Daily Clips: January 25th, 2016
The price Americans pay for slow growth: Here’s a very interesting read on economic growth and its impact upon Americans. As Noah Smith claims,
To increase prosperity for the vast majority of Americans, the U.S. doesn’t just need growth — it needs a way to funnel that growth to the masses instead of just to the people at the top. That may prove to be an even trickier task than boosting growth itself.
Someone has been reading Nick Hanauer’s writing on middle-out economics.
Ta-Nehisi Coates opines about Bernie Sanders: Prepare yourself Bern-ers, you’re most likely going to hate this article, even though Coates does a brilliant job of walking you through his critique. The byline hints at such displeasure, stating, “What is doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things.” Let’s examine what Coates is talking about.
Coates’ previously had written an article which criticized Bernie “for dismissing reparations specifically, and for offering up a series of moderate anti-racist solutions, in general.” He received a lot of flack for this, mostly for not focusing on other candidates that are doing even less to help African Americans. So in his most recent piece, Coates immediately tried to outline why he had solely focused on Bernie (even though he already did a good job of that in his first article).
When a candidate points to high unemployment among black youth, as well as high incarceration rates, and then dubs himself a radical, it seems prudent to ask what radical anti-racist policies that candidate actually embraces. Hillary Clinton has no interest in being labeled radical, left-wing, or even liberal.
Coates goes onto question Bernie’s “rising tide lifts all boats” approach to addressing racism in America:
Across Europe, the kind of robust welfare state Sanders supports—higher minimum wage, single-payer health-care, low-cost higher education—has been embraced. Have these policies vanquished racism?
Perhaps the most powerful paragraph comes here, when he addresses Bernie supporters and their qualms:
The need for so many (although not all) of Sanders’s supporters to deflect the question, to speak of Hillary Clinton instead of directly assessing whether Sanders’s position is consistent, intelligent, and moral hints at something terrible and unsaid. The terribleness is this: To destroy white supremacy we must commit ourselves to the promotion of unpopular policy. To commit ourselves solely to the promotion of popular policy means making peace with white supremacy.
The Obama Theory of Trump: David Axelrod knocks it out of the park in this guest column for the New York Times. He has a theory he “developed over decades as a political writer and a campaign consultant” and that is people want the opposite of what the incumbent offers. That’s why, he argues, Trump has risen to power – he is the complete opposite of Barack Obama. He’s boorish, edgy, reactive, and unintellectual. Trump is “the most ardent and conspicuous counterpoint to the man in the white House today” and that in large part can explain his appeal to the Republican base.
