Real Majority Rule

I recently read Larry Bartels' book Unequal Democracy. The book begins by presenting a case that the economic policies of Republican presidents are harmful to most Americans and the policies of Democratic presidents are beneficial to most Americans.  Then, he explores why this hasn't led to more Democratic electoral victories.  He considers when in the election cycle voters need to see benefits, why voters support tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich / repeal of the estate tax, why the minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation despite wide public support, etc.  Because he argues Democratic policies are better for most people, partisan reactions to the book are likely. While I think GOP policies have been worse for working people than Democratic policies, my impression has been that Democratic policies haven't been as good as he suggests.  The Wikipedia item on Pres. Carter's policies describes him as a fiscal conservative, says his first economic proposal cen...

How does the economy work for the majority of people?  If you want to get information from the major media, you have to be careful and not just look at the most prominently presented figures. Even using a comparatively good source such as the Washington Post, you need to go step by step through their 10/31/18 article " U. S. workers see fastest wage growth in a decade, but inflation takes a toll "  The first sentence of the article says that wages rose 2.9% from September 2017 to September 2018.  The second sentence says that is the biggest increase (not adjusted for inflation) in 10 years. It then tells us that adjusted for inflation, wages rose 0.6%, and that is the biggest increase in 2 years. We're then told that unemployment is at a 49-year low, and this has put pressure on employers to increase wages.  [Apparently, under such pressure, employers consider a 0.6% rise in real wages after a decade of low wage growth to be "good."] They then quote an eonomist ...

Let me start by saying this article isn't specifically about Democrats and Republicans.  It uses them as examples to make a point, but the point is about elected officials of whatever party taking advantage of a biased system to ignore the will of the majority. Today people talk about the Republicans controlling the White House and both houses of Congress.  This has allowed them to carry out various policies.  Their record of passing legislation in Congress has not been as extensive as one might have expected.  Some GOP efforts in Congress have failed because of opposition from extremist Republicans in Congress.  In one famous case, the Republicans lost by one vote when John McCain decided not to follow the herd.  On the other hand, there have been presidential actions, confirmation of nominees, actions by cabinet members, etc.  Congress has passed the tax bill, confirmed one Supreme Court nominee, and are attempting to push through another Supreme C...

Since January of 2017, one party has controlled the Presidency, the Senate and the House, and has been working to install enough judges to control the courts for decades.  In situations like this, the party in power will tend to say, "Elections have consequences," "The voters have spoken," and/or "We have a mandate from the people." However, our election and government systems are organized in such a way that the majority of voters - as distinct from anti-majority mechanisms in the system - may have actually said they wanted something else.  And the 2016 election is a good example of that - and not just in terms of the presidential selection by the Electoral College. Presidential election First, let's look at the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election.  Wikipedia shows us the vote counts below.  (I'm only showing the counts for the Democrats and Republicans as the candidate with the next highest vote count received only 3.28% of the ...

I saw a news item that the Trump administration expressed support for a lawsuit against Harvard University's affirmative action admissions policies. I thought this could start an interesting look at the social / political motivations in these kinds of matters. Generally, the affluent and/or members of traditionally privileged groups in society find anti-discrimination and affirmative action rules inconvenient.  In recent years, they've been pushing back the laws on such policies claiming government should not be involved in such things.  However, the privileged may consider it appropriate for the government to take action to tell a private company or college that they can't have anti-discrimination or affirmative action policies.  The logic or standard the privileged use changes depending on what benefits the privileged - "heads I win, tails you lose." I also thought this was an interesting example to discuss mainstream assumptions.  The lawsuit opposes Harvard g...

I recently read Martin Gilens' book Affluence and Influence .  It's an excellent, award-winning book from Princeton University Press. This book analyzes policy preferences of the nation's majority, and the preferences of demographic groups including income strata, and compares that to whether polices similar to those are enacted within 4 years of the opinion poll.  While the author knows this is not a perfect method to see how majority will is / isn't carried out, he explains why other methods are more flawed.  The analysis finds the most affluent 10% have much more political influence than the other 90%.  The book doesn't go into depth about the top 1% or 0.1% because there wasn't enough definitive data to make a fully scientific case for that.  The book doesn't merely focus on saying the top 10% have more influence, but tries to find more specific rules on when, in which areas and why the 10% have how much more influence. The book frequently discusses...

Over the last few years, there's been increasing discussion about the possibility of establishing a "universal basic income."  The discussion has become more significant with Stockton, California starting a program to implement one. What is a universal basic income?  Wikipedia says: a type of program in which citizens (or permanent residents) of a country may receive a regular sum of money from a source such as the government. A pure or unconditional basic income has no means test, much like Social Security in the United States. Basic income can be implemented nationally, regionally or locally. An unconditional income that is sufficient to meet a person's basic needs (at or above the poverty line), is called full basic income, while if it is less than that amount, it is called partial. CBS recently re-broadcast a segment which discussed the idea.  I thought there were several significant problems with their presentation, suggesting (intentional or unintentional) ...