I may not like everything he proposed, but if he had lived he would have tried to shift our attention away from our obsession with “race” and “racism” back toward incomism and classism. Could you imagine what he would have thought of college dorms for blacks? Probably not rejected CRT entirely, but taken a saner approach to it.
One point I get out of the article written before MLK’s murder involves the need for some kind of mass movement to put pressure on the political class. We’ve had some strong right wing movements since Roe v. Wade and only a few on the other end of the spectrum. It’s almost as if left wing politicians were afraid of the people they purported to represent
"and I tell you if this country does not see its poor" is quite telling but also poses a real moral question. To what extent are the rich responsible only to the poor of "this country" as opposed to poor who inhabit this planet. Effective altruism is clearly tilted towards the latter. And globalism and free trade, arguably, have done far more to improve the lives of the truly poor, across countries, than any redistribution efforts within a rich country. It's a question supposed progressives shy away from but it's important to be honest about the outcome they desire.
I am truly confused as to what white supremacy culture is. The DEIA consultant that “trained” me said America is a white supremacy culture. I would have liked to ask questions but was afraid for my job. I have often heard people say that one party or the other made them afraid. I can say I know what that feels like now. The Democrats made me fear that if I spoke up…I would lose my job. Let’s not act like the DEIA training is not wholly a Democratic Party thing…it is. I will remember that fear when it comes time to vote.
It’s unfortunate because I want to help the poor but Democrats (and young people in general) have abandoned the poor in favor of the identity politics that they mandated that I get trained in.
When someone says white supremacy culture I presume they mean whites and whiteness are considered “normal” or “standard” and that most of us unselfconsciously accept this viewpoint.
- A $3,000-3,600 fully refundable child tax credit (per child!)
- $45 billion in emergency rental assistance and $25 billion (I think) in assistance to distressed homeowners
- Extended unemployment benefits
If BBB hadn't crapped out, there would be:
- Universal free preschool
- Increased funding for elder care
- Extended child tax credits
- Reductions to prescription drug costs
- ACA premium reductions
- Closed Medicaid gap
- Expansion of Medicaid to cover hearing
- Huge investments in affordable housing
Tell me again how Democrats have abandoned the poor?
Democrats' rhetoric is annoying nowadays, but the extent to which that rhetoric has affected their actual policy proposals is pretty minimal (though I'll admit not nonexistant: there's funding for downpayment assistance in BBB that includes a 25% bumpup if you're a member of a "socially disadvantaged group", i.e. a person of color, which I don't love for obvious reasons). As I've said before in Slow Boring comments, I am as fed up with DEI nonsense as the next person, but suggesting you'll vote R because you felt uncomfortable in a diversity training is just nuts. If you truly wan to help the poor, it should be clear which party you should support.
Well, We will never know whether is economic justice program would have succeeded.
My view as a student of strategy and strategic theory is the MLK was one of the greatest strategists of the 20th century and America has not produced one of comparable skill since in any domain.
Today is one of my favorite days, because we get to see politicians (usually Republicans) trot out the one MLK quote they know, and totally ignore everything else the man stood for.
I agree its annoying to see Republicans touting his words in a way that seem to suggest that MLK argues we should ignore race altogether. Its also annoying bc a lot of them want to destroy the welfare state lol not congruous with Dr. King at all haha.
Conversely, however, (and I think the reason one reason why Matt posted this) liberals/progressives are kind of at this point where they want to elevate race and racial issues to the forefront of every political conversation, thinking they are somehow in line with MLK and other civil rights heroes. They are wrong. MLK wasn't a class reductionist, but in the end he was trying to solve essentially class issues, thinking that would be the way to solve racial issues. Progressives turning everything into "This racially neutral policy closes the racial ___ gap" are actually also missing the point of what MLK stood for. He wanted to unite people who disagreed with each other about a lot of stuff, to eradicate material scarcity in America. What a legend lol
There's some interesting commentary about how to measure poverty in the U.S. giving wildly different numbers. By the classic measure the poverty rate was around 25 percent before JFK/LBJ and is now 12 percent. I look forward to Matt's commentary on this in the future.
Tellingly, the poverty rate in the US is not so different from the poverty rate in France, which is between 8 and 15 percent depending on how you measure it. France is an interesting comparator because it is a big, advanced country with roughly the same level of racial tension/segregation/polarization as the US
Can you point me in the direction of this commentary? I want to do some deeper reading about poverty both in the US and global, but I don’t know where to start.
"...the poverty rate was around 25 percent before JFK/LBJ and is now 12 percent."
It was up around 25% in the late 1950s, and declining. By the time the bulk of the "War on Poverty" spending kicked in the steadily declining poverty rate was already down to about 15%. The rate has bounced up and down between 12% and 15% ever since. I think the big picture takeaway from that is that whatever enabled the really significant reduction prior to the "War on Poverty" was considerably more efficacious than LBJ's policies that have continued, more or less, through the present day.
If you start with passage of the Economic Opportunity Act in August 1964 and continue through introduction of Medicare/Medicaid in 1965 and bigger AFDC payments in 1967, I think that the big drop occurred during LBJ’s term. (And of course there was the 1964 tax cut, a war, and concomitant wartime spending.)
It looks to me more that the reduction in 1964 was a continuation of the historical trend and that the leveling off of the rate of reduction is the most notable feature of the Johnson Administration.
Your timing might be a bit off. Analysts at the time including Kennedy’s CEA (and others like Michael Harrington) placed a bigger emphasis on the 1957-58 recession.
I think it is pretty well established that Walmart benefits tremendously from food stamps and medicaid. "It found that a single Walmart Supercenter cost taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year, or between $3,015 and $5,815 on average for each of 300 workers." - from those lefties at Forbes
Hoover tapped his phones. The Birchers alleged he was a communist. But no one had the smoking gun evidence that he was a bent on subverting capitalism.
One of the advantages of religiously-rooted left-wing arguments is that it helps keep people rooted in actual working-class politics. This serves as a check on the progressive tendency to fall down weird abstract rabbit holes that turn "we should help working people and the poor" into "we must dismantle the structures of capitalist oppression."
our government (run by white people) created the all-white suburbs, (white police backed the protection of the white suburbs), and built the highways that moved the jobs away from rails/ports to the suburbs
"Search for _anything_ on Amazon and tell me how many non-foreign options you get"
Amazon doesn't specialize in selling high-value-add products. If you're in the market for a jet or an earth mover or, hell, a BMW SUV, chances are very high that you're buying American.
"There was not enough of a political black-eye associated with selling-out the big-3 economy."
This is a misreading of what happened. The industrial companies of the US spent 20 years being able to sell domestically and abroad at a major advantage. Even if the US had stopped foreign importation of goods from Europe and Japan into the US, the industrial base of the US was going to go through painful competition it hadn't been facing before internationally. And shutting out foreign competition would have simply slowed those companies need to adapt leaving them even more at a disadvantage internationally - making them even more desperate to avoid competition in the US.
" "The gains for which the civil-rights movement had fought had not cost anyone a penny.” I think this is a good thing...."
You realize, though, that in saying it was "a good thing" you are arguing the exact opposite of what MLK meant in that quote, right?
Whatever MLK was, he was not an Yglesian popularist.
(He was also not running for elective office, so that kind of popularist imperative might not apply to him. I take it that MY believes it does not apply to Substack provocateurs, for instance.)
Not that I disagree with the tenor of your post but It is not actually true that redistribution is always zero sum. We know that that the fiscal multiplier varies across income ranges and thus 1 dollar redistributed from the rich to the poor can benefit the poor, the economy and the country overall.
On the other hand, it is certainly true that it is far less popular than other interventions. Also, it is often possible to work accomplish the same thing in less unpopular ways. Minimum wage is redistribution but far less unpopular.
You seem to assume that using the law to mandate that an employer pays someone a certain wage means that the employer will, in fact, pay that wage. That is a bad assumption to make.
I read Noah's article with interest when it came out a while back. I agree that $15 would be fine for many areas in the country, but his paragraph about how monopsony power would make it not that big of an issue for small towns or lower incomes areas seems to get it backwards. Many companies will go to smaller towns or lower incomes states precisely to gain a cost advantage. If you remove the cost advantage of cheaper labor you remove the incentive for them to be there at all.
You can seem him articulating this idea in his articles on Caribbean countries of DR, Jamaica, etc. Yet he doesn't seem to recognize this within the US itself.
Like is it possible to create actual equal opportunity? It seems far more likely that we’d just divide the pie in a reasonably fair way in that we would on a baseline of massive resource distribution create actual equality of opportunity.
Like it seems to me that we just keep finding new ways to show how wealth matters and there’s no escaping the power of compound interest that even if you could create an equal floor and have it it would slip away within 2 generations or so.
when i hear the phrase “equal opportunity,” i know i’m talking to a person who hasn’t thought much about equality beyond not wanting to sound like a douche.
wealth is only one barrier to equal opportunity. how can the person with an iq of 85 have the same opportunities as the person with an iq of 135? how can the baby with fetal alcohol syndrome have the same opportunities as one who had a healthy uterine environment? how can the child whose parents’ lives were too chaotic to encourage quiet reflection keep up with the child whose parents taught curiosity and patience?
There is no equal opportunity, though, without some baseline equity in the distribution of economic resources (access to quality education, healthcare, etc, etc), which requires laws. And there's more likely to be a consensus for that a national community with a strong emphasis on the equality and identity of all citizens as Americans, rather than one that divides and classifies citizens by race, ethnicity and ancestry.
Nationality absolutely is different than race/ethnicity, because it corresponds to the borders of sovereign political entities, with the capacity and right of internal self-governance.
We have the right and responsibility to govern our own nation for the benefit of all of it members. We don't have that right, or responsibility, for the governance of people in other nations.
"...right and responsibility to govern our own nation for the benefit of all of it members" There in you capture the essence of the disagreement between extreme sides of both political parties. Rs define "our nation" and "members" based on a race and lifestyle lens while Ds define it differently.
Internal self governance has resulted in the status quo. Maybe that's what the populace wants. Difficult to accept, but true. And finally, since when has US lacked the capacity or thought it didn't have the right to govern outside it's borders.
I may not like everything he proposed, but if he had lived he would have tried to shift our attention away from our obsession with “race” and “racism” back toward incomism and classism. Could you imagine what he would have thought of college dorms for blacks? Probably not rejected CRT entirely, but taken a saner approach to it.
One point I get out of the article written before MLK’s murder involves the need for some kind of mass movement to put pressure on the political class. We’ve had some strong right wing movements since Roe v. Wade and only a few on the other end of the spectrum. It’s almost as if left wing politicians were afraid of the people they purported to represent
"and I tell you if this country does not see its poor" is quite telling but also poses a real moral question. To what extent are the rich responsible only to the poor of "this country" as opposed to poor who inhabit this planet. Effective altruism is clearly tilted towards the latter. And globalism and free trade, arguably, have done far more to improve the lives of the truly poor, across countries, than any redistribution efforts within a rich country. It's a question supposed progressives shy away from but it's important to be honest about the outcome they desire.
I am truly confused as to what white supremacy culture is. The DEIA consultant that “trained” me said America is a white supremacy culture. I would have liked to ask questions but was afraid for my job. I have often heard people say that one party or the other made them afraid. I can say I know what that feels like now. The Democrats made me fear that if I spoke up…I would lose my job. Let’s not act like the DEIA training is not wholly a Democratic Party thing…it is. I will remember that fear when it comes time to vote.
It’s unfortunate because I want to help the poor but Democrats (and young people in general) have abandoned the poor in favor of the identity politics that they mandated that I get trained in.
When someone says white supremacy culture I presume they mean whites and whiteness are considered “normal” or “standard” and that most of us unselfconsciously accept this viewpoint.
In the American Rescue Plan there was:
- Increased SNAP funding
- A $3,000-3,600 fully refundable child tax credit (per child!)
- $45 billion in emergency rental assistance and $25 billion (I think) in assistance to distressed homeowners
- Extended unemployment benefits
If BBB hadn't crapped out, there would be:
- Universal free preschool
- Increased funding for elder care
- Extended child tax credits
- Reductions to prescription drug costs
- ACA premium reductions
- Closed Medicaid gap
- Expansion of Medicaid to cover hearing
- Huge investments in affordable housing
Tell me again how Democrats have abandoned the poor?
Democrats' rhetoric is annoying nowadays, but the extent to which that rhetoric has affected their actual policy proposals is pretty minimal (though I'll admit not nonexistant: there's funding for downpayment assistance in BBB that includes a 25% bumpup if you're a member of a "socially disadvantaged group", i.e. a person of color, which I don't love for obvious reasons). As I've said before in Slow Boring comments, I am as fed up with DEI nonsense as the next person, but suggesting you'll vote R because you felt uncomfortable in a diversity training is just nuts. If you truly wan to help the poor, it should be clear which party you should support.
Well, We will never know whether is economic justice program would have succeeded.
My view as a student of strategy and strategic theory is the MLK was one of the greatest strategists of the 20th century and America has not produced one of comparable skill since in any domain.
Today is one of my favorite days, because we get to see politicians (usually Republicans) trot out the one MLK quote they know, and totally ignore everything else the man stood for.
People can be right about some things and wrong about other things.
I agree its annoying to see Republicans touting his words in a way that seem to suggest that MLK argues we should ignore race altogether. Its also annoying bc a lot of them want to destroy the welfare state lol not congruous with Dr. King at all haha.
Conversely, however, (and I think the reason one reason why Matt posted this) liberals/progressives are kind of at this point where they want to elevate race and racial issues to the forefront of every political conversation, thinking they are somehow in line with MLK and other civil rights heroes. They are wrong. MLK wasn't a class reductionist, but in the end he was trying to solve essentially class issues, thinking that would be the way to solve racial issues. Progressives turning everything into "This racially neutral policy closes the racial ___ gap" are actually also missing the point of what MLK stood for. He wanted to unite people who disagreed with each other about a lot of stuff, to eradicate material scarcity in America. What a legend lol
What's wrong with promoting the good things he stood for and ignoring the bad?
Civil rights and anti-poverty policies are both good IMO
I entirely agree. It does not follow, however, that *any* anti-poverty policy is a good thing.
What “bad” anti poverty program did King support?
Sure, but the ones Republicans want to scrap, cut, or otherwise restrict access to (e.g., Medicaid, SNAP) are
There's some interesting commentary about how to measure poverty in the U.S. giving wildly different numbers. By the classic measure the poverty rate was around 25 percent before JFK/LBJ and is now 12 percent. I look forward to Matt's commentary on this in the future.
Tellingly, the poverty rate in the US is not so different from the poverty rate in France, which is between 8 and 15 percent depending on how you measure it. France is an interesting comparator because it is a big, advanced country with roughly the same level of racial tension/segregation/polarization as the US
Can you point me in the direction of this commentary? I want to do some deeper reading about poverty both in the US and global, but I don’t know where to start.
"...the poverty rate was around 25 percent before JFK/LBJ and is now 12 percent."
It was up around 25% in the late 1950s, and declining. By the time the bulk of the "War on Poverty" spending kicked in the steadily declining poverty rate was already down to about 15%. The rate has bounced up and down between 12% and 15% ever since. I think the big picture takeaway from that is that whatever enabled the really significant reduction prior to the "War on Poverty" was considerably more efficacious than LBJ's policies that have continued, more or less, through the present day.
If you start with passage of the Economic Opportunity Act in August 1964 and continue through introduction of Medicare/Medicaid in 1965 and bigger AFDC payments in 1967, I think that the big drop occurred during LBJ’s term. (And of course there was the 1964 tax cut, a war, and concomitant wartime spending.)
Things have been pretty stable since then.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/2018/demo/p60-263/figure4.pdf
It looks to me more that the reduction in 1964 was a continuation of the historical trend and that the leveling off of the rate of reduction is the most notable feature of the Johnson Administration.
Your timing might be a bit off. Analysts at the time including Kennedy’s CEA (and others like Michael Harrington) placed a bigger emphasis on the 1957-58 recession.
The post WW2 economy was robust. High-paying industrial jobs with pensions and health benefits were plentiful.
Redistribution policies by the government actually bail out companies that make shareholders rich by scrimping on their employees.
What companies are those? Because I want to invest!
I think it is pretty well established that Walmart benefits tremendously from food stamps and medicaid. "It found that a single Walmart Supercenter cost taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year, or between $3,015 and $5,815 on average for each of 300 workers." - from those lefties at Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/?sh=720e766c720b
Hoover tapped his phones. The Birchers alleged he was a communist. But no one had the smoking gun evidence that he was a bent on subverting capitalism.
Until he quoted the Gospel of Luke.
One of the advantages of religiously-rooted left-wing arguments is that it helps keep people rooted in actual working-class politics. This serves as a check on the progressive tendency to fall down weird abstract rabbit holes that turn "we should help working people and the poor" into "we must dismantle the structures of capitalist oppression."
In your view, Who are the people who let that happen? The whites who deserted the city or the blacks who ruled it?
our government (run by white people) created the all-white suburbs, (white police backed the protection of the white suburbs), and built the highways that moved the jobs away from rails/ports to the suburbs
"Search for _anything_ on Amazon and tell me how many non-foreign options you get"
Amazon doesn't specialize in selling high-value-add products. If you're in the market for a jet or an earth mover or, hell, a BMW SUV, chances are very high that you're buying American.
Is there a way when searching for a product on Amazon to specify US made?
"There was not enough of a political black-eye associated with selling-out the big-3 economy."
This is a misreading of what happened. The industrial companies of the US spent 20 years being able to sell domestically and abroad at a major advantage. Even if the US had stopped foreign importation of goods from Europe and Japan into the US, the industrial base of the US was going to go through painful competition it hadn't been facing before internationally. And shutting out foreign competition would have simply slowed those companies need to adapt leaving them even more at a disadvantage internationally - making them even more desperate to avoid competition in the US.
"Yet it didn't destroy Germany's middle class"
It didn't destroy the American middle class either.
What is MYgpa?
" "The gains for which the civil-rights movement had fought had not cost anyone a penny.” I think this is a good thing...."
You realize, though, that in saying it was "a good thing" you are arguing the exact opposite of what MLK meant in that quote, right?
Whatever MLK was, he was not an Yglesian popularist.
(He was also not running for elective office, so that kind of popularist imperative might not apply to him. I take it that MY believes it does not apply to Substack provocateurs, for instance.)
Not that I disagree with the tenor of your post but It is not actually true that redistribution is always zero sum. We know that that the fiscal multiplier varies across income ranges and thus 1 dollar redistributed from the rich to the poor can benefit the poor, the economy and the country overall.
On the other hand, it is certainly true that it is far less popular than other interventions. Also, it is often possible to work accomplish the same thing in less unpopular ways. Minimum wage is redistribution but far less unpopular.
"...1 dollar redistributed from the rich to the poor can benefit the poor, the economy and the country overall"
Or it might not. It all depends.
"Minimum wage is redistribution..."
No it's not. It is a price floor with all the attendant bad effects.
Ken, you're right; the extra dollar in someone's paycheck didn't come out of anyone's pocket. \s
You seem to assume that using the law to mandate that an employer pays someone a certain wage means that the employer will, in fact, pay that wage. That is a bad assumption to make.
$15/hour seems perfectly reasonable to me with minimal negative effects: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-15-minimum-wage-is-pretty-safe
I read Noah's article with interest when it came out a while back. I agree that $15 would be fine for many areas in the country, but his paragraph about how monopsony power would make it not that big of an issue for small towns or lower incomes areas seems to get it backwards. Many companies will go to smaller towns or lower incomes states precisely to gain a cost advantage. If you remove the cost advantage of cheaper labor you remove the incentive for them to be there at all.
You can seem him articulating this idea in his articles on Caribbean countries of DR, Jamaica, etc. Yet he doesn't seem to recognize this within the US itself.
Minimal is not none. And if your goal is to get more money into the pockets of low-income workers, the minimum wage is a very blunt tool.
Like is it possible to create actual equal opportunity? It seems far more likely that we’d just divide the pie in a reasonably fair way in that we would on a baseline of massive resource distribution create actual equality of opportunity.
Like it seems to me that we just keep finding new ways to show how wealth matters and there’s no escaping the power of compound interest that even if you could create an equal floor and have it it would slip away within 2 generations or so.
when i hear the phrase “equal opportunity,” i know i’m talking to a person who hasn’t thought much about equality beyond not wanting to sound like a douche.
wealth is only one barrier to equal opportunity. how can the person with an iq of 85 have the same opportunities as the person with an iq of 135? how can the baby with fetal alcohol syndrome have the same opportunities as one who had a healthy uterine environment? how can the child whose parents’ lives were too chaotic to encourage quiet reflection keep up with the child whose parents taught curiosity and patience?
There is no equal opportunity, though, without some baseline equity in the distribution of economic resources (access to quality education, healthcare, etc, etc), which requires laws. And there's more likely to be a consensus for that a national community with a strong emphasis on the equality and identity of all citizens as Americans, rather than one that divides and classifies citizens by race, ethnicity and ancestry.
Nationality absolutely is different than race/ethnicity, because it corresponds to the borders of sovereign political entities, with the capacity and right of internal self-governance.
We have the right and responsibility to govern our own nation for the benefit of all of it members. We don't have that right, or responsibility, for the governance of people in other nations.
"...right and responsibility to govern our own nation for the benefit of all of it members" There in you capture the essence of the disagreement between extreme sides of both political parties. Rs define "our nation" and "members" based on a race and lifestyle lens while Ds define it differently.
Internal self governance has resulted in the status quo. Maybe that's what the populace wants. Difficult to accept, but true. And finally, since when has US lacked the capacity or thought it didn't have the right to govern outside it's borders.
Nationalism is a disease. Get well soon.