The Philosophy of the Gun in Trumpland

September 17, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

It seems odd for a politician to boast that many of his supporters are potential murderers, terrorists, and assassins. But then much about the Trump campaign is strange and odd.

Trump acknowledges that his supporters believe in what I once called (here) “The Philosophy of the Gun.” Here’s the gist of that post from seven years ago.

The philosophy of the gun is simple: if someone does something you don’t like, shoot them. If you can’t shoot that person, shoot someone like them. If you don’t like abortions, shoot an abortion doctor . If you don’t like an anti-abortion protester , shoot him. If you feel wronged by people at work, go postal. If a woman has rejected you, shoot her. If you can’t find a woman who actually rejected you, shoot several women. Don’t like the kids in your school? Shoot them. Feel you’ve been dissed by someone from another gang, shoot them. Gun advocates put this in terms of self-defense. If you have gun, you can defend yourself, your property, and your loved ones from people who are doing something you don’t like. Which is just another way of saying that if you don’t like what the person is doing, shoot them. The only difference is that such shootings might be legal.

My blog usually gets few comments, but on this one, the gunslingers descended en masse,* though as I said in a post the next day (here), they mostly agreed with my basic point; they just didn’t like the way I put it.

Now Donald Trump has joined me. A few weeks ago, he hinted that if gunlovers (“Second Amendment people”) didn’t like a judge, they would take aim and assassinate the judge (or perhaps the president who appointed the judge).  Yesterday, he suggested that they would shoot Hillary Clinton. No mention of policies or judicial appointments. They would shoot her just because they don’t like her – if they could get away with it.

I think they [Clinton’s Secret Service detail] should disarm immediately. Take their guns away, she doesn't want guns. Take their— and let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away. OK, it would be very dangerous.

Very dangerous. Trump is talking about people who adhere to the philosophy of the gun, and apparently he counts many of these people among his supporters. He is saying essentially that they will shoot the Democratic nominee for US president. He merely adds the caveat, if they can be successful, i.e., if the Secret Service cannot shoot them first.

When Clinton said that half of Trump supporters were racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic, the Trump campaign and supporters took umbrage. When Trump himself suggests that many of them are potential terrorists and assassins, they seem to take it as a compliment. 

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* Peter Moskos, whose blog Cop in the Hood is well worth reading, once told me that sometimes when he’s feeling neglected and lonely, he’ll put up a post about guns. And very soon, he’s got lots of company.

Has Trust Gone Bust?

September 16, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Brooks was preaching again this week. His Tuesday column (here) was a jeremiad on the ills that “an avalanche of distrust” is bringing to US society.  (The phrase “avalanche of distrust” came probably from the headline writer, not Brooks. Brooks refers to “an avalanche of calumny.” Either way, the country’s being buried under a lot of bad snow.)

A generation ago about half of all Americans felt they could trust the people around them, but now less than a third think other people are trustworthy. Young people are the most distrustful of all; only about 19 percent of millennials believe other people can be trusted. But across all age groups there is a rising culture of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering.

Brooks is partly right, partly misleading. He seems to be referring to the General Social Survey, which, since 1972, has asked regularly about trust.  The GSS has three items that pertain to trust.

• TRUST – Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in life?
• HELPFUL – Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?
• FAIR – Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?

The GSS data does show some decline in all these since 1990 – i.e., a generation ago.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

               
Of the three variables, TRUST has declined the most. The percentage of people saying that most people could be trusted fell from 39% to 30%, Brooks’s statement about “half of all Americans” a generation ago being trusting is a bit misleading as it implies that 50% was standard year in year out. In fact, in only one year, 1984, did the percentage reach that level. As for the other variables relevant to the “culture of paranoia,” perceptions of other people’s helpfulness also declined; perceptions of their fairness changed little.

What about the age differences Brooks notes?  I extracted GSS data on the Trust variable at three different periods – 1972-1976, 1989-1991, and the most recent years that we have data for.

In every period, the young are the least trusting, but the difference between them and people in older age groups is much greater now than it was 25 or 40 years ago. That’s because millennials, as Brooks correctly notes, are much less trusting than were their 18-30 year old counterparts in the 1970s.

But what about the rest of us? According to Brooks, “across all age groups there is a rising culture of paranoia.”  In the 1972-76 period, in the youngest group, 38% were trusting. In 1990, those people would be in their early 40s to early 50s. In that year, that age group was somewhat more trusting than they had been 25 years earlier. And 20 years later, when they were in their late 50s and up, they were still as trusting as they had been before. The same is true of the people who were 30 and up in the 1970s. Similarly, the youngest group in 1990 had the same level of trust twenty years later – about 30%.

Trust seems to be remarkably resilient – impervious to the vicissitudes of aging or of social and political changes. The Watergate era, the Reagan years, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the recent recession – none of these seems to have made much difference in each cohort’s level of trust.  Go figure.

Brooks’s sermon then turns from the aggregate data to the effect on people’s souls.

The true thing about distrust, in politics and in life generally, is that it is self-destructive. Distrustful people end up isolating themselves, alienating others and corroding their inner natures. Over the past few decades, the decline in social trust has correlated to an epidemic of loneliness. In 1985, 10 percent of Americans said they had no close friend with whom they could discuss important matters. By 2004, 25 percent had no such friend.

That finding, which made headlines a decade ago, has since been questioned if not debunked.The GSS data it’s based on contained a coding error, and other surveys have found no such drastic increase in friendlessness. Claude Fischer has an excellent blog post about this issue (here). He includes this graph based on results from the Gallup poll.

Brooks obviously is not interested in these corrections. He is, after all, crying “avalanche” in a crowded political theater. But it tuns out there’s not all that much snow. The change to worry about is that over the last 25 years, each new cohort is less trusting, and this is one time when hand-wringing about what’s wrong with kids today might be appropriate. Those attitudes, once formed, are little effected even by major changes in the society and government.

Trump Unrestricted

September 15, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Commas are important. Sometimes.

• I waved to the young man who was wearing a gray suit.

“Who was wearing a gray suit” is a restrcitive clause. It’s called that because it limits the subject. There could have been a lot of other young men, but I waved to the one in the gray suit.

• I waved to the young man, who was wearing a gray suit.

With the comma added, the clause becomes nonrestrictive. The young man is the only possible one, and he was wearing a gray suit.

Today we have this statement from Donald Trump’s doctors.

We are pleased to disclose all of the test results which show that Mr. Trump is in excellent health, and has the stamina to endure — uninterrupted — the rigors of a punishing and unprecedented presidential campaign and, more importantly, the singularly demanding job of President of the United States.

With no comma, the clause “which show that Mr. Trump is in excellent health” becomes restrictive. It implies that there may other test results which do not show Trump to be in excellent health. Was the copy editor being cagey or merely careless?

Today’s statement is a bit more specific than the previous medical records released by a Trump doctor — “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” which sounds almost as if the Donald himself could have written it.

Of course Mr. Trump is in great health, the best – believe me. I know his doctors, the finest really. I admire them, and they say his stamina is great. I can’t believe that people are complaining about a comma. Don’t get me wrong. I love commas. China – by the way, a very great country – China doesn’t have commas, and we’ve let them get away with that. China is incredible in many ways. I eat Chinese food. I mean, my Chinese chef is tremendous, tremendous. But many people say that there are no commas on the menus. No commas at all. Sad.

All In the Family

September 11, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

“God must love the common man,” goes the quote usually attributed to Lincoln, “He made so many of them.”

Greg Mankiw must love the rich. He writes so many articles promoting policies that help them. In today’s installment in the NY Times Business section (here), he writes about the estate tax.*

Mankiw probably didn’t write that headline, and it’s slightly misleading. It suggests that Mankiw wants to get rid of all inheritance taxes without making any other changes. In fact, he proposes other ways to “make sure those at the top pay their fair share.” But the headline captures the takeaway – or at least what rich people and their advocates take away.

Not taxing inheritances is what happened when Mankiw was, as he reminds us, chief economic advisor to President George W. Bush. Bush phased out the estate tax entirely. Presumably Mankiw raised no strong objections. It’s possible that Mankiw recommended to Bush the alternate taxes he mentions in today’s Times. We don’t know. But if he did, the only item in his advice package that Bush and the Congressional Republicans paid attention to was the call to just get rid of this pesky tax on the heirs of the wealthy.

In writing against the estate tax, Mankiw pulls the same switcheroo that other opponents of the tax use. He writes about it as though the people who pay the tax are those who accumulated the fortune. They aren’t. Calling the inheritance tax the “death tax” makes it seem as though the dead are being taxed for dying. They aren’t. If you leave an estate to your heirs, you have departed this mortal plane and are safely beyond the reach of the IRS.

The people who would pay the tax are those who inherit the money. If they had gotten this money the old fashioned way, by earning it, they would pay tax on it – and nobody objects on principle to taxing the money people get by working. But money they get because someone gave it to them gets preferable treatment. Mankiw dodges this issue by talking about “families,” as though the family were still the same as it was before the death of the one who made the money – as though the money hadn’t really changed hands.

The same logic would shield income in the paychecks that someone got by working in the family business. And who knows? Maybe Republicans will propose making income from the family business tax-free. The Trump kids would get a free ride. After all, if we don’t want a death tax, why would we allow a parenthood tax?


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*Another post on Mankiw and taxes is here. Other posts about Mankiw in this blog are here and here.

(A day after I posted this, Matt Levine made basically the same criticisms of the Mankiw piece. Levine writes for Bloomberg, so his post probably had a few more readers.)