Dear America,
Let me elaborate a bit on what I said last time, that is, that the Democratic Party has to devise a platform that addresses the fundamental problem of lack of opportunity in America. That is, the Democratic Party must convince the voting public that changing what is wrong is both their intent and a thing that they want to be judged upon accomplishing or failing to accomplish. In my opinion, it will take some kind of formulaic approach to defining and measuring the problem for the Democrats to succeed, and here is my suggestion.
There are two statistical terms, which may be confused with one another, that should be useful: mean and midrange. The mean is the average of a group of things. The midrange is the number at mid-point between the biggest number and the smallest. Just to be clear, statistics provides for lots of other numbers deriving from a group of numbers like the incomes of Americans, but these are the material ones for this purpose. So, if we apply those two statistical factors to the incomes of Americans, they will look something like this. The mean will be something between several billion, and of course, zero, which is as low as income gets (though somehow many rich people manage to earn less than zero in given years). That can be equated with, say, the average income of the American family of four: $55,775 according to the U.S. Census Department. The midrange is the average of the highest income in the nation--let's say Bill Gates' annual yearly income of approximately $11.5 billion--and again, let's say $0, the amount the poorest of us earn though some rich people have fake zero incomes too. Thus, the midrange income is $5.75 billion. Now, compare the mean income to the midrange and you have a disparity of, well let's not be punctilious, a little less than $5.5 billion. Therefore, the Democratic Party's avowed goal should be to bring the difference between the midrange and the mean down by, (let's start with a manageable number) say, a mere $10,000 dollars. One way in which that could be accomplished would be by taking a commensurate amount from Bill Gates, but he would still be obscenely rich, and no one else would be any better off. In the alternative, we could bring the average income, that is the mean, up by $10,000: not an easy task. But bringing the disparity between the midrange and the mean down by $10,000 does seems feasible. You could give more money to the lowest on the income ladder, but in general to all those below the midrange, but with emphasis on helping those with lower rather than higher incomes. You could increase the minimum wage, for example. And with regard to bringing down those at the top so that they are closer to those at the bottom, you could also increase the tax rate for those in the top brackets while reducing it in the middle and the bottom of the range. And there are lots of other things that could be done too, but the goal has to be to reduce the gap between the midrange and the bottom so that it looks more like the gap between the midrange and the top, even if only a little. That's a way to measure the progress of the Democrats in achieving their goal of leveling out the peaks and valleys in our income range. And that's how they should explain the Democratic platform to the American people.
Of course, it could be made simpler in the end, but the point that has to be made is that the Democrats' goal is to decrease the disparity between super high earners and super low earners to...decrease the number of both, and increase the number of members of the vaunted middle class. That's how the Democrats could make their point graphically, so that everyone could understand what is going on in practical terms; a couple of simple numbers should make all the difference.
Of course there were other issues in this past campaign, most of them canards created by Donald Trimp's go-to phrase that sufficed for his constituents as proof of his point: "believe me" (it has to be uttered twice to be considered probative, as in "believe me, folks, believe me"). The defense against that kind of demagoguery is again, numbers. For example, a Trumper recently said to me that in order for our elections to be fair, we have to close our southern border...apparently the problem is only Mexicans, not Canadians. The reason, he opined, is that Mexicans are illegally crossing the border and when they do, they vote Democrat, and he reached this conclusion in spite of the fact that the consensus is that voter fraud is not a problem of any significance in our elections. I need not get into the fact that an illegal resident isn't likely to risk drawing attention to himself by trying to vote. Rationality has nothing to do with these things, which is where numbers come in. But rationality in elections is a topic for another time. For now, lets just focus on distilling the most salient issue--income inequality--into irrefutable form...numbers.
Your friend,
Mike
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