Daily Clips: July 10th, 2015

July 10, 2015 Nick Cassella

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Why the Gun Control Movement is borrowing from the Marriage-Equality Playbook: New York Magazine has a great piece which talks about the strategy of the gun control movement in this country and it features our very own political strategist, Zach Silk. Zach was the campaign manager for Washington Referendum 74, the marriage-equality initiative, and he is quoted extensively throughout the article. Here are his best bits:

But watching the incremental, state by state progress on marriage that accrued over many years has given anti-gun-violence activists a different template, or a battle plan, for a way forward — although Silk says this new coalescence on guns is still embryonic, reminding him of the early days, back in 2004, when Massachusetts passed the first same-sex-marriage law…

When Zach Silk thinks about how to articulate the values of the renovated gun movement, he uses the same words that the gun advocates use: “Community. Safety. Responsibility. Protecting my family.” In this redefining, he hopes to make a point. “Protection” isn’t an individual matter (a canard in any case, because having a gun in the house makes you exponentially less safe) in which individual patriarchs safeguard individual offspring. “Protection” is a communitarian thing, in which the safety of one’s own children depends on the safe habits of one’s neighbors. Like love, everyone deserves a chance at that.

Minnesota shows the ridiculousness of Wisconsin’s trickle-down policies: If you haven’t heard yet, Scott Walker is a trickle-down Republican (shocker, I know). There are many things that get in the way of Walker’s economic view – namely, facts. However, his state’s neighbor is also proving to be an annoyance. David Madland over at the Center for American Progress told the Daily Beast:

The fact that Minnesota’s economy rallied under progressive policies while Wisconsin’s has struggled is “one more data point proving that trickle down is wrong,” says Madland.

The economic juxtaposition of Wisconsin and Minnesota may prove to be a useful example for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats in 2016 who want to illustrate the devastating effects of the trickle-down scam.

Hillary Clinton to make economic speech on Monday: For political junkies like myself, anticipating how Hillary Clinton 1) frames her economic message and 2) outlines her economic policies is like waiting for Christmas morning. No, I’m not exaggerating. I’m really that excited.

Here’s what we know so far:

her aides say that she will seek to pay for them with higher taxes on wealthy Americans, along with cutbacks and closing loopholes elsewhere; the amounts in play are expected to be substantial…Her most ambitious ideas, which her advisers say are designed to help families, include prekindergarten for all 4-year-olds, expanded access to child care, paid sick days and paid family leave, helping to make college students “as debt-free as possible,” a higher minimum wage, company profit-sharing for employees, legal protections for people in the country illegally, and more financing for medical research.

These all sound like well thought out policy choices from Clinton (hardly anything to do with her campaign isn’t heavily focus-grouped). Whether or not her economic message is a success will largely be based on her framing and whether or not she can provide a “growth” argument around these policies, as opposed to the usual Democratic “fairness’ argument.

Donald Trump: (I’m not linking to anything he said today about the birther question – it doesn’t deserve viewership.) The moron from New York City continues to eat up media coverage in our country. It always amazes me how easily the press is manipulated into reporting on sensationalists like Trump. Say what you will about the guy, he knows how to “play the game.” Thankfully, that game isn’t politics.

NY Mag: Hanauer’s Shared Security System is best option for today’s Uber economy

July 9, 2015 Nick Cassella

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Economics, Policy

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The Uber economy has given American workers an unprecedented amount of flexibility and independence within the workplace. This sort of innovation in the labor-market is welcome and needed. There’s no point denying that.

However, as Annie Lowrey correctly points out, we cannot ignore the obvious downsides of the Uber economy:

Per-gig pay that sometimes works out to less than the minimum wage. No benefits. Responsibility for costs incurred while at work. The need to pay payroll taxes out of pocket. And there are downsides for consumers and businesses, too. The contractor designation prevents start-ups like Uber and TaskRabbit from giving their workers too much supervision or direction, making their services uneven and their workforces occasionally unreliable.

It is completely understandable that our government has yet to address this very new issue in our democracy. For goodness sake, we’re just getting around to dealing with the Confederate Flag.

But, whether we like it or not, we now find ourselves immersed in a time of great economic insecurity and heightened inequality. Wages are flat and the middle class is shrinking. As Lowrey elegantly states, our government must “help guarantee a pathway to the middle class without crushing these nascent businesses or precluding the rise of flexible, part-time work.”

How could we best achieve that? She points to Nick Hanauer and David Rolfe’s “Shared Security System” as the most “holistic solution” to ameliorating the plight of contractors in today’s economy. In this system:

the government [would] create a system of prorated fundamental benefits, paid for by deductions from all workers’ paychecks, no matter how big or small. Those benefits could include sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, retirement savings, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation.

After all, as Lowrey claims, “[n]ew kinds of work need new kinds of laws.” Such a fresh and imaginative model for the Uber economy can be found within Hanauer and Rolfe’s Shared Security System. The tough part will be getting our legislative bodies to actually do something about it.

Not Every Gaffe Is Created Equal

July 9, 2015 Paul Constant

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2016

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The media loves a good gaffe from a presidential candidate. You might say that at this early point, months before anyone actually starts voting, the electoral news cycle runs nearly entirely on gaffes. Jeb Bush’s comment yesterday about how we can get four percent growth in America if our workers just “work longer hours” was the first real, substantive error made by a presidential candidate in the 2016 race because it actually highlighted a genuine flaw in Bush’s thinking: his trickle-down policies do blame the middle class and the working poor for bringing down America’s economy.

If elected, Bush would reward the top one percent and large corporations with tax cuts and dangerously reduced regulations that would amount to more profits, and those profits would never find their way to the hands of the 99 percent. The problem with the average American worker, according to the trickle-down worldview, is that she just doesn’t work hard enough. If she just became a CEO or a hedge fund manager, her problems would all be solved. The mistake resonated so strongly with so many people because it was an occasion in which Bush accidentally said what he really believed, like Mitt Romney’s 47 percent comments.

O’Malley’s mistake was not equal to Jeb Bush’s mistake.

Here’s an example of a gaffe that doesn’t deserve all the attention it received: Martin O’Malley released a ten-page policy paper. The first of ten endnotes on the policy paper referenced a (very unfunny) satirical website, rather than a real news source. That’s it. Never mind the fact that as soon as the O’Malley campaign realized its mistake it released a revised endnote linking to a legitimate news source that made the exact same point as the satirical one. Never mind that the point—that the walls between high-level government jobs and high-level banking jobs are way too porous—was valid.

As Bloomberg’s Phil Mattingly points out, the gaffe has completely distracted the media from the point of the policy paper. O’Malley makes some important claims—that banks are too powerful, that we need serious policies to keep big banking and government separate, that those policies need to be intelligent enough not to constrain business growth even as they protect the average American—which the media has ignored for the sake of a cheap laugh.

In the span of roughly 12 hours, two candidates made two very different gaffes—one superficial, one serious—that were treated the same way by the media. In both cases, we had real opportunities to discuss serious policy. Instead, the general tone by the major news outlets was something akin to a schoolyard bully: “haw-haw, look at the dummy!” I guess we’d better hope that Scott Walker’s disastrous Wisconsin budget accidentally quotes Obi-Wan Kenobi or some other silly mistake. Otherwise, nobody will ever pay attention to what it actually says.

Daily Clips: July 9th, 2015

July 9, 2015 Nick Cassella

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Why Jeb Bush Wants You to Work Harder: If you haven’t heard already, Jeb! made his first dumb and consequential statement in his nascent presidential campaign. He was answering a question on tax reform when he said the following:

My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.

How tone deaf can he be? Americans already work on average 47 hours per week, as Paul Constant highlighted yesterday, making us the most over-worked Western country in the world. I’m sure this inconvenient fact was pointed out to Bush soon after the interview, as he was quick to backtrack on his comment yesterday, responding to the media’s criticism in this way:

Well I think people want to work harder to be able to have more money in their own pockets and not be dependent on government. You can take it out of context all you want, but high sustained growth means that people work 40 hours rather than 30 hours.

This statement is almost as insulting as the first. Almost. For the love of god, though, can someone ask him about his position on overtime pay! Please?!

Here’s Hillary’s response to the gaffe:

Oh snap.

The Average US Woman Is Saving $255 Per Year On Her Birth Control Pills: According to ThinkProgress, the Affordable Care Act has made birth control more financially accessible “than ever before.” Prior to Obamacare mandate taking effect,

…contraceptive spending accounted for roughly 44 percent of the average woman’s annual health expenditures, but this number has dropped to 22 percent since the ACA provision was widely adopted in 2013.

I’m sure this welcome news has Rush Limbaugh muttering sexist comments left, right and center.

South Carolina House Votes To Remove Confederate Flag: It’s truly amazing how quickly this issue has moved. I only wish Republicans and Democrats had spent as much time discussing the issue of gun violence, as well. Why hasn’t the media directed as much attention to those shameful politicians who quietly renewed a ban on gun violence research?

While I don’t mean to downplay the importance of taking down the Confederate Flag, the media’s obsession with this racist symbol has conveniently distracted Americans from the real root of the Charleston church shooting: guns. One can only hope that after the next, inevitable mass shooting we focus on more pertinent issues.

Jeb Bush Says We Can Get Four Percent Growth If Americans Just “Work Longer Hours”

July 8, 2015 Paul Constant

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2016

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Jeb Bush’s unofficial 2016 slogan: “Work harder, peons!”

We have noted on this blog that Jeb Bush believes America can achieve 4 percent annual growth if he becomes president. Others have noted that this is not very likely to happen. But today, in an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, Jeb Bush explained how he believed America would hit that four percent target:

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.”

You heard him, America. Jeb Bush says you’re not working hard enough. Even though that’s not true, according to this story based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Americans work more than anyone in the industrialized world.

More than the English, more than the French, way more than the Germans or Norwegians. Even, recently, more than the Japanese.

And Americans take less vacation, work longer days, and retire later, too.

Americans are working harder than ever before. A Gallup poll says we work 47 hours a week and almost half of us already work at least 50 hours a week. By Bush’s own metric, we should already be enjoying more growth than anyone else in the world. And to reach four percent, we need to work even harder? Would we have to hit 60 hours a week to achieve true prosperity?

And how is he going to increase our productivity? We’re more productive than we’ve ever been. According to the New York Times, the Economic Policy Institute has found that in the years between 1973 and 2011, American “worker productivity grew 80 percent.”

So we have to somehow become “a lot” more productive than ever while working more than 50 hours a week. When are we supposed to stop and enjoy this alleged prosperity we’d supposedly enjoy during a hypothetical third Bush presidency? We’d all be too busy working all the time to enjoy any of it.

And it’s important to note that the media still hasn’t asked Jeb Bush how he feels about raising the overtime limits. So we don’t even know if Bush wants us to be paid for all that extra time worked. Could Bush be more out-of-touch with the average American? What a clueless, classless statement for a presidential candidate to make.

Oregon to Offer Free Community College

July 8, 2015 Paul Constant

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Now to go out and start making money! (Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

Nigel Jaquiss at Willamette Week reports the bill that Oregon’s legislators just passed makes Oregon the second state—Tennessee is the first—to offer free community college to its residents. Jaquiss explains the bill here:

If eligible students apply for and receive federal grants for community college, Oregon will pay the balance of their tuition. The recipients must have lived in Oregon for 12 months, begin their community college course work within six months of finishing high school or the equivalent, take courses that are required for graduation and maintain a 2.5 grade point average.

This is a great start, and it will reap tremendous rewards for Oregon’s economy. But I’d like to see them eventually do away with the requirement that recipients must begin their schooling within six months of finishing high school. Adult education is so crucial, and it’s only becoming more important as the economy evolves. As automation looms on the horizon, we’re going to need new ways to re-educate, say, the fleets of taxi drivers who will eventually be put out of work by self-driving cars. And without some program to subsidize that retraining process, the economy could wind up in shambles.

The Sharing Economy Isn’t All Early Morning Raves and Thriving Free Agents

July 8, 2015 Paul Constant

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In a story titled “Meet The On-Demand Workers Who Say They’re Living The Sharing Economy Dream,” Caroline O’Donovan at BuzzFeed reports on a house full of people in San Francisco who make their living as on-call indpendent contractors.

America: Behold, your new employer!

Like Gonen and Ledet, Joseph makes her living on TaskRabbit, an on-demand platform on which workers set their own hourly rates for gigs that range from the quotidian (installing TVs and moving furniture) to the more bizarre (delivering thousands of donuts and pranking tech executives). All told, there are seven people in Joseph, Gonen, and Ledet’s informal group, and all of them are living off of TaskRabbit. Most, but not all of them, live in the same house, with a rotating spot on the couch available as needed. All seven of them work collaboratively, connected by a constantly running group text message thread that enables them to ask for and offer help with tasks. And all, perhaps crucially, are of the age (22 to 34) and family structure (single and childless) that enables them to take on this kind of precarious employment model.

In some ways, the seven of them are the perfect embodiment of sharing economy ideals, working cooperatively to support themselves while following other passions and adopting a schedule that works for them. But spend enough time with the Taskers and it becomes easy to wonder if they don’t also embody something more sinister than all the glitter might indicate: An unsustainable, shortsighted work model that sacrifices decent pay for the promise of “flexibility,” facilitated by the so-called “on-demand economy” and perpetuated by the tech industry’s insistence that the nine-to-five grind (plus the stability and benefits that come with it) is a thing of the past.

I suppose this might be “the dream” for some, but most people tend to experience a moment—maybe they fall in love, maybe they decide they want a house or a child, maybe they get tired of going to “trendy, sober, early-morning rave[s]”—in which they need a little more stability in their lives. And as it currently stands, the sharing economy simply doesn’t provide that kind of stability. You might be able to maintain a savings account in the sharing economy—maybe—but basic essentials for American adults like a retirement plan and a decent credit rating will likely fall outside the realm of possibility for most workers in this model.

Unsurprisingly, Jeff Tennery, the CEO of a freelancing marketplace, disagrees. In an editorial for PSFK, Tennery writes:

This latest economic trend for earning a living is a trend we do not see ever reversing. If anything, the pendulum will eventually swing in the favor of the American worker. I envision workers becoming “free agents,” with the most talented and adept at using mobile technology driving hire [sic] wages and income growth outside the conventional corporate world of full-time employment.

I agree with Tennery on one point: this trend is not going away. And I suppose he’s right about the fact that some small subset of workers—both the young people in the above BuzzFeed story and a few hyper-talented mercenaries—will thrive in the sharing economy. But as we’ve learned in the last few years by observing the impact of income inequality, an economy isn’t driven by a few people. If a large number of Americans can’t find security in the sharing economy, the system will eventually collapse.

So we need to find a new way forward. I know we’ve linked to this a lot in the past month, but Nick Hanauer and David Rolf’s proposal for a shared security program is the only serious idea I’ve seen that will offer stability for both workers and employers in the sharing economy. It’s the beginning of a conversation we desperately need to have; the American economy certainly can’t survive if everyone is expected to live like couch-surfing ravers. If you don’t like the Shared Security proposal, you had better come up with an alternate plan of your own, because the sharing economy isn’t going away.

Daily Clips: July 8th, 2015

July 8, 2015 Nick Cassella

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Tim Burgess proposes tax on gun sales in Seattle: The Seattle Times reported today that City Council President, Tim Burgess, will propose legislation that would tax ammunition and gun sales and oblige gun owners to contact police about lost or stolen guns.

“Gun violence is very expensive,” Burgess said, noting that the direct medical costs of treating 253 gunshot victims at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center last year surpassed $17 million, with taxpayers covering more than $12 million of that. “It’s time for the gun industry to help defray those costs and this is a very reasonable way to do it.”

Like tobacco, alcohol and marijuana, gun sales should also be taxed. If the product you are selling has clear costs associated with its use, then it makes utter sense to offset the burden on society via taxation. (And just for the record, taxation is not equivalent to slavery, as Paul Constant noted yesterday.)

Where will the GOP land on immigration? In her interview yesterday with CNN, Hillary Clinton said that the Republican presidential candidates’ stances on immigration are on a “spectrum of hostility.” While she’s not wrong, there is a rather sizable gap between, say, Donald Trump’s perspectives on immigration and Jeb Bush’s, for example.

John Dickerson at Slate wondered “where on this new immigration spectrum the GOP’s reputation falls.” If polling is any indication, than it appears immigration will not be seen as an “act of love” by the Republican base. According to Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Republican voters today view immigrants as a “burden” who compete with Americans for job, health care etc…

Compare that 63 percent number with 62 percent of Democratic voters who agreed with the statement that immigrants “strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” Moreover, 57 percent of independents also think immigrants strengthen our nation. In the Republican world view, immigration is very much a zero-sum affair, while the rest of America views the issue in a much more optimistic light.

These are not promising numbers for Republican strategists who want create a campaign which unites, not divides America. When you have a large majority of your voting base wanting the exact opposite of what the rest of the country wants, you’re undoubtedly going to dig yourself into some holes during the primary season. Time will tell how deep the GOP’s immigration hole becomes.

Washington State has brought in $70 million in marijuana revenue: And what’s more? The world isn’t ending. Kids aren’t smoking reefer on the sidewalk and general anarchy hasn’t ensued. With positive revenue results occurring now in both Washington and Colorado, the arguments of the anti-marijuana crowd are quickly fading. With seven states on the verge of passing recreational marijuana in the next few years, this important issue is now finally being given the attention it deserves. Legalize it!

CVS leaves US Chamber of Commerce over tobacco lobbying: CVS made a bold move on Tuesday, announcing that it would sever ties with the Chamber over its lobbying efforts to roll back anti-smoking laws. Of course, because the Chamber is run by deluded individuals they responded by saying there has been an egregious “misinformation campaign” run against them. That’s pretty rich coming from the same people who in 1975 said that raising the minimum wage to $3 would result in millions of job losses. Talk about misinformation…