Donald Trump’s Briefing Book: Economic insecurity

About this series

By these basic measures, the U.S. economy is doing excellent.

Yet most Americans say the U.S. economy is worsening. In Gallup’s polling, for instance, 58 percent say the economy is getting worse, while only 38 percent say it’s improving. The unexpected successes of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fruits of these economic concerns. And if you drill deeper into the numbers, the economic insecurity isn’t made up.

Being out of work for half a year can be disastrous. It destroys family savings and piles up debt. It causes depression and the erosion of skills. It poisons your resume. The long-term unemployed, defined as being out of work and looking for work for 27 weeks or more, make up a third of all unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data in late 2014.

That percentage is falling from its 2010 highs, but it is still way higher than in the recent past. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the long-term unemployed were less than 20 percent of the unemployed, on average. Over the past five years, the average has been nearly 40 percent.

Working-age men are even dropping out of the labor force altogether. For men between the ages of 25-54, labor-force participation has fallen from 94 percent in 1990 to about 88 percent today. Put another way, the portion of working-age men neither working nor seeking work has doubled in 25 years.

So, while the economy looks good for many Americans, for those facing difficulty, it looks more treacherous than ever.

Divide the country up by region, and you see the divide even more clearly: The Northeast and the West are pulling away from the South and the Midwest.

The long-term unemployed, defined as being out of work and looking for work for 27 weeks or more, make up a third of all unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (AP Photo)

In 1975, the Midwest as a region had the highest median weekly earnings, at $50,325 in 2014 dollars according to the Census Bureau. That was 6.6 percent higher than the national average. Today, the Midwest has fallen to a distant third place out of the four regions, well behind the West and the Northeast, and below the national average in most of the past five years.

One reason: New businesses, the dominant source of jobs, don’t pop up outside of a handful of major cities, mostly on the coasts.

Median wages fell in 80 percent of the metropolitan areas examined in a recent Pew study.

The divergence is also evident if you divide the country by class. The highly educated and relatively wealthy are doing fine and improving. The less educated are doing far worse than their counterparts a generation ago.

For instance, the 80th percentile of earners, which is the upper-middle class, earns about the same today as the 80th percentile earned in 1999, and this group has seen its income grow significantly in the past four years.

The 60th percentile, the just-above middle class, earns about 4.7 percent less than in 1999, but the general trajectory since 2010 is upward.

Look at the working class, the 40th percentile, and it’s a lot uglier. Incomes are 10 percent lower for this cohort than for their counterparts in 1999, and over the past few years, the trend is flat.

The median adult over 25 with a high school degree but no college experience earned $41,427 in 2014. Adjust it for inflation, and that’s an 18 percent decline since 1999. Those with some college but no degree have seen an even greater decline, falling 19 percent since the peak in 1999. That’s more than twice the drop of those who have a bachelor’s degree or more.

Those who didn’t finish high school are more likely to be unemployed than to be employed.

Huge portions of the population are doing poorly without much hope, and a bigger chunk is scraping by with trepidation for the future. Ignoring them is morally unacceptable and politically suicidal.

Democrats find it easy to throw popular but unwise policies at them — such as a higher minimum wage or promises of subsidized green jobs. Trump promises to bring back the golden days of the 1960s, with high-paying factory jobs, once the tariffs and border walls are in place.

What conservative policies could help the economically vulnerable in the age of Trump?

Manufacturing

For the working class, it looks like high-paying manufacturing jobs go overseas, and low-wage jobs take their place. (AP Photo)

“We don’t win at trade,” Trump says. “China, everybody, Japan, Mexico, Vietnam, India, name the country. Anybody we do business with beats us. We don’t win at trade.”

This is one of his most popular arguments, and one of his biggest clashes with GOP orthodoxy. Free trade has shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, leaving the American worker in the lurch, Trump argues.

It’s true that manufacturing jobs are drying up. In World War II, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. workforce was in manufacturing. The percentage hovered just below one third for nearly a decade, and then after 1954, it began a steady, six-decade drop.

Just over 11 million Americans worked in manufacturing in 2014, according to Census data. Go back a decade and the number was 13 million. In 1994, before the North American Free Trade Agreement, 17 million Americans worked in manufacturing. That’s 6 million manufacturing jobs lost, more than one in three, in 20 years, while the population grew by 20 percent.

And Trump’s account isn’t totally false. Mexico, China and Japan are gaining these factories.

General Electric used to make its refrigerators in Indiana. Now it makes them in Mexico. Ford Motors announced in April it was moving 2,800 jobs from Detroit to Mexico. Carrier recently announced massive layoffs in Indianapolis in order to move jobs down to Mexico. This has been the pattern.

It’s easy for free traders to describe the manufacturing job loss as a simple shift: Cheaper manufacturing means cheaper goods, leaving consumers with more disposable income which they use to hire services performed, in the abstract at least, by the former factory workers or their kin.

But the shift isn’t so pleasant for the less educated and less skilled. Manufacturing jobs in general were unusually good jobs. So for the working class, it looks like high-paying manufacturing jobs go overseas, and low-wage jobs take their place.

Jeff Mason, a dad from near Charlotte, N.C., said at a Trump rally last year, “I’m tired of getting shafted and not making good money.” Mason delivers groceries for about $12.50 an hour. “What happened to the 20-dollar-an-hour jobs? They’re gone … They ship it over to China, overseas, India.”

The departing Carrier plant in Indianapolis pays workers $20 an hour. The old GE fridge factory in Bloomington paid around $22 or $24 hourly. With a little bit of overtime, that’s $50,000 a year, not bad at all for a high-school graduate living in a lower-cost area such as upstate New York, or downstate Illinois.

The shuttered GE lightbulb factory in Winchester, Va., paid comparably, but GE now makes its incandescent bulbs in Poland and Mexico. Robert Pifer, a laid-off Winchester worker, said the remaining jobs he could find paid half as much.

“I live paycheck to paycheck,” Pifer said when he learned in 2009 of the impending layoffs. He was raising his son in a house he owned. “So what am I going to do when I’m earning $11 an hour?”

Trump’s solution is simple, simplistic in fact.

“I’m going to bring jobs back,” Trump says. “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China.”

To this end, Trump has advocated tariffs as high as 45 percent in order to drag manufacturers back here. He’ll threaten companies that try to move jobs overseas. “With me,” he said, “there will be consequences if you move, and the consequences will be severe.”

Manufacturing output in the U.S. has grown over the past 50 years. But as a share of employment, manufacturing jobs have fallen from one in four in 1960 to less than one in 10 in 2014. (AP Photo)

Here’s the thing serious policymakers need to consider though: Even if globalization deserves the blame for the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs, that doesn’t mean protectionism will bring the jobs back or help the working class.

Blaming trade ignores the real rival to U.S. manufacturing jobs today: the automation of U.S. manufacturing.

Manufacturing output in the U.S. has grown over the past 50 years at the same pace as the rest of the economy. In other words, manufacturing has accounted for the same portion (about one-seventh or one-eighth) of GDP consistently since the 1960s, as it does today.

But as a share of employment, manufacturing jobs have fallen from one in four in 1960 to less than one in 10 in 2014. Manufacturing jobs historically have been perfect for low-skilled workers because the duties are repetitive and simple.

As robots and machines have become smarter, they have been able to replace many humans in factories. Put another way: One worker can make a lot more stuff today than he could 20 years ago, because he’s working with better machines and more efficient systems.

An American manufacturing employee’s productivity has nearly doubled since 1998, according to a recent Ball State study, and it has more than doubled in the manufacture of durable goods. For instance, production per worker grew by 121 percent in the automobile and boats industry.

The study found, “Almost 88 percent of job losses in manufacturing in recent years can be attributable to productivity growth, and the long-term changes to manufacturing employment are mostly linked to the productivity of American factories.”

If protective tariffs did bring factories back to the U.S., many factories would be quiet, robot-filled factories. Unless we ban robots, protectionism won’t prove effective at restoring manufacturing jobs.

Tariffs would impose economic costs that could harm the working class, too. Higher tariffs mean more expensive consumer goods, which would disproportionately hurt the middle and working classes. Also, about half of all inputs into U.S. manufacturing, such as parts that automotive factories will use, are imported. Tariffs will hurt U.S. manufacturing by making their inputs more expensive.

Trump’s tariffs would also violate the rules of the World Trade Organization, and would trigger retaliation by China and other WTO members. These other countries would impose tariffs on U.S.-made goods, thus hurting U.S. exporters.

Trump’s solutions are questionable, but his diagnosis of the problem can’t be ignored. It’s too easy for conservatives and free-marketeers to focus intently on the truth, accepted by economists across the ideological spectrum, that free trade helps the U.S. economy.

Yet for the hundreds of millions of American winners from free trade, there are losers, people whose losses in wages and employment are bigger than their gains in cheaper goods.

The Trump phenomenon shows that conservatives can’t ignore this anymore. Trade isn’t the only root of working-class stagnation.

Immigration as a jobs issue

In effect, U.S. employers get to import workers who lack the possibility of mobility that domestic workers enjoy. If a guest worker gets fired, his visa is pulled. (AP Photo)

In Trump’s account, not only is Mexico stealing our jobs through NAFTA, it is also sending job thieves across the Rio Grande to steal our jobs in our backyards.

“I’m a Trump supporter because I agree that mass immigration, both legal and illegal, has been a detriment to the average American citizen,” Bob Garrett Jr. said at a Trump rally in upstate South Carolina. “There’s a flood of people, and a minimum amount of jobs,” he argued, resulting in “lower wages.”

Critics of the GOP establishment have a point when they say the party’s favored policies serve the elites at the expense of the average Joe. Many of the ideas in Republicans’ various “comprehensive immigration reform” bills and some current immigration laws have no place in conservative agenda, unless “conservative” is twisted to mean simply “pro-business.”

Mainly, the U.S. has a program that is a laser-guided missile aimed at reducing working-class wages in some industries. It’s called the H-2B visa, or the low-skilled guest-worker program.

In effect, U.S. employers get to import workers who lack the possibility of mobility that domestic workers enjoy. If a guest worker gets fired, his visa is pulled. This isn’t a free market in labor. It’s a rigged game, rigged in favor of employers and against workers.

A policy simultaneously pro-market and populist would be abolition of the H-2B visa program and possibly its agricultural counterpart, the H-2A visa.

Rather than a complex reform of the programs, as the 2013 immigration bill attempted, Congress could pair abolition of guest-worker visas with an increase in immigrant visas, thus opening the door wider for those who want to become Americans while helping those workers already here.

Regulation

Republicans have been consistent throughout the years in railing against “job-killing regulations.” These days, that agenda is as important as ever. But there’s a difference (which Republicans sometimes miss) between the regulations most hated by the business lobby and the regulations that cost the most jobs and hurt the middle and working class the most.

For a regulatory reform agenda to address economic uncertainty, lawmakers would need to shift their focus from the Chamber of Commerce’s wishlist to those rules that most directly prevent hiring and hold down wages.

The Institute for Justice found in a recent study that a worker today is 15 times as likely to need a license as his or her counterpart was a few decades ago. (AP Photo)

Occupational licensing would be a good place to start.

Governments reasonably require licenses for certain occupations. You cannot fly a passenger jet without a pilot’s license. You cannot call yourself a doctor and set up a heart-surgery clinic without a medial license.

But floristry? Hair-braiding? In dozens of industries, local and state governments require licenses that pose huge barriers to entry and work, while serving no valid public purpose. These licensing laws often exist simply to protect existing businesses from competition.

Occupational licensing is growing as a burden on would-be entrepreneurs. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that has fought these requirements in many states and industries, found in a recent study that a worker today is 15 times as likely to need a license as his or her counterpart was a few decades ago.

“In the 1950s,” the IJ study found, “only one in 20 U.S. workers needed the government’s permission to pursue their chosen occupation. Today, that figure stands at almost one in three.”

Sometimes these are small matters. You pay a $100 licensing fee, fill out a couple of forms, and you’re fine. Sometimes the burdens are huge. IJ studied 102 lower-income occupations and found “thirty-five occupations require more than a year of education and training … and another 32 require three-nine months.”

If Republicans want to battle “job-killing regulations,” they should look at these occupational licensing requirements, which go after the ability of the poor and the middle class to go into business for themselves.

Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Henry Ford are the typical Republican models for entrepreneurship, but the party should probably focus more on the story of Melony Armstrong.

Melony is an African-American woman who lives in Tupelo, Miss. A few years ago, after getting her hair braided at a beauty salon, Melony had a business idea: She wanted to launch a salon that only braided hair. She had grown up with her mother braiding her hair on Saturday nights, and she saw nobody else in town specialized in this traditional hairstyling.

So Melony traveled to Georgia and took a two-day course from a master hair-braider. Then Melony spent months practicing on a mannequin.

Then she went to figure out what paperwork the local and state governments required for her to launch her business. That’s when she hit the brick wall. Mississippi wouldn’t let her braid hair for customers until she completed a 2,000-hour course in cosmetology — basically a full-time job for a year.

She would also have to pass a test and pay $10,000 for the privilege. The kicker: Neither the cosmetology class nor the cosmetology exam had anything to do with hair-braiding, a practice that doesn’t involve chemicals, flames or even scissors.

Melony, her husband and IJ took to the courts and to the state legislature to fix the law requiring her to pass a test and pay $10,000 to open a business. (AP Photo)

So Melony, her husband and IJ took to the courts and to the state legislature to fix this law. The incumbent beauty parlors pushed back. They didn’t want low-priced competition for a service they also offered.

Melony won in the long run. She opened her salon and hired a staff. She even launched a training academy of her own. But Melony isn’t the story here.

Just as there aren’t hundreds of Steve Jobses and Mark Zuckerbergs with billion-dollar ideas, there are only so many Melony Armstrongs with such determination and security (her husband’s job provided her the stability from which to wage her lobbying and legal fight). The real story here is the two dozen women Melony has employed, and even more the 100-plus women she has trained.

When Republicans say “entrepreneur,” they sometimes think only of those like Melony who can innovate and expand and change the way a business is done. But a woman who learns hair-braiding so she can spend her evenings on her front porch making a second income by providing a service to her neighbors — she deserves the label, too.

The florist, the toymaker, the guy with a lawnmower and a weed-whacker, or the Mexican immigrant who wants to sell tacos from a cart, they’re entrepreneurs, too. These are the economically vulnerable people who are most likely to be kept down by regulations.

For instance, all states have “scope of practice” laws for medicine, which reserve certain procedures and tests for doctors alone, or for nurses and physician assistants under the supervision of doctors. These laws vary widely from state to state. In some states they are reasonable. In many states, the scope-of-practice laws go way too far, and effectively ban nurses from going into private practice.

Nurses hail disproportionately from economically vulnerable demographics. More than 90 percent of nurses in the U.S. are women. Newly minted nurses are disproportionately racial minorities. About 45 percent of nurses don’t have a bachelor’s degree, and their associates’ degree in nursing is their first degree, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Making it easier for these people to work, and even work for themselves and start their own businesses, is the best way to put a limited-government agenda to work for those most vulnerable economically. Most of this work will be done on the state and local level, repealing the onerous protectionist regulations such as the type Melony Armstrong battled.

Making it easier for these people to work is the best way to put a limited-government agenda to work for those most vulnerable economically. (AP Photo)

If national Republicans made it their platform to roll back and reform these rules, it could give a jolt to the 31 states where the GOP controls the legislature. The two states that regulate the low-income industries the most, Louisiana and Arizona, both have GOP legislatures, as do six of the eight most regulated, according to data from the Institute for Justice.

For federal lawmakers, there is parallel work to do. Federal toy-safety laws, for instance, impose huge regulatory barriers before the hand-making of children’s toys, clothes or furniture.

USDA rules made for factory farms and massive meatpackers are inapt for smaller producers and retailers, and create barriers to entry. Congress could also relieve the local and state red tape by passing laws to increase reciprocity, the ability for a professional to carry a license across state lines.

Fighting for these workers means fighting against the entrenched business interests. That hasn’t always been easy for Republicans, who tend to see their roles as being the champions of industry.

Low wages

Democrats, as is their election-year tradition, are pushing federal legislation and regulations they argue will raise working-class wages.

Bernie Sanders has signed onto the national campaign for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, while Hillary Clinton and most Senate Democrats argue for a $12 minimum wage. Current federal minimum wage is $7.25, but most workers live in states with higher minimums.

While politically a winner, since overwhelming majorities of Americans support a big hike in the minimum wage, this is an economically treacherous path. Increasing the minimum wage, many economists argue, leads to layoffs.

About half a million people would be laid off if Congress increased the minimum wage to $10.10, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2014. That’s equal to about 20 percent of the people who earn minimum wage.

At the same time, about 16 million workers would see pay hikes under this smaller adjustment. A $12 minimum wage would result in even more layoffs. A higher minimum wage has the same problems as protectionism; it will just make more jobs for robots.

It’s telling that some of the employers banging the drum most loudly for a higher federal minimum wage are also the employers turning most aggressively toward automation.

A predicted hike in the minimum wage is “one of the reasons, quite frankly” that Panera is pursuing “our digital capabilities,” Panera CEO Ron Schaich said in a quarterly earnings call.

Ron Shaich, CEO of Panera and an Obama supporter, has called for a higher minimum wage. Simultaneously, Shaich is aggressively pursuing the robotification of Panera. He calls it Panera 2.0.

A predicted hike in the minimum wage is “one of the reasons, quite frankly” that Panera is pursuing “our digital capabilities,” Schaich said in a quarterly earnings call recently.

“Labor is going to go down, and as digital utilization goes up, and like the sun comes up in the morning, it is going to continue to go up, digital utilization, much as you are seeing it happen in Panera today, as it happened, it’s going to benefit larger organizations like Panera, who already have the technology in place.”

If you’re a big business intent on replacing workers with technology, a higher minimum wage is good. If you’re a small businessman who can’t afford the machines, or the half-million workers laid off because your job is now illegal, this isn’t such a sweet deal.

Democrats’ other election-year “pay-hike” policy is Obama’s recent overtime rule. In short, employers of many salaried workers making under $47,500 will be required to pay time-and-a-half overtime any time they go over 40 hours per week. The administration said this covers 4.2 million workers.

This has the same problems as minimum-wage hikes: Raising the cost of employing someone decreases how much companies will employ people.

Industry officials object that this will force companies to trim hours and salaries of these low-to-moderate-income workers. As Labor Secretary Thomas Perez put it, “Some people are going to get more money. Some people are going to get more time off. Everybody will get clarity.”

Democrats’ seem pretty OK with policies that give people “more time off” with less pay. This time off may come via layoffs caused by a higher minimum wage, or hours trimmed to avoid Obamacare’s rules on full-time employees, or hours trimmed to avoid the new overtime rules.

“For its advocates,” Washington Post writer Lydia DePillis wrote of the $15-minimum-wage movement, “the question isn’t whether minimum wage hikes will kill jobs, but rather how to help people who end up unemployed when they do.”

“What’s so bad about getting rid of crappy jobs,” asked liberal professor David Howell, “forcing employers to upgrade and having a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed by that?”

Conservatives reject this approach. Putting people out of work and onto welfare is bad, because work is good in itself. Besides a wage, working gives people dignity, purpose and personal growth. Policies that discourage work always carry the risk of imposing moral harm.

But it’s just reality that some people who work don’t make enough to feed their families. Flattening of low-skilled wages exacerbates that. So a conservative agenda would appreciate what’s under-appreciated on the Left — economic realities and the personal importance of work — to address problems under-appreciated on the Right.

Any conservative averse to expanding tax credits could look to more straightforward tax cuts. One problem: Republicans are running out of taxes to cut, except for taxes on the wealthy. (AP Photo)

Republican presidents had in mind such considerations, such as averting the work disincentives in many welfare programs but providing a cushion for low-income people, when they created the Earned Income Tax Credit in 1970s and expanded it in the 1980s.

These days, with a few decades of experience, and a changing economic landscape, conservatives could respond to Dems’ job-killing labor rules by reforming and expanding the EITC.

The EITC is tilted toward parents, which has a definite rationale. But these days, many working-class men and women are unable to even start a family because of their low wages. House Speaker Paul Ryan has proposed doubling the benefit, up to a maximum of $1,000 a year, for low-income childless workers.

Any conservative averse to expanding tax credits could look to more straightforward tax cuts. One problem: Republicans are running out of taxes to cut, except for taxes on the wealthy.

Over the decades, Congress has aggressively cut lower rates and knocked people off the tax rolls altogether through expanded deductions, credits and exemptions. The result, as Mitt Romney famously pointed out, is about 47 percent of U.S. adults owing zero dollars in federal income tax.

Some Republicans find it problematic that so many Americans “have no skin in the game,” as former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal put it in 2015 during his presidential run.

But the Jindal-Romney argument, that being free of income tax makes one more open to big government, is totally unproven. Workers making $30,000-$50,000 in 2012 dollars voted 55 percent for Democrats in both 2000 and 2008, according to exit polls.

Republicans could help the working class by cutting the taxes they still pay: the payroll tax. Medicaid and Social Security taxes take 6 percent of every dollar a worker earns. Before he or she’s able to pay rent and buy groceries, a low-income American worker is paying into the retirement of Warren Buffett.

A bipartisan Congress and Obama gave all Americans a payroll tax cut of 2 percentage points for 2011. For a family earning $35,000, that’s $700 a year. This cut expired for a year, but nothing stops a Republican Congress from trying to permanently lower the rate.

Another way to approach this would be an exemption for all income below the poverty line: Don’t charge the payroll tax against a worker’s first $12,000 or so, with a greater exemption for workers with dependents. The idea here is that in a wealthy country, a man should have met a basic subsistence level before the government taxes him.

Conservative safety net reform

Covering Trump rallies around the country, this author met many men who had a disability that kept them from working full-time, but who wanted to do some work. (AP Photo)

Universal Basic Income is an idea for which many conservatives have advocated for decades as a replacement for the current safety net. Unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, all of these programs help the economically vulnerable, but they create a disincentive to work.

Covering Trump rallies around the country, this author met many men who had a disability that kept them from working full-time, but who wanted to do some work. The rules of Social Security Disability Insurance meant that if they found any sort of work, they lost their benefit entirely.

Most federal safety net programs have this characteristic of discouraging work. Food stamps and welfare, for instance, phase out as a worker climbs upward from the poverty line. The result: a single parent going from $17,000 a year to $20,000 a year — maybe she earns $8.50 an hour putting in 5 hours of time-and-a-half overtime every week — doesn’t result in $3,000 in extra money.

She loses enough benefits over that range that her effective rate is about 90 percent, one CBO report indicated. In effect, she earned less than $1.50 per extra hour of work.

These cliffs and massive effective tax rates for the low-and-moderate income could be largely eliminated with a Universal Basic Income. Many conservative scholars, including Charles Murray and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, advocate a UBI as a replacement for the safety net. Every adult gets a monthly check, the same amount of money for every adult, or more for adults with dependents.

Unlike unemployment benefits, you get this money even if you’re working. Unlike the EITC, the check doesn’t shrink as your paycheck rises or if you take a second job. Unlike Medicaid, you get the money directly. Unlike food stamps, you can spend it on whatever you please.

Plenty more

Conservative policy experts have spent much of the past few years suggesting ideas to help the economically vulnerable.

Where employers have stopped disqualifying applicants for having a felony on their record, employment for men rose by 4 percent in low-income neighborhoods, two scholars found in a study published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Trump has opened the eyes of conservatives to inconvenient facts about the economy and the electorate, that Americans are worried about going poor and that the GOP base isn’t ideologically conservative. (Washington Examiner Graphic)

A conservative healthcare reform could replace the web of regulations, taxes and subsidies with something of a safety net to prevent an accident or a costly health condition from driving people into bankruptcy.

If unemployment insurance were changed from a weekly benefit to a one-time lump payment, it could be paired with efforts to help workers move to places with lots of jobs, say, from California to Iowa or Texas.

Some of the most damaging regulations are those that curb the most promising sectors of the U.S. economy, such as oil and natural gas. The Obama administration’s new methane-emission rules will raise the costs of petroleum exploration and potentially cost jobs.

Donald Trump has opened the eyes of conservatives to inconvenient facts about the economy and the electorate, that Americans are worried about going poor and that the GOP base isn’t ideologically conservative. Adapting to this new world requires embracing long-ignored realities, but it doesn’t have to mean abandoning long-held principles.