Natasha Bach — One-Third of Eligible Voters in the U.S. Will be Non-White in 2020, Research Says

The US is facing the turning point that Israel just went through with the majority of the population non-Jewish. Will the US act in the same way as Israel?

One-third of eligible voters will be non-white in 2020, according to new datafrom Pew Research Center.

Latinos will be the largest minority group in the electorate, surpassing African-Americans for the first time. Pew projects that Latinos will account for around 32 million eligible voters, or 13% of the electorate, up from 7% in the 2000 election. There will be 30 million African-American voters, meanwhile, remaining at a constant share of about 12% since 2000. Asianswill also constitute a larger share of the voting population, reaching approximately 11 million--more than double the 5 million eligible in 2000.

The increased share of minority voters is at least partially driven by immigration. One in 10 eligible voters in 2020 will have been born outside of the U.S., the highest share in at least 50 years.

The change is also hastened by Generation Z, many of whom will be voting for the first time in 2020. Generation Z, or those born after 1996, is the most ethnically diverse in American history--only 55% of the generation is white....

Fortune
One-Third of Eligible Voters in the U.S. Will be Non-White in 2020, Research Says

Natasha Bach

Jean Hopfensperger — Fastest Growing Religion Is ‘None’

Institutional religion off, spirituality on.

On a practical level, that means a lot less funding for religious institutions — and a lot more funding for "spirituality," some of which is organized and some not. This trend was already perceptible as an aspect of the countercultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. An underground or alternative economy also developed then and it has grown into the billions presently and become mainstream. Part of that is the so-called New Age market.

Minneapolis StarTribune
Fastest Growing Religion Is ‘None’

Jean Hopfensperger

Frank Jacobs — How to split the USA into two countries: Red and Blue

Notice who gets all the most desirable (and expensive) property. There are the areas that pay most of the taxes based on income and wealth distribution.

See the post for other "strange maps" and stats.

Big Think

How to split the USA into two countries: Red and Blue

Frank Jacobs

Stephen Johnson — Here's how diverse the 116th Congress is set to become

• In Total, Almost Half of the Newly Elected Congressional Representatives Are Not White Men.
• Those Changes Come Almost Entirely From Democrats; Republican Members-Elect Are All White Men Except for One Woman.

****

• LGBT breakthroughs include Democrat members-elect Sharice Davids (D.-Kan.), the first LGBT Kansan elected to Congress, and Kyrsten Sinema (D.-Ariz.), the first openly bisexual person ever elected to the U.S. Senate.
• The first Muslim women were elected to the House: Ilhan Omar (D.-Minn.), a Somali-American, and Rashida Tlaib (D.-Mich.), a Palestinian-American.
• Two new Native American women were elected to the House: Deb Haaland (D.-N.M.) and Sharice Davids (D.-Kan.).
• Ayanna Pressley (D.-Mass.) is the first black woman elected to Congress in Massachusetts.
• Sylvia Garcia (D.-Tex.) is the first Latina to represent Texas in the House.

The Democratic Party is starting to actually like America. The GOP, not so much — in fact, not at all.

Big Think

Here's how diverse the 116th Congress is set to become

Stephen Johnson

Anatoly Karlin — Who’s Coming to the US?

The Unz Review
Who’s Coming to the US?

Anatoly Karlin

See also

Emulating Israel? Or ???

"I hope there won't be that, but I will tell you this – anybody throwing rocks... we will consider that a firearm, because there's not much difference," said Trump.

Zero Hedge
Trump Says Military May Fire on Rock-Throwing Migrants

Tyler Durden

David F. Ruccio — Sciences of inequality

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States).

The numbers for 2017 are indeed stupefying: more than 45 million Americans (13.9 percent of the population) were poor (according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure*), while 28.5 million (or 8.8 percent) did not have health insurance at any point during the year.

But the situation in the United States is even worse than widespread poverty and lack of access to decent healthcare. It’s high economic inequality, which according to a new report in Scientific American “negatively impacts nearly every aspect of human well-being—as well as the health of the biosphere.”...

Occasional Links & Commentary
Sciences of inequality
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Zero Hedge Millennials Are Now Considered The "Lost Generation"

Lost economic and financially, that is.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a new report examining the relationship between a person’s birth year, and measures of his or her family’s economic status, including income and wealth. Fed economists determined that substantial wealth declines were visible across the age spectrum around the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) but found that young families suffered the most.

Zero Hedge
Millennials Are Now Considered The "Lost Generation"

Tyler Durden

See also

Political impact?

Pew
Millennials projected to overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation

Richard Fry

Benjamin Carter Hett — What We Really Have to Worry About Isn’t Trump

The country is divided into two hostile camps, a division as much geographic as ideological.

On one side are the big cities, the centers of progressive politics and home to social movements for women, for gay people, for minorities, and to an unprecedented wave of immigrants. Many of the immigrants look and dress very differently from residents of longer standing, marking them as followers of a different religious faith. Many are refugees from an unprecedented wave of war and civil war. Many have entered the country illegally.

Then there are the rural areas. These have always been conservative, but now economic hard times and a pervasive feeling of humiliation are driving their conservatism to a new level of anger. People in rural areas attribute much of this humiliation to urban liberals who seem to care more about refugees and minorities than they do about their country cousins. The country people are statistically much more likely to have served in the armed forces and they feel that their patriotism contrasts with the deracinated, increasingly foreign cities. Religious faith, especially evangelical Christian faith, is central to life in the country. Rural people often see the cities as nothing but cesspits of every conceivable kind of vice.

Into this volatile mixture comes a politician who thrives on the exploitation of anger. He tells the suffering rural people that those urban elites, the religious minorities, and much of the rest of the world are responsible for their troubles. He is willing to say things that no other politicians would dare to utter. The rural people respond by giving their votes overwhelmingly to him. Soon the strange new politician is in power.

But this is not the United States in 2018. It is Germany in the early 1930s....

It doesn't suggest that Trump is Hitler, but rather that this is a disturbing direction for the US to be headed toward, with a very uncertain future and a largely discredited Establishment in the eyes of many voters.

AlterNet — History News Network
What We Really Have to Worry About Isn’t TrumpBenjamin Carter Hett | professor of history at the City University of New York

US News & World Report Best States Rankings

Measuring outcomes for citizens using more than 75 metrics

Iowa #1! (I am in Iowa City right now.)

US News & World Report
Best States Rankings

Nick Bunker — An update on the state of wealth inequality in the United States

Charts.

WCEG — The Equitablog
An update on the state of wealth inequality in the United States
Nick Bunker

Zero Hedge — Whites Are The Slowest Growing US Group; Will Lose Majority Around 2040

Demographic shift in full swing.

Zero Hedge
Whites Are The Slowest Growing US Group; Will Lose Majority Around 2040

Tyler Durden

Lynn Parramore — America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People

A new book by economist Peter Temin finds that the U.S. is no longer one country, but dividing into two separate economic and political worlds.

You’ve probably heard the news that the celebrated post-WW II beating heart of America known as the middle class has gone from “burdened,” to “squeezed” to “dying.” But you might have heard less about what exactly is emerging in its place.

In a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, draws a portrait of the new reality in a way that is frighteningly, indelibly clear: America is not one country anymore. It is becoming two, each with vastly different resources, expectations, and fates....

The US begins to resemble Latin America as the American Dream fades into memory for many Americans.

Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority. Without a robust middle class, America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations....

Expect increased sales of The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.

INET
America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People

Lynn Parramore 

Yves Smith — More on the Economic Hardship of Young Adults

In the US, the cost of the aftermath of the crisis has fallen heavily on young people, mainly due to bad policy responses to the crisis that we’ve described at length as it was happening: the failure to restructure bad loans (particularly mortgages) and impose costs on banks and investors, not just homeowners; the refusal to engage in enough fiscal spending, not just during the crisis but in deficit fights during the Obama Administration. That isn’t to say that other groups haven’t suffered too. Remember that older, less educated whites have suffered a decline in lifespans, which is unheard in anything other than post-USSR economic collapse. And even though some people in their 50s and 60s are sitting pretty, virtually all the ones I know outside McKinsey and top Wall Street circles are looking at working till they drop.

But young people have suffered in a very large way and don’t have any reason to expect much improvement. And the impact on them of diminished earnings early in their career is more serious than taking a hit for a similarly long period later in one’s working life. Various studies have found that lower earnings at the start of one’s career lead to diminished lifetime earnings....

Naked Capitalism
More on the Economic Hardship of Young Adults
Yves Smith

Urban Carmel — Demographics: The Boomers Have Already Been Overtaken by the Millennials

The chief driver of economics is population growth and demographics. 

Until recently, the Boomers have dominated the US economy, whose recent history is a record of their life passages. Now the Millennials are coming into their own as the largest generation.

"It's a new world."

Financial Sense
Demographics: The Boomers Have Already Been Overtaken by the Millennials

Urban Carmel

Jeff Stein — Young Republicans are surprisingly moderate — and they could change American politics

History has a liberal bias.

Vox
Young Republicans are surprisingly moderate — and they could change American politics

Jeff Stein

William K. Black — Wall Street’s Message to Young Adults: “You are Clueless”

It is, after all, all about “capital,” not people. The Wall Street CEOs think the young should cheer Wall Street’s “effective[ness]” in destroying the middle and working classes in America.

New Economic Perspectives
Wall Street’s Message to Young Adults: “You are Clueless”
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Must read — Joel Kotkin: We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already in Progress

Must read. Demographics is the real basis of political economy as well as politics.

New Geography
We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already in Progress

Joel Kotkin | executive editor of NewGeography.com, the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism

Dr. Housing Bubble Blog — When housing becomes unaffordable for the young: The crushing burden of rents and student debt on future home buying.

Young Americans are priced out of buying homes and many are priced out from even renting. And somehow this is the group that is going to buy all the crap shack turnover once baby boomers decide to downsize either by choice or by nature.

Dr. Housing Bubble Blog

When housing becomes unaffordable for the young: The crushing burden of rents and student debt on future home buying.
drhousingbubble

RT — Latinos surpass whites as largest ethnic group in California

Latinos have officially become the largest ethnic group in California, making it the third US state without a white majority. Texas is expected to reach the same milestone by the end of the decade.

According to the United States Census Bureau, California's milestone happened in the first half of 2014. The data was officially confirmed by a tally released in late June.…

Ironically, the majority of "Latinos" are native to America or of native American descent. The real Americans.

RT
Latinos surpass whites as largest ethnic group in California

Charles Hugh-Smith — The Changing World Of Work I: America's Nine Classes

The new and improved caste system.

Zero Hedge
The Changing World Of Work I: America's Nine Classes
Charles Hugh-Smith | OfTwoMinds blog