Between Hell and High Water

By Mike Koetting          July 16, 2018

Needless to say, I’m not expert on trade policy. But with the issue at the front of every media report, it is hard to avoid. And equally hard to determine what one’s own position should be. Both political parties find adherents of every view within their party. So even with a souvenir program, it’s pretty hard to guess where someone is going to come down on these issues—let alone whether that position makes sense.

Not knowing much, it seems to me that the logical place to start thinking about trade policy is to ask what a country wants from its trade policy. But even with a simple answer to that question, to help the country obtain maximum benefit from its trade, it doesn’t take long to throw to up one’s hands at the complexity of the thing. It’s more than the obvious fact that in a $20 trillion economy there are millions of moving parts. The whole conceptual base is swampy. Continue reading “A Non-Expert Considers Trade Policy”

                                           By Mike Koetting          July 3, 2018

In preparation for the Fourth of July, the Washington Post recently asked its readers to describe how they identified themselves and what did that mean about being an American. Those seemed like good questions for a Fourth of July post.

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I believe the most fundamental thing about how I identify myself is an idea: All men are created equal. (And, just so there isn’t any question, that means all humans, not just males.) Continue reading “My Identity and America”

  By Mike Koetting        June 24, 2018

It is impossible to write this week about anything other than the family immigration issue.  I am not going to address the issue specifically, others are doing a fine job on that, but try to step back a little. What have we learned from this? Continue reading “Lessons from Family Separation Crisis”

By Mike Koetting      June 12, 2018

The February 5^th issue of this year’s New Yorker included a long article by Rachel Aviv on the question of what constitutes death. The article was organized around the saga of a 13-year old California girl, the victim of a profoundly tragic surgical mishap. She was subsequently declared “brain dead” but her parents refused to accept that verdict and moved her to New Jersey, one of the two states that have laws allowing families to reject the concept of brain death. She remains there, her breathing supported by a ventilator. Continue reading “Science and Defining Life”

By Mike Koetting               June 4, 2018

As I noted in the last blog, I am skeptical that we can save a lot of money at the end of life. If that is our primary goal, I think we are likely to be disappointed—and might well wind up further reducing quality of life. I believe the goal should be improved quality at the end of life without spending more. That may be attainable. Not that I have neat solutions that would readily translate into a compelling legislative program. Rather what I am seeing is two, kind of fuzzy thought clouds, in which various approaches reside. These can be summarized as encouraging different attitudes and more aggressive palliative care. Continue reading “Healthcare & End of Life: Modest Proposals”

By Mike Koetting       May 27, 2018

In virtually every conversation I have about health costs, someone says:  “But isn’t the real problem all the money we spend in the last year of people’s lives?”

Well…sort of…but not exactly.

First, end of life costs do not explain America’s uniquely high healthcare costs. The distribution of American costs by proximity to end of life is no different from other developed countries, if anything lower as a percent of costs. America’s costs are high for other reasons. Continue reading “Healthcare and the End of Life”

By Mike Koetting    May 15, 2018

This post relies more on pictures than words.

While the pattern isn’t perfectly consistent, it is clear enough. The former Confederacy, joined pretty consistently by a band of states up the middle of the country to Canada, Indiana and Arizona have a different set of values than the reminder of the country. (Kansas was a slave state although there were no slaves there, Indiana home to the Ku Klux Klan and Arizona broke away from New Mexico on the idea it would become a slave state.) Wisconsin and a few other Rust Belt states often join them, although their orientations have floated more over time. Continue reading “Is This Really One Country?”

By Mike Koetting      May 6, 2018

Without question, slavery was America’s original sin. But right behind that in the sin category was the Democrats’ 100-year affair with the conservative South. Democrats argued that the alliance allowed them to pass laws, opposed by Northern Republicans, that improved the economic lot of American workers. True—but mostly for white workers and, largely by accident, some black workers who had made their way North. For that, Southern Democrats were allowed to continue their backwards, racist social order at the state level.

Proof of what was important to the Southern Democrats was readily found when Lyndon Johnson and Northern Democrats tried to extend those gains to black workers. The South turned solidly Republican quicker than Richard Nixon could say “states’ rights”.

To be sure, the current cultural wars are not solely about racism and are not limited to the South. But even the most cursory review of the history of post-Civil War America shows that cultural values are deeper than any nominal loyalty to political parties or the policies they ostensibly stand for. The Trump phenomena has proved that again. The vast bulk of the Trump base has no more loyalty to the Republican Party than Dixiecrats had to the Democratic Party. Their loyalty is to a way of life, one that is as unfathomable to me as I presume my way of life is to them. There is no respect in either direction. Continue reading “Politics and the Culture Wars”

                                   By Mike Koetting          April 24, 2018

This post wraps up, at least for now, my on-and-off again posts on what I consider the three most pressing issues facing us—inequality, the environment and the nature of work. Since I think these are the most important issues for our time, I am sure I will return to them. But before I jump to other topics, I wanted to make sure the connections among these three issues were spelled out, especially given the fragmentary way in which I have posted them.

To me, these are not separate issues that can be addressed independently. One of the many reprehensible things about current Republican positions is that they set these issues against each other—attacking environmental standards claiming it is necessary to create jobs, or suggesting that increasing inequality actually creates jobs. Continue reading “All Together Now”

       By Mike Koetting              April 15, 2018

My last post returned to the evolving nature of the labor economy and continued to argue that we needed to change the overall framework in several respects.  This post continues that line of discussion.

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In theory the American economy is at one of its lowest percentages of unemployment in recent years. But there’s an appropriate reluctance to celebrate too much. It doesn’t feel like America is at full employment because we know that simply having a job is no guarantee of making a sustainable wage, that a material number of people have withdrawn from the labor force, and that there are imminent threats to automate or offshore more jobs.

One can think of incremental responses to each of these issues separately but the problem may be more fundamental. Why should we expect that the economic framework that got us to this situation is likely to get us out of these concerns? Continue reading “Planning for Jobs”