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You are here: Home / Archives for Economics / Fuck The Middle-Class

Fuck The Middle-Class

Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on Society

by Tom Levenson|  November 5, 20205:43 pm| 53 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Open Threads

While we’re waiting for…oh, I dunno, something or other, an article I chanced upon today about wine and income inequality triggered a thought about what we are really up against in the ongoing fight for our country.

Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine critic, published this about a week ago:

Among the many ways the rich are different from you and me: Only they can afford grand cru Burgundy.

That wasn’t always the case. In the 1990s, middle-class wine lovers could still afford to experience that rite of passage — drinking a truly great wine, not simply to enjoy it, but to understand what qualities made it exceptional in the eyes of history.

It might have been a splurge, perhaps requiring a few sacrifices. But it was feasible, just as it was possible to buy first-growth Bordeaux, or the top wines of Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino or Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, to name a few other standard-bearers.

Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on Society

Not any more. The TL:DR is that prices for top wines–not just Burgandies, but all the iconic names/regions–have diverged from most other bottles:

In 1980, the price of a first-growth Bordeaux was roughly four times the price of a fifth-growth Bordeaux, he said in a phone interview, referring to an 1855 classification that ranked top Médoc producers in five tiers, or growths. Nowadays, he said, as prices have risen for all these top wines, the ratio between first- and fifth-growth price is more like 10 to 1.

The driver: demand from the top 1 percent, or one tenth of 1 percent:

In another example from Bordeaux, Professor Ashenfelter, along with two researchers from the University of Bordeaux, presented a paper in 2018 showing that as income inequality has increased since 1980, the price of first-growth Bordeaux has paralleled the rise in top incomes.

Asimov, no raving radical he, is nonetheless perfectly able to connect the dots:

Though the problem matters to wine lovers, the rising inaccessibility of fancy wines is just a microscopic example of how income inequality and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands have affected daily life.

The macroscopic story, as I see it, is the rich-to-ultrarich war on the idea  and the real life of society. They lead lives that are carefully demarcated in both experiences and physical spaces that are theirs, and very much not ours. They drink stuff we don’t–can’t, anymore, even as special treats, because they’ve bought it all. When they fall ill, they enjoy boutique health care, and have thus less and less stake (they think) in public health. And so on.

That’s what income inequality does, what it’s supposed to do: bifurcate the world into two, one that a small group enjoys in seemingly secure isolation, and the one everyone else lives in. Worse, the ethos evoked to defend such wealth and such distinctions is an atomized one, of meritocratic, individual success. That’s not a social vision; it denies the value of collective action; it is bloody lonely.

And, of course, it drives our politics. All the signalling–the bigotry, the divide-and-conquer hate, the religious dog whistling and so on–may in fact matter to some in the Republican political class, but the driver is making sure nothing impedes the progress of generational fortunes.

This is all obvious to most here, I think–but it reminds me that progressive income taxes and confiscatory inheritance duties are existential–not just for them, but for the survival of American democracy, and maybe America itself.

Probably won’t do much to bring down the price of Petrus (lots of Chinese and Russian and whoever gazillionaires to suck up the available supply, even if we got a handle on our gilded class). But that’s what it will take, I think, to get a sustainable politics back, and (when the virus looses its hold) the kind of social and cultural world we might like to inhabit.

Enough such windy stuff.

As I said to Mr. Gorbachev: Open Up This Thread!

(ETA to add the link to the Asimov article.)

Image: Willem Kalf, Wineglass and a Bowl of Fruit, 1663

Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on SocietyPost + Comments (53)

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)

by Tom Levenson|  March 21, 20206:05 pm| 67 Comments

This post is in: Austerity Bombing, Economics, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality

Coronavirus is changing America hugely in the here and now–just look outside.

It’s also true that it will have a lasting impact on the country (and the world), and while prediction is hard, especially about the future, there is one obvious impact that will harm both millions of individual Americans and the long term economic health of the nation.

That would be what’s waiting for students graduating this June into a job market that for all intents and purposes won’t exist–likely for months/years to come.

TL:DR: it’s bad. Really bad. There are serious losses of income and long term wealth that produce knock-on effects on health and social factors in the lives of those who, by no fault or action of their own, happen to come into adulthood at just the wrong moment.

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)

At this moment, we’re diving into what looks like a deep economic disaster that will wreck the dreams of millions of kids just getting started, and we are doing so because the Republican leadership botched both short and long term plans for a predictable event. This is social misery that is about to happen as a direct result of political choices made by Donald Trump and 40 years of decisions by Republican elected officials. We will need to drive that point home, until being a Republican ranks in popular estimation a couple of rungs below refurbished condom retailer.

To our sorrow, there’s a fair amount of research on  the natural experiments we’ve already endured that shwo what starting one’s career in such a moment does to both short term and longer prospects.  In 2006, a paper looking at Canadian college graduates between 1982 and 1999 showed that recessions have a significant impact on new graduates:

Our main results suggest that the average worker graduating college in a recession faces earnings losses that are very persistent but not permanent. On average, a two standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate (roughly comparing the difference between those exiting college in a bust versus boom) leads to an initial wage gap of about 10 percent. This gap declines relatively slowly, and fades to zero after about the eighth year. Controlling for unemployment rate conditions after the first year of labor market entry, we also conclude that virtually all of the wage deficit can be attributed to the unemployment rate variation in the very first year after leaving school.

Graduating at the wrong time affects the shape of careers; timing matters, in that the newest graduates suffer more than those with a toe-hold in the job market; finally, that average 10% loss masks the differential effects by income level. As usual, the poor suffer more (from the non-technical summary):

show full post on front page

 …initial random shocks affect the entire career. Graduating in a recession leads workers to start at smaller and lower paying firms, and they catch-up by switching jobs more frequently than those who graduate in better times. Third, some workers are more affected by luck than others. In particular, earnings losses from temporarily high unemployment rates are minimal for workers with two or more years of work experience and are greatest for labor market entrants. Among graduates, those with the lowest predicted earnings suffer significantly larger and much more persistent earnings losses than those at the top.

I’ve seen studies on the impact of the 2007-8 events that report similar patterns, but what really caught my eye was this one, published in January, 2020, by Hannes Schwandt of Northewestern and Till M. von Wachter from UCLA. Here’s the abstract, which captures the scope of its miserable findings:

We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early 1980s suffer increases in mortality that appear in their late 30s and further strengthen through age 50. We show these mortality impacts are driven by disease-related causes such as heart disease, lung cancer, and liver disease, as well as drug overdoses. At the same time, unlucky middle-aged labor market entrants earn less and work more while receiving less welfare support. They are also less likely to be married, more likely to be divorced, and experience higher rates of childlessness. Our findings demonstrate that tempo-rary disadvantages in the labor market during young adulthood can have substantial impacts on lifetime outcomes, can affect life and death in middle age, and go beyond the transitory initial career effects typically studied.

Schwandt and von Wachter begin with background capturing how the picture of income and career costs have held up, and in some cases worsened since the earlier research I linked above:

Losses in cumulated lifetime income implied by typical estimates per se could lead to lower wealth accumulation, and there is some evidence of reductions in housing wealth among individuals coming of age in the Great Recession (e.g., Dettling and Hsu, 2014). Several studies have documented lasting changes in occupational choice (Oyer, 2006, 2008; Altonji et al., 2016) and employer characteristics (Oreopoulos et al., 2012), and Kahn (2010) finds that 1982 college graduates may begin to lose ground again around 15 years after job entry.

So yeah: graduating in a recession is not what you want. But here’s the killer, literally:

For cohorts coming of age during the early 1980s recession, a temporarily higher state unemployment rate at the age of labor market entry leads to precisely estimated increases in mortality that appear in the late thirties and increase until age 50. These increases in mortality are driven to an important extent by a rise in both disease-related and “external” causes, including lung cancer, liver disease, and drug poisoning.

Aside from early death, effects of entering the job market in crap times make life suck in many ways:

We also find entering the labor market during a recession has a substantial impact on a broad range of measures of socioeconomic status in middle age, including a decline in marriage rates, a rise in divorce rates, and a decline in family size. We also find that after initial recovery in their mid-thirties, adversely affected entry cohorts suffer a reduction in earnings as they reach their mid-forties.

And there are interesting (if that’s the word) distinctions in outcomes by race that may help explain Trump’s appeal to folks whose interests he assaults:

Finally, while the effects on overall mortality are similar by race, increases in deaths of despair appear to be chiefly concentrated among white, nonHispanic men. White men also tend to experience a decline in earnings in midlife and tend to experience larger reductions in family stability than their non-white counterparts. This is despite the fact that non-whites experience larger short-run effects on earnings and other outcomes…

Kids These Days (Are F**ked) 1

In sum: the Trump recession/depression that is beginning right now will damage the hopes and prospects of a generation for a generation.  It will affect us all, including those of us fortunate enough to start our careers in better times, as millions of Americans will have less of chance to lead the fully productive/creative lives they could–and thus our economy and culture as a whole will lose what could have been.

There are some responses that could mitigate the worst effects, it seems to me, and I’m going to be getting in touch with my legislators to push them. First, the most obvious, is to forgive any tuition debt incurred this year. Second, almost equally obvious, would be to forgive it all, certainly for students currently in college, but better, for everyone, as that would be an instant stimulus/support. If students graduating now or over the next few years didn’t have to pay down a debt that the crappy job market will make yet more intractable, they would have more flexibility, more resilience, and hopefully both a better short term and more healthy and emotionally robust time as the years roll by.

And the other urgency, of course, is to not do what Hoover did, and Trump and McConnell and the rest of the junta are doing now: dither over a response that in its first iterations is clearly inadequate to the task. The best thing to do when facing the prospect of double digit job losses is to throw money at anything that (a) keeps folks alive and (b) offers jobs that pay wages.

It’s really not that complicated: don’t burden the most vulnerable with the hardest road to hoe; give them a leg up in hard times. And drop cash from helicopters.

Over to y’all.

Images: Franz von Felbinger, Poor Children, by 1906.

Edvard Munch, Despair, 1894.

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)Post + Comments (67)

Paging Doctor Teeth

by ruemara|  November 19, 20197:30 pm| 87 Comments

This post is in: 2020 Elections, C.R.E.A.M., Fuck The Middle-Class, Open Threads, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?

Doctor Teeth & The Electric Mayhem Can’t Be Beat

Last week was a frustrating week in chez Mara. After years of messing around with cleanings for the old teeth, I finally got to see a periodontist for a gap in my back teeth. Please note, this has been an issue I’ve brought up for years. And every hygienist & dentist has brought it up to me, as if I have jack shit to do with solving bone loss in my jaw.

The solution, it turns out, is cutting open my gum & stuffing it with, uh, bone, I believe. Like stuffing a bra with tissues only the hope is the tissues will bond with the boobies to build healthy bone in the jaw. Or something like that. This procedure costs $3k. With insurance. Which is a yikes. And a “motherfuck, is this going to give me superpowers, at least? ” Because, yikes, and on both sides of my jaw. Double yikes.

I’ve been struck by how ridiculous the American health insurance & medical system is. We have outrageous costs for service & materials, yet we only talk about insurance costs. Coverage for dental and mental health are often discrete from general coverage. Why has the industry been allowed to do this? Last I checked, your mind operating right helps your body & teeth are a critically important component of eating, which is a reason to live. Bacterial infection in your mouth can have some serious consequences, RIP Andy Hallett. We can implement insurance reform measures but making healthcare affordable will require addressing the scale of costs in the U.S. for medicine, tools, personnel, materials — the whole shebang. I don’t believe Medicare for All addresses that except with the idea that we excise insurance companies from the equation. Stepping over the landmine of legal authority, dealing with displaced employees, etc., I don’t get the impression that’s something people are truly dealing with in their proposals.

No human system is perfect. We’re going to be retooling things for decades, as we should have been for all time past. I guess the problem is we have to cure innate selfishness so we don’t craft health policy that respects profit over patients, yet respects the rights of doctors et al to make money. No one will get everything they want but we should get what we need.

We also need to address medical outcome disparities for POC. I wouldn’t have gotten my consultation without finally getting mad and saying, “Look, this has been going on for years, why are you just talking about cleanings still? Shouldn’t you do more? What are my options?” I wish I was only talking about a few months and one provider. We’re talking over 8 years and 3 dental providers. This could have been tried years ago, when I had the actual income to do it. Instead, lots of “caution”. It doesn’t mean any of the dental offices were unskilled or that they didn’t provide decent service. But when it comes to offering good health action plans, advanced care options – they’ve all fallen short and I’m not alone. This shit kills people. I’m probably more forward about finding solutions than others and I can attest that largely, I’ve been recommended to be patient. Many times, that patience would have severely injured me or killed me, see also, adventures with birth control, Georgia & the blood thinners. How do we get medical providers to accept & overcome implicit biases? Maybe Mr. Anderson can weigh in with his valuable expertise.

We have a lot of work to do on medical care. Just fixing the for profit insurance part of it won’t resolve it. I’d love to see anyone running for office who’d make a stab at these issues. I’d also like to be a billionaire just so I can upend the entire GOP as my personal petty vendetta. So I’ll settle for landing some more VO gigs so I can make an action plan on this teeth bullshit. Have at folks. And really, what kind of policy do you think should be discussed for any issue at all versus how it’s presented during elections? I got a million of them, but I’ll save it for another long post.

2 Floofy cats, watching birds.
The Morning Crew

Paging Doctor TeethPost + Comments (87)

Spiraling Decompensation Open Thread

by Anne Laurie|  August 24, 20191:57 pm| 128 Comments

This post is in: Dolt 45, Fuck The Middle-Class, Open Threads, Repubs in Disarray!, The Party of Fiscal Responsibility, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Bitter Despair is the New Black, Good News For Conservatives

White House aides right now offering no explanation for why President Trump believes he can “hereby order” American companies to do anything. Also, officials have no information about what the president may or may not be announcing this afternoon, per his Tweet. https://t.co/QbGwBnfduE

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) August 23, 2019

when you're running for reelection on the great economy and whoops it isn't working out so well –> https://t.co/YrMyPbW49i

— Joshua Green (@JoshuaGreen) August 23, 2019

You can definitely tell that the White House thinks this will be received well, given that Trump waited until after markets closed https://t.co/GFoYtV9xWM

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) August 23, 2019

Little known fact: the president of the United States may be unable to hereby order private companies to do anything but the chosen one and the King of Israel do actually have that authority so the joke is on us.

— Tom Wright (@thomaswright08) August 23, 2019

If Obama had done any *one* of the bat-crap crazy things POTUS did just *today*, the Republicans would have lost their shit. McConnell would be waving the Constitution around and Tom Cotton would be getting into camo and waiting for the Red Guards to storm Little Rock. https://t.co/SbAgNrg9Zr

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) August 23, 2019

Trump: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Trumpalos: lol losers he's just doing it to get a rise out of u and also he's objectively right if you weren't biased you'd see Cthulhu DOES wait dreaming this is how you get Trump

— HerebyOrderedHat (@Popehat) August 24, 2019

#Russia's state TV: Dep. Dean of World Politics at Moscow's State University:
"Unfortunately, Trump didn't reach the level of Abraham Lincoln & didn't drive the U.S. to civil war. That's sad. Hopefully, he'll become Herbert Hoover and at least drive them into a Great Depression." pic.twitter.com/rc5I9UYXxZ

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) February 11, 2018

The only good news is Trump will do something horrifically embarrassing at G7 this weekend to distract from his trade war before the markets open on Monday.

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 23, 2019

Spiraling Decompensation Open ThreadPost + Comments (128)

Repub Venality Open Thread: Mick Mulvaney Gets Caught Telling the Truth

by Anne Laurie|  August 22, 20199:35 am| 103 Comments

This post is in: Economics, Fuck The Middle-Class, Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, Assholes, Clap Louder!, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Get Mad You Sons Of Bitches

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney this week braced Trump donors for what he hopes will be only a “moderate and short” recession. Three-quarters of business economists expect a recession by the end of 2021. https://t.co/UknrEZmysw

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) August 22, 2019

They’d throw him off the GOP Titanic for this, but Mulvaney’s the Acting Head of Everything They’ve Still Got… and possibly the only one who’s figured out how to work the light switches in the Oval Office.

He told 50 people who would not be impacted by the recession.

— Outside Agitator (@FairwaysOfLife) August 20, 2019

this sounds an awful lot like "recessions are good and easy to win" https://t.co/UonZqtk4pL

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) August 21, 2019

Telling steel workers the economy is fine while whispering to jillionaire donors that they should invest in canned food and shotguns. Gargantuan scandal any non-Hellworld timeline. https://t.co/kjCncWRJow

— Zeddy (@Zeddary) August 21, 2019

Competition will be stiff, but I’m betting the single most obnoxious Republican reversal of the post-Trump era will be Mick Mulvaney deciding he’s a deficit hawk again https://t.co/zkZxBi5sKN

— Allahpundit (@allahpundit) August 21, 2019

Repub Venality Open Thread: Mick Mulvaney Gets Caught Telling the TruthPost + Comments (103)

Revisiting Graham-Cassidy

by David Anderson|  April 2, 20196:09 am| 10 Comments

This post is in: 2020 Elections, Anderson On Health Insurance, C.R.E.A.M., Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome

President Trump has stated that he wants a new healthcare proposal. His budget called from major Medicaid and exchange cuts as well as the Graham-Cassidy framework of state blockgrants to cover far fewer people in the exchange and Medicaid expansion populations.

It's been like 3 weeks since the Graham-Cassidy approach to ACA repeal was proposed in the President's Budget, which most definitely did not protect coverage for people w/ pre-existing conditions currently benefiting from the ACA's protections.https://t.co/li1dbkKyAT https://t.co/laUrMHAm4E

— Loren Adler (@LorenAdler) April 1, 2019

In the short run this is irrelevant. There probably are fifty one votes in the Senate for something like Graham-Cassidy to pass. The Majority Leader would be willing to schedule that vote.

There are not 218 votes in the House to pass Graham-Cassidy. Nor is there a Speaker willing to schedule a vote on Graham-Cassidy if it was likely to pass.

However, it is worthwhile to look at the logic of the plan. It is a major cut to federal spending and a major redistribution of federal spending. Right now, more federal money goes to states that aggressively implement the Affordable Care Act or have very high cost markets. That means states like California which aggressively outreach for every single possible enrollment and expanded Medicaid will get more federal ACA money than states like Mississippi or South Dakota which have not expanded Medicaid and have not aggressively pushed enrollment on the Exchanges.

Graham-Cassidy wants to give block grants to states that over time converge to a narrow band on a per-capita basis. It reduces the overall pool of money available and then shifts the remaining funds to states that have done opposed the ACA’s implementation. There were variants where money would be freed up to throw at Senators from states that had implemented the ACA and Medicaid Expansion aggressively but whose votes might be needed to pass the bill.

During the summer of 2017, I tracked the outside evaluation of federal fund flows to states in 2026 under the counter-factual of Graham-Cassidy being implemented and current law of the ACA with CSR funding as the baseline. The coastal states got hammered while the Great Plains, Mountain West and the Deep Confederacy did well.

Circumstances have changed. The three major changes are more states have expanded Medicaid since September 2017, the termination of CSR payments increased effective net subsidies for more people and the elimination of the individual mandate probably depressed enrollment. The 2017 scores will need to be updated, but I think a 2019 score of Graham-Cassidy would be similar.

Revisiting Graham-CassidyPost + Comments (10)

Idaho, Partial Medicaid Expansion and the 400% FPLers

by David Anderson|  March 22, 20199:15 am| 17 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Meth Laboratories of Democracy

Medicaid is primarily health insurance for poor people or very sick people.

Idaho’s legislature is monkeying around with the voter approved straight-up Medicaid expansion to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL).

 

Medicaid expansion news: Idaho House is debating today a bill which rolls back the voter approved Medicaid expansion and replaces it with a much weaker partial expansion and a work requirement. https://t.co/aqOHWouxjZ

— Joan Alker (@JoanAlker1) March 21, 2019

This will harm middle class Idaho families who need community rated, guaranteed issue insurance from the individual market.

How does that work if Medicaid is health insurance for poor people?

Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) work-arounds of Silverloading and differential morbidity matter.

Adrianna MacIntyre and I argued in a Health Affairs blog that full expansion has two paths to decreasing premiums for people earning over 400% FPL that are not available if a state elects and receives a waiver for a partial expansion to only 100% FPL.

 evidence found that Medicaid expansion improved the risk pool of state individual markets, suggesting that the population between 100 and 138 percent FPL is sicker and more expensive, on average, than other exchange enrollees. Insuring this cohort through Medicaid is associated with a seven to eleven percentage point decrease in individual market premiums. …

household incomes between 100 percent and 150 percent FPL, those that would be eligible for 94 percent AV silver plans.  This income bracket overlaps the Medicaid expansion income group significantly.  States that fully expand Medicaid end up with far fewer people in the most generous CSR bucket, as they have moved the 100-138 percent population to Medicaid

CSR 94 Enrollment by all APTC receiving enrollees 2018 Healthcare.gov

Keeping a cohort that is more expensive than the rest of the ACA individual market risk pool in the risk pool raises premiums. Pulling the 100-138% population out of the ACA risk pool lowers market premiums as long as this group is more expensive than average. Furthermore while Idaho has engaged in the Silver Switcheroo, Silverloading increases premiums for folks who want a Silver plan and buy it on Exchange either because they don’t know if they will be just over or just under the subsidy cut-off point of 400% FPL or they can’t access an off-Exchange plan that meets their requirements.

Full Medicaid expansion reduces the premium pain of the middle class. Partial expansion continues the pricing pain for the middle class.

Idaho, Partial Medicaid Expansion and the 400% FPLersPost + Comments (17)

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