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Inequality

Workers

Who Are the Middle Class?
Back in 2008, Barack Obama pledged not to raise taxes on households making less than $250,000 per year (and individuals earning less than $200,000). During his administration, almost none of the tax proposals that have come from the White House have cross

Kevin Cashman, Cherrie Bucknor, Nicole Woo and / February 04, 2016

Article Artículo

Haiti

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Survey: Haitians Overwhelmingly Support Investigation into Election Fraud

Less than three percent of Haitians would have voted in the planned January 24 election, according to a new survey. As political leaders and international officials meet and discuss a way out of Haiti’s current political crisis, the survey sheds light on what the Haitian people would like to see happen.

Released today by the Brazilian Igarape Institute, the report, co-authored by Athena Kolbe and Robert Muggah, shows a tremendous lack of faith in the current electoral process, but indicates that it could be restored if certain actions are taken. Three quarters of all respondents said they would vote if they believed elections were free and fair. Getting there will be the tough part.

“Haitian citizens need to be informed of the process behind every key decision made for the resulting actions to have a chance of being viewed as legitimate,” the authors write. “And ordinary Haitian people need to be confident that their needs, opinions, and votes are driving the democratic process.”

After violent and fraud marred legislative elections in August, many voters were wary about going to the polls in the October presidential elections. 41 percent of respondents indicated they stayed home due to fraud or security concerns. Many also said that there was no point in voting and candidates didn’t care about people like them.

These concerns only increased in anticipation of the planned January 24 election. Only three percent intended to vote, with 68 percent citing “election fraud” as the reason why they would stay home. The election was officially cancelled due to security concerns, but it was this lack of faith in the process that had doomed the election.

Looking forward, respondents identified clear actions that could be taken to restore trust in the electoral process. Asked what needed to be done to restore confidence, the most popular answers involved conducting an independent investigation into fraud and intimidation in previous elections before moving forward. “Respondents, overall, preferred options that excluded Jovenel Moïse from automatic participation in a second round election,” the authors conclude.

Jake Johnston / February 03, 2016

Article Artículo

Haiti

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Why the OAS Quick Count Doesn’t Mean What They Want You to Think it Means

With less than a week left in Haitian President Michel Martelly’s term, and no elected successor to take office, Haiti remains mired in political uncertainty. As negotiations take place over what comes next, one key issue will be whether to go back and investigate the first round results before moving forward.

Many within the international community and the Haitian government are seeking to move forward as quickly as possible with the same two candidates that were scheduled to participate in the January 24 runoff. On the other hand, protesters and many within civil society are advocating a further investigation and verification of the vote.  The Organization of American States (OAS) dispatched a special mission to Haiti yesterday to facilitate dialogue on next steps.

The main argument against further verification has relied on the “quick count” conducted by the OAS on election day that was based on a sample of tally sheets observed from polling centers throughout the country.

The OAS count has been used by others to argue that fraud allegations are overblown. During an OAS council meeting last week on the situation in Haiti, Gerardo de Icaza, the head of the OAS electoral observation department, said the “results published by the CEP [Provisional Electoral Council] agreed with the OAS statistical sample,” and that the organization had conducted three other statistical tests that all showed the same top four candidates.

During an interview in December, State Department Special Coordinator Ken Merten told me that there had not been credible proof of fraud and the U.S. “understanding is that both the U.N. and OAS think the results were close to the quick count.”

Telegraphing why this matters in the current context, the European Union representative, speaking at the same OAS meeting last week, stated the EU’s desire to see the electoral process move forward, “considering the results of the process so far.” In other words, this means moving forward without any verification of the first round results.

But the OAS’s quick count does not mean what they want you to think it means. There are serious concerns about what percentage of the votes cast were legitimate votes but the OAS count sheds no light on this crucial issue.

Jake Johnston / February 01, 2016

Article Artículo

Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and the Experts

I have tremendous respect for Paul Krugman. I also consider him a friend. For these reasons I am not eager to pick a fight with him, but there is something about his criticisms of Bernie Sanders that really bothered me.

In a blog post last week, Krugman told readers:

“As far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.”

While I already had some fun with the idea of Krugman revoking the credentials of everyone who works in these areas who does not back Clinton, the appeal to the authority of the “experts” is more than a bit annoying. The reason is that the “experts” do not have a very good track record of late and still have a long way to go to win back the public’s trust.

To start with the obvious, almost none of the experts saw the 2008 collapse coming. Almost all of them dismissed the idea that there was a housing bubble and even the few that grudgingly acknowledged the possibility of a bubble insisted that it could not have much consequence for the economy.

Given the devastation wreaked by the collapse of this bubble, this failure is comparable to weather forecasters missing Hurricane Katrina. Just to be clear, I don’t mean failing to recognize the full severity of the storm, I mean missing the hurricane altogether and forecasting nothing but blue skies for the day it hit. The public could be forgiven for not wanting to trust future forecasts.

Dean Baker / January 31, 2016

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Understanding the Trump/Sanders Constituencies: Inequality Is Something the Elites Did

John Judis has an interesting piece in Vox on the success so far of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They have garnered the support of large numbers of voters who are disaffected with the agenda pushed by the mainstream in both parties. Judis argues that this agenda, which he alternatively describes as “neo-liberal” or “free market,” has been responsible for the rising economic insecurity of the white middle class. This insecurity has led Republicans to embrace Trump’s nationalistic and often racist agenda as well as Sanders’ openly left-wing agenda of a radically expanded welfare state.

There is an important point that Judis leaves out of his story. The policies that have led to so much upward redistribution were not simply “free market,” they were policies that were designed to redistribute income upward.

Starting with trade, the agreements pushed by presidents from both parties did not subject all areas equally to international competition. They quite explicitly put less-educated workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world by making it as easy as possible to set up factories in Mexico, China, and elsewhere and ship the products without barriers back to the United States. The predicted and actual effect of this sort of trade is to reduce the number of jobs and wages for manufacturing workers. And, by denying workers opportunities in manufacturing, this also puts downward pressure on the wages in the service sectors where former manufacturing workers then looked for jobs.

Real free trade agreements would have made it easier for people in India, China, and elsewhere to train to U.S. standards and then work as doctors, dentists, lawyers and in other highly paid professions in the United States. Instead, the barriers in these professions were largely left in place or even increased.

Driving down the wages of these high-end professionals would have reduced the cost of health care, dental care, and legal services. This raises the real wages of other workers. If the wages of doctors in the United States were reduced to the level of doctors in Europe, it would reduce what we pay our doctors by roughly $100 billion a year. This would be sufficient to add almost $1,000 a year to the paycheck of every worker in the bottom 70 percent of the workforce.

Dean Baker / January 30, 2016