Link Salad, the Ballad of George McGovern Edition
-- The Liberal Millennial Revolution - Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, Feb. 29, 2016
"This is the most educated generation in American history by both total degrees and share of college graduates. But whereas education once seemed to promise an inviolable social contract-a degree produced a job, and the job procured a good middle-class life or better-the rising cost of school has combined with a chilly labor market to create a perfect storm: Low youth wages that make it hard to pay off record-high student debt. One study from the San Francisco Federal Reserve found that since 2009, wages for recent college graduates have grown 60 percent more slowly than those of the general population. Given the alarmingly slow growth of overall wages, this is not unlike identifying an animal that moves 60 percent slower than a garden snail. The youth job market appears to require ever more preparation to secure increasingly meager wages."
-- What Democrats Still Don’t Get About George McGovern - Joshua Mound, The New Republic, Feb. 29, 2016
"Any Democratic nominee was doomed in 1972. Modern election forecasting models based on variables like the state of the economy and the incumbent’s approval ratings make clear, in retrospect, that Nixon was destined to win in a landslide. Taking any guesswork out of the result, Nixon stoked the economy with expansive fiscal and monetary policy, and when polls showed that the public preferred McGovern on issues like inflation and taxes, Nixon shifted to the left. He took the unprecedented step of instituting wage-price controls to clamp down on inflation and promised to sock it to the rich and slash tax rates on the working class if reelected. “The essence of this is redistribution,” Nixon’s top domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, told an astonished press. On foreign affairs, Nixon could justifiably claim that he was not only winding down the war in Vietnam, but also cooling off the Cold War, thanks to his famous trip to China. The Democrats could have resurrected FDR and Nixon would have trounced him in 1972."
"This is the most educated generation in American history by both total degrees and share of college graduates. But whereas education once seemed to promise an inviolable social contract-a degree produced a job, and the job procured a good middle-class life or better-the rising cost of school has combined with a chilly labor market to create a perfect storm: Low youth wages that make it hard to pay off record-high student debt. One study from the San Francisco Federal Reserve found that since 2009, wages for recent college graduates have grown 60 percent more slowly than those of the general population. Given the alarmingly slow growth of overall wages, this is not unlike identifying an animal that moves 60 percent slower than a garden snail. The youth job market appears to require ever more preparation to secure increasingly meager wages."
-- What Democrats Still Don’t Get About George McGovern - Joshua Mound, The New Republic, Feb. 29, 2016
"Any Democratic nominee was doomed in 1972. Modern election forecasting models based on variables like the state of the economy and the incumbent’s approval ratings make clear, in retrospect, that Nixon was destined to win in a landslide. Taking any guesswork out of the result, Nixon stoked the economy with expansive fiscal and monetary policy, and when polls showed that the public preferred McGovern on issues like inflation and taxes, Nixon shifted to the left. He took the unprecedented step of instituting wage-price controls to clamp down on inflation and promised to sock it to the rich and slash tax rates on the working class if reelected. “The essence of this is redistribution,” Nixon’s top domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, told an astonished press. On foreign affairs, Nixon could justifiably claim that he was not only winding down the war in Vietnam, but also cooling off the Cold War, thanks to his famous trip to China. The Democrats could have resurrected FDR and Nixon would have trounced him in 1972."