Income Inequality and the Republican Party: Do We Really Want More of the Same?

Slate magazine has been publishing a well-done series on income inequality in America. It came to my attention by Ezra Klein's Wonkbook and Rachel Maddow's daily show. While the TV format and the short blog post tends to oversimplify quite a bit, some of the graphics are nevertheless still quite illustrative. Probably the best one (below) shows the correlation between growing income inequality and Republican administrations:

Source: Ezra Klein's Wonkbook; Slate Magazine's Visual Guide to Inequality

This graph shows that under Democratic administrations, income gains were largest at the bottom end of the income scale and grew progressively smaller as one moved up the income scale. Income gains were still positive, even at the top of the income scale, indicating that reducing inequality can (and has) coexisted with growing prosperity. Under Republican administrations, however, the opposite trend held. The largest income gains were found at the top of the income scale, and grew progressively smaller as one moved down the income scale.

This is pretty straightforward. Obviously, the rich make out pretty well under Republican administrations, while everyone does pretty well under Democratic administrations. The rub, however, is in the causal mechanisms. No one can say for sure why this happens. The easy target is tax policy, but as the Slate series goes over in quite a bit of detail, a lot of academic research by political scientists (Larry Bartels, Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson) and even liberal economist Paul Krugman hasn't been able to find solid evidence pointing to tax policy as the cause for this phenomenon. And the "usual suspects" - racial inequality, gender gaps, immigration - are also ruled out by convincing evidence by research in the Slate series.

So what could it be? Nobody knows for sure, but Krugman points to "a strong circumstantial case for believing that institutions and norms … are the big sources of rising inequality in the United States." In short, we should be looking at the correlation between economic and political/social trends.

When Republicans are in power, people think and behave differently in the market than when Democrats are in power? An interesting idea, one that certainly bears further investigation. Sounds like a job for our behavioral economists!

In the mean time, the correlation (if not causation) is pretty clear. Do we really want to vote that in next November?

Yes, the Economy still Sucks

Courtesy of Kevin Drum (who cites Greenberg Quinlan Rosner) - the number of people who have experienced some sort of "economic distress" has gone up since the beginning of the year.

Yet stimulus is still politically out of the question.

The Rise of the Filibuster

It is not our imaginations; the filibuster has indeed been used at an unprecedented rate since the new congress took office in early 2007. Check out this graphic from Kevin Drum's blog on Mother Jones.com:

Even though the filibuster has been used predominantly against Democratic initiatives - as a tool of minority "negative" power, this should not be surprising - Democrats have no desire to get rid of the filibuster rule. They could easily do so with a simple majority at the beginning of the next (112th) session, but apparently have no intention of doing so, according to Congressional newspaper The Hill:

Five Senate Democrats have said they will not support a lowering of the 60-vote bar necessary to pass legislation. Another four lawmakers say they are wary about such a change and would be hesitant to support it...

“It won’t happen,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said she would “probably not” support an effort to lower the number of votes needed to cut off filibusters from 60 to 55 or lower.

Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) echoed Feinstein: “I think we should retain the same policies that we have instead of lowering it.

“I think it has been working,” he said.

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) said he recognizes his colleagues are frustrated over the failure to pass measures such as the Disclose Act, campaign legislation that fell three votes short of overcoming a Republican filibuster Tuesday.

 “I think as torturous as this place can be, the cloture rule and the filibuster is important to protect the rights of the minority,” he said. “My inclination is no.” 

The filibuster is used to protect the perogatives and fiefdoms of Senators, who aren't likely to give them up easily. Even the prospects of more easily passing the President's agenda doesn't attract Senators much, since their eyes are trained toward their home constituencies, which are not always attuned to such things. Other countries with stronger party systems (almost every advanced democracy in the world, that is) scratches their head in wonder at our amazing gridlock and undisciplined parties. Thank the founding fathers, who believed that checks and balances would prevent "tyranny of the majority" while still allowing some policy to be made. At this point, their theory is being severely tested.  

The End of the Myth of the "Wretched of the Earth" Jihadists

The End of the Myth of the "Wretched of the Earth" Jihadists: "
One of the striking things in the three most recent high profile jihadist attacks -- the 'Underpants Bomber,' the Ft. Hood assassin and the attacker on the CIA base in Afghanistan -- has been the attackers themselves.

While many studying terrorism have understood that the threat is not from the dispossessed of the earth, but from an educated elite in the semi-Westernized (or completely Westernized) world who radicalize in different ways.

Yet there is still a policy, going back many years and continued now, that aims at a completely different social and economic demographic -- the poor and wretched of the earth who are believed to be angry at the U.S. and the West for its policies in the Middle East.

We spend vast amounts of money to convince one group that we have virtually no way to reach that they should like us, while having little strategy to deal with those who have repeatedly shown themselves to be the greater danger.

Yet we have Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a a doctor who was the son of middle-class, English-speaking Jordanians; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who grew up in a wealthy Nigerian family and studied at University College London; and Nidal Hasan, who was born in Arlington, graduated from Virginia Tech and did his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed.

One of the chief radicalizing influences in the case of the latter two was Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who did not rise out of the teeming ghettos or dirt-poor villages, but family that lived in the United States, a country he returned to in order to study at George Washington University.

Perhaps this will put an end to the myth of the poor and wretched jihadist, waging a form of religious class struggle.

As Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post, we are seeing a 'international jihadi elite' that resembles international elites of the Bolshevik days who were no more working class than the Tsar. As she notes:

These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven't emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, 'Westernized' parents who sacrificed for their education -- though they are often people who, for one reason or another, didn't 'make it,' or didn't feel comfortable, in their respective societies.

My full blog is here."

Of course, scholars of social movements, revolutions, and terrorism have known for a long time what is being pointed out here - it is the educated middle class that is at the forefront of these sorts of movements, though usually from poor countries. It is interesting that mainstream folks are finally noticing. (Sherry)

Imperial Overreach Stretches American Budget

Vindication for the academic IR theory of realism?

Today, the New York Times writes:

In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.
The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.
But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.
For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.
Or, as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, used to ask before he entered government a year ago, “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”

In short, trying to have guns and butter both is undermining our economy, which directly impacts our ability to project our military power abroad. Are we trying to do too much? Aparently so. We will eventually have to choose much more carefully which foreign interventions we spend our precious resources on, much as we will have to prioritize domestic spending.