Tag Archives: childcare

What Should Democrats Say About Jobs?

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent reports today on work by Priorities USA to figure out why so many people who voted for Obama in 2012 turned around and voted for Trump in 2016:

One finding from the polling stands out: A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump. I was also permitted to view video of some focus group activity, which showed Obama-Trump voters offering sharp criticism of Democrats on the economy.

….The poll found that Obama-Trump voters, many of whom are working-class whites and were pivotal to Trump’s victory, are economically losing ground and are skeptical of Democratic solutions to their problems.

I’m afraid I can’t find this very interesting without answers to a few questions:

How many voters switched from Obama to Trump? Are we talking 5 percent? 1 percent? Less?1
How does this compare to other years? Is it unusually high?
How does this compare to other years after a party has held the White House for eight years?

That said, let’s assume this is a problem. What should Democrats do about it? Here’s my take: above all, these folks want steady, secure jobs. Health care is great. Free college is great. Childcare is great. All that stuff is great, but it’s not fundamentally what drives the votes of these party switchers. What they want to hear about is jobs. They want their old-time good jobs back.

Trump had a good message on jobs: the Chinese stole them from you and I’ll get them back. This is not an especially correct message, but it’s both plausible and galvanizing. It works.

So what should the Democrats’ message be? What policy would plausibly and directly impact the likelihood of these “left behind” folks getting good, steady jobs again? There’s trade, of course, which Bernie Sanders raised in the primaries, but I think Trump has that one covered. It needs to be something else. But what?

If it takes more than a sentence or so to explain, it’s no good. If it’s couched in liberalese, it’s no good. If it’s not viscerally plausible, it’s no good. If it’s about “retraining,” it’s no good. If it’s gobbledegook about the changing world, it’s no good. If it’s not directly focused on getting a good job, it’s no good.

Any ideas?

1Please note my admirable restraint in not mentioning that if it weren’t for James Comey, Hillary Clinton would have won and the number of vote switchers would probably have been minuscule.

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What Should Democrats Say About Jobs?

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How Are Democrats Supposed to Appeal to the White Working Class?

Mother Jones

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Over at Vox, Sean Illing interviews Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University. Gest says that the white working class doesn’t fit neatly into either party: Republicans don’t like their protectionism and Democrats don’t like their nativism. This feeds their sense of marginalization:

White working-class people were left, not necessarily dismissed, but they’ve received a lot of lip service from both political parties over the years who were never truly prepared to go all in on the things they most cared about. But perhaps even more importantly, neither party did much to symbolically represent white working-class people in terms of the candidates they selected and the language they used.

….Politics is all about perceptions, and perceptions are so much more important than reality in terms of predicting voting behavior….If we’re trying to understand the political behavior of white working-class people, their sense of marginality and beleaguerment is real, and in their minds it’s meaningful — and that’s what matters in terms of our efforts to make sense of it.

In other words, you can tell them all day long that other people have it even worse, but that doesn’t make things any better. In the entire history of the world, it’s unlikely that this approach has ever made anyone feel any better.

But this raises a question that’s poked at me for years. Let’s just agree that the way we talk is important. Liberals certainly agree that it’s important when it comes to marginalized groups like women, blacks, Muslims, and so forth. They want dignity and respect, and you can’t use language that demeans them if you’re trying to win their votes.

Fine. But at some point you also need some substance. Eric Holder fought back against the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Democrats passed—and Obama signed—the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Hillary Clinton supported an increase in the number of Syrian refugees we accepted even though it was politically dangerous.

So if liberals want to appeal to the white working class, they need some substantive policies to go along with a change in attitude. But what would those be? This is where I keep coming up short.

Stop negotiating trade deals? OK, but we all know that this won’t really accomplish much—and has plenty of downsides.
Bring back the manufacturing jobs? There’s almost unanimous agreement that there’s no way to do this.
Increase unemployment benefits and other forms of social welfare? That’s not what they want. They want good jobs.
Childcare and maternity leave benefits? See above. Besides, Democrats already support this. Republicans are the roadblock.
Offer retraining and relocation benefits? I recommend you keep your distance when you suggest this. Most struggling working class folks (a) don’t want this and (b) have heard it a million times and don’t believe it.
Move lots of government agencies out of Washington DC and into the heartland? Maybe, but the overall impact would be small and would mostly provide middle-class service jobs anyway.
Bring unions back? That would be great, but Republicans will never let it happen.
Get tough on immigration? Rhetorically this worked pretty well for Trump, but the truth is that the white working class in the upper Midwest hasn’t actually lost many jobs to Mexican immigrants—maybe none at all. In the end, I doubt that Trump will reduce illegal immigration much, and even if he does it won’t have more than a minuscule impact on the white working class in Wisconsin.
Tax cuts? There aren’t a lot of taxes to cut for families at working-class income levels. Besides, from a purely political standpoint, Democrats will never out-tax-cut Republicans.

Maybe there’s some genuinely great idea that I haven’t heard of. If so, I’m all ears. Beyond that, the only real possibilities seem to be some mix of moving rightward on social issues and paying less attention to the concerns of people of color. Those are nonstarters, I hope.

So what’s the answer? These guys want us to bring back the 50s, and that’s not possible. Are we supposed to adopt a campaign of pure gasbaggery, like Trump, with no actual substance to go along with it? Or are there truly some simple, concrete, and highly effective policies we could adopt to help out the white working class?

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How Are Democrats Supposed to Appeal to the White Working Class?

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The Mystery of Declining Labor Force Participation Continues

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen says there have been a lot of papers about the declining labor force participation of men, so it’s about time we investigate the declining labor force participation of women. He recommends a paper by So Kubota, a job market candidate at Princeton.

Unfortunately, I ran into a huge roadblock. Kubota thinks the answer involves the rising cost of childcare, and that certainly sounds reasonable. But take a look at the chart on the right. It comes at the very beginning of a presentation based on his paper. I’ve excerpted just the part starting around the year 2000, since that’s when overall female labor force participation started to decline. What it shows is clear: participation rates for women with children declined less than rates for women without children.

What am I missing here? It seems perfectly sensible that rising childcare costs reduce the net income from market labor and therefore reduce the number of mothers who find it worthwhile to work outside the home. And I’m fully willing to accept that the costs of childcare have gone up over the past couple of decades. That should make a difference, and Kubota estimates that it’s reduced female labor force participation by 5 percent. But Kubota’s own chart suggests that it hasn’t had this effect. All the subsequent discussion of subsidies and market vs. home-based childcare doesn’t change that basic fact.

So the interesting question seems to be this: given that childcare costs have increased, why are labor force participation rates for mothers declining less than those for women without children? That’s a genuine mystery.

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The Mystery of Declining Labor Force Participation Continues

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