Why Trump Now?
By Thomas B. Edsall

The economic forces driving this year’s nomination contests have been at work for decades. Why did the dam break now?

The share of the gross national product going to labor as opposed to the share going to capital fell from 68.8 percent in 1970 to 60.7 percent by 2013, according to Loukas Karabarbounis, an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Even more devastating, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 36 percent, from 19.3 million in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2015, while the population increased by 43 percent, from 225 million to 321 million.

The postwar boom, when measured by the purchasing power of the average paycheck, continued into the early 1970s and then abruptly stopped (see the accompanying chart).

In other words, the economic basis for voter anger has been building over forty years. Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes.

First, that year marked the end of net upward mobility. Before 2000, the size of both the lower and middle classes had shrunk, while the percentage of households with inflation-adjusted incomes of $100,000 or more grew. Americans were moving up the ladder.

After 2000, the middle class continued to shrink, but so did the percentage of households making $100,000 or more. The only group to grow larger after 2000 was households with incomes of $35,000 or less. Americans were moving down the ladder. (This downward shift can be seen in the other chart that accompanies this article.)

The second adverse trend is that trade with China, which shot up after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated, according to recent studies. And the costs of trade with China have fallen most harshly on workers on the lower rungs of the income ladder.

In their January 2016 paper, “The China Shock,” David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, economists at M.I.T., the University of Zurich and the University of California-San Diego respectively, found that

If one had to project the impact of China’s momentous economic reform for the U.S. labor market with nothing to go on other than a standard undergraduate economics textbook, one would predict large movements of workers between U.S. tradable industries (say, from apparel and furniture to pharmaceuticals and jet aircraft), limited reallocation of jobs from tradables to non-tradables, and no net impacts on U.S. aggregate employment. The reality of adjustment to the China shock has been far different. Employment has certainly fallen in U.S. industries most exposed to import competition. But so too has overall employment in local labor markets in which these industries were concentrated. Offsetting employment gains either in export-oriented tradables or in non-tradables have, for the most part, failed to materialize.

High wage workers find it relatively easy to adjust and “do not experience an earnings loss,” argue Autor and his colleagues. Low wage workers, in contrast, “suffer large differential earnings loss, as they obtain lower earnings per year both while working at the initial firm and after relocating to new employers.”

This is why Trump’s charge that China has gotten the better of the United States has gained traction.

When I asked Gordon Hanson what factors provoked the populist insurgencies in both parties in this particular election cycle, he emailed back:

The recipe for populism seems pretty clear: take a surge in manufacturing imports from China and continued automation in the US workplace and add a tepid macroeconomy. The result is a combustible stew sure to sour the stomach of party leaders nationwide.

The stew, to continue Hanson’s metaphor, began to boil over with the cataclysmic financial collapse in September 2008, which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street. The collapse and the destruction it left in its wake was, without question, the most important economic and political event in recent years.

“It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,” Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., wrote in reply to my questions. “Once trust in government was destroyed, those that had not benefited from the previous boom years became particularly easy pickings for populist rhetoric.”

On Oct. 3, 2008, Congress enacted, and President Bush signed, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP funds bailed out major investment banks, and were also used, as the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis put it, “to make loans and direct equity investments to select auto industry participants, backstop credit markets, provide a lifeline to the American International Group (AIG) and provide ongoing support for government housing initiatives” – but in addition, TARP insulated the very institutions and executives that caused the collapse and the disastrous recession that followed.

“I don’t think you can underestimate or underemphasize the impact of the bailout,” Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think Washington think tank, told me in an email:

The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.

On Jan. 10, 2010, the Supreme Court granted those in upper income brackets additional privileges in its Citizens United decision (buttressed by subsequent lower court rulings) that allowed wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited political contributions. By opening the door to the creation of Super PACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.

A Bloomberg poll last September found that 78 percent of voters would like to see Citizens United overturned, and this view held across a range of partisan loyalties: Republicans at 80 percent; Democrats at 83; and independents at 71.

In March 2010, two months after Citizens United was decided, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, a program many in the white middle and working classes perceived as reducing their own medical care in order to provide health coverage to the disproportionately minority poor.

By the midterm elections of 2010, voter dissatisfaction among whites found expression in the Tea Party movement, which produced the sweeping defeat of Democrats in competitive congressional districts as well as of moderate and center-right Republicans in primary contests.

Voter anger was directed at two targets — the “undeserving rich” and the “undeserving poor.”

The 2010 election pattern was repeated in the 2014 midterms.

To many of those who cast their ballots in anger in 2010 and 2014, however, it appeared that their votes had not changed anything. Obamacare stayed in place, Wall Street and corporate America grew richer, while the average worker was stuck going nowhere.

Already disillusioned with the Democratic Party, these white voters became convinced that the mainstream of the Republican Party had failed them, not only on economic issues, but on cultural matters as well.

A September 2015 Ipsos survey asked voters if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.” 72 percent of surveyed Republicans concurred, compared to 58 percent of independents and 45 percent of Democrats. Two thirds of Republicans, 62 percent, agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country,” compared to 53 percent of independents and 37 percent of Democrats. Here is one place where Trump’s scathing dismissal of political correctness found fertile ground.

Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, described in blunt terms the consequences of disillusionment with old guard Republicans:

The intersection of inequality driven by real wage/income stagnation and the fact that the folks perceived to have blown the damn economy up not only recovered first, but got government assistance in the form of bailouts to do so. If you’re in the anxious middle and that doesn’t deeply piss you off, you’re an unusually forgiving person.

In these circumstances, Bernstein wrote, the logic supporting the traditional Republican Party fell apart:

The core theme of Republican establishment lore has been to demonize not unregulated finance or trade or inequality, but ‘the other’ – e.g., the immigrant or minority taking your job and claiming unneeded government support. And yet, none of their trickle down, deregulatory agenda helped ameliorate the problem at all. So they lost control.

Just as animosity to Republican power brokers in Washington intensified, the Republican Party began to splinter.

I asked Nathan Persily, a Stanford law professor, “Are party establishments now fictions, no longer able to exercise control?” Persily responded:

This election has demonstrated that there is no Republican Party organization, per se. The Republican Party exists as an array of allied groups, incumbent office holders, media organizations, and funding vehicles (e.g., SuperPACs, 501(c)(4)s, and the like). When people ask why the “establishment” or “the party” has not done anything to stop Trump, it is not exactly clear who they mean.

On Super Tuesday, Donald Trump won a majority of the dozen states that were up for grabs. He collected far more delegates than Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.

If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.

If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.

社會不公日子苦 共和黨員造反

美國共和黨總統初選至今，原本被許多人當成笑話的川普竟遙遙領先。紐約時報專欄作家艾德索（Thomas Edsall）以2000年之後的美國經濟發展和政府作為，剖析「川普現象」為何在此時出現？共和黨基層選民為何造反？

影響這次初選的經濟因素已運作了幾十年，為何現在水壩潰堤？艾德索指出，美國人口在1979到2015年間，從兩億兩千五百萬增加到三億兩千一百萬，製造業工作卻從一千九百卅萬縮減到一千二百卅萬。

戰後持續成長的平均薪資購買力，在1970年初突然停滯。換言之，今年選民憤怒的經濟基礎已累積了40年，而從2000年開始，兩項相關的發展使中產階級和薪水階級情況惡化。

首先，從2000年開始，年收入十萬美元以上的家庭減少，年收入三萬五千美元以下的家庭增多。其次，美國與中國的貿易在2001年底大陸加入世界貿易組織（WTO）後激增，對美國勞工的衝擊超出經濟學家預期，特別是低收入勞工。川普指控中國占了美國便宜的說法因此能打動人心。

2008年9月雷曼兄弟倒閉引發全球金融危機，多數美國人認為肇因於華爾街的貪婪魯莽，他們也發現政府與華爾街的關係。小布希總統在同年10月簽署國會通過的「問題資產救助計畫」，用公帑對大投資銀行紓困，更瓦解了民眾對政府的信任。

艾德索在文中引述學者歐恩斯坦（Norm Ornstein）的觀察：「不能低估紓困的影響。普遍的感覺是華府和華爾街的精英分子共謀紓困引發金融災難的惡棍，而其餘的人失去房子，或看著房價暴跌，或是失去工作，看著貧富差距擴大。」

2010年3月，歐巴馬總統簽署「平價健保法案」，許多白人中產階級和薪水階級覺得，為了提供少數族裔窮人健保，而使他們的醫療保險縮水。

到了2010年期中選舉，不滿的白人選民支持「茶黨」運動候選人，在共和黨初選打敗溫和派，並在兩黨競爭激烈選區大勝民主黨。2014年期中選舉情況類似。但在這兩次選舉以選票表達憤怒的選民，發現他們的選票毫無作用，歐巴馬的健保仍在，華爾街和企業愈來愈有錢，薪水階級仍苦哈哈。

川普成功以選舉語言動員了這批充滿憤怒不滿的選民，但艾德索認為，這股民氣原本可以迫使政治人物正視中產與藍領階級的問題，如今卻受騙，虛耗其能量支持一個沒有能力改善他們生活的候選人。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/opinion/campaign-stops/why-trump-now.html

2016-03-14．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡