What "the deplorables" tells us about the nation's ruling elite

Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" outburst a week ago fits right in with Obama's 2008 dismissive "clinging to guns and religion" comment and George Romney's 2012 "47 percent" comment. What all of these comments from wealthy elites - Republican and Democrat alike - show is that they are completely intolerant of views and world views that differ from their own, and completely ignorant about the lives of millions of the people they aspire to lead.

I don't happen to be very religious, but I certainly don't think that those who are religious are deplorable.  I don't happen to be a gun owner, but I certainly don't think that owning a gun puts a person beyond the pale. I am personally fairly liberal in outlook, but I understand perfectly why some people would feel threatened by a massive influx of people from an entirely different culture, or by significant changes in the social contracts they grew up with.

But Clinton and Obama and Romney - wealthy and well-connected - are completely insulated from the real world, and for the most part completely unaffected by the very policies they are trying to put in place. And these comments simply demonstrate that.  Indeed, if anyone is "deplorable" in this situation, it is Obama and Romney and Clinton, and those like them.

Recommended: Donald Trump Does Have Ideas, And We Had Better Pay Attention to Them.

Joshua Mitchell had a good piece in Politico yesterday: Donald Trump Does Have Ideas, And We Had Better Pay Attention to Them. Since the establishment - Democratic and Republican alike - are solidly against Trump's candidacy because he is an outsider and doesn't represent their world views or interests, it is a bit hard to discern exactly what it really happening.  And of course the media have demonized him for the same reason, which also obscures the underlying processes.Mitchell's piece is one of the better analyses I have seen.

Mitchell points out that since World War II the ruling elites of the world - the Davos crowd - have been selling identity politics (ie - segregating people into identity voting groups, like Afro-Americans, or Hispanics) and supra-national organizations and trade deals. This has been wonderful for the wealthier investor and professional classes, and for large corporations, but disastrous for the working classes. As he says:

Yes, Donald Trump is implicated in that unraveling, cavalierly undermining decades worth of social and political certainties with his rapid-fire Twitter account and persona that only the borough of Queens can produce. But so is Bernie Sanders. And so is Brexit. And so are the growing rumblings in Europe, which are all the more dangerous because there is no exit strategy if the European Union proves unsustainable. It is not so much that there are no new ideas for us to consider in 2016; it is more that the old ones are being taken apart without a clear understanding of what comes next. 2016 is the year of mental dust, where notions that stand apart from the post-1989 order don’t fully cohere. The 2016 election will be the first—but not last—test of whether they can.

If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.

These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989. That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads us toward: A future where states matter. A future where people are citizens, working together toward (bourgeois) improvement of their lot. His ideas do not yet fully cohere. They are a bit too much like mental dust that has yet to come together. But they can come together. And Trump is the first American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his formulations have been.

There is no question that Trump has disrupted the Republican Party - and it badly needed disrupting. Bernie Sanders, had he won the nomination, would have done the same for the Democratic Party. If Trump loses, which is more likely than not, the Republicans will have to start the rethinking process while the Democrats, at least for the next four years, will most likely continue down their current dead-end path (and probably lose disastrously in the next election).

In any case , this piece is worth reading and thinking about.

Recommended: How the Democrats Lost Touch on Trade

I recommend the article How the Democrats Lost Touch on Trade by Thomas Frank of  Politico. He makes the point, now obvious to all except apparently the politicians in Washington, that the trade deals to date have benefited one portion of the population - owners, CEOs and investors - while decimating other portions of the population - largely workers. No wonder we have a populist uprising going now!

The lesson of Trump

Polling still suggests Donald Trump will lose the election to Hillary Clinton, barring any new surprises. Nevertheless, a substantial portion of the nation – something around 40% - apparently favors the Donald over Hillary. Whether they really like him or just see him as the lesser of the two evils is an interesting question, but he certainly has an appeal, and politicians in both parties would do well to ponder why that is.

My own interpretation at the moment, after watching his rise over the past few months, is that he offers four things that traditional politicians in both parties do not offer:

1. He says what he is really thinking.  Yes, often that turns out to dumb or offensive to someone. But at least it is real. I think we as a voting public have gotten tired of and cynical about politicians trotting out the same of standard phrases that we all now know they really don’t mean; the politically correct, focus-group tested,  mealy-mouthed statements designed not to really take a clear stand on anything that might lose votes.  The repeated assertions that they are “serving the American people” when we all know perfectly well they are serving themselves and their biggest donors first. More often than not I don’t agree with Trump, but I do find his candor – erratic as it often is – to be refreshing.

2. He is willing to talk about “sacred” topics – topics that need discussion but that the “politically-correct” politicians carefully tiptoe around and avoid.  Immigration is an example. In our current “victim-centered” society illegal immigrants are “victims”, but in fact it is not at all clear why we have any obligation at all to people who sneak across our borders illegally. Now I often don’t agree with what he has to say about these topics, but at least he is willing to say something about them, and he often expresses what a fair proportion of the voters are thinking. which is more than most traditional politicians are willing to do. 

3. He doesn’t look like he has been bought, or even that he can be bought. That may be an illusion, but he doesn’t seem to be in the pockets of Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers, or the oil companies, or the coal barons, or any big corporations, or any super-PAC that controls his ideology, or any big donors. Nor in fact does he seem to be ideologically committed to the pet causes of either the liberals or the conservatives. Of course that is why the Washington establishment is so profoundly against him – he isn’t one of them, and he doesn’t seem to be prepared to look out for their interests. He will certainly look out for his own interests, of course. But considering how little support he has gotten, even from his own party, he certainly doesn’t seem to be beholden to anyone.

4. He is unabashedly pro-America.  After eight years of President Obama apologizing to the world repeatedly for America, it is kind of refreshing to see someone who seems prepared to stand up for the nation he wants to lead. I can’t think of another nation in the world that isn’t proud of itself and of what it has accomplished – even nations mired in endless civil wars retain a sense of self-worth in their history and cultures. So I suspect many voters are a little tired of the constant East Coast liberal attitude of apologizing for our faults.  Yes, America has faults, but in fact as near as I can tell our democratic systems is working as hard as anyone in the world to grow past them.

Of course none of us – TV talking heads and op-ed pundits included – have any idea how he would actually be as president. As Scott Adams pointed out in a recent blog, no one really knows who would be the best president, because no one knows what challenges she/he will face. A person who would be good at handling a war might be disastrous in handling a recession – and we have no idea ahead of time which of these they might face.

But traditional establishment politicians would do well to ponder Trump’s success.  If he loses, which he probably will, this voter discontent isn’t going to disappear. Thus far it seems to me the establishment has been blaming everyone else, including the “dumb” voters”, for this unsettled election season. But in fact I think most of the voter discontent is with the establishment itself and its policies. Until/unless the establishment can overcome it’s hubris and look honestly at itself, it is going to continue to face these sorts of voter revolutions.

PS - having said that, I seriously doubt that the current political establishment - liberal or conservative - can bring itself to that sort of self-examination.  It has gotten so insular, so isolated from the lives of average Americans, so sure that its views are the right ones and everyone else is either dumb, uninformed, or bigoted, that it would take something fairly drastic to shake up the system.

How much is a billion? A trillion?

The GAO estimates that Medicare lost $60 billion in fraudulent charges in 2014. Thus far we have spent about $4 trillion on our assorted wars in the Middle East including long-term veteran’s pensions and medical care. The US national debt stands at about $19 trillion. The US military budget for 2016 is about $600 billion. The Chicago public pension fund currently is $104.6 billion short.    It is hard to get one’s head around such big numbers – millions, billions, trillions.

A billion is a thousand million (the British used to have a million million in a billion, but they have converted to the US system now.)

A trillion is a thousand billion, or a thousand thousand million. So how much money is that?

Parkland Memorial hospital in Dallas Texas is a newly-built major teaching hospital with 862 beds and about 2 million square feet of space, and it cost $1.3 billion to build. So for what Medicare lost in fraud in 2014 alone we could have built 46 such hospitals, almost one per state.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated in 2015 that it would cost about $3.6 trillion to bring the entire US infrastructure (roads, bridges, train tracks, power lines, phone systems, high-speed internet, water systems, sewer systems airports, seaports, etc) up to good condition. So for what we have spent and committed in our Middle East wars we could have fixed all the infrastructure in the nation with enough left over to perhaps build one or two major new airports or another interstate highway or two across the entire nation.

The average 4 year cost at a private college these days is about $130,000.  So the $19 trillion US national debt is equivalent to putting a little more than 146 million people – about half the entire US population – through an undergraduate degree at a high-priced private college.  Another way of looking at the debt is that every US man, woman and child owes about $60,230.

Nationwide (obviously there are large local variations) the average cost to build a 2000 square foot house is about $300,000. So the $600 billion US military budget could build about 4.6 million average-sized houses per year.

The average public school teacher salary in the US is between $42,000 and $49,000, depending on grade level, experience and specialties.  So let’s say the total average is about $45,000. The amount that the Chicago public pension fund is short would pay the annual salaries of about 2.3 million new teachers.

Or as Senator Everett Dirksen (Illinois) is supposed to have said (though apparently he never did), "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money."

Makes one think, doesn’t it?

Obamacare and the Public Option

Now that it is becoming increasingly obvious, even to diehard defenders, that Obamacare is failing, I see the usual suspects are once again raising the suggestions of (a) a public option, and (b) universal federal health care.

The public option essentially involves the government putting up its own insurance company. Why liberals think the government, with absolutely no experience in the field, can make money or at least break even when professional insurance companies can’t is beyond me.  So really the public option involves the taxpayers (ie – the rest of us) subsidizing yet another, probably inefficient government agency.  I don’t think so!

We already know how the government would do with universal federal health care, because they already run two such systems – Medicare and the VA system.  The Veteran’s Administration health care has been a scandal for years now, and despite lots of embarrassing revelation over the past two years, it STILL isn’t fixed. In Phoenix this year, for example, the average wait time for a first appointment with a doctor was still 115 days, almost 4 months, and 1700 veterans were simply “lost” from the waiting lists.

So that is one model of how a federal health care system might look.

Medicare works better, but is economically unsustainable in the long run. In 2014 Medicare accounted for nearly $600 billion in the federal budget, or about 14% of the total budget. This year’s report from the trustees estimates that the fund will be depleted by 2028. And it is so poorly run that the Government Accounting Office recently estimated  that in 2014 it lost over $60 billion (yes, BILLION) in fraudulent charges

So yes, the nation’s health care system badly needs a major overhaul, but turning it into another expensive, bloated, inefficient, and unresponsive government agency is likely to make the problem worse, not better.

A Hillary Presidency

As things stand now, I would judge it more likely than not that Hillary Clinton will be our next president. I suppose we might have a Brexit-like surprise, or Wikileaks might release an “October surprise” – something so damming from all the hacked Clinton files and emails that even yellow-dog Democrats would have to rethink their support.  But that seems unlikely. Trump’s campaign seems to stumble from one error to the next, and Hillary seems finally to have learned Napoleon’s maxim: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake”. Every time there is another damaging revelation about Hillary – which is almost daily – Trump manages to upstage the news cycle with another dumb statement so that the Hillary revelation loses its punch.

So what might we expect from a Clinton presidency? She certainly won’t have a mandate from the voters, most of whom voted against her crazy opponent rather than for her. She also is highly unlikely to have a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, and perhaps not even a veto-proof majority in the Senate. So she will face the same Republican obstructionism that Obama has been facing the past six years, except that many Republicans in Congress hate her more than they hated Obama.

Nor will the bad news about her questionable ethics stop coming just because the election is over.  In fact, once there isn’t Trump to distract everyone, her questionable past dealings, especially with the pay-for-access issues with the Clinton Foundation, will probably continue to fester.

On foreign policy she will no doubt remain a hawk, meaning she will likely get us even more involved in the Middle East wars.  The Saudi Arabian royal family are heavy supporters of her campaign and the Clinton Foundation slush fund, and she is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds her so generously, so presumably she will tailor her policies in that area to support them.  That actually may be a bit difficult for her, because as Secretary of State she supported the Iran deal, which the Saudis vehemently opposed, and which they blame for Iran’s new aggressiveness.

On domestic policy she espouses the standard economically-unsustainable Democratic progressive ideas that have been failing so miserably for years.  Consider that almost all the big cities in the US have been governed by Democrats for decades – and almost all of them are in terrible financial straits, with bankrupt public pension funds, endemic corruption, miserable school systems controlled by powerful teacher’s unions, dangerous racial tensions, and crumbling infrastructures.  I never fault progressives for trying new ideas to improve things, but I do fault them for never paying attention to whether those new ideas are working or not.

Needless to say, I don't expect her to propose any legislation that would seriously inconveniences the Wall Street firms who paid her so handsomely for her speeches.

She will face several very serious problems early in her tenure. Obamacare, despite the repeated, almost hysterical denials by the administration and its supporters, is crumbling fast. Obamacare insurance rates for next year will rise 30-40% or more in a number of states. Aetna, United Healthcare, Humana, and Blue Cross are all withdrawing from most of the markets next year because they are losing so much money. 12 of the 23 original federally-financed Obamacare state insurance co-ops have already gone bankrupt (costing the taxpayers $2.5 billion), and 8 more of those remaining 11 are expected to fail this year. It’s getting pretty hard to ignore the collapse, even for those who are determined to keep their heads in the sand.

The job market will continue to be weak, due mostly to automation but also a bit due to the trade agreements that she supported so strongly as Secretary of State (but now says she opposes). So the anger that fueled the Bernie Sanders movement will continue to dog her.  She has made lots of vague promises, but in fact the president has relatively little control over these events, so she will get blamed – whether fairly or not - by a large and angry portion of the population when those promises come to nothing.

Internationally, besides the long-standing Middle East mess and the increasing unhelpful influence of Iran and Russia in that part of the world, she will have to contend with the increasingly aggressive Chinese in the South China Sea, continuing Russian provocations along its borders, and especially in the Ukraine, the weakness of NATO, the weakness and upheavals in the European Union, and continuing terrorist activities across the world.

Finally, she will have to deal with her health problems. Her campaign continues to insist that she is fine, but clearly she isn’t fine. She looks wildly different from day to day, so something about her medication and/or her metabolism is swinging wildly from day to day.  A few insiders have admitted privately that she suffers from serious mood swings, and is even at times incoherent.  She manages to hide this in public, but the stresses of the job will take their toll, so whatever it is she is suffering from will probably get worse during her term as president.  She isn’t the first presidential candidate, by the way, to lie about her condition. We now know President Kennedy, when he was a candidate, paid four physicians to give him a clean bill of health when they knew he suffered from colitis, prostatitis, and Addison's disease, among other conditions, and took painkillers, antianxiety agents, stimulants and sleeping pills, as well as hormones, in order to function.

Of course, she may not really care. She will have achieved her goal - to become the first female president of the United States.  And no doubt she and Bill will  enrich themselves handsomely during her time in office, and even after, from the access the two of them can sell.