Why Bernie vs Hillary Matters More Than People Think
by Benjamin Studebaker
Lately the internet has become full of arguments about the merits and demerits of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been discussing and pondering all the various views about this, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that most of the people engaging in this debate don’t really understand what is at stake in the democratic primary. This is in part because many Americans don’t really understand the history of American left wing politics and don’t think about policy issues in a holistic, structural way. So in this post, I want to really dig into what the difference is between Bernie and Hillary and why that difference is extremely important.
We have a tendency in American politics to focus too much on individuals and personal narratives, especially in presidential campaigns. Who’s in touch with ordinary people? Who is experienced? Who is a nice person? Who connects better with different identity groups? Who would you like to have a beer with? This is in large part because many democrats like to think of Hillary and Bernie as different flavors of the same Democratic Party popcorn. Consequently they mostly just pay attention to which candidate they feel they can more readily identify with. But Sanders and Clinton represent two very different ideologies. Each of these ideologies wants control of the Democratic Party so that this party’s resources can be used to advance a different conception of what a good society looks like. This is not a matter of taste and these are not flavors of popcorn.
What are these two groups? Bernie Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist–he connects himself politically with Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, with the New Deal and the Great Society. To understand what that means, we need to know the history of this ideology. Under Calvin Coolidge’s right wing economic policy in the 1920’s, economic inequality in the United States spiked:
The left in the 1930’s understood rising inequality as the core cause of the Great Depression. Because wealth was concentrating in the hands of the top 1%, the amount of investment steadily increased while the amount of consumption stagnated. Whenever there is too little consumption to support the level of investment in the economy, investors struggle to find profitable places to invest their money. Investment is usually a positive thing–it helps businesses increase their production and create jobs. But with consumption weak, businesses have little reason to increase their production, because no one will buy the additional goods and services provided. So instead, businesses that receive investment tend to reinvest that money rather than use it to grow. That investment circulates through the financial system and accumulates in speculative bubbles–places like the stock market, housing market, commodities market, or various foreign markets. These assets become massively overvalued until one day, the markets recognize the overvaluation. The assets collapse in value and the bubble bursts. People relying on these assets to pay off other debts get into serious trouble, and a contagion can spread throughout the economy with horrifying consequences.
So what did the left do? As you can see in the chart, between the 1930’s and the 1970’s, the United States drastically reduced economic inequality. It redistributed wealth from the top to the middle and the bottom, resulting in consistent wage increases and consequently consistent consumption increases. This allowed investment to be put to effective use–because the bottom and the middle were rising, they were able to support the additional spending that business owners needed to successfully expand. This was accomplished through a series of policies that if they were proposed today, would strike most Americans as socialist–Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, strong union rights, high minimum wages, high marginal tax rates on the wealthy (with a 90% top rate under Eisenhower), and strong enforcement of financial regulations and anti-trust laws.
Democratic presidential candidates that can be associated with this ideological tradition include Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern. That’s it. Starting with Jimmy Carter in 1976, the Democratic Party became something different, something that was no longer ideologically continuous with this. Even the Republican Party to a large degree acknowledged the need for these policies during this period–Eisenhower and Nixon supported and even extended parts of this system that kept investment and consumption in balance.
I’ve written about what happened in the 1970’s in detail elsewhere–the short version is that in the 70’s there were two oil shocks, in which the price of oil went up very rapidly (the OPEC embargo in the early 70’s and the Iranian Revolution at the end of the decade). Rising oil prices created stagflation, because they drastically increased the price of goods over a very short span of time. This reduced consumption, damaging economic growth, while simultaneously leading governments to increase wages in an attempt to prevent workers from rapidly losing purchasing power, creating inflation. To solve this problem, governments needed to stabilize oil prices or reduce dependency on foreign oil. They also could have allowed real wages to fall temporarily until that was accomplished (in tandem with a strong social safety net to protect those at the bottom of the wage scale).
Instead what happened is that the right co-opted the oil crisis to claim that the entire project of balancing investment with consumption was fundamentally mistaken, that the problem was that there was not enough investment and too much consumption. The right embarks on a political platform of reducing union power, reducing the real value of the minimum wage, cutting welfare spending, reducing taxes on the wealthy, and deregulating the financial sector. Inequality, which in the US bottomed out in 1978, began rising rapidly and during the new millennium has frequently approached depression-era levels, having the same harmful effects on consumption that it had in the early 20th century and creating the same endemic risk of bubbles and financial crises.
Many people think that it is the Republican Party alone that is responsible for this, but beginning in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, the Democratic Party was captured by this same ideology, which in academic circles is often referred to as neoliberalism. It is now largely forgotten that it was Carter, not Reagan, who began deregulating the market. Indeed, during the 1976 democratic primary, there was an ABC movement–Anybody But Carter. Democrats who remained committed to the party’s egalitarian ideology rightly feared that Carter was too right wing and would effectively strip the party of its historical commitment to the continuation and expansion of the legacy of FDR and LBJ. However, they ran too many candidates against Carter, splitting the left vote and allowing Carter to win the nomination.
Bill Clinton took the party even further to the right. In 1992 he ran on the promise to “end welfare as we know it”, a total repudiation of the FDR/LBJ legacy. With the help of republicans, Clinton was eventually successful in drastically cutting the welfare program. Clinton also signed important deregulatory bills into law, like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Most economists blame one or both of these pieces of legislation with directly facilitating the housing crisis in 2008 (there is a robust debate about which one is more important, with economists like Paul Krugman leaning toward CFMA as the more important one while Robert Reich argues GLBA). Hillary Clinton supported these measures during the 1990’s and has in some cases continued to voice support for them. Bill signed all of this legislation into law. Bernie Sanders was against welfare reform and GLBA at the time (he voted for CFMA–it was snuck into an 11,000 page omnibus spending bill at the last minute).
The 2008 primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is sometimes billed as if it were a contest between two ideologies, but the most prominent difference between them was the vote on the Iraq War. On economic policy, there never was a substantive difference. The major economic legislation passed under Obama (Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act) did not address the structural inequality problem that the Democratic Party of the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s existed to confront.
Wealth inequality, which decreased under FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ, increased under Carter, Clinton, and Obama:
On economic policy, contemporary establishment democrats have more in common with contemporary republicans than they do with the FDR/LBJ democrats. Carter and Clinton took the party away from economic progressives. The Democratic Party, which was once the party that saw economic inequality and poverty as the core causes of economic instability, now sees inequality and poverty as largely irrelevant. Instead of eliminating inequality and poverty to fuel the capitalist system and produce strong economic growth, establishment democrats now largely agree with establishment republicans that the problem is a lack of support for business investment.
So Bernie Sanders is not merely running to attempt to implement a set of idealistic policies that a republican-controlled congress is likely to block. He is running to take the Democratic Party back from an establishment that ignores the fundamental systemic economic problems that lead to wage stagnation and economic crisis. Those who say that the Democratic Party cannot be reclaimed by the FDR/LBJ types or that if it is reclaimed it will flounder in elections against the GOP are thinking too small. In the 1968 and 1976 republican primaries, this guy called Ronald Reagan was running to take the Republican Party back from the Richard Nixon types who went along with the democrats on welfare and regulation in a bid to return the republicans to their 1920’s Calvin Coolidge roots. At the time, Reagan’s plan was considered madcap–everyone in the 60’s and 70’s knew that hard right Coolidge style economics leads to depression and crisis. But the stagflation in the 70’s created an opportunity for Reagan to convince republicans and eventually the country as a whole to fully embrace a totally different ideology that was much closer to Coolidge’s politics than it was Eisenhower’s or Nixon’s. In the years since 2008, many Americans, in particular young people, are willing to consider the possibility that neoliberalism–the economic ideology espoused by both the post-Reagan republicans and the post-Carter Clinton-era democrats–is fundamentally flawed and must be revised or potentially replaced entirely.
This can only happen if democrats recognize that Bernie Sanders is not just a slightly more left-wing fellow traveler of Clinton’s. This is not a contest to see who will lead the democrats, it’s a contest to see what kind of party the democrats are going to be in the coming decades, what ideology and what interests, causes, and issues the Democratic Party will prioritize. This makes it far more important than any other recent primary election. The last time a democratic primary was this important, it was 1976. Only this time, instead of Anybody But Carter or Anybody But Clinton, the left has Bernie Sanders–one representative candidate that it is really excited about. The chance may not come again for quite some time.
Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal building on the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. She doesn’t understand the pivotal role inequality plays in creating economic crisis and reducing economic growth. She has been taken in by a fundamentally right wing paradigm, and if she is elected she will continue to lead the Democratic Party down that path.
Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist building on the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. He understands that inequality is the core structural factor in economic crisis and that growth in real wages and incomes is required for robust, sustainable economic growth.
It doesn’t matter which one is more experienced, or which one’s policies are more likely to pass congress, or which one is more likely to win a general election, or which one is a man and which one is a woman. This is not about just this election, or just the next four years. This is about whether the Democratic Party is going to care about inequality for the next decade. We are making a historical decision between two distinct ideological paradigms, not a choice between flavors of popcorn. This is important. Choose carefully.
UPDATE:
This post is getting a lot of attention, which is terrific and I thank all of you who are sharing it and helping more people see it. The downside is that there are a lot of comments, and it’s overwhelmed my ability to thoughtfully reply to each one. To allow myself to get other work done, I’ve had to go cold turkey and I will no longer be writing any more comment replies for this post. In the comments I’ve seen so far, I’ve noticed some people expressing concerns about electability, and I will write a post about why non-neoliberal candidates are fundamentally more viable now than they used to be soon (this includes not only Bernie, but also Trump–Trump is a right nationalist, not a neoliberal, which is why the republican establishment hates him). If you want to be sure not to miss that post, I invite you to scroll down to the bottom of the webpage, where I have all sorts of means by which you can follow my blog (via Facebook, Twitter, or E-Mail). My thanks again to all of you who are helping to make this post so popular by sharing it on social media.
UPDATE II:
The aforementioned post is now available and is called Why Bernie Sanders is More Electable Than People Think.
UPDATE III:
The Huffington Post has honored me by sharing a repost of this with their large audience.
[…] Source: Why Bernie vs Hillary Matters More Than People Think […]
“Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos, I’m an agent of chaos , and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”
I believe you’re confusing “indiscriminate” with “fair.”
One element not mentioned, and maybe relevant, is that unlike the 70s, with emerging international markets, the one percent does not need to support the American consumer.
… but as the American consumer eschews the 1%, their actions can affect the 1%.
No, and in fact they may be abandoning the American middle class, largely tapped out of credit, in favor of building new middle classes in China, India and SE Asia. With the potential of billions of new consumers in these regions, it makes good business sense for the multi-national corporations to invest there, but it sucks for Americans. Sixteen percent of the American middle class has evaporated in the last thirty years, and unless this trend is reversed or at least slowed, our place as world economic leader is threatened.
16% disappearance of MIDDLE CLASS is WAY TOO LOW!!!!
More like 50%…
It makes a lot of sense Alan!
The same is going on in other countries like Brazil which hasn’t even get to the point of industrialization the US has.
Unfortunately, the author, Benjamin, is fixated on the 1%. What does he thing they do with their money?
My concern is the shrinking middle class. A large middle creates a strong economy with a base of purchasing power. A happy middle class is more inventive and artistic deepening our culture.
Two things that erode the middle class are 1) Minimum Wage. Besides increasing unemployment, artificially creating a lower limit reduces everyone close to that limit to lower class. More people will need to rely on social services. 2) Unrestricted Immigration. It doesn’t matter if it is legal or illegal, it increases competition for jobs which lowers wages (especially for union workers) and increases unemployment. Again more people will need to rely on social services.
Yeah, look at Europe. They have had minimum wages for ages now. And they never had a proper middle class.
And after introducing socialism in Europe the economy immediately crashed. And never recovered. Look at norway, the highest level of socialism, and the poorest country in all of europe. They cannot even afford to properly punish their criminals.
If only the Europeans had not focused on getting money from the top 1% who own 70%+ of all wealth. They would not be a third world country now, and face so high emigration towards the middle east and africa.
/s
What are you talking about?
The “Socialist” Norway’s GDP per capita is fourth in the world!
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/norway/gdp-per-capita
US is number ten, so i think you should educate yourself a bit more and maybe you would understand how good we have it here in Scandinavia.
We have free healthcare, free education, unemployment protection and much more. All this with a 30%~ tax rate.
I don’t know where you are from but judging by your post i would guess USA. You don’t understand how bad your system is. The socialism ghost is strong in some, but how long can you blame a ghost and not realize reality.
Bernie will win this election and your beloved USA will become Socialist, probably your biggest nightmare, and you know what, 90%~ of the people will benefit from it, what a nightmare right.
Keyser, you do realize that Bub was being facetious?
Lol took me a second to get the sarcasm..
I live in Germany (expat) and my friends all want to living in Norway and Sweden, they call is ‘social paradise’
Yes, but the “social paradise” of Sweden is collapsing due to the large influx of people looking for that paradise. At the end of the day, someone needs to work for that paradise to function as well. This year brought a tax increase to some municipalities of Sweden and the taxes are predicted to continue increasing over the next few years due to the ageing population and the influx of refugees the current funds can no longer support. Norway has done better, in my opinion they are slightly more grounded in their decisions and realistic about how much could or should the state handle. Good on them.
Nice POE of a supply-side critique…
“Europe never had a middle class.” Excuse me, the British invented the middle class during the Industrial Revolution. There were aristocrats, middle class merchants and the working class. Always were, still are. If you’re going to make sweeping statements, at least know your facts.
HI Bub, Norway is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Everybody earns more or less the same, which is plenty. The problems there now stem from importing too much capitalism.
Oh its a joke? Thanks for wasting my time.
Norway poor??
Is this a joke? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
No, all you irony-challenged readers, it is not “a joke”. It is sarcasm.
Bub, sarcasm is fun to type because it nicely expresses your scorn for a stupid remark, but it is less effective in written media, to an audience which is not familiar with your character or your style, and which may not speak the same primary language as you, than simple straightforward fact.
Mr Bob I think you are full of it and do not know what you are talking about. Go back to watch Fox News, you belong with them and can create your new false facts together. The quality of life in Europe is greater than you can imagine, but considering your narrow mindedness you could not understand.
Lololol guys this is very clearly sarcasm, I mean he just called Norway a third world country.
But I enjoyed reading the angry responses.
Also, though the Scandinavian countries are doing well economically, they may need to work on their sense of humor. jk
How embarrassing for you guys. He even put a “/s” at the end to clue in the clueless. Maybe go with the more obvious {/sarcasm} next time.
Um… you’re describing Europe as “third world”? Relative to the Mid East? Is that wh the Mid East is arriving by the boat and trainload into Europe?
This is one of the funniest threads on my post. Bub’s sarcastic response to Barca’s fact insensitive comment is really great, but then many people missed the sarcasm (understandably, it’s easy to miss sarcasm online). Other people pointed out that the sarcasm was being missed, but did subsequent people read those notices? No, they just sprinted ahead, again attacking Bub and missing Bub’s sarcasm. And then more people pointed out that it was sarcasm, and more people ignored those notices, and so on. I bet if I wait long enough, there will be people continuing to do this even after I have pointed out that this is what’s happening. People are so interesting.
Your employment of sarcasm was not lost on us all, you had me going for about a paragraph and a half, “can not properly punish their criminals” ha! You would think even is the /s is not well known enough to tip everyone off, your assertion that European “emigration towards the middle east and africa” would.
smhs (acronym for: shakes my head slowly)
you realise that wall street shouldn’t be gambling with peoples pension funds right? You realise a speculation tax – which is what he is calling for.. not a made up transaction tax will help peoples pensions not hurt them, right? right?
Please show me the flourishing American middle class today, Barca … fact is that middle class families have to live off two jobs in order to just keep their status, but that doesn’t mean a kid in college yet. And it has been going from bad to worse ever since the 1980s. What has become of the American dream?
Actually what killed off the American middle class is neither minimum wage nor immigration. It’s the erosion of the US’s manufacturing basis by US companies diverting investments from local production to offshore manufacturing sites. This is what hurt the middle class. By the way, this is pretty much the same development we’ve seen in the UK – Thatcher’s politics pretty much destroyed Great Britain’s manufacturing basis, and with it the labor-based middle class. It left, basically, a grossly imbalanced economy relying disproportionally on the fourth sector – banking and trade, pretty much like what can be seen in the US.
A.
Thank you for a balanced perspective.
We’re worth more as a whole …hmmm …what about union of stock brokers and the rights they have to work 🏢 (gotcha?) (lol?)
Glass–Steagall – you understand that’s what he wants to bring back right? right? its designed to stop fund gambling with peoples pensions.. right? right?
He tells us what the 1% does with its money. Read the article! They create the bubbles that tumble our economy every 5-7 years by investing, for example, in internet start-ups without a prayer of succeeding, in mortgages pushed on people who can’t possibly make the payments, more recently, in auto loans — the crash there is on the horizon.
51% of Americans have less than $10k in savings or the stock market. As things are now, most profits in a 401k (if you are lucky enough to have one) will be diverted in fees to your broker anyway- at a much higher rate than .05 percent proposed- and could actually be reduced by the proposed tax by changing the profitable margin of frequent trades that are largely eaten up the managers of the account. You have now been replied to. You’re welcome.
I’m an economic major (1972) and know all (and believe every word) you wrote plus this: we need a revolution – one that you are not ready for as it is not bloodless…
Its actually a 5 cent per $100 tax on stock market purchases, not some magical tax on pensions. I don’t know where you got that from.
The UK Stock market has a FTF. The FTSE continues to be a leading global exchange. Investment banks continually tout their financial instruments as “products” – many of them should be termed “figments”. As the author pointed out, a goal is to achieve the proper balance between consumption and investment. With market volatilities at a high level, and computer algorithms inducing outcomes and aberrations that have little relevance to the actual human economy. This is why the markets can swing in value by whole numbers in a single trading day, while nothing at all really changes on the ground. Investment in the modern age has turned into largely speculation and hedging, rather than capital investment. Wealth building is expected at unreasonable rates in unreasonable time frames. It literally feels like they are pumping the markets back and forth and extracting value on each side of the cycle. The tax on the consumption side should have an analogue on the investment side, and if nothing else, could help build a fund when basic economic principals play themselves out to their logical, if not unfortunate, conclusion. Forget ‘too big to fail’. Try “too out of sync not to fail”.
Yes.
Yeah! Minimum wage gets in the way of job production. Matter a fact, if we went back to slavery we could even imagine a negative unemployment figure! And all these consumers, I mean immigrants, wait…
Great analysis
Honestly, the people claiming that reading this article is the reason they have now decided to vote for Bernie is absurd. Either you were already a Sanders fan prior to reading this and are just lying about your sudden “epiphany”; or you are like a vast majority of Americans who lack any critical thinking skills, blindly believe anything they read, and tend to only read things that support their own preconceived notions.
You’ve got no idea how people have access to information. “blindly believe” can you tell the fake fake from the real fake? Gotcha? Lol
As if lacking critical thinking skills and blindly believing what one reads is unique to Americans. Please.
Actually…..
This makes perfect sense to me. Thanks for your concise read on what is at stake. I believe you are spot-on.
alert(“gotcha”);
<script>alert(“gotchaaa”);</script>
There are four major markets where the top .1% are scraping the money from. 1. Mergers and Accusations: companies are bought by more wealthy companies and then saddled with consulting fees until they either submit or fail, in either case the wealthy company has already made an absurd amount of money by scraping all available cache from the company that was acquired. There are many other scenarios here that result in the same thing. 2. Buying and selling money products: Debts and bonds are passed around like hot potatoes, each merchant scrapes as much money as they can from the money product and passes it on, until one of them is stuck holding the paper that has all the money vanished from it. Since companies can buy and sell stocks each company can make extra money and is vulnerable, and is not as reliant on it’s physical products. 3. Healthcare gouging: Hospitals and drug companies are taking advantage of the lack of regulation and gouging people who need drugs and services with obscene rates. 4. Weapons manufacturing: Why people need to make obscene profits from killing each other is beyond me, but it is a reality. The people at the top are acquiring an unheard of amount of money while each of these markets are hemorrhaging money. There is no quick fix to any of this, but Bernie is the only candidate who is actually taking on these challenges and doing something about it. All the other candidates seem to be blinded by there own greed.
Agreeeeeeeed!
Excuse me? I’m in Physical Therapy school, and we are drowning in regulations!!!
Check back after you get a job at a hospital!
The profits in the “healthcare” industry are obscene. You’re just not getting any of it. $15 million, $25 million, and so forth are typical CEO salaries.
5. Higher education. Even adjusted for inflation, tuition has increased 300% in one generation. The growth of cost and the expansion of student loan debt is unsustainable.
I would replace SOME with MANY. You’re right that community colleges and 2-year schools have improved in quality and offer a cheaper option for higher education. However, many, many (most?) colleges and universities in the U.S. are first and foremost businesses that intend to extract profit above educating students.
Even if we can’t debate the intentions of universities, it’s still glaringly obvious that several generations of people have been and will be strangled with debt by the time they’re looking for their first job. That’s not exactly the way you encourage consumer spending.
go on
I’ve worked in healthcare, in a hospital setting, for 30 years. There are regulations on top of regulations. Don’t lump healthcare providers together with pharmaceutical companies who are the real “gougers”.
I want to know who’s more likely to annihilate the welfare class and not vote for them,
if no one is too poor to pay double, those % can get the moneys worth out of people with the money. I want to wonder out loud how impossible life can become before it is realized. Will it need to be a miracle each day? How hard will I have to fight for my life when I am not allowed to fight, in the job market for money?
I want to know which side is hiding the elephant in the closet–cern, nasa, dhs, billion dollar technocrats from the country of USA enemy, senseless rhetoric and back-less $. Housing authority hud state gov. government dependents prisons?Whose the first to die, poor or something …? Economic warfare tactics. Will they take out the (adj) or the (adj), what if you’re both, neither?
What? Maybe put the crack pipe down…
Thanks for the excellent analysis. I’m very supportive of Bernie Sanders’ plans. The big obstacle, however, is Congress, and that’s why Bernie’s “revolution” must also eject the Republican majority that blocked almost all of Obama’s proposals because they came from him, a black Democrat.
In health reform for example, Democrats and Obama called for universal access, but they gave in to the power of the medical lobby and instead settled for a less impactful system modeled after Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts, and that came from a right-wing ThinkTank.
My concern also. Congress is bought and paid for as well so my fear is that we’ll have 4 or 8 years of nothing being done again.
That’s exactly why it’s so important to go voting, and not only for the presidential elections. It’s the same thing everywhere: a vote not cast is a vote for the wrong people.
Therefore, anyone who is serious about the political revolution has to vote for more progressive representatives and senators. A progressive President alone is merely a symbol, a token for change. Not more.
A.
Drop the race card would you! Makes me want to puke!
I liked Bernie before I read this blog post, but that first graph did it for me. Born in 1953 to a blue-collar middle-class family with three older siblings, entered the workforce in earnest in the late 70’s. My youth was effortless it seemed but my adulthood not so much. Graduated high school and was greeted by the oil embargo. Saw the savings & loan banking crash, the dot-com bubble burst, watched 3k of my fellow citizens attacked and murdered by a foreign entity right here on our own shores and an economic crash that rivaled the Great Depression and that sent ripples around the globe. And the longest war in our history ( my god this is the 21st century). All precipitated by what I see as a bloated, dysfunctional, and complacent government. I don’t blame any one person or institution. But I know that somethings not right and we need to take this nation’s future into consideration and not keep the status quo. Bernie Sanders is willing to change the status quo and he is 74 years old, our youth thinks we need change, I think if my fellow Boomers can get their rebel back on maybe we can change this country’s direction again, and leave it better than we found it.
Here’s to the rebels!
I think you got it Gene, im a white 72 yr old union guy, and watched all this crap come down, and so here we are 2016 and things have never been worse for my kids and grand kids, i have a union pention and soc sec, which is a modest income today, but my kids and grandkids are struggling, they cant afford college, and dont have anything better than a partime minimum wage job and no health care they make just enough to fall between the cracks make too much but cant afford med insurance for profit,so are pretty much kept from climbing that broken econimic ladder., just an observation. so its BERNI for this guy.
Right on, Gene! (And thank you for taking the time to write in complete and logical sentences!) While I have always been an active voter (I’m 60 years old), Senator Sanders is the first candidate that I have actively campaigned for. Bernie’s moment is now, as his ideas have finally been proven in the crucible of time. If I had enough hair left, I would let it grow out. If I can’t find my old peace sign pendant, I’ll buy a new one. This is voter viagra, friends! Viva la revolucion!
There are other factors that influence the directions and options available to political leadership.
-The global economic interdependence facilitated by advances in technology is significant.
– International currency and in particular the role of the US $ vs other currencies directly influence global economies and policies.
– The American society is fundamentally a capitalist society that prizes it’s constitutional liberties and it has improved access to important information, a result of advances in social media.
– This desired form of govt. is built of compromise and shared power. The shared power is heavily influences by seemingly a center-right general populist.
– In general times and circumstances change to meet the various demands, but in we continue to improve our ongoing experiment in a positive direction, the history bears that out.
– More of the world population continue to seek out our approach to governance. It’s not easy nor concise.
What of the impact of wealth redistribution on the social fabric. You can’t say minorities are better off under the great society
[…] This post originally appeared on BenjaminStudebaker.com. […]
Income inequality spiked under Hoover, not Coolidge. Otherwise, a good article.
First time I’m seeing this. EXCELLENT.
Great article, and about to get lots more attention.
I propose a summary/main ideas/abstract at the top for the folks with short attention spans…
I would hope the summary would encourage a full read, but would surely lead to some poorly-informed (dickish) comments. I feel that it might be a worthwhile trade-off, considering the vital message.
Following your blog and recommending where I can!
Gotta stop buying from China , having things made in China . Almost everything you buy now is made in China . Bring it back to The USA . Mexico too ! Cars are being built now in that country. Bring it back to USA. I also feel it’s wrong to tax the rich more . The rich worked for it ! I’m in the middle class , retired, and we are doing fine . We planned ahead . Im tired of people that are welfare and drive new cars . How can that be ? I’m tired of women who have 5-6 kids not married different fathers on welfare . I say get her tubes tied . No more kids ! Cheaper to do that than pay welfare . All this talk – is bull . How are we going to have free college . I put 2 through College and had no help ! How are we going to get more jobs when company’s are going outside the USA . I could go on and on . Do not like Bernie nor Hilary . Frankly I’m not in favor of anyone running . I feel very sorry for my grandkids and greatgrand kids . This country is going down . We need to get back on track and it’s going to a big up hill to get it done . We were a great country at one time . We should be proud of the USA again
You’re right, so important to spend your hard earned dollars on local economy, support local wages, but locally produced, and I mean as close to home as possible. Stay away from Wal-Mart. You might save a few dollars on your purchase, but it’s driving us all into the ground. As irritating as it might appear, I’m not sure that the local welfare cases you are seeing ( people might look like freeloaders) are the problem. Our gov’t doesn’t represent us anymore, doesn’t invest in us. Spend all our taxes Halliburton and private war profiteers.. Look at our federal budget! I’m not saying cut our defense budget, maybe some, carefully, but don’t give it to these private contractors!!!! Rather have it cost twice as much and go back into the little American guys pocket.
Just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they worked for it.
POTUS has less influence than we normally assign…I.e. Most people think that electing one official will positivistically cause a chain reaction of enormous change. I don’t buy that.
However, this blog post points to the ideological change that electing Sanders signals. Honestly, I don’t really care how the change happens. I just know that what we’ve been doing is broken, and that Hillary obviously isn’t the answer.
Is the 1% by wealth a different group than the 1% by income? Which is the focus? I still haven’t seen any leadership focus on the difference and where the energies should be focused.
If it’s income, why has the conversation not evolved to the top 1% of wealth? If it’s income, why has the conversation not focused on the top 0.5% of income? Vast majority of those in the top 1% are not bearing significant influence over their direction of our nation/the world.
I’m tired of the tagline 99% vs 1%…it does in fact marginalize a sizeable population who feel that the system is rigged and have the resources to assist in a transition to the Next System.
Open to discussion.
I believe it is concentrating on ‘income’ (gains in wealth) because of our financial structure where the returns on investment are what is growing the disparity. If you are on the same 100 acres that your great grandfather got, your wealth has probably increased- but your income has probably stagnated- until you decide to subdivide that acreage and sell it off, invest the money you made from that sale into the stock market, and take out the returns as income. There are arguments to be made that the original land should be taxed at inheritance (unearned income) but the general concern is over those who are paying a 14% rate on those market returns or other passive income while a regular person is paying close to that amount in just FICA taxes.
Reblogged this on mermaidcamp and commented:
Income inequality is the issue that is driving our destiny. Pay attention to the details.
Pitch Perfect
Once America, under an onslaught of campaign messages, denies a Socialist Bernie will not be leading a New Democratic Party. He won’t be welcome back in Washington, D.C.
It’s nice you can cut 1 piece of the bill and use it as a straw man. Maybe you should read the whole thing and no just 1 piece from a website selling something?
” Head of the Financial Research Office being a Presidential appointment ”
“an independent member (with insurance expertise), appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, for a term of 6 years.”
“Provided that the Secretary of Treasury, in consultation with the President may also made a determination to appoint a receiver for a financial company”
“”the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. The new Bureau regulates consumer financial products and services in compliance with federal law.[37] The Bureau is headed by a director who is appointed by the President, ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street_Reform_and_Consumer_Protection_Act
The fix to get us there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhEFehRWApM
That was 100% sarcasm 😉
A.
Pfft, they started off with a lie, Coolidge was the most frugal of all presidents, one of the greatest. One of the few president’s that posted a surplus instead of a deficit. He was the reason for the roaring twenties and the financial boom. The rest of the article is similar crass, agenda driven, ideology based misrepresentation.
Nice article: Most Americans are ignorant of many of your points because – because they are , well, Americans. Americans are ignorant of history, politics, government but luv to opine and tell you what they think but it is all personal – how I’m affected byit/stuff. They are for the most part utterly clueless. They don’t get the big picture – and don’t let me get started with ECONOMiCS which almost no-one gets or understands BUT is the underlying cause and effect of most things – especially political and therefore governmental. And that includes the ignoramuses in the Congress. We need Bill Clinton’s “it’s the ECONOMY STUPID approach to this election. What is important for the future of America and a resurgence of the Middle Class is a firm discipline by supporters of either candidate especially those whose candidate isn’t the nominee that the most important thing in this election is that the Left gets to choose the next SUPREME COURT JUDGES…. If the Left doesn’t win in November and doesn’t get to place those judges – you can kiss this country’s future goodby…
I believed eve what he is referring to is making the reserve follow the law by having them uphold the legal standards. Yes, the president can do that. They can’t give you the list and then fail to enforce their own legal standards for creating the list. It’s not especially complicated.
After reading all the interesting back and forth comments here, I am of the opinion that the full ramifications of Bernie’s planrs are still a mystery to most folks. Reminds me of the blind men asked to describe and elephant. One felt the side of the elephant and said it’s like a wall. Another felt the trunk and said it’s like a rope, etc. As applied to Bernie’s plan, it seems like each person looks at one aspect of his plan and sees it their way, and the reader is left perplexed as to where the truth lies and what to believe.
Reblogged this on NeoPolitiEs and commented:
ICYMI/FYI- From a particular economistic perspective….
“The Democratic Party, which was once the party that saw economic inequality and poverty as the core causes of economic instability, now sees inequality and poverty as largely irrelevant. Instead of eliminating inequality and poverty to fuel the capitalist system and produce strong economic growth, establishment democrats now largely agree with establishment republicans that the problem is a lack of support for business investment.”
“In the years since 2008, many Americans, in particular young people, are willing to consider the possibility that neoliberalism–the economic ideology espoused by both the post-Reagan republicans and the post-Carter Clinton-era democrats–is fundamentally flawed and must be revised or potentially replaced entirely.”[!]
Thank you for your comments in response to the quoted/excerpted paragraphs of this reblogged article from
http://wp.me/p2DVJR-Gg
by/via @BMStudebaker
[to whom then the (caustic?) remarks in your reply are (also/ultimately/) presumably directed].
Focusing on rhetorical anecdotes ignores decades of policy differences between Clinton and Sanders. I’ve been noting what Karl has been doing a for a while now–all of Karl’s arguments have been red herrings intended to distract from ideological and policy differences. Those reading should ask what ideological purposes they serve. Why does Karl want to minimize the clear historical distinctions between Clinton and Sanders?
Clinton and Sanders have clear policy differences on welfare reform, on shrinking the financial sector, on GLBA, on DF, on tuition free college, on single payer.
Your accusation of ad hominem indicates that you don’t know what that term means or are deliberately obfuscating. Calling someone a neoliberal is not an ad hominem, it is a factual statement that a person’s policies and views conform to the neoliberal ideology. This is either true or false. Hillary herself has made statements against single payer, against tuition free college, against a modern GS, against shrinking the financial sector, and for welfare reform. There is no need to assume that she supports Bill on these issues because she’s married to him–she has a long and explicit record of stating that these are her positions. It is because these are her positions that major financial institutions donate to her campaign–they know her history and they believe she can be bought, because she can.
In every one of your comments, you have conspicuously avoided and run from these differences. What motivates that? You could be a neoliberal political operative trying to defuse the threat Bernie poses by running a relentless campaign of disinformation on a popular post supporting that candidacy. The alternative is that you honestly don’t know what ad hominem is and don’t know very much about how argument works.
However, the fact that you are using the name “Karl Schulmeister”, in reference to the Austrian double agent for France during the Napoleonic Wars, strongly suggests that you are deliberately attempting to subvert the discussion and are not a trustworthy interlocutor. All those reading should be informed that Karl has deliberately chosen to use this man’s name for a reason–nothing he says should be taken at face value:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schulmeister
After talking about this with a number of people with expertise both in the substantive arguments and in spotting hired agents, it is my strong suspicion that Karl Schulmeister is a paid operative of the Clinton campaign. Consequently he is no longer permitted to comment on this page and his previous comments are being removed.
Here is the fatal flaw in Mr Studebaker’s reasoning: consumption did not stagnate during the 1920s! This refutes his attempt to explain the bubble as the result of excessive investment by the wealthy, and in fact shows that the bubble (with its simultaneous expansion of both consumption and investment) MUST have been caused by an expansion of the money supply. This also causes the increase in income concentration, since money is added through injection into the banking system. Mr Studebaker’s attempt to explain the income concentration pattern through some (alleged) ideological shift is thus completely spurious – a painfully obvious example of reasoning backward in order to find support for a desired conclusion.
Learn about the 20’s:
Click to access work137.pdf
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-u-s-economy-in-the-1920s/
Short version:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/tch_wjec/usa19101929/2riseandfall6.shtml
This is the most willful effort toward cognitive dissonance to justify a candidate from some sexist place I’ve ever seen. Congrats on the effort; too bad about the dissonance.
Reblogged this on Speak to Me of Life and commented:
An excellent piece that helps explain why people should take Bernie Sanders more seriously than they do.
Read this article and tell me if this changes your narrative. http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/2016/2/11/the-art-of-selling-the-impossible-the-candidacy-of-bernie-sanders-1
This is a hit piece. It makes many assertions that have elsewhere been challenged or refuted, but nonetheless does not engage with any of those counterarguments or outside work. This means either that the author doesn’t read other work or that the author wrote it for political purposes as a piece of propaganda. Here are a few pieces that contradict the claims made:
On fo po:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-foreign-poicy-213619
On passing legislation:
https://pplswar.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/fact-bernie-sanders-got-more-done-in-the-senate-than-hillary-clinton/
On CFMA:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2016/02/05/3746742/clinton-sanders-derivatives-regulation/
On electability:
https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/02/10/why-bernie-sanders-is-more-electable-than-people-think/
On what happens if Bernie gets a republican congress:
https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/01/19/paul-krugman-is-wrong-about-the-democratic-primary/
I’m not concerned about Bernie’s personal investments–any person who owns a diverse investment portfolio is likely to hold investments in big banks. The question is whether the banks give your campaign money–if they do, this means they have reason to believe you can be bought. They give Clinton money, but they don’t give it to Sanders.
Who paid for this! 😦
thankyou for such an articulate and thoughtful analysis. It makes so much sense. I wish Bernie would explain it this way during a debate. I think he would get more traction.
Sally D
Excellent and clear article! This is the most helpful way to decide of whom to vote for, and why.
I have been very clear about not voting for Hillary. She is very right wing, and she supported the 2009 coup d’etat in Honduras. That has caused thousands of innocent people losing their lives, outrageous level of corruption, repression, criminality, and an incredible level of poverty and hunger. That’s Hillary Clinton…
Thank you for this illuminating analysis!
Zenaida Velásquez
San Jose, California
Truth! Clarity. Thanks
[…] direction was and still is embraced by both Democrats and Republican. The political shift is detailed in this post but my aim here is to point not to a political but a fundamental […]
[…] said before, I’m not that smart. If you want a blog with reasoned analysis, I recommend this guy, Benjamin Studebaker. (I know, not completely objective, but smart, backs everything up with facts, and […]
I would like to politely suggest that your remarks about “investment” are a bit cursory and fail to acknowledge how these schemes have become a wealth transfer mechanism. I won’t lecture you, since I suspect you understand the history of savings in the U.S., the increasing disconnect between securities markets and the productive economy, and that the loss of manufacturing parallels the rise of the financial sector.
Thank you for a careful and thorough analysis. I agree wholeheartedly.
The only reason Liberals were able to pull off what they did, was because of the Great Depression and World War II. It will take another disaster like those, for it to happen again. The people that came out of the Great Depression and World War II, had learned a few things, they learn that the poor and unemployed aren’t lazy people, because we all had been those people or knew those people. They learned that we have to compromise. They learned that government can be good. They learned we all had to work together. They learned that war was bad. They had learned the corporations are not wonderful institutions that cared about the best thing for people and society. They learned that corporations, think of workers this tools to be used and thrown out. And they learn that unions were needed.
Here’s the problem, all those people that learned that? They’re dead now. Until a new generation experience life like they did, they will continue down the path we are on, until they cause a disaster for their children to fix and to learn and start all over again.
The 2008 crisis and the years of stagnation that have followed for ordinary folks may be more similar to depression conditions that is commonly acknowledged.
Thank God liberals were IN charge during the Great Depressiom or we’d still be wandering the street asking, “Brother can you spare a dime?”
The saying, “People vote their pocketbook” may only be true if people realize what is in their best interest. In view, people vote emotionally more than they do rationally. They have their likes and dislikes. They can be passionately for a candidate. Or they can be “ho hum”, “who cares”. The town halls and the debates are all about revving up the feelings. You’ve probably noted how many people are undecided, or if they have decided, interviews show that only a minute number have changed their minds after watching a debate. A person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still. Few people are going to be swayed by the eloquent analyses of neoliberalism vs nationalism stances. Most voters are not into sophisticated rational analyses. Democrats are likely to vote for a Democrat. Republicans, for a republican. How many can get behind a revolutionary like Bernie? How many will be gung-ho by the prospects of a march on Washington? Perhaps a lot of the young who may or may not actually vote. How many will feel safer by voting for a well known person who will move cautiously like Hilary?
On the Republican side, who is attracted to the strong man image of a blustering Trump who shoots from the hip and reflects later if at all? Who finds the ultra conservative of a Cruz appealing? Who will vote based on their evangelical or atheistic or other religious preferences? In my view, it is all about emotional appeal of the candidates along with the element of trust or distrust.