Robert B. Reich's Blog, page 47
February 12, 2019
America’s Widening Inequality of PlaceYou’ve heard me talk...
America’s Widening Inequality of Place
You’ve heard me talk about inequalities of income and wealth and political power. But another kind of inequality needs to be addressed as well: widening inequalities of place.
On the one hand, booming mega-cities. On the other hand, an American heartland that’s becoming emptier, older, whiter, less educated, and poorer. Trump country.
To understand what’s happening you first need to see technology not as a thing but as a process of group learning – of talented people interacting with each other continuously and directly, keying off each other’s creativity, testing new concepts, quickly discarding those that don’t work, and building cumulative knowledge.
This learning goes way beyond the confines of any individual company. It now happens in geographic clusters – mostly along the east and west coasts in places like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and suburban Washington D.C.
Bright young college graduates are streaming into these places, where their talents generate more value–and higher wages–together than they would separately.
As money pours into these places, so do service jobs that cater to the new wealth – lawyers, wealth managers and management consultants, as well as cooks, baristas and pilates instructors.
Between 2010 and 2016, according to Brookings, nearly half of America’s employment growth centered in just 20 large metro areas that are now home to about a third of the US population.
One consequence is a more distorted democracy. California, now inhabited by almost 40 million people, gets two senators – as does Wyoming, with just 579,000.
Even though Democratic Senate candidates in the 2018 midterm elections received 18 million more votes than Republican Senate candidates, Republicans still gained 2 more Senate seats.
A second consequence is turbo-charged gentrification in these mega-urban clusters, creating growing populations of poor who have been stranded.
These gleaming cities are becoming the most Dickensian locales in America, with homelessness and squalor among luxury high-rises and trendy restaurants.
So as the American middle class disappears, the two groups falling most perilously behind are white, rural, non-college Trump supporters, and the very poor inside America’s trendiest mega-urban centers, who are disproportionately black and Latino.
This inequality is unsustainable. It’s literally tearing America apart.
February 11, 2019
Trump Wants Socialism for the Rich, Harsh Capitalism for the Rest
February 4, 2019
The State of Our Disunion
Union address on Tuesday evening will be about “unification”....
January 30, 2019
The Disaster of Howard Schultz
January 29, 2019
Public Workers’ Trump Card
January 28, 2019
A
Survival Guide to Two More YearsIt’s doubtful he’ll be...
A
Survival Guide to Two More Years
It’s doubtful he’ll be leaving anytime soon. Even an impeachment will drag out for a long time. Here are 7 suggestions for what to
do to survive in the meantime:
1. Don’t pay attention to what he says. Pay attention to what he does.
Disregard the ridicule, name-calling, threats,
personal attacks, spectacle. These are distractions.
Pay
attention to his obstructions of justice, attempts to suppress the Mueller
investigation, his attempts to take over Justice Department decisions over whom to prosecute, attempts to cut back freedom of the press, his profiting from his office, his endangering
America internationally.
Make a
ruckus about the big things, and push House Democrats to focus on them
too.
2. Keep track of what his cabinet is doing to gut health, safety, and environmental protections.
Pay special attention to new rules and regulations,
or changes in how regulations are enforced, that hurt people.
Spread the word.
Get House Democrats to expose and fight them.
3. Don’t get lost in the procedural skirmishes over House subpoenas, executive
privilege, impeachment.
Support
big strategic objectives: getting big money out of politics, infrastructure,
cutting drug costs, protecting the Affordable Care Act, and stopping bad laws
coming over from the Senate.
4. Watch what your state is doing, and be active there, too.
Support legislators and governors making
progress on climate change, reducing inequality, and public financing of
elections.
Fight
state legislators and governors cutting back on Medicaid, imposing draconian
work requirements for public assistance, seeking an Article V constitutional
convention.
5. Prepare for 2020.
Help reverse state voter ID laws. Instead of political
gerrymandering, push for independent state commissions to set district
boundaries.
Have your state join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
to make the Electoral College irrelevant. Make sure people are registered to
vote.
6. Don’t let the upcoming presidential primaries divide us.
There are going to be
a lot of candidates for the Democratic nomination. But regardless of what
candidate emerges, keep your eyes on the prize of winning back the White
House.
7. Finally: Keep up your morale and energy.
Don’t fall into cynicism or despair.
We’ve already put limits on this catastrophe. Have faith: We’ll get America
back.
January 22, 2019
The Fall of Davos Man
January 21, 2019
Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law The “rule of law”...
Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law
The “rule of law” distinguishes democracies from dictatorships. It’s based on three fundamental principles. Trump is violating every one of them.
The first principle is that no person is above the law, not even a president. Which means a president cannot stop an investigation into his alleged illegal acts.
Yet Trump has done everything he can to stop the Mueller investigation, even making Matthew Whitaker acting Attorney General – whose only distinction to date has been loud and public condemnation of that investigation.
The second principle is that a president cannot prosecute political opponents. Decisions about whom to prosecute for alleged criminal wrongdoing must be made by prosecutors who are independent of politics.
Yet Trump has repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to bring charges against Hillary Clinton, his 2016 rival, for using a private email server when she was Secretary of State, in alleged violation of the Presidential Records Act.
The third principle is that a president must be respectful of the independence of the judiciary. Yet Trump has openly ridiculed judges who disagree with him in order to fuel public distrust of them.
He recently referred to the judge who halted Trump’s plan for refusing to consider asylum applications an “Obama judge,” and railed against the entire ninth circuit in which that judge serves.
John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, condemned Trump’s attack. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges,” Roberts said. An “independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
Almost a half-century ago, I watched as another president violated these three basic principles of the rule of law, although not as blatantly as Trump. The nation rose up in outrage against Richard Nixon, who resigned before Congress impeached him.
The question is whether this generation of Americans will have the strength and wisdom to do the same.
January 14, 2019
The Trump Dictatorship
January 8, 2019
The Big Economic SwitcherooThe biggest untold story about how we...
The Big Economic Switcheroo
The biggest untold story about how we pay for government involves a big switcheroo by America’s wealthy.
Decades ago, wealthy Americans financed the federal government mainly by paying taxes. Their tax rate was far higher than what it is today.
Now, wealthy Americans finance the federal government mainly by lending it money, and collecting interest payments on those loans, profiting when the rest of us pay them back.
Follow the money: As the debt continues to grow, interest payments are becoming huge. Taxpayers could soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt than we spend on the military or on Medicaid.
Interest on the debt is expected to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Who’s receiving these interest payments? Mostly Americans, not foreigners. And most of these Americans are wealthy investors who park their savings in treasury bonds held by mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, personal trusts, and estates.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, which is more wealth than the bottom 90 percent put together.
Which means a big chunk of the growing interest payments American taxpayers make on the federal debt is going to… rich Americans.
Now, keep following the money. One of the biggest reasons the federal debt has exploded is that tax cuts, starting with the Bush administration in 2001 and extending through Trump’s 2017 tax cut, have reduced government revenues by over $5 trillion.
The Trump-Republican tax cut will cause the debt to explode even further. Trump’s own Office of Management and Budget predicts an added $100 billion a year in deficits over the next decade, adding up to $1 trillion of additional debt.
Keep following the money: Most of the benefits from those tax cuts are going to the wealthy. 65 percent have gone to the richest fifth of Americans, 22 percent to the top 1 percent.
So you see the big switcheroo? The rich used to pay higher taxes to the government. Now, the government pays the rich interest on a swelling debt, caused largely by lower taxes on the rich. Which means a growing portion of everyone else’s taxes are now paying the rich interest on those loans, instead of paying for government services everyone needs.
That’s wrong. America’s wealthy have never been wealthier. They should pay their fair share of taxes. The big switcheroo should be reversed.
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