Public Policy and Governance – Page 37

If Demography Is Destiny…

White America is aging.

I know that won’t come as a huge surprise to many of the readers who comment here–a number of you reside in my own age cohort, and–shocked as I am by how quickly it seemed to happen–I have to admit that I’m pretty old.

I posted a while back about America’s changing electorate, and the fact that some 4 million Americans turn 18 –voting age–every year. Also every year, two and a half million older Americans die.

I recently came across yet another article considering America’s ongoing age shift; this one was titled “White America is Getting Older.” Here’s the lede:

A news release from the Census Bureau published on Thursday morning summarized three-quarters of a century of American history succinctly. It was titled, “America Is Getting Older.”

This is the Census Bureau, so the assertion was backed up with data. The median age in the U.S. rose to 38.9 years in 2022, up 0.2 years from 2021. Over the past year, 46 states saw increases in their median ages. Four states (and D.C.) saw no change.

This isn’t surprising but is, instead, a continuation of a long-standing trend. But there is an important detail that’s easy to overlook here: The increase in age is largely a function of White Americans getting older — a distinction that itself helps explain an awful lot about American culture and politics in the moment.

As the article explains, the Americans who are beginning to die off were part of the post WWII “baby boom.” That boom began at a time when immigration was constrained, and as of 1970, about 84 percent of the country was non-Hispanic White, and the median age was just over 28.

A few years ago, the Census Bureau released data showing the age of Americans by race. At that point, the most common age for a White American was 58. The most common age for a non-White American — Black, Hispanic, Asian, mixed-race, etc. — was 27. For Hispanics, the most common age was 11.

The charts accompanying the article show that most White residents of the U.S. are older than the country’s median age, while most Asian, Black and Hispanic residents are younger. “Whites make up 52 percent of the population under the median age — and two-thirds of the population over it.”

The article notes–almost gratuitously, since most of us know it–that the people who are aging are those most likely to be voting Republican. As the report concludes,

It’s easy to see how this percolates into the political and cultural conversations. We have a heavily White older population that is competing for power and resources — like funding for schools or senior centers — with a more-diverse younger population. We have a partisan divide that overlaps with the age divide. We have explicit and implicit political appeals that center on the country’s changed demography.

In other words, we are at a point in America’s trajectory where demographic change is too obvious to ignore. That awareness helps explain the eruption of more explicit racism, as an older White age cohort tries frantically to hold onto its diminishing social dominance.

If we step back a bit to view the ebb and flow in historical context, it seems very likely that–once these older White Americans have passed away–our politics will calm down and settle into a new, (hopefully more equitable) normal. The danger, however, lies in what we might think of as the “death rattle” of an aging and angry elderly White Christian cohort.

The 2024 elections will tell that tale. If the nearly departed can install Trump and his ilk–in Indiana, Braun and Banks (both of whom have enthusiastically endorsed Trump)–they will continue on their merry way: arming the unhappy, forcing women to give birth, and awarding judgeships to partisans who will cheerfully dismantle the protections of the Bill of Rights. Embedding those policies for yet another term will make it difficult if not impossible for demographics to save us. If there is no Blue wave in 2024, demographic “destiny” will take a lot longer–assuming it can be achieved at all.

I sure hope the Democrats are working hard on getting out the vote……

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Blue Cities…

That cities are “blue” has become a truism. For the past several election cycles, the nation’s urban areas have repeatedly voted Democratic, while more rural parts of the nation have remained–or become increasingly–Red.

But “blue” also means “sad,” and according to a New York Times story a few weeks back, that meaning is also applicable to cities, if –like Indianapolis–they are located in a Red state.

The article focused upon St. Louis; the author noted that while conservatives love to point to San Francisco as an example of failed “liberal” policies, places like St. Louis demonstrate the harms done by conservative state legislatures.

St. Louis’s significantly more dire problems don’t neatly fit that conservative-media narrative. Unlike San Francisco, St. Louis is a blue island in a red state, and conservative state policies have at least partly driven the city’s decline. More apt parallels to St. Louis are places like Kansas City, Mo.; Memphis; Nashville; and Little Rock, Ark. — liberal enclaves that in a macrocosm of the worst kind of family dysfunction are at the mercy of conservative state governments. The consequences of this dysfunction can be far-reaching.

The article noted that St. Louis has been losing population for years, a situation exacerbated by the coronavirus. The pandemic especially emptied out the office workers, “who scattered away to Zoom from their suburban homes and have not fully returned.”

A July 2022 Brookings Institution analysis described urban population loss during the pandemic as “historic.” The report highlighted cities like San Francisco, New York, Washington and Boston — and St. Louis. Some downtowns have since bounced back. St. Louis, like San Francisco, isn’t among them.

The reasons are debatable, but St. Louis’s politically fraught relationship with the Republican-controlled state government certainly hasn’t helped. Even as St. Louis leaders and schools struggled to navigate the once-in-a-century plague by following federal pandemic guidelines and expert advice, they had to contend with a barrage of lawsuits from the Republican state attorney general (now the state’s junior senator), Eric Schmitt, demanding that they drop their mask mandates.

Missouri Republicans also echo the accusations of Hoosier politicians who claim that crime is out of control. In Missouri, that led to the legislature attempting a state takeover of the city’s police force.

The narrative from the right was that the city’s soft-on-crime policies were to blame for the unmoored violence that is driving the city’s economic decline, so the police need to be under outside control.

That narrative sounds very familiar to anyone in Indianapolis who has seen the television ads of this year’s GOP candidate for mayor, who (inexplicably) wants to govern a place he evidently considers an urban hell-hole.

Left out of that narrative is the fact that gun crime here is abetted by Missouri gun laws that are among the loosest in the nation. Virtually anyone can walk around the city with a gun, with no state-mandated background check and few state-level restrictions, and there’s next to nothing the police can do about it until the shooting starts. The state has rebuffed all entreaties from the city to be allowed to enforce some kind of permit requirement.

We have precisely the same situation in Indiana, where the Republican super-majority in our legislature has ignored both public sentiment and law enforcement testimony in favor of “permit-less carry.”

Republican critics maintain it is the city’s de-emphasizing of policing that’s the real problem, and as such, the legislature in 2021 passed a state law that effectively penalizes cities that cut their police budgets. But even the largest St. Louis police force would still be policing a city flooded with unregulated guns and few tools to confront them, courtesy of the same Republican state leaders. A current effort to pass a statewide ballot referendum that would go around lawmakers to give St. Louis the authority to impose firearms permits and other reforms is the kind of Hail Mary the city is left with.

At least Missouri allows referenda–in Indiana, there is absolutely no check on the culture warriors in the Statehouse, who were elected by to rule over us by mostly rural voters.

The state has been unhelpful in other ways. The largest-ever Missouri state income tax cut, which lawmakers passed last year, will inevitably affect St. Louis and every other city in Missouri, where basics like infrastructure and education remain chronically underfunded.

It’s the same situation in Indiana, made even more frustrating by the fact that Indianapolis is the economic engine of the state. Evidently, none of the “good old boys” running things in the Statehouse have ever heard of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs…

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Working

A million or so years ago, I taught high school English. (This was back when women could prepare for jobs as secretaries, nurses or teachers–as my father put it, “in case your eventual husband dies.” I couldn’t type well, and the sight of blood made me faint–ergo, I would teach.)

I still remember a poem from an anthology I used; a person sat at the gate of a village and responded to questions from people entering the town. They’d ask: “what sort of people will I find here?” and the gatekeeper would inquire: “What sort of people lived in the village from which you come?”

If the answer was negative–“knaves and fools”–the gatekeeper would say “You’ll find the people here the same.” If it was positive–wonderful, kind folks–the gatekeeper promised “You’ll find the people here the same.”

As poetry goes, it wasn’t great. But as wisdom, it scored.

I’ve had several opportunities to revisit the undeniable truth that we humans see what we look for. I thought about it again when I read a recent Paul Krugman newsletter. We’ve all heard versions of the rant by Bernie Marcus with which he began his column:

Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, had some negative things to say about his fellow Americans in an interview last December. “Socialism,” he opined, has destroyed the work ethic: “Nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work — I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’”

You’re naïve if you think his take is exceptional. Without question, rich men are constantly saying similar things at country clubs across America. More important, conservative politicians are obsessed with the idea that government aid is making Americans lazy, which is why they keep trying to impose work requirements on programs such as Medicaid and food stamps despite overwhelming evidence that such requirements don’t promote work — but do create red-tape barriers that deny help to people who really need it.

Krugman says he’s not under “the delusion that facts will change such people’s minds.” But he notes that people for whom facts do matter should know that America has, over the past year, conducted what might be termed a “huge test of the proposition that Americans have become lazy.”

They haven’t.

Krugman reminds readers that the American labor force is aging, which means we should be seeing a downward trend in the fraction of adults still working. (I will add that, given our unwillingness to admit immigrants with Brown skin who are mostly younger, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.) Despite that demographic decline, the data about labor force participation by Americans in their prime working years shows that such participation is higher now than it has been for 20 years.

Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress reports that if you adjust for age and sex, overall U.S. employment is now at its highest level in history — again, despite the lingering effects of the pandemic.

During the pandemic, of course, social welfare supports skyrocketed. If the “socialism” of such supports really made people lazy, the data fails to show it.

Krugman explains the benefits of the current “hot” labor market–including the fact that it has increased employment for members of marginalized groups. He then concludes:

The larger point is that despite what grumpy rich men may say, Americans haven’t become lazy. On the contrary, they’re willing, even eager, to take jobs if they’re available. And while economic policy in recent years has been far from perfect, one thing it did do — to the nation’s great benefit — was give work a chance.

Given the data, what explains the constant carping from employers who say they cannot find workers? A report in CNN says we have some 8.1 million job vacancies.

This problem is concentrated among America’s low-wage workforce, hitting restaurants, warehouses, manufacturers and the service industry. Many Republicans see these numbers and conclude the problem is unemployment payments that are, in their estimation, doled out to lazy people unwilling to work.

The real reason–confirmed by several studies–is low pay. (Seventy percent of workers receiving federal aid work full-time, and are still so poor they qualify for government aid.) When jobs are plentiful, workers have options. That’s bad news for the businesses that have felt entitled to employing and abusing a steady supply of poorly-paid workers.

Remember the gatekeeper in that poem?

Ask a Republican why he can’t find workers, and–like Marcus–he’ll tell you it’s because Americans are lazy and the government is too “socialist.” Ask a Democrat, and he’ll tell you it’s because employers are unwilling to pay a living wage. Our expectations frame our answers.

It makes policymaking very difficult…..

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Idiocy And Its Consequences

Most of us know people who ignore what is happening in Washington, D.C., or in their own state’s capitols. During my teaching years, I had several students who simply failed to connect the activities of policymakers to their own lives–governance seemed remote, almost irrelevant, especially when they were overwhelmed with efforts to balance school, jobs and families.

The extent of that civic apathy, alongside the ongoing culture war, goes a long way toward explaining why we have a Congress filled with clowns, self-important ignoramuses and assorted lunatics intent upon preventing, rather than producing, governance and policy.

Government gridlock matters, whether the apathetic crowd understands that or not. The most recent evidence is the downgrading of long-term American debt by Fitch Ratings, one of the three major independent credit rating agencies. Fitch downgraded the nation’s long-term debt from AAA, the highest tier, to AA+ — only the second time in U.S. history that the country’s debt has been downgraded. The first followed a cut by S&P Global Ratings in 2011, prompted by a fight between House Republicans and President Obama over raising the federal borrowing limit. Fitch cited a similar standoff this spring, when House Republicans again refused to raise the debt ceiling for several months.

The agency explained that “The repeated debt limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management.” Although it also listed America’s growing debt burden, the agency made it clear that the fact of the debt wasn’t the issue: it was the “erosion of governance” that had created doubts about the nation’s ability to cope with that debt. Fitch highlighted the GOP’s tax cuts, at a time when fiscal prudence called for increasing, rather than decreasing, tax receipts.

In their announcement of the downgrade, Fitch analysts cited “erosion of governance” compared to peers that “over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.”

In other words, as The New York Times observed, the downgrade was yet another sign that those knowledgable about the economy are increasingly worried about the effects of America’s political chaos–and especially about the recurring brinkmanship over the debt limit that is becoming entrenched in Washington–despite the fact that the U.S. economy is currently robust.

The immediate consequence of the Fitch downgrade was a sell-off on Wall Street, where retirement funds and stocks held by many of those apathetic citizens took a bath. And as ABC News reported, when government struggles to address debt issues, triggering such a downgrade, consumers face higher interest rates for loans– higher costs for borrowing for everything from credit cards to mortgages to cars.

So here we are.

I have drawn two broad conclusions from the country’s current failures of self-government: one, the apathetic Americans who have failed to “connect the dots” between government dysfunction and their own daily lives have facilitated the election of people who are demonstrably incapable of understanding the policy process. They have done so either by voting mechanically on the basis of partisan identification, or (frequently) by failing to vote at all. Two, far too many Americans cast their votes on the basis of cultural grievances, ignoring–or failing to understand–the actual responsibilities of the political offices to which they have elevated their chosen culture warriors.

For years, Democrats have complained about voters who–as they see it–fail to vote their own interests. What they mean by that is that such voters discount the pocketbook benefits they would receive from the enactment of Democratic policies. What that complaint ignores is the reality that, for most people, “interests” are not necessarily–or even predominantly–financial. The voters who return the Paul Gosars, Jim Jordans, Margery Taylor Green and their ilk to Congress are fighting social change and the perceived diminution of their privileged status as White Christians, males, heterosexuals, etc.

The problem for the rest of us–genuine Conservatives and moderates as well as progressive Democrats–is that this cohort has zero interest in governance and no ability to function as policymakers. Their sole interest is performative. They appear to be totally unaware of the consequences of those performances–one of which, as we’ve just seen, is to convince rating agencies that the United States government is incapable of dealing with the legitimate issues it faces.

We can only hope that culture warriors and apathetic Americans–aided and abetted by extreme gerrymandering–don’t vote in 2024 to return the clowns to what has become a dysfunctional Congressional circus.

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The Aliens Are Here

Sometimes, you have to laugh or you’ll cry….

Let me begin this post with some confessions: I love science fiction. I’ve read tons of it since I was a child. I’m a huge Star Trek fan, currently fixated on “Strange New Worlds.” My scientific knowledge is admittedly limited, but the odds have convinced me that humans cannot be alone in the universe–it’s really inconceivable that only one planet among billions has generated (semi) intelligent life.

But really, idiot Congress-critters!

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post had the story:

The aliens have landed. And they have a gavel!

That is as plausible a takeaway as any from this week’s House Oversight Committee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the curiosity formerly known as UFOs. The panel’s national security subcommittee brought in, as its star witness, one David Grusch, a former Defense Department intelligence official who now claims:

That there are “quite a number” of “nonhuman” space vehicles in the possession of the U.S. government.

That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII.

That the aliens have engaged in “malevolent activity” and “malevolent events” on Earth that have harmed or killed humans.

That the U.S. government is also in possession of “dead pilots” from the spaceships.

That a private defense contractor is storing one of the alien ships, which have been as large as a football field.

That the vehicles might be coming “from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”

That the Roswell, N.M., alien landing was real, and the Air Force’s debunking of it was a “total hack job.”

And that the United States has engaged in a nearly century-long “sophisticated disinformation campaign” (apparently including murders to silence people) to hide the truth.

I’d tell you more, but then they would have to kill me.

I actually have a more plausible theory: there are aliens among us, and they are currently serving as Republican Right-wingers in the U.S. House of Representatives. (I mean, really, who thinks that Marjorie Taylor Green and the other loonies currently preventing anything remotely resembling governance are sentient members of the human race? Unlikely, I tell you!! They’re here to effectuate the paralysis of Earth’s governments–and they’re doing a pretty good job of it!)

Although the star witness in this hearing was unable to provide any evidence whatever to support his claims, Milbank noted that several Republicans on the panel greeted those claims with “total credulity, using them as just more evidence that the deep-state U.S. government is lying to the American people, covering up the truth and can never be trusted. Their anti-government vendetta has gone intergalactic.”

I’d almost like to believe that the U.S. has a government capable of pulling off a cover-up of this magnitude. Think about the thousands of people who would have had to be sworn to silence and the fact that their compliance would need to be closely monitored over decades…It’s a theory right up there with Robert N. Kennedy, Jr.’s insistence that the entire medical establishment must be “in on” the “truth” about those nefarious vaccines.

I love science fiction, but I’m getting pretty tired of following the clearly alien MAGA life-forms controlling today’s GOP.

Maybe I should just use my Space Laser to wipe them out…..

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