I’ve just read what must be the tenth think piece about how awful life is for the poor rural Americans – that they had no choice other than to abandon democratic principles and root for a demagogue. I am a proud son of rural Vermont, and having grown up at my family’s farm store, I learned how to identify bullshit at …
The cake is baked, and it comes down to ground game
Here endeth the close watching of the presidential election, and here beginneth the watching of the downticket. ABC News’ latest poll shows a 12% national vote margin between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That tells us, fifteen days out, that there isn’t much left to the story of who wins the presidency; we’re really just wondering if Utah or Georgia …
Job growth and jobless young men under each president
Check out two labor trends in U.S. economics, and then we can talk trends in U.S. politics. Consider the rate of unemployment under each president since Carter. Now let’s look at a labor trend at record levels: young men 19-30 without jobs. It’s fascinating that while there is a cyclical nature to the trend of “great recessions” post-Carter …
The Republican Party is dead, gone, and we already miss it
Four years ago, after Bill O’Reilly race trolled the world by saying that the only reason Mitt Romney didn’t win was that there weren’t enough “traditional Americans,” I set my lilly-white Mayflower-descended butt to writing that nope, y’all got some structural issues and it ain’t a lack of white people. I made a forecast – either the Republican Party strategically …
Garry Trudeau’s 1999 political scenario for a Trump campaign
One powerful technique in futures studies to get people to think about potential scenarios is the “future news headlines” game. For example: 2024: Ireland rolls tanks into London 2020: Cash officially outlawed in the United States 2030: Soylent Citizens program assists with healthcare budget crisis Yeah, the last one is nice and creepy. But that’s the point, to send you …