God and Hollywood: The Onslaught Continues

Republicans do badly with young voters [because] they’re seen as uncool. . . [It’s the] “Footloose” [factor.] For a large majority of people, the political question is, “How would the sanctimonious preacher from the movie ‘Footloose’ feel about this subject?” They answer the question, and then take the opposite position.

--Glenn Harlan Reynolds, New York Post

Michelle vs. “the sanctimonious preacher.” That’s one way to encapsulate the cultural war Democrats seem to be winning. As former adviser to the Romney campaign Tevi Troy wrote recently:

Throughout 2012, . . . Obama continually demonstrated an unprecedented and often disturbing level of pop culture fluency, showing himself to be up to date on music, movies, and especially TV. Obama, at one time or another, mentioned Homeland, Modern Family, Boardwalk Empire, and Mad Men as among his favorite shows. . . Obama also knew where to go to demonstrate how hip he was, appearing on more than two dozen “soft” entertainment-style interviews during the campaign. . . He told the deejays [he] enjoys working out to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”

Obama also used his strong relationships with pop culture figures to get stars like George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker to direct their pro-Obama efforts toward targeted demographic groups in which the Obama data machine discovered that they would have the greatest appeal. . . the strategy paid off, especially with America’s screen-loving youth.

Nothing symbolized that strong Hollywood-Democratic Party relationship more vividly that Michelle Obama’s center-stage role at this year’s televised--to a gigantic worldwide audience--Oscar ceremony, presenting the award for best picture from the White House, backed by the U.S. military in dress uniforms.

This blog has repeatedly noted that Hollywood seems to have supplanted religion’s place in American culture. Now with the First Lady, in the role of Queen Michelle, tying herself to Hollywood the way presidents used to grab onto God and religion at key moments in our history, who can doubt Hollywood's triumph?

Much of this is due to organized religion’s decline. Listen to Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton, charged to be the keeper of his employer’s conscience, justifying a Post reporter’s attack on religious conservatives:

most journalists have a problem with religionists telling people what they can and cannot do. We want to write words, read books, watch movies, listen to music, and have sex and babies pretty much when, where and how we choose.

In other words, at one of America’s top newspapers we now call people of faith “religionists” (as opposed to socialists?), while defending “if it feels good, do it” morality.

And what of Republicans, who still tend to take organized religion seriously. What role can they possibly hope to play in America’s current “cool” and “hipster” culture? Liberal sage James Fallows, in the Atlantic magazine he once ran, pointed out that “Ridicule is generally more threatening to a public figure or a public idea than ‘logical’ rebuttal is. That's why Colbert and the Daily Show matter.” (The Daily Show and Colbert Report dominate late night TV among viewers 18-to-34, as well as among young men.) Fallows is right, so why should there be serious talk (as we just attempted) about culture, religion, values, and morality at all?

Over 50 years ago, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow famously called television a “vast wasteland.” There are notable exceptions, but generally Hollywood movies and TV have sunk lower since, to today’s open sewer.  Don’t we think of Rome as marked by excesses of immorality and violence that sent it into decline, with Emperor Caligula’s reign an especially low point?

Yet earlier this month, Justin Timberlake hosted Saturday Night Live. Timberlake, a respected member of Hollywood’s performing elite, ran through a series of tasteless, raunchy skits, topped by one where he played Caligula as a sympathetic figure! How low can they go? Hollywood, though ostensibly in jest, admiring Rome at its worst.

Timberlake sympathetically playing sadist Caligula touches the most objectionable side of Hollywood’s Rome-like decadence--its affinity for gratuitous violence. The Newtown massacre last December raised anew the possible link between mass media violence and impressionable potential mass killers. And once again, Hollywood, at least in the form of Tinseltown’s Vincent Bruzzese, president of the motion picture group at the market research firm Ipsos, brushed off any responsibility for the consequences of their work:

If [violence] didn't make money, studios wouldn't make these movies. It comes down to what's the biggest audience we can get for the best film we can make. The studios would put out a four-hour documentary about how to garden tulips if they thought they'd have a $100-mil opening weekend. But it doesn't work that way.

So that’s it. From the industry that routinely attacks capitalism’s greed, a straight defense of violence when it feeds Hollywood’s greed.

Happy Easter.

Just Maybe? “Marriage + Family = Success”?

There are signs our national elite is awakening to America’s broken home disaster. Megan McArdle of the liberal-leaning “Daily Beast” is a moderate former senior editor at the (liberal) establishment Atlantic.

McArdle has fixed on Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s critique, in Forbes, of economist and author of The Great Stagnation Tyler Cowen’s New York Times op-ed. In his column, Cowen proclaims--to much approval from his fellow economists--that economists are biased (toward “good,” but biased anyway). Gobry notes that “economists praise Cowen’s finding,” even though it “undermines economics’ claim” to be based on “scientific knowledge.”

Gobry offers an example of economists’ bias: the discipline’s relative treatment of college versus marriage as a path to success. As McArdle puts it, “College improves your earning prospects.  So does marriage.  Education makes you more likely to live longer.  So does marriage.”  So she sides with Gobry when he asks why economists strongly back initiatives to move people into college, yet rarely back initiatives to get people married.

McArdle quoting Gobry:

economists’ “cosmopolitan perspective” (as Cowen puts it) makes them not feel good at the idea of public policy that would interfere with personal choices (allowing for a second that getting married is a “personal choice” in a way that going to college isn’t). Most economists think that government should not interfere or have a stance one way or another with decisions that feel intimate to people. That is a complete value judgement. And it’s a completely defensible one.

But at the level of the economics profession, this leads to bias: much more ink is spilled on, and thought given to the college wage premium than the marriage wage premium. One is mostly praised and interpreted in a certain way, while the other is mostly ignored. And, of course, the thing that academic economics focuses on has an effect on elite debate and public policy, especially when the socially liberal, pro-higher ed biases of economists line up well with those of the rest of the elite.

McArdle offers her own reason economists ignore the value of marriage:

all economists are, definitionally, very good at college.  Not all economists are good at marriage.  Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad.  Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad.

An even clearer sign our elite are finally grappling with marriage’s relationship to success comes from a recent column by liberal Ruth Marcus in the liberal Washington Post. Marcus defends the latest campaign of nanny City (“No Big Gulp sodas here!”) of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this one against teen pregnancy. In addition to the poster above, Bloomberg is papering his city with ads that say, "I'm twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen," and "If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty."

Marcus adds other relevant facts, including children of teenagers are more likely to be born prematurely and at low birth weight, more likely to be abused or neglected, less likely to complete high school, with boys twice as likely to end up in prison as the sons of mothers aged 20 and 21, and girls three times as likely to become teen mothers themselves compared to mothers who wait until 20 or 21. Only half of teen mothers obtain a high school diploma by age 22 compared to 89% of women who did not give birth as teenagers, and less than 2% of mothers who give birth before age 18 obtain college degrees by age 30, with half below the poverty line and the family's chances of living in poverty increasing as children grow older.

Marcus believes the New York City ad campaign will work. The city’s existing anti-pregnancy effort includes making “Plan B” emergency contraceptives available in schools, the effort helping drop teen pregnancies 27% over the last decade. And in Milwaukee, which once had the country’s second-highest teen pregnancy rate, teen pregnancies have fallen five years in a row -- faster than the national average -- since the city instituted "shock advertising" similar to New York’s. Says New York City's human resources director Robert Doar, "Cultural messages do matter, whether it's smoking or drunk driving or obesity."

Who would oppose a campaign against teenage pregnancy? Marcus calls out New York State Sen. Liz Krueger ("This campaign seems laser-focused on shaming already struggling teen parents or, ludicrously, convincing teens not to get pregnant because really bad things will happen"), City Councilwoman Annabel Palma (Teenage mothers across the city will feel "shamed and stigmatized"), and most of all, Planned Parenthood of New York City, whose Haydee Morales complained the ad campaign "creates stigma, hostility and negative public opinions about teen pregnancy and parenthood."

Of Planned Parenthood’s objections, Marcus responds, “Excuse me, but we're not supposed to have a negative opinion about teen pregnancy and parenthood? Isn't that the planned part of Planned Parenthood?”

Marcus writes that saying it's a shame when a teenager gets pregnant certainly isn’t the same as shaming pregnant teenagers. Being squeamish about pregnancy does teenagers no favor. To Marcus’ credit, she goes on to criticize “undue squeamishness” about “out-of-wedlock births in general.”

Though neither Bloomberg nor Marcus directly advocate marriage before baby, a campaign to slow down children having children does move our largest city in the right direction.

No Dad, Big Problem (II)

Walter E. Williams is a black, conservative economist at George Mason University. He also is appalled at America’s working-class family breakdown.

In Investors Business Daily, Williams makes these points:

• 29% of white children, 53% of Hispanics and 73% of black children are born to unmarried women. The absence of a husband and father from the home is a strong contributing factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance and a host of other social problems. [emphasis added] 

• the low marriage rate among blacks is relatively new. Census data show that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults from 1890 to 1940. 

• In 2009, the poverty rate among married whites was 3.2%; for blacks, it was 7%, and for Hispanics, it was 13.2%. The higher poverty rates — 22% for whites, 35.6% for blacks and 37.9% for Hispanics — are among unmarried families. 

• Other forms of cultural deviancy are found in the kind of music accepted today that advocates killing and rape and other vile acts. Punishment for criminal behavior is lax. 

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is similarly alarmed. In USA Today, Reynolds writes:

why don't people get married. . .? [B]ecause they don't have to. Single motherhood (or fatherhood) is no longer looked down upon . . . Shotgun weddings are largely a thing of the past. Welfare payments and other social assistance can (partially) replace a father in the house. (When you subsidize something, you get more of it -- and we're subsidizing unmarried mothers). And. . . marriage [is] much less attractive . . . than it once was. [emphasis added]

marriage and kids [are] now seen as something closer to exile from adult life -- imprisonment in the land of Chuck E. Cheese and My Little Pony. Suburban parents often drive SUVs instead of minivans because minivans, though more practical, are associated with low-prestige activities like parenting, while SUVs are associated with higher-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. . .masculinity in today's society [is] not a dad -- just look at the bumbling doofuses who portray dads on pretty much every TV commercial and sitcom.

The problem [is] the kids do worse. A government check isn't a substitute for a father, and. . . single-mom kids . . . tend to do worse on measures ranging from educational attainment and future income to criminality. And the process feeds on itself: Women want "marriageable" men -- those with good incomes and stable lifestyles -- but the more single-parent households there are, the fewer men are likely to be "marriageable" in the next generation.

Neither Williams nor Reynolds mention Charles Murray’s research on families Coming Apart, but both seem in tune with Murray’s concern that a government-encouraged moral breakdown contributes to the problem.

No Dad, Big Problem (I)

Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic, is appalled by what’s happening to American families. He’s stung that “58% of first births in lower-middle-class households are now to unmarried women,” while “two in five of all births are to unwed mothers, an all-time high.” To Thompson, the big question is, “Why so few marriages?"

His answer:

• marriage like any other contract [is] most likely to happen when the gains are big. So we should expect marriages among low-income Americans to decline if women perceive declining gains from hitching themselves to the men around them. 

• Low-skill men have had a rough two generations. The evaporation of manufacturing work has gutted their main source of employment, while globalization has held down their wages. Marriage has declined the most among men whose wages have declined the most (see graph below--hit to enlarge). 

 

• Thompson quotes from The Truly Disadvantaged author William Julius Wilson, who argues that "high rates of unemployment and incarceration mean. . .the local dating pool [is] populated by unmarriageable men--[so] women chose to live independently." 

• Thomson also believes it’s much easier to raise a child and keep a home given modern household innovations, including cheap prepared foods, cheap clothes, machines to wash and dry, and to vacuum. Machines not only encourage women to seek work, but also make it easier for them to raise a child alone. 

In the end, this is bad news, suggests Thompson, meaning “women find themselves drifting ‘unintentionally’ into parenthood with men they have no intent of marrying,” thereby creating “another generation of problems.”

To Thompson, it’s pretty much economic determinism, a concept associated with Marxism. At least Thompson, however, sees family breakdown as a problem.

This blog, in contrast to Thompson, has repeatedly followed the lead of Charles Murray, whose book Coming Apart first and best documents family breakdown in the white working class since the 1960s.   Murray pins the breakdown on “Hollywood” values combined with government policies that encourage single (female) parent families, while lowering the importance of (male) employment.

Harvard takes on Princeton (II)

Harvard's Alesina

“Way back in 2010, when everybody in Washington seemed determined to anoint Representative Paul Ryan as the ultimate Serious, Honest Conservative, I pronounced him a flimflam man. Even then, his proposals were obviously fraudulent: huge cuts in aid to the poor, but even bigger tax cuts for the rich, with all the assertions of fiscal responsibility resting on claims that he would raise trillions of dollars by closing tax loopholes. . . Since then, his budgets have gotten even flimflammier. . .

“[L]et’s turn to the serious proposals. . . the one released by Senate Democrats[, b]y comparison with the Ryan plan, . . . is a very reasonable plan indeed.”

--Paul Krugman, New York Times

As the title indicates, this is our second time going to Harvard to answer Paul Krugman, the Nobel prizewinning Princeton economist. Our thanks to Daniel Henninger, who in the Wall Street Journal, has grabbed onto the work of Harvard economist Alberto Alesina.

Henninger calls Alesina “the last economist that Democrats want to deal with” at a time the country is gaining sympathy for spending cuts. He notes that Democrats have long believed in the 1931 Keynesian multiplier (“spend your way to prosperity”; Paul Krugman), saying no president believes in it more than Obama.

Alesina contrarily argues for a combination of significant, permanent cuts in public spending and small tax increases, if any. His views come after Alesina and his colleagues analyzed the International Monetary Fund history of all fiscal plans enacted by 17 OECD governments--including the U.S., Canada and Japan--between 1978 and 2009. Together, these countries tried everything to grow the economy—raise spending, cut spending, raise taxes or cut them, in endless combinations.

Alesina and company concluded:

"Adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax-based ones.  [Cuts] have been associated with mild and short-lived recessions, in many cases with no recession at all. Tax. . . increases—have been associated with prolonged and deep recessions."

Alesina says the European debate over "failed austerity" is misleading because it emphasizes the spending cuts but rarely refers to tax increases. In truth, "austerity" plans fail to revive growth when they too heavily rely on raising taxes—in Europe or in the U.S.

The studies found that fiscal plans based on large, permanent spending cuts lead to renewed growth more than any alternative policy mix tried. Canada is the leading example the past 15 years. Henninger adds that in the U.S., the Dow reached its all-time high after the sequester happened. Weren’t the cuts the first credible step in rebuilding private-sector confidence?

The Patty Murray Senate budget: A $975 billion spending cut and a $975 billion tax increase. The Paul Ryan House budget: $4.6 trillion of spending cuts and no new taxes beyond the fiscal-cliff increases.

Henninger concludes the Murray budget would be a disaster, while the Ryan budget is the way to go, if Harvard’s Alesina is right.

Viva il Papa! Francis fights poverty.

"Francis . . . is attuned to the needs of the impoverished, perhaps more than any of his predecessors since John XXIII. If [he] first addresses . . .social justice, it may be the result of his pent-up frustration with the increasing gap between rich and poor"

--John Moody, Fox News and former TIME Vatican correspondent and Rome bureau chief  

“Francis, Go and rebuild my Church, which you can see has fallen into ruin." 

--God to St. Francis

The Catholic church’s renewal and reform effort is in its 55th year, having begun with the papacy of John XXIII in 1958. Francis will continue this renewal, which weaves between reform (John XXIII: 1958-63 and John Paul II: 1978-2005) and consolidation (Paul VI and Benedict XVI), with Francis' elevation suggesting another surge forward. That is good.

The 1.2 billion-member church faces what secularists believe to be its terminal crisis, the one resulting from the scientific progress sweeping religion aside in Europe, North America, and even Latin American cities. Relevancy is important in the Catholic fight for survival; empty churches symbolize approaching death.

The previous great Catholic renewal effort--the 100 year Counter-Reformation which began in 1545 with the Council of Trent--rebalanced Europe between Catholics and Protestants, and kept the church relevant through the next three centuries. In the present renewal, John XXIII (and Paul VI) democratized the faith with vernacular language masses, greater reliance on scripture and the life of Jesus, devolution of greater authority to bishops (over 5,000 today), and greater participation by lay people.

John Paul II is remembered for drawing developing world Catholics into full church participation. But John Paul’s greatest contribution was precipitating the Soviet empire’s collapse, which began in Poland with his 1978 selection as pope, an event that led directly to the rise of Lech Walesa, Solidarity, liberation of the Eastern Europe satellites the following decade, and finally the U.S.S.R.‘s complete break-up in 1991.

Now Francis will be going after poverty--the developing world’s greatest problem by far, however little the issue grips a Western elite fixed on birth control, abortion, and gay rights. (To those arguing population growth is bad for the economy, my response is: Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource.)  Will a Catholic war on poverty restore the church’s relevance?

I would think so.

Ryan says, "close tax loopholes to spur growth, not to enlarge government."

Yesterday, House budget chair Paul Ryan said on “Fox News Sunday”:

By continuing to raise taxes to fuel more spending, you’ll never get tax reform, which is critical for economic growth and job creation. And so yes, we have an impasse right now, which is that the president wants to continue raising taxes not for deficit reduction, but to fuel more spending, and we see tax reform as an incredibly important goal in policy, to getting pro-growth economics, to getting business growing again and to hiring people. Tax reform to us is an economic growth-generating exercise.   .   .

I do believe there is a consensus for tax reform. There are a lot of moderate Democrats, especially in the Senate, that are in favor of lowering tax rates by closing loopholes. That's what we are proposing. Stop picking winners and losers in Washington. Let people keep more of their hard-earned money. You don't lose revenue for the federal government. And you make it easier for small businesses to create jobs and hire more workers. We think there is a bipartisan consensus for that and I'm hoping the president comes to join that consensus.

Obama wants to close tax loopholes benefiting the wealthy, in order to underwrite more government spending. Ryan and Republicans instead want to lower tax rates, especially the corporate tax rate now at 35% the highest in the developed world, in order to fuel private sector growth and investment.

“Tax reform” to Ryan means using Obama's desired loophole closing to finance lower tax rates, and to do so during this time of unbalanced budgets by keeping net taxes where they are now. Ryan is not, as some Republicans want, asking to lower total tax collections, nor does he want to raise them, as Obama advocates.

Ryan’s goal is economic growth.  And if you want economic growth and jobs, Ryan's tax reform path of exchanging loophole closing for lower rates is the road to follow.

Huh? Jobs up, stocks up, Obama approval drops?

Big numbers are making big news. The two biggest economic numbers are the monthly jobs report (which includes the unemployment rate), and the daily Dow Jones closing. Both are doing well, with the Dow at all time highs. Yet the most important political number--the president’s job approval rating which is tracked daily like the Dow--isn’t doing well at all. What gives?  


Jobs

The U.S. economy created 236,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since late 2008. This in spite of expectations that higher taxes and federal spending cuts would damage the economy. The number of people who found work in February easily topped Wall Street forecasts of 160,000 jobs. The job creation pace in February was the fastest since November, and entering the new year, the U.S. has averaged more than 200,000 new jobs a month.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, fell to 7.7% from 7.9%. Experts said the unemployment rate would stay at 7.9%. The last time the jobless rate was this low was in December 2008, before Obama took office.  

Yet . . .

“MarketWatch’s” Jeffry Bartash, who supplied the positive figures quoted above, added in his report:

the falling jobless rate stemmed mostly from a small decline in the size of the labor force, reflecting the most negative aspect of an otherwise upbeat employment report. The percentage of people who have a job or are looking for one fell a tick to 63.5% and matched a 32-year low.

Some 22.6 million Americans remain out of work, including nearly 5 million who have been without a job for at least six months. The unemployment rate is an even higher 14.3% when including people who have gotten too discouraged to look for a job or who can only find part-time work.

Stocks

The market is booming . Wall Street loved the latest jobs figures, sending the Dow (14,397) to an all time high for the fourth day in a row, with NASDAQ (3,244) higher than it’s been since 2000, and the S&P 500 (1,551) within 14 points of its all time high.  My FOX Index (see chart), which tracks the distance from 15,800, the “healthy” market minimum total of a Dow of 12,000, an S&P 500 of 1,300, and a NASDAQ of 2,500, reached its all-time high of +3,392. (Obviously, since the Index only began in August 2008.) It’s all seemingly great economic news.  

But. . .

While Jeffrey Anderson at the conservative Weekly Standard points out that since March 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen about 100% in inflation-adjusted dollars, at the same time, the typical American family’s income has fallen 6% or $3,168 (from $54,752 to $51,584), and the share of employed Americans has dropped by 1.3% (from 59.9% to 58.6%). Anderson believes that

the big government-big business alliance benefits the big guy.  . . heavy-handed regulation and cronyism, and . . . redistributing some portion of the [wealth] isn’t actually an effective solution to income inequality.  Rather, this approach — an example of trickle-down economics if ever there was one — has managed to undermine growth and equality simultaneously. A far better approach would be to decentralize power.

Job Approval

Most people pay little attention to Obama’s job approval ratings, if they even know such a number exists. But after years of closely following political reporting out of Washington, I’m convinced the almost-daily job approval tracking numbers from Gallup and Rassmussen, along with results from other recent polls and especially when brought together in the “RealClearPolitics” President Job Approval average, is to political junkies what the Dow is to stock brokers.

Few if any Washington potentates refer to the “RealClearPolitics” average. That’s possibly because the site as yet lacks the prestige of Dow Jones, possibly because “RealClearPolitics” seems to lean conservative (while striving to be scrupulously nonpartisan), and more than possibly because the D.C. pontificaters like to think they practice an art, not something reduced to a three-digit number. But the number exists, and its hard for a commentator to write Obama is flying high when his approval rating is below 50%, and the commentator’s fellow scribes all know it.

It’s time for this blog to record, therefore, the fact that Obama’s "RealClearPolitics" job approval average has now fallen below 50% for three days running, something that didn’t happen in Obama’s first term until November 26, 2009, or more than a year after he was elected. As the chart below shows, the president’s approval rating shot up after last year's re-election, probably emboldening him to go after Republicans on tax increases and to defend big spending in hopes of destroying the GOP. It didn’t work, his job approval rating dropped, and recently, his partisan attacks have eased.  

Still. . .

Will the economy help Obama, if job growth continues and the stock market boom is extended? Of course it will, and his job approval ratings--closely tied to the economy--will reflect that positive development. But the stock market rise and job gains first have to translate into real economic growth. That hasn’t happened yet.

Schizophrenia and Mass Killings: Feds Botch Treatment

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, tells us that 50 years ago, the federal government created community mental-health centers, or CMHCs, to take the place of state mental hospitals. The fed action was historic because care of the mentally ill had been a state responsibility for over a century.

And the fed take-over was a big mistake.  Quoting Torrey:

• Over the following 17 years, the feds funded 789 CMHCs with a total of $2.7 billion ($20.3 billion in today's dollars), as the number of patients in state mental hospitals fell by three quarters—to 132,164 from 504,604—and those beds were closed down. 

• From the beginning, it was clear that CMHCs were not interested in taking care of the [discharged] patients. Instead, they focused on . . . "the worried well." [Though] individuals discharged from state hospitals initially made up [just] 4% and 7% of the CMHCs patient load,. . . the longer the CMHC was in existence the lower this percentage became.  [CMHC] failed because it did not provide care for the sickest patients released from the state hospitals. 

• half [those discharged from state mental hospitals], many of whom lack family support and suffer from the most severe illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, have done poorly. . . these untreated mentally ill are responsible for 10% of all homicides (and a higher percentage of the mass killings), constitute 20% of jail and prison inmates and at least 30% of the homeless. Severely mentally ill individuals now inundate hospital emergency rooms and have colonized libraries, parks, train stations and other public spaces. 

• Meantime. . . Medicaid and Medicare [--not] originally intended to become a major federal support for the mentally ill [--] now fill that role. In 2009, 4.7 million Americans received [social security support] because of mental illnesses, not including mental retardation, a tenfold increase since 1977. The total cost was $46 billion. 

• The total Medicaid and Medicare costs for mentally ill individuals in 2005 was more than $60 billion. . . the annual total public funds for . . . treatment of mentally ill individuals is now more than $140 billion. The equivalent expenditure [when] the CMHC program [began] was $1 billion, or about $10 billion in today's dollars. 

• President Obama['s] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration['s] contribution to the . . . Dec. 14 Newtown tragedy focused only on school children and insurance coverage. . . its current plan of action for 2011-14, a 41,000-word document, includes no mention of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or outpatient commitment. 

Torrey states the federal experiment has failed, as seen most recently in the mass shootings by mentally ill individuals in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., and Tucson, Ariz. He concludes, “It is time for the federal government to get out of [mental health treatment] and return the responsibility, and funds, to the states.”

Schizophrenia and Mass Killings: The Facts

Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist in private practice, has in the New York Times given us a compelling picture of what’s wrong with our current treatment of potential mass murderers. According to Steinberg, we are the victims of

too little education about the public health impact of untreated mental illness.

too few psychiatrists to talk about and treat severe mental disorders — even though the medications now available can be remarkably effective.

too much concern about privacy, labeling and stereotyping, about the civil liberties of people who have horrifically distorted thinking.

As a result, we neglect the rights of ordinary Americans to be free from being shot.

Steinberg makes these points:

• The most common source of severe psychosis in young adults is schizophrenia, . . a physiological disorder caused by changes in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is essential for language, abstract thinking and appropriate social behavior[, a] brain area . . . weakened by stress. . . often . . . in adolescence. 

• [schizophrenia] may result in auditory hallucinations, as well as disorganized thoughts. When the voices become commands, all bets are off. . . symptoms include . . . distorted thinking. . . a spaceship, or a comic book character — is controlling one’s thoughts and actions. 

• People with schizophrenia are unaware of how strange their thinking is and do not seek out treatment. 

• At Virginia Tech, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a rampage shooting in 2007, professors knew something was terribly wrong, but he was not hospitalized for long enough to get well. 

• The parents and community-college classmates of Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and shot and injured 13 others (including a member of Congress) in 2011, did not know where to turn. 

• what demons tormented Adam Lanza, who slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. on Dec. 14, are not known, though his acts strongly suggest undiagnosed schizophrenia. 

Steinberg specifically criticizes the so-called Goldwater Rule, an ethical standard of the American Psychiatric Association that prevents psychiatrists from commenting on someone’s mental state if they have not 1) examined the person and 2) received permission to discuss the case. As a result psychiatrists, the ones who know the most about severe mental illness, have been marginalized.

And he reminds us that medication and treatment work. The vast majority of people with schizophrenia, even untreated, are not violent, though they are more likely than others to commit violent crimes.

Steinberg believes we need

criminal penalties for those who sell weapons to people with clear signs of psychosis; greater insurance coverage and capacity at private and public hospitals for lengthier care for patients with schizophrenia; intense public education about how to deal with schizophrenia; greater willingness to seek involuntary commitment of those who pose a threat to themselves or others; and greater incentives for psychiatrists to treat the disorder [over] less dangerous conditions.

For an idea of what Steinberg’s recommendations are up against, listen to Abby Rapoport, writing in the progressive American Prospect:

The stereotype that the mentally ill are very violent is simply incorrect. According to the National Institute for Mental Health, people with severe mental illness, like schizophrenia, are up to three times more likely to be violent, but “most people with [severe mental illness] are not violent and most violent acts are not committed by people with [severe mental illness.]” On the whole, those with mental illness are responsible for only 5%  of violent crimes.

U.S. Economic History in Brief

"The president has made jobs and growth an intermittent priority, when it should really be the only priority. Many. . . truly believe jobs and growth are the byproducts of government spending. If that were true, we’d be living in paradise."

--Thomas Donohue, U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO  

"growing jobs is not Obama's real priority. Growing government is."

--Nolan Finley, Detroit News

Being president is always about the economy. Except when the president’s economy is bad. Then it’s never about the economy.

Twice before, we have quoted the Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost writing:

The modern press is at times sycophantic of the incumbent president and at other times trying to mimic Woodward and Bernstein; it all depends on which party is in office. With a Democratic president cut from the same cloth as they, many journalists have done everything in their power to set the national conversation in ways that favor Obama.

In deference to the importance a strong economy plays in insuring a healthy America, we have rewritten Cost's quote to read:

The modern press is at times sycophantic with “It’s the economy, stupid!” and at other times trying to hide economic performance; it all depends on which party is in office when the economy is bad. With the economy underperforming under a Democratic president cut from the same cloth as they, many journalists have done everything in their power to set the national conversation in ways that ignore the economy.

The U.S. before the Civil War was an agricultural country divided between free farmers in the North and West and slave-owning plantations in the South. Slavery split the nation, killed off the Whig Party, gave birth to the Republican Party, and led to war.

After the Civil War, Republicans dominated the victorious North and West, nurtured an increasingly powerful industrial state, and supported liberal immigration that both populated the West and filled Northern factories with cheap labor.

Progressives came to power under Democrat Woodrow Wilson 100 years ago to check capitalism’s excesses, but government failed to sustain economic growth after the Great War concluded (1918-20), leading first to depression, then under Republicans to “return to normalcy” limited government and “roaring twenties” prosperity.

The Crash of 1929 brought Democrats back to power, creating the big government mixed economy we know today. Big government, big business, and big labor shared power under largely Democratic control (the “Blue Model,” blue as in Democrat “blue states”), and presided over post-World War II prosperity that lasted to 1968.

National security (Vietnam/"9.11"/Iraq), social issues (civil rights/busing/fair housing/affirmative action/welfare/crime/equal rights for women/abortion/religious secularization), and government growth/taxes have divided the parties since. If the economy does well, incumbents generally retain power. If not, incumbents turn to non-economic issues, often without success.

Parties ignore the economy’s importance at their peril. Since 1968, the economy has been a leading issue in 15 out of 23 elections, and a winner in 11--or 73%--of those (see chart below).

Obamanomics: Conservatives See Broken Economy

"The commitments we make to each other. . . do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great."

--Barack Obama, Inaugural Address (2013)

“The commitments we make to each other.” Obama is talking about robbing Peter to pay Paul--taxes to pay for government.  But what has Obamanomics--bigger government--done for Paul?  

From conservative Robert Samuelson at the Washington Post:

there are 3.2 million fewer jobs now than at the previous high. The official unemployment rate is 7.9%, but it would be 14.4% if it included part-timers who would like full-time work and discouraged workers who have stopped looking. . . Scarce jobs are the nation's first, second and third most important economic and social problem.

Samuelson notes unemployment isn’t expected fall below 7.5% until 2015, making six years above 7.5%-- the longest stretch of high joblessness in 70 years. America, he believes, has gone from being “an expansive, risk-taking society to a skittish, risk-averse one.”

Samuelson points out that while in the boom years, personal saving as a share of income fell from 10.9% in 1982 to 1.5% in 2005, by 2012, it was back up to 4.4%, limiting the economy's expansion to rates -- lately, 1% to 2%-- too weak to absorb our jobless.

To Samuelson, “Pessimism produces a sluggish economy; a sluggish economy produces pessimism,” a psychological shift grounded in the fact that the financial crisis and Great Recession were largely unpredicted. Americans are now building wealth to protect themselves against unknown dangers, making the country “hostage to a stubborn, restraining psychology.”

From Rich Karlgaard, publisher of the conservative Forbes:

“It once was true that as General Motors goes, so goes the U.S. economy. Today that is truer of Wal-Mart, and that's a problem.”

Karlgaard believes Wal-Mart faces a “long season of headwinds:”

• The expiration of the payroll-tax cut will continue to hurt, as Wal-Mart's customers will sorely miss that lost $80 per month. 

• Food prices are rising faster than overall inflation--going up 3%-4% in 2013. 

• Gas prices are up 30 cents a gallon in 2013, and to get to nearly all of Wal-Mart's more than 4,000 American stores, one must drive. 

• Wal-Mart shoppers have a higher unemployment rate than the national average. 

Karlgaard points out that only 23% of Wal-Mart shoppers have a four-year college degree. The degree-less suffer more, with an employment-to-population ratio of only 54%, as compared to the general population’s 62%.

Only 54% of the college degree-less population working!

 From Nicholas Eberstadt of the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

empirical evidence points to increasing dependency on state largess. The evidence documents . . . perverse and disturbing changes that this entitlement state is imposing on society.

Eberstadt wants us to consider that:

• since 1960, government payments of cash, goods and services to citizens have grown twice as fast as overall personal income, and now account for nearly 18% of all personal income in America—up from 6% in 1960. 

• social-welfare programs currently dispense entitlement benefits of more than $2.3 trillion annually, and the burden of entitlement spending is now over $7,400 per American man, woman and child. 

• in 1960, social-welfare programs accounted for less than a third of all federal spending.  Today, entitlement programs account for nearly two-thirds of federal spending, nearly twice as much as defense, justice and everything else combined. 
 

• 49% of Americans live in homes receiving one or more government transfer benefits, up 20% from the early 1980s, with only 10% due to old-age pensions and health-care for seniors.  The real cause: public reliance on "means-tested" programs such as Medicaid and food stamps. About 35% of Americans accept money, goods or services from "means-tested" programs, a percentage that has doubled in three decades. 

• entitlement outlays have sent men out of the work force--the proportion of adult men 20 and older working or seeking work dropped 13% from 1948 to 2008.  The male flight from work is so acute that more than 7% of men in their prime working age late 30s had totally checked out even before the Great Recession. Our workforce opt-out was twice that of contemporary Greece, and higher than in practically any Western European economy. 

• our flight from work has largely been a flight to government disability programs. The number of working-age Americans relying on Social Security disability increased dramatically to more than 8.8 million working-age men and women in December 2012, nearly three times as many as in December 1990. For every 17 workers, there is now one on Social Security disability. And another 3.6 million working-age Americans in 2011 obtained disability support from other government programs. 

• the biggest increases in disability claims come from "musculoskeletal" problems (e.g., back pains) and mental disorders (including mood disorders), meaning a government disability-insurance program originally intended to address genuine need is now set to run out of funds while Obama's still president. 

• Social Security and Medicare "social insurance" programs meant to pay for themselves cannot do so, having already made tens of trillions of dollars in future promises not covered by current funding streams. Using outside resources to keep them solvent will make them transfer programs, not insurance programs. 

Eberstadt argues that the “moral hazard” the social-welfare program explosion generates “is plain” to see. Transfers funded by other people's money foster a "something for nothing" mentality—especially when the transfers relentlessly grow year by year. We end up with a "taker" mentality that weakens our nation.

Obamanomics in short: hurting Peter and ruining Paul.

Obamanomics: Liberals Live with No Growth?

“Roosevelt. . . was tired of utopias. [He] formulated a bet. If he followed his political instincts, furiously converting ephemeral bits of legislation into solid law for specific groups of voters, then he would win reelection. He would focus on farmers, big labor, pensioners, veterans, perhaps women and blacks. He would get through a law for pensioners, one for organized labor. . . would take care of the poor and homeless of the countryside.”

--Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, Chapter 9, “July 1935: Roosevelt’s Wager,” pp. 246-47.

Shlaes’ amazing study of the Great Depression overturns much of the history I grew up with. It turns out that economically, nothing really worked for Roosevelt (unemployment in 1940, the Depression’s 11th year, was still over 14%). In his first two years (1933-34), Roosevelt tried everything, and did lift a nation’s spirits even as the economy continued underperforming.

Shlaes highlights a real turning point for Roosevelt: July 1935, when he gave up on grand economic schemes and turned instead to government paying off enough constituencies to assemble a winning political coalition. Politically, he succeeded--massively in 1936--in the process building the coalition of government-dependent special interests that is the prototype of today’s Democratic Party.

Obama and company today seem similarly focused on holding a government-based coalition together, rather than clearing a path for economic growth. But is this a fair assessment?

Jonathan Cohn, in the liberal New Republic, makes the case for turning America into social democratic Scandinavia, with no mention of the region’s low growth rate (Norway, 2.1%; Sweden, 0.7%; Finland, -1.8%; Denmark, -0.3%; Scandinavian average: 0.7%):

In the red states, government is cheaper, which means the people who live there pay lower taxes. But they also get a lot less in return. The unemployment checks run out more quickly and the schools generally aren’t as good. Assistance with health care, child care, and housing is skimpier, if it exists at all. The result of this divergence is that one half of the country looks more and more like Scandinavia, while the other increasingly resembles [Guatemala. T]he liberty the red states seek is the liberty to let a whole class of citizens suffer.

The New Yorker’s progressive Hendrik Hertzberg likewise speaks not of growth but of “an energetic public sphere” and “collective action,” phrases associated with European-style democratic socialism:

[Obama’s] Inaugural Address . . . added up to a quietly passionate brief for both the necessity and the Americanness of an energetic public sphere—a manifesto for what the President dared to call, with a touch of sly provocation, “collective action.” That mainstream newspaper editors [subsequently] felt free to trumpet what is still sometimes called “the ‘L’ word” in such a charged context, and with no discernible fear of giving offense, suggests that the Arctic isn’t the only place where the ice is melting.

Yet there are some on the left who recognize the economy’s poor performance poses a problem. Shortly after Obama had been re-elected, NBC’s Brian Williams actually said, “With the election now over, it is once again safe to talk about the economy and jobs. Now that it is not a campaign issue, it’s back to reality.” Kudos to Williams for honestly admitting the media--in the tank for Obama--stayed away from discussing America’s poor economic performance during election season.

So what do liberals think about today’s economy? Tom Blumer of “PJ Media” showed us the pessimistic outlook of America’s major wire service:

[AP’s] three-part series bemoaning the rapid advancements in technology and smart machines [summed up the current “recovery”]: “This time it’s different. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines. … [T]he future has arrived.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor/publisher of the progressive Nation, while faithful to the left’s traditional concern with re-cutting the national pie into more equal pieces, does at least recognize something has to be done about the economy:

The media now chronicle the flailings of Republican leaders slowly awakening to the weaknesses of a stale, pale and predominantly male party in today’s America. . . In his inaugural address, President Obama spoke powerfully to this rising American electorate — single women, minorities, the young —. . .But today, the progressive coalition must address the challenge faced by the original progressive movement, at the dawn of the last century — of extreme economic inequality, which is turning the American dream into a bygone memory.

Who can fail to see that this rising American electorate is sinking economically? More than 20 million people are in need of full-time work— and single women, minorities and the young have fared the worst. . . The young find good jobs scarce, even as they carry record student loan debts, now higher than credit card debt. . . Making this economy work once more for working people will require a new strategy for growth — and a confrontation with the current complacency and its entrenched interests and exhausted ideas.

Right on, vanden Heuvel, you do see the problem clearly! But her solution is a stale return to the Democrats’ New Freedom (Woodrow Wilson, 1913-21) and New Deal agendas of 100 to 80 years ago:

in the Gilded Age at the dawn of industrial America at the turn of the last century. . . hundreds of thousands of farmers created a people’s movement for a new monetary policy. Workers organized unions in the face of police billyclubs. Muckrakers exposed the tentacles of the trusts, the miseries inflicted on working people. It took years — and a Great Depression and a world war — but we built the first broad middle class the world had known.

Groan. Those are the very class warfare policies failing today!

Further evidence of a party stuck in the past comes from liberal Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, who writes, “asked whether deficit spending had helped prevent a depression, as the vast majority of economists believe[, Paul Ryan] said, “I think that it’s pretty clear that [Keynesian economics] doesn’t work.”

It’s pretty clear Chait and vanden Heuvel think Keynesianism--government spend, spend, spending to prosperity--does work. But no, what works is private sector ingenuity, as we found out during that most important value-of-spending test case of all, World War II.  

New York Timesman Tom Friedman likes to position himself between liberals and conservatives, and champion a “radical center”. So what does Friedman tell us to do? His advice:

to sustain the kind of public institutions and safety nets that we’re used to [requires] a lot more growth by the private side (not just more taxes), a lot more entrepreneurship, a lot more start-ups and a lot more individual risk-taking — things the president rarely speaks about. . . for the last two centuries it happened that productivity, median income and employment all tracked each other nicely. . . But there is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everyone. It’s entirely possible for the pie to get bigger and some people to get a smaller slice. [It’s] why we have record productivity, wealth and innovation, yet median incomes are falling, inequality is rising and high unemployment remains persistent.

Uh oh. Is Friedman going down the conventional pessimism path we saw from AP’s study (above), the liberal pessimism recorded in an earlier blog entry here? Maybe not. Certainly, it’s nice to have him conclude with a call both for more personal responsibility and for moving beyond the SAT meritocracy, and in the process talking language conservatives understand:

How to adapt? [M]ore individual initiative. . . more of the “right” education. . . The winners won’t just be those with more I.Q. It will also be those with more P.Q. (passion quotient) and C.Q. (curiosity quotient). . . the president needs to explain that this won’t just be an era of “Yes We Can.” It will also be an era of “Yes You Can” and “Yes You Must.”

The Other America: 2013

 
"People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.”

--Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)  

So here we are. To vastly oversimplify, America is divided into two supertribes, red for conservatives and blue for liberals (because the left is frightened of being called “red”). Red for Republicans, blue for Democrats (see map, colored red for Romney congressional districts, blue for districts carried by Obama).  

How did we get here? In 1964-68, civil rights and the Vietnam war blew up the country, and when the debris settled, liberal Democrats and the welfare state had lost. Conservatives had the upper hand from 1968 to 2004, especially if one concedes that Clinton, who shared power with a Republican congress for six years, truly meant his 1996 state of the union pronouncement that “the era of big government is over.” In a time of conservative domination, liberals gained power only when conservatives failed to tend to the economy (Carter, 1976; Clinton, 1992).

Race put the conservatives on top.  New Deal white working class Democrats, frightened by rising crime, disgusted by a federal government determined to force blacks into their schools and neighborhoods, and resenting having their taxes finance welfare programs for minorities, abandoned the party that once cherished them to vote for Republicans Nixon, Reagan, and two Bushes (1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004).

But today, with race still a major issue, the roles have reversed. Barack Obama, our first non-white leader, has stitched together a supertribe of government-related white liberals, government employees, unmarried women, minorities, and youth who vote Democratic even when the Democrats’ economy doesn’t work.

So it seems that by 2016, America will have marked 50 years of division significantly based on race. The two sides don’t talk to each other; rather they are tribes that converse, work, and play among their own, that even live in separate parts of cities, states, and the country. Each now have their own sources of information, their own cultures, their own religions. Maybe this isn’t such a surprise. After all, we are a nation first sharply divided by slavery, then by its segregation aftermath. It’s our history.  

What to do? I’m still trying to understand the depth of what seems an unhealthy division. Last year, science taught us that in their drive to survive, humans have learned to be biased against those who 1)  are inconsistent and 2) operate outside their own tribe. These instincts help keep our divisions sharp and continuing. Ronald Bailey, in the libertarian journal Reason, told us:

people cling to selected “facts” as a way to justify their beliefs about how the world works. [Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date,] notes, “We persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview.” All too true; confirmation bias is everywhere.

Discouraging. I myself fell into "confirmation bias" when I missed that which Obama’s folks understood--race would hold Obama’s 2008 coalition together in 2012, even though Obama failed to fix the economy. A year ago, I incorrectly reasoned that the blue supertribe included large numbers of minorities hit hard by unemployment who would vote their pocketbooks over tribal loyalty, thereby turning Democrats out of power. Only last September did I finally realize minorities most affected by unemployment would stick with Obama anyway. As they did.

So it seems tribal loyalties set over half a century may continue to trump America’s poor economy as the factor determining minority, unmarried female, and other votes. Our divisions are deep. Crossing over the bridge separating us--very difficult.

Will Democrats Capture the House Next Year?

Israel

 

Alexander Burns at the liberal website “Politico” reports Democrats are counting on Obama to play an “unprecedented” role in the fight to win the House by keeping the Democrats’ successful 2012 coalition engaged this year.

 From a memo by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel:

In 2012, President Obama was completely focused on his own re-election, as he should have been. But for 2014, he will be able to focus on Congressional races, and he has already made early commitments that are unprecedented and transformational. President Barack Obama has agreed to eight events just in 2013 for House Democrats, with additional support from Vice President Biden and other surrogates. In addition, [Obama for America’s] ground game, which was a vital part of the Obama campaign’s success in 2012, will now be focused on Congress — energizing the critical ‘New American Electorate’ that we need to keep engaged through the 2014 elections.

In preparation for 2014, the DCCC and Democratic-aligned outside groups hope to use 2013 to soften up closely divided and Republican-leaning districts. Israel specifically mentions the outside House Majority PAC (HMP) as a key ally:

Unlike in the 2010 election cycle, where outside spending only existed on one side of the ledger, Democratic allies like HMP have proven themselves to be successful. In the 2012 election cycle, HMP spent over $40 million in 56 races, and they have already released their top target list for 2014.

Conservative James Taranto, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has a response for Democrats predicting any House take-over next year. In a column entitled, “The House of His Dreams,” Taranto writes:

President Obama's . . . State of the Union address reinforced the perception that he has. . . given up on working constructively in a divided government. His supporters will say he is resolute and the Republicans are pigheaded[. A] neutral way of describing it is that the two parties' worldviews are irreconcilable.

Taranto then quotes the New York Times writing, “Obama's broad second-term agenda is . . . what won him re-election. His task now is to turn his widespread public support into a wedge to break Washington's gridlock.” That, to Taranto, means winning the House, to which Taranto responds

If the Democrats win the House next year, it would be a historic first. Never has the president's party taken control of the chamber in a second-term midterm election. . . to win the House in 2014, the Democrats would have to carry districts that not only sent Republicans to the House in 2012 but preferred Romney to Obama. If Obama is betting his presidency on a Democratic House in 2015-16, it's a long shot.

As I wrote here, “Poltico” may be right and Taranto wrong. Democrats have a real shot at winning the House next year.

1,360 days to go--liberals already after Rubio

From liberal Stephanie Condon of CBS News:

“delivering the minority party's response to the president's State of the Union address [can] be a perilous moment, leaving one open to criticism. Rubio smiled throughout his address, but in one uncomfortable moment, he stooped down off camera to grab a plastic bottle of water.”

Liberal “how it’s done” maven Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote:

“[Rubio] looked as if he needed some saving . . . Tuesday night as he delivered the party’s response to the State of the Union address in English (and Spanish). He seemed parched, shaky and sweaty, rubbing his face and at one point lunging off-camera to grab a bottle of water. He needed some . . . swagger.”

Responding to the obvious, Rubio himself tweeted a photo of the water bottle. He later told “Good Morning America” host and Clinton administration veteran George Stephanopoulos, “I needed water, what am I going to do? God has a funny way of reminding us we’re human.”

And it's “human” for liberals to make Rubio’s speech all about his gulp of water. Gotcha!

More seriously, liberal former TIME White House correspondent Karen Tumulty, 58 and now with the Washington Post, wrote (with Manuel Roig-Franzia):

“the spotlight that has fallen on this relatively new arrival to the national scene says as much about the state of the Republican Party as it does about the 41-year-old senator. And it remains to be seen whether he represents the solution to the GOP’s problems, or whether the party’s sky-high hopes in an untested newcomer are just another measure of its drift.”

“state of Republican Party. . . GOP’s problems. . . measure of its drift,” “relatively new,” “untested newcomer.” That's a lot of loaded language sent Rubio’s way in just two sentences--and so early in the 2016 campaign! I believe that if we could crawl inside Tumulty’s head, we’d hear, “Of course Hillary should be our next president, Rubio is the major obstacle in her path, and we must do everything to knock this Obama-lite phony ethnic out of her way!”

Finally this piece, “Marco Rubio Can’t Save GOP,” from progressive Jamelle Bouie, American Prospect staff writer and frequent Washington Post contributor:

"Latino voters are more liberal than their white counterparts. . . the Pew Research Hispanic Center [reports] 75% of Hispanics say they support bigger government with more services, compared with 41% of the general population. 51% say abortion should be legal, and 59% say 'homosexuality should be accepted by society.' Compare this to the actual rhetoric of Rubio. . .Latinos might be proud of having their own in the Senate, but pan-ethnic pride isn’t a substitute for substantive representation."

I decided to go to the Pew Research Hispanic Center for their poll’s actual findings on Hispanics. Here’s what I learned:

1. “Latino voters are more liberal”

While Latino voters are 30% liberal, more (32%) are conservative, not too far from the general population, which is 34% conservative, 21% liberal.

2. “75% of Hispanics say they support bigger government with more services, compared with 41% of the general population.”

True, but misleading. The question posed a choice between those who want smaller government with fewer services, or bigger government with more services. Latinos, still more concentrated toward the lower end of the economic scale, responded as would any group so positioned, favoring more government services over less by 75% to 19%, while the ratio of a general population less reliant on government was 41% for bigger to 48% for smaller government.

3. “51% say abortion should be legal”

Should you trust anything Bouie writes? Actually, 51% of Hispanics said abortion should be illegal, not legal, as against only 43% who want it legal. Contrast that to the “less liberal” general population, which favors legal abortion by 54% to 41%. Such an error betrays Bouie’s overriding desire to fit statistics to his own (inaccurate) world view.

4. “59% say ‘homosexuality should be accepted by society.’”

True, but the Hispanic answer hardly makes Latinos more liberal, since general population acceptance of homosexuality is a nearly identical 58%.

Long before even the 2014 mid-term elections, it’s surprising liberals are so driven to reassure themselves Rubio isn’t what they fear: a full-on threat to their hanging onto the White House after 2016.

Rubio has plenty of time to bring his water supply closer; liberals fortunately have time to start getting their facts straight.

“Let them eat cake.”

David Brooks, house conservative at the New York Times, liberal America’s Pravda, sees something mostly invisible to us mortals: “an enormous race, which you might call the race between meritocracy and government.” Brooks is fixed on the contrast between meritocracy, which widens inequality, and Obama’s government supposedly fighting for equality.

We’ve argued this is a sham fight, since our meritocracy values its privileges and only makes gestures in the direction of leveling the playing field. What seems to be the meritocracy’s greater concern is their desire to keep their children and families at the top, and finding highly stressful the somewhat meritocratic rules they face in doing so.

The meritocracy, as we have said, does feel guilty about coming out on top in a society that to them consigns a majority to more-or-less permanent underclass status. As Brooks says, a “self-reinforcing” sorting “seems to grow more unforgiving every year.” And Brooks calls efforts to resist the meritocracy’s spreading inequality “like shooting a water gun into a waterfall.” But it’s false to call this, as Brooks does, a “race between meritocracy and government,” for the simple reason that government and meritocracy are so intertwined.   It’s those outside meritocracy+government who are the real losers.

Meritocracy-led government, in fact, is ruining the country.

Byron York, at the conservative Washington Examiner, has unearthed evidence unemployment is wreaking ordinary people’s lives as much as it ever has. He draws on a survey by Rutgers University scholars showing that

many more Americans than previously reported have been profoundly touched by joblessness and its related hardships. . . 23% of those surveyed -- have lost a full- or part-time job in the last four years. An additional 11% who have not lost a job said someone in their immediate family had. "Together, the data indicate one-third of American households -- approximately 39 million -- lost work as a result of the recession during the past four years," the report concludes.

The researchers found that an additional 26% had an extended-family member -- parent, cousin, aunt or uncle -- who had lost a job in the last four years. Still others reported having an unemployed close friend. Add them all together, and nearly everyone has been affected. "What we showed is that unemployment and what happened in the recession are society-wide experiences," says Rutgers professor Carl Van Horn, a co-author of the report.

Are we doomed to some sort of permanent unemployment problem, one like America lived through during the 1929-40 11-year Great Depression?

Jay Cost, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, doesn’t think so. He believes Democrats (and their meritocratic government) will lose power unless they fix the economy.

According to Cost:

majority coalitions inevitably depend on how well the party they empower governs. . . since the 1830s, no issue has mattered more to the question of “Who governs?” than the performance of the economy. [And] since the recession of 2001, the economy has been in stall speed, [averaging] just 1.6% since then, [with] real incomes [stagnant and] paychecks [unable to keep] pace with the rising cost of health care, education, and energy.

the most recent GDP number is inconsistent with where the economy should be at this point in the business cycle. We should be hitting 3% growth or higher, not saddled with a modest contraction. And let us not forget [that w]ithout growth, there is no way for the United States to meet its social welfare obligations, which has in turn [given us] the budget deficit. If the Democratic party cannot bring about improvement in the economic numbers, it will not retain control of political power. It is as simple as that.

Cost sees a particular problem facing any Democratic coalition attempting to reform the economy, for the party has many powerful factions “isolated from the ebbs and flows of the private economy.” These factions include “upscale” Northeast and Pacific Coast social liberals “so well off that they are basically recession-proof,” along with government workers and “far-left gray-collar labor unions like the SEIU” more interested in expanding government than the economy.

Cost ends by asking, “Can the Democrats keep these groups happy and grow the economy? The evidence to date suggests the answer is no.”

Will Youth Culture Doom GOP?

Polling guru Stu Rothenberg has just written:

the president beat Mitt Romney 60% to 37% among voters 18-29 years of age, a much better showing than Obama’s 4-point win in the final popular vote (though not as good as his 66% showing among younger voters in 2008). Romney did carry white voters in the 18-29 age group last year, but by only 51% to 44%. In contrast, he won whites 65 years and older by 61% to 39% and whites 45-64 by 61% to 38%.

So 38-39% of older whites voted for Obama, and 44% of white youth? It’s a difference, but merely a 5% difference. Isn’t it possible white youth are at least 5% more likely than their elders to be living, playing, and working with the non-whites who voted overwhelmingly for Obama?

Still, Rothenberg has a point when he says, “Republican strategists have to consider the possibility that younger voters have different values and views than their parents have now and had when they were 20 or 25 years old.”

I’m concerned not only about “different values = poor values,” but also about the truly scary thought that people in power want those out of power to be dependent on them (on government), which means the national elite have little interest in 1) truly better schools, 2) truly viable, affordable medicine, and 3) a job-creating economy. After all, the more helpless the mass of voters, the more dependent they are on government.

Let’s review some of what we’ve seen here, in this blog:  

1. We found liberals delight in Hollywood’s domination of our culture.

From New York’s liberal Jonathan Chait:

[Hollywood propagates] an ethos in which greed [i.e., capitalism] is not only bad but the main wellspring of evil, authority figures of all kinds are often untrustworthy, sexual freedom is absolute, and social equality of all kinds is paramount.

2. We wrote that liberal domination of our culture is driving politics, and we learned from conservative Charles Murray that Hollywood’s culture is destroying working class lifestyles, even lives.

As conservative Matt K. Lewis of The Week told us:

A lifestyle of addiction, promiscuity, and chaos comes with a hefty price tag. Sadly, our elites are exporting those values to the people least capable of sustaining them. Most will likely spend the rest of their lives paying for the sins of their youth. The rich kids, on the other hand — well, they will likely land on their feet.

3. We do worry conservatives could lose any political contest between makers and takers (which media are already making an unacceptable framework for understanding today’s politics).

California-based Republican political strategist Reed Galen a year ago argued:

The messages that President Obama and his re-election campaign officials espouse -- that the system is “unfair” that the playing field must be “leveled” -- are code words for letting Americans off the hook. . . But a citizenry that expects -- even demands -- its government to provide happiness is surely bound to end up unhappy with their lives and with their government.

The Democratic message . . . neither requires nor expects anything from citizens. It doesn’t want anything from them other than lemming-like acquiescence. . .What the president and his surrogates should be speaking about is opportunity. [But t]he last thing [Democrats] want is to encourage individual initiative; that would begin to abrogate the need for Uncle Sam to . . . say everything is going to be all right if we have just a little more taxation, a little more debt, a little more government.

If the party of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton is going to abandon the old-time religion of personal responsibility, then, Galen says, Republicans in their place

should try to articulate what Thomas Jefferson really meant. If you [want happiness,] you are going to have to take the initiative to make that happen. That is inherently American. This ethos doesn’t excuse leaving the most vulnerable among us out in the cold. [But the rest] of us [should] get up every morning and figure out how we’re going to improve our situation -- because in many cases that’s the only thing we can control.

George Will, Washington Post, provides a much-needed lesson on public choice theory, which:

demystified politics by puncturing . . . the fiction that elected politicians and government administrators are more nobly motivated, unselfish and disinterested than are persons acting in the private sector. [It] extend[s] the idea of the profit motive to the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats, two groups seeking to maximize power the way many people in the private sector maximize monetary profits. Public-sector actors often do this by transactions with [other “pie cutters”]— private factions trying to maximize their welfare by getting government to give them benefits, such as appropriations, tax preferences and other subsidies.

[C]ritics cling to a comforting — and, for advocates of ever-bigger government, a convenient — theory. It is that in politics and government, people, acting as voters or legislators or administrators, do not behave as people do in markets — they supposedly are not responsive to incentives for personal aggrandizement. [Public choice] theory supplanted an ideology — the faith in government as omniscient and benevolent. It replaced it with realism.

So both sides are greedy. Both sides fear loss. Youngins, here’s the difference. Conservatives want the pie to grow so that we can all be greedy; liberals in the name of a higher cause (a cause that public choice theory exposes as false) want to re-cut the pie to give themselves and supporters more, business less.