Flood the Zone

     "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."
          Steve Bannon, provocateur and strategic advisor to Donald Trump

     "We'll take the hit."
          JD Vance, GOP vice presidential nominee

On Friday I posited something so unintuitive as to seem ridiculous. I wrote that Trump's claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating pet dogs and cats, a claim that appeared to be blowing up in his face, would in fact help his campaign. 

Oh, the story would confirm that Trump was undisciplined, unreliable, divisive, cruel, and happy to spread racist dog whistles, but that was already well-understood by voters. The important thing -- and the benefit to Trump -- was that it pictured immigrants as profoundly foreign and dangerous, and that the mental image of dark-skinned people eating cats or dogs would be mentally "sticky."

The Haitian immigrant BBQ story crowded out discussion of Trump's poor debate performance and Harris' credible one. It took off center stage news about inflation dropping below 3%, news of a pending interest rate cut, news of polls showing Harris now ahead of Trump. The Haitian claim moved immigration back to the center of attention.

Vice presidential nominee JD Vance went on the CNN's "State of the Union" yesterday to say that this was exactly what they were doing, and he didn't mind making stuff up nor smearing Haitians to do it. CNN reporter Dana Bash asked why both he and Trump were spreading debunked rumors. 

JD Vance: "American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do."

Dana Bash: “You just said that this is a story that you created.”

JD Vance: "It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.”

The Haitian story is dishonest, but useful.

Biden and Democrats made a giant policy and political error on immigration. They were baited by the "If Trump says it, we must be against it" reflex. Across a wide political spectrum,  Americans -- like Europeans -- are feeling unsettled about immigration from poorer countries. Trump opposed immigration on bluntly xenophobic grounds, and did so from the first day of his campaign. He didn't like Mexicans, to whom he soon added Muslims, and then the rest of the non-European world. There was ample political space for Democrats to have re-framed the issue as one of immigration control and accountability, not one of Trump-style prejudice. Democrats could have been conspicuous for border bureaucracies. Instead they are conspicuous for allowing mass scofflaw immigrants to arrive and stay by gaming a failed asylum system.

Democrats accepted Trump's frame of good people vs. bad people, a frame of well-controlled vs. uncontrolled immigration. Democrats left the border in a chaotic state for too long, lest they be thought cruel and racist. Public opinion has jelled. Democrats are living with that history now, and that failure may result in Americans electing a felon who instigated a plot to overthrow an election to stay in power. At least he will do something about the border. Democrats had their chance and didn't.

Harris has a job to do: show herself to the American people and explain what she might do regarding food, housing, and fuel prices, and what she will do about the southern border. The debate showed her to be personally competent -- adept, articulate, and far more mentally and emotionally credible than Trump. However, she did not make the sale that her policy positions will solve America's problems. Trump keeps stealing the spotlight. The Haitian cat and dog story was intentional. So was Trump writing that he hates Taylor Swift. The second assassination attempt on Sunday was not part of the campaign plan, but it will serve the same purpose. 

The spotlight is on Trump, always Trump. 

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Easy Sunday: Quick Satire

Sometimes you have to laugh.

One way to keep your mental health in this Era of Trump is to laugh at the absurdities.

A Medford neighbor, Gerald Murphy, has a lighthearted approach to Trump. He writes little satirical pieces that are misunderstood as real, which gets him kicked off of social media platforms. Murphy laughs it off. He is a retired high school English teacher. He has written dozens of plays and musicals with productions in over 40 countries, mostly in schools, churches, and community theaters.

Murphy, at his granddaughter's high school graduation

The presidential debate and its aftermath produced some humor, if one has the right mindset. Murphy sent me these, hoping I would get the jokes:

My wife is mad at me -- again.

"You promised to make a plan to stop drinking so much ten years ago, but you still drink like a fish," she said.

"Give me a break," I told her.

"Well, what's the plan?" she said.

She was pretty pissed so I had to come up with something.

"All right," I said, "I don't have a plan yet, but I got this great concept."

 

And this one:

Friday night football turned out dismally for the Medford High School Black Tornadoes. A sports reporter was on hand to interview the coach.

Reporter: "Tough game, coach. The final score was 36 to 0! How do you explain the loss?"

Coach: "I wouldn’t count this as a loss. Our boys can hold their heads up high. They did remarkably well, considering the officiating."

Reporter: "Bad refs?"

Coach: "Cheating refs. Definitely. Before the game started, we saw their coach hand the refs a bundle of money. Then the ref gave him a copy of our playbook." 

Reporter: "So, you had no chance?"

Coach: "I believe we still could have crushed them except for the way they drugged our quarterback’s Gatorade."

Reporter: "I guess that explains the four fumbles and three interceptions."

Coach: "Right. But we still would have won if they didn’t have that bozo changing the scoreboard. We scored seven touchdowns, but not one showed up."

Reporter: "But I was there--"

Coach: "You were up in the stands. It was a different game here on the sidelines." 

Reporter: "And you won’t accept that you guys lost?"

Coach: "No, no, no! Only losers accept a loss. I say we won. And when the truth comes out about all their shenanigans, we’ll be on our way to a perfect season! Our tenth perfect season in a row!"

Reporter: "But you were two and six last year!"

Coach: "Where’s the reporter for another paper? We can’t trust your fake news reporting. This is the last time you’ll ever interview me!"

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I won! I won! I already won!:

It's a negotiating technique: Claim the initial position. 

Assert that the matter is settled. Claim you've already won.

On election night, 2020, before most of the ballots were counted, but when the early indications looked like a Biden win, Trump spoke:

   "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election, we did win." [Audience cheers.]

We saw a fresh iteration of the technique after the debate on Tuesday. In the post-debate spin room, at subsequent speaking events, and in writing, it is the same message: Trump won in a landslide and the opponent cheated. 

Trump on Truth Social:
     "Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats' Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night."

Also on Truth Social:

     "People are saying that Comrade Kamala Harris had the questions from Fake News ABC. I would say it's very likely. . . . Despite having to debate three people, Polls firmly state that I won, and EASILY."

In a speech in Las Vegas yesterday:
     "I hear she got the questions, and I also heard she had something in the ear." 

In Trump's world, there is no set of facts that would allow a Kamala Harris victory to stand on its face. Even Trump political allies and Fox News acknowledged that it was a bad night for Trump and a good one for Harris. No matter. Someone acting in bad faith was quick to present evidence to the contrary. After all, it is the internet and we have free speech:

Elon Musk comes along shortly after, admitting his data is worthless, but presents it anyway. It fits Trump's narrative, and Musk's:

What is true? Anything could be true. Trump uses a ready-made source that will meet any need: "People are saying" and "I hear that."

I know of no effective way to inoculate the American political system against a November reiteration of Trump election denial, except, of course, a Trump win. Trump has trained his supporters to accept what he claims. It is either true or could-be-true. Could-be-true is close enough.

Mainstream media warned of the "red mirage" problem four years ago: Early votes would skew to Trump and Democratic votes would come later. Before the 2020 election Steve Bannon was caught on tape laughing about Trump's plan to announce and claim victory on election night when Trump was ahead in the vote count. Americans knew what to expect, but it did not inoculate the system against what Trump doing exactly what was predicted.

After the fact, the political system took action to protect itself. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 clarified the role of the vice president as ministerial in counting votes. Indictments of 2020 fake electors are a caution to potential new ones in 2024. Security at the Capitol has been beefed up for this coming January 6. The biggest vulnerability remains, though. Approximately half the American public tolerates and endorses a leader who flagrantly and proudly creates his own reality. This is a democracy, so a self-governing people are free to be governed by someone who makes things up. And that is what we have. Trump makes things up, proudly and shamelessly. 

Trump can sell. Democrats underestimate how believable he sounds to people who want to believe what he makes up. He says he won elections and debates in a landslide, and that is welcome news, and it could be true. He seems utterly confident and convinced of what he says, and that makes him believable, at least to some of the people some of the time, and very possibly half the people this time.

Whatever the vote this November, he will claim a landslide victory, and a lot of people will believe him.

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The “Haitians eat your dogs” gambit.

Trump:
      "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats . . . The people on television say, my dog was taken and used for food.”

Trump's attack is vile, dishonest, racist, defamatory, and bad for America. 

It may well win him votes.

Trump: hero and savior of cats

At first glance Donald Trump appears to have sabotaged his debate performance by making crazy accusations. The most memorable of them was that Haitian immigrants are killing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. 

There was early blowback.

Debate moderators did a real-time fact-check, and said it was not true. Democrats scoffed at it. Even conservative media said that Trump embarrassed himself. Karl Rove called it "probably Team Trump’s lowest moment.” The Wall Street Journal ran a headline about the "False Claim That Immigrants Are Eating Pets."

Conservative pundit Erick Erickson used blunt language:

But wait. 

Maybe this serves Trump's purpose.

Underlying Trump’s popularity is his overarching idea that American identity -- its culture, its economy, its blood, and the safety of its native-born citizens -- is under economic and physical attack from foreigners, especially dark-skinned ones, many from "s-hole countries." He is playing to a perennial theme in American culture, the fear and distrust of immigrants from new places. In prior generations it was the Irish in the 1840s, the Italians, Greeks and Chinese in the 1880s, and Germans during World War I. Always, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background, there is fear of Jews. Always, less now but still present, is racial prejudice against Blacks. Trump turned the focus to Muslims and people from Latin America. Both Bush presidents said we were not at war with Islam. Trump said yes we are. And Trump's campaign in 2015 started by saying that Mexico isn't sending its best. "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."

Trump is playing the race card more bluntly than did Richard Nixon, with his "southern strategy," or Ronald Reagan, who kicked off his presidential campaign in, of all places, tiny Philadelphia, Mississippi. That's a place distinguished in American history as the town whose leaders conspired to cover up the investigation of the murder of three civil rights workers. There is always reason to be afraid of strangers, crime, and disorder. Trump is unusually direct in appealing to that fear and putting a dark face on it.  

Trump says that Haitian immigrants eat dogs and cats. Yuck. It's vivid and mentally sticky. Trump's Republican allies are looking to see if somebody, somewhere in America -- maybe an immigrant, ideally a dark-skinned one -- killed and ate a dog or cat. See! It might be true! The very search for it keeps the idea bubbling at the top of the public mind. Focus:

Immigrant. Kill and eat cats and dogs. Haitians. S-hole countries. 

Trump is not recoiling in the face of the blowback. He is doing the opposite. His Truth Social posts perpetuate the story. Laugh about it. Scoff. But keep in mind the idea, here again:

Immigrant. Kill and eat cats and dogs. Haitians. S-hole countries.

One of many posted on Truth Social by Trump

Trump openly shows his contempt and disgust; Haitians are dangerous, dark-skinned, and profoundly foreign. Weird foreign. Disgustingly foreign. And they want to move next door. The more Trump is criticized for saying it, the more the idea registers with voters that Trump is rough and crude and just the person we need to protect America from foreign defilement by dog and cat eaters.

Don't underestimate Trump. He isn't appealing to our sense of reason. He is appealing to something more instinctual and primitive: our gag reflex. 

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Housing in Boston

Boston is booming. 

It is a success story of urban redevelopment and transition to the 21st Century. It has become a great American city again.

Jobs in Boston are being created faster than housing is being built. 

I lived and worked in Boston during a rough time there, the early 1970s. Ethnic groups -- Irish, Italian, Polish, Black, Jewish -- divided into neighborhoods that were being roiled by court-ordered busing to attempt to integrate the public schools. People and jobs were leaving.

I worked for Boston's mayor and the Bicentennial program to celebrate Boston's role in the American Revolution. (The revolution started early in Massachusetts. The Boston Massacre was in 1770; the Boston Tea Party was in 1773; and the shots heard round the world were fired in Lexington and Concord were in 1775.) One element of life there was not a problem. I paid $160/month for a nice one-bedroom apartment, about 20 percent of my income. I could walk to a subway stop and commute to work downtown. I was a fish out of water there, and I wanted to escape the politics of ethnic rivalries I didn't understand. I moved back to my hometown: Medford, Oregon.

In that same period, college classmate Larry DiCara -- Boston-born-and-raised, a graduate of Boston Latin School -- had been  elected to a seat on the Boston City Council. Just 22, he was the youngest person ever to serve on that body. He did not leave Boston. He dug in, continued on the City Council for a decade, became a lawyer and civil leader, and for the next five decades and into the present has been a key player in the physical and economic development of Boston.

Prosperity brings problems of its own. Boston is expensive. 

Larry DiCara

Guest Post by Larry DiCara

I grew up in a poor neighborhood in a poor city. My grandfather paid $18,500 for a two-family home in 1956 because nobody wanted to pay any more. I rented cheap apartments when I was young, as did all young people in Boston in the 1970s.

Boston was on its knees. Our population was reduced by over 250,000 in the course of 25 years; a loss of 30 percent. As a result, there was no significant demand for housing. When the Desegregation Order was implemented in the mid-70s, families disappeared. There were arson rings. Some of them included members of the fire department and the police department. This followed a series of economic sucker punches, including the closing of major employers such as Plant Shoe and Walter Baker Chocolate and then the Charlestown Navy Yard and the Army Base in South Boston. Furthermore, as a result of high interest rates, construction slowed down significantly. My contemporaries would relocate to Texas to get work and come back to visit once a month to pay the rent.

All of this has changed now that we are a city dominated by educational and medical facilities where people toil with their brains rather than their brawn. There are fewer poor people, many of whom live in some type of affordable housing.

The other aspect of no longer being a poor city is that we are city full of young people, many of whom are single and who have great jobs and who want to live near a transit line, even if the MBTA may not work on a regular basis.

As a result, younger, mostly single people without children have replaced, and arguably displaced, families, often single-parent families with children. Those without children pay less for food, sneakers and jeans, and therefore can pay more for rent. Let’s not even try to calculate the cost of childcare! Two, three or four wage earners can pay more for rent than one or two. Not surprisingly, the school-aged population continues to decline, despite an influx of immigrants, even as the population has returned to the levels of the 1960s, when the Boston schools had over 100, 000 students

These are the normal rules of economics. I think it was Chapter four in Professor Paul Samuelson’s book which so many students read in the 1960s and 1970s. When there is a great demand, the price goes up. When there is less demand the price goes down. The only way to solve the problem is to build more housing -- lots of it -- which means we must override discriminatory local zoning laws across the Commonwealth.

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Trump blustered.

"Never let them see you sweat."
        Advertising slogan, Gillette's Dry Idea anti- perspirant 

Trump returned to form. He went into an extended rant. He sweated.

At 27 minutes after the hour, Kamala Harris said Trump's rallies were poorly attended and that people left early "out of boredom and exhaustion." 

Trump was hooked. 

He looked desperate. He was a salesman who had to meet a sales quota and he would say anything -- anything! -- to close the sale before the customer left the sales floor.

Lindsey Graham called Trump's performance "a disaster." Fox News hosts admitted it, too. Trump advisor Stephen Miller and Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida look glum going into the spin room to defend Trump.  

Meanwhile, Democrats are giddy.

Huffington Post

The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages are universally understood to be Republican-oriented, but even Kyle Peterson, a member of their editorial board could not ignore the obvious:

“We have the biggest rallies,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s because people want to take their country back.” The U.S., he continued, is a failing nation. “You’re going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject.” In Ohio, immigrants are eating people’s dogs and cats, “they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” (Moderator: “The Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.”)

Mr. Trump went on to say that the FBI’s crime statistics are “a fraud,” and the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs numbers are “a fraud,” and the 2020 election was, yes, still a fraud, and “they should have sent it back to the legislatures.” About the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, he regrets nothing. Then World War III again. What of this is supposed to reassure suburbanites who worry that Mr. Trump is too erratic to put back in the Oval Office?

The followup news and commentary about the debate will be that Trump melted down and Harris did well. It may not be enough to secure victory for Harris. Trump's incompetence meant that Harris never got pressed hard on the issues that trouble swing state marginal voters. Harris did not face a back-and-forth on fracking sufficient to make voters in Pennsylvania know, for sure, that she won't end it by regulating it into impracticability. Trump did not challenge her directly enough on immigration to assure voters that she will do something about it and not cave -- as Biden did for two and a half years -- to forces within the Democratic coalition that consider border enforcement cruel and unjust. She never had to persuade people she has an economic plan she could defend against an opponent's criticism.

Trump's incompetence has that silver lining for him. 

I expect Trump's campaign will stop calling Harris low-IQ. She looked smarter and more mentally sound than did Trump. If mental fitness is the issue, Harris wins big. Trump's campaign will redirect the attack to saying she is a San Francisco Marxist, trying to hide it with a smile and gauzy generalities.

Trump may be a whack job, but Harris hasn't yet assured voters she isn't dangerous in a different way. She still has work to do. But this was a very good night for her.

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The rent is too damn high.

       "If we want to make it easier for more young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country."

            Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, Tuesday night.

 

     “We will end America’s housing shortage."

           Kamala Harris, Democratic National Convention, Thursday night.

 

 The debate tonight will take place under a cloud of frustration among younger voters.

Maybe Democrats are waking up to one of the reasons for the discontent.

In prior generations, the "American Dream" of home ownership was accessable, accessable even for working people who earned and saved their own money from their work. Now it isn't. The cost of housing is too high in relation to average -- even above-average -- incomes, unless the home buyer has some kind of parental boost or inheritance, or significant equity from the sale of a prior house. Democrats are starting to become YIMBY: Yes In My Back Yard. This is controversial. Trump is warning suburban voters that Democrats may try to site moderate income housing in their neighborhoods -- potentially a threat to safety and property values. It is a lightly-coded racial threat; it is a direct warning about social class. Do you want poor people anywhere near your house? And in any case, new construction is expensive wherever it is sited. Low and moderate income housing doesn't pencil out unless there are tax abatements or other subsidies.

Robert Locher was the first to write me complaining that my praise for the current economy, with its high asset prices, failed to acknowledge who was hurt by those prices. Those people are voters, too, and they have drifted away from Democrats. Locher is in Gen X; he served four years in the navy aboard an aircraft carrier; he has an engineering degree and a good job. His complaint is a wakeup call.

Guest Post by Robert Locher

I believe I detect a bias in your post, that of someone who has owned his or her own home for a long time. You cite real estate values being up as a good thing.  Please allow me to give you my perspective, from the point of view of someone who doesn't own a house, is trying to get by on wages, and relies on health insurance for medical care.

Higher inflation is not always a bad thing for everyone. In a more-normal housing market, house prices drop when inflation rises, because mortgages get more expensive. But for someone who has carefully saved a down payment, higher interest could be the chance to buy a first house. Once into his or her first house, the first-time buyer enjoys the many benefits of being a homeowner: a mostly-fixed monthly payment, the mortgage interest tax deduction, more stability in general, and so on. If interest rates later decline, the new homeowner can refinance and benefit from a lower payment.

However, supply of housing of all types has been extraordinarily stagnant for 10 years or more, through administrations of both parties, and house prices essentially haven't dropped even with higher inflation. Why is the supply so low? In Oregon the finger can be pointed at our zoning laws that favor preservation of farm land and wilderness over new housing plots. But low housing supply is a nation-wide problem.

The net result is that the hopeful first-time buyer is being screwed, when he or she should be enjoying a rare opportunity. To make things worse, investors large and small have been buying up many of the few available houses, denying even more would-be first-time house buyers. Locally the rental market is very tight also, and rents are soaring.

I believe I detect another bias in your post, Peter, that of someone on Medicare. For those of us paying for health insurance, medical care is more expensive than ever before. Costs go up 15 or 20 percent annually with no break in sight, the highest in the world, an unsustainable trend. Non-union employers largely aren't able to absorb the increased costs, so instead they pass higher prices down to their employees.

It's not just high grocery prices fueling voter anger. Soaring housing and medical costs are hitting many people hard, especially young people. Is it any wonder that young people aren't engaged by politics when their concerns seem to be ignored by the politicians?

 

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Don't forget Covid

Americans have been giving Trump a "pass" on Covid. They consider it an "act of God," so it doesn't count against his performance as president.

Americans remember his "real" presidency as the year 2019, pre-Covid.

How Trump mishandled Covid matters. We are living in the economic aftermath of it. We are also living under its health effects. The U.S. had "excess deaths above baseline" far in excess of our peer countries.

Our World in Data

People can argue about "cause of death." Was Covid the cause or was it a complication?  Was it really Covid and not the flu? Did the underlying heart problem cause the Covid? There is a method for resolving the question; that is by not asking it. Instead, simply look at deaths from all causes, period. During waves of Covid outbreaks the U.S. experienced about 1.3 million deaths above the baseline of expected deaths. One thing is sure: Extra people died.

Joe Yetter responded to my question "Are you better off today than you were four years ago." I had answered that question by citing economic indicators. He cited public health data. Joe Yetter is a retired Army physician and a former Democratic candidate for U.S. representative.

Joe Yetter

Guest post by Joe Yetter, M.D., MPH

Peter asked me to flesh out a comment I made a few days ago in response to the quadrennial question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? I’m answering as a retired physician with a continuing interest in public health.

Hell, yes, I am better off! And so is our country.

Trump has tried to memory-hole that annus horribilis of 2020, but most of us can recall: neighbors fearing the breath of neighbors, the late-night calls from relatives across the country announcing hospitalizations or deaths, the lined-up refrigerated trucks chilling the dead against spoilage, the pots-and-pans and cheering celebrations for nurses heading home after excruciating double/triple shifts.

CDC: Excess deaths above baseline, coincidental with waves of Covid infections

Later, of course, medical personnel were sometimes assaulted or beaten for telling families that their relative had the coronavirus. And other anger and threats were directed at school boards, public health officials, medical experts, and, especially, Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

In May of 2018, Trump disbanded the Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit, and he threw out the playbook for handling a pandemic. 

Vanity Fair, May 1, 2020

In January 2020, when he became aware of the gravity of the COVID pandemic, Trump chose to downplay it, insisting that it would “disappear like magic” or that one might eliminate the virus inside bodies with bright lights or by ingesting bleach, “almost like a cleaning.” It was an absurd and deadly exhibition of his anti-science, anti-intellectual, solipsistic character. It killed Americans. 

Trump properly gets credit for Operation Warp Speed, and for economic stimuli. 

GAO: Operation Warp Speed accelerated development

But I’d also award him a pile of demerits for downplaying the importance of the vaccine and other measures, and for delaying those checks in order to try to get his name on them.

Are we better off than we were four years ago? When was the last time you worried about finding toilet paper at the store?

Never forget: Four years ago, the U.S. had the highest COVID mortality rate in the world, by far: 2.44/million/day. Our COVID mortality rate peaked at 9.29/million/day, the second-highest in the world, on January 23, 2021--call it 72 hours into the Biden presidency, when we were losing 3,000 Americans daily. It was a 9/11, every day! I’d call that worse off than today.

Trump did not create the global pandemic, but he did give it legs here at home. Trump’s mismanagement of the crisis caused the additional deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and the Trump legacy of vaccine-denialism and antipathy to masking is killing us still.

It has also killed us in far greater numbers in the places that are the "Trumpiest." According to JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, "Excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults." Trump and Republicans made the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci into villains, and they criticized the vaccines. Fewer Republicans got vaccinated. They are still more likely to die of COVID than are Democrats. As a physician and as a human being, I find that tragic. 

Anyone who cares about his fellow Americans knows that we are better off today than we were four years ago. Denying this invites further tragedy.

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Easy Sunday: A word from a Trump supporter

Many of my readers won't like today's post.

The guest post is hard to read, and many won't like the content.

Lynn Myrick is a Trump supporter. He is a retired Southern Oregon family law attorney. He practiced for 47 years and still serves as an expert witness on attorney ethics and billing practices.

Myrick is a regular reader of this blog. My critique of Trump's criminality, his business frauds, his sexual crimes, and his seditious effort to overthrow the election did not dampen Myrick's support of Trump. 

Myrick dashed this off, typing with his thumbs, creating a Gertrude Stein-style unfolding of the continuous present in a stream of consciousness. Critics may think he sounds drunk, stupid, willfully uninformed, profoundly biased, or worse. They may think Myrick is mired in the alternative reality of a religious cult led by a con-man guru. But Myrick is not stupid. This is what he thinks. Something along the lines of this interior monologue takes place in the minds of a near-majority of our fellow citizens. Read it as literature. Read it for insight on how it is possible Americans might choose to elect Trump.

I am publishing it verbatim.

Lynn Myrick and wife Meredith

Guest Post by Lynn Myrick

I keep wanting to see Peter's face and crossed fingers when he gaslights me to say he is better off now. 3 wars by biden - none with 45 - 20 + %cost of living - $7k in lost purchasing power for for Americans - crime stats odd when harris and dems defund police - up to 20m illegals bringing crime, drugs and sex trafficking of children (sickening) - lost over 300 of the children - housing costs through the roof (and that is a bragging point?) - elevated rental costs - Hamas supporting dems and college campuses - the inflation accelerating inflation reduction act (she brags she was the vote bringing that home) - ballooning debt - the failed new green deal - 7 EV charging stations for those billions - homeless populations at record levels - illegals taking available jobs - killing 13 service members and a withdrawal from Afghanistan that made us the laughing stock - giving the enemy $80b in military equipment - losing both air bases in Afghanistan - killing Ashli Babbitt - and the failed build back better - failed student debt debacle - covid mismanagement - school and unnecessary school closures - fauci (says it all) - incompetent reversal of remain in Mexico and 80 other successful executive orders - the most secretive and divisive leader since obama - describing half the country as evil/anti democratic and Maga as an existential threat - all the while the dems were the penultimate underminers of democracy - the 'woke' federal beauracracy - diminished military readiness - bidens lawfare against his opponents - kamala promoting extremist gender ideology (men in girls sports) and in general a corrupt and intellectually bankrupt regime. We can't afford an incompetent, empty vessel, secretive kamala to get close to the Whitehouse. She is so afraid of talking to America it's totally weird. I have more but…… 😊

Photo appended to the end of Myrick's comment

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Are we better off now? Another view.

     "Peter, I believe I detect a bias in your post, that of someone who has owned his or her own home for a long time. You cite real estate values being up as a good thing."

        Comment from a reader of yesterday's post

The boomer generation had a very different experience with housing prices than today's young people do. 

Compared to today, housing used to be affordable. Now it isn't.

The premise of yesterday's blog post was that the economy is better than it was four years ago when Trump was president, or even five and six years ago, before Covid.  The economy is strong, GDP is up, the stock market is up, real estate prices are up, and unemployment is down. Good, right? I'm a boomer, and my income and assets are up sharply. Great! The implication is that Biden, and now Harris, should be helped by that tailwind from a good economy and asset price growth. 

Maybe not. Consider real estate prices. I wrote from the point of view of someone who owns a home, not from someone buying one.  

John Coster wrote from another perspective. After graduating from what was then called a "vocational high school," he and a friend started in business as electricians, in a micro business, "Two Guys and a Truck." His career blossomed. Over his 40-year career, he owned and operated electrical contracting companies. That evolved into work overseeing the design and construction of multimillion-dollar projects for Amazon, Microsoft, T-Mobile, CenturyLink, and Toyota.

Cleaned up for his license photo, 1977

How he looked in that era

1977

Guest Post by John Coster

Peter’s recent post stating that even the working poor are better off financially than they were four years ago is not necessarily correct, nor necessarily relevant. Rather than debate economic theory or statistics, I propose we unpack the reasons why ordinary working people would feel they are not better off than they should be; or could be, because that’s what truly matters. Also “four years ago” is too abstract to be meaningful. People remember “a time before now” that was better, and that’s the benchmark.

Here's an example. In the late 70s, I was a young construction electrician working in Sacramento. My monthly rent for a nice but modest two-bedroom apartment was eight percent of my pre-tax income. I could have easily afforded a nice tract home for 12% of my monthly income. That’s my mental model for “normal” -- whether reasonable or not. 

Today, the monthly rent for that exact same apartment would be 26% of pretax earnings of a union electrician. A modest house there today would require almost 50% of that worker’s pretax salary, which means he or she would not even qualify for financing.

Today, in King County, Washington, where I live, the median annual household income is $116K, but the median income required to buy a median-priced home here is $188K. That’s a 62% spread.

So this got me thinking: Was the affordable housing of my Sacramento experience an anomaly? I decided to look up some family history in Massachusetts going back almost 100 years. In 1931, sudden tragedy forced my grandmother and her four children to move in with her sister into a multifamily rental in Malden, which is a working-class city adjacent to Boston. 

John and brother Doug Coster in front of the rental house

My dad recalled the rent was $25 a month for the second and top floors of the house. According to the census, the average rent in the U.S. was $18/month so that seems like a reasonable range. I looked up the wage for different occupations at that time in Boston, but it gets tricky because women and African Americans got paid significantly less. However, the average non-skilled factory worker made $.87/hour and a skilled laborer could make up to $1.50/hour. Doing some simple math, that means an unskilled factory worker would have experienced only 12-15% of their earnings going to housing. And this was during the Great Depression!

I wondered how a renter in that house would fare in today’s economy. In 2022, the same two-floor unit had a monthly rent of $4,000. The median household income for Malden is $94K, which means rental of that same unit would require 51% of that salary. That's over five times the income-to-rent ratio of the 1930s. 

I understand that “median” and “average” are not always meaningful. But in my lifetime, we’ve seen housing grow to consume three to four times of what had been previously experienced in a family’s budget.

In a 2024 survey reported by Forbes, nearly 30% of all American adults (including 20% of Boomers) have less than $1,000 in any kind of savings. That’s over 72 million people living on the brink of insolvency.

That doesn’t sound like “doing well” to me -- or to them. 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]