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Blah. Too much to do. Stupid work.
In other news:
Economic inequality, from The New York Times:
"The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class ( Read more... )
In other news:
Economic inequality, from The New York Times:
"The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class ( Read more... )
"If middle-class and poor people do so much better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents, why do so many of them vote for Republicans? One popular answer, advanced by Thomas Frank and others, is that they are alienated by Democratic liberalism on cultural issues like abortion, gay marriage and gender roles. This does not appear to be the case. In recent presidential elections, affluent voters, who tend to be liberal on cultural matters, are about twice as likely as middle-class and poor voters to make their decisions on the basis of their cultural concerns.
A better explanation for Republican electoral successes may be that while most voters, rich and poor alike, do vote with their economic interests in mind, they construe those interests in a curiously myopic way. Their choices at the polls are strongly influenced by election-year income growth but only weakly related to economic performance earlier in the president’s term. And while Republicans have presided over dismal income growth for middle-class and poor families in most years, they have, remarkably enough, produced robust growth in election years.
Why have Republican administrations typically presided over strong election-year growth? The pattern probably reflects the fact that presidents have more clout early in their terms than at election time. Republicans have often used that clout to rein in inflation and social spending, producing or prolonging economic contractions that then wear off by the time of the next election. New or newly re-elected Democrats, for their part, have frequently stimulated the economy and expanded employment, producing economic booms that raise all boats in their second and third years but trail off as the next election approaches. As a result, even working-poor families have experienced stronger income growth under Republicans (1.8 percent) than under Democrats (1 percent) in election years."
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