Friday Open Thread [1.8.2016]
NATIONAL—Reuters: Trump 42, Cruz 14, Carson 11, Rubio 8, Bush 8, Christie 3, Paul 3, Huckabee 2, Kasich 1, Fiorina
Ed Kilgore says the GOP is gambling that Cruz will take out Trump and then be taken out himself:
At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver and his colleagues conducted a Slack chat Wednesday on this very subject, and they conclude Trump’s enemies are confident enough that he will stumble in Iowa and New Hampshire that they are willing to pause once again before panicking and going after Trump with tire irons. The one thing that’s still troublesome, however, is that the Establishment has yet to choose its own candidate to harvest the preordained victory in New Hampshire. Rubio seemed to be The Guy until recently, but now there’s a fresh buzz about Christie, and no one can talk Jeb Bush out of the race so long as he’s got $50 million or so in super-pac money left to burn. If the “wrong” Establishment candidate winds up finishing well in Iowa and gets the inevitable bounce in New Hampshire, it will probably be too late for the movers and shakers to recalibrate their strategy. And it would be something of a Pyrrhic victory for the Republican Establishment to block Trump at the price of giving Ted Cruz a path to the nomination as wide and straight as the Iowa stretch of I-80, which is what he’ll have if he wins the first two states and heads into the southern primaries like the second coming of Barry Goldwater.
Matt Yglesias says Hillary Clinton is actually confronting Bernie Sanders from the left on bank regulations:
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign did something a little unexpected early this week in advance of an expected Bernie Sanders speech on Wall Street reform — it tried to hit Sanders from the left by having campaign chief financial officer Gary Gensler accuse him of taking “a hands-off approach to some of the riskiest institutions and activities in our economy, which were among the biggest culprits during the 2008 crisis.” Sanders fired back through a spokesperson, Michael Briggs, who sniffed that the Vermont senator “won’t be taking advice on how to regulate Wall Street from a former Goldman Sachs partner.”
But while it’s certainly true that Gensler used to work at Goldman Sachs, he’s better known in policy circles for his more recent job chairing the Commodity Futures Regulatory Commission in the Obama administration, a vantage point from which he became a hero to many financial reformers by clashing with Tim Geithner and Larry Summers over a desire for stricter rules for Wall Street.
In a bit of a reversal of the usual political pattern, though, what began largely as an exercise in cynical gamesmanship and name-calling has evolved into a wonky policy dispute. It is one that touches on important aspects of financial regulation but that also more broadly speaks to a century-old divide in American thinking about how to deal with the problems of corporate power in sensitive segments of the economy. Is the most important thing to break up existing large companies and prevent the emergence of new large ones? Or is the most important thing to regulate and supervise companies, in which case having a market dominated by a finite number of small players might even be helpful?
The debate reflects the particular political circumstances of 2015 and the specific dynamics of the financial sector, but also essentially restages an argument between Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Go and read the whole thing.
Brian Beutler says Ted Cruz is exactly what the GOP needs:
Cruz would be the most unapologetically right-wing major-party nominee since Barry Goldwater, and would thus have an extremely difficult time appealing to the shrinking, but still-meaningful, pool of voters who are undecided between Democrats and Republicans. But he would also give the GOP something it desperately needs: an opportunity to purge its ranks of scores and scores of self-interested operatives and advisers who treat campaigns as opportunities to soak candidates and build networks of future clients. It would also provide a clarifying moment for the conservative movement and the rest of the country. For conservatives, it would be the first time since Ronald Reagan (or arguably Goldwater) that they’d see the Republican Party run a candidate who is a leader of the movement itself. For the broader public, a Cruz nomination would provide a referendum on the substantive aims of American conservatism, untempered for once by the unprincipled, election-driven impulse to tack to the center.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) made a racially charged comment during one of his regular town hall meetings about how he was tackling substance abuse in Maine, the Portland Press Herald reports.
Said LePage: “These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty… these types of guys… they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”
Impeach his rather large ass already, Maine.
Among the good people in the autism community, there is a clear and sometimes bitter divide. Some advocates focus on research into prevention and cures. Others clamor for more adult services that allow autistic people to thrive and shine with their unique wiring.
Perhaps recognizing that it takes a village to advance the cause of people who think differently, Hillary Clinton on Tuesday proposed a sweeping autism agenda that addresses the concerns of both camps.
The Democratic presidential front-runner wants new services, rights protections, and employment opportunities for adults with autism, and called for a first-ever U.S. study of adult autism prevalence and needs—all at the urging of Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit run by and for autistic people.
She also called for a “significant increase” in government funding for research into autism, the primary focus of some advocates. Autism Speaks has launched a groundbreaking genome sequencing program in hopes of improving diagnosis and treatment of autism. The group also offers tool kits that help autistic people live independently, and has built a website (created by a person with autism) that matches employers with potential employees on the spectrum.
I'm worried that if Trump wins the presidency, he'll just wind up leaving us for a younger European nation.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) January 6, 2016
Charlie Cook says Cruz will emerge as the viable anti-establishment choice: “I remain convinced that between now and the March 1 Super Tuesday/SEC primaries, and particularly the March 15 set of primaries and some contests after, those angry and profoundly anti-establishment voters will have finished venting their spleens. They will have sent their angry messages to the political establishment and will turn to the serious business of selecting a president, taking into account such things as temperament and judgment, marking the beginning of the end of their affair with Trump. They will coalesce behind a more plausible vehicle for their anger and anti-establishment views. That candidate is likely to be Cruz.”
Trita Parsi has a fascinating take on the rising tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
History teaches us that it is not rising states that tend to be reckless, but declining powers. Rising states have time on their side. They can afford to be patient: They know that they will be stronger tomorrow and, as a result, will be better off postponing any potential confrontation with rivals.
Declining states suffer from the opposite condition: Growing weaker over time, they know that time is not on their side; their power and influence is slipping out of their hands…
Saudi Arabia is exhibiting the psychology of a state that risks losing its dominant position and whose losing hand is growing weaker and weaker…
Iran, on the other hand, is by all accounts a rising power. Ironically, much of Iran’s rise is not due to its own actions, but must be credited to the reckless mistakes of its adversaries.
If you are one of those people who isn’t buying the Republican fear mongering about how this country is going to hell in a hand basket and the world is on fire, you’ll want to read Michael Grunwald’s piece titled: Everything Is (Even More) Awesome!
America is already great, and it’s getting greater. Not everything is awesome, but in general, things are even more awesome than they were a year ago. The rest of the world can only wish it had our problems.
Start with the economy, which, if you listen to Sanders or the Republicans, is a garbage dump of existential despair. Actually, it’s doing quite well. Unemployment has dropped from 10 percent during the worst of the Great Recession to 5 percent today, thanks to a record 69 consecutive months of private-sector employment growth that has produced 13.7 million new jobs. The past two years have been the best two years for job creation in the 21st century. After a near-death experience during the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. auto industry enjoyed record sales in 2015. The housing market has also rebounded from the crisis, and after-tax corporate profits are at an all-time high. It can sound partisan to mention those facts when a Democrat is in the White House, but they’re facts; it ought to be possible to acknowledge them without necessarily giving President Obama too much credit for them. […]
Growth is modest but steady. Inflation is low. Interest rates are very low, although the Fed felt confident enough about the recovery to raise them last month for the first time since the global financial meltdown. Gas is barely $2 (€1.86) a gallon. About 17 million uninsured Americans have gotten coverage in the past few years. The federal deficit has plunged from $1.4 trillion (€1.3 trillion) in 2009 to under $500 billion (€465.10 billion), while the dollar has gained strength against foreign currencies. […]
The most widespread criticism is that wages have been stagnant for decades, a legitimate problem, but wages actually grew 2 percent faster than inflation over the past year. Meanwhile, other recent developments — cheaper gas, free birth control and preventive care, the elimination of annual and lifetime caps on health insurance, expanded tax credits for the working poor, increased efficiency measures that lower energy bills, and much more — have put more money in the pockets of American families, even though their incomes have grown slowly. Health care prices have risen at their lowest rate in half a century since the passage of Obamacare, increasing just 1.3 percent over the past year. Tuition costs are still soaring and Americans now hold more than $1.2 trillion (€1.12 trillion) in student debt, but the Obama administration has quietly changed the rules to let borrowers cut their payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income and get their loans forgiven after 20 years. Savings rates have almost doubled since the crisis, and family debt burdens have dropped to 2002 levels.
In non-economic news, despite a year of furor over mass shootings and urban unrest, crime in big cities dropped about 5 percent in 2015, and has been cut in half since 1990. The teen birth rate is down more than 60 percent since 1990, and that’s not because of increasing abortions, because they’ve fallen by more than a third. U.S. oil imports are at their lowest level in nearly three decades, while wind generation is up more than threefold and solar generation is up 25-fold since 2008. Carbon emissions have dropped 10 percent from 2005 levels. High school graduation rates are at an all-time high, with the most striking gains for minorities and the poor. The financial sector is much safer, with much more capital to absorb banking losses, much less of the risky overnight funding that fuels panics, and much broader regulation of Wall Street institutions that once operated in the shadows. And despite all the rhetoric about border crises and wall-building, America’s population of undocumented immigrants has remained stable for the past five years.
This: Iran, on the other hand, is by all accounts a rising power is something that the US has needed to accept for a long time. Iran is, like it or not, going to be the power in the Middle East very soon and for most of this century.
On the other hand, Matt Gruenwald’s paean to the economy is not a needed response to “doom and gloom,” it’s just opposite-land talking points. The reality is that you can quote all the stats you like, but the US economy is changing (and often not for the better) in ways that our current bundle of statistical indicators does not measure.
Here’s just one example that came up in conversation with a bunch of parents of late teens and twenty-somethings, all of whose children are highly motivated and pursuing really good career paths (engineering, computer science, math, etc.): generationally these kids don’t care about possessions anywhere to the degree that Americans have done so for the past several decades. They don’t care about owning a home, many don’t care about owning a car. They don’t want bookcases full of books when they can have a tablet. They don’t give a shit about designer curtains or matching china or the newest convection oven, although they will pay through the nose for the best tech.
This is what some have called “the zero-marginal-cost” society, coming to life in the flesh–it is literally the post-industrial age writ large, occurring in the midst of a government and corporate sector so concerned with stimulating consumer spending and propping up manufacturing capabilities that it doesn’t even have a clue what’s actually coming. These kids want really good 3-D printers to make the smaller things they need from feedstock, and they want to pretty much order everything else (including their groceries) off of Amazon to be delivered by drones.
We have no candidate, no government office (except, sad to say, maybe DARPA) capturing that.
Steve: I’m not sure we have many people who even recognize that, let alone know how to manage the transition.
I, for one, am prepared to bow down to our future artificially intelligent overlords. It is far preferable to subjugation by the current unintelligent candidates on the Republican side.
Tom Coughlin (GIants) ?!?! Are you people freaking kidding me?
steve: I suspect your conversations with those parents were shaped by their particular economic circumstances. Hockessin parents, of which I am one, live in an economic bubble.
The UPS trucks roll every day delivering Amazon boxes on our street. When we want something, we usually order it from Amazon, so that is what our kids have grown up with. But that is not the reality for many. I don’t think Hockessin values can be projected onto an entire generation. Perhaps the redefined expectations you state for young adults can be attributed to their more fortunate circumstances, at least for the ones who are headed for college.
There’s some truth in that, puck, but what Steve’s seeing is happening. My son is a prime example. Money does not motivate him. He graduates with a Mech engineering degree this spring and I have no idea what sort of job he’ll take, other than this… he wants to love what he does. He will not settle, and since money doesn’t motivate him I doubt he’ll have to settle. He simply doesn’t need or want much.
And he’s not alone in his way of thinking. Not my son, daughter, nephew and many of their friends own a car, or are hoping/saving to buy a car. That boggles my mind. And all three of them, and many of their friends, use public transportation – yes, even in Wilmington. They smirk at Lexus ads and aren’t into designer labels (unless they score them at Goodwill or Marshalls) and think people who spend a fortune on labels are foolish. And here’s another thing I noticed – not one of them is interested in what pharmaceutical companies are selling. They listen to those endless ads, complete with side effects, and state that they would never take those drugs unless absolutely necessary. Big Pharma may have lost potential clients by winning their right to advertise. Any one seeing this phenomenon?
There’s a definite change in this generation. Oh, and they have very little interest in working for corporate America, and if they do land a job there, don’t expect them to stay. They learned well from their parents and grandparents, many of which were laid off from these companies. We’ve already heard companies grumbling about young people’s lack of commitment. LOL!
Puck, let’s assume you are correct for a second. (FTR I don’t think you are. I don’t live in Hockessin, and I have observed similar indicators in the past five years at DSU among lower SES/first-generation college student.)
But let’s go with this zero-marginal-cost mentality being confined to the super high-achieving sons and daughters of privilege majoring in high-tech fields. These are kids on their way to becoming the top 5% of the next generation in economic terms; many of them will leave college at age 22 to take first jobs in the high five- and low six-figure range. They are the upscale consumers who drive market trends, whose spending undergirds consumer confidence, whose debt is required to keep the whole credit industry revolving as they buy houses and cars, run up credit card debt.
And if a significant percentage of them check out of that behavior pattern?
It’s going to have a profound economic impact, because it is the harbinger of a new economic paradigm in the middle of a political system staking everything on propping up the old one.
Steve, according to your election filing you live less than half a mile from my house in Hockessin. I suppose the ZIP boundary runs between us. If your point is about trend-setters, you may be right. But in terms of mass market, probably not. The group you are describing as getting high five and six figures right out of college is getting smaller. That’s what all the “economic inequality” stuff is about, at least in part. It’s real. I understand that the market wants to chase hign-income trend setters, but most sellers have to settle for the mass market.
puck, I live in Pike Creek. That half-mile puts me outside Hockessin–I get my mail from Marshallton USPO. That aside, I note that you focused on where I live as a determinant and completely ignored my comment about DSU students.
My point (which appears to have escaped you while you were pouring over my election filing) is that we aren’t collecting the statistical data to show this kind of movement or any other kind of movement toward a zero marginal cost economy, and thus our policy makers are likely to miss its emergence completely. You don’t agree; I get that.
@pandora
He will not settle, and since money doesn’t motivate him I doubt he’ll have to settle. He simply doesn’t need or want much.
Does your son support himself? Is he paying his own way through college? Where does he plan to live once he graduates?
Not that this really matters, LeBay, but… he received a four year academic scholarship. He will complete his degree in the 4 year time frame, has maintained a GPA of 3.7 and already has several job offers. He hasn’t decided if he will accept these offers yet since he is still looking at these and other options.
But none of that is the point. He simply doesn’t place value on material things. He is very self-contained. He also has a significant amount of money saved from his summer jobs. And while he was raised with economic privilege he doesn’t rank things that mattered to my generation high on his list – owning a home, a car, stuff. From what I see his world is virtual, not material. His room at our house reminds me of a monk’s chamber. 🙂
pandora: it’s easy for a young person to not “place value on material things” if he has grown up in a situation where he gets pretty much whatever he wants as if by magic and is smart enough to get a 4-year scholarship. sounds like he’s in that little interlude when he has few responsibilities. he’ll soon have to pay his own way (unless mom and dad are going to take care of his genuine needs forever). or maybe he wants to live like a monk all his life. not talking about luxury, just things like health care or supporting a family. and somebody will have to pay for all the electronics he’ll need to live the virtual life, a concept that’s a little disturbing anyway, though i understand that we’re on the road to where people won’t need their bodies at all. also, not having a car makes sense in a big city or college town, but not so much in wilmington. not talking about your son in particular; don’t know him, i’m sure he’s a fine young man. it’s a more theoretical idea about a generation of elites who don’t understand that’s what they are.
“it’s easy for a young person to not “place value on material things” if he has grown up in a situation where he gets pretty much whatever he wants as if by magic and is smart enough to get a 4-year scholarship. sounds like he’s in that little interlude when he has few responsibilities.”
But that’s just it – he doesn’t want much. Every year at his birthday or Christmas we have the same conversation. I ask him what he wants and he says, “Nothing.” It drives me crazy, and eventually he gives in and asks for a book or a board game. That’s it.
You and Lebay are acting like my son (and others like him) has no responsibilities, that once he’s in the “real” world he’ll start wanting stuff. And while he’ll probably have a mortgage (at some point) and may own a car and have health insurance, he isn’t interested in all the stuff that my generation considered a sign of success. Advertisers marketing to him will have to change their methods – he’s not buying into it.
And the entire point of this conversation is about luxury items and how many of this new generation are bucking market trends.
Both of my kids use public transportation in Wilmington. It’s easy if you actually value it and your parents don’t throw you the car keys every time you want to go somewhere.
Pandora… in my experience the wave of upper-income consumer culture began in the Reagan administration, which was not coincidentally when consumer credit cards became common. I grew up here in the 60s and 70s, and youth culture still had vestigial hippie values. I believed “do what you love and the money will follow.” I don’t recall any particular yearning for high-end stuff or expensive status symbols. That came much later 🙂 Maybe today’s youth are just returning to the norm.
Maybe they are, puck. They have also witnessed their parents and grandparents debt and lack of job security. I think these things impacted them.
And I wrote about today’s kids not wanting to drive in 2012. This change has been happening for a while.
so today’s young elites just want different kinds of luxury items, delivered in a different way. i agree. and, of course, marketers will change their approach and the consuming will continue. i don’t necessarily think this is a good thing.
the hippies — i was there! –were content to live a grubby life (on their own), until they weren’t.
and even if you use public transportation in wilmington, where would you go? in a big city, you can walk to neat places.