On a Friday one month before the midterm elections there were hints that the Republicans would retake the Senate and widen their majority in the House, and win all sorts state elections, furthering their ability to make abortion impossible, even if it remains legal, and assuring that the wealthy and corporations pay next to nothing in taxes and everyone else takes up the slack, and assuring that the wrong sort of people don’t get to vote, and that the schools no longer teach anything about people disagreeing with our government on anything. There is that member of Colorado’s state Board of Education who argues that the United States voluntarily ended slavery – that’s what should be taught in schools. We just decided, collectively, to end slavery here, because we’re good people – so perhaps that Civil War we had was about something else entirely, if there even was one.
Few remember things that way, and her views on these matters are not entirely coherent, but she’s not alone. People like her are elected at the local and state level everywhere these days – the libertarian Koch brothers spend their money wisely, working from the bottom up – and what is established at the base-level becomes the national norm. Democrats, with their demographic advantage – angry old white Christian people will be overwhelmed soon by young and non-white folks, most of who aren’t born again and waiting for the Rapture, who want a government that makes life better for everyone – should beware. Those young and non-white folks, not that into having the government do what some think Jesus would obviously do, are going to find it increasing hard to ever vote again anywhere in America. The states determine the voting rules for their citizens, unfair as that might seem to some, and the current Supreme Court is fine with that – let the states decide on any restrictions they want. It’s up to Congress to pass a new law if anyone complains. The Supreme Court, gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act last year, as just too out of date, has walked away from this matter. That we have a Congress that can’t even pass a bill to rename a post office isn’t their problem.
This means that the Republicans will do well for the foreseeable future, if the future is foreseeable. It usually is, even if no one expected Barack Obama to get us into a third war in Iraq. These things happen – or in this case ISIS happened – but the domestic political trends are clear. A wave of inevitable demographic change can be countered by careful and permanent structural changes at the state and local level. A new levee can contain a massive flood – all it takes is enough sandbags, and enough money. The current polling shows that the Republicans will do quite well in the midterms – they’ve sandbagged the nation.
All of this has been discussed endlessly in thousands of articles in the political press, and on cable news and the Sunday morning Meet-the-Press kinds of shows, and it’s all true – but it may be beside the point. All of that is a discussion of trends and tactics to counter those trends. It’s a high-level discussion of strategy, and actual voters don’t live on that level. They don’t have to time to think about such things, and have no interest in thinking about such things. There are bills to pay, and the worry that they might be the next one to lose their job in the next round of consolidation or automation or outsourcing. They’re worried about crime or drunk drivers or some madman from the Middle East, or some domestic white supremacist militia, blowing up the local mall, or shooting their kids. There are those gangs out there too. Every city has them. And why is everyone suddenly speaking Spanish, or Tagalog, or what sounds like Klingon? And why would a fifteen-year-old girl want a tattoo? Daughters are difficult. Politics isn’t an issue. The only issue is how things feel at the moment. Are things getting better out there? It would be nice if they were.
That’s what may determine the outcome of the election – how thing feel out there – and there the advantage may go to the Republicans. There’s good news on the economy, which may be bad news in disguise, and we’re all going to die of Ebola, unless we’re not. It gets a little confusing, but on Friday, October 3, 2014, a month and a day before Election Day, there was the kind of good economic news that should help Democrats:
Job growth rebounded strongly last month and the unemployment rate fell below 6% for the first time in more than six years, easing fears the labor market was faltering again and providing a boost to congressional Democrats before the midterm elections.
Economists were relieved that an August hiring slowdown now appears to have been just an anomaly.
Cool, but not so cool:
But they warned of worrisome signs in Friday’s Labor Department report – stagnant wages and more discouraged jobless Americans dropping out of the workforce – that showed the recovery from the Great Recession still has a ways to go.
“The trend is positive,” said Alan MacEachin, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, the nation’s largest credit union. “But there were some things in the report that continued to cloud the picture.”
Yeah, no one’s wages are going up. Even with mild inflation, that means, in this recovery, you have less money in your pocket than ever before, unless you’re a hedge fund manager. The economy news sounds good, but it feels bad, but it does sound good:
The economy added a robust 248,000 net new jobs, and the unemployment rate dropped 0.2 percentage point to 5.9%, the lowest since July 2008, the Labor Department said. Job growth in July and August also was revised upward by a total of 69,000. That included lifting August’s disappointing initial estimate of 142,000 net new jobs to 180,000.
The report triggered “a sigh of relief on both Wall Street and Main Street,” said prominent economist Sung Won Sohn, a professor at Cal State Channel Islands. “August was an aberration, and we’re back to healthier growth and that’s good,” he said.
The report buoyed financial markets. The Dow Jones industrial average was up 208.64 points, or 1.24%, on Friday. And the dollar soared against major currencies.
Obama and the Democrats can crow about this – the economy is coming around at last – so vote for our side. Republicans can ask voters how they feel, at the moment, about how things are going for them, not the financial markets. They have the advantage:
Average hourly earnings dropped a penny to $24.53 last month and have risen just 2% for the year that ended in September
“What you’re seeing is a jobs market that’s improving slowly but still with enough slack to keep wages flat,” said Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and former Labor Department chief economist.
“When there’s a lot of slack in the labor market, employers can find the workers they need without having to raise wages,” he said. “It remains a buyers’ market, and the buyers are the employers.”
If you’re a worker – not everyone is a business owner – you will continue to get screwed. You’re at a structure disadvantage that may be permanent. Jim Tankersley puts it this way:
Why would you create a job in America? That’s a once-unthinkable question for the world’s premier economy, but it’s a necessary one, because there are so many reasons not to create a job here today. …
The increasingly connected, increasingly automated global economy gives companies a lot of options for how to spend their money in search of profits. Most of them don’t involve hiring an American. You could hire someone in a developing country, for a fraction of the price. You could invest in software or machinery or robotics that does the work humans once handled. You could buy a foreign company for tax advantages or simply buy back shares of your own stock.
So why create a job here?
He can only think of one reason, and it’s troubling:
Americans spend a lot of money. How they spend money is changing, though, with heavy implications for job creation in the years ahead.
Dating back to the 1970s, about three in five U.S. jobs have been directly supported by consumer spending. That share has stayed level even as consumer spending has grown more and more important to the economy overall – it contributed about 61 percent of GDP in the mid-1960s and rose steadily thereafter, to 71 percent in 2012, according to the Labor Department.
Now employers don’t seem care about aggregate consumer spending, about getting a bit more money in workers’ pockets, so they’ll spend it and keep the economy humming:
That’s a critical decoupling, and one that sheds light on workers’ anxieties today. The reason consumer spending grew as a share of the economy, but consumer-related employment did not, is that Americans started spending more money on products made in other countries – and automation made it easier for American companies to produce more consumer goods and services with the same amount of workers.
Yeah, but there aren’t more consumers dollars out there to purchase those goods and services – there are fewer workers, and those with work have fewer dollars. The financial markets are doing just fine – it was a wonderful Friday – but Matt O’Brien offers a structural analysis of the problem:
This is a story about stocks and houses. The middle class doesn’t have much of the former, which has rebounded sharply, but has lots of the latter, which hasn’t. Indeed, only 9.2 percent of the middle 20 percent of households owns stocks, versus almost half of the top 20 percent. So the middle class has not only missed out on getting a raise, but also on the big bull market the past five years.
The only thing they haven’t missed out on was the housing bust: 63 percent of the middle-quintile owns their homes, which are more likely to be a financial albatross than asset. And it doesn’t help that, with student loans hitting $1.2 trillion, people have to take out more and more debt just to try to stay in, or join, the middle class. It’s no surprise, then, that people are still so gloomy about the economy.
The good news of the day wasn’t good news for them. It was good for someone else, someone in Lower Manhattan perhaps. Annie Lowrey puts it this way:
Jobs Day has become less and less of a tentpole event in the economic data calendar. In part, that is because the story of the recovery has become static: It just keeps chugging along at the same decent-enough pace. It is also because the unemployment rate – the headline number in the jobs report – has started telling us less and less about the state of the economy. …
So applaud this jobs report. It’s a legitimately good one. But do not let it change your view of the economy too much. Growth might be accelerating, but the underlying story of the recovery is not changing. For tens of millions of families, that unemployment rate is nothing but a number.
People know this. This great economic report will do nothing for the Democrats, as long as people don’t find out the Republicans want to make things even worse. There’s a reason they hate trade unions and the whole concept of collective bargaining. Keep wages down, and high unemployment means you can get the best workers cheap, because they’ll be glad to even have a job, so your labor costs will be low and your profits high. Finding paying customers might be a bother, but Americans still seem willing to go into massive debt, so they can put your new gizmo on Master Card or Visa – and that’s their problem, not yours, or it’s the bank’s problem when they max-out the plastic and stop paying the monthly minimum. You have your money. Cool.
Republicans won’t say this, at least not quite that way, but what else is all that yammering about free markets with no rules, and no pesky unions, all about? People – all but that One Percent – are hurting. Blame Obama if you want, but the alternative is a lot more hurt. Know this and there’s no one to vote for. Try to keep your job, even if it pays less and less each year, adjusting for even mild inflation. That’s the best you can hope for.
Ed Kilgore explains why this is all moot:
Will it matter politically?
It’s unlikely. As Dave Weigel points out, at this point in 2006, just prior to a Democratic midterm landslide, the unemployment rate was under 5% and net job growth was steady if not spectacular. What tend to matter are perceptions of the economy rather than objective conditions, and negative perceptions from earlier in the year are hard to shake this late in an election cycle.
But the Jobs Report doesn’t hurt, obviously, and does subtly help undermine Republican claims that the sky is falling.
Ah, for that you need Ebola. Fast and Furious didn’t work, the IRS scandal didn’t work, Benghazi didn’t work, but if you want to have people feel that things are getting better out there, that they’re getting worse and the sky really is falling, Ebola will do. Josh Marshall sees how that is playing out:
There’s a new meme emerging on the right which I’ve noticed in the last 24 hours. It goes like this: The ‘government’ or President Obama promised Ebola wouldn’t or couldn’t get to the United States. But now it’s here. So people, the argument goes, are rightly worried that the ‘government’ is lying to them or isn’t telling them the whole story. In other words, when you see the next ignoramus on Fox News jonesing on about how he’s not going to be a patsy for the virology elite, that’s the story.
I’ve now heard it on Fox, in National Review and a few other outlets. It’s hard for me to tell whether this is simply lying about what various officials including the President have said, ignorance of how contagious diseases (and particularly Ebola) work or just a blasé willingness to fan hysteria. Unfortunately it seems like all three.
I have heard from a few readers that Chris Matthews is in full crisis mode too. So perhaps it’s not confined to the right. But there is a mix of animosity to the government and fear of it that seems to make this line of thinking particularly intense on the right.
This line of thinking is good for the Republicans in the midterms of course, and Chris Matthews is an excitable fellow, but this is nuts:
The prospect of an airborne viral contagion in a major American city in an era of pervasive international travel is deeply worrisome. But Ebola is not an airborne virus. It’s not shocking that a victim reached the US. And all the available evidence – both general and particular – suggests that aggressive public health measures and quarantine should be able to contain or halt entirely the spread from this one person. Indeed, in one of the most encouraging developments to date, Nigeria – even with its vastly inferior public health infrastructure – appears to have contained its Ebola outbreak with aggressive quarantine and other containment efforts.
Infectious diseases are scary – particularly airborne infectious diseases which are by definition more difficult to contain than those spread by bodily fluids. But effective public health and infectious disease containment measures are an amazing thing. So it’s particularly unfortunate when people’s rage and ignorance about ‘government’ intersect with this kind of important work. Disease containment and culture-war nonsense and paranoia are a bad combination.
And they are a useful combination, and Media Matters reports this:
Conservative media outlets, including Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham, are fanning the flames of Ebola panic and anti-immigrant sentiment by highlighting the unfounded opinions of fringe medical expert Dr. Elizabeth Vliet, the former director of an organization that claimed that undocumented immigrants caused a leprosy epidemic.
After news outlets reported the discovery of an Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, radio host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham hosted Dr. Elizabeth Vliet to inform listeners about the disease. Vliet used the platform to accuse President Obama of “underplaying the risk” of Ebola and suggested the disease could be transmitted through the air, an opinion that runs contrary to widespread medical opinion.
We’re all going to die, and Obama knows it, and he’s lying, and there’s this:
In August, Vliet wrote an exclusive column for WND.com titled, “Illegals Bring Risk of Ebola.” In her article, the Vliet parroted other anti-immigrant voices by suggesting undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border were spreading Ebola and that the government was concealing their diagnoses.
Despite “zero evidence” that migrants have carried Ebola through the U.S.-Mexico border, Vliet’s opinion was cited by Breitbart, InfoWars, and Newsmax…
And there’s this:
Vliet is also the former director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a group of far-right conspiracy theorists with a history of making false claims about undocumented immigrants carrying disease. Mother Jones reported on the organization’s connections to the Tea Party and examined the contents of the AAPS’ publication Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons…
“The publication’s archives present a kind of alternate-universe scientific world, in which abortion causes breast cancer and vaccines cause autism, but HIV does not cause AIDS. Cutting carbon emissions represents a grave threat to global health (because environmental regulation would make people poorer and, consequently, sicker). In 2005, the journal erroneously claimed that illegal immigration had caused a leprosy epidemic in the US, a claim that was reported as fact in more mainstream outlets such as Lou Dobbs’ show.”
Why was everyone hiding that leprosy epidemic? Demographic trends and the permanent structural changes made at the state level to counter them won’t change the outcome of the midterm elections, not will the good economic news, which wasn’t that good, but this sort of thing might. The only issue is how things feel at the moment. Are things getting better out there? That’s a subjective assessment made by individuals, and it not a rational assessment more often than not. This is about how you and you alone feel. If you feel the day is ending in darkness, and all days do now, or so it seems, you’ll vote for anything that will lift the darkness, even if they cannot tell you how they plan to do that. That means that thing may get even darker, and probably will. That may be why Americans just don’t vote much.