Crosstalk

One of the things that gets me about American politics is it's tendency towards "let's you and him fight." Especially when social media enters the picture. The following was posted to LinkedIn, but I'm sure that it's popped up in any number of other corners of the Internet:

For the record, I don't have much faith that either of these men are being quoted accurately here.

According to the picture, Dave Ramsey believes that poverty comes from poor choices, whole Jon Stewart sees the cause as predatory financial policies. Fair enough (maybe). But my first question was: How are these men defining "poverty?"

The Federal guidelines for poverty are listed in terms of annual income: $15,960 for a single adult and $33,000 for a family of four, for instance. Nothing in what Messrs. Ramsey or Stewart say have any bearing on people's actual incomes; expenses, including frivolous ones and housing costs, don't reduce a person's income as paid to them by their job(s). So whatever understandings of "poverty" the two of them are referring to, it's not the Federal poverty level.

And since there isn't any other context, there's no indication that whatever other definitions they using align with one another. Or, for that matter, that one of them is responding to comments by the other. It's just Dave Ramsey going the "personal responsibility" route, while Jon Stewart is leaning more into the "systemic factors" side of things. I suspect that their placements on the right and left side of the image is not a coincidence.

This is the sort of social media post that's designed to produce an emotional reaction where one person is cast as a sinner, and the other a saint, based on the reader's own political (or maybe simply politicized) viewpoint. And I don't really see the utility in that.
 

Jeffersonian

[Vice President J. D.] Vance over the weekend said, “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion.”

“They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn’t listen,” he wrote in a social media post that reposted a video of a French building burning.
Trump, Vance blame immigration for French riots

When I read that, the first thing that came to mind was: "Does Vice President Vance has any understanding of what sparked the protests?" The simple fact that Muslim Students of France supported the protests doesn't make them immigrant-led. Next, however, was this:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.
Thomas Jefferson "Notes on the State of Virginia" 1785

Of course, the primary difference between Vice President Vance and President Jefferson (although he was not yet President when he wrote "Notes on the State of Virginia") is that Thomas Jefferson was willing to point out that White people could be, and had been, dicks. (And that this state of affairs was likely to continue.) Vice President Vance, feeling a need to pander to a White Nationalist movement that believes it has never done wrong by anyone, cannot be so forthcoming. And so he simply makes the bogus case that something about differences in skin color prevent pluralistic societies.

So how does the Vice President account for the modern United States? Does he honestly believe that the presence of say, Native Americans, Hispanics and East Asians raises "fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility?" If so, where does the fault lie? Last I checked, it wasn't the Native Americans who attempted to exterminate native megafauna in the name of denying people a food source. Last I checked, Mexico didn't appear to have much outright hostility to Americans who wanted to go live there. It wasn't the Japanese who placed White Americans into internment camps and then helped themselves to things left behind. So if he's waiting for the United States to devolve into internecine violence along racial lines, who does he think will start that fire. When you look at people who take to mass shootings in the hope of igniting a race war, it's not recent arrivals from the third world pulling the triggers.

Okay, granted, the Industrialized West isn't really set up to manage a program that relieves world poverty by taking people in from poor nations. A massive influx of people seeking the benefits of a modern welfare state is going to cause problems. But if Vice President Vance is under the impression that the only people who can get along with Europeans are other Europeans, maybe he should ask himself where the responsibility for that might lie. Because "the real distinctions which nature has made" are unlikely to be the culprits here.

Back to the Corners

 

Went down to Lake Forest Park today, to check out the demonstration. Given that there were No Kings rallies today, it was pretty well attended. And, of course, there was someone in an inflatable costume. Given the proximity to Halloween, I would have expected to see more, but it seems that they were more popular back in the summer.

Dissembled

The whole debate about gun control is spinning up again following a shooting at a school in Bend, Oregon. I suspect that this iteration will have pretty much the same contours as the last. While I don't 100% agree with Malcolm Gladwell's new book on the subject of guns in America, I do generally take his point that the discussion about guns in the United States is fundamentally dishonest. As I noted when I mentioned the book, Mr. Gladwell doesn't think that the dishonesty is entirely intentional. (Although he does not some deliberate deceptions.)

One area where I think that the public debate around firearms policy is intentionally dishonest is the subject of costs. Current firearms culture and policy in the United States carries with it a death toll. And it's a very large one, especially considering that the United States is an advanced, industrial society with a decently well-functioning government. But it's hard to find someone who will openly stand up and say: "These deaths, as unfortunate as they are, are an acceptable price for the good that comes from people having widespread access to guns."

Politics in the United States tends to make people feel poor, and then attempts to find a villain upon which that poverty can be blamed. It makes complex problems simple, and gives people someone or something to define themselves in opposition to. For gun-rights activists, that villain is often some combination of "the government" and "criminals." Which is all fine and good, but for all of the death toll, those parties are still out there. There's been no righteous rebellion since the American Revolution, and violent crime is unlikely to ever go anywhere. And to the costs being paid are rarely being extracted from the identified villains.

So why not own that? Why not simply come clean about the fact that while yes, some number of the people killed every year with guns are "bad guys," like the Bend shooter, a pretty good number of them aren't, like the children and teacher at the school? While it's something of a truism in American politics that "Not my problem," equals "Not a problem," the unwillingness to admit to a problem that everyone else can see is part of what keeps things from going anywhere.

Questioned

I, for my part, am not a fan of populist politics, mainly because everyone can be at fault but "the people." Granted, this can said to be true of representative forms of government more broadly, but populism tends to explicitly make it front and center, as candidates running on populist platforms seek to burnish their "the people can do no wrong" bona fides.

Enter James Talarico.

“Why do we have a trillionaire when veterans are sleeping on the streets? The reason poverty exists is not because we can’t feed the poor, it’s because we can’t satisfy the rich.” By the way, what happened to the point of the question mark?

Personally, I would have figured that he's smarter than this, but, to borrow from Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his political ambitions depends upon parroting the public's misunderstanding of it."

Big picture, the "reason 'we' have a (paper) trillionaire" is simple. Given the choice between spending money to buy goods and services from one of Elon Musk's companies and spending money on subsidizing housing for impoverished veterans, more people choose the former. Enough people choose the former that the value of Mr. Musk's interest in his companies is astronomical, because the Boards of Directors of those companies believe (correctly or not) that a) no-one else can increase the value of these companies like Mr. Musk will and b) to keep the man's mind on the task at hand requires showering him with oodles of equity.

That's it. It's all down to choices that people have made. And if the United States, as a society, made different choices, there would be different outcomes.

No-one is prying some homeless person's last dollar from their desperate grasp to hand it over to Mr. Musk. People don't feel that they're well-off enough to devote resources to the issue of homelessness and/or they don't feel that the money will be well-spent/generate workable returns. In other words, people with resources are pursuing value, rather than charity.

I get that Mr. Talarico is playing on the sense of poverty that Mr. Musk's current net worth is generating, but this way of putting things gets in the way of people understanding that they have at least some agency in fixing it.