We Need A New Measure Of Economic Health––A Misery Industrial Average

The DowJones is at record levels, likely because of mouthwatering promises to remove regulations on pollution and regulations against gouging consumers and other antisocial corporate behaviors, as well as further tax cuts and forgiveness on the 1% and large corporations that Trump has outlined or suggested or promised.

But a lot of Americans are not enjoying robust economic health or feeling economically secure. As pollution regulations are relaxed we can expect cancer rates and deaths to rise and deaths and illness from various mysterious causes downwind and downstream from industries to rise also. These ills will not be reflected in the Dow. As consumer safeguards go away lots of large companies will breathe easier and have a healthier bottom line because they will be able to get away with things they used to be prevented from doing. This will not elevate average Americans' feelings of well-being.

We need a different metric, another gauge of our economic health at the level working people feel it, not just at the level where the stock portfolios of workers lucky enough to have stock portfolios feel it. Regardless of what SCOTUS says, corporations are not people.

I am recommending what I call

The Misery Industrial Average

(compare DowJones and Standard&Poors averages)

Private prisons

Collections companies

Pawn companies

Private security firms

Predatory lenders

Polluters

Payday lenders

Day labor companies

Weapons manufacturers

Gambling and casino companies

Porn companies (like Manwin)

(Plus other categories of publicly traded corporations who create or profit from the misery and vulnerability of working people.)

When these firms flourish it likely means that American workers are not flourishing. Their robust health comes at the expense of working people. Corporate lobbyists like to refer to working people in need as parasites, as unproductive, but these kinds of companies are the parasites because their profits subtract from working people’s standard of living.

This idea has been broached in various ways before, but not as a daily metric that people could follow the way they follow the Dow. They watch the Dow and figure its happiness and security is their happiness and security. Even when it isn’t. Even when the Dow might very well reflect the opposite of their own economic position.

This, from Upworthy, calls the private prison industry the Misery Industry

The right wing UK tabloid The Daily Mail equates the “misery industry” with the professionals who try to treat human misery and depression, because it is a “conservative” belief that nothing is wrong if we ignore what is wrong. Shut up and stress and fear and anxiety and depression will go away without costing the fortunate happy people anything.

But the pharmaceutical companies that provide the medication to treat depression and anxiety should also go on the Misery Industrial Average.

Something called the “misery index” was invented during the Johnson administration. It reflects the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate. President Carter called it "malaise" which described it pretty well. This malaise peaked during the Carter administration because the Arab oil monopolies tightened supplies which dramatically raised prices and depressed the global economy, which made people uneasy and threw people out of work.

Because the unemployment rate and the inflation rates are low right now, we’re fine, right?

But what if inflation is low and has become low and remains low because wages have been suppressed. We all know higher education and the cost of medical care and food and housing have risen more every year than the inflation rate shows, so how can inflation be low and how are depressed incomes among working people causing them to be less miserable instead of more miserable?

An actual index measuring the value and the profits and the scale of misery-related industries would be a better measure. When a town loses its local merchants because a Walmart goes in just outside the city’s tax boundary and begins paying low wages requiring its employees to obtain public assistance to live––that is misery. When the small town main street loses its local druggist and its local hardware store and those local taxpaying businesses are replaced by a Pawn America and Dollar Store and Payday Lenders, that is misery. When more of those businesses show up on main street those companies are flourishing, and that industrial average in share prices would be a useful, even a vital, measure of how hard American life is getting. When private prisons are supplying a captive and obedient labor force competing with workers not in prison that is a reflection of negative economic growth. But it seems likely that many of the business categories buoying the Dow Jones right now may be helped by the robust health of the misery industrial complex.

One more key driver of American misery is the right wing media, which provides a steady 24/7 diet of fear mongering and hate mongering and dark descriptions of where America is at that don't have anything to do with reality but serve to drive reality in that direction. People who watch FoxNews have a weaker hold on fact and reality and tend to be whipsawed by the indoctrination they receive from their preferred news media. They tend to be driven by fear rather than hope, by hate rather than love, by suspicion rather than trust.

Scientific American summarized the differences between the right wing mindset and the liberal mindset

There is a tendency toward fear and anxiety among conservatives. There is also a tendency for Red States, Republican run states, to be less successful and less happy by a whole range of measures, and yet those citizens held captive by those beliefs and by their Republican leaders continue to elect them and perpetuate their misery. In a recent study, discussed in USAToday, the ten most miserable states to live in all fall into the Republican column.

This NPR interview addresses the odd paradox of how Red States where "family values" are a core issue are failing in those areas

Red states hate the federal government yet they need it more than blue states do because their systems are failing in so many key categories, in the education rate, the domestic violence rate, in family stability and income stability

This NPR story discusses how the Red States who distrust and despise the federal government the most also need it the most

So in the Red States where Republicans rule and right wing media promotes its mixture of fear and anger, we find a vicious cycle: negative policies create negative results.

The Confederate States of America still exist and are now Republican

From Ron Paul's favorite website comes this frank declaration that Lincoln was a murdering Yankee meddler who violated the sacred rights of Southern planters to keep human beings as slaves. An idea that is still prevalent in the states which dominate the Republican Party.

Here's a map of this "New Confederacy". (Thanks to the well-known and rational conservative writer Andrew Sullivan for the map.) These members of Congress are willing to derail the US economy in order to humiliate the black guy who got into the White House by mistake.

The rationale is usually that the federal government is spending too much of their god-given money on people and places that don't deserve it (other liberal states with lots of poor people or foreign countries), but it's interesting to look at decades of tax data and see that the states with the stingiest attitudes towards taxation tend to get more in tax dollars than they pay in. Here's the data, state by state, published by the Tax Foundation.

These Red States get more than they pay because they tend to be poorer and more dysfunctional, meaning they need federal help. Notice also that these legislators (mostly Republican) are also the ones who loudly refuse to vote aid for areas hit by devastating hurricanes, but they immediately demand aid when their districts are hit by tornadoes and floods. (They also tend to claim that these more devastating storms and floods and droughts are not caused by high levels of fossil fuel use as scientists say is happening but are caused by homosexuality in the US.)

There have been a lot of website postings of how Red and Blue States compare in terms of various problems like divorce rates, teen pregnancy, gun deaths, low education rates, low life expectancy, infant death rates, etc.

The red states tend to have more of these problems, which might be directly correlated to their stubborn refusal to deal with those problems. But if they have these problems they should stop preaching reform to the rest of us, or they should at least stop taking our money. Of course their most vulnerable people would be the ones to suffer. And those are the citizens they work hard to prevent from voting. If those people were allowed to vote and their votes were counted honestly, there would be fewer Red States.

The Supreme Court ruling on Citizen's United gave the Republicans the 2010 elections, which allowed them to redraw the congressional districts across the country into safe seats for dangerously insane right wing radicals whose sole aim in life is to make sure the black guy isn't allowed to fulfill his campaign promises. It's worth noting that the Republicans held the House of Representatives in 2012 despite Republican congressmen receiving more than a million fewer votes nationally. The Dems got more votes and fewer seats in the House.

This is a what happens when the Republican strategy of suppressing voting takes hold. They don't like democracy. They don't want to do what the people would like them to do. They have other clients who pay their bills for them. They are the representatives of big money, the representatives of corporations foreign and domestic. Suppressing the vote is a timeworn Republican strategy. Because they dislike democracy. Just listen to Paul Weyrich speaking in the 1980s. He helped get Ronald Reagan elected. He also helped found the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank which is helping take the democracy out of our political system, the think tank which helped the Supreme Court reach the conclusion that corporations are people and money is speech.

The Heritage Foundation is also where the system of private insurance exchanges was invented. The system now called ObamaCare. The system they are willing to derail the US economy to prevent from being put in place, because they hate anything enacted by the current black president.

Or, in the immortal words of Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx):

"I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
No matter what it is
Or who commenced it
I'm against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
And even when you've changed it
Or condensed it
I'm against it!"

(Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, from the Marx Brothers film Horsefeathers)

The Red States Get the Government Spending, Blue States Pay the Bill

Ever wondered why we need journalism? Read this piece from Eric Black. He provides a useful and intelligent analysis of a very important piece of reporting from yesterdays' New York Times.

"Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It" is an eye-opening feature article from the New York Times. It includes an intriguing interactive map showing region by region breakdown of government spending and taxes paid.

Here's Krugman's commentary on it, with a useful chart.

The point is this: the places and people in the U.S. that oppose government the most are often the places that need it the most and rely on it the most, who take the most from the federal government in subsidies and programs and contracts, in dollars, but pay in the least in taxes.

These Red areas and people oppose the taxes they aren't paying anyway, and oppose the government payments they are receiving more than other bluer, more Democratic areas and people. The areas that pay MORE in tax dollars than they receive in government payouts? Mostly Democratic areas populated by Democrats.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture. And there's something wrong that you don't hear this repeated every time a Republican stands up and hollers about gummint spendin'. All he needs to do is reject it. And if he doesn't it would be less hypocritical if he'd agree to pony up for the government millions he brings to his district. He won't though.

And it's not a new story. Simply underreported. Suppressed you could say. Don't believe the New York Times? Read on.

From Business Insider, reported in 2011.

A tax professor's commentary on the same bizarre red-state paradox, from 2004.

A 2002 paper from the ultra conservative Hoover Institution and Ohio State about The Red State Paradox.

The Washington Post's economist Ezra Klein posted a map of this bizarre but true correlation in 2010.

Data from the Tax Foundation

A 2010 article from SLATE.

You also hear Republicans shouting about the immorality of Democrats. But it's the Red States that have higher measures of the usual moral failures, divorce, teen pregnancy, murder and smut.

From Vox Nova, a Catholic blog, a chart of the correlation between Red States and high divorce, teen pregnancy and pornography rates.

From James Wolcott, a 2006 article on the higher "moral failure" rate in the "ultra-moral" Red States vs. the allegedly immoral Blue States.

It's factual and downright stunning. Especially because Americans in large numbers are angry about something that is not true. Which also shows the power of journalism...or "journalism" in the case of FoxNews, which is a player in the spreading of bad information and the shaping of ignorant opinion.

A Few Words About Hypocrisy

Never mind that Michele Bachmann can't tell John Wayne from John Wayne Gacy, it's her lies about her own personal government subsidies that should make voters angry. This from the Des Moines Register backs up this from Politico.

("But she's so pretty when she lies, and she seems to believe what she's saying.")

Pork is a big Republican boogeyman, but they love their earmarks. Republicans know how to suck up government spending even when they're busy condemning it. Government spending is wrong except when it's spent on them. Read about it in USNews and World Report, not exactly a liberal magazine.

Even thought they are dead set against government spending and high taxes, Red States pay less in taxes and receive more in government spending. As noted in the Washington Post.

It's called HYPOCRISY.

Republicans shut the "public option" down during the healthcare reform debate. Never mind that they have the Cadillac of public options. It's not socialist if a Republican enjoys it personally. Story from Raw Story.

Republicans holler about the minor misbehavior of Democrats and demand resignation. But they remain in office after far worse. All well reported in The Nation. Was this hypocrisy reported on FoxNews?

On the Republican side, sexual misbehavior is an institution. They have a special church group to cover it up. And notice it's all men. Reported on Alternet (because the main stream media is too afraid of being called liberal.)

Sanctity of marriage? Republican pols have a sorry record of infidelity and still manage to be sanctimonious and point fingers. Reported in Washington Monthly, but not talked about on right wing talk radio.

The culture war was invented by Republicans to "defend" the superior values of the solid Republican south, west and middle west. The problem is these Red States have the worst statistics on teen pregnancy, divorce, murder, poverty and other "values" issues than the so-called Blue States. Again, reported by Alternet because the main stream media is too busy covering Republicans preaching values.

Do Republicans preach values because they lack them? From ScienceBlogs. And again.

It's called HYPOCRISY. I for one have a hard time forgiving this sin.