Found this interesting. Tucked in the reconciliation bill they want to mandate employers with 5+ employees to contribute up to 10% to an IRA. Failure to do so is “taxed”.
As Washington dickers over raising the debt limit, the White House is offering a sober take on the real-world impact of default.
If lawmakers fail to raise the federal debt limit before the government runs out of money to cover its bills, it could set off a global financial crisis that the United States would be powerless to confront, White House economists warn in a report released on Wednesday.
“A default would send shock waves through global financial markets and would likely cause credit markets worldwide to freeze up and stock markets to plunge,” officials at the White House Council of Economic Advisers warned. “Employers around the world would likely have to begin laying off workers.”
The potential for an ensuing global recession, they wrote, could be worse than the 2008 financial crisis, because it would come as countries continue to struggle to escape the coronavirus pandemic. Adding to the burden, Congress and President Biden would be unable to spend money to prop up the economy until the debt limit, which caps the amount that America can borrow, is raised.
“The federal government could only stand back,” they wrote, “helpless to address the economic maelstrom.” …
(The good news is this would quite possibly put the GOP out of business.)
the “hidden” requiement that employers contribute 10% to an !RA appears to be an example of taxing the people to support Wall Street. it makes the Democrats look incompetent as to both policy and politics. if, of course, Forbes can be trusted.
Did you know Kyrsten Sinema did a paid internship at a California winery during the pandemic?
Credit to reporter Dave Levinthal at Insider for breaking the story … all the way back in May. (Again, I’m gobsmacked that I only learned of it in October, but that’s the whole genesis of this piece.) Levinthal cracked the case thanks to a single line item in a new financial disclosure statement Sinema filed that month showing she’d earned $1,117.40 at Three Sticks Winery in Sonoma County….
A few smaller sites rehashed the original story, but John Gorgola at The Nation was just about the only person to really pick up the thread, wondering last month why Sinema chose this winery out of the 8,000 or 9,000 across the country. As Insider’s Levinthal noted, one of the destinations listed on an invitation for a $5,000-a-person Sinema-headlined fundraiser the same month as her vineyard gig was Three Sticks.
And as Gorgola in turn pointed out, Three Sticks is owned by private equity titan William Price III. (His generational suffix—those triple vertical lines—is also how the hyper-exclusive winery, with a product that’s seldom available for purchase, earned its name.) The investment firm Price founded, TPG Capital, has spent more than $10 million on lobbyists over the past decade. What’s an extra $1,117.40 for another friendly ear to a man like that, especially for the target of a last-ditch persuasion campaign aimed at preserving a tax loophole beloved by Wall Street?”
Just like the original Sphinx, the Phoenix Sphinx is blocking the way until those who would move ahead solve her riddle:
What does Kyrsten Sinema want? And why doesn’t she stick around to explain it? …
… The Arizona senator’s name is pronounced “cinema,” and it is apt because she sweeps — and sometimes, when the triathlete has a sports injury, limps — through the Senate like a silent film star.
“The Greta Garbo of Congress,” as one top Democrat called her.
Sinema rarely gives interviews and shuns the scrum of reporters at the Capitol. But she is not shy about drawing the spotlight, whether she is swathed in fur stoles or bedecked in pink, purple and mint-colored wigs or bedazzling in glittering stilettos. It is hard to believe that the Senate had a nutty sexist ban on sleeveless outfits on the floor. But the mandarins quit worrying about it for members once their colleague blithely turned the hallowed marble halls into an iconoclastic catwalk.
Sinema’s more conservative — and monochromatic — colleagues were agog at her stylings when she first ascended to the Senate — a moment when she was celebrated as the first openly bisexual senator. And they were appalled this past year when her fashion statements included presiding over the Senate in a pink sweater reading “Dangerous Creature” and when she put a picture on Instagram, following her defiant thumbs down on a $15 minimum wage, sporting a hot pink newsboy cap, matching oversized glasses and a ring that expressed the sentiment “Kiss off,” but in a more vulgar way. …
Sinema enjoys poking the bear, especially the more righteous wing of her party, but her allies cry sexism in the way she is treated by Democrats, compared with Manchin.
“I don’t think that in her mind, when she dyes the front of her hair purple or whatever she does, she’s trying to get press attention,” one told me. “Frankly, it’s just an expression of who she is.”
While progressives may disdain Joe “I’ve Never Been A Liberal” Manchin, they understand that he has a record as a conservative Democrat; Sinema is a puzzle to them.
What has caused the former social worker and Green Party champion who grew up in a gas station, a left-winger who supported Ralph Nader for president, to shift from progressive stances to more conservative ones? Is she unmoored in her politics, simply being opportunistic? What is the principle that is leading her to obstruct the party of her own president, who really needs a win right now?
“She doesn’t do interviews, she doesn’t answer questions, she speaks in vagaries, she doesn’t explain the core reason she’s opposed,” one member of the progressive crew on the Hill told me. “It’s hard to look at her actions and not conclude that the donations are part of the story. If she’s here to fight for corporate power and lower taxes for the wealthy and get more money for pharma executives, be on the level and say it.”
Do you remember the days of the Simpson-Bowles debt-reduction plan?
A decade ago elite opinion was obsessed with the supposed need for immediate action on budget deficits. This consensus among what I used to call Very Serious People was so strong that as Ezra Klein, now a Times Opinion writer, wrote, deficits somehow became an issue to which “the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply.”
The news media more or less openly rooted not just for deficit reduction in general, but in particular for “entitlement reform,” a.k.a. cuts in future Medicare and Social Security benefits. Such cuts, everyone who mattered seemed to argue, were essential to secure the nation’s future.
They weren’t. But here’s my question: If elite opinion cares so much about the future, why isn’t there any comparable consensus now about the need for climate action and spending on children? These are two of the main components of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, and the case for both is much stronger than the case for entitlement cuts ever was.
Yet whereas calling for Social Security cuts used to be treated as a sort of political badge of seriousness, calling for urgent action on climate and children isn’t. If anything, much reporting on current politics seems to suggest that the handful of Democrats trying to dismantle Build Back Better, to limit the Biden agenda to modest spending on conventional infrastructure, are being responsible, while the progressives trying to make sure that we really do invest in the nation’s future are somehow unserious.
Let’s talk about what securing the future really means.
The logic of demands for entitlement reform was always suspect. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs may eventually force us to choose between tax hikes and benefits cuts (although worries about government debt have long been greatly overblown). But why was it urgent to take action in, say, 2010? What would be lost by waiting a few years? If you thought about it, the elite consensus was that we needed to cut future benefits in order to avoid … future cuts in benefits. Huh?
By contrast, the cost of delaying action on climate and children is real and immense.
On climate: Every year that the world fails to limit greenhouse gas emissions, humanity emits about 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide — and these emissions will stay in the atmosphere, warming the planet, for hundreds of years.
We’ve already seen the costs imposed by the leading edge of climate change — severe droughts, a proliferation of extreme weather events. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that such costs will get far worse in the decades ahead. So by postponing climate action, we are undermining our future in a much more substantial way than we do by, say, adding a few percent to the national debt.
On children: Child poverty is a huge problem in America. And there’s overwhelming evidence that spending on programs that alleviate child poverty has huge payoffs: Children who receive aid from these programs grow up to be healthier adults, with higher earnings, than those who don’t. In fact, the evidence for high returns from spending more on children is much stronger than the evidence for high returns to spending on roads and bridges (although we should do that, too).
So every year that we don’t increase aid to children, for example by expanding the child tax credit, leads to decades of wasted human potential.
But elite opinion — and much reporting — somehow fails to highlight the extreme irresponsibility of opposing clean energy plans and the immense waste of human potential that comes from failing to address child poverty. Instead it’s all “$3.5 trillion! $3.5 trillion!” — often without pointing out that this is proposed spending over a decade, not a single year, and that it would amount to only 1.2 percent of G.D.P.
OK, I don’t fully understand this double standard — why Very Serious People became obsessed with the supposedly urgent need to limit government debt yet are blasé about if not hostile to proposals to tackle the issues that really matter for our future.
Money is surely part of the story: Corporate groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were all in on entitlement reform but are lobbying furiously against Build Back Better. Indeed, the Democrats trying to scuttle Biden’s agenda are more accurately described as the party’s corporate wing than as “centrists.” After all, polls suggest that the policies they oppose are highly popular, so in that sense they’re well to the right of the political center.
But not everyone defining conventional wisdom is on the take. There also seems to be a sort of social dynamic in politics and the media, perhaps reflecting the circles in which opinion leaders move, that treats people who want to make the lives of ordinary Americans harder as courageous, while considering those who want to raise taxes on corporations and the rich flaky and unrealistic.
Whatever the reasons for this dynamic, it needs to be fought. Right now we have an opportunity to really do the right thing. It will be a tragedy if this opportunity is missed.
The fact that the media was not being an honest broker in these discussions was something I have spoken to, was thinking about writing more about. I felt that Krugman lost his focus on this in the piece, should have emphasized the problem more. I couldn’t/didn’t see an effective way of excerpting this.
I was trying to “guess” which is the better place to put it. In the end, either works. More people dive into the front than the open thread even though they may not comment. Either suits me. Just thinking early – on.
I assume Ken’s post is entirely an excerpt of Krugman.
It is of course right as far as it goes. The answer to Krugman is that they are not all on the take. Except they all take take the opinions of “nonpartisan eperts” as “truth.”
krugman fell for this once before until corrected by Dean Baker. Social Security is not government spending or government debt. it is just a very good way for people to save enough of their own money, safe from inflation and other losses cash is heir to, to have enough to live on in their old age (or disability)..without becoming dependent on government welfare, which as we all know is not dependable, given the reluctance of other people to pay for someone else’s groceries.
as far as i can tell the child tax credit is not as good a solution to poverty as a higher minimum wage, same for day care for all…as these programs seem to be proposing to pay for the “needs” of people with more money than i ever had, even allowing for inflation.
i am not sure more roads and bridges are the best way to fight climate change, nor are more, faster, longer range, electric cars.
medicare for all is the best way to manage health care costs..IF the congress is honest enough, and smart enough, to actually control costs and not just give away the people’s money to the health care providers, and IF medicare is paid for by the workers themselves and not made an unreasonable “tax the rich” scheme which will be opposed by people stronger than we are, and is not “fair” whatever we think. or don’t think, as the case may be.
Please understand that i do not disagree with Krugman at all. I am just trying to fine-tune what Democrats are calling for so they don’t shoot themselves in the foot.
I don’t see where he lost his focus. Unless, as a media creature himself, he couldn’t afford to bite the hand that feeds. Or, as I have witnessed in some other knowledgeable people, they lack the killer instinct: they cannot close decisively on an issue but leave it sort of vague and “up to you.”
As for the media not being an honest broker.. when has it ever been? The only chance we ever had with the media was that sometimes different people owned different parts of it (them?) and we could hope to get different points of view, if not always at least one sane one.
Or maybe it IS up to us.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
Our republican political system of representative hypocrisy is implicitly a capitalist state rather than a democratic state with a capitalist economy. The golden rule is those with the gold will rule. During times of great common cause, then some semblance of state and media that represents the will of the people emerges as much because we the people are loyal followers in a clinch than because the republic takes into account public interests in and of themselves. Divided we fail. Divided we are conquered by dollar democracy. United under widespread duress then we will be heard and catered to because of the survival interests of elites. The media is a PR firm for the capitalist state providing every sort of pandering that sells.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
I couldn’t tell if the article about media bias was claiming that the media had a liberal bias, or that people believe that the media has a liberal bias…because the media keep telling them it does. or just what a “liberal” bias is.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
So, I have been surveying reality in search of some sign for hope and it has been slim pickings this AM. Our (Boomer and maybe your pre-Boomer) generation like the (Greatest) generation of our parents that raised us was very supportive of Social Security, a second pension for some and an only pension for many. Our parents had seen how bad that bad can be during the Great Depression and then WWII, which united them. What fostered solidarity among young adults during those hard times only made the youngest folk resentful as they grew up into the Silent Generation. The children of the Silent Generation are far more likely to be Republicans than Boomers are. If I find hope then it is that the great grandchildren of the Silent Generation will see their grandparents hit the skids in retirement and realize that they have been lied to.
It is not like words do not have meaning or any power to make change, but rather that people are mostly selective listeners gravitating strongly to hearing what they want to hear and also succumbing to repetition. Also we choose to read what we read and listen to what we listen to the extent that selection bias means far more than accuracy.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
The Generation Gap in American Politics
1. Generations’ party identification, midterm voting preferences, views of Trump
“…The Silent Generation is the only generation in which, on balance, more registered voters identify as or lean Republican (52%) than identify with or lean Democratic (43%)…”
(AP) — Senate leaders announced an agreement Thursday to extend the government’s borrowing authority into December, temporarily averting an unprecedented federal default that experts say would have devastated the economy.
“Our hope is to get this done as soon as today,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declared as he opened the Senate.
In their agreement, Republican and Democratic leaders edged back from a perilous standoff over lifting the nation’s borrowing cap, with Democratic senators accepting an offer from Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.
McConnell made the offer a day earlier just before Republicans were prepared to block longer-term legislation to suspend the debt limit and as President Joe Biden and business leaders ramped up their concerns that a default would disrupt government payments to millions of people and throw the nation into recession. …
… McConnell said in his offer Wednesday that Republicans would still insist that Democrats use the reconciliation process for a long-term debt limit extension. However, he said Republicans are willing to “assist in expediting” that process, and in the meantime Democrats may use the normal legislative process to pass a short-term debt limit extension with a fixed dollar amount to cover current spending levels into December.
While he continued to blame Democrats, his offer will also allow Republicans to avoid the condemnation they would have gotten from some quarters if a financial crisis were to occur.
Earlier Wednesday, Biden enlisted top business leaders to push for immediately suspending the debt limit, saying the approaching deadline created the risk of a historic default that would be like a “meteor” that could crush the economy and financial markets.
At a White House event, the president shamed Republican senators for threatening to filibuster any suspension of the $28.4 trillion cap on the government’s borrowing authority. He leaned into the credibility of corporate America — a group that has traditionally been aligned with the GOP on tax and regulatory issues — to drive home his point as the heads of Citi, JP Morgan Chase and Nasdaq gathered in person and virtually to say the debt limit must be lifted.
“It’s not right and it’s dangerous,” Biden said of the resistance by Senate Republicans.
His moves came amid talk that Democrats might try to change Senate filibuster rules to get around Republicans. But Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., reiterated his opposition to such a change Wednesday, likely taking it off the table for Democrats.
The business leaders echoed Biden’s points about needing to end the stalemate as soon as possible, though they sidestepped the partisan tensions in doing so. Each portrayed the debt limit as an avoidable crisis. …
has anyone seen what’s really in those Covid vaccines?
New Hampshire GOP Lawmaker Claims COVID Vaccine Contains ‘Living Organism’ With Tentacles’ – A 79-year-old Republican New Hampshire state lawmaker has claimed the COVID vaccine contains “living organism with tentacles.” Representative Ken Weyler, who has served in the state House for 30 years, recently sent his congressional colleagues a discredited, false report full of conspiracy theories, according to NHPR.The report said that COVID-19 deaths had been caused by plotters in Vatican City, Washington D.C. and London. It also claimed that COVID-19 vaccines include “living organism(s) with tentacles.” Weyler has said he doesn’t regard the federal government, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci as credible sources for accurate COVID-19 information.Weyler is unvaccinated. He has said he has no intention to get vaccinated because “I’ve had 25 years of flu shots. I believe I have antibodies.”He is also chair of the House Finance Committee. In that role, he and other Republicans opposed his state’s acceptance of $27 million in federal aid for boosting vaccination efforts. They said they didn’t think the state needed the money. “They want everybody to get the shot. Why?” Weyler asked. “Are they getting paid off by Big Pharma? Is there something in the shot that’s going to help them control us? There’s lots of things I’m reading that make me very suspicious.”
Found this interesting. Tucked in the reconciliation bill they want to mandate employers with 5+ employees to contribute up to 10% to an IRA. Failure to do so is “taxed”.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2021/09/26/hidden-in-the-reconciliation-bill-a-retirement–plan-mandate-that-will-take-most-people-by-surprise/
Michael
Why not raise SS 1% for employer and employee and bump Medicare up a percent or so and start to expand it?
100% agree
As the debt default looms, the White House warns of financial crisis
(The good news is this would quite possibly put the GOP out of business.)
run
thank you. 1% would be a good start.
the “hidden” requiement that employers contribute 10% to an !RA appears to be an example of taxing the people to support Wall Street. it makes the Democrats look incompetent as to both policy and politics. if, of course, Forbes can be trusted.
Again.
Did you know Kyrsten Sinema did a paid internship at a California winery during the pandemic?
Credit to reporter Dave Levinthal at Insider for breaking the story … all the way back in May. (Again, I’m gobsmacked that I only learned of it in October, but that’s the whole genesis of this piece.) Levinthal cracked the case thanks to a single line item in a new financial disclosure statement Sinema filed that month showing she’d earned $1,117.40 at Three Sticks Winery in Sonoma County….
A few smaller sites rehashed the original story, but John Gorgola at The Nation was just about the only person to really pick up the thread, wondering last month why Sinema chose this winery out of the 8,000 or 9,000 across the country. As Insider’s Levinthal noted, one of the destinations listed on an invitation for a $5,000-a-person Sinema-headlined fundraiser the same month as her vineyard gig was Three Sticks.
And as Gorgola in turn pointed out, Three Sticks is owned by private equity titan William Price III. (His generational suffix—those triple vertical lines—is also how the hyper-exclusive winery, with a product that’s seldom available for purchase, earned its name.) The investment firm Price founded, TPG Capital, has spent more than $10 million on lobbyists over the past decade. What’s an extra $1,117.40 for another friendly ear to a man like that, especially for the target of a last-ditch persuasion campaign aimed at preserving a tax loophole beloved by Wall Street?”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/6/2056406/-Did-you-know-Kyrsten-Sinema-did-a-paid-internship-at-a-California-winery-during-the-pandemic
Sinema Stars in Her Own Film
NY Times – Maureen Dowd – October 2
Krugman:
Do you remember the days of the Simpson-Bowles debt-reduction plan?
A decade ago elite opinion was obsessed with the supposed need for immediate action on budget deficits. This consensus among what I used to call Very Serious People was so strong that as Ezra Klein, now a Times Opinion writer, wrote, deficits somehow became an issue to which “the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply.”
The news media more or less openly rooted not just for deficit reduction in general, but in particular for “entitlement reform,” a.k.a. cuts in future Medicare and Social Security benefits. Such cuts, everyone who mattered seemed to argue, were essential to secure the nation’s future.
They weren’t. But here’s my question: If elite opinion cares so much about the future, why isn’t there any comparable consensus now about the need for climate action and spending on children? These are two of the main components of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, and the case for both is much stronger than the case for entitlement cuts ever was.
Yet whereas calling for Social Security cuts used to be treated as a sort of political badge of seriousness, calling for urgent action on climate and children isn’t. If anything, much reporting on current politics seems to suggest that the handful of Democrats trying to dismantle Build Back Better, to limit the Biden agenda to modest spending on conventional infrastructure, are being responsible, while the progressives trying to make sure that we really do invest in the nation’s future are somehow unserious.
Let’s talk about what securing the future really means.
The logic of demands for entitlement reform was always suspect. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs may eventually force us to choose between tax hikes and benefits cuts (although worries about government debt have long been greatly overblown). But why was it urgent to take action in, say, 2010? What would be lost by waiting a few years? If you thought about it, the elite consensus was that we needed to cut future benefits in order to avoid … future cuts in benefits. Huh?
By contrast, the cost of delaying action on climate and children is real and immense.
On climate: Every year that the world fails to limit greenhouse gas emissions, humanity emits about 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide — and these emissions will stay in the atmosphere, warming the planet, for hundreds of years.
We’ve already seen the costs imposed by the leading edge of climate change — severe droughts, a proliferation of extreme weather events. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that such costs will get far worse in the decades ahead. So by postponing climate action, we are undermining our future in a much more substantial way than we do by, say, adding a few percent to the national debt.
On children: Child poverty is a huge problem in America. And there’s overwhelming evidence that spending on programs that alleviate child poverty has huge payoffs: Children who receive aid from these programs grow up to be healthier adults, with higher earnings, than those who don’t. In fact, the evidence for high returns from spending more on children is much stronger than the evidence for high returns to spending on roads and bridges (although we should do that, too).
So every year that we don’t increase aid to children, for example by expanding the child tax credit, leads to decades of wasted human potential.
But elite opinion — and much reporting — somehow fails to highlight the extreme irresponsibility of opposing clean energy plans and the immense waste of human potential that comes from failing to address child poverty. Instead it’s all “$3.5 trillion! $3.5 trillion!” — often without pointing out that this is proposed spending over a decade, not a single year, and that it would amount to only 1.2 percent of G.D.P.
OK, I don’t fully understand this double standard — why Very Serious People became obsessed with the supposedly urgent need to limit government debt yet are blasé about if not hostile to proposals to tackle the issues that really matter for our future.
Money is surely part of the story: Corporate groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were all in on entitlement reform but are lobbying furiously against Build Back Better. Indeed, the Democrats trying to scuttle Biden’s agenda are more accurately described as the party’s corporate wing than as “centrists.” After all, polls suggest that the policies they oppose are highly popular, so in that sense they’re well to the right of the political center.
But not everyone defining conventional wisdom is on the take. There also seems to be a sort of social dynamic in politics and the media, perhaps reflecting the circles in which opinion leaders move, that treats people who want to make the lives of ordinary Americans harder as courageous, while considering those who want to raise taxes on corporations and the rich flaky and unrealistic.
Whatever the reasons for this dynamic, it needs to be fought. Right now we have an opportunity to really do the right thing. It will be a tragedy if this opportunity is missed.
Is this kind of a post? I kind of remember anne doing this at Economists View
paywall at NYT
So Open Thread is better, I guess.
The fact that the media was not being an honest broker in these discussions was something I have spoken to, was thinking about writing more about. I felt that Krugman lost his focus on this in the piece, should have emphasized the problem more. I couldn’t/didn’t see an effective way of excerpting this.
Ken:
I was trying to “guess” which is the better place to put it. In the end, either works. More people dive into the front than the open thread even though they may not comment. Either suits me. Just thinking early – on.
Bill
I assume Ken’s post is entirely an excerpt of Krugman.
It is of course right as far as it goes. The answer to Krugman is that they are not all on the take. Except they all take take the opinions of “nonpartisan eperts” as “truth.”
krugman fell for this once before until corrected by Dean Baker. Social Security is not government spending or government debt. it is just a very good way for people to save enough of their own money, safe from inflation and other losses cash is heir to, to have enough to live on in their old age (or disability)..without becoming dependent on government welfare, which as we all know is not dependable, given the reluctance of other people to pay for someone else’s groceries.
as far as i can tell the child tax credit is not as good a solution to poverty as a higher minimum wage, same for day care for all…as these programs seem to be proposing to pay for the “needs” of people with more money than i ever had, even allowing for inflation.
i am not sure more roads and bridges are the best way to fight climate change, nor are more, faster, longer range, electric cars.
medicare for all is the best way to manage health care costs..IF the congress is honest enough, and smart enough, to actually control costs and not just give away the people’s money to the health care providers, and IF medicare is paid for by the workers themselves and not made an unreasonable “tax the rich” scheme which will be opposed by people stronger than we are, and is not “fair” whatever we think. or don’t think, as the case may be.
Please understand that i do not disagree with Krugman at all. I am just trying to fine-tune what Democrats are calling for so they don’t shoot themselves in the foot.
A little humor today
The 25 best episodes of ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’
I used to catch these on a Saturday morning,
Ken
I don’t see where he lost his focus. Unless, as a media creature himself, he couldn’t afford to bite the hand that feeds. Or, as I have witnessed in some other knowledgeable people, they lack the killer instinct: they cannot close decisively on an issue but leave it sort of vague and “up to you.”
As for the media not being an honest broker.. when has it ever been? The only chance we ever had with the media was that sometimes different people owned different parts of it (them?) and we could hope to get different points of view, if not always at least one sane one.
Or maybe it IS up to us.
Coberly,
Our republican political system of representative hypocrisy is implicitly a capitalist state rather than a democratic state with a capitalist economy. The golden rule is those with the gold will rule. During times of great common cause, then some semblance of state and media that represents the will of the people emerges as much because we the people are loyal followers in a clinch than because the republic takes into account public interests in and of themselves. Divided we fail. Divided we are conquered by dollar democracy. United under widespread duress then we will be heard and catered to because of the survival interests of elites. The media is a PR firm for the capitalist state providing every sort of pandering that sells.
Cynicism is next to godliness :<)
“No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”
Lily Tomlin
Ron
me and Diogenes agree.
I couldn’t tell if the article about media bias was claiming that the media had a liberal bias, or that people believe that the media has a liberal bias…because the media keep telling them it does. or just what a “liberal” bias is.
Coberly,
So, I have been surveying reality in search of some sign for hope and it has been slim pickings this AM. Our (Boomer and maybe your pre-Boomer) generation like the (Greatest) generation of our parents that raised us was very supportive of Social Security, a second pension for some and an only pension for many. Our parents had seen how bad that bad can be during the Great Depression and then WWII, which united them. What fostered solidarity among young adults during those hard times only made the youngest folk resentful as they grew up into the Silent Generation. The children of the Silent Generation are far more likely to be Republicans than Boomers are. If I find hope then it is that the great grandchildren of the Silent Generation will see their grandparents hit the skids in retirement and realize that they have been lied to.
It is not like words do not have meaning or any power to make change, but rather that people are mostly selective listeners gravitating strongly to hearing what they want to hear and also succumbing to repetition. Also we choose to read what we read and listen to what we listen to the extent that selection bias means far more than accuracy.
Report March 1, 2018
The Generation Gap in American Politics
1. Generations’ party identification, midterm voting preferences, views of Trump
“…The Silent Generation is the only generation in which, on balance, more registered voters identify as or lean Republican (52%) than identify with or lean Democratic (43%)…”
Deal reached in Senate to suspend debt ceiling into December, temporarily averting debt crisis
has anyone seen what’s really in those Covid vaccines?