In the wake of his mishandling of public relations after the Orlando massacre, presidential candidate Donald Trump has finally started to slump in the polls, although he was still only 6 points behind Hillary Clinton. One reason Clinton isn’t pulling further away is because of her own negatives (which I’ve already discussed). However the reason Trump retains such polling as he does is the same reason the Republicans can’t just get rid of him: He represents a certain voter base that seems as resistant to empirical evidence as the Inquisitors who tried Galileo. “Trump will never get Mexico to pay for a wall.” “Yes he will.” “The Wall didn’t work for East Germany.” “Yes it will.” “We can’t balance the budget by defaulting on our debt.” “I don’t care.”
“Two plus two makes four.” “I don’t care.” “Gravity does not make things fall up.” “I don’t care.” “The sun does not rise in the west.” “Sez you, commie.”
When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”
According to the government figures for April 2016, the US economy added fewer jobs than expected as the job market approached “full employment” even as the GDP figures showed that the economy grew by only 0.5 percent, its lowest rate in two years. What isn’t being mentioned in the low unemployment is figure is part of why the economy is still so sluggish: the near-employment figure doesn’t count those formerly employed people who have just flat out stopped looking for work. According to a recent survey cited in a CNBC article, overall 43 percent of the jobless told pollsters that they had given up looking for work. “There was one optimistic sign in the survey” according to the article: 22 percent of those who reported being unemployed was because they quit their last job, up from a score of 15 percent in 2015, which supposedly is “a trend economists generally equate with a more mobile labor force.” But then the same survey said that more than half of those polled had not had a job interview since 2014, which may indicate that anybody who quits a job in this economy must hate it that much.
Of course the reason things have been stuck where they are is that businesses refuse to raise real wages, citing “the economy” and weak demand, blanking out the fact that demand is weak because no one has any disposable income.
The reason Walmart is such a great business model for this economy is due to a similar kind of circular logic: Walmart keeps their wages low, in order to keep their prices low, so that the kind of people who work at shitty jobs like Walmart HAVE to shop at Walmart cause that’s the only place they can afford to buy stuff.
Generally, I describe myself as right-wing and capitalist as opposed to left-wing and socialist, because I think the Right has a better grasp of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Which isn’t to say they don’t have their blind spots.
For instance, conservatives and libertarians mostly think that we shouldn’t make the welfare system too “cushy” because that will de-incentivize work since at some level you could get a better standard of living without working. But that policy has two issues: One, given the “Puritan work ethic” of this country, it’s very unlikely that we ever will have a comprehensive welfare state on the level of an EU country, at least not with our current political class. And two, given that fact, the gradual desertion of the workforce is not so much because the benefits of welfare are so great, but because the benefits of work are so meager. Put another way, if you’re going to be just scraping by whether you have a job or not, you might as well be just scraping by with plenty of free time on the government dole as opposed to just scraping by while busting your ass over 40 hours a week.
For my part, one of my last jobs was working in a call center for ten dollars an hour, doing a outsourcer campaign in support of a major insurer that offered Medicare Advantage policies, and I was one of the people who took calls from customers and pharmacies investigating why a drug claim wasn’t paid, or whether the policy was in effect, or some such. And at least once a day, sometimes once an hour, I’d have to tell some senior citizen that their claim didn’t run through because (rarely) the policy wasn’t even in effect due to a mistake on someone’s end, or more commonly because they were still in the deductible, or they were in the “donut hole”, or whatever, and that’s why the prescription that cost $30 last month cost almost $300 this month. And I’d have to hear them wailing and panicking, going, “How do you expect me to pay for this? Ooh, just you WAIT til you get to be my age! You don’t know what it’s LIKE to live on a fixed income! I have 800 dollars a month, to cover food, and rent, and utilities, and now you’re telling me I have to pay 300 of that every month for the rest of the year, just to get the medicine that I need to LIVE? Where am I supposed to FIND all this money???”
And I would have to listen to this, and I would think to myself, “Lady, I am half your age, with a full-time job, and I have the exact same problems.”