From Obama to Trump

I came across this interview with Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and campaign strategist, on the Naked Capitalism web log today. 

It was done back in January.  I happened to turn it on and kept watching until the end.  It’s an hour long, another video that’s a little long to watch on a computer screen, but you can listen to it while doing something else, such as making and eating breakfast.

I don’t agree with everything Luntz had to say, he’s more inclined to give some people the benefit of the doubt than I am, but he is someone who gets around and who actually listens to people, and he had interesting things to say. 

I’m not sure the whole PBS Frontline series is worth watching,  but here are the links if you’re interested.

America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump, Part One.

America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump, Part Two.

Donald Trump is out of step with public opinion

Rolling Stone had a good article on how Donald Trump’s policies are go against not only the wishes of a majority of the American public, but also many (not all) of the wishes of a majority of Republican voters.

I think this is interesting, but the fact is that leaders of both political parties have gone against the wishes of the American public for a long time without suffering fatal consequences.

The American public didn’t want the government to bail out Wall Street, but it happened just the same.

Many Americans are so disillusioned with American politics that they no longer are indignant about politicians who break their promises.   In the 2016 election, more voters stayed home than voted either Democratic or Republican.

Public opinion and Obamacare

This opinion poll by Pew Research indicates that more than half of the opponents of the Affordable Care Act think that elected officials should try to make it work as well as possible rather than sabotaging it and making it worse.

Some time back I saw a public opinion poll that indicated that some of the opponents of Obamacare oppose it because (like me) they would prefer a single-payer system (Medicare for everybody) or a public option as a voluntary alternative to private insurance.  I wasn’t able to find the poll in a Google search. 

[Update: In the latest CNN poll, 54 percent of respondents opposed Obamacare, but of that group, 16 percent opposed it because they thought the bill was not liberal enough.]

What I’d be interested in seeing is a current poll of the opponents of Obamacare giving a breakdown as to (1) those who oppose it because they think it won’t provide affordable health insurance to the currently uninsured and (2) those who oppose it because they are opposed in principle to the government spending money to give people medical care.  I’d also like to see a breakdown of opponents who would like the government to (a) do more or (b) do less.

But whatever Americans think of the Affordable Care Act, a majority disagree with shutting down the government or risking a default on government in order to prevent it from being implemented.

Noam Chomsky on the spectrum of opinion

Click on The Noam Chomsky Web Site for more.

Washington’s elite vs. the American public

Thomas B. Edsall wrote a good article in the New York Times earlier this weekmonth about how the consensus of the Washington elite goes against the views of the majority of American voters.

Click to enlarge

Public opinion polls indicate that most Americans want to protect the social safety net by, if necessary, raising taxes on rich people, while the Washington consensus, including both Democrats and Republicans, is that taxes should be kept low and the social safety net should be reduced.

Social Security and Medicare policy are a good example.

Cutting benefits is frequently discussed in the halls of Congress, in research institutes and by analysts and columnists. The idea of subjecting earned income over $113,700 to the Social Security payroll tax and making the Medicare tax more progressive – steps that would affect only the relatively affluent — is largely missing from the policy conversation.

The Washington cognoscenti are more inclined to discuss two main approaches that are far less costly for the affluent: means-testing of benefits and raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare.  Sidenote: policy makers and national journalists who weigh in on this issue generally earn more than $113,700 a year.

via NYTimes.com.

Click to enlarge

Raising the age of eligibility for Social Security is a bad idea.   It means a net cut in Social Security benefits.   It especially hurts poor people because they don’t live as long, on average, as rich people.  In today’s USA, if you’re laid off from work in your 50s, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to get a new job that pays a middle-class salary.

Double click to enlarge

Means-testing Social Security—that is, denying Social Security benefits to people who are well off—is a bad idea.  It would penalize people for saving and trying to provide for themselves, which would be bad in itself and also provide ammunition for those who want to get rid of Social Security altogether.

Another popular proposal is the tinker with the cost-of-living adjustment by tying it to something called the Chained Consumer Price Index, which would rise more slowly than actual prices.  As I argued in a previous post, this would be a stealth cut in Social Security benefits and all other programs that are tied to the existing CPI.

Edsall said that raising the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes would solve the problem.  With an increase in payroll taxes amounting to 0.6 of a percentage point of Gross Domestic Product, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the Social Security trust fund would be in surplus for 75 years.  Federal taxes in 2009, 2010 and 2011 were 15.1, 15.1 and 15.4 percent of GDP, which is the lowest since 1950, Edsall said.  While this is off the table for discussion in Washington, public opinion polls indicate that this is the solution favored by a majority of the American public.

Elite anxiety over entitlement-driven budget deficits and accumulating national debt has created a powerful class in the nation’s capital.  The agenda of this class is in many respects on a collision course with mounting demands for action by those lower down the ladder to address the threat to government social insurance programs.  Intransigent opposition by the better off and their representatives to raising the necessary revenue means that not only Social Security and Medicare face a budgetary ax.

Among the additional likely casualties: WIC, which provides free nutrition for women, infants and children; long-term and emergency unemployment compensation benefits; low-income housing vouchers; vaccines for poor children; schooling for children with disabilities; special education; preschool programs; child care for disadvantaged and vulnerable children; after-school programs; treatment of the mentally ill; and meals for sick and homebound seniors.

This conflict could not have come at a more difficult time: the United States is in the midst of a zero sum struggle requiring politicians to pick losers, not winners.  The population of those over 65 is set to multiply, with longevity steadily increasing even as median annual household income for the population at large has shrunk to $51,584 in January 2013 from $54,000 in 2008.

In this kind of conflict over limited goods, one of the most valuable resources that can get lost in the fray is the wisdom of the electorate at large. In this case, the electorate is pointing toward progressive tax increases for those closer to the top far more readily than members of the political class, for whom high-earners are a crucial source of campaign contributions.

via NYTimes.com.

Edsall wrote a book published last year called The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Reshape American Politics.  I have skimmed it but not studied it, but I can say that his general assumption is that the age of shared prosperity is over, and that no group of Americans can now gain except at the expense of someone else.  The rich are going to cling to their riches, we senior citizens are going to cling to Social Security and Medicare, nobody else is going to give up anything either, and American politics is going to be increasingly bitter.

It’s very true that many social and economic problems would go away, or become a lot easier to deal with, if we had a full-employment, high-wage economy as in the 1950s and 1960s.  Our political debate would be over who is going to gain the most rather than who is going to have to sacrifice the most.  Edsall doesn’t think these days are coming back.  He is an astute observer and he could be right.

The life cycle of political beliefs

Folks on a web site called OK.trends produced some interesting graphs on how political beliefs change over time.  The data comes from 172,853 people who answered questionnaires on a dating site called OK.cupid.  Maybe they’re not a representative cross-section of the population.  Take it for what you think it is worth.

They then took the data and applied it to Democratic and Republican party affiliation.  The results appeared to be good for the Democrats, but the OK.trends folks say that closer analysis gives the advantage to the Republicans.

Democrats’ timidity has not paid off

I respect a politician who sticks by principles when they’re unpopular.

I understand a politician who does the popular thing even if it goes against principles.

What I don’t understand or respect are politicians who abandon their principles even when those principles have public support.

Public opinion polls show a majority of Americans would rather have government spending to create jobs than cutbacks in spending to reduce the budget deficit.

They show that a majority of Americans would be happy to allow the upper-bracket tax cuts to expire on schedule.

And they show that a majority of Americans favor tough regulation of the big banks and Wall Street investment firms.

All these are things that President Obama and the other national Democratic leaders say they want. What, then, is the problem?  Why do they hesitate?  Why are they so timid in what they propose?

The Gallup poll in the chart above is just one poll.  Other polls show a more nearly even race, but none of them are encouraging for the Democrats.  But after all, if the Democrats don’t believe in their own platform, why should anybody else?

[Update 9/8/10]  Here’s a new poll with different results.  It shows how volatile public opinion is, or how voters distrust both parties, or maybe what a large margin for error Gallup has.  But my original argument still stands.