MAGA’s biggest election campaign strategy against President Biden is to repetitively portray him as having an open border policy, despite data that reveals Biden deported 3.5 times as many illegals as Trump did. Biden doesn’t have an open border policy, but neither is Biden opposed to immigrants, he just wants them to enter our country lawfully, whereas Trump wants to change the law to make immigration more illegal. Trump wants to take away natural-born citizenship rights for children with illegal parents which would require changing the US Constitution. Constitutions define the principles of our national law and thus express our national character, which is of a nation built by immigrants. Immigration goes to the heart of our national humanity, as well as our economy. Trumpsters would have you believe that immigrants come to this country for welfare, as if welfare is the meaning of the Land of Opportunity. Defining opportunity as welfare is not a humanitarian concept. Biden is a humanitarian and Donald Trump is not.
Today there is a battle raging between Senate Republicans and House Republicans. This time around the immigration bill is packaged with aid to Ukraine versus combining immigration reform and a path to legal citizenship. From beyond the halls of congressional or administrative power, Donald Trump is advising the Speaker of the House, Johnson, to prevent this bill from passing. It’s transparent that Trump’s motivation is his re-election campaign, which is also his get-out-of-jail-free card. Trump does not want Biden to have a win on immigration as it would thwart the primary tenant of his presidential campaign that frames Biden as an open border administration, based on the Trumpster’s mass and generalized understanding of the world at large, all Democrats are for open borders and anyone not a Trumpster is a Democrat.
The remaining detail to be worked out is the status of humanitarian parole, which allows the president to allow certain groups of non-U.S. citizens to temporarily enter or remain in the United States if they apply for admission but lack any legal basis for admission. This allowed the president to grant temporary entry to refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine and create a special program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.
Lindsey Graham is prepared to fall on his sword over humanitarian parole. Enacting the immigration bill is tied to aid to Ukraine, which the Republicans have been trying to withhold. Regarding the choice, Trump loses even if he wins as a loss for the immigration act underscores that a vote for Trump is a vote for an authoritarian dictatorship, which trumps immigration policy for MAGA if the House heeds Trump’s advice and rejects the immigration reform bill, although the understanding of what transpires will be portrayed through the fragmented lens of the media.
Campaigning on the economy:
According to economists, the Biden economy is doing well on multiple fronts:
The U.S. economy is on the rebound, unemployment is at 3.7%, real wages are outpacing inflation, and inflation has largely come back under control — with some arguing Fed targets have already been reached. By most metrics of economic fundamentals, we’ve made a miraculous recovery, one that many economists believed wouldn’t occur without withstanding a bitter recession first. Source The U.S. Economy and Public Perception: What’s Happening?
However, this is not convincing the American public. Why not?
Recently I came upon an article that argues that the number of jobs created under the Biden administration is not a genuine economic indicator because most of the jobs being created are not “quality” jobs, which, the author believes is the true indicator of the state of the economy, even though by legislative definition, “quality jobs” are “jobs that pay higher than average wages and benefits”, and mathematically available to only a minority of the workforce. On the political extremism barometer, this belief falls into the same category as MAGA cultists who will tell you that real Americans are exclusively Donald Trump loyalists, ie. the benefits of the economy are only for those with jobs that pay higher than average than the most of the economy (a quality job by state definition).
A headline on the Biden Whitehouse website declares:
Bidenomics Is Working: The President’s Plan Grows the Economy from the Middle Out and Bottom Up—Not the Top Down
The top-down economy coined the phrase”quality jobs” to mean subsidized jobs calibrated as a percentage that always pay higher wages and benefits than the average wage for the area.
The jobs report simply counts the number of new jobs being created. It tells you where these jobs are being added but not the types of jobs being created. The quality of those new jobs matters more than the number itself. source
The author’s point of view reflects the social attitude imparted by state newspeak in the branding of the “quality job”, conveying privilege, the top-down economy exists to serve those making above median income, and reducing all jobs paying average or below to “crap jobs” as portrayed in an article titled An Open Letter to Economists, subtitled The problem with the economy is staring you in the face, the problem, according to the author is jobs that don’t pay enough in wages and benefits to qualify as “earning a living”.
However, earning a living is not merely a function of the amount and benefits in a paycheck, but also a function of the purchasing power of the paycheck. If the purchasing power of the paycheck is enough to earn a comfortable living, it doesn’t matter if it is a higher-than-average paycheck. In an economy with an equitable gini rating, even a below-average paycheck should constitute enough to earn a living. A better measure of success than the number of “quality jobs” is when a low-income job means earning a living, but that takes more than just raising the rate of pay, it takes calibrating all the metrics that economists measure into an almost utopian balance. It’s the paycheck and it’s the context from which the paycheck derives its true value.
Anything that increases or decreases the wealth divide factors into the purchasing power of the dollar. The participation of buyers who can pay higher prices is a factor in affordability throughout the whole economy, for example, such buyers in the housing markets drive home prices up and affordability down. The mechanics of the trickle-down economy increase the ownership class-working class divide by trading x number of jobs at higher than average wages and benefits in exchange for subsidizing the capitalization of the privately-owned industry at 40% and upwards of the business‘s capital costs. Programs such as Maine’s Seed Capital Tax Credit only require a tax exemption to turn a refundable tax credit into a subsidy. 100% tax exemptions are available in separate programs such as the Pine Tree Zone. Since most of the companies receiving the tax credits are publicly traded, the tax credit subsidizes the shareholder’s (ownership class) profits, which is not earned, nor is it a loan, nor an investment, it is the capitalization of profits that is simply granted, unlike the “quality jobs” that make it nearly possible for workers to earn a living these days, but even affordable home ownership is subsidized at 120% of the median income, or at “quality job” income levels, indicating that in the 21st century, even a quality job income is not enough to earn a living that includes home ownership Furthermore the worker still has to earn whatever pay he or she receives rather than receiving a grant just because the state made a deal that created a quantifiable revenue stream for the state in personal income taxes on the quality jobs, and justified the deal as “job creation” done purposefully for the benefit of the working classes, whose living standards have been steadily sliding downward into serfdom for decades.
The shareholders of the corporation that creates the quality jobs now have a higher income that drives up housing prices. Perhaps they will purchase a second home. Perhaps they will turn it into a short-term rental. The state, which does not collect property tax, collects a 9% sales tax on short-term rentals and related services, so the state needs more control over municipal ordinances to ensure that short-term rentals have the space to expand. Over-crowded workforce housing zones are the solution. See LD 2023-HP1489
A commenter in my local media takes that line of thought to the next reverse-engineered logical step holding that only those of privileged economic status have value to society:
Has the commenter never heard of the phrase “essential worker” coined during covid for those workers in non-quality jobs who went to work and kept everything going?
I commented that we don’t have a market economy, we have a centrally managed economy.
Those benefitting from the command economy can easily delude themselves when the government takes the form of public-private relationships, using whatever interchangeable face is convenient to the circumstance, allowing the viewer to see only the side of the relationship that the hegemony wants the public to see.
The top-down economic theory posits that raising the pay level for some will raise it everywhere but other parts of the economy are not being given a helping handful of free capital (I could sure use it!) to arbitrarily raise wages as dictated by the state without an ounce of understanding of how a business operates and what the business work process needs are.
What Is a Command Economy?
A command economy is a key aspect of a political system in which a central governmental authority dictates the levels of production that are permissible and the prices that may be charged for goods and services. Most industries are publicly owned. Investopedia
The state is not yet dictating the prices charged for goods and services but it is dictating the cost of labor for its subsidized sector. All jobs compete in the job market against the subsidized sector, but the free enterprise sector operates as a market economy. The state also dictates the prices charged for affordable housing and the types of applicants that qualify for building such housing, and limits the upward mobility of those who live in affordable housing, to keep the lower half of the economy in its place. By penalizing the bottom half of the economy for engaging in free enterprise, the state is also dictating levels of production.
A market economy is an economic system in which individuals, rather than the state, own most of the resources. This includes land, labor, and capital. In a market economy, individuals control the use and price of these resources through voluntary decisions made in the marketplace.
The jobs created in the free enterprise sector are not subsidized and so do not cost the greater economy by subsidizing shareholder profits, a practice that expands wealth inequality by making the rich richer through means unavailable to everyone else.
There are currently multiple factors affecting the subsidized jobs market, one being the remote workers movement which disperses the area in which the workforce works so that “jobs that pay higher than average for the area” is not negotiable for a remote workforce. The remote workers movement also reduces the need for large capital investments in corporate headquarters, that are subsidized in exchange for creating quality jobs. The workspace becomes the home or independent office environment, which is not subsidized in the manner of corporate headquarters, and not yet recognized as the new workspace in state and local economic development and housing policy.
Given that the formula for subsidized “quality jobs” is “jobs that pay higher than average wages and benefits”, the subsidized jobs are positioned to always be at the top of the job market. The newspeak used to identify those jobs subtly characterizes jobs produced in a free enterprise system as jobs of lesser worth., which is the theme of the two articles that I previously brought up. The jobs at the bottom and middle of the economy tend not to be subsidized and thus operate in the free enterprise economy.
The author of the essay reflects the social psychological character of those holding jobs that have, until recently, been favored by the public-private hegemony when she writes:
That’s a stunning figure to pay attention to. While jobs are, in fact, being created, the qualitative data suggests job creation isn’t being equally distributed throughout the economy. Instead, it’s being highly concentrated in sectors where jobs are certainly available but likely not desired.
Take health care and social assistance as an example. While you might assume job growth applies to highly-skilled jobs like surgeons and anesthesiologists, those only consist of a small fraction of the broader healthcare sector. There’s a greater abundance of jobs for low-paid work like home health aides, nurses, and administrative assistants. source
Stunning figures indeed! On the one hand, the author talks of “quality jobs” adopting the definition put forth by the state as “jobs that pay higher than average wages and benefits” as if jobs that pay higher than average should be developed in greater abundance than jobs that pay average or below. The author tells us that “The quality of those new jobs matters more than the number itself”, as if growing any job other than higher paid jobs is political marketing trickery to make us believe the economy is doing well when it isn’t.
The transformation of the economy from a trickle-down economy to a bottom-up middle-out economy is a process that transforms a command economy into a free market economy. A command economy is a hierarchical social order, a free market economy is laterally organized as is “bottom-up and middle-out”.
The economic indicators show that the transformative process is working. Unemployment is the lowest it has been in fifty-five years meaning the job market is competitive which drives up wages and since most jobs are being created in the unsubsidized bottom and middle of the economy- that’s where the wages are being driven up and wages are starting to outpace inflation, which doesn’t mean that the growth in wages is yet greater than inflation, It means that the growth in wages is happening at a faster rate than the growth in inflation. It may not yet be apparent at the retail level but if the process is given time to unfold, it will eventually become apparent.
Since jobs are being created that are not “quality jobs”, are fewer subsidies being granted to the ownership class?
How does bartering with public subsidies affect inflation? If the state trades subsidies for jobs that have no relationship to the number of jobs needed by the industry, that means the cost of labor is higher than it needs to be pushing the cost of the product or service that the industry produces upward. The corporation benefits because of the subsidies but the subsidies are extracted from the general economy, most of which is seeing no benefit from the exchange other than the hypothetical trickle-down effect, which has yet to manifest after nearly five decades of central management during which time inflation has expanded.
What happens if corporate welfare is reduced or eliminated as a factor?`
Tech jobs are in decline, and Jobs in service industries are on the rise.
While the headlines have been filled with news of layoffs in tech, the vast majority of jobs in the last six months have been created in health care and social assistance, the government, and leisure and hospitality. source
The past surge in tech jobs was amplified by state policies that “targeted sectors” and then negotiated subsidies for those sectors creating jobs to meet the state’s target, not necessarily the workforce needs of the business. Reports of fake jobs in the tech sector emerged. When jobs are created for a purpose other than the need for those jobs by the business, fake jobs and unnecessary layers of middle management follow.
The remote work movement is undermining the structural basis for such negotiations as well as the commercial real estate market. Simultaneously businesses are having to make large investments in AI which will likewise radically transform the job market.
Service jobs require people and are minimally affected by AI, as is also true of hand-made products.
Contrary to the author’s opinions of the two articles cited herein, jobs in the lower and middle sectors are not worthless to society or to the workers who are employed by them. During covid, the term was “essential worker”, meaning what it says. They are people that keep things going. In the sectors that are not included in the state’s subsidized “targeted sector”, a low-wage job is a job-training wage, and if a worker increases their skill level on the job contributing to increased profits for the business owner, it can result in a higher income for both the business and the worker who has learned their skills on the job without public subsidies paying for it.
Finally, it’s socially reprehensible that the jobs of the people who are subsidizing other people’s jobs that pay “higher than average wages and benefits” should be denigrated as worthless.
The trickle-down economy didn’t work out well for most since it continually expanded the wealth divide. The proof is in the pudding which has been baking in the oven for far too long and is now overdone.
And President Biden slowly but surely keeps on keeping on. Bravo!
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