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| Rich Man Poor Woman by Vincent Rodriquez |
Progressivism works! For the upper crust and the professional metrosexual class...
The Holy Places of urbanism such as New York, San Francisco, Washington DC also suffer some of the worst income inequality, and poverty, of any places in the country. (Kotkin)He points out that progressives themselves contribute to John Edwards' Two Americas...
the now triumphant urban gentry have their townhouses and high-rise lofts, but the service workers who do their dirty work have to log their way by bus or car from the vast American banlieues, either in peripheral parts of the city (think of Brooklyn’s impoverished fringes) or the poorer close-in suburbs. This progressive economy works for the well-placed academics, the trustfunders and hedge funders, but produces little opportunity for a better life for the vast majority of the middle and working class.Anyone who goes skiing here in Colorado can see this in the Latte Liberal ski areas. The cooks, janitors and other manual laborers cannot afford to live among the progressive snobocracy who purports to stand up for them, so they are relegated to little shanty towns of huddled together trailers or cramped, run-down apartments far from the sparkling slopes and trendy coffee shops they work at.
(Kotkin)
Kotkin goes on to caution progressives that unless they can deliver a good economy, jobs and upward mobility for the hoi polloi in the hinterlands, they too will be doomed. He notes that middle class and working class people are not moving to the progressive urban meccas, but rather...
... now tend towards low-cost, lower-density regions like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte and Raleigh. Even while voting blue, they seem to be migrating to red places. Once there, one has to doubt whether they are simply biding their time for Oklahoma City to morph into San Francisco.
In this respect, the class issue so cleverly exploited by the President in the election could prove the potential Achilles heel of today’s gentry progressivism. The Obama-Bernanke-Geithner economy has done little to reverse the relative decline of the middle and working class, whose their share of national income have fallen to record lows.
If you don’t work for venture-backed tech firms, coddled, money-for-nearly-free Wall Street or for the government, your income and standard of living has probably declined since the middle of the last decade. (Kotkin)Mr. Kotkin issues a cautionary message, freely admitting that he could be wrong and America could indeed be turning indelibly blue, but all I know is that at some point Democrats are going to have to deliver. I predict that in four years they will still be blaming Bush, but Hope and Change voters, now 30-somethings with new families, won't be buying it anymore.
42 comments:
"Even while voting blue, they seem to be migrating to red places."
That is what drives me crazy. Look what the blue transplants did to once very red Nevada.
Nice try. The sleazy cons wreck the economy and you blame Obama and "progressivism." Thankfully most voters aren't stupid enough to believe such stupid, sleazy shit.
For once can't any of you cons just man up and admit the people you supported in government and in business were crooks who wrecked the economy? No. Not a man among you.
JMJ
Yeah. Right after you admit that the parasites in DC are a dead weight around the economies neck.
Jersey,
Where did Kotkin blame progressives for wrecking the economy? He's saying they haven't delivered on their promises to improve peoples's lot.
You flunked the reading comprehension portion of this test.
But we 'sleazy cons' understand why latte liberals like you get all defensive when stuff like this comes up. Progressivism is becoming increasingly harder to defend as it makes everything progressively worse.
Kinda like the belly-laugh moment when Obama, upon racking up over $5 trillion in debt, suddenly "warns" the GOP about the debt ceiling. You guys crack me up...
This progressive economy works for the well-placed academics, the
trustfunders and hedge funders, but produces little opportunity for a
better life for the vast majority of the middle and working class.
True.
And the cost of higher education, long the path to mobility into the upper classes, has become so expensive that some who work in the service industries are locked in.
I think for HE we have to choose our eliticism: financial or academic. I unapologetically favour the latter. I don't think there's any need nor enough spare wealth for 50% of people do degrees.
Economic refugees from California. I'm told Colorado has the same problem.
"Progressivism is becoming increasingly harder to defend as it makes everything progressively worse."
Not in very blue Massachusetts. Our students just beat not only other US states in math and science scores, but other countries. We've enjoyed much lower unemployment rates over the past 4 years than have other states. 98% of our population has health insurance, [kudos to our former Republican governor] and, as I've stated before, this progressive state has the lowest divorce rate, among the lowest unwed pregnancy rates, and the highest number, as a percentage of its population, of degreed citizens. In 2010, Mass. ranked 25th among all states for combined state and local taxes as a share of state personal income. In 2009, Forbes ranked Massachusetts #8 out of 50 as America’s best states to live in. We’re not perfect, but we sure as hell are not “progressively worse” than other states.
Shaw: Congratulations! I love hearing success stories and I am happy for you and your state.
Now, if President Obama could just make it work in the rest of the country...
I can't wait until demographics catch up with Boston...
But President Obama had nothing to do with the success in Mass., did he. It had to do with state controlled choices in education, health insurance, and taxation. Are you conservatives/libertarians all about state control?
It's not just Boston that's been successful, it's the entire state. Boston, BTW, made Forbes' list of best cities for retirees.
Again, you're lying. Obama did not rack up anything. He inherited the bills and he paid them, something barely any Republicans are willing to do any more - pay bills when they come due, let alone actually respect their Constitutional duty to assure the welfare of the people.
Sure, we could have left millions of unemployed to starve and loose all their homes, the auto industry to fail and millions more go out of work, hundreds of thousands more police, emergency responders and teachers to find work at Walmart or McDonalds if they're lucky, the consumer credit sector to sink millions into bankruptcy, Wall Street and the banks to continue on their merry way to more shenanigans, 50 million Americans to continue to live without regular healthcare of any kind, and so on.
Gee, wouldn't that have been grand!
"Progressivism" has NOTHING to do with the problems we have in America today, and it is the depth of blind ideological idiocy to pretend to observe otherwise.
JMJ
I don't recall a constitutional duty to assure the welfare of the people, only to "...promote the general Welfare...". Not exactly the same thing.
Semantics. The debating tactic of intellectual scoundrels.
JMJ
What parasites? The lobbyists? The politicians who take their bribe money ("free speech" you guys call it, right?)? The Pentagon and it's gaping money hole?
JMJ
Ad Hominem: The debating tactic of those without a legitimate argument regarding the point in question. To wit: an active versus a passive role.
But not because of it's diversity....
Oh wait, that's probably not on the list of judging criteria. Diversity is only important in qualifying for free handouts.
If it weren't for Boston's 152,000 college students, there wouldn't be a single minority in the entire state.
viburnum, try to stay on topic. I know it's hard for you, but intentionally changing the subject to avoid debate is the depth of sleaziness.
JMJ
Notice how everyone who doesn't agree with Jersey is sleazy, or a moron?
Yeah Jersey, that $15 trillion in debt is all the rebublicans' fault (eye roll)
Yes we are, which is why I cheer your success, and again, I congratulate you.
Gee I thought the topic was the failures of Progressivism. Since that is unquestionably rooted in the sort of fallacious understanding of the Constitution, and thereby the role and powers of government, that you display I thought I'd be helpful and point that out to you.
As for sleazy, see above.
Not at all true. Middle Eastern, North African, Chinese, Japanese, La
How was the abuse of the Constitution by Progressives responsible for the costs of the Great Recession?
Explain that to me, please, if you would.
JMJ
Where shall we start? Wilson? Roosevelt? Johnson? Carter? Clinton? Obama? And that's only the progressives on your side of the aisle. We're looking at the result of a century of governance by people who simply refused to believe in a government of limited powers that was neither designed nor intended as a cure for all the worlds ills. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people."
I must say Shaw it is difficult to argue your facts with respect to Massachusetts. Having lived and worked here for 41 years I can say Massachusetts is actually better than i was when I arrived. My two sisters, my youngest son and his wife all have graduate degrees from this state. Three of the four are hard working liberals and the fourth is a hard working conservative school teacher in a liberal state. But since she is a math teacher doing her job well politics ain't so important.
As to RomneyCare. Maybe I'm talking to all the wrong people who have been in the position to use RomneyCare due to various unfortunate circumstances but they ALL say it sucks and those who have been fortunate enough to get off RomneyCare are happy as two pigs in a poke. But at least they had lousy health insurance as opposed to no health insurance at all. I guess that's the point eh?
Personally I think we ought to be spending time devising a better mousetrap that increases employment, reduces healthcare cost by improving physical well being, allowing competition across state lines among healthcare insurers, and capping profits on a service that Americans need when ill or facing life threatening situations. One of the only one I feel this way about.
Now call me a socialist if you like. But before you do you may want to check in with Thomas Paine on that one conservatives.
Counting 100k more students in Cambridge... I think we've got the rest covered. Thanks for playing, though.
Massachusett's diversity program is called a Student Visa
The poorest looking thing about that woman in the picture is her POSTURE. Next would be her grooming. The "rich man on the left is hardly attractive either.
This article by Kotkin is designed primarily to IRRITATE and PROVOKE.
I frankly don't think his Kotkin cares much about the issues on which he expounds.
I know Kurt Silverfiddle is bound to disagree with me, but the underlying tone of the piece is palpably insincere -- to me.
Oh yeah Jersey, take another toke of the hopium pipe because everything you described is entirely the province of sleazy cons. The Pentagon may be gaping money hole the size of 1/3 of the budget, entitlement programs are the gaping money hole that make up the other 2/3rds. Ah...don't that hopium make you feel so good.
Toke, toke, toke
It's hard to see through the blue haze
It's everything inside the beltway...been to western Mass lately? Not the epitome of economic recovery
Evidently, the Green Welfare crowd aren't parasites... Chevy Volts for EVERYONE! Got $40k?
...but don't just take a partisan's word on it...
FT: Joel Kotkin is a very sincere academic. He is also a self-described moderate, or perhaps and old school democrat.
I find people like him and Walter Russell Mead interesting because they follow the facts where they lead them.
Neither of these men is a firebreathing rightwinger or Randite who wants to tear it all down. They want to reform the system.
I too congratulate Massachusetts on all those sterling achievements, but the cynic in me can't help but wonder who did the rating?
Only a question. Please don't regard it as an accusation.
I automatically question the integrity and sincerity of all academics and journalists -- professions I have come to regard as infinitely scurrilous, especially in the theoretical fields.
I realize too that I have an irritating habit of imagining I can "read between the lines," but having been praised many times for demonstrating that capability -- by academics no less -- I have reason to believe there may be some justification for the conceit. ;-)
Facts can only carry us just so far. Without sound instincts and penetrating insight our species would still be swinging from tree to tree no doubt.
There's nothing wrong with 'testing the spirits'
If more citizens approached things with a healthy does or skepticism, we'd be much better off.
Because he is an old school democrat, I believe he, like WRM, is chiding fellow Democrats to open their eyes and change their ways.
Perhaps that is what you were detecting.
Why would you take any comfort from the infinitely scurrilous and insincere academics' evaluations of your powers of judgement -- surely their endorsement should give you doubts if anything? I realise this may have been a deliberate joke, in which case sorry for ruining it!
Lol. Loving this, Jersey pwns and wingnuts spin in their own wind.
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