The 3.257 trillion miles of 2019 was exceeded in 2024 by 5 billion miles, on an average annual basis.
The depression in road travel from the Great Financial Crisis lasted eight years, from 2007 to 2015.
Previous to that we had similar, but smaller contractions in US road travel, from 1979 to 1982, three years, and from 1973 to 1975, two years, precipitated by the oil trade shocks of the Iranian Revolution and the Yom Kippur War respectively.
You are now free to move about the country.
He means libertarians.
Here:
Free-market dogmatists have played a part in the deindustrialisation of the West as well. Consultants and investors pushed businesses to look offshore for virtually every critical production input. Between 2004 and 2017, the US share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 per cent to 10 per cent. Our reliance on Chinese inputs doubled. The trade deficit with China, according to the Economic Policy Institute, has cost as many as 3.7million American jobs since 2000. Overall, the US and the EU have seen their share of value-added manufacturing drop from 65 per cent in the 1960s to barely half that today.
Discussed here by John Fonte:
Unlike in both the Sharon Statement and the National Conservatism Statement of Principles, “transcendent values” and “God” are nowhere to be found in the Freedom Conservatism Statement . . ..
It is no accident that Grover Norquist, Jeb Bush, and mass immigration enthusiasts associated with Koch-funded organizations such as the Niskanen Center and The Bulwark readily signed on to the FreeCon statement. ...
Overall, the share of American imports covered by trade restrictions
increased under Reagan from 8 percent in 1975 to 21 percent by 1984.
This is what happens when you get 1.8 million votes by mail: a record turnout to surpass the 2018 record turnout.
For the first time in four decades, Democrats are waking up to a state in which their party controls the House and Senate – a feat not done since the early 1980s.
More.
It takes a special kind of stupid Republicanism to screw things up this bad: libertarian Republicanism, for which Michigan is famous.
The key: legislation by referendum of the people instead of by representative government; which yielded 1) easy voting by mail, instead of on election day, for which libertarians are all-in, as they are for abortion, immigration, and free-trade, same as Democrats; and 2) "nonpartisan" redistricting.
Michigan was never a conservative state, and is finished as a Republican state.
Michigan has been irretrievably Californicated in the span of four years.
In Michigan, your choices come down to progressive lunatics who think men can become pregnant, or libertarian lunatics who piss down your back and tell you it's rainin'.
-- Jonathan Swift
Regrettably the study does not mention another factor, how free-trade, particularly with China and East Asia generally, helped drive wages in the US at the bottom ever lower. The Reagan era produced a perfect storm of screwed for the bottom half in America.
Here:
From his essay here:
Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.
If you subscribe to ideology qua ideology, you can pretend that what your lyin' eyes are trying to tell you isn't true. And Holloway explicitly embraces the ideological habit of mind which blinds him to our reality:
Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”
Accordingly, he embraces a sharp, ideological distinction between North and South, which is nothing but a caricature, as if neither love of lucre nor racism existed in the North:
Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain.
You will hardly find in American "conservatism" anywhere any rumination on the founding of the colonies as corporations, entities which were explicitly formed for gain for and by the English Crown in cooperation with the Bank of England. That was the whole point of Samuel Johnson's "Taxation No Tyranny", which ridiculed Americans with "Why do we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?", which is the main reason why no one reads it. The American colonists broke the business deal with the Crown, violating their contracts. We responded by gussying up our thefts with lofty bs about freedom and equality and rights. French loans, and the French navy, helped us get away with it.
Tocqueville's antipathy toward the South is an artifact of French affinity for the excesses of those Enlightenment ideas which enjoyed a higher traffic in the American North, but also of immemorial French hatred for England which enjoyed free trade with the American South. He is hardly the guide Holloway makes him out to be.
If there is any commonality left with the French vein in 2020 America, we have seen it in our streets with the violence, destruction, and blood-letting too reminiscent of the excesses of the French Revolution. The difference is that French republicanism sought to literally behead aristocrats, whereas now the rage is explicitly racial, focused on whites.
We have not learned to live with each other as fellow citizens. Cancel culture is everywhere, a euphemism for murder. The triumph of the ideas of BLM will literally mean the death of whitey.
Any conservatism which pretends otherwise isn't worthy of the name.
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| The top marginal rate averaged 70% from 1960, 73% shown is from 1956. The investment data starts in 1960. |
