Vote blue if you care about deficits, the economy or wages

The Democratic Party is failing

From the Nation:

— For months, poll after poll has showed that rank-and-file Americans of all political persuasions believe that revenues (the nice way to say taxes) should be a part of any deal to resolve our debt crisis. Seventy-two percent of Americans polled between July 14 and July 17 said taxes should be raised on those making more than $250,000 per year, including 73 percent of independents and a stunning 54 percent of Republicans. Fifty-nine percent wanted taxes raised on oil and gas companies, including 60 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans. Yet Republicans refused to vote for a deal that included any revenues at all, and the Democratic leadership capitulated despite the fact that the position was exactly the opposite of what large majorities wanted.

Americans don't believe we have the greatest health care system in the world | Eric Black Ink

Americans don't believe we have the greatest health care system in the world | Eric Black Ink: "

It always drives me a little nuts when, at Republican events, the U.S. health care system is routinely described as The Greatest Health Care System In The world (GHCSITW). The crowd always goes wild at the ritualized invocation of American greatness. In recent history, the invocation of the GHCSITW is, of course, always in the context of denouncing the depredations that will be visited upon the GHCSITW if Obamacare passes (before it did) or is not repealed (now that it has).

Perhaps there is a statistical torture chamber sufficiently nimble to produce some measure by which the U.S. system is the GHCSITW. It’s often pointed out by GHCSITW defenders that the unimaginably wealthy Arab royals like to come to the Mayo Clinic when they are sick, although this measure of American greatness may be difficult to wrestle into a statistic.

Still, you don’t have to be terrifically well-informed to know that by the most sensible and obvious measures of a health care system’s efficiency and effectiveness – for example, how comprehensive it is, the results it produces, how much it costs and even how it treats the less wealthy within a given society – the U.S. has pretty much the worst health care system in, at least, the developed world.

Our GHCSITW is the most expensive in the world (by far) on a per capita basis, leaves by far the biggest portion of its population without health insurance and compares very badly with Europe, Canada, Japan, etc. in life expectancy, infant mortality, death by various preventable illnesses, etc. etc.

So it’s a little hard to know why anyone other than those ignorant of the facts or who hate factuality itself are so willing to applaud the ritual invocation of the GHCSITW.

Now comes some recent evidence of what the general public thinks from a poll done by Harris for the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. When asked what letter grade they would give to the U.S. health care system, here is how Americans graded it:

“A”: 3%

“B”: 19%

“C”: 42%

“D”: 24%

“F”: 12 %.

DeLoitte got similar results with the same question in 2009 and 2010.

When asked whether the U.S. health care system works better than most systems in the world (which is a substantially lower standard being GHCSITW), 23 percent said yes.

Hat tip to Dave Durenberger whose latest “commentary” called attention to the Deloitte survey.

A long writeup of the survey is here.

Click to write a comment or read comments about this post.

"

If we want to swap polarization for moderation, we should adopt Ranked Choice Voting | Community Voices

If we want to swap polarization for moderation, we should adopt Ranked Choice Voting | Community Voices: "

If we want to swap polarization for moderation, we should adopt Ranked Choice Voting

By Cyndi Lesher | Friday, July 22, 2011

I'm a lifelong moderate and have always thought of myself as results-oriented — in work and in life. When there's a problem to solve, I'm not concerned with dogma or ideological preconceptions; I'm interested in what works.

That's how I've approached my career in corporate leadership, and it's how I've approached my public service, including my work on the U of M Board of Regents and my tenure as chair of the Governor's Workforce Development Council. My pragmatic focus on real-life solutions has served me well as an innovator and a leader.

And it's precisely why I'm such a strong believer in Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Because, as this shutdown has so clearly underlined, politics in Minnesota is in dire need of innovation. Because, unless you have a vested interest in political polarization, mudslinging and rancor, the electoral system we've got right now is not working — and it sure isn't good for the Minnesota business community I represent.

We shouldn't accept 'politics as usual' as a fact of life. It isn't. There's a better way to run a democracy, and it's our responsibility — yours and mine — to demand it: RCV.

Father risked everything
My father was my greatest role model. He taught me, by example, the importance of integrity, and of standing up for what you believe in. When I was a teenager, he risked everything — his business, many friendships, even his neck — by discovering and reporting several cases of insurance fraud by some very prominent individuals. Indictments followed, and my father's life was threatened.

I remember asking him, 'Dad, why did you have to be the one? Why can't somebody else speak out?' His answer: 'Because it's right. And if not me, Cyndi, then who?'

I've carried that all my life and tried to apply it in all kinds of different situations. It's why I volunteer my time on the board of FairVote Minnesota — because I know that our political system is broken, and we can't just wait for others to fix it.

There was a time when it didn't matter so much who won election: Democrat or Republican, I could trust they would govern in the interests of the majority of Minnesotans. This was the Minnesota way.

Those days are now gone, and I have no illusion they'll return. Appealing to candidates and the parties to tone down the attacks, engage in civil discourse and rise above the narrow interests of their base hasn't worked — and won't work as long as the system is hard-wired to reward this political behavior.

Under our 'plurality-take-all' system, candidates win by mobilizing their party base and scaring undecided and independent voters away from their opponents. Divide-and-conquer campaigns work in a system that locks voters into a 'lesser-of-two-evils' choice.

Current process jeopardizes state's health
Our electoral process is jeopardizing the long-term health of our state.

Satisfying the party's 'base' is a winning strategy in a system where elections can be won with as little as a third of the vote. But it's a dangerous way to elect officeholders who have to govern an entire state. Elected officials who are indebted to their base enter office with their hands tied by single-issue pledges that put thoughtful deliberation and consensus out of reach.

Moreover, they can't work productively together when just weeks before they waged nasty ad campaigns belittling each others' character and reputation. As the shutdown and lose-lose budget deal have revealed, problems are simply pushed off to the future, exacerbating their size and scope and prolonging their resolution.

We must change the system if we want to swap polarization, zealousness, and deadlock for thoughtfulness, moderation, and compromise. We must put the incentives in place to compensate these outcomes. Ranked Choice Voting does this.

Under Ranked Choice Voting, voters 'rank' their preferences — 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. In a single-seat race (e.g. governor), if no candidate receives a majority of first choices, the least popular candidates are eliminated and their votes are reassigned to remaining candidates until one receives a majority of continuing votes. It works like a traditional runoff but happens in a single election, saving taxpayers the cost of a second election, candidates the expense of another campaign and voters another trip to the polls.

Under this kind of system, third-party candidates can run and capture votes without being labeled a 'spoiler.' Voters can rank No. 1 the candidate they think will do the best job without concern that they'll 'throw their vote away' or help toss the election to the candidate they least favor.

More choice to voters
RCV gives more choice to voters and makes third parties more competitive. In multicandidate races, candidates must reach beyond their base to appeal to voters for their second choices. It rewards candidates — and parties — who strive to represent the broad interests of the majority and penalizes those pushing ideologically extreme, single-issue agendas. Finally, it produces winners who take office with the affirmation of a majority.

RCV isn't just smart, it's doable. We know from its use in Minneapolis (and several other cities across the country and countries across the globe) that it works. St. Paul debuts RCV this year, and other Minnesota cities are working toward it. As counties across the state replace their voting equipment in the coming years, they can install machines able to tally a ranked ballot. The technology already exists.

RCV is within reach, and I hope Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature will put this critical reform on their list of priorities in the next session. Please join me in asking our elected leaders to enact RCV statewide.

Minnesota can't wait.

Cyndi Lesher is a retired CEO of Northern States Power, an Xcel Energy Company, and served as president of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Host Committee for the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Click to write a comment or read comments about this post.

"

Practical Government

The more I think about a short description for my political positions, the more I come back to this idea: practical.  Especially in the issue of public v. private.

For some folks, it's a matter of principle that the government should do least, letting the private or charitable sectors handle the rest.  But what happens when the private sector (contrary to our conventional wisdom) is not the most cost-effective (let alone effective)?

Take health care. We know that we can do health care more cheaply with a public system (Medicare) than with a private one (Medicare Advantage, etc.). So rather than waste economic resources on private health care, let's create a public health care system and re-dedicate our savings to a more useful economic pursuit.

There are some other great examples.  Publicly-provided education loans leave fewer students in default of their debts (and more able to take risks, be entrepreneurial, and buy things), as well as costing taxpayers less money.

Community-owned broadband networks deliver superior services at costs below what the private sector does, and the high quality and low cost create massive economic multipliers as the private sector takes advantage of the better public infrastructure.

Government is often better than the private sector, especially for essential services and the basic infrastructure of a market economy.  It's time we made better choices about when to use it.

You can't always be in the bike lane

Posted for my wife:

It's so true

How the media fail to stop rumors

They did it with ACORN, which lost federal funding despite being cleared on all counts of the allegations trumpted by FOX News.  Now Planned Parenthood is getting the rumor mill treatment and the media is helping.  From Minnpost, a headline saying that "Bachmann says..."

There's absolutely no way that Rep. Bachmann should ever get a headline like that.  She lies.  A lot.

Whither economic justice?

Not only has the last decade been remarkable for its lack of economic growth, but it's been even worse for the middle class.  The growth of middle class wages over the past ten years has been just 4 percent, total.  That's 1 percentage point less than the period 1929-39 (the Great Depression).

And the economic problems continue for the middle class:

Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills.

And employment has not really improved since the start of the recession.  Rather, the employment:population ratio has fallen 5 percentage points and has not recovered any ground:

To make matters worse, the social safety net has been eroded significantly compared to earlier recessions, thanks to "welfare reform" in the 1990s.  Rather than move families to work, welfare reform has simply dropped them through the cracks and made the poor poorer by allowing states to shift from cash assistance to the poor to other services.

What else do we know about the economic distress of the middle class?  Well, workers at the bottom are not only struggling to stay employed, but also struggling to maintain their pay.  Service workers at Minnesota grocery chains have seen wages fall 25 percent in recent years.

There are other broader problems for the middle class.  Take these two items from the 20 things everyone should know about inequality (hat tip Economist's View).  One, unions helped maintain private sector wages (and middle class living standards):

And second, upward mobility is declining, putting the American dream further out of reach for many Americans.

Ultimately, unemployment is a political failure, with one major party committed to policies that actively reduce middle class welfare (Republicans) and the other abdicating its commitment and instead focusing on the deficit bogeyman (which is also a political will problem of paying our bills).  While traditional strategies have been employed, if insufficiently (an economic stimulus), Krugman notes that there are a number of other strategies that could be deployed to get Americans back to work.

It's a absolute shame that lawmakers are more focused on the largely fabricated deficit issue rather than the ongoing economic crisis.  JOBS!

Feeling dumb

Had a problem months ago with variable volume when typing on my iPhone.  Thought it must be a software problem and did a lot of forum searching.  Just realized yesterday that I put my pinky finger under the phone to hold it up when I type in portrait mode, right over the external speaker.

Smart.

Social Insurance Keeps Millions Out of Poverty

Why would we even think of reducing anti-poverty programs before increasing taxes on the wealthy, say to where they were before George Bush decided that we needed to get rid of Clinton's budget surplus (one of the few things he did well)?:

Public Programs Keep Millions Out of Poverty, CBPP: With anti-poverty programs under serious attack in Washington, here’s something to keep in mind: a major new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that public programs keep one in six Americans out of poverty — primarily the elderly, disabled, and working poor — and that the poverty rate would double without these programs.

...read more...

How Many Fruits and Vegetables Should I Eat: A Visual Guide

From Chow.com:

Vegetables

Asparagus: About 4 spears

Beans, Cooked (black, garbanzo, etc.): 1 cup

Bell Pepper: 1 cup chopped or 1 large pepper (about 3 inches in diameter)

Broccoli: A generous fistful (tennis ball size) of florets or about 16 small florets

Carrots: 1 cup chopped or 2 medium whole carrots (6 to 7 inches long)

Cauliflower: A little less than a 1/4 head of florets

Celery: 1 cup diced or 2 stalks (11 to 12 inches long)

Corn: 1 cup of kernels or 1 large ear (8 to 9 inches long)

Cucumber: 1 cup sliced/chopped or about 1/2 of a medium cucumber (8 to 9 inches long)

Green Beans: 1 cup cooked (we counted: It's about 19 to 20 beans)

Greens, Cooked (kale, chard, etc.): 1 cup

Greens, Raw (lettuce, spinach, etc.): 2 cups (about two large leaves of chopped romaine)

Summer Squash: 1 cup cooked/sliced/diced squash or 1 whole zucchini (7 to 8 inches long) or about 1/2 of a large yellow crookneck

Sweet Potato: 1 cup mashed or 1 large baked potato (about 2 1/4 inches in diameter)

Fruit

Apple: 1 small apple (about 2 1/2 inches in diameter, a little smaller than a baseball)

Banana: 1 large banana (8 to 9 inches long)

Cantaloupe: 1 cup diced or about 1/8 of a large melon

Dried Fruit: 1/2 cup

Grapefruit: 1 medium grapefruit (about 4 inches across)

Grapes: About 32 average grapes

Orange: 1 large orange (a little bigger than a baseball)

Peach: 1 large peach (about the size of a tennis ball)

Pear: 1 medium pear

Pineapple: 1 cup chopped (a little less than 1/4 of a pineapple)

Plum: 2 large plums

Strawberries: 8 large berries

Tomato: 1 cup chopped or 1 large tomato (about 3 inches in diameter, about the size of a baseball)

Best Education Policy Article in a Decade

WASHINGTON—According to bewildered and contrite legislators, a major budgetary mix-up this week inadvertently provided the nation's public schools with enough funding and resources to properly educate students. 

Sources in the Congressional Budget Office reported that as a result of a clerical error, $80 billion earmarked for national defense was accidentally sent to the Department of Education, furnishing schools with the necessary funds to buy new textbooks, offer more academic resources, hire better teachers, promote student achievement, and foster educational excellence—an oversight that apologetic officials called a "huge mistake." 

"Obviously, we did not intend for this to happen, and we are doing everything in our power to right the situation and discipline whoever is responsible," said House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), expressing remorse for the error. "I want to apologize to the American people. The last thing we wanted was for schools to upgrade their technology and lower student-to-teacher ratios in hopes of raising a generation of well-educated, ambitious, and skilled young Americans."

...read more...

Get Your Federal Tax Receipt

Find out exactly how Uncle Sam spends your taxes.

Three federal fiscal lessons

We're not broke:

So who is the we in the “we’re broke” mantra? The recession has certainly been a rough patch of road for many families, but the output produced by corporations in the private sector has already recovered to pre-recession levels, and these firms’ profits were 21.7% higher overall, driven largely by the 60% jump in pre-tax profits enjoyed by firms in the financial sector.

Why we have a deficit (#1 = Bush tax cuts, #2 = wars, #3 = recession):

Simple deficit reduction arithmetic (cutting spending is harder than it looks, which is why raising taxes also makes sense):

Suppose that the country – let’s call it Austerityland – has a GDP of $100/year, and a budget deficit of $10/yr, or 10% of GDP. And suppose that the government decides it wants to get the deficit down to 5% of GDP. How can it get there? ... 

To keep things simple (and to make it particularly relevant to the three examples mentioned above), let’s focus on the strategy of trying to halve the budget deficit primarily through spending cuts. So the government of Austerityland decides to cut spending by $5/yr. What happens? ...

If G is reduced by $5 in Austerityland, the first thing that happens is that GDP falls by $5. But then a bunch of secondary effects kick in ...[list of effects] 

So, what is the budget deficit in Austerityland after a $5 reduction in government spending? If we assume a relatively modest multiplier of 1.5, and a tax rate of 25%, then we get:
ΔG = -$5ΔY = -$7.5ΔT = -$1.875 

And the new deficit is now $6.875, which is 7.4% of the new level of GDP. Wait, I thought we were trying to get the deficit down to 5% of GDP? What happened?  

What happened is that we’ve missed our target, by quite a bit, due to the ... fall in tax revenues that resulted from the shrinking economy. In fact, just a bit of simple algebra allows us to figure out that government spending in Austerityland will have to be cut by about $9 in order to reach a budget deficit target of 5% of GDP. In other words, the government will have to cut spending by almost twice as much as it initially thought it would in order to reach its deficit target.

A spoonful of sugar help the medicine kick ass

Certain strains of bacteria can shut down their metabolic functions when trouble comes. They're called persisters. They are genetically identical to their non-persister brethren, but they're nastier. Although they're produced in low numbers, they're able to hide out for weeks or months in a patient being treated with antibiotics. Once they come 'back to life,' they re-start the infection. Once they're in, only patience, persistence, and luck can eventually eradicate them. Recently their luck took a turn for the worse. Researchers discovered a weakness: persisters have a sweet tooth.

Adding some ordinary sugar to the antibiotic helps it kill off persisters. Bacteria, persister and not, feed on sugars. Persisters survive by shutting down their metabolism when antibiotics strike, but if they're stimulated by sugar, they just keep feeding. This allows the antibiotics to destroy them exactly the way ordinary bacteria are destroyed.

Adding such a simple and widely available compound to existing antibiotics enhances their effectiveness against persisters, and fast. One test showed that a sugared up antibiotic could eliminate 99.9 percent of persisters in two hours, while a regular antibiotic did nothing. [emphasis added]

Journalism FAIL

When a Congressman does a town hall meeting touting a federal budget proposal for its deficit reduction properties, despite the fact that the bill also includes massive tax cuts that completely offset the specified spending cuts, should a news outlet just quote him and ignore the chance to set the record straight?

If your name is Minnpost, yes.

FAIL

Eight facts about social security

For those who like a fact-based conversation:

"Eight Facts about Social Security"Ezra Klein on Social Security:
Among his comments, my preferred solution:
Social Security’s 75-year shortfall is manageable. In fact, it’d be almost completely erased by applying the payroll tax to income over $106,000.Source (PDF).

1) Over the next 75 years, Social Security’s shortfall is equal to about 0.7 percent of GDP. Source (PDF).

2) For the average 65-year-old retiring in 2010, Social Security replaced about 40 percent of working-age earnings. That “replacement rate” is scheduled to fall to 31 percent in the coming decades. Source.

3) Social Security’s replacement rate puts it 26th among 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations for workers with average earnings. Source.

4) Without Social Security, 45 percent of seniors would be under the poverty line. With Social Security, 10 percent of seniors are under the poverty line. Source.

5) People can start receiving Social Security benefits at age 62. But the longer they wait, up until age 70, the larger their checks. Waiting to 66 means checks that are 33 percent larger. Waiting to 70 means checks that are 76 percent larger. But most people start claiming benefits at 62, and 95 percent start by 66. Source.

6) Raising the retirement age by one year amounts to roughly a 6.66 percent cut in benefits. Source.

7) In 1935, a white male at age 60 could expect to live to 75. Today, a white male at age 60 can expect to live to 80. Source.

8) In 1972, a 60-year-old male worker in the bottom half of the income distribution had a life expectancy of 78 years. Today, it’s around 80 years. Male workers in the top half of the income distribution, by contrast, have gone from 79 years to 85 years. Source.

Brilliant politics

Faced with Republican legislators wanting to put poor Minnesotans on insufficient vouchers for health care, Sen. Goodwin offers an amendment to have legislators pilot the voucher program first.

If it's so great, why don't we try it?

Touche!

Life-size Barbie highlights large impact on body image

How Many Gays Must God Create Before We Accept That He Wants Them Around?

When the poor cheat, they get caught. We let the wealthy off easy.

And it speaks poorly of America.

Bring your judge a cookie

Because it unfortunately looks like hunger influences their decisions.

Eliminate the bell curve in math?

A teaching strategy known as Jump confronts the "myth of ability," and has nearly eliminated achievement diferences in math students where it has been used.  Amazing.  And as a math major and Upward Bound teacher, I totally believe it.

From the article:

What if Americans got to pick where their taxes went?

A fascinating thought exercise.  What if Americans could dedicate 1 percent of their taxes to any part of the federal budget?

But what interested me even more is finding out what people would spend on if allowed to choose. You think it's foreign wars and fossil-fuel subsidies? No. Lamberton sums it up as "more butter, fewer guns." Specifically:

Tough tax day for the richest

we know that in 2007, the fortunate 400 paid an effective tax rate of just 16.6 percent

Huh.

The average American paid 22.5 percent.

America in the Hands of a Professional Military

Two of a three part series, a fascinating look at the result of professionalizing and then out-sourcing America's military activity to contractors.

Things that really bother me:

• How a professional military makes it easier to go to war, because the sacrifice isn't shared. Not only do fewer people serve, but fewer people even have relatives in the military.  From the article:
• "The professional military also makes it possible to sustain wars. Long wars become possible because the boots-on-the-ground can be deployed and redeployed. In the past, to fight wars like the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, “you would have had to institute a draft in order to sustain the action that’s been going on,” Keaney says. “And that would have been a brake on any administration."
• This next quote drives the point home even more convincingly.  As even fewer members of Congress have had military service, there's less understanding of the impact and more willingness to use the military to solve problems:
• "When the Gates Commission signed off on its report, the 91st Congress had nearly 400 veterans, from World War II and Korea. The just completed 111th Congress had far fewer, 121. Only seven members of the 110th Congress had family serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.The fear is not that the military would attempt to usurp the government. “The real danger,” Betros says, “is that Americans reflexively move towards a military solution before they will try all the other elements of national power. For now, the country relies very, very heavily on its military, without asking if there is an alternative. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
   

The second article in the series looks at the privatization of U.S. warfare, with astonishing implications for our ability to control our armed conflicts. For one, the Defense Department offers no-bid contracts to companies stuffed with military veterans, and then fails to fully account for the money spent.  The use of contractors for base support, kitchen duty, etc seems to be a minor one.  But the U.S. is increasingly using contractors in armed combat, with disastrous results.

What most rankles the colonels is that contractors have only one obligation: to fulfill their contract. They answer to no chain of command; they are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice; they are not required to have U.S. military training; and they are not subject to the Law of Land Warfare or the Geneva Conventions. Contractors decide on their own rules of engagement. Those security contractors who work for “U.S. agencies” or the State Department, which will soon be taking over control of security in Iraq, are immunized from Iraqi laws, and potentially U.S. law as well. Put another way, they have license to kill.
...
Two of the largest battles of the Iraq war, which took place in Fallujah, a city of nearly half a million, occurred in part because four well-armed security contractors — who had been warned not to drive through the heart of the big city — proceeded into a no-go conflict zone and were murdered. They were on their way to deliver catering supplies.

The security contractors who were from the now infamous Blackwater USA (renamed Xe Services LLC), a private military company, were ambushed as they slowed at an intersection. A frenzied crowd then pulled the dead and wounded contractors from their vehicles and tore their bodies apart, set them on fire and hung their remains from a bridge over the Tigris.

The article goes on to talk about how private contracting has become the default option for overseas security, whether for the armed forces or the State department, and how it means ceding more control of those operations to third parties who are less under the control of our civilian-led government.

I worry that we've created a too-professional military, an entire workforce of people who require ongoing military conflict to sustain their careers, at the expense of more productive uses for our collective dollar. 

My number 1 search term

Blogger tells me that the search term that has brought me more traffic than any other (since they started keeping track in May 2010) is "tom emmer is an idiot."

I could do worse.

Why are no bank executives in prison yet?

A voluminous report on the financial crisis by the United States Senate — citing internal documents and private communications of bank executives, regulators, credit ratings agencies and investors — describes business practices that were rife with conflicts during the mortgage mania and reckless activities that were ignored inside the banks and among their federal regulators.

Read more here

Giving our meat the premium drugs

It's pretty sad when our beef and chicken has been getting more and better antibiotic treatment than we do.  Especially when it means we're more likely to get sick as a result:

A team of researchers from Arizona bought meat and poultry in five cities across the United States, tested them for bacteria, and found this: 47 percent of the samples contained the very common pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and 96 percent of those isolates were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Of more concern: 52 percent of those staph isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics that are commonly used in both veterinary and human medicine.

That is, roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the United States contained multidrug resistant staph.

Maybe they should be called ideology tanks

Instead of think tanks...

Chart: Housing Bubble in Perspective

via Economist's View

On the public teat, with no accountability

A restaurant will get a $2 million city subsidy AND a waiver from the city's living wage requirement. Unconscionable.

Why we run federal deficits

An acute observation of our current political culture, also described aptly as "our cowardly Congress" by Nicholas Kristof.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Washington antagonists executed a series of deals that included tax increases and spending reductions. But these days, due to a combination of utter Republican intransigence and Democratic wishy-washiness, no such deals are possible. The legislative and executive branches have no problem working together to massively increase deficits — think about 2009's uni-partisan stimulus package or the more recent bipartisan lame-duck to extend Bush tax cuts and enact a new payroll tax cut. But our government has an extremely difficult time making even symbolic spending cuts. Slashing about $40 billion in spending, an amount equal to 2.5 percent of this year's projected budget deficit, spurred the news networks to create shut-down clocks. And revenue enhancements? The phrase doesn't seem to be in official Washington's vocabulary. President Obama campaigned on letting the tax cuts for high earners expire at the end of 2010, swore up and down that he wanted them to expire throughout 2009 and 2010, and then meekly surrendered.

Second, even if Washington were somehow to get serious, I don't think the public is anywhere near prepared for the truth about our fiscal affairs. That's largely because nobody has bothered to tell the Americans that, as much as they feel overtaxed, the federal government, largely by design, has done an extremely poor job of collecting revenues in the past few years. That failure, as much as spending, lies at the heart of our massive structural deficits. Don't take it from me. Go to the OMB's website and check out Table 1.2, [see chart below]

...

Yes, the U.S. has a spending problem. But the federal government also has a serious taxing problem. As currently designed, the system does a poor job of collecting revenues. Receipts are unacceptably volatile. And all the political momentum is in the direction of reducing taxes. Now the size of the U.S. economy in 2010 was $14.66 trillion, which means one percent of GDP is equal to $146 billion. And so if federal taxes were anywhere near the normal rate of recent history — say at the 18.2 percent of GDP as they were as recently as 2006 — the deficit would be about $482 billion smaller than it is today.

Note how revenues and spending started to sharply diverge in 2000, around the time the Republican "no new taxes" mantra and Bush's massive tax cuts started punching a huge hole in the federal budget.

Public radio goes totally hypocritical

A California public radio station decides to suspend sponsorship spots by Planned Parenthood during the federal budget debate.  I can't count how many times I heard ads for Koch Refineries or for "increasingly clean" coal during environmental reporting on public radio.

This isn't about objectivity, but rather about trying to dodge the "liberal" label by unfairly cutting off a nonprofit family-planning organization's sponsorship rather than standing up for the truth.

Asshats.

The Economy and Budgets

A few good articles:

First, word the much-maligned financial bailout will actually end up making taxpayers some money.  I was one of those folks who reluctantly supported the idea, but it's nice to know that is also ended up doing no harm to the taxpayers. 

Of course, it's sad to realize that the bailout has helped return a lot of corporate America to profitability, but still leaves millions of Americans unemployed.  The linked article is one of the few with a progressive view on the economy (read: is more about how the average American is doing rather than the average stockholder).  And naturally, since business profits have recovered, a lot of states are already thinking about ending unemployment benefits, even though unemployment rate is still 3 percentage points higher than it was at the start of the recession.

Finally, the federal budget.  A shutdown - that would have hurt the economy and the federal budget - was narrowly averted, as were a lot of ridiculous Republican demands such as cutting off money to Planned Parenthood (whose family planning services help reduce abortions).  Furthermore, the "budget" (for those who have budgeted, you understand we use the term loosely) proposed by Rep. Ryan actually increases the federal deficit while at the same time severely slashing health care programs (Medicare and Medicaid) that help provide critical medical assistance to the elderly and poor.  And Paul Krugman, nobel economist, points out the numerous "unicorns" in Ryan's budget, such as assumptions of incredibly low unemployment and a massive housing boom.

Nicholas Kristof sums up our Congress pretty well:

What does all this mean? That we’re governed by self-absorbed, reckless children.

A few reasons our public education system needs help

Three interesting articles on education in the past month:

From Nicholas Kristof, an impassioned argument for paying teachers more, based on their disproportionate impact on the rest of our society. We used to value them more:

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

From Minnpost, a discussion of how little education policy and practice applies the lessons from research about what works.

Also in the news, Gothamschools.org highlights a new report that finds that merit pay – a favorite among education reformers, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan – didn’t work to improve test scores in a New York City experiment, and was actually connected with dropping test scores among middle school students. A Vanderbilt University study in September found largely the same thing, that offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores.

Finally, a story from Miller McCune, showing that collective bargaining for teachers helps increase average student test scores, and especially helps those students at the top, but it increases the achievement gap between whites and non-white students. A teacher union law lapsed in 1999, and the real-life experiment provided this lesson:

In many districts, pre-1999 collective bargaining agreements allowed “senior teachers — those with the most experience, who are often higher-performing teachers — to concentrate themselves in a district’s higher-income, higher-performing schools...High-poverty schools with lower-performing students, by contrast, wind up with the least-experienced (and least successful) teachers."

It's a good illustration of how teacher collective bargaining isn't always aligned with students' best interest. However, I'd argue that's reason to amend union contracts, rather than throw out teacher unions (since, as the first article points out, teachers are unfortunately low paid relative to their societal value).


Overall, these articles leave me with the feeling that our education policy is badly failing. We pay teachers too little to attract and retain the best talent, we fail to use best practices in the schools, and we have mindless attacks on unions that fail to address the major issues (student performance) and instead are more about political retribution.

Spring Cleaning: climate denialism, American exceptionalism, and Congress punts on the middle class

Oops!  Hoping to find scientific backing for their climate denialism, House Republicans got a rude surprise when a Koch Industries funded physicist reported that their research actually syncs up with existing climate change science.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth. 

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.” 

A nice article on the American (conservative) superiority complex, with a fascinating map of passport ownership by state.  Seems folks are less egotistical about their own country when they've seen others.

In other words, it’s part of the superiority complex you often encounter in U.S. politics; people just know that we’re the best, and won’t believe you when you tell them that actually they have the Internet, cell phones, and antibiotics in Europe too.

The economy hasn't really recovered (e.g. unemployment is still far above pre-recession levels), but Washington has given up on the millions of Americans still out of work.

More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed

...polls indicate that voters still care much more about jobs than they do about the budget deficit. So it’s quite remarkable that inside the Beltway, it’s just the opposite. 

...I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly. 

He hasn't been replaced

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

See the original news broadcasts of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, 53 years ago today.

Star Wars lightsaber popsicles - brilliant

Are we human or economic tools?

I just read this essay on the decline of labor unions (and middle class living standards) by David Morris. 

In the last generation, US unions have shrunk in size and influence, largely as a result of a withering attack by corporations and Republicans.  And with that shrinking influence has come a corresponding decrease in the standard of living of most Americans.  Indeed, as we shall see, the correlation between the strength of unions and the strength of the middle class is so empirically strong it might well be considered causal.

What bugs me the most is that the decline of unions has been a deliberate strategy of large corporations and the Republican Party, and that their demise undermines the middle class.  I understand that corporations might like to see us all as little cogs in their profit machine, but it's disappointing to see a political party also selling us out.