Ah! Gotcha! Makes sense.
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This is important. We’ve gone what, almost 10 years now with near-zero interest rates. For all this time savings have looked like an activity for either for suckers or gamblers. One aspect of The American Dream™ that our prosperity is founded on is that even small but steady amounts of thrift and saving is rewarded. When cash savings is for suckers, we shouldn’t be surprised that assets become bouncing beach balls. People like to make out that the stock/tech crash and subsequently housing were the fault of greedy assholes, but it was also a hefty dose of gov’t monetary policy (which has been explicitly anti-savings, in favor of spend! spend! spend!) that ensured those bubbles would happen.
Does anybody even go through the ritual anymore of taking their kid to the bank to deposit birthday money? What lesson can possibly be taught anymore? “There honey, you might be sad to not have the twenty dollars to spend right now. But I’m teaching you an important lesson, trust me you’ll be so happy when you come back in 5 years to find that it’s grown to $21 and that it will buy what $19 buys you today!”
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not sure how you read any condescension, snideness or lack of respect from that post to mindy, the inclusion of a smiley should have been enough of a hint that I didn’t mean any disrespect. I was attempting to playfully point out that this was exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, apologies if this wasn’t sufficiently clear (tone is hard to read from a screen, but I think I’ve been around here long enough to expect a more charitable understanding).
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This takes us back to the old debate about whether it’s better to get everything you want or better to get something of what you want. Or, should the perfect be the enemy of the good? (I anticipate you’ll criticize this framing as presuming that the good and the perfect can’t coexist.)
The history of attempts to create single-payer health care in the United States is long and frustrating. FDR tried to insert it into the Social Security Act, but faced with criticism, decided to leave it out rather than tank the whole Social Security proposal. Truman tried to pass such a plan, and did make his case to the American people, but the machinations of the American Medical Association stopped him – as it would stop multiple future attempts at single-payer health care for the next 40 years. (The AMA also made its case to the American people, through records narrated by Ronald Reagan decrying even Medicaid as the way communism gets its foot in the door in America.)
This long history of thwarted attempts at single-payer may be why modern-day Democrats have been so quick to give up the ghost on explicit single-payer. Of course, this is again, a tactical decision.
Agree.
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I appreciate that. it did feel like condescension and I’m glad you didn’t mean it that way. Let’s not forget that we’re online here and the normal cues we receive in having a face to face conversation is lost here.
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I don’t think it has to be about perfect being the enemy of good, though, but rather about a further rightward shift since the 1970s. We’ve always (in the US, anyways, clearly this doesn’t apply to other places) have been generally speaking center right in political orientation. The era of liberalism (from the New Deal to the 1970s, roughly speaking) were about as far left as we’ve ever gotten and we weren’t really all that left at all. We never had as comprehensive a safety net as in other places with comparable political systems and our labor movement was far to the right of most of their colleagues abroad.
I don’t doubt that it’s true. However, it’s been a while since they’ve tried (again, you got to go back to Johnson) and a single-payer option included in the ACA would have been the perfect place to start. It was off the table and never really taken seriously though. I don’t think they took it seriously, but put it on the table for a second in order to keep the progressives onboard and then tossed it once the GOP even raised an eyebrow. I have no reason to believe that the Democratic leadership ever had any real intentions of pushing for it’s inclusion.
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The housing bubble and crash came to pass because there was an unspoken assumption that the taxpay,oops, government would make sure that the TBTF institutions would not F.
Do not forget that GWB, Trump, McCain, both Clintons, and Obama supported the 2008 bailouts, and since that time we have “solved” the problem with Dodd-Frank which further cemented the TBTF into our system.
The one thing that could have changed the course of our economy for the better would have been for GWB in 2005 to have announced that any institutions heavily into mortgage based securities were on their own dime, and that “bailout” was a term he would use only in reference to what his dad did every birthday.
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I like to think, this could be resolved in short order by disincentivizing the income gap through taxes. When it becomes more profitable to invest your money back in to business growth and employee benefits instead of higher C level pay, the middle class blossoms. I’d say an income tax of 90-95% on anything over $500K would be a good start. Of course, you’ll need to couple that with eliminating tax dodges like trust funds, offshore accounts, and the rest of the laws passed to benefit the wealthy.
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Right. Pretty much proving my point. 
A real neoliberal would not have implemented the policies in the 80s and 90s, even though the people who did would have called themselves that.
When I talk about neoliberal policies, I mean things like supply-side economics, repealing the Glass-Steagal act, the financialization of just about everything, and other general economic policies of the United States since around 1980 or so.
I definitely grant you that the meaning of neoliberal is now so vague that it can capture just about any policy you don’t like, but most people who use the term seem to think that Reagan and Clinton were beacons of it.
As for whether or not their policies helped or hurt in the long run, I think that’s a mixed bag. Things like NAFTA have been pretty positive for most people, whereas repealing Glass-Steagal has not. And the further we go, the more obvious this becomes.
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I would pretty strongly disagree with that statement, I think the fundamental basis of communism (and any marxist system), state control of the economy, however that is enacted, is doomed to failure, economies are simply too complex to control, attempts to do so will lead to economic failure, which leads to an increase in poverty and corruption.
With the latter, we’re not talking about the removal of all state interference of the economy (neoliberalism isn’t libertarianism), simply that it should be done in a manner that is empirically based and can be shown to provide results, the current system obviously fails that standard so we need to improve it, but it’s not like it requires a drastic overhaul to improve things.
We’re not comparing apples with apples here, the failings of ‘neoliberalism’ are not comparable to the failings of Marxism. Despite the recent financial collapse the west is still doing very well, in objective measures, and the rest of the world is continuing to catch up thanks to large wealth transfers from the west via the movement of manufacturing and liberalisation of trade generally.
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That’s the key, here. I think the New Democrats had two things in mind: (1) the 1970’s as a backlash to the 1960’s, and (2) the success of Ronald Reagan. Politicians of Bill Clinton (and Hillary Clinton)'s age would have remembered being lambasted throughout the '70’s and '80’s as un-American or what not. This became part of their psyche, and the success of Reagan only confirmed to them that America was moving right-ward. (Whether or not it actually was, that’s what the New Democrats thought.)* So rather than pull the country back to the Left, they moved to the Right because it would be easier to win as a centrist Democrat in a country they perceived to be shifting more conservative.
*The asterisk is because Nixon peeled off Southern Democrats and converted them into Republicans after the success of the Civil Rights Act, so in some sense, the electorate did move to the Right. Of course, this actually cuts in favor of your argument: if Johnson were a savvy tactician, he would have known the Civil Rights Act would cost him Southern voters and would oppose it. But he pushed it through Congress anyway, because he believed it was the right thing to do.
But lots of people did vote for those fees. When you vote for “financial deregulation” and “letting the market decide”, you have cast a strong implicit vote for all of this garbage.
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Waiting out the Baby Boomers, for their jobs they can’t give up because they’re underwater.
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Johnson was fully aware of the damage the CRA and Voting Rights act would do to the democratic party in the south. They were aware of that since the 1930s, which explains why the various economic programs often left out African Americans (through leaving out specific key kinds of labor from benefiting from some of the reforms, as they were traditionally done by African Americans). But this was also why Johnson pushed his war on poverty, because he was smart enough to understand that what he knew many southern whites would consider an attack on their privilege could be mitigated (in part, at least, enough to let the new normal become common sense) by a strong economic package. Johnson understood (growing up in the south himself) that southern poverty ground down the white man and that the only psychic wage that they got was in the form of segregation and racism. You had to mitigate the one in order to have the other. Johnson was a hell of a lot smarter on this stuff then people give him credit for. Again, in this light, Vietnam is a huge tragedy. He was the last really visionary progressive we had, I think - except when it came to the CW.
Nixon gave them the platitudes of “understanding” the struggles of poor whites, but he did not couple it with any real world economic program, Reagan was even worse, dog whistling while cutting tax rates and the social safety net in a way that’s made it hard to reassemble.
You might be correct, but they also lived through the Johnson years and should have known better. I think that might have animated some aspects of it, but the pure desire to remain in power also has a role to play here.
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And by the time they do get out, they go to younger millennials. And guess who gets to support the boomers, for the most part?
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where some of them Genx’ers?
I voted for Clinton (both times) and remember vividly the situation back in the late 90’s that transpired to push the Democratic party rightward. Remember that Clinton had to deal with a hostile, Republican controlled Congress for most of his term and needed a centrist approach in order to get any agenda passed. The whole idea was the concept of triangulation in order to offer a fresh approach. It worked for a while politically but even then, Congress (led by Gingrich and the Republican Revolution) still crucified Bill at every turn.
So as a chicken vs. egg, I don’t think the political winds started blowing rightward at that time more than hostile politics started becoming normal and the Republicans started harnessing rightwing ideology as a strategy and began the recent era of scorched earth politics.
By almost all accounts, Bill Clinton should be regarded as one of our most popular presidents of all time - historic economic growth, low unemployment, middle class prosperity, technology boom, (relatively) low military engagements. Like Obama, Republicans hate Clinton for his success and vilify him at every opportunity.
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Not proving your point. Being an “actual” neoliberal isn’t about measuring up to some unattainable standard of perfection (what the no-true-scotsman fallacy sets out to address, a form of circular argument), mostly it’s a list of negatives (things not to do), and then it allows for reasoned debate about the rest (they were surprisingly flexible when it came to the raising and spending taxes, and the kinds of government intervention that they could live with). The 80s and 90s did see a lot of genuine neoliberal policies put in place, thanks to the genuine influence of actual neoliberals, broadly these policies were beneficial (privatisation in particular), but not all worked, and there was a lot of pushback against them for internal political as well as vested-interest reasons (and I’m not talking about from the left here, but within the right, and the new centrist left). Ultimately the neoliberals did not win that struggle, and the people who did win went on to implement policies which were diametrically opposed to the ones the neoliberals were suggesting (see Thatcher’s fall from grace and the rise of Blairism), all of which had a big influence on the financial crisis of the 2000s.
Plenty of them. Using partisan affiliation as a very rough proxy it looks like about half. http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/30/a-different-look-at-generations-and-partisanship/
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I’m still bitter that after all these years, marijuana legalization is finally happening not because people see the harm done by prohibition or came to the realization that it’s no one else’s damn business what I put in my body or grow on my property, but because of tax revenue. It’s rather disgusting. I’ll take it, the best shouldn’t be the enemy of the better, but it just adds to my general pessimism.
I suppose it works (at least it did for MJ), but economic arguments for ideals isn’t a good idea IMO because the economics can flip one way just as easily as the other. It’s a cheap victory that’s easily undone, and can just as easily lead to horror as good legislation.
It is my opinion that we (all sides) should be more idealistic in politics, not less. We need our best ideas (from any side) to get hashed out, not just a tactical scrum back and forth for naked power. Otherwise, any good done is entirely incidental and will just as easily be discarded next election.
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