dagblog - Comments for "1 County = +20 Obama '12 and +20 Trump '16"

I will continue to breathe as

moat — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 00:12:47 +0000

In reply to The rational response would

I will continue to breathe as long as possible.

I wonder if a resurgence of collective bargaining would change the market in the way it has in the past.
Marx was wrong about a lot of things. His observation that unions tend toward becoming partners of "Capital" is not without merit. When you want a better deal in the bigger deal, you become a cheerleader for the deal.

That isn't to say collective bargaining is dead. Especially in places where the potential workers of an enterprise can look at each other and agree to apply some leverage. But the labor market inside the U.S. is very fluid. All the concern about whether we are screwing ourselves in foreign trade deals is something to reckon with. But those kinds of shifts of market viability happen within the U.S. too.

Maybe Ohio and Utah will form a trading partnership.

The rational response would

Flavius — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 14:00:21 +0000

In reply to I do agree the Appalachians

The rational response would be for the republicans to ease their hostility to unions (perhaps in exchange for some change in their direct political involvement ) and let them return to their once- useful role as an effective counterveiling power to Capital. Cf Political Science 101.

Don't hold your breath.

Your last paragraph helps

artappraiser — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 13:57:56 +0000

In reply to I do agree the Appalachians

Your last paragraph helps make a big picture thing that has happened clear to me, something about how times have changed.

Union provided health care back in the good old days was just the basics. Like Medicaid today, one pair of cheap glasses for the kids per year. If your wife got breast cancer, no fancy Mayo clinic specialists with the new treatments, she got radical breast removal and she got nuked with radiation at the local hospital and she still died a few years later.Nowadays everyone expects the best available for everyone. So in effect, they don't realize it, but people have traded that nest egg for what used to be called rich people's doctors. Leave out that it can be done way more efficiently than we in the U.S. do it, but still everyone in the first world has come to expect the best in high tech medical care. That was a tradeoff, a choice to have medical care a much larger part of the economy and a much larger part of pay. Right now here in the U.S. it's a part of wages. If you switch to universal, the ever rising expense of giving the best to everyone is still there as higher taxes. Especially if you want "freedom" about behavior, you don't want to impose wellness nanny state rules that for-profit insurance tries to do.

In the end, high tech health care for everyone is a transfer of jobs to that industry from jobs in other industries as well. As are expectations not to be warehoused in a nursing home but to have a home health aide in old age. Once again, that was something that only rich people could have in the good old days.

Another thing. It should not be forgotten that Trump promised to fix this real easy. Everybody will get good health care without the problems of Obamacare, we'll show you, I'm the big shot CEO you saw on Apprentice, I know how to get the right people to fix these things. By mentioning some specifics like insurance should be transferrable between states, he made it sound like maybe he really did know something about it. You can't really blame people who don't have the time or smarts to understand the system for falling for that. (I recall Perot basically promised the same thing.) If he had admitted "health care, it's complicated" back during the campaign, instead of promising an illusion, it would have been a big fail., hurt him badly in votes. But he didn't, he, and most of the GOP Congress, lied, and now people will know that. It might take some time for it to really kick in, but eventually they will see it.

I do agree the Appalachians

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 06:13:00 +0000

In reply to Absolutely fascinating piece.

I do agree the Appalachians version of Hillary that got blasted for focusing too much on whites in 2008 (for being racist) largely gone missing this election, probably even before the misstrewn coal comment killed her reputation there.

Did anyone have a real message on wages? Does anyone have one now?

The issue with the union-sponsored healthcare and rising deductibles is an example of how we'll end up with universal health care in the end. All the providers are gaming these policies in one way or another, such as how they dismantled retirement benefits a generation ago. That's another issue that's disappeared - my parents could count on working for one company for decades and banking a nestegg.

"The financial crisis of 2007

NCD — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 05:28:27 +0000

In reply to 2007 2008

"The financial crisis of 2007–2008, also known as the global financial crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s." Wikipedia

The 1930s, note unemployment rose for 4 years, and did not drop below pre-FDR level of Hoover until 2 years after the US went to war:

Obama first 3 years were the

Flavius — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 05:01:28 +0000

In reply to 2007 2008

Obama first 3 years were the worst since WW2.

2009 9.3%

2010 9.6

2011 8.9

The nearest comparison would be Reagan's

1982 9.7

83 9.6

84 7.5

2007 2008

Flavius — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 04:49:45 +0000

In reply to Bureau of Labor Management

2007 2008 2009

Jan 4.6% 5.0 7.8

July 4.6 5.6 9.5

Oct 4.7 6.5 10.0

W's 2007 was at about the level economists describe as non inflationary unemployment rate,

Obama's Jan 2009 was a level touched now and then in normal years. But October's 10%

was a killer.

Bureau of Labor Management

rmrd0000 — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 04:24:14 +0000

In reply to My usual comment

Bureau of Labor Management reports different higher unemployment under Bush and a decrease in unemployment after 8 years of Obama

https://www.vox.com/2015/11/7/9684780/unemployment-rate-obama

My usual comment

Flavius — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 04:08:20 +0000

In reply to People rationalize their

My usual comment

Unemployment %

Bush's last 4 years Obama's first 4

4.7% 9.8

4.6 9.1

5.0 8.3

5.2 8.0

Roughly 4% more were unemployed during Obama's first term. Roughly,1%=s 1.5 million.

So 6 million people learned to associate the democrats with their being out of work. Say half of them

were already Republicans. How do you guess the other 3 million voted when Hillary ran?

Whoever the Democratic candidate, whatever her assets, ,were she a combination of Joan of Arc and Eleanor Roosevelt many of them weren't going to vote for a Democrat. At best they'd have stayed home.

Not because they were sexist or racist although no doubt some were. But because they hated the people in charge when they lost their job.

Some of them no doubt still do and will go on doing that for a long time.

We smarties know that W bequeathed Obama an economy in a free fall . And some of us -me for instance- know he miraculously did what FDR failed to do-completely turn around an economy heading for the depths .

So Hillary was campaigning with unemployment back down to the level under George W.

If you think the Democrats are dying now give a thought to how moribund they would have been if the unemployment was still at 9.8% when Obama handed the key to the nuclear war heads over to the orange hair liar..

Instead we had this week's mini recovery and we ain't dead yet.

Absolutely fascinating piece.

artappraiser — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 02:40:59 +0000

In reply to 1 County = +20 Obama '12 and +20 Trump '16

Absolutely fascinating piece. I am skeptical how much can be applied to the whole country as advice for "the Democratic party" but it's still absolutely fascinating.

One thing is clear it continues to be "Jesse Ventura country" there as to: proud of iconoclasm. I'm originally from Wisconsin, not Minnesota, the two states are similar, so I sort of get it, but there's some differences, too.