2.  GETTING READY

This trip had actually been sorta vaguely planned for about a year from now, after my wife and I had sold our house.  However, our daughters returned from Germany earlier than we had expected and graciously agreed to postpone their plans to move back to the Pacific Northwest and to house-sit here so we could leave within about a month.  As attested by the tens and tens and tens of hours we’ve spent planning and reserving trains and boats and planes, oh, and lodging, a month isn’t really enough time.  But to spur us on, we immediately picked a departure date and got our one-way tix to Paris right away, and we fly out tomorrow at 7 AM.

Our initial vague plans had been to just wing it in Europe.  The theme song back then was “Footloose”.  It became immediately apparent, however, that the trains and hostels and Airbnbs you want fill up quickly.  For example, we got about the last two seats available with our Eurail passes on our chosen date on the Glacier Express from Zermatt to Chur, and these not together and not on a window.  So, First Tip:  reserve early.  Even so, we’ve got some tricky connections and our itinerary could blow up in any number of ways.  Quite a change, and some days the theme song seems closer to “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It.”

We had decided that we would only travel light, not like last time when my camera bag alone weighed almost as much as my whole backpack this time, with only carry-on luggage that can be pulled and/or carried on our backs.  We pretty much followed the advice of all the travel experts:  choose only items you absolutely, positively must have with you no matter what, lay them all out on your bed and then remove 50% of them.  In spite of trying to follow this advice, as late as this morning we’re still removing stuff. We’ve got the total for both of us down to under 41 lbs, not counting some food we’ll have for the flight over.

And not counting what we’ll have in our pockets.  Of which we have many.  To avoid the need for a purse and pants pockets full of valuables and necessities that have to be emptied at airport check-ins, we each bought a 25-hidden-pockets ScotteVest, with zip-off sleeves. The idea is that one can simply remove the garment, lay it on the scanner conveyor and sail through the body scanner devices/people.  (Well, other than the time spent explaining that my left hip beeps because it’s made out of titanium and chrome steel.)  I’ll let you know how that works.

We were initially going to buy two wheeled backpacks, but we sensed that we’d fill them both, so we’re going with one, an Osprey Ozone Convertible 22, and my old bike-camping Trek backpack with the bladder and drinking tube removed.  The Osprey has a removable day pack and is claimed to qualify as a carry-on.  We’ll see.  The plan is that, most of the time, I’ll carry the lighter Trek and my wife will pull the Osprey.  When the terrain is unsuitable for wheels, like the steps in Corniglia from the train stop up to our hostel, I’ll backpack the heavier Osprey and she’ll backpack the Trek.

Since we’re both officially old, 66 and 73, we’ve been training with appropriately weighted packs at 3000 ft. on the hilly streets around our home.  I learned at least one thing in Basic Training, the motto of the Drill Sergeants Corps (at least at Ft. Bragg):  “The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.”  Can’t hurt, right?

Our son is going to meet us at the apparently quite-confusing Charles de Gaulle and escort us to Angers for a couple of days of jet lag rehab.  Just video chatted with him and his sense is that Le Pen is likely to get stomped on May 7.  Let’s hope that the French pollsters have figured out the hidden-anger factor better than ours did.  If Le Pen wins and global markets tank, I might be too broke to return to the good, old Yew Hess Hay.

 Skip Christensen.  2 May 2017

Halloween 2016 has just arrived, to be followed in a week with a very scary election day. The impression that we may be choosing between life and imminent death and destruction is nurtured by the TV advertising from both sides. That this impression is not without justification has made this election season especially horrifying, and thus today’s celebration of Halloween seems scarier than usual, an omen of the horrifying day of reckoning looming a week further down the road. As we worry about their future, our own young children will be ringing our door bells this evening, exclaiming “trick or treat!” But to me, this is no longer just innocent good fun.

Over the last few weeks, my own sense of foreboding has been heightened by the remarkable new HBO series “WestWorld.” This ingenious series, which has now advanced to its fifth episode, forcefully thrusts into our consciousness darkly profound imponderables about good and evil, truth and falsehood, and “real” versus “unreal” at every turn. Indeed, what makes this series especially frightening is that its premises are concerned with the nature of consciousness itself.

WestWorld is a futuristic theme park located in the canyonlands of the U.S. West, a place where wealthy “guests” can pay huge sums (one guest mentions a $40,000/day charge) for a vacation interacting with android “hosts” who engage them in story lines written and monitored by “the Park’s” staff of employees. There are numerous story lines among which guests may choose to get involved. Each robotic host is programmed with a rich, complex set of behaviors, and a “back story” identifying his or her personal history in the old post-Civil War West. Story lines overlap, and unfold simultaneously in real time. Key hosts can be assigned more than one story line, and are moved around the Park almost instantly to fulfill their various roles. When a host is killed, WestWorld cleanup staff quickly retrieves the body, removes it to underground labs for repair and analysis, and the host is then returned to its world.

The memory of each android host is purged following each episode, permitting a fresh start to each story line every day or so, as if it is happening for the first time. In this fanciful environment, staff and hosts are virtually teleported from place to place, shielding the Park itself from visible evidence of maintenance activity. Park staff can also simply take an elevator to the surface and mingle, and can stop the action by putting hosts in “sleep mode” as they do their work. We are challenged with each episode to figure out how the whole thing works. The series begins as WestWorld operations start to unravel when memories of key hosts begin to survive the memory purges, and they begin to question who and what they are.

There is, of course, a corporation behind all of this, and as the early episodes unfold, just as the android hosts are beginning to develop new intentions and self-realization, we learn of conflicting agendas among the Park’s managers and directors, and potential conflicts with the interests of the corporate board of directors. We also learn of even more mysterious objectives for the Park pursued over 35 years by one of the Park’s creators and developers, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) along with his deceased partner, Arnold. A photograph of the mysterious Arnold is actually a picture of a much younger Anthony Hopkins, suggesting that Robert Ford may have been Arnold himself. Regardless, Ford has achieved god-like powers and control over his creation, and he confidently exercises that power.

Like “Game of Thrones,” this series has a talented, world-class cast. Among the main characters are the Man in Black (Ed Harris), Ford’s chief assistant Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), a rancher’s daughter Dolores, a crucial protagonist among the hosts (Evan Rachel Wood), her erstwhile boyfriend, the gunslinger and bounty hunter Teddy Flood (James Marsden), a saloon madam Maeve (Thandie Newton) and her top prostitute Clementine (Angela Sarafyan). Among the high-level directors and operators is a corporate representative Theresa (Sidse Babbett Knudsen), and the principal Park guests are William and Logan (Jimmi Simpson, Ben Barnes).

The story lines and character roles are presented with some ambiguity, preserving suspense and intrigue. From the outset, it is obvious that this series presents a very advanced level artificial intelligence (A.I.), scarcely indistinguishable from the “real” thing. But it also raises the bar on A.I. fiction, posing an intriguing question that will pervade the narrative throughout the series. At the beginning of Episode two, when William and Logan arrive at the Park, a female host preparing William for his journey into the Park remarks, as he looks her over: “I know you want to ask, so ask.” William immediately responds: “Are you real?” The host instantly replies, “Well, if you can’t tell, does it matter?” This exchange ominously raises deeper, universal questions we face in our lives: What is the nature of reality, and what is the importance of distinguishing between reality and fantasy?

WestWorld vacations offer guests the opportunity to really escape the humdrum constraints and evils of the “real” world outside the Park. But this theme is darkly foreboding, as “real” world evil, naturally enough, infects the Park. WestWorld vacations were always attractive to many who wanted a chance to kill other people, and in the Park, they could kill with little or no risk or consequence, because the hosts’ guns would not kill humans – only other hosts. In Episode 4, in a meeting between Robert Ford and Theresa to discuss his massive (and disruptive) Park expansion plans, when she admits to not liking the Park very much, Ford remarks that he and Arnold originally had a more balanced approach in mind for WestWorld story lines, evidently to offer more romantic or at least benign vacations.

Over the years, however, the dark side prevailed: As guests became increasingly dissatisfied with relatively benign interactions, the story lines became dominated by guns and killing, inviting guests to act out their darker fantasies. The Man in Black appears to be a good example of this dark tendency: He first visited the Park 35 years ago, but he has not returned for some time. Although he reminds us that he still enjoys killing, his mission now is to find the deeper truth or reality he believes underlies the Park.

The theme and plot line of this series marks a significant advance in the approach to A.I. and its philosophical underpinnings. A Sci-Fi junkie in youth, I was always spooked by the sinister implications of stories involving A.I., which I found at least as frightful as the typical Halloween ghost or witch story. One of the basic themes that emerged in 20^th Century science fiction involved machinery possessing externally driven prescience and malevolent intent. One especially scary story was “Killdozer,” a science fiction/horror novella by Theodore Sturgeon originally published in Astounding magazine in 1944, and revised (just in time for my 15^th birthday) for the 1959 collection Aliens 4. This is the chilling story of an eight-man construction crew building an airstrip on a small Pacific island during WW II. They uncover and open an ancient stone “temple,” releasing an ancient entity composed of pure energy, left over from a war involving sentient machines. The entity possesses the crew’s bulldozer, which proceeds to kill the workers. Three survivors ultimately manage to destroy the bulldozer, and presumably the entity. This horrific story was brought to the screen in a 1974 movie.

Killdozer may have influenced horror-master Steven King, who published a short story called “The Lawnmower Man” in the May 1975 issue of Cavalier and in his 1978 collection Night Shift. In this macabre story, a man (Harold) seeks to hire a lawn mowing service for the summer and responds to an ad for “Pastoral Greenery.” The man driving the company van, a hairy, pot-bellied fellow, is hired and shown to the back yard. When the mowing begins, Harold goes to his back porch where he sees the lawnmower running by itself, and the naked lawnmower man following on all fours eating the grass. The lawnmower chases and kills a mole. The lawnmower man then explains to the terrified Harold that this approach to lawn care offers substantial benefits, but that his boss makes sacrificial victims of unappreciative customers. When Harold tries to call the police, the lawnmower man interrupts, revealing that his boss’s name is “Pan.” The lawnmower chases Harold through his living room before brutally slaughtering him, leaving a strong scent of freshly cut grass in the air.

In those early fantasy/horror stories, ordinary machines are magically and terrifyingly bestowed with prescience, but they do the bidding of external masters. Artificial intelligence, however, implies a prescience inherent to the machine itself. Of course, the idea of A.I. is not entirely new to fantasy literature. In Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), an Italian woodcarver named Geppetto carved a wooden marionette named Pinocchio. Magically, the wood became animated, and Pinocchio “lived.”

The blockbuster movie “A.I.” (2001) takes this theme to a disquieting new level. In a future world where robots and androids are gradually developed to embody increasingly sophisticated programming, they begin to display what resembles real human intelligence. There is a social backlash to this trend, however, and a resistance movement led by Lord Johnson-Johnson (Brendan Gleeson) searches for rejected androids in a hot-air balloon that resembles the moon. Captured robots are taken to fairs where they are destroyed in front of jeering, irate crowds. One special android, however, meticulously designed by Prof. Hobby (William Hurt) in the image of his own departed son, is virtually indistinguishable from a real little boy. This android, David (Haley Joel Osment) also possess advance A.I., and comes to believe he is a “real” little boy. When his adoptive mother realizes she cannot keep him, she tells him the truth, and abandons him in the woods, where he encounters other robots fleeing Lord Johnson-Johnson. He hooks up with an advanced and convincing male prostitute android Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), the two are captured, but they escape destruction at the hands of the carnival mob when the mob is not convinced that David is not a real boy. The two set out on a hair-raising search for Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy, which David is convinced is real and can change him into a real boy, so that he can return to his beloved mother.

The WestWorld series is the next, and perhaps ultimate step in the developing A.I. theme. This series emphasizes the disquieting tension we increasingly face in distinguishing between what is “real” and what is “unreal” (or non-real) in our lives. Intriguingly, in WestWorld we see both real humans and androids grappling with the same issues, further blurring that distinction. And morality is posed not just as a human question, but as a universal abstraction. Worse still, the nature of consciousness itself as a human attribute is challenged: A headnote at the WestWorld cast site states that this “futuristic park – which is looked after by robotic ‘hosts’ – allows its visitors to live out their fantasies through artificial consciousness. No matter how illicit the fantasy may be, there are no consequences for the park’s guests, allowing for any wish to be indulged.”

By postulating a very dangerous concept of “artificial consciousness,” this explanation goes beyond earlier literary explorations of A.I., addressing not just the nature of intelligence, but of consciousness as well. The intriguing suggestion here is that Park guests are transformed into an alternative state of consciousness for their entire WestWorld experience: Is this supposed to be some sort of shared dream or hallucination? I don’t think so. However, this reference to “artificial” consciousness clearly grows out of Ford’s reference in a conversation with Bernard (Episode 3) to Arnold’s intriguing hope to create “real” consciousness in robots, relating to a theory that consciousness relates to the “bicameral mind.”

Commenters have been quick to note the obvious origin of this idea – the 1976 book by Princeton Professor Julian Jaynes entitled “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” This point is discussed by Nick Romano of Collider, who has also endorsed the more sensible “game theory” interpretations of the Park’s interactions, suggesting that the Man in Black is not really a sinister gangster type, despite his rough demeanor, but is actually an expert gamer. Park guest Logan also advances the common-sense perspective that the whole WestWorld theme park is just an elaborate game, especially in his argument with William when he threatens to shoot Delores in Episode 4. The hosts are all just robots, he reminds his partner, that cannot really be killed. And, as the human characters are frequently reminded, it is a mistake to think of the hosts as “real.” Still, the idea is floated that Arnold tried, and failed, to make hosts’ consciousness really real, i.e., something more than robotic. Of the Jaynes theory, Romano writes:

“It essentially postulates that early man believed consciousness to be the voice of the gods, which we eventually realized to be their own instincts kicking in.”

But this conceptualization partially misperceives the Jaynes thesis. I have had the popular Jaynes book in my library since the early 1980s, and spent some time with it years ago. His intriguing theory is that in antiquity, well over 2000 years ago, there was a time when bicameral minds produced, inside the head, what appeared to be actual voices. A vestige of that phenomenon exists today in schizophrenia, for example, with the sensation of hearing people speaking who are not actually there, i.e., hallucinating. Jaynes’s thesis is that the bicameral mind once produced these “internal voices” for everyone, and that “consciousness” came with the breakdown of the bicameral mind.  This is not a straightforward idea, and it has been largely imperceptible to me. For most of my life, I have been inclined to equate consciousness with “awareness,” but that is not at all, according to Jaynes, what consciousness is:

“Subjective conscious mind is an analogue of what is called the real world. It is built up with what is called real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. … And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.” (p.55)

Thus, “consciousness” requires both biological (human) life and language. Our consciousness consists of established lexical analogues (maps) we have learned of the real world. What, then, is meant by the “bicameral mind”? Jaynes writes:

“We are conscious human beings. We are trying to understand human nature. The preposterous hypothesis we have come to … is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us. And since we are conscious, and wish to understand, we wish to reduce this to something familiar in our experience…” (p. 84)

Perhaps a metaphor of something close to that state might be helpful. In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little consciousness. In fact my consciousness will usually be involved in something else. . . My hand, foot, and head behavior, however, are almost in a different world. *** Now simply subtract the consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like.” (pp.84-85)

In discussing the evolution of consciousness, Jaynes hypothesizes that “natural selection may have played a role in the beginning of consciousness.” But, he cautions:

“I wish to be very clear that consciousness is chiefly a cultural introduction, learned on the basis of language and taught to others, rather than any biological necessity. * * * It is impossible to calculate what percentage of the civilized world died in those terrible centuries toward the end of the second millennium B.C. I suspect it was enormous. * * * It is thus possible that individuals most obdurately bicameral, most obedient to their familiar divinities, leaving the genes of the less impetuous, the less bicameral, to endow the ensuing generations.” (p. 220)

At this point, let me dispel any intention of appearing like Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977) who, standing in the ticket line at a theater, and incensed by a conversation in the line behind him, suddenly blurts out: “I’ve got Marshall McLuhan right here…” and then retrieves McLuhan himself from behind a poster to explain to the flabbergasted man that his ideas are all wet. Consciousness is a tough concept, and I am sure there is more extensive knowledge on the Jaynes hypothesis among the series producers than I can claim to have. I suspect that the concept of consciousness and still more unfathomable notion of a bicameral mind that Jaynes advanced have gained more support today than the details of his theory about the origin of consciousness.

With respect to WestWorld, it is important to note that the producers have gone to great lengths to show that the lead character Dolores displays all of the attributes of conscious mentality, and to contrast her thinking with that of her boyfriend Teddy. In an important conversation between them in Episode 3, she expresses a clear desire to get away from the confines of her world, and asks Teddy if he knows of a place they can go. He tells her that he has heard of a place down south, where the mountains reach the ocean. She asks why they don’t go there immediately. Teddy hesitates, conflicted by the goals he has been programmed to achieve. He promises to take her there “someday.” When Dolores reacts negatively, he asks, “Is something wrong?” And Dolores replies: “You said ‘someday.’ That sounds exactly like what people say when they actually mean ‘never.’” Teddy reacts, indicating he honestly intends to take her “someday… soon.” (This appears to be an oblique reference to the 1964 Ian Tyson Western genre song of that name.) He then rides off on his next assignment.

There are other signs of Dolores’s true consciousness, including Bernard’s recognition that she is “different” and his probing of her intellect. In one session with Bernard she says, “I think there must be something wrong with this world…. Either that or there is something wrong with me.” This kind of thinking requires consciousness, and could not be performed by the bicameral mind Jaynes describes. Other characters  (principally Maeve) are emerging into conscious thought as well, evidently prompted mainly by the jolts they are getting as their memory purges break down.

The important point here is that these characters are all robots, so for them consciousness, which requires and grows out of biological mentality — i.e. “real” thought — is impossible. Even with the most complex programming to enable computers somehow to both achieve self-awareness and continue to learn from experience on their own, the crucial emotional components to thought (and language interpretation) provided by biological life will always be missing. This is, nonetheless, an imaginative theme, and an excellent premise for a science fiction/horror story. One exciting  potential plot line introduced so far follows on Bernard’s suggestion that if Dolores can find the center of the mysterious Maze, the place the Man in Black is trying to find, she might be able to find her “freedom” –- presumably from her “unreal” consciousness as an android — becoming able to choose her own destiny. That possibility implies that Arnold must have come close to success, and that at the heart of the Maze lies the key, like Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy, to obtaining “real” humanity.

What troubles me most about experiencing WestWorld at this point in time is its juxtaposition with the monumentally important election coming up next week. I’m not concerned that this fictional series postulates the physically improbable and likely impossible state of artificial consciousness. Nor am I suggesting that there is any sort of backsliding in this world toward the state of the bicameral mind, an equally impossible development. I am deeply troubled, however, by the extremely dysfunctional state of the results produced by actual human consciousness.

Consciousness is here to stay, but there is also a very real physical world underlying the “real” world of our conscious perceptions, and that world is being made more dysfunctional by our technology and our decisions. There are several problems here: Our attraction to artificial intelligence is leading us down a dangerous path, a  growing tendency to surrender control of conscious human activities to machines — e.g., vehicles that can drive themselves, and drones that can carry out preprogrammed combat missions. We seem even to be getting closer to computerized judgments on when and what to strike. Down that road, human warfare could ultimately be chosen and carried out by machines without the intervention of conscious judgment. Still, we persevere in that direction.

It is consciousness, clearly, that enables logic and advanced reasoning, yet I am among those deeply troubled by the extent to which the benefits of human intelligence are being squandered. Our society, inundated with fantasy themes and religious ideologies, seems largely to have lost interest in determining the underlying truths about our world. This has had a chilling effect on politics and democracy. Voters are attracted by the most superficial of reasons to candidates who advocate manifestly harmful policies. A great many people will be elected next week with the avowed goal of undermining government, or who deny scientific reality at a time when climate change is far too rapidly destroying the viability of life on the entire planet. Many will advocate policies that will result in a far less progressive tax system, inevitably reducing our economic growth and ensuring our drift toward the next depression. A Trump presidency promises the most severe decline in this regard, yet conscious awareness of reality is so deficient that, it seems, Donald Trump is incapable even of defeating himself, no matter how indifferent he may actually be about winning the election.

The inevitability of the further decline and demise of civilization, despite what should be the positive advantages of human consciousness, is very real. For me, this takes away nearly all the enjoyment I once experienced with fantasy and science fiction: It is terrifying, in fact, to consider what the WestWorld episodes suggest about the dark side of human nature, and that dark side is hard to counter when far too many of us cannot effectively distinguish between fact and fiction or, hooked by fanciful ideological or religious thinking, choose to remain in denial about what is “real” and what is “unreal” in this world.

Tonight, the neighborhood children will come trick-or-treating. For me, this will not be the welcome respite it has been in years past from the realities  of our world.

JMH – 10/31/2016

After Thursday night’s debate in Brooklyn between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, analysis focused mainly on candidate attitude and demeanor. How did each candidate perform? Was Sanders too sarcastic? Was Clinton too evasive? The reality is that strong language, frequent interruptions, and personal attacks are inevitable in the circus atmosphere of presidential debates: With nothing to look at but people standing at microphones, viewers tend to get bored in the absence of combative argumentation. The TV news producers know this. In this debate, personal attacks were invited from the outset when Wolf Blitzer opened by asking Bernie Sanders what he meant when he said Hillary Clinton was not “qualified” to be the president. (Let’s get ready to rummm-bbble!!) Amid a crowd outburst, Sanders emphasized the meaning he had always intended for that poor choice of words – that she has compromised her independence by accepting huge campaign contributions from wealthy donors. There seemed to be audible sighs of disappointment in the muted audience response.

This debate was more informative than some, however, and I have to credit both candidates for doing as well as they could under the circumstances. When it was over, viewers who listened closely had a better sense of differences in many major issue areas, such as foreign policy, immigration, election finance reform, and the minimum wage. I remain extremely concerned, however, that the hard core economic issues, like taxation and banking are so poorly understood – not just by the public in general but also by the media, the economics profession and the candidates themselves – that even if given more time, the candidates would still have left viewers feeling uninformed and perhaps even confused. I sincerely believe that both Democratic candidates have sincere, progressive intentions, and that the opposite is true of all of the Republican presidential hopefuls in this election cycle. The outcome of this election cycle is gravely important, for after 35 unabated years of trickle-down Reaganomics, American prosperity and democracy is rapidly declining, and with it our hopes for an acceptable future.

More and more people are coming to realize the serious implications of the 2016 election. Ironically, for the first time in decades, the New York primary this coming Tuesday will be pivotal for both parties. In today’s Albany Times Union, the paper’s editor Rex Smith has prfesented a near-perfect perspective on the situation in “Curtain rises on New York party shows” (here):

In most years, New York is more a backdrop for political theater than a place where the show gets fully staged. * * * But this election year neither party has gotten its show together as quickly as usual, so the audience here matters, for once. * * *

Polls suggest the frontrunners aren’t likely to be tripped up here Tuesday. A Marist-NBC4 poll released Friday showed Clinton widening her lead over Sanders. And Trump running away from Kasich and Cruz. That means that most of each party’s voters are comfortable with the prospect of autumn’s big nationwide show being a contest between the incremental liberalism of Clinton and the radical authoritarianism of Trump.

If that turns out to be the outcome when Wednesday dawns, it will mean that New York has passed up its chance to truly unsettle American politics, for good or ill. But whatever happens, change is coming.

Wins here would energize the campaigns of Sanders or Cruz, and either as the nominee of his party would unhinge long-standing realities, shifting the fulcrum of American politics to the left or right, with corresponding push-back from the other side.

The notable suggestion here is that New York has an opportunity to “truly unsettle American politics.” I would argue that a Sanders/Trump outcome in New York would reflect a deep seated disturbance that has already taken place and has been growing for a long time: It’s not that change is coming, but that change, driven by economic decline, is well underway. After the Wisconsin primary the New York Times reported that exit polls showed economic issues to be the greatest concern of voters of both parties, and it is the growing seriousness of economic issues that explains the political revolts in both parties.

This post will look beneath the candidate positions and voter concerns on major economic issues to identify the underlying reality at play in each instance. The use of terms like “liberal” versus “conservative,” or “moderate” versus “radical,” often generate conclusions with little more thought, and can generate wildly varying impressions depending upon what they mean to each reader. Thus, I will use he terms “Right” and “Left” as representing relative positions on a continuum of “Lorenz curves” (here), depicting the distribution of income. On the extreme hypothetical “Left,” every household has the same income and wealth. No communist economy ever came close to making such a  high degree of “liberalism” a reality; nor has any communist philosophy, contrary to popular myth, ever aspired to absolute equality. On the extreme “Right,” hypothetically, one household possesses all wealth and everyone in else the society is a serf. That represents no known reality today either, and so far as I know no “authoritarian” rule has ever come close to that reality.

On such a scale, it is generally understood that the American political parties have both shifted toward the Right over the last one-half century. The Republican Party has strenuously opposed all economic policies – such as Social Security, unemployment benefits, Medicare and Medicaid, and Food Stamps – that would effectively move distribution to the Left on the Lorenz Curve. The Democratic Party has also supported corporate welfare (subsidies and tax breaks) that move economic reality to the Right on the Lorenz Curve.

In this election cycle, we are witnessing rank and file Republicans rising up in great numbers to oppose the GOP establishment, supporting Trump because he promises a move to the Left on the Lorenz curve. Although this is fairly obviously a revolt, I offer this view from Chris Collins, a Republican representative from Western New York, from an Op-ed in the April 15 New York Times entitled “The Case for Trump” (here):

Americans are angry. I hear it from the former factory workers who lost their jobs or other countries because of bad trade deals, and veterans who wait months to see a doctor at a Veterans Affairs hospital and the small business owners who are struggling to stay afloat because of the Affordable Care Act’s crippling regulations. The professional politicians they trusted and supported have repeatedly sold out our country in favor of special interests and the status quo. Finally, millions of Americans are saying, “Enough is Enough.”

Although, as Collins observes, Trump endorses the arguments of the Right against Obamacare, and claims there is economic growth and job creation potential (as did Mitt Romney four years ago) in “buying and rebuilding distressed companies,” Collins also points out that Trump acknowledges the need to get our country “back on course and restore the possibility of the American dream for our children and grandchildren.” Trump supporters, he argues, want a chief executive to run the country, not a politician. In that view, of course, achieving growth and prosperity is nothing more than a business management problem. Thus, even as Trump endorses the faulty economics of Republican orthodoxy, it rejects the consequences of that orthodoxy, propelling him inexorably toward the GOP nomination.

Although Collins no doubt fails to see it this way, the rejection of Republican economic orthodoxy amounts to acknowledging a need to move to the Left on the Lorenz Curve. This is almost exactly the same perception of economic reality to which the revolution on the Left is responding in its support for Bernie Sanders. As we shall see, all of the internal inconsistencies and bad economics are on the Republican side, and the progressive economic arguments are correct.

The reason the Democratic Party hasn’t “gotten its show together” yet, as Rex Smith puts it, is that the Sanders supporters do not believe that the “liberal gradualism” of Hillary Clinton will be nearly enough to get us where we need to go. Thus, the Sanders campaign rejects Democratic Party orthodoxy in the same way Trump’s campaign rejects Republican orthodoxy, but again, only the Sanders revolution has the economics right. Clinton’s economics is about one-half correct, but for bad economic reasons her “gradualism” approach remains too far to the Right on the Lorenz Curve. This post intends to make that abundantly clear. Let’s begin with a review of the minimum wage issue.

The Minimum Wage

In the Brooklyn debate, the moderators focused much attention on the minimum wage issue, and reduced it to a relatively trivial dispute over each candidate’s past support for a national $15 hourly minimum wage. The current minimum wage in the United States is $7.25, and only seven states and the District of Columbia have enacted minimum wages in excess of $10.00, some of which, including New York’s and California’s $15 minimum wage are to be gradually implemented and fully effective on 12/31/2018 and 1/1/2022, respectively. (NCSL, 2016 Minimum Wage by State, here).

The current $7.25 minimum wage fails, in most instances,  to meet the current minimum poverty threshold computed by the Census Bureau (here). Before taxes, a full 40-hour workweek over 51 weeks would produce a pretax income of $14,790. That is under the poverty threshold for a two person household, even without any children under 18 to support. A $15 minimum wage would produce $30,600 in a year, barely enough (if it was effective in 2015) to meet the poverty threshold for a family of two parents and three children.

Several points should be discussed here: Because of inflation, $15 will be worth less in 2019 or 2020 than today, and so it will not go as far for financially strapped families than as suggested by these computations.

One argument against raising the minimum wage that has been pressed in the states is the claim that employer cost increases will force them to cut back on employment to maintain profit margins, and could cause small businesses to fold. These claims are insubstantial for several reasons:.That would happen only in instances where business prices are so constrained by competition they could not be raised in response to cost increases, but that is rarely the case in today’s market’s. Moreover, competitors typically face the same state-level minimum wage requirement, and all American  employers face the same national requirement.

There are macroeconomic benefits to raising the minimum wage: At either the state or federal level, an increase in the minimum wage will:

• Reduce reliance on federal aid programs, like food stamps, freeing up tax dollars for other purposes;
• Reduce subprime dis-saving and associated bad debt;
• Increase direct spending on goods and services.

The net effect of reducing inequality is demonstrably to increase income growth. Thus, these three factors together would tend to stimulate the economy even if the increase is otherwise neutral in effect, because it would reduce income inequality. Moreover, employers are receive benefits offsetting the higher wage costs, because:

• The stimulation of effective demand from wage increases in response to an increase in the minimum wage, through all of the above mechanisms, will provide offsetting revenues for employers;
• Raising wages to meet a higher minimum wage will reduce the pressure for collective bargaining, and help avoid the potential cost of strikes and other labor relations strife.

At the state level, concerns about employers moving away from the state to avoid the minimum wage are unrealistic. Large employers, like Walmart, Lowes, Target, AT&T or Verizon, cannot move and continue to serve the same customer base, nor would they need to move. Smaller businesses have already been largely marginalized by or consolidated into the big companies, and “middle class” business income has significantly declined. An increase in the federal minimum wage eliminates any possible advantage of moving, and the similarity of most state minimum wages today suggests that little advantage currently exists.

Taking income and wealth distribution in effect, therefore, leads to the conclusion that raising the minimum wage will tend to increase business income, benefiting all marginal and small businesses that are struggling to survive. Increasing the minimum wage at the national level would have the greatest positive effect on growth.

Republicans routinely oppose increases in the minimum wage, because their supply-side ideology prevents recognition of the positive income effects I have identified. Instead, they make strained supply-side arguments. Ted Cruz, for example, a few days ago argued that “I think the minimum wage systematically hurts the most vulnerable” (here). His reasoning was that when you order food on an iPad at a fast food restaurant “you’re seeing the minimum wage.” That’s a flawed argument: Although iPad ordering may increase ordering efficiency, it does not necessarily reduce labor requirements at fast food restaurants. Even if technological enhancements reduce labor requirements, there is no a priori reason to assume that investing in the more capital intensive approach will likely reduce total cost of output, and that low end labor cost would be a decisive factor.

Donald Trump is the only Republican  candidate for the presidency in the past two years, so far as I am aware, who has ever supported an increase in the minimum wage. However, back in August of 2015 (here), he argued that “having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this county.”  He suggested that decisions to locate or relocate were based on differences among the states in the minimum wage, but he quickly backed away from that insensible claim, arguing:”But we are no longer competing against one state against the other. … It’s the United States against other places. Where the taxes are lower, where the wages are lower, where lots of things are” lower.

With “lots of things” driving business out of this country, it would hardly make sense to try to prevent the exodus by holding wages, down. The median income has fallen ten percent over the last eight years, and real incomes of the bottom 80% have been stagnant since 1980. And as higher paying jobs have relocated out of the country, the American work force has had to adjust to taking the available, lower-paying work. Reflecting this shift of the workforce to lower-paying jobs, there has been a steady shift in the “most common” job in the states from “secretaries” in 1978 to “truck, delivery and tractor drivers” in 2014 (here).

Of course, minimum wage requirements apply to secretaries and truck drivers too; but the concentration of truck drivers is increasing because these are all jobs that cannot be exported. None of this provides a basis for not increasing the minimum wage. The GOP claim that an increase in the minimum wage would hurt low income people and business is baseless.

Even though the minimum wage is important as a backstop against increased poverty, and the drift of more and more households toward the poverty threshold, the problem of low and declining real incomes across the board in America is a much bigger problem. More recently, The Guardian (here) reported that Trump “flip-flops” on wages and the minimum wage issue:

Donald Trump, billionaire Republican presidential frontrunner, has changed his mind about wages: Americans aren’t earning enough. He’s also not keen on Wall Street. The shift has Trump on a collision course with Democrat Bernie Sanders – while oddly agreeing with many of his points.

“Wages in are [sic] country are too low, good jobs are too few, and people have lost faith in our leaders. We need smart and strong leadership now!” Trump tweeted on Monday.

The opinion appeared to reverse what the Republican frontrunner said in November during the fourth Republican debate. Asked if he was sympathetic to the protesters demanding a $15-an-hour minimum wage, Trump said: “I can’t be.”

This report falsely conflates the minimum wage with wage levels generally. There is no inconsistency between Trump’s position that the minimum wage is not too low (which as just discussed is not persuasive) and his recognition that American wages in general are too low. The latter argument pits him, as he responds directly to the demands of his middle-aged white working-class support base, squarely against the GOP establishment by admitting that income inequality is a macroeconomic problem.

Increasing the minimum wage will provide modest economic benefits, and slightly reduce the growing number of former middle class income earners that are drifting toward and over the poverty line. Increasing the minimum wage is a good idea, and we should do it, but that won’t begin to counter the damage to lower income groups caused by the forces of growing inequality.

Breaking Up the Big Banks

A more significant issue addressed in the Brooklyn debate is the question of breaking up the big banks. Hillary Clinton argued that Sanders was remiss in not explaining how he would break up the big banks and leaving it to the banks to work out, but then, curiously, she pointed out that the banks have been charged in the Dodd-Frank legislation with working out their own plans for dissolution in the case of another banking crisis. Sanders correctly argued that developing the details of dissolution must be left to the big banks in the first instance.

Clinton attempted to minimize the danger of a big bank failure, arguing as Krugman did in his recent Op-ed “Sanders Over the Edge” (here) that it was the smaller “shadow” banks, not the big banks, that were “really at the heart of the financial crisis.” Incredibly, Krugman has missed the point: It is the big banks who were bailed out by U.S. taxpayers to prevent economic collapse, and the burden of the bailout fell disproportionately on low income groups. The reporter Matt Taibbi immediately, and correctly, shredded Krugman’s Op-ed in a Rolling Stone article “Why the Banks Should Be Broken Up” (here).

Clinton argued she would definitely act, should the need arise, to prevent a recurrence of that cataclysmic event. Sanders responded that this wait and see approach is inadequate and the banks simply must be broken up now. He reacted sarcastically to Clinton’s argument that she has “called out” the big banks in the past. The media argued that chiding Clinton in this way was inappropriate, but there is a serious point here: The concern of the Sanders campaign about the big donations Clinton is getting from Wall Street corporations, and her unwillingness to release the transcripts of private speeches she has given at Wall Street gatherings (a point she waffled on when Dana Bash pressed her about it) cannot be easily dismissed in connection with enforcing Wall Street reform.

Regardless, Sanders is correct on the issue of breaking up the big banks. Dana Bash pointed out in her question that the Federal Reserve and FDIC had just jointly announced (here) that 5 of the 6 largest banks are still too big to fail (The New York Times, here): Eight years after passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation, these banks still had not developed adequate “living will” provisions for dissolving in the case of another crisis in a way that would prevent the need for taxpayer bailouts to avoid catastrophe.The danger of another such event is growing with significant debt bubbles inflating that could burst at any time. It is common knowledge that regulators and economists did not see the 2008 crash coming, and it is irresponsible to ignore that risk now, knowing how dangerous it would be to put “living will” provisions to the test in an emergency.

In the debate, Sanders appropriately held firm to his commitment to break up the big banks now, rather than wait for another disaster to take place. The media characterize Sanders’s positions as “radical” but there is nothing radical about avoiding an extremely debilitating crash that would likely hasten the onset of another Great Depression. The “living will” approach, quite frankly, was a stop-gap measure that avoided dealing immediately with the “to big to fail” problem, preserving the high profitability of the  private banking system.

Of course, the GOP will never support tampering with its money-making machine. There is no difference between Trump and Cruz in this regard. Given the general media ignorance of the banking issue, the political advantage falls to the GOP: An unwary public is being misled into ignoring a very dangerous situation.

Inequality and Growth

The same can be said about the popular perspectives on inequality and growth, and the role of taxation in controlling both, that has permeated federal policy and infected the political atmosphere in every election cycle. Because of the long-term dominance of economic thinking by “neoclassical” economics, almost everyone is blinded to the extent of the danger we face from inequality growth. I have written a thorough account of the failure of the economics profession and of the disastrous consequences the “neoclassical synthesis” has had for the U.S. and world economies. Hopefully, it will soon be published, but I have been blogging my thesis here for several years, so I’ll just summarize the basic points here:

• As income inequality grows, “economic” (i.e., income) growth declines, substantially and, over time, exponentially. This is consistently proved over the entire century of income tax records, and theoretically required by the quantity theory of money;
• U.S. inequality has grown since 1980 because the wealthiest Americans and their corporations have been allowed to take in too much money (profit and rent) for the value they provide, and have been allowed (through reduced taxation) to keep too much of it as accumulated wealth;
• This has led to steady decline, and will lead eventually to depression and collapse; after 35 years of the Reagan Revolution we have already suffered one collapse (the Crash of 2008) and we can expect more as our depression worsens.

The officially unrecognized signs of this debilitating process are everywhere, but it has advanced to the point where economic factors have caused a political revolution that is ripping apart both political party establishments. Consider the following evidence which is becoming increasingly apparent over the last two years:

• Income growth has been gradually declining for several decades, as inequality has grown, and recently aggregate growth has fallen to one percent or less. Because aggregate growth includes the high income growth going to the top, lower incomes are necessarily declining;
• The median income has fallen 10% since the Crash of 2008; and the number of households living in poverty or near poverty is increasing rapidly as below median incomes decline ever faster;
• Interests rates have been near zero for several years, an unprecedented failure of the monetary system which means the demand for capital remains very low;
• The low demand for capital is explained by the gradual shrinking of the economy. According to EPI estimates, between 1983 and 2009, 40.9% of all wealth gains went to the top 1%, and 81.7% of all wealth gains went to the top 5%. Meanwhile, the bottom 60% lost 7.5% of its wealth. Growth in the level of economic activity therefore continues to decline;
• Meanwhile, wealth is accumulating at the top. Corporations increasingly buy back outstanding shares of their stock, reducing their payout obligations, a clear sign of economic contraction, and as the demand for investment funds in the U.S. shrinks, several trillions of dollars have been removed to offshore accounts.

Clearly, the GOP narrative that income growth is merely a business management problem is false: The “supply-side” neoclassical economics that sustains that narrative fails to address the need for effective consumer demand to promote growth.

Taxation

Ever since the Reagan Revolution began, its cornerstone policy has been reducing the income tax burden on the wealthy and their corporations. This point, thoroughly addressed in previous posts, will only to be highlighted here: The top income tax rate on ordinary income was reduced from 71% to 35% since 1980, and the top marginal capital gains tax rate has been kept considerably lower. The justification for this systematic tax avoidance has been the supply-side claim that lower taxation of the wealthy encourages increased investment and job creation, and promotes income growth. That “trickle-down” argument is just the opposite of the truth, as is finally becoming abundantly clear. It remains the official economic policy of Republican orthodoxy, nonetheless, and every GOP presidential candidate this year has promoted more tax decreases for the rich and more tax relief for  corporations, even as they profess a desire to promote growth. On February 22, 2016, Jackie Calmes reported in the New York Times (here):

The tax plans of the Republican presidential candidates would cut federal revenues as much as $12 trillion over a decade, a post-World War II record eclipsing the deep tax cuts of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. And they would come just as America faces the costs of its aging baby-boom generation.

The combination of the tax cuts’ size and timing has many tax and budget policy analysts questioning their viability. The Republican rivals routinely denounce the current $14 trillion debt, but none has said how he would offset the revenues lost to his tax cuts, beyond unspecified cuts to domestic programs and repeals of some existing tax breaks.

Each candidate has said his tax cuts are needed to promote work, saving, investment and faster economic growth.

“I believe by cutting taxes and simplifying the tax code, we will grow our economy and create more taxpayers rather than more taxes,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has said.

Tax policy groups agree generally, but only if the revenue losses are offset by budget savings that avoid piling up more debt that would be counterproductive to spurring the economy.

Tax policy groups generally agree, we are told, with trickle-down economics. Thus, the prevalent mainstream belief is that trickle-down works in the long run, so long as we avoid too much additional short-run debt accumulation by cutting government spending. This caveat is the so-called “austerity doctrine” which has proved unworkable at home and abroad for decades. Both ideas are dead wrong: Income and wealth do not trickle back down, but accumulate and concentrate at the top, as just discussed.

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders advocate higher taxes for the rich, but the Clinton “liberal gradualism” as described by Rex Smith (and that was just today endorsed by his newspaper, the Albany Times Union, here) ignores the continuing drag on economic growth and concentration of income and wealth at the top resulting from the tax decreases at the top that created this problem to begin with. That’s a frame of mind I call “partial trickle-down.”

            Paul Krugman’s “Partial Trickle-down”

            This remaining difference between Sanders an Clinton will prove to be the most significant of all, and it can be traced back to Paul Krugman’s belief that inequality is just a “political” problem. As I have pointed out countless times, he fails to recognize the concentration of income at the top and the associated transfers of wealth. This perspective has led him, somehow, to recognize that reducing taxes on top incomes will not stimulate growth but to deny or overlook the fact that those tax cuts actually reduced growth. From that erroneous perspective, it is easy to deny that restoring the previous levels of taxation would restore the previous level of growth and, more to the point, that doing so is needed to restore that growth. In short, Krugman misses the entire mechanism of income redistribution associated with income inequality growth.

This is no trivial problem – it is a problem with major dimensions. Not only can we not rely on increasing the minimum wage to provide any significant stimulus, but nothing else is available to stop the huge decline. Fiscal and monetary policy are no longer available to influence growth. Fiscal policy only works if you eventually pay back the loans. However, we now have over $18 trillion of national debt that can never be paid off under the current tax structure, and the top 1% has gained roughly $25 trillion of additional wealth since 1980, about one-half of that concentrated in the top 0.1% of wealth holders. Inequality is our most serious economic problem, and to prevent the accelerating slide toward a collapse into another Great Depression there is no alternative to greatly increasing the taxation at the top.

As I have pointed out, the Congressional Budget Office has projected that by 2021 the interest on the national debt will exceed the entire defense budget, the nation’s largest discretionary budget item, and that projection was made without taking into account the drag on growth created by the ever-growing inequality. Our government is effectively bankrupt, because it cannot repay its existing debt, and it must borrow to pay the interest on that debt. It is not at all clear that the dollar can be sustained long enough to get through the first term of the next presidency.

It is their perception of the gravity of the situation, and the extensive evidence of decline, that led Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley to become the first U.S. Senator to announce his support for Bernie Sanders on April 13 (here), and Alison McLean Lane, an Albany County Legislator, to support Sanders in a letter to the Times Union published April 14 (here). In support of their endorsements, both offered their observations of the continuing long-term decline they have experienced. Lane offered this explanation:

The school district my 4-year-old twins will attend this fall has a student body of which 11 percent are homeless and 36 percent live in poverty. If I sent my children today to the same university I attended, it would bankrupt us.

Here are three more alarming statistics that explain why this epidemic is in this legislative district: In 1980, 11.7 percent of the entire income of New York went to the top 1 percent; in 2015, that number soared to 30.2 percent; yet, America’s suburban poverty rate is 11.8 percent, the highest since 1967. Our entire state should be screaming from the rafters over statistics like this.

We live in the world’s wealthiest nation, yet our country has one of the highest poverty rates of any developed nation. We have homeless veterans and children, but our nation spent $2 billion a day on two wars. We could have housed, fed and clothed these vulnerable populations.

Merkley offered a similar assessment:

I grew up in working-class Oregon. On a single income, my parents could buy a home, take a vacation and help pay for college. My father worked with his hands as a millwright and built a middle-class life for us.

My parents believed in education and they believed in the United States. When I was young, my father took me to the grade school and told me that if I went through those doors, and worked hard, I could do just about anything because we lived in America. My dad was right.

Years later, my family and I still live in the same working-class community I grew up in. But America has gone off track, and the outlook for the kids growing up there is a lot gloomier today than 40 years ago.

Many middle-class Americans are working longer for less income than decades ago, even while big-ticket expenses like housing, health care and college have relentlessly pushed higher.

I have discussed in earlier posts how neoclassical economics, especially the “neoclassical synthesis” promoted by Paul Samuelson (Paul Krugman’s PhD faculty adviser) over the last 60 years, has perverted the thinking of mainstream economists. That perverted thinking insists that our economy will continue to grow, and to thrive “in the long run” despite continuous evidence that the alleged pendulum forces (a la Alfred Marshall, circa 1880) and the forces of the “rocking horse” (a la Paul Samuelson, circa 1953) are just fantasies. Now, at last, enough evidence has accumulated for people to seriously question the very foundations of modern mainstream economics.

That is what I have done. No one will take my word for the advanced degree of the neoclassical perversion, however, so I have written it up in a 500-page book that I am seeking to publish as soon as possible. This election cycle makes this summary of my findings essential.

Conclusion

In the general election, it will be crucial to elect the democratic presidential candidate, and to restore a democratic majority to both houses of Congress. If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, Bernie Sanders (as his wife Jane has already announced, in the April 13 interview with Jane Sanders entitled “The need for party unity,” here) will vote for her, and we can expect Sanders to do everything in his power to dissuade his supporters from defecting, and to encourage them to vote for Clinton, and for Democrats across the board. This, by the way, was a revealing caution from Jane Sanders, given that her husband is still in the race and has won seven of the last eight primary caucuses.

If Sanders does not get the nomination, we must fervently hope that Clinton wins and that what she has learned in this election cycle has informed her natural progressive tendencies sufficiently that she will be able to avoid the major catastrophe that looms ahead in the not-too-distant future. Basic elements of the Sanders economic plan should be adopted for the Democratic Party’s platform in the fall.

JMH – 4/17/2016

I’m over seventy years old, and in my view the 2016 election cycle is easily the strangest, and probably the most historically significant, of my lifetime.  The U.S and world economic and political situation is more dangerous today than it has been at any time since World War II. Economic issues always control elections, but economic issues are so important this year that they are causing radical changes in political orthodoxy. Both of the major political parties in this primary cycle face revolution as voters mount a major revolt against their party establishment’s perspectives and positions.

In the GOP, great numbers of voters are turning to Donald Trump, and many Democratic voters are turning to Bernie Sanders. This year, the New York State primaries are pivotal for both parties, and both of these candidates were campaigning yesterday (April 11) in my home area of Albany, New York. The political firestorm that raced through my home town reaffirmed my impression of the disintegration of “politics as usual” in this campaign cycle.

The new political revolution is bottomed on the failure of the economy. Lurking in the background, however, is the failure of the economics profession, both political parties, the media, and the voting population to fully grasp the danger posed by growing inequality. This has given the contentiousness in the debates of both parties a bizarre character. The Democratic race has been especially unpredictable, because the two candidates agree on the goals but convey a very different sense  of urgency about meeting them.

Despite its overwhelming importance in our lives, everyone avoids the topic of “economics” like the plague. The reason economics is regarded as such a “dismal” topic is that almost no one understands how the economy actually works.  This is not a new problem: In every election cycle, enormous public ignorance and confusion have invited an endless parade of distortions, false claims and misrepresentations by politicians. In an atmosphere in which exaggeration and falsehood are expected, even the most objective media analysts have steered away from directly addressing the factual substance of economic issues: In the heart of any campaign season, it is so much easier for broadcast media chit-chat to focus on voter preferences and delegate counts, and the candidates’ positions on issues are routinely reduced to slogans and sound bites.

This campaign cycle has been no exception, but the result in 2016 has been extremely surreal. The Republican Party is virtually dissolving before our eyes, and the Democratic party is also in a major crisis. The current state of political confusion, and the class warfare that perpetuates it, has resulted in what is shaping up to be the ugliest presidential campaign season since WW II. The reason, I submit, is the gradual decline of our economy over many years and the rebellion, at long last, of the victimized middle- and lower-class income earners against the economic establishment.

The GOP and the Trump Conundrum

The primaries have narrowed the race for the Republican presidential nomination down to a choice between two candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The field has narrowed substantially in the last two months, and Cruz, who eked out a victory in the Iowa caucus on February 1 after Trump boycotted the Fox News debate before the caucus, is now the only viable Trump opponent still standing. Cruz easily won the Wisconsin primary on April 5 when Trump’s popularity began to fade in light of Mitt Romney’s blistering repudiation in early March (here), and the outrage that followed Trump’s interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on the eve of the primary, where he argued for punishment of women who get illegal abortions.Trump has also aroused concern about his fitness for the presidency, for reasons like his cavalier support for a nuclear arms race among smaller countries and his argument for the potential offensive use of nuclear weapons.

Both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump passed through New York’s Capital District in recent days, as did Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is staying in the race in case of a deadlocked convention. The Albany Times Union extensively reported yesterday’s events, including the “3 cases for change” presented by Kasich, Sanders, and Trump. The newspaper’s “Election 2016 pages reported attendance of 500 at the Kasich rally in Troy, 4,000 at the Sanders rally in Albany, and 15,000 at the Trump rally in Albany. Whatever his prospects for winning the Republican nomination may actually be, Donald Trump is still drawing large crowds to his rallies.  

Ted Cruz passed through the area about a week ago, holding a rally in Scotia (here). Cruz has never been near the top of the GOP preferred list of presidential candidates. He is an extremely right-wing “tea party” libertarian, highly unpopular within his own party, who would think nothing of shutting down the government, come hell or high water. He is a religious fanatic who supports government by biblical law (here). From his perspective, federal taxes on the wealthy and corporations cannot be too low, and his stump speech in Scotia reiterated his proposal for a regressive flat tax. Regardless, some Republican voters see Cruz as the only viable alternative at this point. An attendee at the Scotia rally from Clifton Park, Rich Rivetz, was quoted as saying: “Trump is psychotic and Kasich doesn’t have a chance, so there you have it.”

Donald Trump’s popularity in this primary season, despite his many drawbacks, has an anti-establishment  economic explanation: As the GOP establishment disintegrates, the middle-aged, working-class, white male segment of its base, the locus of the party’s racists, malcontents, and misogynists, has gravitated to Trump and, until recently, Trump’s supporters have been impervious to his lack of political maturity. These voters are hearing from Trump what they have been waiting for someone to say, namely, that the GOP establishment has sold them out, pandering for their support while reneging on its promise to create jobs and raise incomes. They are hurting economically, and as their incomes and standard of living steadily decline they are, at long last, starting to see themselves as victims of the corporate oligarchy that runs the GOP and the country. Consider this succinct summary by Michael Maiello in “The Republican Civil War Has Begun,” Rolling Stone, March 25, 2016 (here):

The conservative intelligentsia – the collection of free traders, tax cutters and government shrinkers who have dictated the Republican Party’s agenda since the Eighties – have had it with the losers of globalization who make up a significant portion of the party’s base: the white males of modest education who have been most full-throated in their support of Donald Trump.

In the mainstream organs like the op-ed pages of The New York Times or the editorials of The Wall Street Journal, right-wing columnists might support using the Republican convention process to deny Trump the nomination, but they discuss it in language that offers some respect to the legitimate anger of Trump’s supporters. Last week, David Brooks tried to play nice (here), writing, “Well, some respect is in order. Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams.”

Brooks’ niceties will prove too weak a dam to hold back the anger that conservative intellectuals indulge with every Trump victory. The Trump supporters might register Republican and have been counted on to vote the party’s way in past elections (flirting for a while with Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, then voting for George H.W. Bush and Robert Dole against the hated Bill Clinton in the general) but they are, from the point of view of right-leaning think tanks, pretty lousy conservatives.

Trump’s appeal, remarkably, seems to extend across the entire base of Republican and Independent voters, despite his obvious shortcomings: Economic adversity is not limited to middle-aged white male voters, and Trump is likely gaining broad support for his attack on the undemocratic nature of the primary delegate selection process. The Democratic Party faces the same problem, of course: In American politics, there never has been a guarantee that a party’s most popular candidate will get the party’s nomination.

The GOP Strategy for Success

But there is a more fundamental explanation for Trump’s popularity. The GOP is a minority party: Gallup figures released in January 2015 (here) revealed that in 2014 a record 43% of voters identified as Independent, with 30% identifying as Democrat and 26% as Republican.Because it represents and promotes the interests of only about 1% of voters, it is remarkable that the GOP has been able to control the U.S. Congress as much as it has over the years.

In the days of monarchies, when political power was inherited, economic inequality could be imposed by force. In a “democracy,” however, the masses must be swindled into supporting policies against their own interests. The GOP has accomplished that feat with a combination of strategies, including deflection away from economic issues, and catering to all forms of social and religious prejudice and discontent, such as racial bigotry and opposition to women’s rights. On issues where facts are important but reality gets in the way, such as climate change, the GOP has been known for its lies and hypocrisy.Since the Reagan Administration, there has been a persistent GOP call for lower taxes on the rich and their corporations. Republicans have used a perversion of economics known as “voodoo economics” – a “trickle-down” fantasy supporting ever more tax reductions at the top. Every Republican candidate for the presidency this year supports lower taxes for the rich and for corporations.

Controlling U.S. taxation has not been enough to satisfy the ultra-rich, however. In the last few years substantial evidence has emerged of tax avoidance on a massive scale, totaling many trillions of dollars, as corporations have moved their legal residences out of the country, and massive sums are secretly placed in off-shore accounts (See, e.g., “Don’t Blame Panama. Tax Evasion is a Global Problem,” by Juan Carlos Varela, President of Panama, here).

The help of mainstream economics has been enlisted to persuade people that the wealthy can get wealthier without limit, with no harm to anyone else. Only the widespread aversion to the “dismal science” has permitted this fairly obvious falsehood to go unrecognized. But even ordinary people with no background in economics are beginning to see clearly that the oligarchy has gone too far. Inequality growth is way out of control, and people are enduring its effects. The wonder is not that the GOP is losing the support of the base it has betrayed, but that it has taken this long for the political revolution to take place.

The Democratic Dilemma

A Salada tea bag I have seen several times, the latest being on a work break today, says that: “Among economists, the real world is often a special case.” That puts it mildly: We’ve been deeply misled, for more than 120 years, by an elitist ideology called “neoclassical” economics, an ideology in which assumptions and presumptions are routinely substituted for real world evidence. I’ve been researching, writing, and blogging about this problem, and about the enormous threat posed by income inequality, for more than four years. Our popular attachment to bad ideology has been so profound that, I fear, that realistic, fact-based perspectives on how the economy really works will not coalesce rapidly enough to avoid the collapse of the U.S. economy into an even deeper depression. The forces that create inequality are still at work, unabated, and the process is accelerating. The collapse of our political orthodoxy is a symptom of that process.

With the GOP disintegrating, the Democratic Party ought to have a reasonable opportunity not only to win the Presidency in November, but also to regain control of both houses of Congress. Then the United States might be able to moonwalk back from the brink of economic disaster. However, there have been recent signs of discord and confusion within the Democratic party as well.

It is fair to say that before the primaries began, Hillary Clinton expected to win the Democratic nomination fairly easily, and that the enormous success of the Sanders campaign has been as unexpected as the success of the Trump campaign. Sanders, who lost narrowly in the Iowa caucuses, has won most of the primaries since Super Tuesday. He won in Michigan on March 8, and he won five straight primaries before winning by a large margin in Wisconsin on April 5 (here). A breakdown of the voting in Wisconsin reported by the New York Times helps understand why:

• The Wisconsin voters cited the economy as their top concern
• On the issues, voters significantly favored Sanders who were most concerned about income inequality (66%/34%), the economy and jobs (54%/46%), and health care (53%/47%), as did those who were concerned about the effect of international trade on U.S. jobs (54%/45%). Voters who were most afraid about terrorist attacks leaned toward Clinton (56%/43%), as did those who felt the U.S. role in world affairs should increase (55%/44%). Those who want the U.S. to be less active in world affairs favored Sanders (74%/25%).
• Age was a huge factor. The youngest reported age group, 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Sanders (81%/18%), as did the 30-44 age group (66%/33%), while the 45-64 age group leaned toward Clinton (54%/46%) and the 65 and older group overwhelmingly supported Clinton (63%/37%).
• Women favored Clinton 50%/49%, but men favored Sanders 63%/36%.

Clinton was stung by the extent of her loss to Sanders in Wisconsin, and with a new sense of desperation, her campaign developed a plan to win the primary contest in her adoptive home state of New York which was reported by CNN on April 6 in this report: “Clinton plan: Defeat Sanders, then unify Democratic party.” According to the report:

The Clinton campaign has been watching these Wisconsin results come in, and the delegate race of course is tight there, but the reality is they’re running out of patience. So they’re going to begin deploying a new strategy, it’s going to be called disqualify him, defeat him and then they can unify the party later. Disqualify him, defeat him, and unify the party later.

            The Gun Control Issue

As reported in the Albany Times Union  on April 7, The AP reported on the initial thrust of this strategy:

Armed with a blistering tabloid cover, Hillary Clinton is pitting Bernie Sanders against the parents of children murdered in Sandy Hook, part of an effort to punch her way into the critical New York primary.

The inflammatory rhetoric underscores the importance of the April 19 New York contest to her campaign and the mounting frustration of Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, with the lingering primary battle.

That irritation spilled out into the public arena Wednesday, when Clinton released a flurry of attacks on Sanders, questioning his truthfulness, preparedness for the presidency and loyalty to Democratic party principles.

The Sandy Hook massacre was used in an attempt to characterize Sanders as opposed to gun control and unsympathetic to victims of gun violence. The AP article continued:

During an appearance on MSNBC Wednesday morning, Clinton pointed to a New York Daily News cover criticizing Sanders for saying he did not think victims of a gun crime should be able to sue the manufacturer. His comments came when the newspaper’s editorial board asked him about a wrongful death lawsuit against a rifle maker over the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. “That he would place gun manufacturers’ rights and immunity from liability against the parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook is just unimaginable to me,” said Clinton, who has long sought to highlight the candidates’ differences on guns.

In the interview with the Daily News editorial board, Sanders said he did not think gun crime victims should be able to sue gun manufacturers. But he did say people should be able to sue dealers and manufacturers who sell when they know “guns are going to the hands of wrong people.” He also said he supported a ban on assault weapons.

This article correctly reported Sanders’ reaction. In my opinion, this was a cheap shot by the Daily News on behalf of the Clinton campaign. I watched the interview, and the Daily News editorial staff was clearly gunning for Sanders, looking for a sound bite that could be used to suggest that Sanders was opposed to gun control.  In response to a question about his views on gun control, Sanders replied that his gun control agenda is the same as Obama’s: He supports efforts to strengthen and expand background checks, to do away with the gun show loophole, and to eliminate the ability to buy a gun legally and sell it to someone who is a criminal.

Sanders was then asked about the Connecticut lawsuit in which the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre are attempting to sue the manufacturer of the assault rifle used in the massacre. After Sanders clarified that the precise question he was asked was whether he believes victims of gun violence should “be able to sue” gun manufacturers, he said “No, I do not.” At that point the interviewer, having obtained his desired sound bite, tried to move on: “I know we’re short on time – two quick questions. Your website talks about…” But Sanders continued, finishing his answer: “But I do believe that gun manufacturers and gun dealers should be able to be sued when they should know that guns are going into the hands of the wrong people. So somebody walks in and says, ‘I’d like ten thousand rounds of ammunition, you know, there might be grounds for that suit. But if you sell me a legal product — what you’re really saying…” The interviewer interrupted at that point, asking whether the AR-15 assault rifle “should never have been in the hands of the public to begin with.” Sanders answered unequivocally, “I do not support the sale of assault weapons in the United States.”

Sander’s record on gun control has been thoroughly vetted, as the Daily News editors must have known. In the CNN Democratic Primary debate in Las Vegas on October 13, 2015, for example, Sanders said: “Bernie Sanders has a D-minus voting rating from the NRA. Back in 1988, when I first ran for Congress, I supported a ban on assault weapons,” and he lost that election.

For me, this episode with irresponsible journalism by the Daily News editorial board marked a low point in the Democratic primaries. Shortly thereafter, Sanders made his now famous statement that Hillary Clinton is not “qualified” to be president. That unfortunate comment was made with reference to the big donations her PAC receives from corporate donors, but nonetheless, it was a very poor choice of words. Sanders has since retracted that statement.

Although there are signs in the last few days that the solidarity the Democratic Party needs to win in November may be repairing, the New York primary is crucial to both candidates, and we’ll have to see how the Clinton/Sanders debate goes Friday evening in Brooklyn.

The Crucial Economic Issues

Paul Krugman, Hillary Clinton’s economic adviser, has dangerously contributed to this divisiveness, hawking for the Clinton campaign.  In “Sanders Over the Edge,” New York Times, April 8, 2016 (here) Krugman harshly condemned Sanders:

On many major issues — including the signature issues of his campaign, especially financial reform — he seemed to go for easy slogans over hard thinking. And his political theory of change, his waving away of limits, seemed utterly unrealistic.

In my last post on this blog, I pointed out how Krugman teamed and other mainstream economists in the Democratic Party establishment to improperly attribute an unrealistic Congressional Budget Office economic growth projection to Gerald Friedman, the Sanders campaign’s economic adviser. The argument was that Sanders is making promises that cannot be kept, and that the Clinton plan – which is essentially to move slowly on economic reforms – is the sensible approach to take. That was an erroneous critique, however, and it seriously misrepresented the Sanders economic report. Krugman appears to be alluding to that critique here with his argument that Sanders is “waving away” limits.

In this article, Krugman lashes out at the proposal to break up the big banks with a dubious argument that the crisis in the Crash of 2008 centered on “shadow banks” that “weren’t necessarily that big.” Krugman says that “pounding the table about big banks misses the point.” Frankly, Krugman has missed the point about the growth of income inequality all along, claiming in his 2012 book that inequality is just a “political” problem. And it was not the smaller shadow banks that had to be bailed out by taxpayers after the Crash of 2008. The wealthy investment class recovered their losses after the Crash, but lower-income classes, which lost an estimated $7 trillion, have not recovered. The cost to taxpayers is a major point that Krugman is missing, and it is a big reason for the success so far of the Sanders and Trump campaigns against the respective party establishments.

The Krugman piece goes downhill from there. He argues:

[T]he way Mr. Sanders is now campaigning raises serious character and values issues. It’s one thing for the Sanders campaign to point to Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street connections, which are real, although the question should be whether they have distorted her positions, a case the campaign has never even tried to make.

Seriously? It is up to Hillary Clinton to demonstrate that her Wall Street connections have not conflicted her abilities and judgments as president. Big donors always expect to have influence, whether they are giving to presidential or Congressional campaigns. There is no mystery about that.

Krugman ends his rant with an irresponsible suggestion that Bernie Sanders might “join the ‘Bernie or bust’ crowd, walking away and possibly helping put Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the White House.” What “Bernie or bust” crowd? This is a figment of Krugman’s imagination, and a petulant insult to Sanders and his supporters, and it seems to be a part of the campaign to “disqualify” Sanders and unify the party later: No one who wants economic improvement would ever vote for a Republican and for more trickle-down economic policy.

Hillary Clinton does understand that trickle-down doesn’t work, but she and her economic adviser need to know a lot more about the economics of inequality. Wealth is transferring to the top by the hundreds of billions each of dollars year, and well over $20 trillion has transferred to the top since 1980. This continuing inequality growth trend means that any benefit that might be achieved by raising the minimum wage will be swamped by the growth wealth and income losses from increased inequality.

I realize that this distributional perspective on economics is still relatively new, but Paul Krugman has had plenty of time to learn about the effects of inequality. When he was interviewed by the BBC three years ago, he refused to offer any explanation for his disagreement with Joseph Stiglitz on the issue. In my view, a true progressive would have shown more sympathy with the victims of inequality all along.

Attacking inequality is what the Sanders campaign is all about, and as I argued recently in a short letter to the editor of the Albany Times Union, (here) that should be the salient issue in this campaign. Hillary Clinton, should she win the nomination and go on to be President of the United States, will discover the truth about inequality economics soon enough, after a great deal more economic damage has been done. It is Paul Krugman, not Bernie Sanders, who is behaving irresponsibly.

JMH – 4/13/2016