Paul Krugman took aim in today's NYT at failed Republican attacks on White House economic policies. He notes that Paul Ryan's attacks on Obama's economic policies back in 2009 were wrong; they did not lead to stagflation similar to the 1970's but to conditions similar to 1995, after which the economy took off under Clinton.
Needless to say, those warnings proved totally wrong. Soaring inflation never materialized. Job creation was sluggish at first, but more recently has accelerated dramatically. Far from seeing a rerun of that ’70s show, what we’re now looking at is an economy that in important respects resembles that of the 1990s.
Krugman then calls on the Federal Reserve not to raise interest rates until the signs of inflation are unmistakeable.
To me, as to a number of economists — perhaps most notably Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary — the answer seems painfully obvious: Don’t yank away that punch bowl, don’t pull that rate-hike trigger, until you see the whites of inflation’s eyes. If it turns out that the Fed has waited a bit too long, inflation might overshoot 2 percent for a while, but that wouldn’t be a great tragedy. But if the Fed moves too soon, we might end up losing millions of jobs we could have had — and in the worst case, we might end up sliding into a Japanese-style deflationary trap, which has already happened in Sweden and possibly in the eurozone.
While the economy has significantly improved since the Great Recession of 2008, there are still far too many people who have dropped out of the work force -- and who are not counted in unemployment statistics.
The St. Louis Federal Reserve notes that the number of people not in the Labor Force is, as of February 2015, nearly 93 million and rising. While unemployment levels have dropped, the next step should be to put every person who wants employment back to work.
The fact that so many people did not participate in the 2014 election can be attributed to the after-effects of the Great Recession. The three biggest reasons influencing people voting include age, education, and marital status. While Socioeconomic Status was not a direct cause of voter apathy, it is clearly an indirect cause.
There is a direct link between SES and educational outcomes, which influences voting:
Socioeconomic status appears to create achievement gaps for Black and Hispanic children, when compared to the achievement levels of White children (Duncan and Magnuson, 2005).
Children from low-SES families often begin kindergarten with significantly less linguistic knowledge (Purcell-Gates, McIntyre, & Freppon, 1995).
Children from less-advantaged homes score at least 10% lower than the national average on national achievement scores in mathematics and reading (Hochschild, 2003).
Children in impoverished settings are much more likely to be absent from school throughout their educational experiences (Zhang, 2003), further increasing the learning gap between them and their wealthier peers.
While national high school dropout rates have steadily declined (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002), dropout rates for children living in poverty have steadily increased. Between 60 and 70% of students in low-income school districts fail to graduate from high school (Harris, 2005).
There is also (same link) a direct relationship between SES and family well-being:
Evidence indicates that socioeconomic status affects family stability, including parenting practices and resulting developmental outcomes for children (Trickett, et al., 1991).
Poverty is a reliable predictor of child abuse and neglect. Among low-income families, those with family exposure to substance use exhibit the highest rates of child abuse and neglect (Ondersma, 2002).
Lower SES has been linked to domestic crowding, a condition which has negative consequences for adults and children, including higher psychological stress and poor health outcomes (Melki et al., 2004).
All family members living in poverty are more likely to be victims of violence. Racial and ethnic minorities who are also of lower SES are at an increased risk of victimization (Pearlman, Zierler, Gjelsvik, & Verhoek-Oftedahl, 2004).
So if we want to generate the kind of voter turnout that will help us reverse the outcomes of 2010 and 2014, the solution is not to blame people who didn't vote (the very people who we want to vote for us). I have a background in sales, and the quickest way to alienate customers is to lecture them when they are reluctant to buy your product. The solution is to push for policies which create universal employment, which will create more educational opportunities and stable families. That will lead to more voter participation, which will lead to better electoral outcomes.
The battle for universal employment can and must be won. I deal with young people a lot, and the best way to win them over is not just to scaremonger over the Big Bad Republicans (although we have to be able to differentiate ourselves from them). We have to give them something to shoot for. When John Kennedy was President, we choose to go to the moon as a country. Today, we can choose to put everyone who wants it back to work.
If we learned anything from Darwin's Theory of Evolution, it is that the goal of any species, including our own, is survival. As Darwin noted, the species which survive are the ones which are most responsive to change. This means that we have to adapt to the changes that we are experiencing and will experience as a species. That creates opportunities for us to create millions of new jobs that we currently don't have. Given the fact that man-made climate change has been established as scientific fact, it is imperative to put wind and/or solar in every town, city, and county in the country as well as build more electric and hybrid cars. And given the fact that many of our natural resources are finite, it is imperative for our survival that we explore and colonize space so that we can develop resources without polluting our planet. And someday, a few billion years in the future, the sun will swallow up our planet as it expands into a red dwarf, meaning we will have to find a new place to live.