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Your Salary in 2016
YOUR SALARY IN 2016....Due to the vagaries of print magazine lead times, my swan song at the Washington Monthly is only now hitting newsstands across the globe. It's part of a package called "The Stakes," and the question put to me and a bunch of my fellow contributing editors (that's the title you get when you're a Monthly alum) was how things would change over the next eight years depending on who wins the election. The subjects include China, the courts, healthcare, broadband infrastructure, and all the other wonkiness that the Monthly is famous for. And me? No mushy predictions here, my friends. My focus was on economic fundamentals, and at the end of my piece my conclusion was blunt:
Democrats really are better for the economy than Republicans, and it really does seem to be related to differences in their economic programs. Given that, then, I'll make this prediction: If Barack Obama is elected president, the economy over the next eight years will be better than if John McCain is elected. In fact, I'll go further and put some hard numbers to that prediction. Here they are:
Click the link to get firm dollar figure forecasts for 2016 for both McCain and Obama. Plus an explanation of where they came from. Email it to all your Republican friends!
And if you want to read all the other essays, you can find them here. Enjoy.
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Not much sense in sending this to "Republican friends"...most can't read anything more complicated than a hate e-mail about Obama...
My friends, we will continue to push tax breaks for the wealthy and de-regulation of every industry, despite the fact this course of action has been shown to be an utter and complete failure. And I will fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight and fight and then fight a little more. Fight. Fight. Right? Fight.
Kevin, 4 years ago the monthly asked you to predict what would happen in the 2nd bush administration and you suggested we watch out for the scandals, i wish you could link to it, because it was spot on.
Before Paulson's economic indenture of American households' income there might have been reason for optimism if Obama won the presidency.
I respect Kevin Drum for giving numbers, but the problem is, only one of his experiments will be run in the real world, so we will never have a true scientific test.
Nonetheless, here's my offer: if Obama hits Drum's numbers during his first term (or half of the cumulative numbers), I'll vote for him for re-election. But I expect others to agree that if Obama's numbers are closer to what Drum predicts for McCain, they will vote Republican in 2012.
Let us be clear: the income increases predicted by Drum are real, not nominal.
I was struck by this paragraph in Kevin's article:
Still, not everyone is convinced. Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, said recently that he had not written about Bartels's results before now because he couldn't figure out a "plausible mechanism" that might account for them. But then he went on to draw an intriguing parallel to Alfred Wegener, the German geologist who first proposed the theory of continental drift in 1912 but was roundly ignored during his lifetime. Why? Because even though Wegener had accumulated plenty of evidence in favor of his theory, there was no plausible mechanism to explain it. Continents are big pieces of rock, after all. How can they drift?
So, this is a lot like the difference between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of evolution, eh? Republicans are busy denying any possibility that evolution could be real because it would challenge some cherished faith based belief of theirs. But for Dems the evidence is there and can't be ignored. So Republicans are convinced that raising taxes will always kill off economic growth, but don't rile them by pointing to the numbers after Clinton raised taxes and compare them to the numbers after Bush lowered taxes. Raising the minimum wage will always stifle job creation, right? Don't disturb their fantasy by making them look at job creation figures after Clinton raised the minimum wage in 1996 and make them compare those figures to Bush's record without raising the minimum wage for 7 years.
It is faith based economics versus data based economics. So can anyone tell me why the Republicans keep winning elections?
I hope the Obama campaign is paying attention to this column.
Don't see how anyone can find Kevin's predictions happy news.
With his prediction of annual inflation at 4%, the dollars in wage increase that Kevin gives means that everybody, poor, middle class and rich alike, will have less buying power in 2016 than they have today.
y81, I will make you this promise:
If TRUE, I will never vote for a Republican the rest of my life.
You can make that choice too. You really can. Try it.
Optical weenie, I am pretty sure Drum means his increases to be in real (i.e., inflation adjusted) dollars.
karog, I am not capable of that long-term a commitment.
By 2016 I'll be sitting in the cold sun with Aqualung, my friend.
America may very well be Aqualung by 2016.
"Democrats really are better for the economy than Republicans"
This has been repeatedly debunked. If you lag the figures by two years (which is reasonable) then it's a wash. And this is before factoring in things like the end of the cold war.
Either Kevin is so far in the cocoon that he doesn't know this, or he's lying again.