More wealth, less satisfaction

    
     I once belonged to a millenialist religion. The second coming ,we believed ,was just around the corner and soon Christ Himself would rule on Earth. This wasn't some whacky fringe group either. We weren't looking for spaceships or comets to carry us to the promised land ,or living in an isolated desert compound purifying ourselves in preparation for the coming rapture. There was a widespread belief that the world was rotten and getting rottener. That idea is a common thread in all millennialist cults , religious and secular.  If life wasn't getting worse, if the world wasn't descending into ever greater depravity  and suffering, then why pin your hopes on its sudden culmination and speedy redemption? I had a few problems with the doctrines of that church , this was one of them. For whatever reason, I tended to think of the world as a pretty wonderful place and improving all the time. It turns out that my uninformed ,overly positive impression was right all along. I may have been naive but I wasn't deceived. 
    The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook adds further confirmation to my sunny outlook. It's his contention that life in the United States has improved tremendously over the last sixty years. It's been on the same trajectory since colonial times, with occasional hiccups here and there, but always trending upwards. The air is cleaner, rivers and streams are less polluted. The rich have become richer, but then so have every other class. Those in the middle, for instance, have experienced a doubling in income over the last sixty years in inflation adjusted dollars. Not only that but the goods and services available to them far surpass what the nineteen sixties had to offer in quality, convenience, and life enhancement. The author is amazed that the good news isn't getting out there, and so am I. It's not in the interest of politicians or the news media to broadcast it. Power for the political class depends on our believing otherwise, and that's the message the mainstream media is pleased to pass on and amplify. False narratives about the decline of the middle class are inescapable. It's not surprising that many of us believe it.
       What about income inequality? Haven't the rich seen their incomes and buying power increase far faster than the middle class? Easterbrook points out that there are two significant factors at play skewing median household income statistics that need to be taken into account. Immigration accounts for most of the income growth disparity. The United States, from around 1980 until today, has taken in over a million immigrants annually. For most of those years that's been about equal to the rest of the world's nations combined. Most of those immigrants are poor. For many of them the climb out of poverty is a slow process while coping with a strange culture and a difficult language to master. Add in the millions of immigrants who have crossed the border illegally , many of whome are largely uneducated, and you begin to see the situation more clearly.                                                     While immigration is a positive phenomenon, and one of America's greatest sources of strength, in the short term it detracts from the median wealth statistical profile. According to Easterbrook and the studies he sites ,the gap between haves and have-nots is actually shrinking, not growing, once you factor out the non-native born. Another factor is the shrinking size of the American family. While the typical household today contains about 2.6 people, twenty-five years ago the average was 4. Household income may have grown only slightly over that period ( factoring in the drag on that statistic due to high numbers of new immigrants), but remember that wealth is spread out over far fewer people per household today. Taking smaller households into account the rise in wealth per person since 1990 on average is fifty percent. 
       My former religion didn't actually teach that shrinking paychecks were a sign of the coming apocalypse. They looked for societal collapse in other forms. There was even some finger pointing at increasing prosperity as a cause of increasing sin. Here they were on to something. Prosperity is at least a mixed blessing. Even as we have gained in wealth and in other measures of a satisfying and comfortable life we've been losing ground on the happiness index. Suicides are up, drug use and alcohol addiction are rampant, more and more of us suffer bouts of depression. That is the "paradox" that appears in the title of Easterbrook's book. It explores the subject and offers solutions. 
        The question comes up, would you rather be rich or do you prefer to be happy? My answer is always, yes.
        
        

None but the most honest and wise

      No candidate for President has ever been as thoroughly vetted  as Hillary Clinton. Although her enemies have made many false claims against her and she has been the target of numerous investigations from her earliest days in the Whitehouse (as first lady) till now ,she has never been convicted or indicted for anything illegal. This is what you hear from the Clinton campaign when the question of Hillary's numerous scandals comes up. It's mostly true too, well ,apart from that false claims business. Not all the claims against her have proven false. Many have been proven true, some in the strictest " legal" sense of the term, some only true as far as one can reasonably interpret events given the facts at hand. It reminds me of a great line from one of the Adam's Family movies. Gomez  greets his brother ," Fester, you old lady killer". "Yes" a beaming Fester replies ," but never convicted".
     After so many investigations , if the best you can come up with is" but never convicted" you're not making a particularly strong endorsement. That's especially true when these probes and investigations give us a picture of someone who will stop at nothing to get her way. I admire people who are relentless, but relentnessness has a flip side too. There's relentnessness on the wrong path, and there's relentnessness driving you to the wrong means. You can have all the right goals and relentlessly still destroy everything in your path. Having a sense of right and wrong,  a moral sense, makes all the difference. Without scruples you're a danger to everyone around you, especially anyone that gets in the way. Determination alone is neither a virtue nor a vice. There's many a future suicide bomber out there who is wonderfully determined. Determination becomes a virtue only when it's tied to virtuous acts.                                                                                                                                               I refer you to Hillary's first Washington scandal, travelgate. Take a look at what she put Billy Dale through. He was fired from his job and given just minutes to clear his desk and leave the Whitehouse. He was repeatedly and exhaustively investigated by the IRS and FBI. He was brought to court on trumped up charges, defending his innocence at great expense.  His only offensive was to hold a position that Hillary wished to reward to a friend. The charges that came against him were a smokescreen to justify his firing. The first lady instigated the initial firing of Dale and his staff and the cover-up, then lied to a special prosecutor about her role. But she was never convicted. She does have the Clinton knack for getting away with anything, everything, outside the unlikely event of someone having preserved the semen stained blue dress.
        I swear I didn't start today's column with intentions of writing about Hillary Clinton. I thought I'd take a few more whacks at the Donald, maybe make the case for why we can't elect this world class buffoon. Why bother? Everyone should be able to make that case on their own by now, unless they're supporters. That bunch are unreachable. Their minds are made up. As Trump himself has said, he can shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue, and they'd still vote for him. I have no reason to doubt that.
      In 1801, second president, John Adams moved into the Whitehouse. He was the first president to live there. On his first night in that large, lonely,and as yet unfinished presidential palace, he wrote to his wife, Abigail, who was caring after their children in Quincy Massachusetts. At the close of his letter he made a now famous prayer ,or blessing on the new digs. " Before I end my letter I pray that heaven bestow the best of blessings upon this house, and all that hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men rule under this roof." he wrote. It's a wonderful sentiment. My only quibble is with the "rule" part. Presidents don't rule, they don't reign, they preside. It's hard to disagree with the rest. Those we elect to the highest office ought to be honorable, just, fair-minded, not exclusively self serving, honest, and reasonable. They ought to reflect the best our society has to offer. 
      Voting for someone just because we like their style, or what they say, or because of their party affiliation, isn't enough. We have a duty to look beyond their positions and question the carefully cultivated image they try to project. We have a duty to judge their character. 
      In the upcoming presidential election that leaves us with exactly two choices. There's none of the above, and anyone else please.