I wanted to bring this article at Washington Monthly to your attention. In it ten pundits each propose an idea to revitalize the Democrats’ outreach to the “working class”. Here are the ten ideas:
- Impose price restrictions on healthcare to constrain prices to those paid by Medicare.
- Constrain illegal immigration via employment (basically, E-Verify)
- Provide more funding for institutions of higher education that graduate higher percentages of minority students.
- Provide more benefits for the self-employed.
- Re-regulate airlines, rail, and trucking to improve fairness.
- Increase the number of federal employees and shrink the number of contractors.
- Free college for the working class.
- Block the involvement of big corporations in elder and child care.
- Provide funding to supplement public schooling with tutoring.
- Reorganize the administrative state.
My reactions to those proposals ranges from conditional support to extreme skepticism. The first proposal reminded of the very first lecture in Econ 101 in which the professor said “We don’t know how to create prosperity. We do know how to produce shortages.”
I also think that the emphasis on higher education is misplaced. In the countries with the highest percentages of college grads (Canada and Russia) just over half the population has college degrees. I doubt that can be improved on much. What about the other half of the population? I think the most effective way to help the “working class” is to ensure that they are able to work. In the United States that means a combination of reindustrialization and reducing immigration. Given the degree to which other countries subsidize their exports, restricting imports may be needed as well.
3,6,7,9&10 sound like Trojan horses to increase the number of big government voters, go blue? They haven’t learned anything.
#1 should be that Democrats talk like they respect the working class and pushback against allied constituencies when they don’t. For example, pushback against the idea that what the working class needs is to go to college so they’ll no longer be working class.
#2 should be that Democrats should treat the working class as multiracial.
#3 Minimum wage increases seem like a standard policy that is missing, but it tends to be meaningless if not enforced, which is what E-Verify would do.
Most of the rest don’t seem like they’d constitute “reach out” to the working class, whether or not they are good policies.
I have one idea, but it usually works. Keep losing elections, each loss will focus minds more and spur greater efforts.
I wish you would define working class. I think it’s another one of those terms that has become near meaningless. So lets go with people who dont have a college degree and earn less than $100k. I think some of those things would actually help them but they wouldn’t be noticed very much. The Dems have actually done much more to help the working class than Republicans but they dont value that help very much.
PD is right they they need better messaging. Wife and i have an ongoing dialog/argument over this. If a Dem says something bad about GOP voters it’s big news and is remembered for months/years. If a Repub does the same it gets passing notice for a day or two. Note that denigrating things said about Dem voters comes from the top starting with Trump, near daily, while it tends to come from some obscure professor, student or low level politician from the left. While this may not seem fair in some ways Dems need to learn to accept it. They also need to clamp down earlier on groups like those that advocated for defunding the police. There were only about a dozen cities that actually did that, and they all increase funding the next year or two, but it let the right claim that all Dems wanted defunding.
They also need to address more obvious, base economic issues in their messaging. They need to claim that they have plans to bring back good jobs that dont require a college education. Reality is that it’s largely not going to happen but this is all about messaging.
Steve
How about the definition I’ve used in the past? Someone paid an hourly wage is working class. Someone who receives a salary is middle class. If your income depends primarily on dividends, royalties, and buying and selling stocks and bonds you’re upper class.
I think that nowadays most people use the term interchangeably with “middle class” and mean anybody earning between two standard deviations below the median income and two standard deviations above. When they say “middle class” they mean middle income.
Keep in mind that I’m a Democrat. Although I’m a Democrat that doesn’t mean that I think that everything the Democratic leadership does is good, true, and beautiful. I’m not a “yellow dog Democrat”. I’m what used to be called a “reform Democrat”. I believe in good government not more government or less government. I think that government needs to be limited and we need to take the observed behaviors of bureaucracies into account.
There are some things on which I agree with most Democrats and disagree with most Republicans. For example, I think that Social Security is a necessity. It’s not a scam or incipient Marxism. It does need tweaking. I don’t believe that people who believe in some mandatory savings program based on equities have thought it through.