Category: Government, Policy, & Politics

Donald Trump Supporters Become More Isolated – The Atlantic

As the country’s ideological and demographic trends continue to favor Clinton, Trump’s blue-collar white backers become more isolated.

Like bookends, both candidates presented themselves as the last defense against gathering forces that would transform America and subjugate their supporters’ values. It only underscored the gulf that Clinton spoke at a Manhattan fundraiser of gay activists who were serenaded by Barbra Streisand, while Trump issued his warning in an interview with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network at a conference of religious conservatives.

while polls show most Clinton voters welcome immigration and rising diversity, much of Trump’s support views each with alarm. Whoever wins in November will struggle to find common ground between these culturally antithetical coalitions.

Source: Donald Trump Supporters Become More Isolated – The Atlantic

Enough With This Basic Income Bullshit

institutions are built, through polarization: it takes a movement of people willing to fight for a big idea over the course of decades.

This is yet another reason why I’m skeptical about basic income: I simply don’t see the movement behind it. It’s intellectually seductive, a lot of people like the idea, but I’ve never met anyone for whom basic income is literally a personal question of life and death.

Basic income is to the social state what the flat tax is to the tax system. It flatters the engineering mind with its apparent simplicity. But in fact it is impossible to implement; it’s also politically suicidal; nobody’s ready to die for it; and even if it existed, it would probably trigger extraordinary political tension and the highest level of inequality in modern Western history.

Source: Enough With This Basic Income Bullshit

 

The fact is that it is not the weight of the tax burden that causes [tax] revolts, but rather the feeling among taxpayers that they do not get anything for their money. People who derive some benefit from a welfare system are its greatest supporters and therefore pay taxes without feeling exploited.

An efficient and stable welfare state must be based on universal social programs, such as health insurance, pensions, and child-support allowances-programs that are directed to all citizens.

— Olof Palme, Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister, “Employment and Welfare“ speech, 1984

Art of the lie | The Economist

Dictators and democrats seeking to deflect blame for their own incompetence have always manipulated the truth; sore losers have always accused the other lot of lying.

But post-truth politics is more than just an invention of whingeing elites who have been outflanked. The term picks out the heart of what is new: that truth is not falsified, or contested, but of secondary importance. Once, the purpose of political lying was to create a false view of the world. The lies of men like Mr Trump do not work like that. They are not intended to convince the elites, whom their target voters neither trust nor like, but to reinforce prejudices.

Source: Art of the lie | The Economist

Australia’s Kevin Rudd Issues a Dire Warning About the United Nations – The Atlantic

It’s not clear the organization can effectively confront—or even survive—today’s challenges.

Source: Australia’s Kevin Rudd Issues a Dire Warning About the United Nations – The Atlantic

 

“national political leaders are no longer, in substance, capable of delivering self-contained, national solutions to the problems faced by their people, as the policy levers available increasingly slip beyond their grasp”

— Kevin Rudd, 26th Prime Minister of Australia

PDF: UN 2030: Rebuilding Order in a Fragmenting World