Glass House (part 3)

April 6, 2017

Previous | Next

The “1% economy”

Brian Alexander’s book Glass House is subtitled “The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town.” Alexander is a journalist, not a macroeconomist, and he doesn’t attempt much analysis of the economy as a whole. Nevertheless, he seems sure that the brand of capitalism we have been practicing lately is largely responsible for Lancaster’s decline.

Alexander suggests that owners and investors have more than one route to profit: “You can increase profits by building value through research and development, creating new products, investing in plants and equipment. But that takes time….Instead, you can also increase company profit by making the same products with the same sales volumes, but cutting expenses.” Which route is chosen dramatically affects people’s lives: “If you were the target company employee, or a small town where that company was located, you might prefer to add value through investment in people, machines, and research and development, for a long-term benefit.”

I didn’t see anywhere in the book where Alexander explained how this choice is affected by the general nature of the “1% economy,” but I’ll offer a few thoughts. Two features of the 21st-century US economy thus far are extreme economic inequality and sluggish economic growth. (Some would say the two are related, although the relationship may not be simple.) The wealthy minority have a lot of capital available to invest. But very weak income growth for the majority limits their ability to spend on new products. Under those conditions, it is not surprising that a lot of capital would go to buy existing enterprises rather than create new ones; nor is it surprising that cost-cutting rather than expansion of production would be a favored route to profit. If this strategy works to make the 1% richer despite hollowing out the middle class, that only reinforces the inequality and sluggish growth, creating a vicious cycle.

Ideological responses

The workers and townspeople who are the victims of economic decline have little knowledge of macroeconomics or high finance. Without understanding the underlying causes, they react to the symptoms they see–the wage concessions, the layoffs, the family instability, the reduced commitment to work, the drug problem and the crime. They try to interpret what they see within a traditional belief system linking hard work, self-reliance, economic success and strong families. If more people are failing, well, that must be due to some mysterious decline in personal responsibility and achievement.

Like many Midwestern small towns, Lancaster, Ohio had always been at least moderately conservative. But as economic conditions deteriorated, “A significant faction within Lancaster lost its moderate conservatism. Stoked by cable news, internet videos, and right-wing politicians, they insisted that most of Lancaster’s problems had to be the natural product of an over-generous social service system that coddled lazy, irresponsible people.” Few stopped to consider what work ethic the high-flying financiers were living by when they made millions off of other people’s misfortunes.

Dependency on government was increasing in two ways: direct assistance through programs like food stamps and Medicaid (whose expansion under Obamacare Ohio chose to implement), and reliance on public money to create jobs. “Medicaid and Medicare supplied over 60 percent of the hospital’s income. The public schools were the second-largest employer in town.” Glass-maker Anchor Hocking had dropped to third. But the increasing dependency was accompanied by denial or resentment.

A certain kind of racism was entangled with popular attitudes toward the needy, but Alexander is careful to qualify it. It was more complicated than a simple prejudice against people who looked and acted different. It was more the resentment of struggling whites against any suggestion that people of color deserved more help than they did, or the idea that one group should have to bear the costs of some other group’s failures. It was easier to direct hostility across racial lines than to identify the shadowy financial interests and economic forces that were really responsible for their problems. “Somebody, they thought, was screwing them out of the good-life lottery. Somebody was screwing them. It just wasn’t who they thought.”

Political fallout

The political leaders of Lancaster and many of its higher-income residents were Republicans. Alexander describes them as having an anti-tax philosophy that kept them from raising the money to maintain the town’s infrastructure and institutions. They also had a “pro-business bias [that] blinded them to how Newell and Cerberus [new owners of the glass company] picked their pockets.”

The blue-collar workers of Lancaster were more likely to vote Democratic, if they voted at all. But they were turned off by the Party’s preoccupation with the rights of minorities like African Americans and gay people.

In 2012, Fairfield County, where Lancaster was located, voted 57% for Romney, although Ohio went narrowly for Obama. In 2016, the county went 60% for Trump, helping turn the state red again.  The great irony here is that by voting for Romney and Trump, the people of Lancaster were casting their lot with the kind of financial wheelers and dealers Alexander holds responsible for the town’s decline.

Donald Trump promised the downwardly mobile workers of towns like Lancaster to “make America great again.” What those workers couldn’t acknowledge was that “buccaneering free-market finance” had done so much to undermine that greatness. It was so much easier to blame “sin, laziness, scientists, immigrants, unions, and any number of other enemies of the American Way.” Trump cleverly combined populist anger with right-wing conservatism. The good manufacturing jobs would come back if the government would defend the borders, make tougher trade deals with other countries, and lighten the tax and regulatory burden on business. Trump shared Romney’s admiration for the wealthy as the job creators. What was missing from his critique was any suggestion that they might be investing the country’s wealth unwisely.

Alexander does not discuss the 2016 election, but I think he would agree that it does not portend a reversal of fortunes for towns like Lancaster. What I fear it does is add a layer of political exploitation to the economic exploitation that has already occurred.

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Steffes

Glass House (part 2)

April 5, 2017

Previous | Next

Yesterday I gave an overview of Brian Alexander’s Glass House, his story of the economic decline of Lancaster, Ohio. Today I will fill in some of the details about the decline of its principal employer, the Anchor Hocking glass company.

First, a word of caution. The financial wheeling and dealing that helped bring down Anchor Hocking is very complicated and sometimes shrouded in secrecy. Alexander is not an economist or CPA, so he has to rely primarily on the stories told by his informants to make sense of it all. What he does have going for him is that he is a good journalist, he digs deep into the information available to him, and he knows the town of Lancaster well, having grown up there himself. Ultimately, we cannot know what would have happened to businesses like Anchor Hocking if they hadn’t been targeted by other companies as sources of quick profits. However, I think Alexander makes a pretty good case that the leveraged buyouts and revolving door of owners did more harm than good.

Newell

The first company to acquire Anchor Hocking in a leveraged buyout (in 1987) was Newell Corporation, a maker of household goods like window shades and hardware. The good news is that Newell’s management “introduced a few needed modern efficiencies and systems that Anchor Hocking had neglected–like data and accounting techniques, order tracking, customer service methods.” They succeeded for a time in making Anchor Hocking more profitable. On the downside, they sold off some parts of the company and eliminated an important segment of Lancaster’s leadership by bringing in outside executives who didn’t reside in the town. They persuaded local authorities to take money away from public schools in order to finance tax breaks. They were also harder on workers, eliminating training opportunities and quickly firing those who didn’t hit performance targets.

The larger problem was that Newell was becoming financially overextended because of its continuing acquisitions. Its merger with Rubbermaid in 1999 “nearly killed the company,” because Rubbermaid was in such bad shape and the deal left Newell with such a debt burden. Newell no longer wanted to put any money into Anchor Hocking for maintenance or improvements. It sold off the company in 2004, one year after getting the tax breaks from the town.

Cerberus

Anchor Hocking’s next owner was the private equity firm Cerberus. Its business was buying and selling companies, not manufacturing as such.  Here things get a little complicated. Cerberus formed a new company, Global Home Products Investors, LLC, to buy Anchor Hocking and two other businesses from Newell. Global Home Products borrowed most of the money it needed to make the buys, meaning that it and not Cerberus bore the cost of the acquisitions. To make things more confusing, it borrowed a lot of the money from a Cerberus affiliate, so that Cerberus made money by lending to GHP, its own creation. That also meant that “Anchor’s cash flow wound up supporting the structure of Global Home Products [and ultimately Cerberus], and because of that it starved.”

Anchor was still profitable, but GHP’s need to get money out without putting much in soon began to hurt the company. Maintenance was neglected; quality suffered; cash flow deteriorated; and the retirement plan was underfunded. After a while Anchor Hocking wasn’t even paying some of its suppliers. In 2007, after only two years in business, Global Home Products filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy proceedings were contentious, but in the end GHP’s lenders got paid, while the pension plan lost millions and retirees lost medical benefits.

“Meanwhile, Cerberus continued to thrive. As of mid-2016, Cerberus was one of the largest private equity firms in the world, with more than $30 billion under management, and [founder and manager] Stephen Feinberg was named as one of Donald Trump’s key economic advisers.” Trump, of course, also knows something about continuing to thrive while taking his acquisitions into bankruptcy.

Monomoy

As a result of GHP’s bankruptcy, Anchor Hocking was sold at auction to the sole bidder, Monomoy Capital Partners. That was an investment fund controlled by the private equity firm Monomoy. As with the Cerberus deal, the purchase was made with mostly borrowed money. The deal was structured so that the debt was incurred by Anchor Hocking rather than by Monomoy.

Monomoy’s intention was to manage Anchor Hocking for a couple of years and then sell it at a profit. Most of what Monomoy did “followed the standard private equity playbook: jawbone the unions, cut costs even at the price of damaging longer-term success, do a sale-leaseback of real property assets, take whatever public money you can get from communities eager to save their industries…and collect fees.” The sale-leaseback occurred when Monomoy sold Anchor Hocking’s distribution center for a quick $23 million, a “shortcut to make the company look profitable, though at the price of a twenty-year lease.”

Before Monomoy could sell Anchor Hocking, the financial crisis intervened, discouraging lending and putting a chill on leveraged buyouts.  Still stuck with a company it didn’t want to keep, Monomoy took cash out in 2009 by resorting to a “dividend recapitalization.” “Monomoy had Anchor Hocking borrow $45 million. Anchor then paid Monomoy Capital Partners, LP, $30.5 million as a dividend.”

In 2012, Monomoy merged Anchor Hocking with Oneida, another troubled company that it owned, naming the combined company EveryWare Global. In 2013, Monomoy sold a minority share of EveryWare Global to a special purpose acquisition company controlled by the Clinton hedge fund. Most of the money for this purchase was also borrowed, and that too became part of EveryWare’s debt. At this point, “EveryWare Global was drowning in over $400 million in liabilities. It possessed just over $100 million in total assets.”

As the excessive debt strained EveryWare’s cash flow, Monomoy threatened to shut down Anchor Hocking unless the union agreed to a deal: Monomoy would give the company a cash infusion of $20 million, but the workers would accept lower wages, an end to company contributions to retirement plans, and higher insurance premiums. The unions accepted the ultimatum in the summer of 2014. Despite those concessions, EveryWare declared bankruptcy in 2015. This time, the lenders took over the company. They appointed a “turnaround board” of bankers and other glass industry outsiders to fix up the company for sale, like a rundown house.

The losses were hardly distributed evenly. Alexander concludes:

From the standpoint of a private equity firm, it was a success. Like a lucky old lady hitting a slot in Reno, Monomoy put a little money in and pulled a wagonload of money out.
….
Monomoy sent what was left of Lancaster’s once-grand, 110-year-old employer into bankruptcy court while it made off with millions and the employees walked their wages and benefits backwards in time. Lancaster’s social contract had been smashed into mean little shards by the slow-motion terrorism of pirate capitalism.

Continued

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Steffes

Glass House

April 4, 2017

Previous | Next

Brian Alexander. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Ask any American why so many manufacturing plants have been closing across the United States, and the answer you will probably get is that they moved to Mexico, or their products couldn’t compete with Chinese imports. Brian Alexander doesn’t deny the role of globalization and foreign competition in the decline of a Midwestern manufacturing town, but he has a different story to tell. It’s a story that is more about the workings of the domestic economy in an era of extreme inequality. Playing a prominent role in this story are private equity firms that buy and sell companies for short-term gain, finding ways to profit even at the expense of the acquired companies themselves and the communities where they are located.

An “all-American town”

The setting for Alexander’s story is Lancaster, Ohio, a manufacturing town that flourished in the decades after World War II. In 1947 it was celebrated by Forbes magazine as the “epitome and apogee of the American free enterprise system” (in Alexander’s words). Its largest employer was the Anchor Hocking glass company, formed by the 1937 merger of Hocking Glass and Anchor Cap and Closure. It was one of the biggest American companies to be located in a small town. “By the late 1960s, it was the world’s leading manufacturer of glass tableware, the second-largest maker of glass containers–beer bottles, baby food jars, coffee jars, liquor bottles–and employed more than five thousand people in Lancaster, a town of about twenty-nine thousand back then.” This was the era when a young man could graduate from high school, join the union, and make good enough money to support a family at a middle-class standard of living. Production and consumption worked together in a virtuous cycle: The workers, who in the 1940s included many returning GIs, “were marrying, setting up house, and having babies. And they needed glass: glass dishes glass tumblers, glass cookware, glass jars.”

Managers and laborers didn’t always see eye to eye, but they lived in the same town, grew up attending the same public schools, made friends across class lines, and shared some civic pride. Wives, who were less likely to be employed, devoted themselves to civic causes for the betterment of the community.  While emphasizing Lancaster’s general harmony and community spirit, Alexander does not overlook the flaws. The small minority of African Americans in town “were treated as barely tolerated guests” and confined to the lowest jobs.

Perils of private equity

By the 1980s, Anchor Hocking was facing some new economic challenges. Aluminum cans and plastic bottles were replacing a lot of glassware. Large discount retailers like Walmart were pushing suppliers to lower prices. Global commerce was increasing, and America’s strong dollar was making imports relatively cheap and exports relatively expensive. Nevertheless, few analysts were ready to give up on the company. Because glassware is breakable and often heavy, it isn’t the easiest product to import. Anchor Hocking also had the advantage of experience and versatility. “No other company made glass using as many different processes, or had as many different products sold to retailers, the food service industry, candlemakers, florists, winemakers, and distillers.”

Anchor Hocking remained profitable, but its declining revenues made it a target for takeover bids. Other companies, especially private equity firms, saw an opportunity to buy Anchor Hocking at a reasonable price, make some changes to boost profitability, and then sell it for a quick gain. In theory, such a takeover could be a win-win for everybody–the firm that makes the acquisition, the investors or lenders who finance it, and the employees of the company acquired. The trouble is that the acquiring firm can arrange things so that it can get more out than it puts in, even if the acquired company continues to do poorly. In fact, the acquiring firm’s quest for short-term profits can actually impede long-term growth and help it do poorly.

Private equity firms have a number of techniques for maximizing gains for themselves while imposing risks and costs on others. They acquire businesses by borrowing other people’s money, but structure the deal so that the debt is carried by the company acquired. Much of that company’s revenue then has to go to debt payments rather than to investments in future performance. New owners looking for quick profits may relentlessly cut costs by cutting wages, skimping on maintenance and training, or underfunding retirement plans. Product quality, worker morale and customer loyalty may suffer.  They may sell off assets and then have the company lease them back, producing a short-term gain at the expense of a longer-term cost. Private equity firms can also charge acquired companies high fees for advising them on what to do. Even if the acquired company has to declare bankruptcy–and Anchor Hocking did it twice–the private equity firm will have taken out more than it put in, leaving any losses to be borne by workers, retirees or other investors.

No wonder that the critics of private equity firms have viewed them as “chain-saw cowboys who slashed employment, cut investment, and shut down marketing and research–all in order to goose the bottom line just long enough to foist a shiny, but hollowed-out and highly indebted, company onto new buyers and then count their money on the helicopter flight from Manhattan to their summer houses in the Hamptons.”

Signs of social decay

By the time a series of new owners had bought and sold Anchor Hocking, the company was a shadow of its former self, with many of its operations shut down or sold off and most of its workers gone. Along with the decline of other manufacturing firms in Lancaster, the impact on the town was devastating. The poverty rate of families with children under five rose to 38 percent, while the percentage of mothers who married the fathers of their babies declined. Department stores that had served the middle class disappeared, and “retailers to the impoverished” like tattoo parlors, dollar stores, pawn shops and payday loan offices proliferated. Loans  for people with shaky finances became more available, but at subprime, exorbitant interest rates that kept people deeply indebted.

More subtle but equally important was the impact on local culture. What Alexander calls “a subculture of immediate, if temporary pleasure” spread at the expense of the traditional culture of work, responsibility and aspirations for the future. Robbed of so many opportunities to produce something of value, more people focused on consuming things, especially pain-killing drugs. The fact that dealing drugs was more lucrative than most of the jobs available to people of limited education fed the supply along with the demand.

As the tax base eroded, and as confidence in government and the future declined, the town spent less on things like schools and good roads. And yet it scraped up money to provide tax breaks for the companies that promised to come in and save local businesses. The top executives of those companies didn’t live in Lancaster and had little stake in the town and its residents. What was left of the local leadership was “incompetent, or just overmatched,” which reinforced the lack of confidence in government. Those residents who did have good jobs were often people who commuted to Columbus and had little time for participation in local affairs.

As for the town’s future, Alexander has this to say:

Lancaster, as a place, would survive; it was too big to dry up like a Texas crossroads bypassed by the interstate. Maybe it would sell scones and coffee to visitors and one day complete a transformation, already well under way, into a Columbus bedroom community with organic delis and rehabilitated loft apartments in the old Essex Wire building. Or maybe it would slide into deeper dysfunction. For sure it could never go back….

Continued

 

 

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Steffes

Repeal and Replace, R.I.P.

March 26, 2017

Previous | Next

Oh, if only the House Speaker hadn’t tried to push through health insurance legislation so quickly, without enough consultation and deliberation. If only the Freedom Caucus had shown a little more flexibility. If only President Trump had sold the bill more effectively, actually understanding and explaining it instead of just declaring it wonderful. Then maybe the outcome would have been different.

Or maybe not. This week’s health care debacle was not just a tactical failure; it was a colossal policy failure. After seven years of riding a wave of popular discontent with Obamacare, Republican leaders presented their alternative, and it promptly bombed. Once the Congressional Budget Office projected how many Americans would be worse off under the plan, popular support for it fell to 17%. What they have probably succeeded in doing is making Obamacare more popular, now that people see how hard it is to improve on it.

The fundamental problem was that “repeal and replace” wasn’t really a very good idea. Although Obamacare did force some people to buy policies for more than they wanted to pay, it helped a larger number buy the insurance they needed. As the number of beneficiaries grew, so did resistance to a simple repeal. Republicans had to claim that they had something better with which to replace the law, and Donald Trump made that claim a centerpiece of his campaign. Trouble is, they never did come up with adequate replacements for the provisions of Obamacare they wanted to get rid of. They were never going to replace the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue they would lose by eliminating the Obamacare taxes; nor were they going to replace over a trillion dollars of insurance subsidies and Medicaid benefits they wanted to cut. The tax credits they offered were better than nothing, but not as good as the  benefits available to most beneficiaries of the existing law. Lower-income, older and rural folks were going to be hurt the worst, making the bill worse for Trump supporters than Clinton supporters.

As a result, the legislation had little appeal. It wasn’t the total repeal that the far right wanted, but it took away too much to please Republican moderates, such as governors whose states benefited from the Medicaid expansion. Democratic support for the bill was practically nonexistent.

For Trump, the defeat on health care represented a massive failure to live up to expectations. After repeatedly promising to make health insurance more affordable for more people, he threw his support behind a bill that did no such thing. He did not demonstrate that he knew or cared exactly what was in the bill, as long as he could undo the Obama administration’s principal domestic achievement. He was even willing to trade away the essential benefits insurance policies must now cover, such as maternity care, in order to pick up a few more votes. In the end, his legendary deal-making skills were no match for a divided Republican Party. Now he tries to make the best of it by rooting for Obamacare to fail, so that the country can blame the Democrats and adopt a Republican alternative, no matter how flawed. Trump even claims that this was his preferred strategy all along. But he got elected by running on “repeal and replace,” not “sit back and let fail.” That’s not the leadership people hoped for. Even worse, the administration may try to sabotage Obamacare by finding ways to discourage people from signing up or insurance companies from participating. That wouldn’t be leadership either, and it would violate the President’s oath to faithfully execute the laws.

The more responsible strategy would now be “retain and repair.” Bring together some reasonable leaders of both parties to identify the weaknesses in the Affordable Care Act and address them specifically. Find some ways to control premiums and deductibles, but don’t fix things that aren’t broken, like the Medicaid expansion.

Somewhat belatedly, Trump has discovered that health care is hard. Maybe we are making it too hard by trying to add in too much profit for insurance companies, on top of the high cost of medical treatment itself. Eventually the US may have to follow other developed countries by insuring everyone through a single-payer, government-run, non-profit system. Premiums could be lower; benefits could be standardized; and people could buy supplemental insurance if they chose, as many do with Medicare. If that’s the direction we ultimately go, then “repeal and replace” may come back to life, but not in a form that conservatives will recognize.

 

 

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Ed Steffes

Let’s Be Honest about Health Insurance

March 16, 2017

Previous | Next

The Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare is turning out to be a tough sell. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that by 2026, 24 million fewer Americans would be covered under the replacement law than under the existing law. Like advertisers making dubious claims about a weak product, advocates for the legislation are doing their best to mislead the public about what it actually does.

One tactic they use is to cherry-pick the CBO numbers, touting the ones they like and ignoring the ones they don’t like. They have no problem accepting the figures on tax reductions and lower deficits, but they hate to accept any evidence of reduced coverage.

This week, Steven Ratner described and refuted ten untruths we have heard from the plan’s defenders. At the top of his list was HHS Secretary Tom Price’s assertion on Meet the Press that “nobody will be worse off financially in the process we are going through.” That would be amazing if it were true, but it is far from the truth.

One reason for Republicans to be less than candid is that they are trying to pretend that the bill fulfills two conflicting promises: the longstanding conservative promise to reduce the federal role in health care, and Donald Trump’s campaign promise to replace Obamacare with something better in terms of coverage and affordability. Fulfilling both would be quite an accomplishment. As it is, the proposed bill addresses the first promise–although not enough to satisfy extreme conservatives–but falls far short on the second. Reduced federal taxing and spending, yes; improved coverage and affordability, no way.

The logic of repeal and replace

We can debate the CBO’s specific numbers, up to a point, but the basic logic of their analysis is inescapable. Repealing Obamacare eliminates the taxes that were raised in order to fund it, and that dramatically reduces federal revenue. In order to avoid increasing the federal deficit, the government must cut health care expenses by at least as much as it loses in revenue. In fact, the bill saves the government money by cutting $337 billion more in expenses (over ten years) than it loses in revenue. That appeals to conservatives because it reduces deficits, and it can also justify further tax cuts later. Conservatives also like the fact that the tax cuts go mainly to people with higher incomes, while the spending cuts affect people with lower incomes. But does anyone really believe that the government can cut health care spending by $1.2 trillion and not hurt anyone?

The two main ways of cutting Obamacare’s spending are to reduce the number of people on Medicaid and to reduce assistance to people buying private insurance. The proposed replacement bill does both. It phases out the expansion of Medicaid to people with incomes a little too high to qualify for traditional Medicaid (incomes between 100% and 138% of the poverty threshold). It also replaces the existing subsidies for private health insurance premiums with tax credits that are worth only half as much, on the average. Because the new plan distributes the benefits differently, some people come out better. But more people come out worse, especially older, low-income people living in rural areas.

Republicans argue that they don’t entirely exclude anyone from coverage, since people can find some kind of plan even if they no longer qualify for Medicaid or no longer can afford their existing insurance. The bill allows insurers to offer plans that cover less of actual costs than Obamacare plans do. The new plans could have lower premiums but also higher deductibles. That is ironic, since the high deductibles of some of the existing plans offered on the insurance exchanges are already a common criticism of Obamacare. The new bill would probably make that problem worse.

The advocates of “repeal and replace” claim that everybody will have “access” to the health insurance market, without addressing the question of whether they can afford to buy what they need in that market. That’s like saying that everybody has access to a grocery store without asking whether they can afford to fill their cart with good food. They can also claim that people will have more “choice”, if that includes the choice to go without insurance, or the choice to buy an inferior plan that lets patients down when they need it.

Seduced and abandoned

Although they refuse to admit it, President Trump and Congressional Republicans seem willing to hurt many of their own supporters, especially with the cuts to Medicaid. The 32 states (including D.C.) that have implemented the expansion of Medicaid include 12 that Trump won: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania. A decline in federal support will impact many people directly, as well as put additional strains on state budgets and health care systems. Many providers in those states have been breathing a sigh of relief because fewer uninsured people have been showing up with acute medical problems. They are not anxious to go back to those bad old days.

Although voting in the 2016 election was very racially polarized, health insurance is not a black or white issue. The people who stand to lose the most from the proposed legislation are people with relatively low incomes but not actually in poverty, since the poorest will continue to qualify for Medicaid. Those affected include a large segment of the working class, whether white, black or Latino. Older and more rural voters, who tended to be Trump supporters, also have more to lose. The thought may cross their mind that they’ve been had.

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Ed Steffes

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »