++++++++++++++++++++++Is The Democrat Party facing a demographic issue? (See 1 below.)
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EU will fall? (See 2 below.)
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Another economic thought.
Even if corporations engage in accelerated depreciation they still may not have the ability to finance a replacement facility due to inflation and increased costs.
For a very simplistic example. Let's suppose a corporation builds a $20 million facility and depreciates it over 20 years or at the rate of $1 million per year. Twenty years go by and they need to replace it and the new facility costs $30 million, partly due to the rise in materiel costs but also because technology has changed. If this company has not retained earnings over the 20 years they may be challenged financially to compete. Add to this their need to spend on research and development, meet all the inane rules and regulations aggressive bureaucrats dream up and union demands for more and more wage increases and benefits that outstrip productivity and it is little wonder American manufacturers leave this country in order to seek lower costs and remain competitive.
Only sovereign governments can finance deficits for a period of time at increasing interest rates but this is generally not something corporations can sustain. Even Greece can no longer finance its continuing poor economic results without assistance from its European brothers.
Tonight Trump will address American competitiveness. I seriously doubt Democrats will applaud much of his proposals except when he proposes spending for infrastructure. It is amazing how cost conscious these former big spenders and Obama deficit supporters have become.
Trump's address tonight should prove interesting and will be an attempt to begin the process of healing the nation's divide. Results always do more than talk and legislation should soon begin.
I suspect Trump will be harsh on his own party members who try and throw sand in the gears.
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Can The EU Survive.
Dick
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1) The Democratic Party is facing a demographic crisis
In 2008, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama outperformed his predecessors
John Kerry and Al Gore with virtually every single demographic group, handily defeating his
Republican rival John McCain.
This success spread to down-ballot races as well. Democrats expanded control over the House
Many progressives came to believe these results were not a fluke. Obama’s coalition seemed to
herald an emerging Democratic majority that stood to reshape politics as we know it.
The logic was simple. Most of those who are young, college-educated, women or minorities
lean left. Older white men leaned right, but whites were declining as a portion of the electorate
due to immigration and interracial unions. Therefore, as the older generation passed away
and a younger, more diverse and more educated cohort stepped into the fore, America would
become more progressive in an enduring way.
Right now, these predictions are not looking so good. In a virtual inversion of 2008, only
worse, Republicans control both chambers of Congress and stand to expand their control of
the Senate in 2018. Republicans also dominate state legislatures and governorships
It may be tempting to hold onto the faith in an emerging Democratic majority. Some predict
of history,” as President Obama often phrased it.
On the one hand, as a social psychologist, I understand this impulse toward comforting
thoughts. However, given my background in applied social epistemology, I also know it is
imperative for progressives to have a clear-eyed view of the situation at hand.
The Democratic Party is in crisis. Demographics will be unlikely to save them. If anything, the
trend seems to be going in the other direction.
From ballot counting to exit polls
The Democratic coalition rapidly deteriorated after the 2008 election. In the 2010 midterms,
the Democrats lost the House in the most sweeping congressional reversal of the preceding 62
years. The hole only got deeper in 2014, as the Senate also came under Republican control.
Between 2008 and 2016, there was a dramatic downward trajectory across presidential races
as well.
In 2008, Barack Obama beat John McCain by 192 Electoral College votes and 8.54 million
popular votes. In 2012, he beat Mitt Romney by just 126 electoral votes and 3.48 million
popular votes. Obama’s margin of victory, while objectively comfortable, represented a 59
percent decline in the size of his popular vote lead.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.87 million votes. Even if she had won the
presidency, her performance would have marked another steep decline in Democrats’ margin
of victory, down a whopping 66 percent from 2008. It would have been the narrowest popular
vote margin of any winning candidate since the 2000 election.
However, Clinton’s popular vote lead came overwhelmingly from densely populated and left-
leaning states like California. Relative to Barack Obama, she underperformed in key
midwestern states, ultimately losing the Electoral College by 74 votes and costing the
Democrats the White House.
To better understand this loss, I turned to exit polls, surveys of voters taken directly after
voting. Exit polls are a great resource for understanding why a Democratic majority has failed
to emerge over the last 10 years. They are specifically designed to help pundits and analysts
make sense of electoral outcomes and produce narrative frames.
New York Times exit poll data from the last three midterm and presidential cycles reveals
distinct longitudinal trends across demographic dimensions such as gender, race, age, income,
educational attainment and ideological alignment.
As one might imagine given the Democrats’ breathtaking electoral collapse, there is basically
nothing but bad news for Democrats across the board. The data showed that the voting
patterns of key demographic groups shifted dramatically downward from 2008 through 2016.
A reality check
Despite these trends, many popular narratives about the 2016 election seem to reinforce the
concept of an emerging Democratic majority.
For instance, there is a common misconception that Trump was ushered into power by old,
white, economically disenfranchised men. However, according to the exit polls, Trump actually
did worse than Romney among whites and seniors, but outperformed him among blacks,
Asians, Hispanics and young people.
While the Democrats lost a lot of support among low-income Americans, I think it would be a
mistake to interpret these as Trump’s base. He won a plurality of every income bracket above
US$50,000 as well. He also won more non-Christian and nonreligious voters than any
Republican since the 2000 election.
However the biggest surprise of 2016 probably relates to gender. The first major party female
candidate for president, running against a notorious misogynist, captured the Democrats’
lowest share of female voters since 2004. And although Trump also got a lower share of female
voters than his last three Republican predecessors, he nonetheless won over a majority of
Granted, Trump’s candidacy and campaign were exceptional. However, it would be a mistake
to think of these outcomes as aberrations rather than the culmination of a long-running trend.
Contrary to the emerging Democratic majority thesis, there does not seem to be any
demographic category with which Democrats are progressively improving.
However, there are lots of them on the Republican side.
The perils of identity politics
Democrats may try to assure themselves that things are not so bleak. The party still pulls in
nearly 90 percent of the black vote, two-thirds of Hispanic or Asian votes, and majorities
among racial and ethnic “others.” They continue to capture a majority of women and young
people. While the exit polls show that Republicans have been consistently chipping away at
this coalition, the trend does not suggest the GOP will actually win majorities from any of
these groups anytime soon.
But here’s the rub: Republicans actually don’t need to outright win – or even come close to
winning – any of these demographic categories in order to come out ahead. If minority
turnout is low, Republicans win. If Democrats fail to capture 2012 levels of black, Hispanic
and Asian votes, they lose. It doesn’t really matter if lost votes go to Republicans or
independents – the outcome is the same.
The Democrats’ current coalition presents a very narrow path to victory. Minority groups like
LGBTQ, Jewish, Muslim, Asian, black or Hispanic Americans each comprise just a small slice
of the electorate. Meanwhile, whites amount to no less than 70 percent. This means
Democrats can get 100 percent of the votes from all other groups combined, and still not be
anywhere near a majority unless they get at least a third of the remaining white
Minority votes also tend to be concentrated in relatively safe states and voting districts. To
win statewide or national races, Democrats would have to capture an even larger share of the
white vote than the raw electoral share data would suggest – particularly in rural and
suburban areas which tend to have higher turnout despite their lower populations.
Unfortunately, most of the “favorable” demographic shifts for Democrats have occurred in
districts that are basically noncompetitive. So long as this trend holds, Democrats stand to
benefit little, if at all, in terms of congressional seats or Electoral College votes, regardless of
how many more Americans happen to fall into Democratic-leaning categories.
Moreover, ideological affiliations and perceived interests tend to grow more diverse within
groups as they expand. Therefore, while Hispanic and Asian voters currently skew heavily
toward Democrats, Republicans could actually end up benefiting more in the long run from
the projected demographic shifts.
Finally, Democrats rely heavily on irregular voters to win national contests, particularly
during years with presidential elections. This group tends to stay home unless they are
easily discouraged from going to the polls.
Adjusting for relative participation rates, internal disagreement and uneven geographic
distribution, a winning Democratic coalition would likely require a ratio of at least one non-
minority white for each minority constituent. And to the extent that Republicans actually do
rally the white vote – again, Trump did not – Democrats’ margin for error more or less
vanishes. Yet Democratic support among white voters has plummeted in every election since
2008. This
trend is not sustainable if progressives aspire toward any kind of majority coalition in any
foreseeable future.
Looking forward
Obama’s election was not the first time Democrats prophesied a permanent majority. Similar
claims were made prior to the ascendance of Nixon, and then again just before Reagan took
the country by storm. This track record alone should inspire deep skepticism about
deterministic and epochal political predictions.
Progressives don’t have any kind of “lock” on the future. In the near term, absent radical
change, the situation may even grow worse for them.
But Republicans should hardly grow complacent with their apparent advantage either. In U.S.
politics, overwhelming majorities tend to be unstable. Nothing is truly inevitable until it
actually happens.
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2)
At its core, what is the EU? And why, despite its vast resources, does it seem perpetually unable to make
sense of the world and meet its objectives? The two answers lie hidden in the EU’s very DNA.
2)
Why the EU can't make sense of the world
and why its downfall is imminent
At its core, what is the EU? And why, despite its vast resources, does it seem perpetually unable to make
sense of the world and meet its objectives? The two answers lie hidden in the EU’s very DNA.
First, there’s the EU’s primary internal contradiction: EU federalism is an ideology that propagates post-
ideologism; a culturally amorphous post-ideological world.
A cosmopolitan easy going agnostic world, in which the single market and currency have made nationalism
obsolete. Indeed, a world where the European Parliament invites a long haired bearded shemale to perform in
front of its building and announces him/her as “The voice of Europe” singing for equality, without anyone
batting an eye.
The EU’s core problem, however, is that in its way of viewing and engaging the world beyond Brussels’
boundaries, it is acting as if the world has already arrived at this so badly coveted post-cultural/ideological end
station.
This is why the EU’s foreign minister is convinced political Islam should be part of the solution for Europe’s
bicultural malaise. It is why for almost a decade now, the EU is maintaining it is reasonable to expect a
German fiscal discipline from Greece ― a country in which tax evasion has been a central pillar of its culture
ever since it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire some 600 years ago. It is why the EU fails to grasp the
fact it’s deepening the migration crisis by acting as a ferry service for human traffickers. It is why the EU
refuses to acknowledge an inherently expansionist religion like Islam views Europe’s open borders as an
invitation to conquest. And it is why it was caught off guard by the mass rapes in Cologne etc. Because in the
EU’s world, man in its natural state never existed and the Rape of the Sabine Women was never told.
In short, the EU is treating the world as if it’s already an earthly EUtopia in which everything can be solved
through dialogue and the right subsidies. And that’s why it will keep on chasing facts until its imminent demise.
But there’s something even more fundamental obstructing the EU’s ability to solve crises.
The EU is artificial and unnecessary
What is the EU? The EU is a government looking for people to govern. It didn’t evolve organically from a
community’s desire to be governed. It was an elitist ideological hobby project ― one that European
Commission first Vice-President Frans Timmermans a few weeks ago referred to as:
The EU is not a peace project
This, however, is a deception. A deception so pervasive, it has become the most pivotal element of the
Eurocrats’ belief system. But the EU is no peace project. It neither caused nor consolidated peace.
True peace is being able to hurt one another, but simply not wanting to. In 1945, after centuries of conflict,
European nation states finally reached this status. Subsequently, the European Economic Community (EEC)
consolidated this peace in 1958 by entangling the French and German economies.
The EU came afterwards, without there ever being an actual need for it ― the continent was peaceful and that
peace was consolidated.
The EU has no actual raison d’être
So, if the EU neither caused nor consolidated peace, what is the EU’s fundamental raison d’être? The simple
answer is: it has none. There is nothing fundamentally positive about Europe, that could not exist without the
EU.
This is no trivial matter.
Because the EU is a highly artificial and non-organic governing body, one without a fundamental raison d’être,
the EU’s priority objective, at all times, is self-preservation. Even when this means not solving problems at
all.
The euro and migration crises serve as prime examples. The EU is not only not solving the euro crisis, it’s
prolonging it by insisting fiscally dysfunctional member states remain member states, simply because their
ejection from the EU would endanger and obscure the EU itself.
The same is true for the migration crisis. It’s not hard to solve. To simply stop being a ferry service for human
traffickers and implement the very straight forward Australian model, is hardly rocket science. It’s no
coincidence Australia’s migration architect claims Europe doesn’t even seem to be trying to solve this crisis.
In 2016, 490,547 migrants reached Europe. The total number of asylum applicants is almost 2.5 times higher
at 1.205 million, which is a modest drop from 2015’s 1.323 million. During the first months of 2017, almost
13.000 arrived by sea.
So what is the EU’s priority during the migrant crisis?
Instead, the EU’s highest priority seems to be preventing nation states from bypassing the EU, by taking their
own measures against the crisis.
For if that were to happen, the EU would lose its ‘greatest achievement’: the federal control of European
national borders, without which, the EU is nothing.
“Sell me this pen”
The EU has been sold to the European people by bored career politicians who persuaded them that Europe
needed a supranational government and monetary union to prosper.
Europeans bought a pen from someone who told them to write their names on a napkin.
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