Monday, December 02, 2019
This Poll Shows How Crazy Modern Republicans Are
This poll reflects the results of a recent Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 24th and 26th of a national sample of 411 Republicans.
It's obvious that today's Republican is not very bright, but this poll shows they are completely out of touch with reality. Note that they think Donald Trump is a better president than all Republicans but one since World War II, including Dwight Eisenhower. The only president they think was better than Trump is Ronald Reagan.
But what is really crazy is that they also think Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln was. Lincoln is regarded by most Americans as one of our greatest presidents, but today's Republicans prefer Trump (Lincoln 47% to Trump 53%).
Ridiculous! They prefer a racist to the president that ended slavery.
Trump Endorses Boris Johnson - It's Not Helping Him
Donald Trump doesn't just want other governments interfering in American elections, but he thinks it is his duty to interfere in the elections of other countries. He considers Boris Johnson to be a good buddy, and is trying to help him stay Prime Minister when the British vote on December 12th.
Last week, Trump spoke on a British radio show and told Brits that the Labour Party would be very bad for them. In a few days, he is going to Great Britain and everyone expects him to speak out for Johnson. Is Trump helping Boris Johnson? Johnson doesn't think so. He's been trying to distance himself from Trump recently.
And the British public doesn't think Trump is helping the Conservatives either. Only 10% say Trump is helping, while 54% say he's not helping (but is hurting).
The chart above reflects the results of a YouGov Poll -- done on November 1st of 3,729 British adults.
U.S. Has Epidemic Of Gun Violence (GOP Won't Address It)
There's still a month to go before 2019 is over, but the numbers above are already shocking. There have been 385 mass shootings and 35,945 gun deaths in the United States this year. That means the United States will end the year with over a mass shooting for every day of the year, and more than 100 gun deaths. That's an epidemic -- whether Republicans want to admit it or not.
Many of those deaths and mass shootings could be prevented with some reasonable (and constitutional) gun laws. The Democratically-controlled House of Representatives has passed a law that would plug the holes in the background check law, but Majority Leader McConnell refuses to allow it to be debated or voted on -- and the Republicans also refuse to pass any other kinds of gun laws (like a "red flag" law).
The Top will have to be voter out of power before anything can be done to reduce the number of mass shootings and gun deaths in this country.
Particularly vulnerable are American children. The following CNN article, by Ray Sanchez, was posted last March, but it's still very relevant:
Gun deaths of school-age children in the United States have increased at an alarming rate, with 38,942 fatalities among 5- to 18-year-olds from 1999 to 2017, according to a new study by Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine.
Indeed, spikes in gun deaths over the past decade amount to epidemics, researchers said.
"It is sobering that in 2017, there were 144 police officers who died in the line of duty and about 1,000 active duty military throughout the world who died, whereas 2,462 school-age children were killed by firearms," said Dr. Charles Hennekens, the study's senior author and an academic adviser at the medical college.
The study, to be published in the American Journal of Medicine, found that children are being gunned down in staggering numbers, with the death rate six to nine times higher than other developed nations.
The gun deaths included 6,464 children between the ages of 5 and 14 years old (an average of 340 deaths per year), and 32,478 deaths in children between 15 and 18years old (an average of 2,050 deaths per year), according to the study.
Of the deaths, 86% involved boys, the study found. Black children accounted for 41% of those killed, though in recent years they've comprised just 14% of the US population, US census data show.
"Among blacks, the annual average percent change of 9.5% for firearm-related mortality among 5 to 14-year-olds from 2013 to 2017 exceeded the 7.8% for overall deaths among 15 to 24-year-olds during the early years of the human immunodeficiency virus epidemic from 1987 to 1995," the study said.
The research should have public policy implications, Hennekens said.
"We need more analytic studies on this, but in the meanwhile, we believe that trying to combat the epidemic of homicide due to firearms without addressing firearms is like combating the epidemic of lung cancer due to cigarettes without combating cigarettes," he said.
"To me, it's tragic that this is going on."
Black children between 5 and 14 years old began to experience statistically significant increases in gun deaths in 2013, the study found. And from 2013 to 2017, racial inequalitiesin firearm deaths between blacks and whites jumped significantly.
The study found these listed causes of death among the children: 61% from assault; 32% from suicide; 5% accidental; and 2% undetermined.
In the 5-to-14-year-old age group, accidents accounted for 12.8% of cases (830 deaths); suicide, 29.6% cases (1,912 deaths); assault, 54.8% cases (3,545 deaths); and undetermined, 2.7% (177 deaths), according to the study.
For those 15 to 18 years old, the cause of death was listed as accidental in 3.5% of cases (1,121 deaths); suicide, 32.9% (10,688 deaths); assault, 62.3%(20,247 deaths); and undetermined, 1.3% (422 deaths).
The study used data from the Multiple Cause of Death files of the US National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
The researchers found statistically significant increases in gun deaths beginning in 2009, with what they termed an epidemic among 5- to 14-year-olds. A second epidemic, beginning in 2014, involved those in the 15-to-18-year-old age group.
The epidemics continued through 2017, the most recent year of available US mortality data.
The study said the epidemic poses clinical, public health and policy challenges. It singled out the 1996 Dickey Amendment as a major factor prohibiting analytic studies on the issue.
In 1996, Congress removed $2.6 million -- the amount the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent on gun research the year prior -- from the CDC's budget and passed the so-called Dickey Amendment, named after late Republican Rep. Jay Dickey of Arkansas. Critics said the amendment ultimately led to the CDC halting gun violence research.
A study last year in the New England Journal of Medicine found that death by gunshot was the second-highest cause of death in the United States in 2016 among children and adolescents, ages 1 to 19.
The United States led the world in 2016 in the rate of firearm deaths in youth among countries with available data. The rate in the US was 36.5 times higher than in a dozen comparable high-income countries around the world; the rate of firearm deaths was five times as high compared with a sampling of low- to middle-income countries.
Sunday, December 01, 2019
Politics Divides Americans On Climate Change
The following charts are from the Pew Research Center. They show the divisions in this country over global climate change. The biggest divide is by political party -- with Democrats believing it is a serious issue, and Republicans doubting that. The biggest division among Republicans is by age.
The Pew Research Center survey was done between October 1st and 13th of a national sample of 3,627 adults, and has a margin of error of 2.1 points. The margin of error for Republicans is 3.1 points, and for Democrats is 2.9 points.
The Pew Research Center survey was done between October 1st and 13th of a national sample of 3,627 adults, and has a margin of error of 2.1 points. The margin of error for Republicans is 3.1 points, and for Democrats is 2.9 points.
The GOP Tax Cuts Are Not Working As Promised
Donald Trump and the Republicans made a lot of promises when they passed their tax cuts in 2017. It was supposed to cause massive job growth, huge wage growth for workers, and provide tax cuts for the middle and working classes. None of that happened. While the rich and corporations got huge tax cuts, almost none of it was shared with the rest of the population -- and that is unlikely to happen in the future either.
Here is how Hunter Blair of the Economic Policy Institute puts it:
Proponents of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) made bold claims about the effects that the TCJA’s corporate rate cuts would have on the paychecks of U.S. households. The economic theory rests on corporate rate cuts bringing forth enough additional savings to finance new investment spending. Specifically, higher after-tax corporate profits are passed down to shareholders in the form of higher dividends. These higher dividends attract more savings from abroad and incentivize U.S. households to save more. These extra savings finance new investments in plants and equipment, which boost the productivity of workers, and eventually that increased productivity boosts workers’ wages.
We pointed out at the time that in practice, this theory wasn’t likely to hold. After the TCJA passed, we indicated that by increasing deficits, the specifics of the TCJA didn’t even conform to the economic theory that was supposed to support it.
But that wasn’t enough to stop the TCJA’s proponents from making disingenuous arguments about the effects it was having on the economy. Proponents pointed to corporate claims that they were giving out bonuses or raising wages in the wake of the TCJA. The economic theory above shows clearly how this was nothing but a corporate PR ploy. Even in theory, it takes time for corporate profits to trickle down into worker wages, and we weren’t the only ones pointing this out. Unsurprisingly, data since then show those bonuses didn’t materialize for workers.
Kevin Hassett, then the chair of the Trump administration’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), went so far as to bless the truly economically absurd notion that “retroactive tax cuts” are a way to boost long-term growth, claiming that businesses invested more before the TCJA was passedbecause they somehow knew that some of the TCJA’s corporate provisions would be made retroactive.
But if you want to know if the TCJA is working as advertised, investment really is the key economic indicator to watch. If the TCJA’s corporate rate cuts are to even have a chance at reaching your paycheck, first investment has to boom. The results have been abysmal for the TCJA.
Year-over-year real, nonresidential fixed investment growth continues to fall off a cliff. If the TCJA was working, we should have seen an investment boom. Instead, after the passage of the TCJA, investment growth continued along its pre-TCJA trend for a couple quarters before falling all the way to 1.3% in 2019Q3. To be clear, if the TCJA’s corporate rate cuts were working, we would be seeing a permanent rise in investment. Instead, investment growth is cratering.
There is little hope in the data that this will change anytime soon. Capital goods orders were down once again in September. And year-over-year growth of capital goods orders has seen a steady but sharp decline in the wake of the TCJA.
The TCJA’s corporate rate cuts haven’t produced the investment boom proponents promised, but what they have done is exacerbate decades of rising income inequality. They should be repealed.
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