A New Era for the Center-Left
A New Engine for a New Economy
The next point is that going to the global standard of Universal Healthcare means that a great deal of the private capital will need to be moved to another use. Some of that private capital will have to be taxed, but more on that later. The direction that it should be moved in is to electrify the economy in a way that has not been seen before. The current grid is designed for a fossil fuel economy, where large volumes of combustibles - coal, oil, and natural gas - are delivered to power plants which are basically the same design but vary dramatically in how they get the heat to drive a turbine. This includes nuclear power, but it is such an elaborate difference that we will touch on nuclear power later.
The primary work of the power plant is to burn the combustible, heat water into steam, drive a turbine, and which then produces electricity. The turbine is one of the most important tools to deliver electricity and thrust in the current age, for example, it is the turbine that makes jet engine trouble possible. The difference in the energy age that is different from the present is that combustibles have a high density and high throughput per hour, while the electrified economy uses low density and low throughput per hour. This is not a problem but it is a change in the way that we have to think about how energy is extracted from the environment. Fortunately, this is a relatively easy thing to do and the cost per kilowatt/hour has dropped tremendously in both solar and wind.
In the last few years, it is clear that wind and solar have become cheap. The problem is that an energy grid is designed for one-way transmission, from the power plant to the home to a two-way transmission where the homes may have power generations that contribute as well as the home being a consumer.
More importantly, the electrical grid will have to be maintained at a much higher level, meaning that there will be lifetime jobs for those people with the skills to upgrade and maintain the power grid. Given that renewables still constitute less than the majority of the installed power plant applications, that means that not only will there be a surplus, but that surplus should grow.
This also points out a very large problem that the Democratic party must work to solve: the transition from fossil fuel to electrical vehicles. While there will be some items in the transportation fleet that will use gasoline or diesel, these will be specialized. That means that by some fixed date, which needs to be close at hand, the remaining vehicles must be transitioned to electrical vehicle standards. It cannot be allowed to have a choice because that destroys the environment. The environment is essential for everything else that humans do. While the Republican party has gathered Elon Musk who runs Tesla, he is doing what corporate billionaires often do: destroying the brand for his own purposes. The current slippage in Tesla vehicles is only the getting of a long slow descent from profitability.
The working class and the capital class are both happy because there is work to be done and there is a capital investment to be deployed. This means that universal healthcare needs more hands-on workers and fewer record keepers, which we can see from how easy it is to fill other countries than to fight with the overly complex system that has evolved to take profit from people.
The final two problems are interlinked: one is inflation, but not macroinflation but the inflation that affects people on a day-to-day basis. This occurs in two segments: one is the inflationary level of the basic level of food and fuel. Since we already have devoted a considerable amount of time to addressing the fuel problem, which involves a shift from fossil fuels to electrical vehicles as a wedge between the old order and the new, we should take a look at how immediate actions can be used to ameliorate the housing crisis.
The food and fuel crisis is very much centered squarely on the working class because at their level food and fuel are necessities to make money. While the middle-class and above are annoyed by many of the price increases that occurred in the first half of Biden’s presidency, the working class was hit very hard and while the inflation has abated it has not retreated. In other words, the working class is stuck with higher food and fuel bills. This is not a large section of the population, but it is a group. of people who could be counted on voting Democratic because of the economic policies. Their desertion meant either that they stayed home or voted for Trump because he at least promised to do something about it, even if the promises were false from the beginning. Because the Democratic Party offers a contract with the working class violating that contract is lethal to the relationship between the working class and the Democratic Party.
The response to the food and fuel crisis is to make basic food commodities inexpensive. The more expensive items are not as worrisome for the higher-end consumer. Since the American runs the SNAP program additional expenditures on this program are not difficult to engineer, and the other action is to make sure that lower-cost items are available because often it is by increasing the lower-cost items that food stores make additional space for more expensive items. The slotting allowances can be part of taking SNAP benefits so that there are options for the budget-conscious consumer. This can be advertised in areas where there is heavy demand and part of an overall package in particularly hard-hit areas and “food deserts.”
Now let us look at the housing crisis. There are two parts: a rental problem and a home problem. They are both related but are distinct in who is affected by them. One of course is the renters: one can see a bulge up starting in January 2002 and continuing until January 2023. Again it has abated but not retreated and therefore the working class remembers it might well because they pay for it every passing month. It is the gift that keeps on giving but not to the incumbent party, which, last I checked, was the Donks in 2024.
The housing crisis affects a more narrow group of people but makes a tremendous difference in key states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada: these are the people who are buying a starter home or want to move up from a starter home to a final home in large metropolitan districts. The supply of new homes or existing homes is extraordinarily tight because the people who might want to move up above them are not going to move because of the higher interest rates. they would rather pay the lower interest rate than move up. Therefore the person who wants to buy a starter home cannot do so because the owner of the starter home decides to remain in place.
This shows that the building of apartments, condos, and houses, is directly contrary to what will happen with climate change. Simply put, we are building in exactly the wrong areas: places that will get hotter and wetter, and deliberately not building in those places that will be more temperate. However, the rules by which housing construction is done are partially in control of the federal government and of the states. If the private market is going to continue to build in places that will not be tenable even 50 years from now, then be government must take action both at the state and federal levels to prop up the market in those places where climate change is not going to be as much of a problem. Again this is based on the long-term trends which are going to continue as the temperature reaches a likely 3°C in the future. his can be done by subsidizing mortgages, and if necessary by public construction of new homes. This is not the first time that this has happened and is related to the fact that present demand is often related to the past while the future is where the actual demand will from. Essentially we a have housing and urban development department, and we should use the power that it gives us to make people’s lives better.
Similarly, there is a movement among older housing owners to restrict the building of new buildings. This is seen across the country in liberal areas and conservative ones alike and one can see why on an individual basis this can happen: restricting supply increases the value of present houses. However, on the national level, the restricting of supply means there are fewer homes and the portion of income to afford the mortgage goes up. While we must allow the working out of local forces, it is here that they have swung too far toward the homeowner side of the equation, and that leaves the home buyer in a desperate position. That means an equilibrium more toward the post-World War II average needs to be put back into place.
One area in which we need to address is the problem of immigration. The problem that we have is that we attract low-skilled workers, and put up barriers to high-skilled workers. One contributing factor is healthcare: we are backward compared to every other developed nation. This is one of the reasons why Universal Healthcare must be a signature part of the equation: we need to take off the table bankruptcy to medical reasons. Consider that people from the UK are moving to Australia to find better jobs and better living standards. One reason that they do not look at the United States is the healthcare standard which we fail abysmally on. The people making money from allowing death care to replace healthcare is costing us in all sorts of ways and it is time to pull the plug.
However, this is one area where the Biden administration did a fairly persuasive job and some of the commotion over immigration is a deflected anger. This does not mean that immigration of low-skilled workers is not a problem, but the long-term need is for more workers to come to the US to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and to support the aging population.1 Immigration, when looked at statistically, is not a major contributing factor to any of our problems. The jobs that immigrants take are not ones that most native-born citizens will take. This means that there should be adjustments but also to realize that immigration is always a problem and our response to it should vary depending on the situation
The problem of inflation is not a generalized inflation, as it was with Jimmy Carter, but a more narrow one. The result is rather than a Reagan-style sweep of the country, instead, it was just enough to give Trump the presidency. The same is true with the food and fuel crisis: it was enough to convince enough people to stay home or vote for the other alternative. The problem is that all of these factors work against the Democratic Party, and the outlets for the Democratic message were immune to seeing what was there in the Federal Reserve Data. There were some members of the center-left who pointed these things out but they were ignored until the last possible minute and did not materially affect the messaging strategy which Harris ran under. Some still look at the close margin as a sign that the old party should be given another chance. This is mistaken because once a block of voters commits to changing sides there must be a compelling reason to shift back again.
While I am not a large proponent of Marxist economics nor of the Bolshevik Party, during the First World War when the Bolsheviks were still struggling for a formulation of doctrine Lenin tried variations of the slogan: “власть Советам, земля крестьянам, мир народам, хлеб голодным” or “The power to the Soviets, the land to the peasants, the peace to the nations, the bread to the hungry.” Which is condensed to “Peace, Land, and Bread.” Even your enemies can be looked to for powerful phrasing. As we can see Trump promises nothing even peace with our Allies. Something that combines a powerful sense that jobs, homes, and peace are our major parties should be the core of our message to the economic voter.
However, outside the world of campaigning and elections, there is another task that needs to be done: there are gaps in economics, political science, history, and law that need to be addressed within the academic world. Some of these require major reforms to the way institutions are made, but many of them address the inconsistencies that the Orthodox view of social science has adopted and have not checked them for consistency. One of these problems is the level of profitability that a company or other collection of economic interests generates. Throughout the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century, the level of carbon dioxide and other gases that warm the planet has been ignored as a source of losses on the company’s profit statement. Now has been seen to be a faulty definition of the word profit. This means that the entire history of companies has to be restated with the global warming gases factored in. Then it must calculate how much we must spend in order to partially erase the debt.
The losses that occur because of global warming gases have been assumed, but as with many things a company, being a profit-oriented collection of stock, will only do what is absolutely necessary to avoid penalties and since companies are also political actors they will try and reduce the losses below that level. The way we can measure this is actually rather simple: the net positive of temperature over what would be naturally expected is the global debt. Industries make a large share of the debt or pass it on to their customers. Being able to quantify this debt is essential as a political exercise: in fact much of the profits are actually losses that have not yet been declared because of legal barriers rather than actual profit.
This allows us to transition from immediate economic effects to the meso-economics of the deeper level. This means that most discussions focus on the Democratic party's core voters and what they want to see, as opposed to this section, which is about gaining the trust of disaffected voters by making their interests central to the message. It means that we are shifting from the first bucket to the second bucket.
The fourth section will focus on how to engage the committed voter and how to shift back to neutrality regarding the problems that the old party allowed: the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.
In fact, this is why many states want to force women to have a child whether they want to or not so that the supply of low-wage workers will be kept up.