The Rising Tide Sinks Some Boats

For people stuck at the bottom of the heap, the tide is not a welcome sight

Somewhere in this picture are people working (photo ©2021 Weldon Berger)

“A rising tide lifts all boats” has to have been coined by an economist or a land-locked politician. The tide comes in and you’re still in the same boat, only a few feet further off the sea floor; the tide goes out and you’re back where you were. If your yacht or oil tanker was grounded, then you’ve benefited—you can scoot on out to the open sea.

But most of us don’t have a yacht or oil tanker. Some of us don’t even have a dinghy. The tide comes in and we’re bouncing off the bottom trying to grab a breath, praying, if we do that, that some yachts will tear their bottoms out on a reef when the tide goes out.

It’s a stupid aphorism.

Back a few days we linked to and spoke briefly about the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) who calculate what they call the True Rate of Unemployment (TRU). This includes fully unemployed people; people who want to work full time but can’t; and—the critical distinction between Ludwig and the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—people who work but don’t earn a living wage, here calculated at $20,000 for an individual worker.

(The Ludwig of the Institute is an actual living guy, Gene Ludwig, who served as Bill Clinton’s first term Comptroller of the Currency. His CV includes a stint at demon-infested law firm Covington & Burling—whence Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, came and to which he returned from the administration, coddling giant banks and multinational corporations all the while—and other entrepreneurial and millionaire-making stops with which one might not associate a deep concern for lower-income people.)

The formal unemployment rate last month (July 2022, readers of the future) was 3.9%.; LISEP calculated the TRU value as 22.3%.

That’s a huge gap, and the larger number represents more than 35 million members of the labor force struggling to get by, many of whom are potential voters, enough to swing an election if voting in a bloc either way.

For a political party hoping to hold its ground in the midterms, the options with respect to these voters are to write them off; to persuade them that the other guy will do them dirtier; to try gaslighting them into thinking they’re doing fine; or, some combination of the above.

The situation should feel familiar to Democrats, who in 2016 faced a similar one. The nominal unemployment rate on election day was 4.7%, down from around 15% when the recession peaked, and Democrats were in a frenzy of economic triumphalism from the national convention at the end of July almost through election day.

The True Rate of Unemployment as measured by LISEP, though, was 26.4% on that day; the disparity even higher than it is now.

Democrats have consoled themselves since Clinton lost with the notion that Trump voters were motivated solely by greed, racism and misogyny, and that all the talk of economic anxiety was simply exculpatory nonsense.

The truth, though, was that in tandem with the attractions of Trump’s vicious, transgressive brand of populism, a great many people were struggling in the backwash of an agonizingly slow recovery that touched them lightly or not at all, and Democrats seemed not to understand this until very late in the campaign.

They’re suffering from the same triumphalism heading into the midterms, with the unemployment rate having dropped by nearly half to historically low levels since Biden took office, and jobs returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Inflation is taking some of the shine off, but you needn’t look far to find Democrats touting a strong economy, you don’t find anyone official talking about the tens of millions of people functionally excluded from it, and in conversation loyal rank-and-file Democrats enforce from the party line.

The stakes aren’t quite as high for Democrats now as they were in 2016. Even if they were to lose control of both chambers of Congress (which is looking a bit less likely now, thanks to Republican overreach on abortion, and the party’s lunatic, overtly criminal standard-bearer, and Biden discovering his executive powers) they still would have the White House to veto whatever legislative insanity a Republican majority might conjure.

However the midterms go, though, Democrats still have to internalize that some tens of millions of Americans are not doing well, and that if they, Democrats, want to establish themselves as a significant enough majority to get good shit done, as in the New Deal era—which desire, dear reader, is not at all fucking clear—before the country melts or washes away or implodes, these tens of millions have to be persuaded that Democrats have their backs.

(A good start would be to permanently retire “we need a strong Republican party.” They’ve been wrong about everything since the racists mostly switched parties 50 years ago. If we must have one, let it be perpetually in hospice.)

What we most need is a government focused entirely on the needs and prospects of those dwelling in and on the margins of the bottom 25% of our economy—those most affected by economic turmoil, climate disruption, pollution, homelessness and all the varied other ills of our physical and social environment.

Because a rising tide lifts all boats, don’t you know. And the tide rises from the bottom.

(Contributors to this post include Loose Blues, from Bill Evans with Zoot Sims, Jim Hall, Ron Carter and Philly Joe Jones; Encounter! from Pepper Adams with Zoot Sims, Tommy Flanagan, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones; No Gods No Monsters from Garbage; and The Promise from Freestyle Fellowship. Music recommendations are welcome; drop them in the comments if you have some.)