For those who asked: the Kindle version of Living Togetheris now available.
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Between the tariffs that are destroying the markets of America’s farmers and raising the price of consumer goods in the United States, and an insane and racist approach to immigration that is making it difficult for businesses to hire the people they need , Donald Trump has managed to vastly improve the economy… of Canada.
On a recent Tuesday, Neal Fachan walked down a dock in Seattle’s Lake Union and boarded a blue and yellow Harbour Air seaplane, alongside six other tech executives. He was bound for Vancouver to check on the Canadian office of Qumulo, the Seattle-based cloud storage company he co-founded in 2012. With no security lines, it was an easy 50-minute flight past snow-capped peaks. Later that day, Fachan caught a return flight back to Seattle.
Fachan began making his monthly Instagram-worthy commute when Qumulo opened its Vancouver office in January. Other passengers on the seaplanes go back and forth multiple times a week. Fachan says his company expanded across the border because Canada’s immigration policies have made it far easier to hire skilled foreign workers there compared to the United States. “We require a very specific subset of skills, and it’s hard to find the people with the right skills,” Fachan says as he gets off the plane. “Having access to a global employment market is useful.”
Half of America’s annual growth in GDP has been attributed to increasing innovation. While the media and politicians are focused on Trump’s crisis at the southern border, tech executives and economists warn that the growing delays and backlogs for permits for skilled workers at America’s other borders are a more significant challenge. The risk of losing both skilled workers and the companies that employ them to Canada and other more welcoming countries are arguably a bigger problem for our economic future than a flood of refugees–even if those refugees were the problem Trump and his white nationalist base insist they are.
“Increasingly, talented international professionals choose destinations other than the United States to avoid the uncertain working environment that has resulted directly from the agency’s processing delays and inconsistent adjudications,” testified Marketa Lindt, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, at a House hearing last week about processing delays at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Lindt’s organization finds that USCIS processing time for some work permits has doubled since 2014, a fact cited in a May lettersigned by 38 U.S. Senators on both sides of the aisle asking USCIS to explain the processing delays.
The backlogs in processing have particularly benefited our neighbor to the north. Canada has adopted an open-armed embrace of skilled programmers, engineers and entrepreneurs at the same time the U.S. is tightening its stance. Research shows that high-skilled foreign workers are highly productive and innovative, and tend to create more new businesses, generating jobs for locals. So each one who winds up in Canada instead of America is a win for the former, and a loss for the latter. “Really smart people can drive economic growth,” says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C. funded in part by cable, pharmaceutical, television, and tech companies. “There are not that many people in the world with an IQ of 130, and to the extent that we’re attracting those people rather than the Canadians doing so, we’re better off.”
This is what happens when voters resentful of “smarty pants elitists” elect an intellectually-challenged President who is equally threatened by people who actually know what they’re doing, and consequently refuses to appoint competent people to important government positions.
We live in a complicated world. If the Trump Administration has demonstrated anything, it is that appointing ideologues, crooks and simpletons to manage that complexity is a recipe for disaster.
In the wake of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, I’ve seen a number of heartfelt and pointed columns, posts and speeches. I’ve also seen responses by “the usual suspects,” insisting that the problem isn’t the obscene number and easy availability of guns–no, it’s mental health, or immigration (!), or (stupidest of all) video games.
The “gun nuts”–a term I reserve for people who abandon any and all sanity in defense of unlimited gun ownership–have posted angry responses to Facebook messages advocating gun control measures.
My recent favorite was the idiot who claimed that guns aren’t the problem–evil people are the problem, and laws won’t stop people from being evil. I really do know better than to respond to such people, but I couldn’t help myself: I pointed out that, by his “logic,” America must have more evil people than all those countries where mass shootings don’t take place.
But in one sense, he has a point about “evil people.”
The shooting in El Paso was just the latest in a series of white nationalist terrorist attacks, encouraged by a despicable, racist President (who, among other things, has run 2,200 FB ads since last May using the word “invasion” to describe immigration). Trump’s bigotry is enabled by Republicans who are either equally racist or moral cowards unwilling to speak up.
I should note that there are exceptions. Two recent, powerful indictments of the white nationalist in the Oval Office are from two prominent conservatives who were (and perhaps still are) Republicans.
Conservative Jennifer Rubin has written that there is no excuse for supporting this President. She points to Trump’s vicious attacks on immigrants, his channeling of “replacement” conspiracy theories, his dehumanization of immigrants and his demonization of the media–and notes how often his words have been quoted by perpetrators of horrific racist acts.
Gerson begins by saying he’d intended to ignore Trump’s latest outrages; he planned instead to write about “the self-destructive squabbling” of Democratic presidential candidates.
But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency. Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Ga., in 1918 that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner. Turner’s enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”
God help us. It is hard to write the words. This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and killing her child.
Trump supporters characterize his racist tweets and white-nationalist-encouraging rallies as “telling it like it is.” But it is Gerson who tells it like it really is.
Racism is the fire that left our country horribly disfigured. It is the beast we try to keep locked in the basement. When the president of the United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is not just another political event, not just a normal day in campaign 2020. It is a cause for shame. It is the violation of martyrs’ graves. It is obscene graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial.
It is impossible for people of good will to deny the truth of his essay, or his closing words.
Trump’s continued offenses mean that a large portion of his political base is energized by racist tropes and the language of white grievance. And it means — whatever their intent — that those who play down, or excuse, or try to walk past these offenses are enablers.
Some political choices are not just stupid or crude. They represent the return of our country’s cruelest, most dangerous passion. Such racism indicts Trump. Treating racism as a typical or minor matter indicts us.
Click through and read the entire column. Then do whatever it takes to help get out the vote in 2020.
If you are a reader who likes this blog, have I got a deal for you!
I have done something I never thought I would do– I have “self-published” a book with Amazon.The paperback is available now, and the ebook (cheaper still) will be available in a couple of days.
Every other book I’ve written–and there have been nine of them–has been issued by either an academic press or a trade publisher. It can be an onerous process; with academic presses, especially, there are usually lengthy times for peer review, changes demanded, etc. This time, for what I’m pretty sure will be my last book, I decided to short-circuit the process–and not so incidentally, keep the book affordable, something few publishers seem to care about.
We’ll see how this experiment in self-promotion pans out…..
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We—by which I mean humanity, and especially citizens of the United States—find ourselves in the middle of a paradigm shift, a fundamental reconfiguring of the basic assumptions through which we view the world we inhabit. Such shifts are not unprecedented (the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution are arguably an example), but while they are occurring, people on either side of the shift find it difficult, if not impossible, to communicate with each other; they occupy different realities.
As humanity negotiates and reacts to accelerating change, individuals are faced with a rapidly morphing information environment, a reversion to overt and troubling tribalism, deepening economic inequities, and growing recognition of the inadequacies and corruption of America’s current legal and political structures. All of these elements of contemporary reality pose a challenge to previously-held worldviews.
Making this time in human history even more daunting is the fact that, while individuals are trying to make sense of the economic and social challenges they are experiencing, they are also facing the very real possibility that climate change will cause large portions of the planet to become uninhabitable—with consequences that are, for most Americans, unimaginable.
In the United States, the 2016 election and its aftermath have exposed the persistence of significant fault-lines in American society and forced recognition of the extent to which a longtime, steady erosion of the country’s democratic norms has hollowed out and corrupted this country’s governing institutions.
That erosion is one of a number of unprecedented social and economic challenges made more daunting by a splintered and constantly changing media landscape. Changes to journalism driven by the Internet have dramatically exacerbated the problems inherent in democratic decision-making. Actual news based upon verifiable fact is still available but diminishing, especially at the local level. Cable news and the Internet’s “information” environment enable and encourage confirmation bias, and are rife with spin, “fake news” and outright propaganda. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United increased public recognition of—and cynicism about– the disproportionate power wielded by corporate America through lobbying, political contributions and influence-peddling. Together with the enormous and widening gap between the rich and the rest, recognition of the outsized influence of money in America’s political system feeds suspicion of all government decision-making.
In order for democracy to function, there must be widespread trust in the integrity of electoral contests. The fundamental democratic idea is a fair fight, a contest of competing ideas, with the winners legitimized and authorized to carry out their agendas. Increasingly, however, those democratic contests have been marred by disinformation, as well as by bare-knuckled power plays and numerous mechanisms—including gerrymandering and vote suppression—through which partisans game the system. As a result, citizens’ trust in government and other social institutions has dangerously diminished. Without that trust—without a widespread belief in an American “we,” an overarching polity to which all citizens belong and in which all citizens are valued—tribalism thrives. Especially in times of rapid social change, racial resentments grow. The divide between urban and rural Americans widens, as does the gap between various “elites” and others. Economic insecurity and social dysfunction are exacerbated by the absence of an adequate social safety net, adding to resentment of both government and the “Other.”
Making matters worse, in the midst of these wrenching changes, Americans (accidentally, to be sure) elected a President incapable of recognizing, understanding or dealing with them.
Citizens in 21st Century America are facing a globalized, technocratic, increasingly complex world that poses unprecedented challenges to the goal of e pluribus unum (not to mention human understanding and survival). The existential question we face is: Can government policies create a genuine “us” out of so many different/diverse “I’s” and “we’s”? Can policymakers use law and legislative processes to create a supportive, nourishing culture that remains true to the Enlightenment’s essential insights, while modifying or discarding those that are no longer so essential? If so, how? How does this nation overcome the escalating assaults on science, reality and the rule of law and create a functioning, trustworthy democratic system?
This book was written to suggest that we can answer those questions in the affirmative, if we can muster the political will, and to suggest policies that would allow that to be accomplished.
The challenges America faces tend to fall into three (interrelated and sometimes overlapping) categories: Ignorance (defined as lack of essential information, not stupidity); Inequality (poverty, civic inequality, power and informational asymmetries among others) and Tribalism (“us versus them”—racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, the urban/rural divide, and political identity.)
An old lawyer once told me that there is really only one legal or political question: “what do we do?” How do we fashion concrete and politically tenable answers to the multitude of questions raised by social and technological change? How do we live together in what should be our brave new world?
That is the fundamental question explored in this book.
As Part I will set out in much more detail, our cultural assumptions and social institutions are in the process of being upended, and issues we’ve dealt with more or less adequately (or swept under various rugs) have suddenly become much more salient and disruptive. We face anew the age-old question: how should humans govern themselves? What institutional arrangements are most likely to be perceived as fair and just by most people, even when those people have very different desires, abilities, beliefs and needs? What sorts of governance and institutional arrangements are most likely to promote what Aristotle called “human flourishing?”
In the 18thCentury, Enlightenment philosophers answered that question by proposing a social contract based upon the issues and understandings of their times. Those philosophers and scientists challenged longtime assumptions about how a society should be constructed, how it should be governed and what it should value. In the United States, the nation’s Founders built a legal and constitutional system based upon Enlightenment insights and values and the belief that human flourishing could best be facilitated by a limited-authority government that allowed individuals to exercise personal autonomy to the greatest extent compatible with an overarching order.
That original vision and approach to governance has never been uncontested or fully realized, but it has provided the framework—the paradigm—that shaped subsequent policy argumentation. That liberal democratic framework, as it has evolved to the present, rests upon a (necessarily limited) respect for self-determination-the ability of individuals, cultures and states to determine and pursue their own ends, their own telos. Respect for the right of individuals or groups to determine their own life choices requires rejection of many legally-imposed uniformities and recognition of the fact that human diversity is both inevitable and socially desirable.
The principles that emerged from the Enlightenment and were embraced by America’s founders are not now and never have been universally held. Furthermore, even among people who do accept the general framework and stated values that undergird America’s Constitution, there are significant differences of opinion about what individual liberty should mean and when government authority may be properly exercised. Ongoing tensions between the majoritarian “popular passions” that so worried the architects of America’s constitution and Enlightenment ideas about the importance of individual autonomy have spawned a long line of academic studies and a significant body of constitutional jurisprudence.
In the 21st Century, the increasingly frenetic pace of technological, economic and cultural change has dramatically intensified the conflict between the individual’s right to self-determination and societies’ need for social cohesion and has tested the country’s purported commitments to equality and respect for human difference. Previously marginalized populations have entered both the workforce and the political arena, contending for equal social and civic status. Demographic change threatens previously entrenched social privilege, and feeds the white nationalist movement that has emerged with such ferocity in parts of Europe and the United States. That movement, together with certain strains of populism, appeals especially to people disdainful of diversity and the claims of previously marginalized groups—and for that matter, Enlightenment values—finding them not simply offensive, but existentially threatening.
The dramatic rise of economic inequality has not only exacerbated group tensions, but—as Part One will describe in much more detail–has challenged what is essentially our 18th Century understanding of the nature of both liberty and equality.
To belabor the obvious, contemporary Americans live in a rapidly changing social and economic environment. We find ourselves in a very different, and infinitely more complex and interrelated country and world than the one most of us were born into. As a result, the potential for a wide variety of conflicts has increased. Regulatory activity, both national and supra-national, has grown, due to recognition that many of today’s issues are national or global in scope and aren’t amenable to state or local remedies. National and international authorities will continue to be established, and to grow, in order to deal with environmental threats, trade issues, immigration, humanitarian crises and power conflicts; their effectiveness in mediating conflict will depend upon whether they are perceived as legitimate and fair by those over whom they assert jurisdiction.
As this is being written, fundamental and acrimonious disputes about immigration, racial equity, women’s rights, global alliances and the rule of law are being further inflamed by the daily tweets of an authoritarian President who is widely seen as corrupt, incompetent and mentally unstable. The legitimacy of the Supreme Court has been compromised by its growing politicization, and most recently by legislative tactics that allowed the unprecedented “theft” of a seat that President Obama should have filled. People are increasingly taking to the streets in protest, convinced that their grievances will not be addressed by a system they see as fatally flawed. It is not possible to predict the duration, severity or consequences of the widespread and growing civil unrest that seems likely to get much worse before it gets better.
Assuming—as hopeful people must—that a reformed democratic order will eventually emerge from the chaos and hostility we are experiencing, we urgently need to revisit our basic assumptions about governance and the social contract. We need to critically assess what has gone wrong, move to safeguard those elements that have proved their ongoing utility, and revise others. We need to learn from the country’s mistakes if we are to facilitate the building of a better, fairer and more durable society.
The questions are eternal: What do humans owe each other? What is the nature of liberty? Of equality? What is the proper role of government? What should the rules be, who should make those rules, and how should they be enforced?
The questions may be eternal, but the answers are not.
In the pages that follow, I will describe what seem to me to be among the most daunting challenges we face as a country. I will refer to and build upon current research that identifies and describes those challenges, and I will argue that they are interrelated in multiple and often convoluted ways. Indeed, those inextricable inter-relationships pose one of the thorniest of the challenges we face– how to recognize the ways in which policies interact, in order to avoid the negative, unintended consequences that so often follow well-meaning policy change.
Part One of this book will detail the threat posed by contemporary manifestations of tribalism and civic polarization; by the dramatic, accelerating changes in the economy and the nature of work; by the “brokenness” and corruption of a current American government that cronyism while rejecting science, evidence and longstanding understandings of what constitutes fair play. Chapters will also address the dangers posed by attacks on public education, by propaganda that has become ubiquitous in the age of the Internet, and by refusal to recognize the extent to which all of these challenges are likely to be dwarfed by the effects of climate change.
In Part Two, I will propose policy changes prompted by these analyses—policy changes that, taken together, would amount to the creation of a new, more expansive social contract appropriate to the age in which we live; a set of policies that would address our growing inequality and operate to moderate the hostilities that characterize current debates among America’s quarrelsome tribes. Policy changes that would facilitate our ability to live together peacefully and productively.
I am not naïve enough to expect current policymakers to embrace these proposals; certainly, a sizable number of the people serving in Congress as I write this have demonstrated neither an interest in advancing the common good nor the capacity to understand the problems America currently faces. However, if (as I hope) the increase in civic awareness and participation that followed the 2016 election and the various public demonstrations and political movements generated by the so-called “resistance” result in the election of a more thoughtful, responsive and ethical set of policymakers, perhaps some of the arguments that follow will provide grist for discussion, debate and corrective action.
If America is, as I think, on the cusp of a broad upheaval triggered by dramatic social, economic and technological changes aggravated by the broken-ness of our current governing institutions, this country’s “best and brightest” will need to explore a variety of potential changes to our governmental, economic and social systems.
This book is my contribution to those explorations, and I hope it will be useful.
Dan Coats–the last remaining adult in the Trump Administration–has been on thin ice with Trump for a long time. After all, he refused to tailor Intelligence reports to Trump’s fantasies. Perhaps the timing of his departure would have been the same in any event, but I found it intriguing that his “resignation” was announced almost immediately after the announcement that he was creating a new position dedicated to election security.
As a patriotic Republican, Coats was vastly outnumbered.
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, blocked a bill authored by Sen. Mark Warner that would have required campaigns to report foreign offers of assistance to the FBI. As the Tennesseean reported,
The bill from Warner, D-Va., known as the Foreign Influence Reporting in Elections Act, required unanimous consent in order to move forward, meaning that Blackburn’s decision to object stopped the legislation in its tracks.
The GOP as a whole has refused all efforts to implement security measures to protect the 2020 election against Russian hacking. Mitch McConnell (aka the most evil man in America) has quashed all legislative efforts to protect the franchise–leading frustrated observers to dub him “Moscow Mitch.”
As President Trump’s own FBI director warns that Russians are planning to try to undermine American democracy in the next presidential election, Republican lawmakers led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are blocking bills aimed at blocking foreign hackers from states’ voting systems.
The obvious question is: why? Why would American lawmakers refuse to protect America’s election system?
McConnell justifies his refusal to move the legislation forward with claims that the federal government is already working with states to address election interference, and that additional legislation would be “too heavy-handed,” since elections are run by the states.
Right. It’s all about states’ rights…..
The New Republic has a different theory. It says this is another case of “follow the money”– that the GOP’s real reason for blocking security measures is financial.
The entire suite of Democratic proposals to improve election security are of course a nonstarter in a Republican-run government, and not just because Republicans have chosen to strategically believe or disbelieve in Russian election interference depending on the president’s moods and ever-shifting statements. Many of the Democratic proposals involve barring candidates and people associated with campaigns and political committees from receiving contributions, monetary and otherwise, from foreign nationals, and Republicans principally oppose most attempts to interfere in any form of influence-peddling.
Monetary influence-peddling comes in many forms. Newsweek recently reported that a Russian oligarch is funding a major factory in Kentucky, where Mitch’s re-election campaign is contending with his 36% approval rating.
Rusal, the aluminum company partially owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, announced plans to invest around $200 million to build a new aluminum plant in Kentucky just months after the Trump administration removed it from the U.S. sanctions list.
The new aluminum plant, slated to be built in the home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will be the biggest new aluminum plant constructed in the U.S. in decades. Rusal will have a 40 percent stake in the facility.
McConnell reacted angrily to Dana Milbank’s column characterizing him as a “Russian asset.” (Andy Borowitz–who, like other satirists, has found the Trump administration a bonanza–countered with a column headlined “Putin denies McConnell is a Russian asset–says he’s never been an asset to any country.”) Milbank was blunt–and accurate:
This doesn’t mean he’s a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation. Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, blocks us from defending ourselves.
We can speculate about McConnell’s motives, but one thing is clear: Mueller, Coats, the head of the FBI and numerous other officials have warned emphatically about Russian interference. They have characterized it as ongoing, sophisticated, and effective.
And far from working to avert that interference, the Republicans–led by Moscow Mitch– are facilitating it.
I have previously cited Nick Hanauer, the billionaire who has repeatedly pointed out that the belief–embraced by the GOP–that raising the minimum wage depresses job creation is a fallacy.
As Hanauer has emphasized, this economic theory has cause and effect backwards: jobs are created by demand. (If you aren’t selling your widgets, you aren’t hiring more people to produce greater numbers of them.) Pay workers a living wage, putting disposable income in the hands of people who hadn’t previously had any, and increased demand will boost both job creation and the economy.
I get an email newsletter from Axios, (link unavailable) and a recent one included a report on fast-food industry earnings that certainly seems to confirm Hanauer’s thesis.
Between the lines: The fast-food industry’s biggest tailwind is coming from a surprising source — the increased pay of low-wage workers.
After trailing higher-paid workers for years since the financial crisis, earnings for the bottom 25% of workers have been growing at a rate much faster than the national average, and weekly earnings for the bottom 10% of full-time workers have grown even faster, data shows.
Generally, rising wages would be seen as a negative for the industry, but coupled with stable gas prices, the increasing paychecks of low-wage workers means more money spent at fast-food and fast-casual restaurants.
Be smart: Goldman’s research team estimates 70% of the industry’s sales growth over the past 5 years can be explained by rising wages, lower gas prices and a boost from third-party apps like GrubHub and Uber Eats.
Traditional economic theory says that if I have to pay employee A more, I will have less money available and I will thus be unable to hire B. That makes all kinds of sense–all else being equal. What real life tells us, however, is that all else isn’t equal. As the Axios report shows, the increase in buying power more than compensates for the increase in payroll.
You would think that a political party devoted to the theory that cutting taxes will generate revenue sufficient to pay for those cuts would understand this.
The theories may be similar, but reality can be a cruel mistress: when the issue is raising the minimum wage, real-world outcomes demonstrate that Hanauer’s approach works, but when the issue is tax rates, the Republican approach– cutting taxes on rich people– doesn’t.
In late 2007 the Trump administration pushed through a large tax cut, whose key component was a drastic reduction in the tax rate on corporate profits. Although most economists were skeptical about claims that this would do wonders for economic growth, conservatives were ebullient. Lower tax rates, they claimed, would give American corporations the incentive to bring back trillions of dollars invested overseas, and foreign corporations a reason to invest huge sums in the U.S.
And Republican politicians bought this argument. Even Susan Collins, the most moderate Republican in the Senate (although that isn’t saying much) declared herself convinced that the tax cuts would pay for themselves.
Krugman followed those opening paragraphs with graphs and statistics demonstrating rather dramatically that the tax cuts did not pay for themselves. Not even close.
For example,Krugman says
Business investment was 13.2 percent of G.D.P. before the tax cut went into effect. It’s now … 13.5 percent. That’s a rise of around 0.3 percentage points, or less than a tenth of what the tax-cut advocates predicted.
As a result of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts, deficits and the national debt have ballooned. Republicans would have marched on Washington with pitchforks if debt levels this steep had been generated by a Democratic Administration.
Real-world evidence says: pay working people a living wage, and everyone benefits.
Give the rich a tax cut, they sock their savings away in a tax haven, and no one else benefits.
