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The Economist has a video story reporting the rise and fall of the stock market from 1929 as charted against who was in the White House. It is foolish to take it at face value because the economy is sluggish for up swings and damn near immediate for down turns. But there are other facts about the stock market's behavior based on which party controls the White House.
The commonly heard complaints are that there is little difference between the parties and that politicians are always beholden to wealth. The first complaint is obviously not true on must social issues and on many economic issues. Right now, the Republican party is mindlessly infatuated with ultra right-wing, pseudo-christian social conservatism and Supply Side Economics. Whether or not one agrees with the completely subjective social issues, it is hard to justify Supply Side policies.The Democrats have the polar opposite view on social issues and they are, more or less, believers in Demand Side economic policies.
The second complaint is way more subtle than it seems from the video. One can make the unconvincing argument that policies put in place by the Republican presidents led to gains that weren't realized until the Dems won an election. The stock market is often slow to start a bull market, but, generally, not that slow. And circumstances beyond presidential control, like the oil "shortage" in the early 1970s, can raise hell with the short-term economic outlook.
One of the things we know about the stock market is this: most of the time (I think it is every time, but I might be misremembering), when a Democrat wins the White House, the stock markets get a bump. And it's a bigger bump if the job is moving from Republican to Democrat. Conversely, when a Republican wins the top job, the stock markets hit the brakes.
So, yeah. It takes money to win an election and it takes connections to powerful people. The exception seems to be after a very big war when a general can win just because everyone already knows who he is and that he is a heroic leader even if that part isn't true. And people with money have more access to decision makers. And it has always been this way. Always.
But it isn't how much money, but who is donating and what is their collective agenda and which very powerful "special interest" is getting the most attention. For which side is the influence more like the candidates are purchased and the legislation canned?
There can be no doubt of this. The Republican party is controlled by a smallish number of very powerful people with a common agenda and no thought to the common good. These are the people who pretend that "jobs" are their highest priority when they demand congress gut the clean water act or the clean air act. "Jobs" is the reason the wealthy should pay a smaller percentage in taxes. These would be the same jobs that get shipped overseas. These are the jobs that are part-time so that the employee has no benefits. (Find a fast-food job that gives their hourly employees even close to 40 hours.)
Economics is a completely made up game. There are some "rules" based on observed human nature which are strengthened by entrenching the game in the social psyche. But it is still a game. And like any game, the strategy changes when the point of the game changes. You can play checkers such that traditional winning is really losing, for instance.
That is the difference between the two competing economic models in play right now. Those in favor of Supply Side make a strong case for it (mostly by lying to the masses) because they firmly believe it is the way to achieve their goals. Control the supply of goods and services and amass wealth. That is the game they are playing. Create monopolies, either directly like Standard Oil -- which is why we have anti-trust laws -- or indirectly through price fixing, insider trading, or, outright, manipulation of currencies and interest.
That is their game. It is a version of "he who has the most toys wins," possibly, the most direct version. And that game plays into the get-rich-quick cultural conversation. You, know, the one that makes the Lotto so popular. And that game has no long-term future. None. It is why the stock markets dip when one of these guys is put in charge. It represents the extreme of capitalism. The rapid accumulation of wealth in an ever narrowing percentage of the population. It is guaranteed that the "middle class" loses in this game.
There are several ways in which the lower and middle classes lose.
First, wages are pushed down. Union busting is the top priority for the big players. So the middle class and working poor have seen their actual wages depressed and their effective wages seriously depressed ever since Ronald Reagan began the Supply Side revolution.
Second, small businesses (I mean really small businesses) tend to get squeezed out by the big ones. The big box stores force local small businesses to close their doors. Amazon killed books stores (although that market was going to die on its own, anyway). It is easily demonstrated that the affect of a big box stores on the local average wage.
Third, we have price gouging. In the activist communities, ghetto gouging is a hot topic (once again). Small groceries selling poor quality at inflated prices. There are lots of reasons for this. And most of those reasons have nothing to do with the motivations of the store owner. Insurance costs more, wholesale costs are higher, and so on. it costs more to run a small store in a "bad" neighborhood. When a chain store moves in, though, they purposefully ("good business decisions, nothing personal, you know") sell second best and inflated prices. It is what the market will bare. But our entire country is getting gouged. Our companies sell the exact same products in other countries for less money. The SCOTUS is going to hear a case about "right of first sale" with Wiley Publications trying to prevent someone from selling their books, imported from Asia, in the US cheaper than they are selling here. This is true for nearly every global product "our" companies make including food(-like) products (Coke and Pepsi), medicine, cars, and on and on. The companies will complain about the cost of doing business here because of taxes and regulations, but that is just a bold-faced lie. Our effective tax rates on business is quite low and our regulations are weak compared to the rest of the G8. We are being squeezed by the Supply Side folks. To be sure, nothing "trickles down." Romney has a lot of money. He creates very few jobs. Not everyone can be his gardener.
Fourth, we limit upward mobility. One can point to President Obama or Bill Clinton and talk about how anyone from humble beginnings can become President. But it is not true. Anyone with sufficient brilliance and ambition can achieve quite a lot, but, really, that is a very small percentage of the human race. In the case of those two, it is something like 1 in 10,000 just for the IQ alone. So upward mobility is no simple matter on its own. Add to that the problem of the pyramid model of most social structures. The "up" is ever narrowing. Simply being smart and working hard can't get two people into the same job at the same time. Supply Side Economics cannot tolerate a model that isn't basically "king of the hill." If you aren't not a contender you are fodder. To ensure there are fewer contenders, the game has been rigged. We have been told that big government is bad, bad, bad. And that education is better left to local communities. I guess you better live in a rich community! We also continue to think of children as units of production, all the same, with the same set of skills, and no thoughts of their own about anything. We teach our children to be a fraction of what they could be and we do that one a curve! Lowest common deliminator education.
There are other ways in which Supply Side is a "fuck you too" economic model. Too numerous to name. But the biggest way, right now, is the deception. The lies about "jobs" that Romney/Ryan and their handlers are spreading through their propaganda media arms. Lies that become so blatant that even Fox "News" is starting to suggest that maybe the truth has been stretched.
Demand Side is a much more subtle beast. For that, it requires a population willing to spend money. While unemployment hovers at 8%, it is not the cause of anything. Normal unemployment is usually around 5% made up of people changing jobs and people entering the work force. So, adding another 3%, while very hard on those people personally, has little real impact on the economy. People aren't spending at levels sufficient to drive demand. And no employer hires people out the goodness of their heart. They hire when their current workforce can't fill the rising demand. That is the only thing that creates jobs. The NEED for more workers. Either the private sector is trying to crank out more widgets or the government wants to pave more streets. Either way, the employer needs more production and can't squeeze the current workforce any harder. That causes employment. Demand -- not Supply.
So, next time you think there isn't a difference between the parties -- that they are Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dom -- consider that you just might be wrong about that! Consider you are being fed a diet designed to create apathy. Consider you are being used and abused to favor the draconian agenda of the Supply Side fanatics. It is just more of their propaganda disguised.
When the average, thoughtful American gives up, the powerful, thoughtless few get to control everything from the price you pay at the pump to the kind of sex you can have and who you can have it with. Control. It is all about control.
The commonly heard complaints are that there is little difference between the parties and that politicians are always beholden to wealth. The first complaint is obviously not true on must social issues and on many economic issues. Right now, the Republican party is mindlessly infatuated with ultra right-wing, pseudo-christian social conservatism and Supply Side Economics. Whether or not one agrees with the completely subjective social issues, it is hard to justify Supply Side policies.The Democrats have the polar opposite view on social issues and they are, more or less, believers in Demand Side economic policies.
The second complaint is way more subtle than it seems from the video. One can make the unconvincing argument that policies put in place by the Republican presidents led to gains that weren't realized until the Dems won an election. The stock market is often slow to start a bull market, but, generally, not that slow. And circumstances beyond presidential control, like the oil "shortage" in the early 1970s, can raise hell with the short-term economic outlook.
One of the things we know about the stock market is this: most of the time (I think it is every time, but I might be misremembering), when a Democrat wins the White House, the stock markets get a bump. And it's a bigger bump if the job is moving from Republican to Democrat. Conversely, when a Republican wins the top job, the stock markets hit the brakes.
So, yeah. It takes money to win an election and it takes connections to powerful people. The exception seems to be after a very big war when a general can win just because everyone already knows who he is and that he is a heroic leader even if that part isn't true. And people with money have more access to decision makers. And it has always been this way. Always.
But it isn't how much money, but who is donating and what is their collective agenda and which very powerful "special interest" is getting the most attention. For which side is the influence more like the candidates are purchased and the legislation canned?
There can be no doubt of this. The Republican party is controlled by a smallish number of very powerful people with a common agenda and no thought to the common good. These are the people who pretend that "jobs" are their highest priority when they demand congress gut the clean water act or the clean air act. "Jobs" is the reason the wealthy should pay a smaller percentage in taxes. These would be the same jobs that get shipped overseas. These are the jobs that are part-time so that the employee has no benefits. (Find a fast-food job that gives their hourly employees even close to 40 hours.)
Economics is a completely made up game. There are some "rules" based on observed human nature which are strengthened by entrenching the game in the social psyche. But it is still a game. And like any game, the strategy changes when the point of the game changes. You can play checkers such that traditional winning is really losing, for instance.
That is the difference between the two competing economic models in play right now. Those in favor of Supply Side make a strong case for it (mostly by lying to the masses) because they firmly believe it is the way to achieve their goals. Control the supply of goods and services and amass wealth. That is the game they are playing. Create monopolies, either directly like Standard Oil -- which is why we have anti-trust laws -- or indirectly through price fixing, insider trading, or, outright, manipulation of currencies and interest.
That is their game. It is a version of "he who has the most toys wins," possibly, the most direct version. And that game plays into the get-rich-quick cultural conversation. You, know, the one that makes the Lotto so popular. And that game has no long-term future. None. It is why the stock markets dip when one of these guys is put in charge. It represents the extreme of capitalism. The rapid accumulation of wealth in an ever narrowing percentage of the population. It is guaranteed that the "middle class" loses in this game.
There are several ways in which the lower and middle classes lose.
First, wages are pushed down. Union busting is the top priority for the big players. So the middle class and working poor have seen their actual wages depressed and their effective wages seriously depressed ever since Ronald Reagan began the Supply Side revolution.
Second, small businesses (I mean really small businesses) tend to get squeezed out by the big ones. The big box stores force local small businesses to close their doors. Amazon killed books stores (although that market was going to die on its own, anyway). It is easily demonstrated that the affect of a big box stores on the local average wage.
Third, we have price gouging. In the activist communities, ghetto gouging is a hot topic (once again). Small groceries selling poor quality at inflated prices. There are lots of reasons for this. And most of those reasons have nothing to do with the motivations of the store owner. Insurance costs more, wholesale costs are higher, and so on. it costs more to run a small store in a "bad" neighborhood. When a chain store moves in, though, they purposefully ("good business decisions, nothing personal, you know") sell second best and inflated prices. It is what the market will bare. But our entire country is getting gouged. Our companies sell the exact same products in other countries for less money. The SCOTUS is going to hear a case about "right of first sale" with Wiley Publications trying to prevent someone from selling their books, imported from Asia, in the US cheaper than they are selling here. This is true for nearly every global product "our" companies make including food(-like) products (Coke and Pepsi), medicine, cars, and on and on. The companies will complain about the cost of doing business here because of taxes and regulations, but that is just a bold-faced lie. Our effective tax rates on business is quite low and our regulations are weak compared to the rest of the G8. We are being squeezed by the Supply Side folks. To be sure, nothing "trickles down." Romney has a lot of money. He creates very few jobs. Not everyone can be his gardener.
Fourth, we limit upward mobility. One can point to President Obama or Bill Clinton and talk about how anyone from humble beginnings can become President. But it is not true. Anyone with sufficient brilliance and ambition can achieve quite a lot, but, really, that is a very small percentage of the human race. In the case of those two, it is something like 1 in 10,000 just for the IQ alone. So upward mobility is no simple matter on its own. Add to that the problem of the pyramid model of most social structures. The "up" is ever narrowing. Simply being smart and working hard can't get two people into the same job at the same time. Supply Side Economics cannot tolerate a model that isn't basically "king of the hill." If you aren't not a contender you are fodder. To ensure there are fewer contenders, the game has been rigged. We have been told that big government is bad, bad, bad. And that education is better left to local communities. I guess you better live in a rich community! We also continue to think of children as units of production, all the same, with the same set of skills, and no thoughts of their own about anything. We teach our children to be a fraction of what they could be and we do that one a curve! Lowest common deliminator education.
There are other ways in which Supply Side is a "fuck you too" economic model. Too numerous to name. But the biggest way, right now, is the deception. The lies about "jobs" that Romney/Ryan and their handlers are spreading through their propaganda media arms. Lies that become so blatant that even Fox "News" is starting to suggest that maybe the truth has been stretched.
Demand Side is a much more subtle beast. For that, it requires a population willing to spend money. While unemployment hovers at 8%, it is not the cause of anything. Normal unemployment is usually around 5% made up of people changing jobs and people entering the work force. So, adding another 3%, while very hard on those people personally, has little real impact on the economy. People aren't spending at levels sufficient to drive demand. And no employer hires people out the goodness of their heart. They hire when their current workforce can't fill the rising demand. That is the only thing that creates jobs. The NEED for more workers. Either the private sector is trying to crank out more widgets or the government wants to pave more streets. Either way, the employer needs more production and can't squeeze the current workforce any harder. That causes employment. Demand -- not Supply.
So, next time you think there isn't a difference between the parties -- that they are Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dom -- consider that you just might be wrong about that! Consider you are being fed a diet designed to create apathy. Consider you are being used and abused to favor the draconian agenda of the Supply Side fanatics. It is just more of their propaganda disguised.
When the average, thoughtful American gives up, the powerful, thoughtless few get to control everything from the price you pay at the pump to the kind of sex you can have and who you can have it with. Control. It is all about control.
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