The Great Debate

Today’s U.S. Labor Department report on jobs confirms what we’ve known for more than a year: We have entered a new normal for jobs, with marginal gains, marginal losses and higher levels of unemployment becoming the unfortunate norm.

It also confirms that where you live, what you do, what race you are and what level of education you’ve attained profoundly shape your employment prospects. In spite of claims of a youth unemployment crisis and ample anecdotes about a punishing job markets for recent college grads, there is – statistically – no job crisis for the college-educated, with their unemployment rate hovering around 4 percent. That contrasts with the national average of 7.9 percent and an average in the mid-teens for those with a high-school degree. For African Americans of any education level, the rate is 14.3 percent; for Hispanics, 10 percent; for Asian Americans, 4.9 percent. If you live in Nebraska or North Dakota, the jobless rate is less than 4 percent, thanks to robust prices for grains and corn and the oil and gas of the shale revolution. If you live in Oklahoma, Iowa, Minnesota or Kansas, the rate is below 6 percent. But in California, Nevada or New Jersey, it is at or above 10 percent.

Above all, the jobs report confirms that the campaign rhetoric about what the next president and Congress will do to “get jobs moving again” is hollow at best. As the numbers starkly demonstrate, the notion of an evenly distributed national jobs crisis is a fiction. Yet all the vague plans touted by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney treat the challenge of employment in 21st century America as a shared national dilemma. Unemployment is a shared affliction the way Hurricane Sandy is a shared affliction. People who live in the Northeast and Northwest may be linked by common citizenship and a shared sense of community (at least in crisis) but not by equivalent pain and suffering. Same goes for unemployment.

A genuine and realistic set of government promises would first acknowledge that any long-term approach to jobs in America should start with identifying the unemployment problem as what it is: a regional one that affects certain industries and skills and workers much more than others. The reason that hasn’t happened is because our national and state politics for the most part avoid discussing issues such as class, education and race, unless it’s in highly coded fashion. The debate about taxing the wealthy is about as close as America comes to discussing class, and that doesn’t even approach a clear-eyed discussion about who is thriving and who is not. Romney’s dismissal of the 47 percent who receive benefits from the government and pay few taxes is another way of talking about the problem, and not the most constructive.

Even more, the notion that the government can “solve” the jobs problem is a classic example of over-promising and under-delivering. The only way an administration can create 12 million jobs in four years, as Romney has promised, is if the millions now receiving unemployment benefits are turned into government employees, in the style of the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration. You could make a persuasive case for that – after all, if people are being paid not to work, why not instead pay them to work, especially given that many of those unemployed are men ‑ yes, gender plays a role, given that male unemployment is higher ‑ who have construction and heavy labor skills that would be perfectly suited to infrastructure projects that America needs. Given that neither party nor candidate has floated that idea, we are left with the hope that higher growth and better government policies will spur employment.

It’s all in the wording. Throughout this presidential campaign, voters have heard a stream of claims and counterclaims about “entitlements” – payments the federal government makes to individuals.

The power of words to frame political ideas can’t be overemphasized. How we label specific practices and proposals affects the ways we think about them. Decades ago statisticians and economists used a neutral phrase, “transfer payments,” to describe various government disbursements: unemployment assistance, old-age pension support, food for the hungry, disbursements to veterans and federal employees.

By calling these “transfer payments,” they sought to focus on accounting techniques. They wanted to avoid the kind of charged labeling and stigmatization that we see today -‑ which prevents thoughtful discussion of the effects and benefits of these practices.

The issue of inequality doesn’t usually feature in U.S. presidential debates. Compared with those in Europe, Americans are more relaxed about seeing higher pay as the reward for effort and ability.

This time it is different. The Occupy movement reflected the general anger toward Wall Street bankers who raked in millions during the boom years and then got bailed out in the bust that they helped to create. Income inequality has been quietly rising in the United States for almost four decades. President Barack Obama plans to increase taxes on those with high incomes and Governor Mitt Romney is against such “class warfare.”

One of the main differences between the two candidates in this election is whether or not to raise taxes on the rich. But rather than talking about the underlying causes of increased inequality, the presidential candidates have focused on dealing with its consequences, particularly over taxes and welfare.

Is President Barack Obama good for black people?  While Obama heads into Election Day with strong support from black voters, some black intellectuals are pressing that question.

In a reproachful op-ed article in the Sunday New York Times, flanked by a large drawing of a black man literally muzzled by an Obama campaign placard, Columbia professor Fredrick C. Harris proposes that “black elites” and voters have effectively conspired to mute criticism of the president because of his race. This argument is plain wrong.

Obama’s presidency, Harris argues, marks “the decline” of a politics devoted to “challenging racial inequality” — a failure facilitated by black America itself. “Black elites” and black constituencies, Harris asserts, have capitulated to a president who does little for them — simply for the “pride” of “having a black family in the White House.”

Policy and political circles are now both talking about the prospect of comprehensive federal tax reform next year. From Capitol Hill to Wall Street to Main Street, people are asking how this reform will be structured. They should look to states across the country for their model. Many are due to embark on sweeping overhauls, even complete rewrites, of their tax codes in 2013.

Lawmakers in numerous state capitals are now poised to introduce major tax reform when they come back into session early next year. As we’ve seen with other policy matters, reforms that percolate in the states often make their way to Washington. More than half of all state governments are controlled by one political party, so it’s likely that state lawmakers will move far more quickly than the folks on Capitol Hill. What these state legislators do will provide a preview of and parallel the debate in the new Congress.

Consider North Carolina. Republicans took control of the General Assembly in 2010 for the first time since Reconstruction, and next month the Tar Heel State is likely to become the 26th state where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature. The Republican gubernatorial nominee, former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, has said that tax reform will be a top priority if he is elected, which appears likely given his double-digit lead in the latest polls. The state now has one of the nation’s least competitive tax regimes. But based on proposals being discussed at the capitol, North Carolina lawmakers next year could enact one of the boldest and most pro-growth state tax reforms in history.

--Lord Hunt is a Visiting professor at Delft University, and former Director-General of the UK Met Office. The opinions expressed are his own.--

Sandy has been called, by some, the ‘perfect storm’ and the storm of the century’.  But there are reasons to believe that strong storms could be even more dangerous in the future.

Normally, if storms move inland they lose strength rapidly. However, in this case Sandy met a cold front to the North West and high pressure to the North East.  It is because of these interactions that the winds and rain extended over such a wide area; although the storm was downgraded from a hurricane to a post-tropical cyclone just before making landfall, the geographic spread remained around 800-900 miles wide from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes and the Mid-West.  Moreover, some winds remained sustained at around 80 miles per hour.

Every four years, presidential nominees tell voters that this election is the most important of our lifetimes. Such proclamations are largely hyperbole.

In 2012, however, it might be warranted. This election is consequential.

During the next four years, the nation will have to face issues of debt, taxes and fiscal stability that will imprint our grandchildren’s futures and beyond. National and homeland security have received less attention during this election than in the previous few, but they always are an international or national incident away from dominating our consciousness in ways we can’t anticipate.

And issues surrounding inclusion, equality and fairness can’t ever be forgotten for long. Otherwise our essential character as a country — the very essence of the American experiment — will be endangered.

This essay is adapted from On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present, published this month by Liveright.

Alexis de Tocqueville never witnessed an American election. He arrived in May 1831, too late for the election of Andrew Jackson to his first term as president, and left the following spring, too early for the congressional elections of 1832 and Jackson’s re-election. Still, it is impossible not to wonder what America’s most distinguished foreign observer might have made of this year’s presidential campaign – indeed, what he might have made of the entire campaigning season. Some things we can guess would have pleased him and astonished him in about equal measure.

Although he said, unconventionally at the time, that Catholicism was the most suitable religion for a democratic society, he would surely have been surprised to see a Supreme Court with not a single Protestant member, and Catholics in a 7-to-2 majority. The fact of a black president running for re-election would have astonished him even more. Such a thing would have seemed almost incomprehensible to the author of the heartrending chapter on “The Futurity of the Three Races” in the first volume of his masterpiece Democracy in America. Tocqueville saw no future for native Americans, and no solution to the problem of Negro slavery. When he died in 1859, he was full of foreboding about the future of a country visibly hastening to civil war. He was bitterly opposed to slavery in all its manifestations, but like many critics of slavery, from Jefferson to Lincoln, he thought emancipation would leave its beneficiaries unemployable and socially isolated.

By Aaron Maasho

Ethiopia and Eritrea are still at each others’ throats. The two neighbours fought hammer and tongs in sun-baked trenches during a two-year war over a decade ago, before a peace deal ended their World War I-style conflict in 2000. Furious veRed Sea, UNrbal battles, however, have continued to this day.

Yet, amid the blistering rhetoric and scares over a return to war, analysts say the feuding rivals are reluctant to lock horns once again. Neighbouring South Sudan and some Ethiopian politicians are working on plans to bring both sides to the negotiating table.

Asmara has been named, shamed and then slapped with two sets of U.N. sanctions over charges that it was aiding and abetting al Qaeda-linked rebels in lawless Somalia in its proxy war with Ethiopia. However, a panel tasked with monitoring violations of an arms embargo on Somalia said it had no proof of Eritrean support to the Islamist militants in the last year.

The most-quoted line from history’s most dangerous confrontation declares, “We were eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.” Now, with the opening of Robert F. Kennedy’s personal papers on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, there can be no doubt that before Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev blinked, President John F. Kennedy winked.

In the official narrative, Kennedy stood tall, hung tough and stared his opponent down. What this obscures is the critical role that cunning, craft and willingness to compromise played in resolving this crisis.

This narrative has informed — and misinformed — many presidential decisions over the past five decades. In 1964, for example, while choosing to Americanize the war in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “It required great American firmness and good sense — first in Berlin and later in the Cuban Missile Crisis — to turn back [Khrushchev's] threats and actions without war.”