Majority Rules? Not in the US

November 13, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Correction (November 14): I misread the House returns, reversing the totals for Republicans and Democrats. The Republican House candidates got a higher total vote --51.4%. They won 55% of the seats.

Update (November 23): The popular vote for president now shows Clinton ahead by 2 million votes.

It’s official. The US government is now in full control of the less popular political party. More Americans voted for Democrats than for Republicans, but the minority party now controls all three branches of the federal government.

President: The Democratic candidate got more votes than did the Republican candidate.
    Clinton 60.1 million 62.4 million
    Trump 59.8 million 62.2 million
The Republican will be in the White House.

Senate: More votes were cast for Democrats than for Republicans.
    Democrats 45.2 million
    Republicans 39.3 million
The Republicans have a 51-48 edge in the Senate.

House:  More votes were cast for Democrats than for Republicans.
    Democrats 56.3 53.2 million
    Republicans 53.2 56.3 million
In Congressional seats, Republicans have a 237 - 193 advantage.

Judiciary: At the Supreme Court level, two justices – Alito and Thomas – were confirmed by Senators who represented a minority of the electorate. More Americans voted for Senators who voted Nay than for Senators who voted Yea. That pattern will likely hold for whoever Trump nominates for the seat that is currently vacant. That seat is vacant because Republicans refused to allow Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, to come up for a vote. Many of them hinted that if Hillary had won but Republicans still controlled the Senate, they would continue this tactic for four more years.

They have taken the same delaying approach to lower-level federal judgeships, so Trump will have many of those to appoint. In these too, the Republicans have shown themselves willing to trash long-standing norms for the sake of GOP hegemony. As Nina Totenberg explained (here) the day after the election,

If history is any guide Republicans will abandon — as they have before — traditional protections for the minority party, meaning that the views of opposition party senators will not be considered in the appointment of judges, even from states where both senators are Democrats. Senate Democrats, even when they controlled the Senate, did honor those GOP views, but Republicans have forsaken that traditional accommodation in recent times.

In my mind’s ear, the phrase “ruling minority party” calls up images of Saddam and the Ba’ath party in Iraq, or the Assad regime ruling Syria despite the Alawites being very much a minority— not exactly governments to emulate. I do not know if this strange and anti-democratic arrangement – the party with the most votes frozen out of power – has ever occurred before in US history. But for at least the next two years, the minority rules, and you can be sure that they will do everything in their power to keep it that way
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Do Do That Voodoo That You Do So Well

November 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economist Justin Wolfers tweeted yesterday.

By “economic & fiscal conservatism,” he’s referring to the Republicans’ often-voiced concern about The Deficit.  As I said in this post  three days ago, when Republicans are in power and want to spend a lot more than they take in, their “deficit scolds” stop scolding.*

The deficit data from the Federal Reserve (here) shows this pattern. The graph below charts the ratio of surplus or deficit to GDP.  In years where the government had a surplus, the line goes above the 0-point. The farther below the line, the greater the deficit relative to GDP. (The coloring and text identifying the presidents and their party are my own addition.)

(Click on the graph for a slightly larger view.)

Compare the first and last years of each administration. In all cases, deficit-to-GDP  under Democrats was less when they left office than when they entered. (For Carter, the difference is too small to see in this graph:  -2.57 in 1977, -2.46 in 1981.) In all Republican administrations, deficit-to-GDP was higher at the end of their terms than at the beginning. Democrats reduce the deficit; Republicans increase it.

The main reason is fairly obvious, though Twitter’s 140-character limit makes the tweet from Wolfers a bit misleading. He refers to “Trump’s tax and spending program.” What he means is “Trump’s less-tax and more-spending program.”  Trump’s people have said that one of their big priorities for the first 100 days is tax cuts. Steven Moore, Trump’s economic advisor, says that these will result in increased revenues. Cut tax rates, and tax revenue will magically increase. Hmmm. Where have we heard this before?

The answer is: Reagan and Bush II. (Bush the first, until Reagan selected him as his running mate, famously referred to this idea as “voodoo economics,” which it was. Costs of the tax cuts were not offset by increased revenue.) Bush II, in his early months in office, seemed to be touting his tax cuts, which of course would benefit mostly the wealthy, as the solution to everything. As Rick Herzberg in The New Yorker said at the time, Bush seems to think that the number one problem facing the country is that rich people don’t have enough money.

The Republicans in 2017 will follow in this tradition – lower taxes, especially for the rich, increased spending, and instead of deficit scolding, a reaffirmation of faith in voodoo economics.

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* In the Bush years, some senators who had been elected as Republicans (e.g., Lincoln Chafee and Jim Jeffords) stuck by their deficit guns. Instead, they changed their party affiliation. They were no longer Republicans, leaving the GOP entirely to those whose concern with the deficit was selective and inconsistent (which is a nice way of saying “hypocritical”). 

Men At Lunch – Then and Now

November 11, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

I saw these construction workers on Broadway at 79th St. today and took the picture mostly because of the color – those neon yellow vests.

(Click on an image for a slightly larger view.)

When I was looking at the picture later, it reminded me of another photo, “Men At Lunch” by Charles Ebbetts – men working on the construction of Rockefeller Center in 1932.

The men in 1932 sit on a girder high above the streets, not on the sidewalk. They wear caps, not hard hats. They smoke. But the difference that most struck me was what they were doing. In 1932, men at lunch are sharing those papers (blueprints?). Except for the guy on the right end, they are all talking to another man.

In 2016, every man is on his cell phone. 

Is There Any Good News?

November 9, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

The next four years are likely to be, in many ways, a disaster (to use a favorite word of our president-elect). But maybe there are some bright spots.

1. Deficit scolds. That’s Paul Krugman’s term for politicians and conservative think-tankers who opposed many of Obama’s policies on the grounds that they would drastically increase the deficit. What we needed, so the argument went was “fiscal responsibility.” In many situations, that argument was not just bad policy, it was bad economics.

But once Republicans are in power, they will no longer cry wolf. As we saw during the Bush years, when it comes to spending lots of money on stuff that Republicans really like – tax cuts for the wealthy, for example, or a nifty little war in Iraq – their worry about the deficit vanishes. No more scolding.

2. Sexual sophistication. European voters don’t care much about what their political leaders do in their private sex lives. They see that sphere as separate from the public world of policy. Conservative Americans, especially the religiously conservative, have usually taken a different view – that a man who is sexually immoral cannot possibly govern wisely.

As I showed in a recent post (here), Trump has gotten these conservatives to lighten up. They have now become cosmopolitan, almost European, in their separation of sex and statesmanship. Their votes yesterday have given us a president with two divorces, several affairs, and a penchant for grabbing women by the pussy (if they are attractive enough) and walking in on naked teenage girls. We are now a nation where each of us is only a click away from nude photos of our First Lady.  Makes the French seem prudish by comparison.

3.  Re-moralization. Four years ago, Charles Murray called our attention to the demoralization of the White working class. They had become disaffected and no longer attached to the dominant institutions of society – work, education, family. They felt that they had been screwed by the system, a system run by a distant and disdaining cultural elite. That feeling, said Murray, was accurate (more here). Their America had been taken from them. 

This sentiment was the basis of Republican political strategy during the Obama years. If you want to take back “your” country from these usurpers, vote Republican. (See my post “Repo Men” from five years ago.)

Now that they have taken it back, perhaps these White working class people will feel more a part of society. They will stay in school, get married and stay married and raise their children in traditional families. They will re-adopt the work ethic and stay in their jobs and in the labor force. Rates of drug use, suicide, and ill health will decrease.

Will any of these happen? Yes, but the changes will not be permanent. The first two are examples of people altering their ideas – about economics or morality – to suit their political preferences. Given a Democratic politician or policies, these people will revert to their former ideas, all the while insisting that fiscal responsibility and conventional sexual morality are rock-solid, inviolable principles.

As for the White working class, I suspect that the economy is far more important than their sense of political efficacy. If Trump can bring back industrial jobs to the heartland as he guarantees he will, their participation in work, family, and school may reverse its downward course. It is possible. But if we do not see a return to a 20th-century economy, the Trumpists will somehow have to resolve the dissonance. It will still be their country; the party and the man who represent them will still be dominant. But the reality of their lives may remain unimproved. The ways they might resolve that dissonance include some possibilities I’d rather not think about right now. These have been visible for a while, but if we lose the economic gains of the Obama years, things could get really nasty.