Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[hrothgar]

 

What? Come again? It's a matter of arithmetic that 1% of the babies will later become in the upper 1% of wealth (compared with others of their age, ignoring the effect of some dying off). So the numbers above say that starting out in a family in the upper 1% gives absolutely no advantage in growing up to be in the upper 1%. This seems extremely unlikely to me.

 

 

Ken, the game is rigged...

 

Consider the range of possible results that are consistent with a positive outcome.

[y66]

this seems to me where we are all going off the rails - arguing about specifics before we agree on the big-picture goal.

On-ness must precede going-off-ness?

 

kenberg's reply was a perfect example of why agreeing on goals is hard. So is this lecture (and the other 5) by Ralf Dahrendorf

 

We can probably all agree to a large extent with Dahrendorf that what matters most in this world is liberty: that is, human life-chances. As for whose life chances, perhaps not so much.

[y66]

From Events Matter More Than Trump’s Strongest Supporters by Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

We really have to discuss the effects of events on presidencies.

 

Politico’s Annie Karni reports that what President Donald Trump’s White House learned from his wildly inappropriate comments after Charlottesville last year was that nothing matters — things that were thought to be toxic to a presidency are not, at least not for this president.

 

But in some ways, the experience of Charlottesville, as well as his ability to recover from any short-term crisis, has been empowering for Trump and his allies. Three former aides said the takeaway from Charlottesville is the nihilistic notion that nothing matters except for how things play.

 

“The lesson of the Trump presidency is that no short-term crisis matters long term,” said one former White House official who worked in the administration last year during the racial crisis.

 

On one hand, the fact that some media frenzies have little or no long-term effects is important and accurate, and some presidents go four or even eight years without learning not to overreact to whatever minor flap people are obsessed with at the moment. One of Barack Obama’s enormous strengths as a politician was that he was aware of that early on, and while his administration didn’t always act accordingly, overall it was a real plus for him.

 

But, no, it’s certainly not true that “nothing matters.”

 

@mattyglesias

It’s a little odd to me that we’re discussing things in these terms after Doug Jones & Conor Lamb and on the eve of a tight special election for an R+7 Ohio House seat.

 

Clearly _something_ has gone awry for Trump and it’s not all LOL Nothing Matters.

 

@anniekarni

Charlottesville, a year ago, “puts Trump in the dung heap of presidents who are completely insensitive of race,” says Brinkley. In present though, the lesson learned is closer to: nothing matters other than how things play. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/05/trump-charlottesville-republicans-midterms-764348 …

6:52 PM - Aug 5, 2018 · Washington, DC

 

Make that: Doug Jones, Conor Lamb, blowout Democratic wins in off-year elections in 2017, quite a few down-ballot special elections that have flipped seats to Democrats, historically low approval ratings over the course of his presidency, generic ballot questions, and seat-by-seat analysis all pointing to a very bad Election Day for Republicans in November.

 

Yes, Trump has retained his strongest supporters. So did Richard Nixon well into 1973; so did Jimmy Carter in 1978, Ronald Reagan in 1982, Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006 and Obama in 2010, all just before brutal midterm results for their parties. The big difference is that all of those examples of disastrous midterms came during hard economic times of one kind or another. Trump is maintaining weak approval ratings despite relative peace and prosperity. Based on that, one might expect him to have approval ratings similar to George H.W. Bush or John F. Kennedy at this stage of their presidencies. That he’s not even close to them strongly suggests that Trump’s conduct in office is having dramatic negative effects on his popularity.

 

It also suggests something that we can’t yet prove: that Trump has permanently alienated half or more of the electorate. We’ve never had a president do that before. But Trump has never reached 50 percent approval, and it’s quite possible he can’t. My guess is that the only previous president to achieve that dubious distinction was Nixon in his final nine months or so. But it’s not hard to imagine the others whose approval slumped to around 25 percent (which is well below where Trump has been) recovering had they had more time, and peace and prosperity had broken out.

 

Determining which of Trump’s various scandals and outrageous comments and actions are responsible for his unpopularity would be a difficult task indeed, and it’s almost certainly the case that some things blown out of proportion really didn’t matter in the long run. But people trying to figure out the effects of anything on Trump’s popularity would be smart to entirely ignore his strongest supporters (and strongest opponents), because that’s not where changes in any president’s popularity will be found. And yes, losing popularity matters, even if a president retains those strongest supporters.

[johnu]

Another defining moment for Dennison

 

Dennison Accuses California Of Causing Wildfires By ‘Diverting’ Water To Pacific

 

The question Americans need to ask is why are Californians letting gravity cause rivers and streams to drain into the Pacific. It takes a stable genius to put things into perspective. My question is why are California restaurants and backyard BBQ'ers letting these fires go to waste by not grilling and BBQ'ing with the already burning coals?

[Winstonm]

Another defining moment for Dennison

 

Dennison Accuses California Of Causing Wildfires By ‘Diverting’ Water To Pacific

 

The question Americans need to ask is why are Californians letting gravity cause rivers and streams to drain into the Pacific. It takes a stable genius to put things into perspective. My question is why are California restaurants and backyard BBQ'ers letting these fires go to waste by not grilling and BBQ'ing with the already burning coals?

 

Obviously the problem was caused by the 3 million illegals who crossed the border for the sole reason of voting - the ones who now live in limestone caves carved out from the cement banks of the Los Angeles river, who are waiting patiently and silently for the next election, while in the meantime raising an entire clan of "takers" by working 14 hour days in jobs no one else is willing to do.

[kenberg]

Ken, the game is rigged...

 

Consider the range of possible results that are consistent with a positive outcome.

 

Yes. But there is intentionally rigged and rigged where it's just that nobody looks very closely/ In the specific case where only 1% of those born into the 1% grow into the 1%, I expect that it's a matter of when. Possibly only 1% of the babies of 1 %ers become 1 %ers when they are 30, but ive them a chance. As mentioned I was off to do some stuff and so I did not read it all in detail. It seems almost certain that a study that shows that only 1% of the children of 1%ers become 1%ers is not looking at the right comparisons. We all know of examples of people who have come a long way from not much, and we know of some going in the other direction as well. It happens both ways, fairly often. But the kids of Jeff Bezos are more likely to become mega-rich than my grandkids are (too late for my kids) and certainly more likely than kids growing up in public housing.

I pulled the result from a column of Robert Samuelson. I read him regularly and I think he is fair and intends to be informative. But that figure just leapt out at me. I see it as a good example because as far as I am concerned it does not matter greatly. I have never wanted to be mega-rich, in fact I would prefer not to be, at least if being mega-rich included being known to be mega-rich. So, for me, this particular example is interesting mostly just as one more case of people reading data without adequately thinking about it. I think that there are far more toxic examples.

I often wonder if kids are really that much different now than my friends and I were in the 1950s. When contemplating my future, I paid attention to what I liked and what I didn't like and to what I seemed to be good at. After that. I thought about how I could make a living at it. Making a living was important, doing something I enjoyed and was interested in was very important, becoming rich was not even a consideration. I gave zero thought to how I could make more money than my father did. I expect that many young people still approach things in that way. I would be surprised, maybe even shocked, to learn otherwise.

 

Data can be useful, of course it can be useful. But it requires care.

 

 

[barmar]

Yes. But there is intentionally rigged and rigged where it's just that nobody looks very closely/ In the specific case where only 1% of those born into the 1% grow into the 1%, I expect that it's a matter of when. Possibly only 1% of the babies of 1 %ers become 1 %ers when they are 30, but ive them a chance. As mentioned I was off to do some stuff and so I did not read it all in detail. It seems almost certain that a study that shows that only 1% of the children of 1%ers become 1%ers is not looking at the right comparisons. We all know of examples of people who have come a long way from not much, and we know of some going in the other direction as well. It happens both ways, fairly often. But the kids of Jeff Bezos are more likely to become mega-rich than my grandkids are (too late for my kids) and certainly more likely than kids growing up in public housing.

Becoming a 1%er is hard, even if you're born into a 1% family. It requires incredible good luck and hard work. What can Jeff Bezos do to ensure that his kids become as uber-successful as he has been? He can give them some shares of Amazon.com, but the rest is mostly on their own. Yes, they have a leg up on the competition -- he can send them to the best schools, and help them get good jobs when they graduate. I'll bet most of the children of 1%ers are in the top 10-20%, but they're not all in the top 1%.

 

The article is mostly talking about the middle class -- the paragraph about the 1% was just an extreme example of the more general phenomenon it's discussing. What the article says is that upward mobility opportunities today are not the same as they were in previous generations. It used to be normal for children to do better than their parents. The economy was improving, and a rising tide lifts all boats. Many people born in the first half of the 20th century didn't go to college, and it was quite common to hear their children say that they're the first ones in their families to get a higher education, which allowed them to get better jobs and make more money than their parents.

 

But since then, things have slowed down. If you're in the second generation to go to college, it's not as easy to do better than your parents -- they already made the quantum leap from lower class to middle class. Most of the 1% are pretty old, like Warren Buffett -- there are only a handful of Mark Zuckerbergs, making huge bucks from new technologies.

 

My paternal grandfather (a first-generation American) started a successful business, all his sons all eventually became executives at the business (and my mother's brother was his IT manager, and later became a salesman), and my father took over the helm when my grandfather retired. Grandpa did reasonably well, but my father and uncles were much better off -- they all moved out to very nice homes in the suburbs. When I was a teenager we moved to an even nicer town, where we bought a house with a pool and tennis court; my high school was one of the few around in the 1970's that had their own computer and taught programming (most other schools on Long Island had cooperative arrangements with a vocational school).

 

I got to go to the most prestigious engineering college, and my father was able to pay for it without me having to get any financial aid (I got a federal student loan because it was cheap -- I think I paid it off in less than 10 years). I live a comfortable life, but I'm pretty sure I don't make nearly as much as my father did. But I haven't really tried -- I've been happy being an individual contributor in all my jobs, I haven't tried to get into management or start my own business. I don't have a family to support, I have a very modest lifestyle, so I don't need much money (I actually took a small pay cut, including losing company-provided medical insurance, to come work for BBO). I think I was a little spoiled, and I've always been lazy -- it would take lots more effort than I'm willing to exert to do as well as my father did, despite the opportunities that are potentially available to me.

 

Wow, I finally got to use anecdotes from my own life to illustrate a point, like Ken usually does!

[kenberg]

Becoming a 1%er is hard, even if you're born into a 1% family. It requires incredible good luck and hard work. What can Jeff Bezos do to ensure that his kids become as uber-successful as he has been? He can give them some shares of Amazon.com, but the rest is mostly on their own. Yes, they have a leg up on the competition -- he can send them to the best schools, and help them get good jobs when they graduate. I'll bet most of the children of 1%ers are in the top 10-20%, but they're not all in the top 1%.

 

The article is mostly talking about the middle class -- the paragraph about the 1% was just an extreme example of the more general phenomenon it's discussing. What the article says is that upward mobility opportunities today are not the same as they were in previous generations. It used to be normal for children to do better than their parents. The economy was improving, and a rising tide lifts all boats. Many people born in the first half of the 20th century didn't go to college, and it was quite common to hear their children say that they're the first ones in their families to get a higher education, which allowed them to get better jobs and make more money than their parents.

 

But since then, things have slowed down. If you're in the second generation to go to college, it's not as easy to do better than your parents -- they already made the quantum leap from lower class to middle class. Most of the 1% are pretty old, like Warren Buffett -- there are only a handful of Mark Zuckerbergs, making huge bucks from new technologies.

 

My paternal grandfather (a first-generation American) started a successful business, all his sons all eventually became executives at the business (and my mother's brother was his IT manager, and later became a salesman), and my father took over the helm when my grandfather retired. Grandpa did reasonably well, but my father and uncles were much better off -- they all moved out to very nice homes in the suburbs. When I was a teenager we moved to an even nicer town, where we bought a house with a pool and tennis court; my high school was one of the few around in the 1970's that had their own computer and taught programming (most other schools on Long Island had cooperative arrangements with a vocational school).

 

I got to go to the most prestigious engineering college, and my father was able to pay for it without me having to get any financial aid (I got a federal student loan because it was cheap -- I think I paid it off in less than 10 years). I live a comfortable life, but I'm pretty sure I don't make nearly as much as my father did. But I haven't really tried -- I've been happy being an individual contributor in all my jobs, I haven't tried to get into management or start my own business. I don't have a family to support, I have a very modest lifestyle, so I don't need much money (I actually took a small pay cut, including losing company-provided medical insurance, to come work for BBO). I think I was a little spoiled, and I've always been lazy -- it would take lots more effort than I'm willing to exert to do as well as my father did, despite the opportunities that are potentially available to me.

 

Wow, I finally got to use anecdotes from my own life to illustrate a point, like Ken usually does!

 

We all draw on our own experiences in forming our views. Growing up we are told things, and perhaps some of it is true. But we watch, and we try out things, and we form our view of the world. I am not saying that logic plays no role, but much less of a role than advertised. Logic is useful for deducing B from A. Usually that's the easy part.

 

[helene_t]

I wouldn't think it would be so hard to stay a billionaire if you inherit a billion from your parents. Just invest the money in a variety of stock and pull out a small fraction of the revenue for living expenses.

[awm]

I wouldn't think it would be so hard to stay a billionaire if you inherit a billion from your parents. Just invest the money in a variety of stock and pull out a small fraction of the revenue for living expenses.

 

This is obviously true, but not everyone in the top 1% is a billionaire. Typically the amount that very wealthy parents pass to their children is less than what they have for a number of reasons: they may have multiple children, they may decide to give some fraction of their wealth to charity, and they may have to pay some amount of inheritance-related tax. Of course Jeff Bezos's kid is still a billionaire and still in the top 1% (once his parents die anyway). But someone whose parents are towards the bottom of the top 1% will often not get there just based on inheritance. And there's a lot of "wealth inequality" even within the 1%, so a lot more people are towards the bottom of that range than the top.

 

There's also a question of what people do with their money -- if you inherit ten million dollars, are you motivated to risk it all by starting a business that might make you a billionaire? Or do you decide to just live off the dividends and do charitable work or whatever you enjoy? Even if you do decide to "try and become a billionaire" your chances of success may only be a little better than someone who started with much more modest net worth.

[johnu]

Becoming a 1%er is hard, even if you're born into a 1% family. It requires incredible good luck and hard work.

 

And then Dad (or Mom) will decide to retire and appoint you as president and CEO of their multi-million (or billion) dollar company. I'm sure the children worked very hard to be successful sons and daughters.

 

Or Mom and Dad set up multi million dollar trust funds for their kids, or die and leave their kids their entire estates.

 

As a minimum, the 1% kids will go to the finest prep schools, the best colleges in the country, they hobnob with other 1%'ers, and their kids. If they decide to start their own businesses, Mom and Dad will usually loan or give them the money, or refer them to a 1% friend who can facilitate a loan.

[kenberg]

I have not yet gone back to look in detail att he data. But in a wat that illustrates my point. It has to be looked at with a bit of care to see how it could happen that fewer than 1% of the 1%ers become 1%ers. We start with the simple. If you give a math exam to 10,00 kis the no mater how well or how poorly the kids have been taught, 100 of the kids will end up in the top percentile. That's the way it is. But now if we examined the data and found that, say, 500 came from households with really smart parents and these kids had been sent to the best schools and had been given private tutoring, we would be surprised if only 5 of them scored, among the 10,000 in the top percentile.

If it were to happenm we would probably think something is funny with the way the comparisons went.And so it is with the wealth. As Richard pointed out early on, there are various ways to explain it.Actually Samuelson mentioned some caveats. I just picked this as one example that should be a caution against taking data at face value.

 

[rmnka447]

If you believe me to be far left, how about some honest answers. Simple yes or no is all that is required.

 

Do you think healthcare for everyone is a good idea?

Do you think everyone who so wishes deserves an education up to and including college?

Do you think less money should be spent on warfare?

Do you think a social safety net is a valid government expenditure?

 

If the world was populated with countries with unlimited means that were completely amiable and fair with each other, then the answer to all those questions would be yes. Unfortunately, that utopian vision is a pipedream. I don't think there's a problem with viewing those concepts as ideals.

 

In the real world, countries have limited resources while enduring rivalries and enmities with other countries/blocs. So, the best that can be hoped for by each country is to find a mix of resource allocation that gives reasonably good outcome among those concepts. For instance, it does you no good to provide healthcare for all when your armed forces are so weak that next week or month, Uncle Vladimir and his Cossack hordes will take the country over.

 

The other issue is that as population increases more resources will have to be created to meet that mix of good outcomes. But in order to grow those resources, you must devote a certain amount of existing resources to insure that resource growth. Should a country fail to do so, it is doomed to decline and then fail. Then it will not be able to provide any of those good outcomes.

 

We can see a microcosm of that in many central urban areas. Maybe it would be better to focus on getting better outcomes there than trying to implement massive new social welfare programs.

[Cyberyeti]

And then Dad (or Mom) will decide to retire and appoint you as president and CEO of their multi-million (or billion) dollar company. I'm sure the children worked very hard to be successful sons and daughters.

 

Or Mom and Dad set up multi million dollar trust funds for their kids, or die and leave their kids their entire estates.

 

As a minimum, the 1% kids will go to the finest prep schools, the best colleges in the country, they hobnob with other 1%'ers, and their kids. If they decide to start their own businesses, Mom and Dad will usually loan or give them the money, or refer them to a 1% friend who can facilitate a loan.

 

My suspicion is:

 

The 1%ers split their fabulous wealth between several children

 

It takes a special kind of person to want to work hard when you never have to work again

 

Many kids of 1%ers don't bother, so they're fabulously wealthy but outside the 1%.

[Winstonm]

If the world was populated with countries with unlimited means that were completely amiable and fair with each other, then the answer to all those questions would be yes. Unfortunately, that utopian vision is a pipedream. I don't think there's a problem with viewing those concepts as ideals.

 

In the real world, countries have limited resources while enduring rivalries and enmities with other countries/blocs. So, the best that can be hoped for by each country is to find a mix of resource allocation that gives reasonably good outcome among those concepts. For instance, it does you no good to provide healthcare for all when your armed forces are so weak that next week or month, Uncle Vladimir and his Cossack hordes will take the country over.

 

The other issue is that as population increases more resources will have to be created to meet that mix of good outcomes. But in order to grow those resources, you must devote a certain amount of existing resources to insure that resource growth. Should a country fail to do so, it is doomed to decline and then fail. Then it will not be able to provide any of those good outcomes.

 

We can see a microcosm of that in many central urban areas. Maybe it would be better to focus on getting better outcomes there than trying to implement massive new social welfare programs.

 

I appreciate the honest response. Once the ideal is agreed upon (not goals, but ideals), then we can have a rational discussion about whether or not those ideals should become goals. But you have to start somewhere. I see you are quite concerned about the implementation of these ideals, and that is OK. If you agree that these are worthwhile ideas, that is a start, because I, too, think they are worthwhile.

 

If we both think these are valid ideals, then why can't we discuss how or if we can move toward those goals.

 

See, this is where I came in - when I first became politically aware the country had Democrats and Republicans, and they came at problems from different viewpoints, but they worked out differences in policy by compromising in order to move the country forward.

 

People of different viewpoints can work together if they have common ideals - and the way to do that is through compromise. Holding the idea that fellow countrymen are enemies to be defeated is a prescription for collapse.

[rmnka447]

I appreciate the honest response. Once the ideal is agreed upon (not goals, but ideals), then we can have a rational discussion about whether or not those ideals should become goals. But you have to start somewhere. I see you are quite concerned about the implementation of these ideals, and that is OK. If you agree that these are worthwhile ideas, that is a start, because I, too, think they are worthwhile.

 

If we both think these are valid ideals, then why can't we discuss how or if we can move toward those goals.

 

See, this is where I came in - when I first became politically aware the country had Democrats and Republicans, and they came at problems from different viewpoints, but they worked out differences in policy by compromising in order to move the country forward.

 

People of different viewpoints can work together if they have common ideals - and the way to do that is through compromise. Holding the idea that fellow countrymen are enemies to be defeated is a prescription for collapse.

 

It becomes much harder to work with someone who calls you deplorable or thinks you are inherently racist, misogynistic, evil, or worse. But from a conservative viewpoint that is the state of mind and vocally expressed sentiments of progressives today. Unfortunately, that has hardened both sides attitudes toward each other and brought about an impasse.

 

Beyond that there are different viewpoints of the relationship between the government and its citizens. Conservatives view government with skepticism and believe in limited government. Progressives generally see government as a means of doing good and want more government. But the bigger government is, the more power it has over people's lives and the less actual freedom people have. OTOH, too little government essentially lets the "inmates run the prison". How do we find a workable intermediate point?

 

Our wise founding fathers, for all their faults, were more aligned with the current conservative viewpoint. That was because they had experienced the corruption and abuses of power of the British monarchy and wanted no part of anything like it in their new experiment in nationhood. Further, they had a healthy skepticism of human nature and sought in the Constitution to guard against the baser side of human nature while providing a workable, if slow means of governing the country. Not bad considering we're 242 years of operation and counting.

[barmar]

I have not yet gone back to look in detail att he data. But in a wat that illustrates my point. It has to be looked at with a bit of care to see how it could happen that fewer than 1% of the 1%ers become 1%ers. We start with the simple. If you give a math exam to 10,00 kis the no mater how well or how poorly the kids have been taught, 100 of the kids will end up in the top percentile. That's the way it is. But now if we examined the data and found that, say, 500 came from households with really smart parents and these kids had been sent to the best schools and had been given private tutoring, we would be surprised if only 5 of them scored, among the 10,000 in the top percentile.

Of course. Similarly, it would be extremely surprising if any of the 1%ers' children were poor. Like I said, I'll bet almost all of them are in the top 10%, but they're not all in the top 1%. Several people have pointed out that they can't inherit their parents' wealth until the parents die, and it will be split among multiple children and others.

 

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have pledged to give most of their vast wealths to charity, although they're so wealthy that the remainder that their children inherit will be huge. Buffett's 3 children stand to inherit about $2 billion apiece. That will presumably make them 1%ers, but they won't be in the top 3 like their father. Buffett has said that the perfect amount is

enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.

https://www.bustle.com/p/who-are-warren-buffetts-children-the-billionaire-raised-his-kids-to-be-philanthropists-33991 says:

Although Warren Buffett's children each have a hefty inheritance in their future, they've all displayed incredible work ethic and are clearly devoted to their philanthropic causes and careers.

[barmar]

And then Dad (or Mom) will decide to retire and appoint you as president and CEO of their multi-million (or billion) dollar company. I'm sure the children worked very hard to be successful sons and daughters.

Aren't CEOs appointed by the Board of Directors? Unless it's a private company owned by the parent, they can't just appoint whoever they want.

[awm]

It becomes much harder to work with someone who calls you deplorable or thinks you are inherently racist, misogynistic, evil, or worse. But from a conservative viewpoint that is the state of mind and vocally expressed sentiments of progressives today. Unfortunately, that has hardened both sides attitudes toward each other and brought about an impasse.

 

Beyond that there are different viewpoints of the relationship between the government and its citizens. Conservatives view government with skepticism and believe in limited government. Progressives generally see government as a means of doing good and want more government. But the bigger government is, the more power it has over people's lives and the less actual freedom people have. OTOH, too little government essentially lets the "inmates run the prison". How do we find a workable intermediate point?

 

Our wise founding fathers, for all their faults, were more aligned with the current conservative viewpoint. That was because they had experienced the corruption and abuses of power of the British monarchy and wanted no part of anything like it in their new experiment in nationhood. Further, they had a healthy skepticism of human nature and sought in the Constitution to guard against the baser side of human nature while providing a workable, if slow means of governing the country. Not bad considering we're 242 years of operation and counting.

 

There are a few points here that seem wrong to me. First, while it is traditionally true that conservatives believe in limited government, I'm not sure that's true of modern Trump-style conservatives. You need a pretty big government to round up eleven million undocumented people, patrol the wall at the border, lock up millions of (mostly minority) citizens on drug possession charges, make sure that women can't abort unwanted fetuses, kick native tribes off their lands when an oil company wants to run a pipeline through it, enforce high tariffs on foreign-made goods, pay money to US industries to keep them in business when the tariffs would otherwise put them out of business, etc.

 

As for the founding fathers, they had a lot of disagreements amongst themselves. They certainly didn't want a theocracy and were very up front about generally deist beliefs (believe in God, but not organized religion) and accepting all faiths (including Muslims and Atheists)... again this seems very different from modern "conservatives." And while they were leery of a strong central government they were also very leery of strong corporations -- the revolutionary war was fought as much against the British East India Company as against the crown. Again, this differs from modern "conservatives" who seem very pro-corporation, supporting rulings equating corporations to people and money to speech.

 

Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that a largely rural and agrarian society with 18th century technology is very different from modern industrial and technological society where many people live in densely populated cities and hand-held weapons can massacre hundreds of people in minutes. So wise as they were, the founding fathers opinions may need to adjust with the times.

[ldrews]

Obviously voting fraud does not exist:

 

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article216056560.html

[kenberg]

I don't want to drag this out too long. Various explanations, bery reasonable ones, come to mind as to why often those who were born in 1980 to parents in the top percentile are not now themselves in the top percentile.

I was focusing on " The children born in 1980 in the richest 1 percent have only a 1 percent chance of themselves being in the top 1 percent".

Had it been

 

"The children born in 1980 in the richest 1 percent have only a 5 percent chance of themselves being in the top 1 percent" this would seem reasonable for all of the reasons given. My concern was that when it is 1%, rather than 5%, a first reading might be that having parents from the top percentile has no effect whatsoever on the chances of being in the top percentile. I seriously doubt that this is so, and my guess would be that the numbers would be different if we were to wait until 12040 when these youngsters turn 60. Or, if we are impatient, we could look at kids born in 1958 and see how those who were born to 1%ers have fared. I would expect that more than 1% of the 1958 group are now in the top percentile, and I would expect that in 2040 more than 1% of those from the 1980 1%ers will be iin the top percentile.

 

My theme is to be cautious about taking data at face value.

 

Here it was harmless. Let me shift to something different.

 

There have been several WaPo stories lately on school scandals in both Maryland and in DC. Here is roughly the sequence of events

There was an effort to evaluate schools and improve them

It was decided that the percentage of students graduating on time would be an important part of the evaluation.Graduation rates at some schools went up very sharply at some schools.These schools were highly praised.It was discovered that many of the kids who were graduating had not even been coming to class with any regularity.

School officials, in their best imitation of Louie from Casablanca, pronounced themselves shocked. They had no idea? How could they have any idea?

They were kidding, right? No, they weren't.

 

Anyone who has been even halfway around the block should be able to predict that if you tell principals that they will get a big bonus if graduation rates increase significantly then some graduation rates are going to increase significantly. [importantly, many will play it straight. They will be very downhearted about watching some people get the big bucks while they are called in to explain their failure.] And then when the rates reach very great heights? No idea that something is going on? Apparently at one school where they were meeting to discuss how to get the rate up from the already very unprecedented 92% someone mentioned that he was really looking forward to when the rate got to 103%. I am not sure that the others realized that he was making a joke.

 

Often I think data is just carelessly reported, possible misleading, but lacking any bad intent. Other times it is clearly gimmicked. At any rate, care is needed.

 

 

 

 

 

[Winstonm]

It becomes much harder to work with someone who calls you deplorable or thinks you are inherently racist, misogynistic, evil, or worse. But from a conservative viewpoint that is the state of mind and vocally expressed sentiments of progressives today. Unfortunately, that has hardened both sides attitudes toward each other and brought about an impasse.

 

Beyond that there are different viewpoints of the relationship between the government and its citizens. Conservatives view government with skepticism and believe in limited government. Progressives generally see government as a means of doing good and want more government. But the bigger government is, the more power it has over people's lives and the less actual freedom people have. OTOH, too little government essentially lets the "inmates run the prison". How do we find a workable intermediate point?

 

Our wise founding fathers, for all their faults, were more aligned with the current conservative viewpoint. That was because they had experienced the corruption and abuses of power of the British monarchy and wanted no part of anything like it in their new experiment in nationhood. Further, they had a healthy skepticism of human nature and sought in the Constitution to guard against the baser side of human nature while providing a workable, if slow means of governing the country. Not bad considering we're 242 years of operation and counting.

 

You may consider that beginning a conversation with "I'm on the correct side" is more the argument of the religious than the rational. Pointing fingers and trying to defend your own bias is not conducive to forward movement - I understand that you are biased, and so I am. From that starting point, how do we move forward toward those ideals with which we both agree are worthy, taking into account each other's biases?

 

I would think you would see a third side of this pyramid, too, that is that the solid base who supports this president is around 35%, which means that many conservatives do not support him. So on the question of this president, the question is not about right and left, conservative or liberal, but a question of rational versus unhinged.

 

Jennifer Rubins explains that last point:

 

Second, let’s not be surprised when 35 percent or so of voters consistently tell pollsters that the president is the victim of a witch hunt or that they agree with every policy position and action he takes. Trump fans’ politics is not the politics of rationality, considered judgment or empirical observation. Blind hatred and unthinking boorishness are not moderated by new facts or observable phenomena. We should stop marveling as his “success” in holding his base as if this were a reflection of his political skill, let alone the efficacy of his policies. Rather, the unbreakable and unblinking devotion of his unhinged base is confirmation that he now must rely on support from people oblivious to reality.

 

Supporting this president is not the same as supporting conservative positions. To claim otherwise is disingenuous. In order to receive the respect that the president's supporters claim they desire, the first order of business for them has to be a repudiation with no caveats of this man and his attacks on the rule of law, on minorities, on civility, and on democracy.

[PassedOut]

Great piece from the March issue of The Atlantic: The Plot Against America

 

The entire article is fairly long for these days, but is well worth reading regardless of political persuasion. Here is an excerpt:

 

Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

III. The Firm

 

During the years that followed World War II, Washington’'s most effective lobbyists transcended the transactional nature of their profession. Men such as Abe Fortas, Clark Clifford, Bryce Harlow, and Thomas Corcoran were known not as grubby mercenaries but as elegant avatars of a permanent establishment, lauded as “wise men.” Lobbying hardly carried a stigma, because there was so little of it. When the legendary lawyer Tommy Boggs registered himself as a lobbyist, in 1967, his name was only 64th on the active list. Businesses simply didn'’t consider lobbying a necessity. Three leading political scientists had studied the profession in 1963 and concluded: “When we look at the typical lobby, we find its opportunities to maneuver are sharply limited, its staff mediocre, and its typical problem not the influencing of Congressional votes but finding the clients and contributors to enable it to survive at all.”

 

On the cusp of the Reagan era, Republican lobbyists were particularly enfeebled. Generations of Democratic majorities in Congress had been terrible for business. The scant tribe of Republican lobbyists working the cloakrooms included alumni of the Nixon and Ford administrations; operating under the shame-inducing cloud of Watergate, they were disinclined toward either ambition or aggression.

 

This was the world that brash novices like Manafort and Stone quickly came to dominate. The Reagan administration represented a break with the old Republican establishment. After the long expansion of the regulatory state, business finally had a political partner eager to dismantle it —which generated unprecedented demand for lobbyists. Manafort could convincingly claim to know the new administration better than anyone. During its transition to power, he was the personnel coordinator in the Office of Executive Management, which meant that he’'d stacked the incoming government with his people.* Along with Stone and Charlie Black, another veteran of the Young Republican wars, he set up a firm, Black, Manafort and Stone, which soon compiled an imposing client list: Bethlehem Steel, the Tobacco Institute, Johnson & Johnson, Trans World Airlines.

 

Whereas other firms had operated in specialized niches--lobbying, consulting, public relations--—Black, Manafort and Stone bundled all those services under one roof, a deceptively simple move that would eventually help transform Washington. Time magazine deemed the operation “the ultimate supermarket of influence peddling.” Fred Wertheimer, a good-government advocate, described this expansive approach as “institutionalized conflict of interest.”

 

The linkage of lobbying to political consulting—--the creation of what’ is now known as a double-breasted operation—--was the real breakthrough. Manafort’'s was the first lobbying firm to also house political consultants. (Legally, the two practices were divided into different companies, but they shared the same founding partners and the same office space.) One venture would run campaigns; the other would turn around and lobby the politicians whom their colleagues had helped elect. The consulting side hired the hard-edged operative Lee Atwater, notorious for pioneering race-baiting tactics on behalf of Strom Thurmond. “We’'re getting into servicing what we sell,” Atwater told his friends. Just as imagined, the firm’'s political clients (Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Arlen Specter) became reliable warhorses when the firm needed them to promote the agendas of its corporate clients. With this evolution of the profession, the effectiveness and influence of lobbying grew in tandem.

 

In 1984, the firm reached across the aisle. It made a partner of Peter Kelly, a former finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who had earned the loyalty of lawmakers by raising millions for their campaigns. Some members of the firm worked for Democratic Senate candidates in Louisiana, Vermont, and Florida, even as operatives down the hall worked for their Republican foes. “People said, ‘It’'s un-American,’ ” Kelly told me. “ ‘They can'’t lose. They have both sides.’ I kept saying, ‘How is it un-American to win?’ ” This sense of invincibility permeated the lobbying operation too. When Congress passed tax-reform legislation in 1986, the firm managed to get one special rule inserted that saved Chrysler-Mitsubishi $58 million; it wrangled another clause that reaped Johnson & Johnson $38 million in savings. Newsweek pronounced the firm “the hottest shop in town.”

 

Demand for its services rose to such heights that the firm engineered a virtual lock on the 1988 Republican primary. Atwater became the chief strategist for George H. W. Bush; Black worked with Bob Dole; Stone advised Jack Kemp. A congressional staffer joked to Time, “Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort and Stone and argue it out?” Manafort cultivated this perception. In response to a questionnaire in The Washington Times, he declared Machiavelli the person he would most like to meet.

 

Despite his young age, Manafort projected the sort of confidence that inspires others to have confidence, a demeanor often likened to that of a news anchor. “He is authoritative, and you never see a chink in the armor,” one of his longtime deputies, Philip Griffin, told me. Manafort wrote well, especially in proposals to prospective clients, and excelled at thinking strategically. Name-dropping never substituted for concrete steps that would bolster a client. “If politics has done anything, it’'s taught us to treat everything as a campaign,” he once declared. He toiled for clients with unflagging intensity. His wife once quipped, according to the text messages, that Andrea was conceived between conference calls. He “hung up the phone, looked at his watch, and said, ‘Okay, we have 20 minutes until the next one,’ ” Andrea wrote to her then-fiancé.

 

The firm exuded the decadent spirit of the 1980s. Each year, it hosted a golf outing called Boodles, after the gin brand. “It would have to move almost every year, because we weren'’t invited back,” John Donaldson, an old friend of Manafort’'s who worked at the firm, says. “A couple of women in the firm complained that they weren'’t ever invited. I told them they didn'’t want to be.” As the head of the firm’'s “social committee,” Manafort would supply a theme for the annual gatherings. His masterwork was a three-year progression: “Excess,” followed by “Exceed Excess,” capped by “Excess Is Best.”

 

Partners at the firm let it be known to The Washington Post that they each intended to take home at least $450,000 in 1986 (a little more than $1 million today). “All of a sudden they came into a lot of money, and I don’'t think any of them were used to earning the money that we were earning,” Kelly said. Senior partners were given luxury cars and a membership to the country club of their choosing. Manafort would fly the Concorde to Europe and back as if it were the Acela to New York. “I must confess,” Atwater swooned to The Washington Post, “after four years on a government payroll, I’m delighted with my new life style.”

 

The firm hired kids straight out of college--—“wheel men” in the office vernacular--—to drive the partners around town. When Roger Stone’'s old hero, Richard Nixon, came to Washington, the wheel men would shuttle him about.

 

Many of these young associates would eventually climb the firm’'s ladder, and were often dispatched to manage campaigns on the firm’'s behalf. Climbing the ladder, however, in most cases required passing what came to be known as Manafort’'s “loyalty tests”—--challenging tasks that strayed outside the boundaries of standard professional commitment and demonstrated the control that Manafort expected to exert over the associates’ lives. At the last minute, he might ask a staffer to entertain his visiting law-school buddies, never mind that the staffer had never met them before. For one Saint Patrick’'s Day party, he gave two junior staffers 24 hours to track down a plausible impersonator of Billy Barty, the 3-foot-9-inch actor who made movies with Mickey Rooney and Chevy Chase—--which they did. “This was in the days before the internet,” one of them told me. “Can you imagine how hard that was?”

 

By the 1990s, the double-digit list of registered lobbyists that Tommy Boggs had joined back in 1967 had swelled to more than 10,000. Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly had greatly abetted that transformation, and stood to profit from the rising flood of corporate money into the capital.

With assorted criminals in DC today constantly trying to intimidate legitimate journalists by shouting "fake news" at anyone who tells the truth, it's heartening to read the honest words of those who refuse to buckle.

[kenberg]

Great piece from the March issue of The Atlantic: The Plot Against America

 

The entire article is fairly long for these days, but is well worth reading regardless of political persuasion. Here is an excerpt:

 

 

With assorted criminals in DC today constantly trying to intimidate legitimate journalists by shouting "fake news" at anyone who tells the truth, it's heartening to read the honest words of those who refuse to buckle.

 

 

I have led such a dull life!

 

[johnu]

Aren't CEOs appointed by the Board of Directors? Unless it's a private company owned by the parent, they can't just appoint whoever they want.

 

Only for very large public companies where the shares of the founders were diluted. For private companies or most small public companies, the original founders usually control a majority of the voting shares so basically they can control the Board if there is one. Plus, many boards are weak willed and do whatever they are told. For examples of this, look at the boards of the casinos that Dennison raided and drained dry of capital with self-dealing loans to himself.