6598

It’s a shame he wasn’t a better actor, then maybe he would have stuck with that career

6599

No, it’s because Borg beat McEnroe at Wimbledon.

6600

All we have to do is push the high-end tax rates back up to where they were pre-Reagan, and close the offshoring loopholes, and everything will be fine again. I’m almost serious.

6601

That reporter with the funny expressions has the nickname Wednesday Adams! I think she went as it on Halloween. I forget her name and I want to know!

6602

That ball was on the line.

6603

Wage stagnation started in the early 1970s, as your own chart demonstrates. The oldest baby boomers had just entered the work force, many were still in school.

To the extent that boomers played a part in wage stagnation, they did as its first victims.

6604

Your comment is out of bounds. Clearly Out! Just look at it, are you an IDIOT?! it’s RIGHT OUT!

6605

I agree–the other stuff that had started up in the 1970’s but really picked up steam after Reagan came in was absolutely relentless, all but officially sanctioned union-busting.* Couple that with wage arbitrage on a global scale over the last 40 years and you’ve got a recipe for having almost all of the proceeds of economic growth accrue to capital and irreplaceable/indispensable high earning employees.

Some of the Boomer cohort were among the “perps” and way more among the victims.

*At the state level it wasn’t even an unofficial thing: “Right to Work (for nearly nothing)” and all that.

6606

Ashley ‘sad eyes’ Parker is the reporter. Tom’s got a crush on her. She shows up on Hardball with Chris Mathews regularly.

6607

She has good eyes, but those eyebrows? Better than a golden retriever’s ears.

6608

That chart is pretty clearly bullshit in its decision to break on 1980, as the separation of wages and productivity clearly starts at around 1960, getting worse around 1970. Reagan didn’t cause it.

6609

You can’t see a clear divergence around 81-82? Prior to that all 3 lines moved in concert - they all went up or down roughly in proportion. Then in 82 productivity starts a skyrocketing trajectory while wages and compensation remain flat.

Even if you use 60 as the baseline there in a demonstrable difference post 82.

6610

As with many things, you can interpret that graph in different ways. Timex is right is the sense that productivity growth outpaced compensation growth from 1965 on. But if you showed me that graph without the background coloration I’d be with strummer - compensation more or less tracked productivity, even if productivity grew somewhat faster, until about 1980. If you project the same gradual lagging of compensation until the present, compensation would be way higher than it actually is. Does that mean “Reagan”? Not necessarily.

6611

We have no Pence-specific thread?

Pitkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo said when a man who lives in the home hung the banner, the Secret Service didn’t stop him.

“He was real sheepish and thought he might be confronted by the Secret Service or deputies who’d tell him he couldn’t do it,” DiSalvo said. “When they said, ‘We’re not here to control your free speech rights,’ they came out with chili and began feeding them.”
He continued: “They’ve been really nice to us.”

6612

The effect of Boomers is akin to gravitational lensing. Now that they are going (or gone), things are returning back to normal. (Or, is it the delayed effect of the dissolution of the Soviet Union? I can’t make up my mind.)

6613

Best to burn it all down. Just to make sure.

6614

You know you wanted to say ‘nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure’ but realized the error of that…

6615

I’m moderating!

6616

I am decidedly less confident about our ability to weather a less tangible form of damage Trump is doing—that is to say the damage of which he has shown proof of concept. It was only recently that the notion of a modern president of the United States openly demanding politicized law enforcement or openly saying that the job of the attorney general was to protect him from investigation was unthinkable. Even Richard Nixon, who believed such things privately and acted on them in secret, never had the audacity to state them publicly. Trump has not merely advocated for the notion of law enforcement as a mechanism of political attack; he has campaigned against those within the bureaucracy who have resisted the vision. He has adopted an active policy of institutional attack on the FBI and public discrediting of intelligence-community findings inconvenient to him on Russia. The question is whether this style of politics—or aspects of it—catches on. This may be hard to imagine if Trumpism ends in a crushing electoral defeat and repudiation. But what if Republicans outperform expectations in 2018 or Trump wins reelection in 2020 or both? What will other politicians take away then?

That is not an idle question—one germane only to future populist demagogues who may arise. Because Trump has not, alas, flown solo in this project of institutional degradation. He has brought much of his party with him. The House Republican caucus is up in arms not about L’Affaire Russe but about the special counsel’s investigation of L’Affaire Russe. The braying for Robert Mueller’s blood and for a housecleaning at the Justice Department and the FBI pervades conservative media. We have to be concerned that Trump is in the process of normalizing for an entire political movement the politicization and weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence. No, he has not yet successfully corrupted these institutions. But he has made surprising inroads in corrupting public expectations of them. That damage is hard to calculate—but it could end up being devastating.

6617

This, again, goes back to the fact that the Republican party is no longer a traditional american political party but is, instead, an insurgent movement. Mike Lofgren called this out in 2011 and time and circumstance have proven him correct:

http://www.truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult