Brett Arends/Market Watch:
Hey, Trumpkins — have you worked it out yet? Is the truth dawning on you, or are you still in the dark?
See if you can put it all together from the resumes of those in President-elect Donald Trump’s closest political circle so far:
Treasury secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin: Goldman Sachs.
Chief strategist Steve Bannon: Goldman Sachs.
Transition adviser Anthony Scaramucci: Goldman Sachs.
Commerce secretary nominee Wilbur Ross: Rothschild & Co.
Possible budget director Gary Cohn: Goldman Sachs.
Potential secretary of state Mitt Romney: Bain Capital.
Trump is just getting started. Check out that “swamp draining.” The whole thing is just draining before our eyes! Take that, Wall Street! Take that, “international financial cabal!”
Trumpkins, you’ve been scammed. There’s a sucker in this game — and it’s you.
...
Trumpkins are learning the hard way what happens when you buy an investment scheme from a con-artist. I’ve been writing about scam artists for more than 20 years. They always promise you the moon — that is, until your check clears.
When will these voters get it? Maybe never. Author Maria Konnivoka notes in her book The Confidence Game that many victims refuse to admit they’ve been scammed — no matter what the evidence. Indeed, she says, many just keep coming back for more. This is something I’ll bet Donald Trump knows full well, and which he’s banking on (pun intended) in 2020.
Meanwhile, give credit where credit is due. Trump is fattening the bank accounts of the elite, but he also may have saved 1,000 jobs at Carrier . If he really did, good for him. Those who opposed Trump should stop being so churlish. After all, on President Barack Obama’s watch the U.S. economy generated 8.6 million net new jobs — equal to 2,945, or about three Carrier deals, every day, including Sundays, for going on eight consecutive years. And who can forget all of those patriotic Republicans congratulating Obama for that?
Atlantic:
The Notable Silence of New York's Charter-School Leaders
Betsy DeVos is an advocate of education choice, so why haven’t many of her colleagues rallied behind her?
But DeVos’s brand of school choice, which so far has focused on fighting for private-school vouchers and less charter oversight, is very different from the type than exists in New York City—and some local charter leaders appear wary of it.
“I think a great many charter supporters, and indeed charter founders, are deeply troubled by the idea of vouchers,” said Steve Wilson, the CEO of the New York-based Ascend charter school network. “I would venture most charter-school founders are liberal Democrats who are committed to social justice and would be very troubled by free-market mechanisms.”
The distinction between charter schools and vouchers is key for Wilson. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run institutions. Vouchers, which can fund private schools, are much more radical, Wilson said, and lumping the two together does a disservice to charter schools.
“I would say that education choice is a double-edged sword,” said Steve Evangelista, a co-founder of Harlem Link, a charter elementary school. “We as the charter-school sector and the education community need to understand the damage that choice can cause.”
Evangelista and others in the sector also disagree with DeVos’s apparent stance on charter-school regulation, which she fought in her home state of Michigan.
For anyone still wanting to battle about how they were right all along about Clinton, read and re-read the above tweet as often as necessary.
Slate:
The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt
Donald Trump didn’t flip working-class white voters. Hillary Clinton lost them.
In the Rust Belt 5, the GOP’s pickup of voters making $50,000 or less is overshadowed by the Democrats’ dramatic loss of voters in that category.
Compared with Republicans’ performance in 2012, the GOP in the Rust Belt 5 picked up 335,000 additional voters who earned less than $50,000 (+10.6 percent). But the Republicans’ gain in this area was nothing compared with the Democrats’ loss of 1.17 million (-21.7 percent) voters in the same income category. Likewise, Republicans picked up a measly 26,000 new voters in the $50–$100K bracket (+0.7 percent), but Democrats lost 379,000 voters in the same bracket (-11.7 percent). The working class is not the only part of this equation. Analysis elsewhere suggests that in states such as Wisconsin, a significant fraction of Democrats’ loss relative to 2012 came from poor districts, and it’s unclear how much voter ID laws affected those numbers.
Very interesting article but doesn’t address FBI Director James Comey, a major reason she lost close races. There wasn’t one reason she lost (while substantially winning the popular vote), but there were many that all broke the same way.
Dylan Matthews/Vox:
Donald Trump has every reason to keep white people thinking about race
There’s a growing body of research in political science and political psychology suggesting that even very mild messages or cues that touch on race can alter political opinions.
Because politically it worked.
Mike Konczal:
Learning From Trump in Retrospect
Watching Trump with fresh eyes shows that we need to think clearer about how our policy forces people to concede to changing social norms, how to convey the rich as the problem, how to have clear messaging, how to deal with trade, and how to deal with wages and power. I don’t have the answers, certainly not here and now; but getting the questions right is the first step.
- Get Back, Way Back, to Work
Trump talked about jobs. All the time. This gets lost in the coverage, which focused on the inflammatory scandals. Watch:
“When I win on November 8th, I am going to bring back your jobs. The long nightmare of jobs leaving Michigan will be coming to an end. We will make Michigan the economic envy of the world once again. The political class in Washington has betrayed you. They’ve uprooted your jobs, and your communities, and shipped your wealth all over the world. They put new skyscrapers up in Beijing while your factories in Michigan crumbled. I will end the theft of American prosperity. I will fight for every last Michigan job.” -
Noah Smith/Bloomberg:
A Job Is More Than a Paycheck
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, I’m starting to rethink one of my basic beliefs about the economy. For a long time, I’ve believed that what mattered most for economic well-being was money. Median income, consumption, wages -- all the things I cared about most were measured in dollars.
Because of this attitude, I’ve supported lots of policies aimed at boosting the amount of money in the average person’s pocket. I’ve called for Japan to liberalize its markets, and for the U.S. to encourage workers to move to places with better opportunities. And I’ve often assumed that a dollar of government redistribution is just as good as a dollar of wages.
I’m starting to think I was wrong. Maybe not completely wrong, but I did ignore a big, important source of economic well-being: jobs.
In most of economic theory, a job isn't treated as something inherently valuable -- it’s just a conduit through which money flows from employer to employee. But most people probably care not just about the amount of money they get, but how they get it. If they see themselves as having earned their daily bread, they feel better about themselves than if they got a handout. A job also probably has an important symbolic value -- it sends a message that society cares about you and has a place for you.
I say “probably” because this just isn’t something economists think about much, so it doesn’t appear in the research literature much. To most people, the idea that jobs give people dignity and a sense of self-worth seems laughably obvious
Yep.
David A. Graham/Atlantic:
So, Why Can't You Call Taiwan?
President-elect Donald Trump has committed a sharp breach of protocol—one that underscores just how weird some important protocols are.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary, noted that he wasn’t even allowed to refer to a Taiwanese government. My colleague James Fallows, not generally a man given to overreaction or caps-lock, was blunter: “WHAT THE HELL????” he tweeted.
As is typically the case with Trump, it’s hard to tell whether this blithe overturning of protocol is intentional or simply a result of not knowing, or caring, better.