Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

What is transpiring today, Robert Reich argues in Saving Capitalism, is that big monopolies support policies that help them compete against smaller businesses by rewriting property bankruptcy and contract laws that favor big business over small. Under recently revised bankruptcy laws, the billionaire Donald Trump can freely declare bankruptcy while insulating himself from risks to investment, while smaller businesses cannot. The choice is not, Reich argues, between a governed and an ungoverned market, but between a market governed by laws favoring monopolistic companies and one governed by those favoring small business.

Ironically, the economic sector that stands to suffer most from big monopolies is small business, many of which are run by those who favor the Tea Party. It might not be too much to say that the embrace of the 1 percent by mom-and-pop store owners is a bit like the natural seed–using small farmers’ embrace of Monsanto, the corner grocery store’s embrace of Walmart, the local bookstore owner’s embrace of Amazon. Under the same banner of the “free market,” the big are free to dominate the small.

Nearly every Tea Party advocate I talked to had voted for Jindal twice, because he promised to enact their values. But after eight years of his governance, they hated the result. He had done what he promised—reduced taxes and cut the public sector—but he left the state in shambles.

Robert Reich has argued that a more essential point of conflict is in yet a third location—between main street capitalism and global capitalism, between competitive and monopoly capitalism. “The major fault line in American politics,” Reich predicts, “will shift from Democrat versus Republican to anti-establishment versus establishment.” The line will divide those who “see the game as rigged and those who don’t.”

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) calculates various measures of exposure to toxic chemical releases and waste disposal. Based on reports from industrial and federal facilities, the most comprehensive of TRI measures are called the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI). For any particular zip code in the country, it gives us a measure of inhabitants’ exposure based on three things—the volume of chemical releases, the degree of toxicity of those chemicals, and the size of the exposed population.

Eight percent of the total 2014 U.S. budget was devoted to “welfare”—benefits that are income-needs based.

Since President Bill Clinton declared “the end of welfare as we know it” in 1996, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) ended and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, with work requirements and time limits) began. TANF—assistance to the nation’s poorest families with children—is now 20 percent below its 1996 levels in thirty-five states and the District of Columbia. But since the Great Recession of 2008, the number of Americans who receive food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP) has risen above 1995 levels, although that number peaked in 2013 and has fallen steeply since then. Medicaid expenditures have also risen but, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, they are projected to fall to 1999 levels by 2016.

Most government aid recipients are children or the elderly. Of Medicaid recipients in 2013, for example, 51 percent were children under age eighteen and 5 percent were senior citizens over age sixty-five. As for those between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four on all forms of means-tested aid—i.e., “welfare”—based on 2010–2012 data, most work.

To turn it around, in 2013, among fast-food workers, 52 percent relied on some form of welfare to supplement low wages paid for full-time work. Among childcare workers, 46 percent relied on welfare, and among homecare workers, 48 percent did so. In such instances, public taxpayers can be said to make up for low wages offered by some companies—a form, some argue, of “corporate welfare.”

For the poorest 20 percent of Americans, only 37 percent of their total income in 2011 came from the government; the rest was payment for work.

among families in poverty, 26.2 percent did not participate in any of the major means-tested benefit programs

half of all tax benefits go to the richest 20 percent of Americans.

In the United States in recent years, the fertility rates for white and black women have almost converged. In 2013, the total fertility rate for black women was 1.88 children over the course of a lifetime; for white women it was 1.75.

“A lot of people—maybe 40 percent—work for the federal and state government.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the end of 2014, 1.9 percent of the 143 million American non-farm workers were employed in the civilian sector of the federal government. An additional 1 percent were in the enlisted military. About 3.5 percent of workers work for state government, including school and hospital workers. In addition, 9.8 percent of workers—including public school teachers—work for local government. In 2014, 826,848 people—or 0.58 percent of all Americans—served in the military reserves. So adding together all military and civilian workers at the federal, state, and local levels, in 2014, less than 17 percent of Americans worked for the government.

private sector workers earn 12 percent more than their public sector counterparts.

Women with advanced degrees earn 21 percent less than comparable men in the private sector but only 12 percent less in the public sector. So while women are underpaid in both sectors, they are less underpaid in the public sector. The same thing is true for blacks: at every level of education, blacks in the public sector earn less than whites—but not as much less as they do in the private sector. In the public sector they earn 2 percent less than whites; in the private sector, 13 percent less.

A 1993 study that compared states’ ratings on strictness of environmental protection with indicators of economic health (overall growth, employment growth, construction growth) over twenty years found that stronger environmental standards have not limited the relative pace of economic growth. In a 2001 study of new air-quality regulations for manufacturing plants in the Los Angeles area, researchers reported no evidence that local air-quality regulation, among the strictest in the nation, substantially reduced employment.

Finally, a 2008 study found that investments in environmental protection create some jobs and displace others, but that the net effect on employment is positive.

“Economic incentives and more relaxed regulations are needed to attract oil and gas business that could and would go elsewhere.” In 2004, researchers investigated the effects of local fiscal policy on the location decisions of 3,763 establishments that began operations in Maine between 1993 and 1995, and found that businesses favor municipalities that spend high amounts on public goods and services, even when these expenditures are financed by an increase in local taxes. This suggests that a local fiscal policy of reduced government spending to balance a tax cut may attract fewer new businesses than a policy featuring additional spending and higher taxes.

There is also recent evidence that suggests, whether or not they “work” to attract business, governments that rely on incentives may face negative outcomes. A 2010 study, based on an analysis of national surveys of 700 to 1,000 local governments from 1994, 1999, and 2004 that tracked the use of business incentives over time, found that governments that rely most heavily on incentives may face more intergovernmental competition, stagnating or declining economies, and lower tax bases. For such governments, business incentives may contribute to a cycle of destructive competition.

“State subsidies to industry help increase the number of jobs.” An eight-part 2014 investigative special report in The Advocate, Louisiana’s largest daily newspaper, was entitled “Giving Away Louisiana.” If Louisiana gives away roughly $1.1 billion per year in taxpayer money to corporations as “incentives,” the team of journalists wanted to know, are citizens getting their money’s worth back in jobs? Their answer was “no.”

Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that researches the link between government subsidies to corporations and jobs, notes that the fifty states it has surveyed vary in their degree of disclosure. But with that disclaimer, it reports that, on a per-capita basis, Louisiana gives away more taxpayer money than any other state in the nation.

“The economy always does better under a Republican president.” For the years 1949–2009, unemployment has been lower and gross domestic product has been higher under Democratic presidents. Political scientist Larry Bartels has also shown that inequality has increased greatly under Republican presidents and decreased slightly under Democrats. Recently, economists at Princeton confirmed that the U.S. economy has grown faster under Democratic presidents, who have also produced more jobs, lowered the unemployment rate, generated higher corporate profits and investments, and seen higher stock market returns. They attribute this, however, to the timing of oil shocks and when major technologies debuted that had positive effects on the economy (e.g., the Internet under Clinton)—in other words, some of the correlation is due to factors outside a president’s control. Republican presidents have also added far more to federal debt levels than Democrats have, as a percent of GDP; since 1945, Reagan has added the most, with an almost 60 percent increase in federal debt to GDP. Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton all managed to reduce debt as a percentage of GDP.