There is no majority for rightwing fundamentalism

[Admin]

The crisis is far more acute, however, for the GOP, which has fallen badly out of touch with its electorate. A mere 30 percent of Republican voters are “enthusiastic about” or “satisfied” with their elected politicians, according to a recent Huffington Post/YouGov poll. Just 41 percent say they are “enthusiastic” or “satisfied with” the future of the party.

These included the Tea Party’s opposition to immigration reform, its suspicion of trade deals, and its hostility to corporate welfare and “crony capitalism.” Cruz captured the Tea Party mood in 2013 when he led a government shutdown to protest Obamacare.

But Tea Party gains on Capitol Hill have failed to mollify angry GOP voters, in part because the party’s economic agenda has continued to ignore working-class Republicans. Fixated on shrinking government, destroying labor unions, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and protecting their big corporate donors from regulation, GOP leaders failed to notice that their electorate had other worries. Substantial numbers of GOP primary voters support tax increases, labor unions, and a higher minimum wage, according to research this year by the RAND Corporation.

Trump has captured these voters with a faux-populist message—even though his actual policies would hurt the working class. Trump promises “major tax relief” for middle-income Americans, but his tax plan would actually favor the wealthy and send the deficit soaring. Nevertheless, Trump has built a robust populist coalition, including voters who are both concerned about immigration and supportive of progressive economic policies, according to RAND’s 2016 Presidential Election Panel Survey. The survey found that 51 percent of primary voters backing Trump support raising taxes on those earning more than $200,000 a year; 38 percent favor labor unions, and 86 percent agree that “people like me don’t have a say in government.”

Crashing the Party

There are probably substantial majorities in the electorate against market fundamentalist positions of unregulated capitalism, in areas like:

• Free trade
  
• Corporate taxation
  
• Excessive inequality
  
• Regulation of the financial industry
  
• Social security
  
• Minimum wage
  

However, the party keeps on catering to the donor class, no wonder they face a revolt. The curious thing is, the revolt has been hijacked by Trump, and earlier by Cruz, while looking that their policy agenda's suggest little deviation from the traditional Republican fare, especially with Cruz. Trump makes nominal deviations, but we have to see whether this will actually translate into actual policy should he get elected:

But if Trump has gathered new voters under his party’s umbrella, he has also fractured the GOP still further with his direct challenges to Republican orthodoxy, including his defense of Planned Parenthood, protectionism, and vow never to touch Social Security or Medicare.

Crashing the Party

[Admin]

One wonders when the Republicans learn that there is no majority for their rightwing fundamentalism of unregulated capitalism, free trade, union bashing, rolling back the welfare state, obsession with the size of government, outsized tax cuts for the rich, climate change denial, etc.

Now the electorate is shifting yet again, and no one knows where the political landscape’s plates will lock. Republicans face a basic math problem amid the accelerating growth of what Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg calls “a new majority coalition of racial minorities, single women, millennials, and seculars.” Greenberg calculates that these groups formed 51 percent of the electorate in 2012, and will comprise 63 percent in 2016.

Crashing the Party

[Martin K]

Thanks for that, admin. The party is in a bit of a bit of a bind. The underlying force is the unfavorable demographics of their electorate.

This causes angst among these older white (mostly males), which is why Trump is riding the anti-immigrant wave in an especially crude manner.

But that's making the party even less willing to head their own lessons from the 2012 loss, which was to reach out to minorities, especially latino's. The hardcore base doesn't want to reach out to latino's, if anybody.

[Admin]

Yes, Martin. But whatever the inconsistencies in actual policy intentions versus what the electorate actually want, politics is deeply tribal. It's a question of who hates who, and what seems to unify most Republicans still is that they hate liberals, even if a good part of them actually supports many liberal policy positions.

[Admin]

Here is another interesting perspective on the differences between Republican unregulated capitalism orthodoxy and actual policy preferences held even by large parts of their own electorate:

Corporate America is doing itself in—while Trump and Sanders capitalize

By Rick Newman
11 hours ago

There are always malcontents. But the portion of Americans sick of crony capitalism, ruthless corporate efficiency and do-more-for-less work is growing large enough to threaten advantages big companies have enjoyed for decades.

This economic frustration, of course, is propelling the insurgent presidential campaigns of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders. Trump, who seems increasingly likely to be the GOP nominee, favors steep new tariffs on imports and other protectionist measures meant to reverse key elements of globalization and bring more jobs back to America. He has also caused publicity problems for companies such as Ford (F), Nabisco (MDLZ) and Carrier (UTX), by calling out their plans to close U.S. facilities and open new ones in Mexico.

Sanders rails repeatedly against “disastrous trade deals” and “billionaires on Wall Street who destroyed this economy,” while calling for breaking up big banks, imposing sharp tax hikes on the wealthy and giving the government more control over the economy than it has had at any time since World War II. With those ideas gaining traction, rival Hillary Clinton has moved left, opposing certain trade deals she once supported.

The revolution could peter out. It’s quite possible that Clinton—an establishment centrist on many economic issues, with close ties to Wall Street—will be the next president, more or less muzzling the roar of discontent until the next election cycle. Yet even so, the forces behind this voter outrage won’t go away, and might even intensify during coming years. And another recession is inevitable at some point, which will swell the ranks of the angry dispossessed.

The attack on capitalism that’s defining the presidential election focuses on free trade, a complex topic policymakers are beginning to rethink. Economists have long thought free trade, with minimal tariffs or other restrictions on the flow of goods between countries, would make everybody better off, overall. Goods would be produced as efficiently as possible, keeping inflation low and assuring strong returns on corporate investment. There would be losers as work shifted from high-cost areas to lower-cost ones, but displaced workers would find comparable jobs in other parts of the economy, with government aid as a backstop. Employment, productivity and living standards would rise faster than in a more closed economy that discouraged trade.

Economists are now discovering, however, that the broader benefits of free trade with some countries—China, in particular—are taking far longer to develop than they should. And they may never arrive. A new study by economists David Autor of MIT, Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, and David Dorn of the University of Zurich finds that China’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse during the last 25 years has caused a “trade shock” in many parts of the U.S. economy that still hasn’t subsided. “Employment has fallen in U.S. industries more exposed to import competition, as expected,” they write. “But offsetting employment gains in other industries have yet to materialize.” Instead of finding other rewarding opportunities in “non-trade exposed” industries, many displaced workers suffer repeated bouts of unemployment and depressed lifetime earnings. That’s when they start paying attention to Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.

Most U.S. multinationals have shifted work to China and other low-cost counties, because they have little choice: Once competitors lower labor costs, they have to do the same thing. When they don’t, they end up like the U.S. auto industry in 2008, which had such bloated costs, compared with foreign automakers, that GM and Chrysler declared bankruptcy and Ford nearly did.

What has been missing from 25 years of mostly unfettered globalization is an adequate safety net for American workers harmed by free trade. Washington offers a benefit known as trade adjustment assistance to workers who lose their jobs because of foreign competition, but it’s so small that the paper's author calls it “effectively inconsequential.” Employers, for their part, mostly rely on the free market to absorb displaced workers. But the market hasn’t been up to the job.

While the unemployment rate today is a low 4.9%, the labor force participation rate--the portion of eligible adults either working or looking for work--has been falling for 15 years and is now at the same level as in 1977, before women joined the labor force in large numbers. The U.S. economy has more jobs than ever, but household income, adjusted for inflation, is still lower than it was in 2000. By definition, that means the typical family is earning less.

Aside from the 2009 stimulus program, Congress has done little to address the problem. U.S. corporations, meanwhile, are focused on ways to keep profits strong in a slow-growing economy, and that doesn’t usually involve a boost in benefits for workers or safety-net programs. Instead, companies are aggressively seeking new ways to dodge U.S. taxes, which has led to the phenomenon of corporate “inversions” and other complex ways of shifting profits to other countries with lower tax rates. A 2015 study by Citizens for Tax Justice found that 358 of the Fortune 500 companies—72%--used offshore tax havens in places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands to lower their U.S. tax bills. Companies with the most money held offshore include Apple (AAPL), General Electric (GE), Microsoft (MSFT), Pfizer (PFE) and IBM (IBM). Everybody’s doing it, which means everybody has to do it.

Americans have been souring on these corporate practices for a while. Only 21% of people said they have confidence in big business in the latest Gallup poll, down from 30% in the late 1990s and a peak of 34% in 1975. A recent survey by Just Capital, a new corporate watchdog group, found that 52% of Americans feel corporate behavior is going in the wrong direction, with just 30% saying it’s going in the right direction. And more than 70% said it’s “never okay” for corporations to pay very low wages, under a variety of scenarios—even if it would create more jobs.

Attitude adjustment

Corporate America has mostly shaken off such concerns, as if it’s mere billowy rhetoric likely to blow over. But a sustained shift in public attitudes may now be leading to real policy changes that hit the bottom line. In the United States, the Trans Pacific Partnership—a free trade deal championed by President Obama—seems increasingly likely to fail in the Senate, which must approve the deal for it to go into effect. Obama and other supporters argue that the TPP, which includes Canada and 10 Pacific nations—but not China—is meant to create a trade bloc with minimal barriers to trade that’s able to counter China’s growing heft. But critics argue it would send even more U.S. jobs overseas, and whether they’re right or wrong, the clamor of opposition to new trade deals could doom the TPP.

That’s not all. Wall Street banks are failing to win much relief from the 2010 Dodd-Frank regulations, and a prominent official from the George W. Bush administration—Neil Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank—now agrees with Bernie Sanders that the government should break up the biggest banks. Meanwhile, the next president may have the momentum to pass new laws penalizing China for currency devaluation (whether it’s actually happening or not), banning corporate inversions, ending the controversial “carried interest” tax provision that almost exclusively benefits the wealthy, and plugging other corporate tax loopholes.

The party could be ending overseas, as well. “Countries around the globe seem to be fed up with profits being shifted to tax havens,”Credit Suisse analysts wrote in a recent report. “It looks like tax risk is on the rise and the companies that have been benefiting most … could see their tax rates head higher over time.” Last year, the European Union published a “ blacklist” of tax havens naming 30 countries it deemed “non-cooperative” on tax compliance. And new EU rules announced just this month will require multinationals to disclose more information on where they stash profits, a move meant to discourage tax dodging and boost revenue for member nations.

Corporate America will undoubtedly survive, even if new policies crimp profits. But it may be time for enlightened CEOs to take more responsibility for workers harmed by globalization and push harder for policies that would create good jobs, such as more spending on infrastructure or public-private programs to train workers in the skills employers need most—coding, say, or other technical abilities. Doing nothing is an option, too, but that may not work as well as it has in the past. Voters seem to have other plans—and finally, the ear of politicians.

[Martin K]

What has been missing from 25 years of mostly unfettered globalization is an adequate safety net for American workers harmed by free trade.

Interesting to note that one can apparently attack these trade deals but basically dismantle the safety net at the same time..

But then again, I guess there is nothing that forces candidates to be coherent, right?