The thing about this mid-term election is that everyone is selling the idea that it's the most important mid-term since whenever. And I suppose it is, in a way. That's because of the Trump phenomenon.
If the Republicans hold Congress it means that the voters were serious about "change" in 2016. If the Dems take the House, not so much. And if the Dems take the Senate then it was all a mistake, sorry fellahs.
And do you know? I have no idea what the voters want. OK, we know what racist sexist homophobes like me want. And we know what #TheResistance wants. But then there are ordinary Americans that are neither rich nor poor nor educated nor uneducated nor woke nor fast asleep. Yes, that kind of American.
We are talking about people that just want a decent job, the chance to make a family, raise some kids, buy a nice house: all that stuff. What do they want, politically? Well, we are about to find out.
But I would say this: the elites of America are peculiarly detached from the ordinary people. Here are a couple of illustrations of this.
First, the liberals. Their identity politics, their social agenda politics is just out of joint with ordinary Americans. Abortion? I'd say that for ordinary Americans the big thing is not controlling fertility, but just being able to afford kids and cars and houses. Diversity and inclusion? I doubt that ordinary Americans think too much about that except when it impacts them negatively. I think that playing the diversity game is mostly an educated-class thing: getting access to fancy colleges, getting into tech companies. Oh, and the question of getting into the gravy train of the local fire department. And when it comes to the feminist obsessions with #MeToo and safe spaces, and the non-binary gender game, I suspect that this is way out of range for average ordinary people. Yeah: when you are in the workplace as an ordinary person you are vulnerable to people with power. They might be aggressive males or rich-bitch women. But you don't think about playing politics about this, like the fancy-pants women at Google did last week. You just do what it takes to hang in there, knowing that people like you don't have an "in" and never will have.
But then the conservative elite. We think about our kids, their colleges, their advanced degrees and the ins and outs of selective colleges. But what about the ordinary folk? People that want an education that leads to a decent job: never mind all the fancy-pants stuff of a liberal education in the humanities, let along the utterly incomprehensible "studies" stuff. We conservative elites have not exactly betrayed the ordinary folk, but we have not thought seriously about their needs and how we might help them.
Here is how my mind works on this. I would like to help detach the ordinary people from the chains of the public school system, so they would have the power to choose an education for their children: E.g., charter schools and home-schooling. And I mean by "home-schooling" creating a culture where ordinary middle-class moms in a neighborhood get together to cooperate and curate their children's education. Then I want a radical turn to apprenticeships, where employers step up to the job of training the future workforce, rather than expecting government to do the job. Really, why would government have a better idea of what employers need than the employers themselves? And I would encourage kids to start transferring from school to apprenticeship in their early teens, for unless you are really going for an elite education what you want is to be directed to a skilled job, and it seems to me that employers would have the best idea about what skills are needed and what kind of kids they need.
The reason I go for apprenticeships is that it shares the cost of education and training between employer and future employee: Both benefit, in my view. The employer gets to select and train the kind of employee he expects to need, and the employee accepts a reduced wage for the term of apprenticeship. I call that a deal that avoids the horror of student debt. In my view the student debt model is absurd because nobody knows before starting skills education what the payoff is going to be. Education financing is an equity play, not a debt play. In the apprenticeship model both parties share the risks.
The other big thing for ordinary people without well-heeled parents is housing. The fact is that government policy to assist with "affordable housing" by providing low-down-payment long-term mortgages has enriched existing home-owners and saddled new home-owners with brutally unjust burdens. My affordable housing policy would end low-down payment mortgages but assist people in saving for down payments. And it would end the long-term mortgage. Why? Because nobody can project interest rates 30 years into the future. But, in the financial system, someone has to take the burden of risk. A high down-payment policy and ten-year mortgages with refinancing to mark to the latest interest rates combined with an encouragement to save that down payment would put sensible protections and safety zones into the housing market and maybe reduce the number of price crashes and credit panics.
Of course, if I had my druthers I would replace the current government-centric SoSec/Medicare/Unemployment racket with a National Savings Plan where everyone gets to save 10-15 percent of wages presently taxed by payroll taxes into a life-long personal tax-protected plan. The idea would be for people to tap the plan for education, home-buying, business startup, kids education, old-age pension and end-of-life medical care. I mean, that's the point of money and credit and investment. You can use it for anything. But putting peoples' life savings away in government-run lock-boxes is straight up theft and injustice. Because government doesn't care about you, it only cares about your vote; it ain't gonna use your money to benefit you, but instead use the money to buy the support of the votes needed to win the next election.
But all that is just my blathering on about my idea for a fair and just society. Meanwhile we have a mid-term election coming up and folks are going to be voting to decide what they want from America.
I know what I want, but the voters may have a different idea.
If the Republicans hold Congress it means that the voters were serious about "change" in 2016. If the Dems take the House, not so much. And if the Dems take the Senate then it was all a mistake, sorry fellahs.
And do you know? I have no idea what the voters want. OK, we know what racist sexist homophobes like me want. And we know what #TheResistance wants. But then there are ordinary Americans that are neither rich nor poor nor educated nor uneducated nor woke nor fast asleep. Yes, that kind of American.
We are talking about people that just want a decent job, the chance to make a family, raise some kids, buy a nice house: all that stuff. What do they want, politically? Well, we are about to find out.
But I would say this: the elites of America are peculiarly detached from the ordinary people. Here are a couple of illustrations of this.
First, the liberals. Their identity politics, their social agenda politics is just out of joint with ordinary Americans. Abortion? I'd say that for ordinary Americans the big thing is not controlling fertility, but just being able to afford kids and cars and houses. Diversity and inclusion? I doubt that ordinary Americans think too much about that except when it impacts them negatively. I think that playing the diversity game is mostly an educated-class thing: getting access to fancy colleges, getting into tech companies. Oh, and the question of getting into the gravy train of the local fire department. And when it comes to the feminist obsessions with #MeToo and safe spaces, and the non-binary gender game, I suspect that this is way out of range for average ordinary people. Yeah: when you are in the workplace as an ordinary person you are vulnerable to people with power. They might be aggressive males or rich-bitch women. But you don't think about playing politics about this, like the fancy-pants women at Google did last week. You just do what it takes to hang in there, knowing that people like you don't have an "in" and never will have.
But then the conservative elite. We think about our kids, their colleges, their advanced degrees and the ins and outs of selective colleges. But what about the ordinary folk? People that want an education that leads to a decent job: never mind all the fancy-pants stuff of a liberal education in the humanities, let along the utterly incomprehensible "studies" stuff. We conservative elites have not exactly betrayed the ordinary folk, but we have not thought seriously about their needs and how we might help them.
Here is how my mind works on this. I would like to help detach the ordinary people from the chains of the public school system, so they would have the power to choose an education for their children: E.g., charter schools and home-schooling. And I mean by "home-schooling" creating a culture where ordinary middle-class moms in a neighborhood get together to cooperate and curate their children's education. Then I want a radical turn to apprenticeships, where employers step up to the job of training the future workforce, rather than expecting government to do the job. Really, why would government have a better idea of what employers need than the employers themselves? And I would encourage kids to start transferring from school to apprenticeship in their early teens, for unless you are really going for an elite education what you want is to be directed to a skilled job, and it seems to me that employers would have the best idea about what skills are needed and what kind of kids they need.
The reason I go for apprenticeships is that it shares the cost of education and training between employer and future employee: Both benefit, in my view. The employer gets to select and train the kind of employee he expects to need, and the employee accepts a reduced wage for the term of apprenticeship. I call that a deal that avoids the horror of student debt. In my view the student debt model is absurd because nobody knows before starting skills education what the payoff is going to be. Education financing is an equity play, not a debt play. In the apprenticeship model both parties share the risks.
The other big thing for ordinary people without well-heeled parents is housing. The fact is that government policy to assist with "affordable housing" by providing low-down-payment long-term mortgages has enriched existing home-owners and saddled new home-owners with brutally unjust burdens. My affordable housing policy would end low-down payment mortgages but assist people in saving for down payments. And it would end the long-term mortgage. Why? Because nobody can project interest rates 30 years into the future. But, in the financial system, someone has to take the burden of risk. A high down-payment policy and ten-year mortgages with refinancing to mark to the latest interest rates combined with an encouragement to save that down payment would put sensible protections and safety zones into the housing market and maybe reduce the number of price crashes and credit panics.
Of course, if I had my druthers I would replace the current government-centric SoSec/Medicare/Unemployment racket with a National Savings Plan where everyone gets to save 10-15 percent of wages presently taxed by payroll taxes into a life-long personal tax-protected plan. The idea would be for people to tap the plan for education, home-buying, business startup, kids education, old-age pension and end-of-life medical care. I mean, that's the point of money and credit and investment. You can use it for anything. But putting peoples' life savings away in government-run lock-boxes is straight up theft and injustice. Because government doesn't care about you, it only cares about your vote; it ain't gonna use your money to benefit you, but instead use the money to buy the support of the votes needed to win the next election.
But all that is just my blathering on about my idea for a fair and just society. Meanwhile we have a mid-term election coming up and folks are going to be voting to decide what they want from America.
I know what I want, but the voters may have a different idea.
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