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Donald Trump’s Negatives Could Go Up…Or Down

by weddinglady9046 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent channels the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton’s negatives are old and baked into the cake, while Donald Trump’s could get even worse than they are now:

Hillary Clinton has been subjected to intense scrutiny for over two decades. Note that Trump’s attacks on her are largely rehashes: He’s going after Bill Clinton’s affairs and Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in “enabling” them….While it’s possible that a renewed focus on all these things could damage Clinton further, it’s more likely that they will accomplish little, because they don’t represent new information.

By contrast, we simply don’t know yet what is out there in the record on Trump….One Dem opposition researcher has estimated that approximately 80 percent of negative stuff out there on Trump has yet to surface publicly — and they continue to do so. Which means it’s possible that Trump’s negatives have more room to grow (as preposterous as that might seem) than Clinton’s do.

This seems like the right way to bet, but I’m a little less sure. On the Hillary side, negatives that are widely accepted can actually be easier to confirm than new ones. If Trump keeps banging away on “Corrupt Hillary,” a lot of people might start remembering all that old stuff that they’d forgotten about during the past decade. And this could be easier than we think, since there are also a substantial group of Bernie supporters these days who are doing everything they can to help this narrative along.

On the Trump side, yes, his negatives have room to grow. But the opposite is true too. If a lot of people haven’t really been paying attention to the campaign yet, it’s quite possible that they might decide the guy isn’t really as bad as rumors have it. Sure, he’s not entirely PC, but he speaks his mind! He’s going to bring back jobs from China! He’s a man of the people!

Then again, maybe they’ll eventually figure out that he’s just another plutocrat Republican who plans to cut the hell out of tax rates for the rich, something a lot of people apparently don’t believe yet. But that’s not a certainty. For some reason, voters and pundits alike seem to give Republicans a pass on their tax plans, shrugging them off more as totems than as actual intentions.

In other words: I don’t know. This is not a normal year and Trump is not a normal candidate. But there’s one more thing to point out: if Pollster’s algorithms are to be believed, Trump’s negatives are actually about the same as Hillary’s and they’re both trending upward at about the same slow but steady rate. The only real difference is that Trump’s ratings are more variable than Hillary’s. This isn’t necessarily good news for Democrats.

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Donald Trump’s Negatives Could Go Up…Or Down

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Unemployment Among Young High School Grads Is…Pretty Much Normal These Days

by ChadwickBowman Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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From the New York Times today on the grim job prospects of high school grads with no college:

Only 10 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds have a college or advanced degree, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute, although many more of them will eventually graduate.

And for young high school graduates, the unemployment rate is disturbingly high: 17.8 percent….“It’s improved since the recession, but it’s still pretty poor,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, who noted the average hourly wage for high school graduates had declined since 2000 despite increases in the minimum wage in some places.

Ms. Gould is part of a growing chorus of economists, employers and educators who argue more effort needs to be put into improving job prospects for people without college degrees.

Is it unreasonable to expect reporters to hop over to FRED for five minutes and check this stuff out? I don’t know how EPI measures unemployment, but the federal government measures it in a consistent way every single month. For young high school grads, the average unemployment rate during the expansion of the aughts was around 11 percent. Today it’s 11.2 percent. In other words, it’s not “pretty poor,” it’s completely normal. And there’s no need to be grudging about how much it’s improved since the recession. It’s down by more than ten points since its peak.

It’s true that young high school grads have seen their incomes drop over the past decade: their cash earnings have declined about 7 percent since before the recession. But that’s also true of every other age and education cohort.

When it comes to both employment and earnings, young high school grads are doing about the same as everyone else. Maybe we should put more effort into improving their job prospects, but we don’t need to wildly misstate the data in order to make the case.

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Unemployment Among Young High School Grads Is…Pretty Much Normal These Days

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Donald Trump’s Newest Delegate Is a Kinder, Gentler White Nationalist

by CecilaMcKenzie Posted on May 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Meet the chairman of the American Freedom Party:

William D. Johnson, J.D., is an international corporate lawyer practicing in Los Angeles….As Chairman of the American Third Position, he serves the purpose of speaking on behalf of the party, and championing its sensible and just policies before the American people. He is also, more than any other, responsible for safeguarding the course, values, and program of the party.

And now, meet the American Freedom Party:

White Americans should push back! Change your party allegiance to the American Freedom Party. A Nationalist party that shares the customs and heritage of the European American people….Return to Americans their traditional right of freedom of association, including freedom in racial matters, along with the abolishment of all forms of government- and corporate-mandated racial discrimination and racial preferences, such as affirmative action, quotas, and all forms of “sensitivity training.”

Finally, courtesy of MoJo‘s own Josh Harkinson, meet Donald Trump’s newest delegate from the great state of California:

Trump’s slate includes William Johnson, one of the country’s most prominent white nationalists….”I just hope to show how I can be mainstream and have these views,” Johnson tells Mother Jones. “I can be a white nationalist and be a strong supporter of Donald Trump and be a good example to everybody.”

….Armed with cash from affluent donors and staffed by what the movement considers to be its top thinkers, AFP now dedicates most of its resources to supporting Trump. Johnson claims that AFP’s pro-Trump robocalls, which have delivered Johnson’s personal cellphone number to voters in seven states, have helped the party find hundreds of new members. “Trump is allowing us to talk about things we’ve not been able to talk about,” Johnson says. “So even if he is not elected, he has achieved great things.”

….Johnson also now finds it easier to be himself: “For many, many years, when I would say these things, other white people would call me names: ‘Oh, you’re a hatemonger, you’re a Nazi, you’re like Hitler,'” he confessed. “Now they come in and say, ‘Oh, you’re like Donald Trump.'”

See? Donald Trump is already making America great again.

UPDATE: No worries, folks. This was all just a big misunderstanding: “A database error led to the inclusion of a potential delegate that had been rejected and removed from the campaign’s list in February 2016.” OK then.

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Donald Trump’s Newest Delegate Is a Kinder, Gentler White Nationalist

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BinC Watch: Donald Trump Still Has No Idea How Government Debt Works

by Carina76B36539 Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump last week:

I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts. I’ve done very well with debt….Now we’re in a different situation with the country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal. And if the economy was good it was good, so therefore, you can’t lose.

Donald Trump today:

It was reported in the failing New York Times and other places that I want to default on debt. You know, I’m the king of debt. I understand debt better probably than anybody….But let me just tell you, if there is a chance to buy back debt at a discount, in other words, interest rates up, and the bonds down, and you can buy debt, that’s what I’m talking about.

….But in the United States, with bonds that won’t happen because in theory the market doesn’t go down so that you default on debt and that’s what happened. So here’s the story, just to have it corrected. If we have an opportunity where interest rates go up and you can buy debt back at a discount, I always like to be able to do that, if you can do it. But that’s all I was talking about. They have it like I’m going to go back to creditors, and I am going to renegotiate and restructure debt, it’s ridiculous and they know it’s ridiculous.

I’ll give Trump this much: it was ridiculous and everyone knew it was ridiculous. It was pure Trump bullshittery. But here’s the thing: even if you accept that this was what Trump was talking about, it’s still ridiculous. The US government isn’t a third party trading Treasury bonds. It’s the issuer of the bonds. If interest rates go up, should the Treasury refinance? No: it should keep paying the lower interest rates on its outstanding bonds. But what if interest rates go down? The answer is still no. Let’s hand the mic over to the Economist:

The interest rate on Treasury bonds is fixed. If the government issues debt during a low-rate period, that’s good news. To refinance that debt in a period of higher bond yields i.e., lower bond prices, the government would have to borrow from the market at much higher rates….Currently, most of the US’s longer-term debt trades above par value because it was issued at a time when bond yields were higher. For example there is a bond with a 2030 maturity and a 6.25% coupon; it trades at 152 cents on the dollar. Would it be worth offering 155 cents on the dollar upfront, and refinancing the debt at today’s lower rates? The dollar value of US debt would rise, not fall, in such circumstances.

In short, any voluntary deal with the market would require the government to pay fair value. And unless you think the Treasury bond market is mispriced (and it is the most liquid market on the planet), the government is unlikely to profit. It might be sensible for the government to alter the patterns of new Treasury issuance; borrowing long-term to lock in low rates for a generation. The Treasury has discussed the idea of refinancing illiquid bonds to improve market liquidity. But that is quite a different idea from Mr Trump’s proposal; the interest savings would be trivial.

Here’s the scary thing: debt really is one of the few things that Trump probably knows a bit about. It’s certainly bitten him in the ass often enough. And yet he still has no idea how it works. He continues to think that the federal government is basically the same thing as a trader on the Goldman Sachs trading desk.

It’s not. Whatever Trump is talking about, it won’t work. Sovereign debt is sovereign debt, and it gets paid off at 100 cents on the dollar. Trump may think everyone except Trump is an idiot, but I’m pretty sure the folks at the Fed and the Treasury are already keenly aware of how to handle open market operations to maximize value for the US government. Someone at the Trump Organization needs to clue him in about how all this stuff works.

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BinC Watch: Donald Trump Still Has No Idea How Government Debt Works

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Did the Stagflation of the 70s Ever Exist In the First Place?

by ErickaFontenot Posted on May 9, 2016

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In a conversation with Dean Baker recently, I learned something interesting. This won’t be new to anyone deeply familiar with inflation statistics, but it was new to me. Maybe it will be new to you too.

The general subject is the stagflation of the 70s, which ushered in supply-side economics and the Reagan era. More specifically, the issue is the measurement of inflation during part of this era. Housing costs are incorporated into the CPI by measuring rents, but prior to 1982 it was done by directly measuring the price of buying a house. In an era when interest rates were steady, this didn’t matter much, but when interest rates went crazy in the mid-70s it made a big difference, overstating inflation by about two percentage points. If you correct for this, and also take a look at exactly when the worst periods of stagflation occurred, you get this:

If you correct the inflation figures and account for the two oil shocks of the 70s, the period from 1970-85 looks remarkably steady. Inflation and GDP growth are both running at about 4 percent for nearly the entire time.

I don’t have the chops to relitigate this, but the question it raises is: Did stagflation ever even exist? Was there anything seriously wrong with the economy of the 70s other than a pair of oil shocks we had no control over? Would the economy have recovered normally after the second oil shock even if Paul Volcker hadn’t created a huge recession? Feel free to litigate in comments.

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Did the Stagflation of the 70s Ever Exist In the First Place?

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Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

by EbonyBirdsong1 Posted on May 8, 2016

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Are pro-business reforms good for economic growth? You’d think so, but the evidence is actually unclear. So Evan Soltas tried a different approach to the question: taking a look at countries that had big, sustained jumps in the World Bank’s Doing Business Index:

This is, I think, a reasonable way of doing things: Even if you are distrustful of the index, as am I, if the World Bank says that your country is in the top 5 percent of reformers in some year, there’s probably something to that. In my sample, it took at least a 10-point increase in the ease of starting a business to qualify as a “reform” year. That is like going from India to China.

A bit of Greek-letter math later, he has an equation that links per-capita GDP growth with the World Bank index:

What I find is that neither term has a significant coefficient. In fact, I can bound the effect of pro-business reforms quite precisely around zero, with a 95-percent confidence interval for the effect of a 10-point reform on the level of per-capita output of -1.4 percent to 3.5 percent. That is far away from the claim that such a reform could double per-capita output.

Now, this isn’t nothing. The reforms led to an increase in economic growth of about 1 percent. And especially in poor countries, there may be other compelling reasons to adopt pro-business reforms. But if Soltas is right, the economic benefits are modest.

Sadly, Soltas did not put this in colorful chart format, which he needs to do if he expects to meet the expectations of his fans. But the bottom line is simple: the United States is already one of top performers in business friendliness. Incremental improvements are all that’s left to us, and the impact of improvements plateau at high levels anyway. More than likely, pro-business reforms in the US would have little to no effect on economic growth. Here’s Soltas:

Maybe the lesson here is to beware the TED-talk version of development economics. Shortening the time it takes to incorporate a small business is not a substitute for deeper institutional reforms, such as those that support investment in human and physical capital, remove economic barriers that hold back women and ethnic or religious minorities, or improve transportation, power, and sanitation infrastructure. Easy pro-business reforms should not distract countries from pursuing changes that, while harder to make, we know to be richly rewarding in the long run.

Roger that.

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Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

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Quote of the Day: Debt? What Debt?

by RJVAshely22 Posted on May 6, 2016

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From Donald Trump, on his plans to run up the deficit in order to rebuild infrastructure:

I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts. I’ve done very well with debt….Now we’re in a different situation with the country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal. And if the economy was good it was good, so therefore, you can’t lose.

There you have it. If Trump crashes the economy, he’ll just default on our sovereign debt. Easy peasy. Why is everyone so worried?

POSTSCRIPT: This is a pretty good example of the Trump Dilemma™. Do you ignore this kind of desperate plea for attention? Or do you write a long, earnest piece about just why it’s a very bad idea indeed? You can hardly ignore it since it’s now coming from the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. But giving it oxygen just gives Trump the free media he was angling for in the first place. In this case, I’m semi-ignoring it. Josh Marshall takes the opposite tack here. Decisions, decisions.

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Quote of the Day: Debt? What Debt?

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Everyone Is Getting Today’s Trump Tweet Totally Wrong

by TeodoroCoulombe Posted on May 5, 2016

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I think everyone is badly misinterpreting this tweet from Donald Trump:

This is not an awkward and embarrassing outreach to Hispanics. It’s not aimed at Hispanics at all. It’s aimed at white people. This is the kind of thing that Trump’s base—the white working class—views as a perfectly sincere appreciation of Mexican culture. It says, “Yes, I want a wall, and yes, I want to deport all the illegal immigrants in the country. But that doesn’t mean I hate Mexicans.” It’s basically an affirmation to Trump’s voters that they aren’t racists.

Plus it gets a ton of attention, and it also induces loads of mockery from overeducated PC liberals who don’t understand a compliment when they see one. It’s really a genius tweet.

Does everyone understand now? Trump is playing this game at a higher level than most of his critics.

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Everyone Is Getting Today’s Trump Tweet Totally Wrong

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Trump’s New Finance Chair Led a Bank That Made Millions Off Taxpayer Bailouts

by GilbertDowney Posted on May 5, 2016

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Donald Trump has slammed Washington insiders, lobbyists, and Wall Street as he has tapped populist anger to snag the Republican presidential nomination. Yet when it came time to pick the top money man for his campaign, he turned to a hedge-funder best known for running a bank that made billions off taxpayer bailouts and, by one account, cost the federal government $13 billion.

On Thursday, Trump named Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner and a hedge-fund boss from Los Angeles, as his national campaign finance chairman. Mnuchin has worked with many of Wall Street’s biggest firms, but he is perhaps best known for his leadership in organizing the takeover of IndyMac’s failed subprime mortgage business in 2009. Mnuchin organized a team of billionaires to buy the California-based bank’s assets from the FDIC after the government insurance fund had taken over the bank. Mnuchin’s group paid roughly $1.55 billion and received a promise from the FDIC to cover a portion of the losses on bad loans within the IndyMac pool. The FDIC’s losses on these assets have since ballooned to an estimated $13 billion.

The FDIC took on most of the risk, but Mnuchin and his partners, who named their new bank OneWest, ended up doing spectacularly well. They parlayed their $1.55 billion investment into a $3.4 billion payday last year, when Mnuchin engineered the sale of OneWest to another California bank, CIT. Along the way, OneWest issued more than $2 billion worth of dividends to shareholders. The tremendous profits the bank made, with taxpayers on the hook for IndyMac’s bad bets, raised eyebrows across the industry.

OneWest’s owners got a great deal when they bought IndyMac’s failed business from the FDIC (with a hefty dose of risk protection, care of US taxpayers), but the bank has not been lenient with homeowners who have found themselves in financial trouble. In fact, OneWest was targeted by regulators, who found the bank was unrepentant in the face of questioning. In one investigation of predatory loan practices, OneWest was the only bank that refused to settle. The bank also was the target of angry homeowners who filed lawsuits around the country that accused the bank of being overly aggressive in foreclosing. In one notable 2009 case that turned into a cause celebre for opponents of predatory loan practices, a Minnesota woman found herself locked out of her mother’s house in the middle of a blizzard after OneWest took the house and changed the locks while still in negotiations to refinance the home.

Mnuchin’s record seems at odds with Trump’s purported populism. When it comes to fundraising, it appears Trump is hardly an unconventional candidate: It’s the money that matters.

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Trump’s New Finance Chair Led a Bank That Made Millions Off Taxpayer Bailouts

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Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

by DeenaBumg Posted on May 4, 2016

Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

By on May 4, 2016Share

About 25 percent of all fossil fuels extracted in the United States come from federal lands. That’s a whole lot of coal, oil, and gas that presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are talking about when they debate ending fossil fuel production on public lands.

In a new report, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) forecasts the kinds of cuts in fossil fuel production the country would need to make to be consistent with a 2 degrees Celsius warming scenario:

Stockholm Environment Institute

The first thing that’s clear from this chart is ending fossil fuel development on federal lands still isn’t enough to stop climate change at 2 degrees. Even the dream scenario, in which we stop drilling and mining on all public lands tomorrow, doesn’t cut it.

And nobody’s even really proposing the dream scenario. Sanders’ proposed Keep It in the Ground Act to ban fossil fuel development on public lands only ends new federal leases — the blue chunk in the chart above. It says nothing about the land already leased and under production.

Even with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan in place, SEI expects fossil fuel production to rise by 11 percent by 2040 — unless we get serious about passing new climate legislation. To line up with a 2-degree goal, the country would need to slice its production by 40–60 percent.

Getting to 2 degrees doesn’t just depend on what the president can do; it requires the entire U.S. economy to shift toward clean energy — along with the rest of the world.

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Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

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