Better the Supreme Court Justice You Know . . .

            Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told John Dickerson, host of CBS’s “Facethe Nation” last Sunday that if he is elected president, he will do everything he can “to see that this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision is overturned.”  CNN took his comment to mean that Sanders has a “litmus test” for choosing Supreme Court justices.

            Three cheers for Sanders!  I hear Hillary has a similar litmus test too.  Three cheers for Hillary!

            For far too long we have decried the idea that a justice should begin his or her life-tenure on the court with no ideas, no judicial philosophy and no opinion as to whether a previous Supreme Court precedent is a fair interpretation of the law.

            That, in turn, has produced a Supreme Court selection process in which a president looks for a judge without a portfolio of decisions and law review articles on the most contentious legal issues in American politics.  And that, in turn, produces the spectacle of a Senate Judiciary committee wrestling with a Supreme Court nominee who won’t spell out his or her views on the grounds that to answer questions about a precedent would be tantamount to “prejudging” a case that could be making its way to the Court.

            Here’s Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s account of an exchange between the late Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and then Supreme Court nominee John Roberts on whether Roberts might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that made abortion a constitutional right:

"I begin collaterally with the issue of stare decisis [the legal principle that prior Supreme Court precedent should be regarded as settled law] and the issue of precedents," began Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Roberts knew where this was going. "While I'm happy to talk about stare decisis and the importance of precedent, I don't think I should get into the application of those principles in a particular area," he said.

Specter was not deterred. "Do you think that the cases which have followed Roe fall into the category of a 'super' stare decisis designation?" he pressed. Offering a bit of translation, Specter wondered whether "Roe might be a super-duper precedent." 

Roberts finally showed some leg on stare decisis . Roe "is settled as a precedent of the court," he said, "entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis."

That was about the most the senators could get out of Roberts. Roe v. Wade may not be a "super-duper" untouchable precedent, but it should be respected.

            Though a Republican at the time, Specter had been a strong “pro-choice” advocate, and Roberts, nominated by the “pro-life” George W. Bush, knew that his nomination would be in peril if he gave an answer detailing his position, regardless of what it actually was.

            This kind of thing is extremely damaging to our democracy.  The Supreme Court is the only one of our constitutional governing institution that is almost wholly insulated from the political process.  Once confirmed by the Senate, it’s a Supreme Court’s justice’s job to be deaf to public opinion.

            After the Court has rendered a decision about a constitutional matter, there are only two ways that a decision unacceptable to a large number of Americans can be corrected. 

            First, we can amend the Constitution.  But by its own terms, short of a Constitutional Convention called by the states, it takes a 2/3 vote in the House of Representatives, a 2/3 vote in the Senate and the approval of ¾ of the states.

            Fat chance.

            Second, upon the death or retirement of a Justice who supports the decision in question, the president can replace him or her with Justices who will vote to overturn the decision.  If the case was decided by a 5-4 majority, replacing a dead or retiring member of the majority with a justice who agrees with the minority will enable the new majority to reverse the precedent when presented with an appropriate case.

            It’s impossible to know what a president asks of a person before he or she nominates that person to a seat on our highest court.  That’s why it’s so important for Senators to demand straightforward answers to their questions about what a nominee believes about particular policy issues that are likely to arrive at the court.  It’s democratic malpractice not to.

            This isn’t an exercise in prejudging or “stacking the court.” Court cases always turn on their facts, and nobody is asking a nominee to decide the facts of a case before a hearing.  But when cases reach the Supreme Court, the facts of the case have already been decided by a lower court judge or jury, and under our system, those findings are generally binding on appellate judges, including the Justices of the Supreme Court.

            Once a case reaches the Court, the only thing left to the justices is "to say what the law is.”

            That’s why it should be fair game for a Senator to ask a potential nominee whether, in general, the right to an abortion is secured by the Fourteenth Amendment, whether the Second Amendment includes an individual right keep guns at home for self-protection, or whether the First Amendment creates the right for a corporation or a SuperPac to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in political campaigns.

            Getting the answers to these and other questions is the only way the people have for influencing the membership of the Court.  It is the last chance the political process has for deciding something as important as the content of our civil rights and liberties.  Citizens are entitled to know what a nominee thinks the Constitution says about crucial issues likely to reach the Court during the nominee’s tenure if he or she is confirmed.  Full disclosure enables voters to contact their senators in order to influence their votes on confirmation before a nominee becomes and unelected and unaccountable Supreme Court Justice.

            Justices hold their offices for life, and it’s possible that they may change their views over time, as Justice Blackmun did with respect to the death penalty.  A justice cannot be removed from office simply because of the way he or she decides a case, even if the decision is contrary to what he or she said during the confirmation process.  But the people are entitled to assess the depth of a justice’s commitment to his or her view of the law before it is too late to do anything about it.

            Transparency and honesty are important if our government is to work.  Better the Justice you know than the Justice you don’t.

             

No Confidence

            In an op-ed published on September 4 in the Washington Post, political theorist Danielle Allen correctly pointed out that the forces that have propelled Donald Trump to the top of the polls are best thought of as a “solidly right-wing ethno-nationalist voting bloc that has been growing since the mid 1990s.”  She likened this group of voters to the United Kingdom’s Independence Party and the National Front party of France.

            Her point was that the difference between the voting bloc currently supporting Trump and the European ones is that “their parliamentary systems register them as “parties,” whereas our two-party model makes it harder to see that what we’re confronting truly is the rise of a new party.”  She went on to argue that it would be healthy for the U.S. if the Trump supporters would leave the Republican party to the centrists and form their own party.

            It’s an interesting insight, but Duverger’s Law, makes it highly unlikely.

            Duverger’s Law says that electoral system in which elections are decided by a plurality of the vote will tend to be able to support only two major parties. 

            Here’s why:

            Consider a constituency with three main parties that can elect one representative using a plurality vote system. On election night, Alice is elected with 40% of the vote.  Betty and Carol lose with 25% and 35% of the vote respectively.

            Alice’s supporters are ecstatic, but the remaining voters are angry.  Not only did their preferred candidates not win, but because democracy didn’t prevail.  Democracy says that the majority should win, and here, a 60% majority preferred somebody else.

            Next time around, though still favoring Betty, a reasonably large percentage of her voters decide that she doesn’t have a chance of winning, and so instead of “wasting their votes” they vote for Carol, giving her 49% of the vote, beating Alice, who still gets 40% of the vote.  Betty only gets 11% of the vote.

            By the third election, everybody realizes that Betty’s party isn’t competitive anymore, and so Alice and Carol scramble to scoop up all of Betty remaining supporters. On election night, either Alice or Carol will win with a clear but probably narrow majority.  In the election’s aftermath, only two parties remain in the constituency.

            Duverger’s Law, unlike the laws of physics, is not absolute.  Smaller parties do exist in places with plurality voting.  But other features of the American system make it hard for third parties to get on the ballot, and, once on the ballot, to win elections.  State legislatures, dominated by Democrats or Republicans, draw legislative districts to favor their members. To have any impact at a national level, a small party must be able to get on the ballot in a large number of states. And political money tends to be “invested” in politicians who stand a chance of winning, not largely in idealists who want to use an election to make a statement.

            Yet, Allen’s insight about the multiparty nature of American politics is largely correct.  We do have a multiparty system, but its operations are largely kept hidden.  And that’s why John Boehner’s resignation last week was so dramatic.

            Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party is monolithic.  Both are coalitions of smaller economic, ethnic and ideological groups whose members may or may not resemble the other members of their respective parties. 

            In the Democratic coalition, for example, the members of its African-American subgroup tend to be more religious than those of its wealthy and highly educated subgroup of whites who prefer more liberal positions on same-sex marriage and abortion.  The Evangelicals in the Republican Party may not be as interested in taxes as the big business Republicans are.

            What we’ve just seen in the House of Representatives is a vote of no confidence in John Boehner, who saw that his “government” did not have majority support and honorably dissolved it by resigning.

            In a true parliamentary system, a vote of no confidence or the resignation of the Prime Minister triggers a new election.  Unfortunately, in the U.S., our Constitution doesn’t allow that to happen.

            And so any number of things can happen.  The next most senior Republican, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, might try to repair the coalition by making additional concessions to the conservatives who would not cooperate with Boehner.  In that case, House will continue to pass even more extreme legislation that cannot survive the Senate or President Obama’s veto.

            Or, perhaps the conservatives in the House will demand that McCarthy be passed over in favor of someone is truly one of them.  In that case, we’re likely to see deadlock within the Republican coalition leading to chaos in the House until a new election can give one of the factions a clear advantage in building a governing coalition.

            Or, perhaps a third faction within the Republican Party will try to build a “national unity” government with the Democrats that aims to stave off chaos and keep the government functioning at current levels until the voters resolve all of the intra and interparty disputes in the next election. Of course, that would require the cooperation of a Republican Congressperson who, having already announced his or her retirement, wouldn’t face retribution from Conservatives after the next election and could be elected Speaker by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats.

            That may be what Boehner is trying to accomplish by announcing his resignation.  If so, it’s a shame that he hadn’t decided to place country above party until now.

Marooned in the Tragic Commons

 

            The Tragic Commons is not a place any sensible person wants to be.  The rules of political logic are unforgiving here, and apply with a vengeance.  Yet poor John Boehner accidentally stumbled into our sorry jurisdiction, and now, calamity has befallen him.

            I’m sure that what Mr. Boehner hoped, when he took the gavel from Nancy Pelosi three House elections ago was that he would be leading his victorious Republican team to victory after victory over the hapless administration of Barack Obama.  How could he fail, particularly with some of the largest Republican majorities the modern House of Representatives had ever known?

            But instead, he’s spent most of his time running for his life.  It must have seemed to him either that there has been an ambitious challenger nipping at his heals every step of the way, or else that few members of the Republican team seem to understand that team solidarity is a precondition to victory.

            Consequently, victories have been few and far between since he got here.

            It’s a simple thing, really.  When all members of the party cooperate with each other, the fruits of that cooperation translate into good feelings about the brand, in general, and higher vote totals for its political candidates at all levels of government.  Voters are happiest when stuff gets done and they are angriest when it doesn’t.

            But the unforgiving logic of the Tragic Commons often makes cooperation unlikely.  The members of the Republican team in the House are often better off individually when they don’t cooperate.

            Consider the latest disaster in the making.  Congress must pass, at least, a continuing resolution—a budget would be better--by September 30, or else the federal government will run out of spending authority. 

            Without spending authority, all but the most essential government services must suspend their operations.  Aside for the various inconveniences citizens will have to endure, suspending and then restarting operations costs a lot of money.  According to the Office of Management and Budget, the last time Congress failed to pass a spending law on time, taxpayers incurred employee costs in excess of $2 billion, and the economy as a whole lost over $20 billion.

            The political costs of the last shutdown were also significant.  The approval rating of the Republican party fell to 32%, which was an all-time low for the party.  It also drove approval ratings for Congress to a chilly 12%.

            Yet, the prospects for passing a spending bill without political disruption are weak.  A sizable portion of the Republican caucus refuses to support any budget resolution that doesn’t include a ban on funding for Planned Parenthood.  Defunding Planned Parenthood, of course, will never pass the Senate, and even if it did, President Obama would veto it. 

            Everyone knows that there aren’t enough votes in Congress to override the president’s veto.  Everyone knows that eventually, Congress will pass a budget resolution without the Planned Parenthood spending ban.  And everyone knows that Republicans will be blamed for the shutdown and that Republican credibility as a governing party will be severely damaged when the dust settles.

            So why has life been so difficult for Mr. Boehner?  Why do we need to endure a period of political kabuki before the government gets back to the business of governing?

            The answer lies in the nature of the Tragic Commons.  Each of the Republican Representatives who think it would be better to shut the government down than to provide even a nickel’s worth of funding for Planned Parenthood may have calculated that the political price he or she will have to pay for standing firm is lower than the cost he or she will have to pay for caving.  Each of these Representatives fears, instead, that “compromising on a principle,” could draw a primary challenge from someone in his or her districts who will use the “concession” as evidence that the Representative in question is not sufficiently orthodox in his or her conservatism.

            But surely, there must be some Republicans interested in the greater good who would not like to see the government go out of business.  Well, there are, but there aren’t enough of them to pass a clean spending bill without the Democrats.

            And so Mr. Boehner had to worry that if he tried an end run around the party’s rejectionist wing, he would face an attempt to oust him from the Speakership.

            It was unlikely that the Democrats in Congress would allow Mr. Boehner to be ousted so that somebody even more conservative could become Speaker.  Yet, unlikely is not the same as impossible, and so it may have cost Mr. Boehner something to get their support in the event of a palace coup.  He’d end up damaged, no matter what.

            John Boehner has just learned that even if it is good to be the king, no one rules the Tragic Commons.

More on Inequality From the Moguls Club, Tragic Commons Chapter

 

            The Harvard Business School just published its annual survey of its graduates, all of whom are members of The Mogul’s Club, Tragic Commons chapter.  HBS wanted to know what its alumni thought about the American business environment and the extent to which they believed prosperity has been shared.

            Our moguls—or at least the ones that work for large businesses—see the world in rosy hues.  They think that our current business environment is better than it is in other advanced economies, and that vis a vis other economies, things in the U.S. are likely to become even better.

            Among the reasons they give for this view is that we have strong capital markets, excellent universities that help stoke innovation and a good communications infrastructure, all of which are improving.  Of course, our moguls couldn’t help but commend themselves on their entrepreneurship and the way they are managing their businesses.  And they were quite happy about the trend in property rights protections and their increasing ability to hire and fire at will.

            They were less sanguine about the distribution of wealth and income, though.  Confirming other research, the respondents were asked how future increases in national income would be distributed and how it should be distributed.  Their answers are summarized in Figure 1:

Figure 1

            Our moguls recognize that, additional income is likely to gravitate rather heavily toward them and away from the poorest element of society.  But, like most other Americans, they say that they’d like to see future income gains more evenly distributed.  Just the same, our one percenters say that instead of the 41% of the anticipated gains (other research says they would actually get about 55%), they’d accept just 16% of it.

            So what are our moguls prepared to do to shift from would to should?  Not much.

            Anyone who has paid any attention at all to the buzz about income inequality since the Occupy Wall Street movement knows that income inequality is at least a problem we should talk about at our cocktail parties. 

            But when it comes down to our businesses, well, we don’t see it as much of a problem.  As Figure 2 shows, the only distributional problem a

Figure 2

majority of our moguls see as a business problem is middle-class wage stagnation.  Only about a third of the moguls said that their companies have done something or would do something to raise the wages of their employees.  They’re far more troubled by slow growth.  And the way they think we ought to address these problems is through changes in education, tax reform and regulatory reform.

            The survey doesn’t say how our moguls would reform the tax code or reform regulations, but it’s a fair bet that they want lower taxes and less regulation.

            The report ends with the authors’ musings about what can be done.  After generally dismissing attempts to address globalization, redistribute wealth and income, boost economic growth by removing “unnecessary” regulations and simplifying the tax code, and fix the political paralysis of the federal government (as if the moguls played no role in paralyzing the federal government), the authors conclude that the best way to restore shared prosperity “is to repair the commons, especially the parts of the commons on which most Americans rely.” 

            “Improving the commons,” the report tells us, “is not only government’s job but also a crucial agenda for business.”

            With due respect, this is the Tragic Commons, a place where we see that we’d be much better off if we’d only all cooperate.  But we can never seem to cooperate.  Instead, we tend to do what is in our individual self-interests, and so we’re left with much less than we could have had.

            Here in the Tragic Commons, we like taxes just fine, but only if the other guys pays them.  And we’re happy to contribute to the common good, as long as our contribution doesn’t hurt our bottom line.

            Except those two conditions aren’t naturally found here. That’s why our politics is paralyzed, and that’s why what we all agree should be done is rarely done.  From a green eyeshades perspective, why should any of our moguls expend business resources when, in accord with Figure 2, income inequality is not a problem for his or her business?

            Addressing income inequality, or any of the other distributional issues the report highlights will require a different way of doing in business in the Tragic Commons.  We can’t just educate our way out of our problems, particularly when nobody is offering to pony up the money for better schools.  We need a tax regime that encourages a fairer split of corporate profits among labor, management and capital.  We need a labor law regime that encourages the formation of unions and protects them once they have been established.  And we need a campaign finance system that discourages any or all of the moguls from investing in politicians instead of investing in their businesses and their workers.

            But more than anything else, we need less happy talk from the sages at the Harvard Business School about win-win collaborations between government at all levels and business and more focus on the idea that if we want to reach a society with the preferred income distribution, the members of the Moguls Club—each and every one of them—is going to have to endure some pain.

Klingons at the Republican Debate

 

            I’ve sometimes wondered what life must have been like for Mr. Spock after the Federation made peace with the Klingons in 2293 and began accepting them into Starfleet.  It must have been bad enough to have to put up with people ruled by their emotions like Dr. McCoy or by their hormones like Captain Kirk.  Adding the often senseless belligerence of the new Klingon officers to the mix must have started his copper-based blood to boil.

            Poor Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and John Kasich must have felt just that way on Wednesday night while contending with a pack of snarling, growling, saber-rattling, Republican candidates seeking the presidency.  They must have felt as if they were in an as yet undiscovered country.

            Speaking of the just concluded nuclear deal, Cruz, for example, bellowed: “If I am elected president, on the very first day in office, I will rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal.” 

            Mike Huckabee, who had once been the pastor of a Baptist Congregation in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas said that he wanted to “destroy” an agreement that “the president treats like the Magna Carta, but Iranians treat like it’s toilet paper” because “otherwise, we put every person in this world in a very dangerous place.”

            Carly Fiorina, the winner of the debate according to a new CNN/ORC International poll, through what looked like clenched teeth, promised to abrogate the agreement on her first day in office.  Right after the inaugural festivities, she snarled, she would make two phone calls. 

            Implying that for her, the key point of the agreement was to protect Israel, Fiorina promised that her first call would be to her “good friend Bibi Netanyahu” to reassure him that we will stand with the State of Israel.” 

            The second would be to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader and a person with whom not even Barack Obama has spoken, “to tell him that unless and until he opens every military and every nuclear facility to real anytime anywhere inspections by our people, not his, we, the United States will make it as difficult as possible to move money around the financial global system.”  She’s since said that she’d tell him, “Idon’t care what your deal was.  Here’sthe new deal.”

           Fiorina also said that having met Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I wouldn’t talk to him at all.  We’ve talked way too much to him.”  To get through to him, she would immediately “begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states, “ and “probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany,” apparently to show Putin that the U.S. has “the strongest military on the face of the planet.”

            Fascinating.  She’s obviously a lady who has the stones to poke at a bear. 

            Marco Rubio wanted to make sure that everyone knew that “There is a lunatic in North Korea with dozens of nuclear weapons and long-range rockets that can already hit the very place in which we stand tonight.  The Chinese are rapidly expanding their military. . . A gangster in Moscow is not just threatening Europe, he’s threatening to destroy and divide NATO.  You have radical jihadists in dozens of countries across multiple continents . . . And now we have got this horrible deal with Iran where a radical Shia cleric with an apocalyptic vision of the future is also guaranteed to one day possess nuclear weapons . . . These are extraordinarily dangerous times that we live in.

            That sure is frightening.

            Scott Walker wanted to cancel a scheduled State Dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping to send a message about Chinese computer hacking.  And Donald Trump wanted everyone to know that he is “the most militaristic person you will ever meet.”

            Bush, Kasich and Paul responded to all of this posturing in a manner worthy of The Next Generation’s Jean Luc Piccard, Captain of the Starship Enterprise.  Said Sen. Paul: “Should we continue to talk with Iran? Yes. Should we cut up the agreement immediately?  That’s absurd. . . .  The same goes with China.  I don’t think we need to be reckless, and I think we need to leave lines of communication open. . . .We do need to be engaged with Russia. It doesn’t mean we give them a free pass, or China a free pass, but, to be engaged, to continue to talk.  We did throughout the Cold War, and it would be a big mistake not to do it here.” 

            Governors Bush and Kasich agreed, with Kasich noting that “we are stronger when we work with the Western civilization, our friends in Europe, and just doing it on our own I don’t think is the right policy.”  Said Bush, “It’s not a strategy to tear up an agreement.”

            Unfortunately, Piccard doesn’t play any better in the Redlands as he does on the Klingon home world.  According to the CNN/ORC International poll, Trump is still in the lead, Fiorina has vaulted into second place and Rubio almost quadrupled his percentage of potential votes, moving from 3% two weeks ago to 11% last week. Neither Bush, Paul nor Kasich has improved his share of potential votes from two weeks ago.

            It’s hard to know whether this is normal for the Republican Party, with its fear-based worldview, or if this is a manifestation of the anger I wrote about a few weeks ago.  What does seem to be clear is that Republican voters want to see that their candidates are willing to put the rest of the world in its place.

            Regardless of which explanation is correct, the belligerence on display last week makes it unlikely that anyone would live long and prosper if any of these people make it to the White House.  No country seriously threatens us.  Iran, Russia and North Korea are small and weak in comparison to the U.S. military, and there’s no evidence that the leaders of any of those countries has a death wish.  Tweeking other countries make it likely that they’ll tweek us right back.

             It’s just that as technology shrinks the world, it becomes more likely that when we all go about maximizing our interests, we’re all going to bang into each other from time to time.  The question is whether we politely mumble “scuse mes” to each other and move on or whether we regard those bumps as insults and demand redress.

            Clearly, most of the Republicans prefer the latter course of action. We all know where that goes, and it’s most assuredly not a place no one has gone before.  That’s why Spock is likely to shake his head and wonder whether there’s any intelligent life in the outfit he works for.

           

           

           

The Elephant in the Room and the Federal Reserve

            The Fed did the right thing on Wednesday afternoon when it decided not to raise interest rates.  In making decisions about interest rates, the Fed is supposed to be primarily concerned about 2 things: inflation and employment.  Generally, it’s supposed to raise interest rates when prices start to surge and lower them when unemployment gets too high.

            There isn’t any inflation to speak of, and in fact, Janet Yellen noted that world economic conditions, including a strengthened dollar and unusually low oil prices are holding inflation well below the Fed’s target rate. 

            And despite the fact that the economy is producing jobs at a brisk pace, there are still too many people who are either in part-time jobs but want full-time work or not participating in the work force because they’ve given up any hope of finding employment.  There also doesn’t seem to be the kind of demand for workers that would result in upward pressure on wages.

            Yet, all this attention on the Fed is diverting attention away from the elephant in the room.  That elephant is the GOP, which has been squashing all attempts to use fiscal policy to improve things for the middle class.

            Fiscal policy comes in two basic flavors.  First, Congress can use its spending power to pick up the slack in the economy when there isn’t enough demand encouraging business to produce more and hire more workers.  Second, it can cut taxes so that people will have more money to spend, thus, increasing demand and stimulating business.  Both types of policies normally result in higher deficits that must be financed by government borrowing.

            Republicans in Congress detest the first flavor and are loathe to spend any money on anything, except sometimes for the military.  They think most government spending is wasteful.  They’re fond of wringing their hands about federal solvency while ignoring the facts that (i) it would be smart to upgrade, repair or replace crumbling infrastructure now while interest rates are low; (ii) Congress can improve the country’s debt position by raising taxes when good times return; and (iii) the bond market isn't showing any concern about the ability of the government to handle debt because it's not demanding higher yields to compensate for additional risk.

            Republicans do sometimes like the second flavor of fiscal policy, but only when it’s in the form of cuts in the marginal rate.  They’ve allowed “holidays” on payroll taxes that mostly benefitted poor and middle income Americans to lapse while continuing to clamor for marginal rate cuts for businesses and the rich.

            The problem is that Republicans remain wedded to a discredited economic theory that burned brightly in the Reagan era.  It’s the “Field of Dreams” notion of supply side economics: if you make it easier or cheaper for entrepreneurs to build it, the customers will come.

            This is obviously an economic theory created in an ivory tower and advanced by people who have never run or managed a business like my wife and I do.

            We own a mom-and-pop outfit that sells corporate swag. We represent a large network of manufacturers who don’t have their own sales forces and will not sell to end-users.  We work with end-user companies that want to give  logo-marked stuff to their prospects, customers or employees.  Our customers choose the products they want to give out, and then we arrange for a manufacturer to make those products.  The manufacturer delivers the products to our customer and sends us a bill. We mark the bill up and send an invoice to our customer.

            Like almost all other small businesses, we do a lot of what it takes to keep the business running ourselves.  We sometimes do product research, billing and accounting and even packing and shipping after regular business hours or on weekends.

            We could hire other people to help us with these activities, but that would mean less profit for us.  Even if we hired another commission based salesperson, it would take over a year for the sales person to be billing enough to repay his or her associated overhead costs.

            There simply aren’t any tax breaks you can give us that would encourage us to expand the business or hire more people.  We’re only going to make commitments to people if we see more customers coming and our workload increases beyond the level where we can handle it ourselves.

            Since we deal mostly with the marketing and human resources departments of other businesses, we only get to do more deals when they are busy marketing or hiring.  Our clients only do more marketing when they think there is an opportunity to sell more to their customers.  And they only hire when their existing work forces can’t handle the additional work more potential sales could generate.

            Customers generally can’t spend what they don’t have.  They also don’t spend when they’re afraid of the future and want to deleverage or save.  Once people stop buying, the only way to protect the economy from tottering into recession is for some mammoth entity to provide the demand the economy needs to remain productive and efficient.  The only behemoth big enough to supply the needed demand is the government.  It can supply the demand by buying things needed for the general welfare such as roads, schools, bridges, computers, and scientific research.

            When ordinary people earn money, they spend it.  That encourages our clients to increase their marketing and hiring efforts.  If they buy more stuff from us, we can consider hiring more people to keep up with all those lovely new sales.

            This isn’t rocket science.  It’s just sensible business. Why the “party of business” doesn’t get it is a wonder.

Trump Trees, Trump Forest

            In trying to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon that has flummoxed most political pundits, it is helpful to think about forests instead of trees.  My take on what is driving Trump to the top of the polls has less to do with anything most of us would think of as an issue and more to do with what most of us would think of as a culture.

            According to 2 NBC News polls of over 12,000 respondents conducted during July and August, Trump supporters “match non-Trump Republicans in terms of age, income, racial identity and political ideology,” but they are somewhat less educated and less religious.

            What’s striking, though, are their positions on a syndrome of cultural, racial and related economic issues.  Table 1, copied from the linked poll results summarizes these positions and shows how they differ from the views of other Republicans.

Table 1

	Non-Trump Republicans	Trump Republicans
Immigrants are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care	61%	83%
Confederate flag is a symbol of Southern pride	79%	88%
Gun Owner	44%	52%
Government should promote traditional values in our society	62%	70%
Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition	86%	93%
Increases in Earth’s temperature are due more to natural changes in the environment	59%	65%
Government regulation of business usually does more harm than good	79%	83%
Display the American flag	76%	80%
In today’s economy, everyone has a fair chance to get ahead in the long run	60%	55%
More likely to vote for a candidate who wants stricter limits on abortion	60%	45%

            The analysts who conducted the poll conclude that Trump supporters “are more conservative than other Republicans on almost every issue.”  While I don’t want to quibble about the meaning of the word “conservative,” there’s something much more important going on, if you look at the results as a whole.

            What I see going on in these poll results is an extreme rearguard attempt to recover a largely white, Norman Rockwell kind of America that no longer exists (if it ever actually existed at all).  We mustn’t miss the fact that for the most part, large majorities of Republicans, regardless of whether they are Trump supporters, are in general agreement with each other.  But in most cases, Trump supporters hold these beliefs much more fervently than other Republicans.

            Responses to the three racial questions are telling, when considered together.  Though, by now we know that Trump’s signature hostility to undocumented workers resonates with his supporters, they are also more likely to say that if African-Americans have failed to get ahead, that failure is the fault of African-Americans.  Trump supporters are less likely to think that everyone has a fair chance in today’s economy, and so for them, “everyone” must not include African Americans.  That’s why it’s not surprising that Trump supporters are more likely to see the Confederate flag as a symbol of southern heritage than as the racist symbol most of the country has come to believe it is.

            Trump supporters are more likely to be gun owners, and though I have no evidence on the point, it wouldn’t surprise me if the reason for this is that they own guns more for personal protection than for sport.  That would be consistent with Trump’s rhetoric about the kinds of people coming across the southern border from Mexico.

            The American flag is a somewhat more potent symbol for Trump supporters than it is for other Republicans. That’s consistent with the idea that Trump’s candidacy is about recovering a by-gone America, as is his supporters’ greater desire for the government to promote “traditional values.”  Whatever those values are, they apparently do not include banning abortion, the mother of all traditional values for other “conservative” Republicans.

            One of the reasons that Trump is doing so well in the polls right now could be that there are so many other Republican candidates vying for the nomination among the same core group of voters.  That’s one reason professional pundits aren’t counting out a Republican establishment candidate just yet.  Even if Trump maintains a plurality lead of about a third of the Republican electorate, that still means that two thirds of the GOP’s voters prefer somebody else.  That leaves plenty of room for one of the establishment Republican politicians to build a coalition composed of supporters of the “also- rans.”

            But it’s also important to note that Trump supporters are merely giving more lurid color to a chimerical image of America most Republicans still hold.   Regardless of who wins the Republican nomination, Trump’s wistful crusade to “make America great again” is likely to be the subtext of the coming general election Republican campaign.