Bob Lord

Conservatives (including those who identify as “fiscally conservative but socially liberal”) generally are quick to “defend” the super wealthy and, in doing so, to justify inequality.

It’s actually easy to do in the early stages of the conversation. Unless you favor communism in its purest form, you have to agree that inequality, in the abstract, is acceptable.

Justifying inequality, as conservatives do, is one thing, but the sledding gets rough for conservatives when they’re asked to speak to degrees of inequality or to constantly increasing inequality (that is, the concentration of income and wealth).

Try this in conversation:

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Do Dems need to eat an election or two in order to succeed in the long run? I think so.

Jim Newell at Salon captures my thoughts exactly on the most hopeful path forward in How to Save the Democratic Party: Path to Nirvana Requires Total Economic Revamp. Newell:

This lack of imagination within the mainstream Democratic mind stems from its devotion to market-based solutions only. The championing of The Market as God — conservatives’ great ideological achievement — has closed the center-left to alternative ways of constructing a sound political economy. That means, as the Week’s Ryan Cooper writes in a piece responding to Marshall and others, that the simplest policy solutions are the ones most often overlooked.

Poverty and stagnant wages have a common root: a lack of money. And if you ignore the simplest imaginable solution to this problem — namely, handing out money — then restoring economic growth to the middle class is going to be really tough. Indeed, it might be impossible!

After the stark failure of neoliberal policy, blunter methods of raising incomes are at least worth a shot. These include policies like a universal basic income, a universal child credit, a climate dividend, and cash transfers known as helicopter drops.

The problem is not the soundness of these proposals. For a country as wealthy as ours not to have a basic income guarantee is ludicrous. I’ve written previously about the basic income guarantee here. The problem with these proposals is a short-term political problem. Newell continues:

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Conventional wisdom now has it that Democrats who lost in the mid-term made a huge mistake running from Obama. They should have touted his accomplishments.

I’m not so sure. I share the view Robert Reich expresses in The Real Reason Behind the Democrats Mid-Term Losses:

If you want a single reason for why Democrats lost big on Election Day 2014 it’s this: Median household income continues to drop.

This is the first “recovery” in memory when this has happened.

Jobs are coming back but wages aren’t.

Every month the job numbers grow but the wage numbers go nowhere.

Most new jobs are in part-time or low-paying positions. They pay less than the jobs lost in the Great Recession.

This wageless recovery has been made all the worse because pay is less predictable than ever.

Most Americans don’t know what they’ll be earning next year or even next month. Two-thirds are now living paycheck to paycheck.

So why is this called a “recovery” at all? Because, technically, the economy is growing.

But almost all the gains from that growth are going to a small minority at the top.

In fact, 100 percent of the gains have gone to the best-off 10 percent. Ninety-five percent have gone to the top 1 percent.

I also agree with the stark choice Reich says Democrats have two years to make:

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How many folks do you know who voted for Fred Duval, but also for Diane Douglas? Yeah, same here. How about Goddard – Douglas? Rotellini – Douglas?

Believe it or not, these voters do exist. There are thousands of them. Weird, huh? You know what’s even weirder? Almost all of them live in Pima County.

Maybe my tinfoil hat is on a bit too tight, but the county-by-county vote totals in the Supe race are kind of bizarre.

At this point, Garcia is leading in red Maricopa County by a slender margin, 374,068 to 373,998, but losing statewide. I don’t remember a Democrat in recent history who lost statewide after carrying Maricopa. Ordinarily, Maricopa is a much greater challenge than the state as a whole.

So what happened? Is Maricopa is not as much redder than the rest of the state as it used to be? Maybe, but the other three Democratic candidates all did better statewide than they did in Maricopa, whereas the opposite was true for Garcia.

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