick (eg cancer treatment and the like). Which tends to not happen in most years/decades of their enrollment, and which is inflated by the high cost of American healthcare overall. So even the “lucky duckies” who get cancer or some other horribly expensive medical diagnosis and have Medicare or Medicaid pay for most/all of their treatment don’t feel like they got a financial windfall from the federal government. They simply feel like they went through a horrible experience and/or are dead and don’t feel anything positive about all the spending the Feds did on their behalf. (For what it’s worth, those of us with employer healthcare also don’t feel like we got raises every year when the premiums paid by our employer went up but the employer didn’t pass along most/all of that increase onto us either.)
Healthcare coverage is a very important benefit, but it’s like saying that we also get a personal benefit from military spending. We do of course - it’s nice to not have an invasion happen in this country since Pearl Harbor - but the benefit is not felt by the average taxpayer in any given year, so whether military spending goes up or down has no bearing on how taxpayers feel about the benefit they’re receiving. Healthcare spending is the same.
Good post, I didnt see this before i posted something similar.
Its worth emphasizing that higher medical costs (more expensive prescriptions, more expensive procedures) show up as higher income in Kevins chart. This is not at all like actually receiving more income.
To use your military spending analogy, we can debate how much better off we are with more military spending...opinions differ. But literally noone would argue that we are all better off if we could pay twice as much for tanks. Especially if the tanks are getting worse.
“Fast Car,” one of the best songs ever written, is still very relevant. Doesn’t matter if the overall economy is better. There are still young people in the many many pockets of poverty and despair who reach a point where they have to make a life-changing decision on whether to leave a bad situation despite the very real fear that what they find elsewhere is even worse. I see dozens, literally dozens, of people every day who made the wrong decision somewhere down the line. Happy little charts don’t make their lives any better.
It seems likely that much or nearly all of the lower income (post taxes and transfers) growth on that 1st chart was due to the rising costs of medicaid and temporary pandemic stimulus handouts.
Medicare is great. Recession stomping stimulus programs are also great.
But.....Medical care becoming more expensive should not be thought of like rising incomes. Especially when life expectancies are falling.
Actual rising incomes vs rising medical costs covered by the government are two very different lived experiences even if they have the same impact on the graph.
Poets of despair can't understand charts of economic data. It renders their art irrelevant.
There are always loud voices on both the Left and the Right who say we are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis and that we are on the verge of collapse unless Something Is Done.
It usually says more about them than the world. Because you can always find something if you want to.
Poet of despair? I would say poet of hope. The singer is talking about building a better life through hard work.
The song is talking about trying to build a better life and FAILING.
I dunno. Stadiums used to be called RFK stadium and Candlestick Park and the like not JP Morgan Chase or Crypto Arena. The Reaganauts did infect the language with that and other business-speak like “branding”. Unforgivable.
The Reagan years were pointing the Republican Party in the wrong direction. It just wasn't as obvious back then. The inflection point was the publication of Milton Freidman's "Capitalism and Freedom" (1961) which, in lieu of being about capitalism and freedom, is to real capitalism and freedom what pseudoscience is to real science in that it involves imposing the method on others in a self-serving way while violating the otherwise obviously moral principle.
For the Monty Python fans in the crowd: Freidman's Capitalism and Freedom is a selfish license with the words "Selfish License" crossed off and the words "Capitalism and Freedom" written in with crayon.
Things are good to the extent that they are good because of real capitalism and freedom, and despite the Republican Party's fundamentalist ideology version of capitalism and freedom, which is "unfettered for me and too bad for you."
In most respects the economy has been on a fairly steady course since the middle 90's, except for the Great Recession (the banking/financial system will always cause these periodically) and the pandemic. Real wages have grown but not nearly as fast as GDP/capita. Many things have improved, but inequality continues to increase, contrary to Kevin's claims.
But there is nothing catastrophic about this that would cause people to become hopeless and commit suicide. The outlook for lower-income people is not as good as it seemed in the Post-WWII period up to about 1970, but it's much better than in the 70's and 80's, including when there was supposedly "Morning in America". In past centuries when poor people made virtually no progress at all were they committing mass suicide?
The idea that now is a particularly bad time is mostly political. Republicans' evaluation of the economy is totally detached from reality - they believe the lies of Trump and Fox News that unemployment is astronomical, etc. They falsely claim that things are much worse under Biden than Trump. The non-right-wing media, pursuing their usual bothsiderism, seem to think they have to give equal if not greater space to stories about problems rather than progress in economics.
"Deaths of despair" may be related to specific drug problems; the opioid proliferation, which was largely a case of deliberate fraud by pharmaceutical companies, and now fentanyl. So far I have not seen any convincing explanation of the falling life expectancy, but it's unlikely to be related to overall economics.
The number of US adults aged 18 years or older with diagnosed diabetes quadrupled from 5.5 million in 1980 to 21.9 million in 2014, corresponding to a nearly three-fold increase in the percent prevalence from 3.5 to 9.1%.