How Big Was Your Work Penalty in 2012?

The screwiest thing about the American tax system is its work penalty: If you earn your money by working, you may well be paying higher taxes than somebody who makes the same amount of money without working, via dividends or capital gains. You’re certainly not paying less.

A simple example shows what I’m talking about: Suppose a single person has $40,000 of taxable income. (That’s the amount on  line 43 of the 1040 or line 6 of 1040EZ; in other words, you’ve already subtracted all your exemptions and deductions and you’re down to the amount you take to the tax table to figure out what you owe.) If s/he got that income without lifting a finger, say by letting dividends and capital gains distributions accumulate in a brokerage account, then the federal income tax bill is $6,000. (15%, in other words.)

But if that money came from working for wages, then the bill is $36 higher: $6036. So our hypothetical worker pays a $36 penalty for working rather than living idly off investment income.

The simple work penalty. That may not sound like much — unless any work penalty riles you as much as it riles me — but so far we’re just talking about the simple work penalty; as you’ll see, it gets worse the more things we take into account.

Here’s how you figure your simple work penalty: Multiply your taxable income by 15% to see what you’d pay if you made that money without working, then check your tax return to see how much you paid. (Or look up your income on the tax tables that start on page 79 of the 1040 instructions.) We’ve already seen that a simple work penalty starts at $40,000 for single people. It starts at $53,500 for a head of household or $80,000 for a joint-filing married couple.

No matter how little you make, you will never pay less than the idle guy who made the same amount from investments. When he figures his tax (on, say, the worksheet in the Schedule D instructions), one of the last lines has him figure how much he’d pay if he just used the regular tax tables like you do. If that amount is less, that’s what he owes.

Even the simple work penalty turns into real money if your wages are high. Say you’re a salesman working on commission and you had a really good year: Your taxable income is $100,000. If you’re single, you owe Uncle Sam $21,460. But the idle guy with $100,000 of taxable income from dividends and capital gains is still just paying 15%, or $15,000*. You’re penalized $6,460 because you made your money by working.

It gets worse. Anybody who has money to invest knows that the game is rigged even worse than that, because investors don’t owe any capital gains tax until they sell the thing that increased in value. So if an investor doesn’t want to pay tax, he just doesn’t sell.

Again, an example makes it real: Suppose a guy bought $10,000 of stock in Walgreens back in 1990 when it was selling at (a split-adjusted price of) $2.75. Ignore the dividends he’s been making all those years; the value of the shares themselves has gone up more than 17 times, so his 10K is now worth $177,300, making a gain of $167,300. How much tax has he paid on that gain over the last 23 years? Zero, because he hasn’t sold. If he never sells, and his heirs sell when they inherit, the tax is never paid. Even if he does sell and pay his 15% eventually, it doesn’t even out, because his money has been compounding tax-free all those years.

And what about payroll taxes? Payroll taxes apply to wages, but not to investment income. In general, wage-earners pay 1.45% of their wages in Medicare taxes and 4.2% in Social Security taxes**, for a total of 5.67%.

If you think of all that as just “taxes”, as money hoovered up by the government never to be seen again, then the work penalty is much higher. Let’s go back to our single guy with $40,000 of taxable income. Say he took the standard deduction of  $5950 and had no dependents other than himself, so he had $3800 of exemptions. So his gross wages were somewhere around $49,750 and he paid $2821 in payroll taxes. The investor paid zero, so that would make the gross work penalty $2857 — a much bigger chunk of change than the $36 simple work penalty. (Under the same assumptions, the $100K worker makes $109,750 gross and pays $6223 in payroll taxes, raising his gross work penalty to $12683.)

But that’s not really the right way to think about it, because some payroll taxes are social insurance payments that you will see direct benefit from. Unless you’re planning to have a fatal accident before you get old, paying money into Social Security now increases the benefits you will receive later, because (in spite of what conservatives tell you) Social Security is not going away. So the investor pays less Social Security tax than you, but he’ll also see less benefit down the road.

The same may not be true of Medicare, though, because it has all-or-nothing eligibility. In order to get coverage after 65, either you or your spouse has to pay into the program for ten years. After that, you get no additional coverage for paying in more.

So that 1.45% in Medicare taxes you paid in 2012 may well be garnering you no additional benefits over the non-paying investor (if, say, either or both of you already have your ten years in). So I think it’s entirely legitimate to include that in what we might call an adjusted work penalty. If we do, then the $40K worker pays a $757 work penalty and the $100K worker’s penalty is $8051.

By that definition, all workers, no matter how little they make, pay an adjusted work penalty. The investor with the same income will never pay a higher amount of income tax, and the worker pays an additional 1.45% in Medicare tax that may provide him/her no additional benefits down the road.

So suppose you work 30 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, at the $7.25 minimum wage, and you’ve been working for ten years or more. You have gross wages of $11,310. An investor whose only income is $11,310 of dividends and capital gains pays the same income tax you do, and in addition you pay $164 of Medicare taxes that provide you no additional benefit.

End the work penalty. Is that crazy or what? Why does our tax system penalize people for working rather than idly collecting dividends or sitting around owning things that go up in value?

Conservatives are always talking about ways to make the tax system “fairer”, by which they usually mean “flatter” —  they want to lower the tax rates paid by people who make the highest wages. (Why that is “fairer” is a mystery to me. I think a progressive tax system is fair.)

But eliminating the simple work penalty absolutely would make the system fairer: Stop treating different kinds of income differently. Wages, dividends, capital gains — they’re all income. Tax them the same. And beyond that, why not tax investment income for Social Security and Medicare?

* I know what you’re thinking: Wouldn’t the alternate minimum tax kick the investor’s taxes up? No, it wouldn’t. The AMT counter-acts excessive deductions and tax-free income, but doesn’t affect the advantages of dividends and capital gains.

** Until their wage income hits $110,100. In 2012, earnings higher than that paid no additional Social Security tax. The 4.2% was a special rate for 2012, temporarily reduced from the ordinary 6.2% (matched by another 6.2% from the employer).

April 15, 2013 – 8:38 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s Tax Day, so it’s time to ask the annual question: “How big was your work penalty in 2012?”

As you may already know, investment income like dividends and capital gains is taxed at a flat 15% rate, which is lower than the rates paid by many people who work for wages. Plus, payroll taxes don’t apply to investment income, and there are a number of other advantages.

Usually, this gets described in terms of the virtues of investment: capital formation, job creation, and so on. But once upon a time, work was considered virtuous too. So I prefer to describe this situation as a work penalty. You pay more tax because you work for a living rather than watching your money work for you.

The simple version of the work penalty is not hard to figure if you have your 1040 handy, and if more people knew their work penalty, we might raise enough outrage to do away with it.

Obama’s budget has put Social Security back in the news, so the second featured article is “Three things I know about Social Security”.

In the weekly summary, everybody was also talking about Margaret Thatcher and (for some reason I can’t fathom) a country-western song.

April 15, 2013 – 7:46 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

No Argument

Straight couples write their own ticket. That’s why they can’t craft an argument to justify excluding same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. It’s not because we want to redefine it. It’s because straight people redefined it to an extent where there’s no argument that can be made to exclude same-sex couples.

— Dan Savage (December 9, 2012)

These last few weeks everybody was talking about same-sex marriage

which was argued before the Supreme Court. (Full transcript and audio at NPR.) More specifically, the Court is considering the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (which tells the federal government not to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in the states that allow them) and California’s Proposition 8 (which made same-sex marriage illegal in California by constitutional amendment).

There’s been an element of triumphalism in the liberal coverage of the hearings, as it became clear in the verbal arguments that the pro-DOMA, anti-marriage-equality side is really straining to find any legal-sounding fig leaf to justify its position.*

This lack of a leg to stand on vindicates Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall’s ground-breaking opinion in 2003 (the first case I ever blogged about). Marshall wrote that a same-sex marriage ban had “no rational relationship” to any legitimate goal of the state. At the time, conservatives were greatly offended by the implication that they were irrational, but now that they have to spell out that rational relationship, all they can do is huff and puff.

The other reason to feel triumphant is the parade of Democratic politicians flipping to support marriage equality. Arguably, the recent trend started with Joe Biden, who seemed to be pushing President Obama last May. (Obama got on board a few days later.) In the last month, Bill Clinton renounced DOMA, which he signed, and Hillary Clinton has also endorsed marriage equality. Every day or two, a new Democratic senator joined the chorus, until last Monday there were just eight Democratic senators who have not. Wait, make that seven. No, six. Sorry, four: Manchin of West Virginia, Pryor of Arkansas, Landrieu of Louisiana, and Johnson of South Dakota. All are from states Obama lost handily in 2012, and all but Manchin are up for re-election in 2014.

Even the occasional Republican has flipped, like Ohio Senator Rob Portman and Illinois Senator Mark Kirk. Bill O’Reilly now says “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals”, and Rush Limbaugh admits that the issue is “lost”.

This is all in line with my post “Everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030” last May. The trends are clear and politicians of both parties can read them. So Biden jumped before Obama because Obama focused only on the 2012 general election, while Biden was also looking at the 2016 Democratic primaries. Claire McCaskill flipped because she doesn’t run again until 2018, by which time the issue will work in her favor, even in Missouri.

It will be a few elections before that logic takes hold on the Republican side, but by 2030, even Republican candidates for local offices in Alabama won’t take an openly anti-gay position and expect to win on it, just as they don’t take openly racist positions now.

The religious right is not folding, though, and this sets up a libertarian vs. theocrat battle that will probably divide the Republican party for years to come. Libertarians and corporatist Republicans will want to play the issue down to win elections, while theocrats will be looking for an Alamo they can defend to the last man.

*All of which raises the question: What really does motivate opponents of marriage equality?

Well, there’s the obvious “Gay sex is yucky”, which wouldn’t be very compelling in court. Also, “My religion requires me to be a bigot”, which likewise has no legal heft. And there are people who just dislike change in general. But none of that really explains the opponents’ sky-is-falling urgency.

Tiffany Wayne suggests something deeper that I find more likely: Defense of “traditional marriage” is really about defending traditional gender roles. Same-sex marriage is threatening because it frames marriage as a negotiated relationship between equals, not as the divinely mandated submission of a wife/mother to the authority of a husband/father, each of whom has a well defined, divinely mandated role in the household.

I am struck in listening to the opposition to same-sex marriage by the persistent denial that gender is a socially constructed role. This is a “traditional” view of marriage in the sense that it is grounded in “biology is destiny,” or specific roles assigned based on sex. It is an extremely narrow view of “marriage” based on specific roles assigned by sex, rather than marriage as an emotional and physical and social partnership between two individuals.  Most telling, it is a view that denies that heterosexual people can be in egalitarian marriages, or should be. It is a belief in “traditional” marriage as hierarchical. Not as a true partnership of equals, but as a microcosm of society with a power structure that flows from husband to wife to children.

I’m reminded of this exchange between Chris Hayes and Dan Savage last December:

SAVAGE: We only hear that monogamy or children or religion are defining characteristics of marriage when same-sex couples want to marry.

Straight couples write their own ticket. That’s why they can’t craft an argument to justify excluding same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. It’s not because we want to redefine it. It’s because straight people redefined it to an extent where there’s no argument that can be made to exclude same-sex couples.

It is the legal, romantic, hopefully sexual union of two legally autonomous individuals, period, the end. They get to write their own ticket, they get to write their own vows. They can, you know, assume all in their relationship and their marriage, all the typical things people might expect a marriage to be.

HAYES: Or not.

SAVAGE: Or they can write — they can be something very different. Marriage is very subjective and interesting and new. And redefined by straight people.

That is a more compelling reason to oppose marriage equality for same-sex couples: opposition to the equality-within-marriage that is becoming the new norm for straights and gays alike. It also explains why the religious right can’t make its case openly: That argument was already lost years ago.

and Mike Rice

I don’t usually do sports stories here, but the firing of the Rutgers basketball coach turned into something larger when conservative pundits framed Rice’s abusive behavior as “old-fashioned discipline”. What I find weird in the conservative focus on “discipline” is that they always think the people on the bottom need more discipline, never the people at the top. I elaborate in Mike Rice, Sean Hannity, and the Real American Discipline Problem. If you’re talking about bankers, billionaires, and CEOs, then I totally agree: America needs more discipline.

If this article reminds any of you of One Word Turns the Tea Party Around, where I made sense out of Tea Party rhetoric by changing the word government to corporations — yeah, me too.

and North Korea

All kinds of saber-rattling has been coming out of North Korea lately, and there’s a big debate on about whether this is business-as-usual, the new ruler trying to build respect inside his country, a predictable test for the new South Korean president, or something to worry about.

I have never pretended to understand North Korea, so I went looking for people who think they do. Foreign Policy has a worry-but-don’t-panic article. I also found this video dialog between Economist editors to be instructive.

and guns

This Dan Wasserman cartoon pretty well covers it: The Senate looks like it might not even pass the universal background check provision that 90% of the country supports. But substantial new gun laws have gotten through in Connecticut (Sandy Hook) and Colorado (Aurora, Columbine), as well as New York and Maryland.

One thing I think all the NRA-cowed politicians are forgetting: Yes, the wave set off by any particular massacre eventually dissipates, but what about the next one?

That’s why it’s important to bring anti-gun-violence measures to a vote, even if it’s obvious they won’t pass. If Sandy Hook turns out to be the last massacre, great. But if it’s not, and if the next one could have been prevented by the measures being debated now (as Sandy Hook could have been prevented by renewing the assault-weapon ban in 2004), we want a clear record of who was responsible for defeating those measures.

and you also might be interested in …

A serious polling group just polled a bunch of conspiracy theories the mainstream doesn’t usually take seriously. PPP finds that 37% of the public (and a majority of Republicans) think global warming is a hoax. 28% (and 36% of Romney voters) still think Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11, which 11% of the public believes the government knew about in advance, but allowed to happen. And is Obama the Anti-Christ? 22% of Romney voters say yes.

A lot of people got excited Monday about a bill introduced in the North Carolina legislature to let the state establish a state religion. (See the 19,000 comments on this HuffPost article.) I don’t think it was an April Fool’s joke, but it didn’t matter: By Thursday the NC Speaker of the House said the bill will never come to a vote — so never mind.

Clearly, not enough people have read Cracked.com’s 5 Ways to Spot a Bullshit Political Story in Under 10 Seconds, which I linked to shortly after it came out last year. Way #2 is: “The headline is about a ‘lawmaker’ saying something stupid.” Cracked editor David Wong points out: There are 7,382 state legislators in the U.S.; any group that size is bound to have some whackjobs in it; and any one of them can introduce a bill.

So it would really be newsworthy if some week no crazy-assed bills were proposed.

Rule of thumb: Don’t waste your outrage. Unless your representative is the one embarrassing himself, pay no attention to a crazy-sounding bill in your own state legislature until it has gotten out of committee. Pay no attention to a crazy bill in some other state until it has passed one house.

Homework: The next crazy NC bill, to put a two-year waiting period on divorces. Is it time to get upset or not?

National Review and I have different visions of Wonderland.

The Kentucky legislature just passed a “religious freedom” bill over its governor’s veto. The bill is short, and the key sentence is:

Government shall not substantially burden a person’s freedom of religion. The right to act or refuse to act in a manner motivated by a sincerely held religious belief may not be substantially burdened unless the government proves by clear and convincing evidence that it has a compelling governmental interest in infringing the specific act or refusal to act and has used the least restrictive means to further that interest.

Religious conservatives have been moving in this direction for several years, with bills that allow medical service providers to refuse to provide services that violate their conscience (i.e., druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions for an abortion-inducing drug like RU-486), and with the court case challenging whether health insurance provided by private employers has to provide the contraception coverage mandated by ObamaCare. (As far as I know, no EMT has become a Jehovah’s Witness and refused to give blood transfusions, but I believe he would have that right in Mississippi.)

As much as I dislike this bill, part of me is glad it passed, because I can stop making slippery-slope arguments now that Kentucky has slid all the way to the bottom. Now, if you don’t want to hire women, you can invoke this law and your sincerely held religious belief that a woman’s place is in the home. If you don’t want to serve blacks, invoke this law and your sincere belief that God doesn’t want the races to mix.

Of course, I don’t recommend you try to invoke this law if your sincere beliefs are Muslim or atheist. As we’ve seen in neighboring Tennessee, religious freedom is for Christians — you knew that, right?

But anyway, run free, religious Christian Kentuckians!

This message from “your high-speed internet and cable provider” isn’t safe for work, but it’s funny and true.

April 8, 2013 – 11:58 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Mike Rice, Sean Hannity, and the Real American Discipline Problem

One of the week’s more interesting stories was the firing of Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice after a video came out showing him physically and verbally abusing his players.

But that’s a sports story, and (in spite of being a major sports fan) I don’t usually cover sports on this blog. What makes the it something more, though, is the way that some conservative political pundits* made Rice a symbol of “old-fashioned discipline” — something they think our country needs. Sean Hannity said:

I’m watching this and I’m thinking, ‘All right, I don’t like this. … But on the other hand, I kind of like old-fashioned discipline.’ … Maybe we need a little more discipline in society.

And you know something? Sean is absolutely right. This is a story about discipline, and our country really does have a discipline problem. I could line up a bunch of conservative-pundit quotes about the failure of American discipline and agree with them completely, after I make one small adjustment: They’ve flipped everything upside down. 

Is the problem at the bottom or the top? The Sean Hannities, Michele Malkins, and Eric Bollings would have you believe that our national discipline problem is the laziness and dysfunctionality of the people at the bottom of the pyramid (represented in this story by the Rutgers players, most of whom probably come from poor families and need the scholarship Rice could take away from them), and that the Mike-Rices-in-charge need a freer hand to whip them into shape.

That’s why conservatives talk and act like this:

  • Tennessee’s one-party legislature** looks poised to cut welfare benefits 30% for families whose children aren’t doing well in school. Says the bill’s sponsor, “What my bill would do is put some responsibility on parents for their child’s performance.”
  • Seven red states already require drug tests for welfare recipients, and threaten those who fail with the loss of benefits. Other red states are considering such laws, in spite of the fact that the predictions haven’t panned out. The NYT summarizes: “a Florida law requiring drug tests for people who seek welfare benefits resulted in no direct savings, snared few drug users and had no effect on the number of applications, according to recently released state data.” In These Times notes: “the notion that low-income families are overwhelmingly riddled with substance abuse is one that researchers across the country have discredited time and time again.”
  • Republicans repeatedly opposed extending unemployment benefits in the wake of the Great Recession, arguing that people would not get out and find jobs without the threat of destitution. But research by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco concluded that this effect is small. Overwhelmingly, the unemployed failed to find jobs because there were no jobs.
  • Again and again during the 2012 presidential campaign, conservative candidates warned against the poor becoming “dependent on government”. Mitt Romney’s 47% video was the most famous example, but far from the only one. Newt Gingrich pledged, “If the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Again, the implication is that large numbers of Americans prefer government handouts and would rather not work — and that benefit cuts are necessary to discipline them.

I agree that America faces a major discipline problem, but I see the lack of discipline at the top: the bankers, the billionaires, the CEOs. Like Mike Rice, they’re out of control and need to face the consequences of their actions.

The Rice video was seen by Rutgers officials months ago, and their response was a wrist-slap: Rice was suspended for three games and told not to do it again. Isn’t that typical of how things go in America?

  • Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship treated safety violations in his coal mines as a cost of doing business. He stonewalled the EPA, dragged things out in court as long as possible, and then paid wrist-slap fines. In a very real sense, he murdered the 29 miners who died in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. Is he in jail? On trial? Have we at least closed the barn door after the horse escaped? No, of course not. According to In These Times, Massey was sold to another corporation for $8.5 billion, Blankenship walked away with $12 million in severance and a $27 million deferred-compensation package, and “Congress has not passed any legislation tightening mine safety regulations.”
  • Dick Cheney has repeatedly and publicly claimed “credit” for the Bush administration’s program of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” (the preferred euphemism for torture, which Ronald Reagan signed a treaty against). Waterboarding is an internationally recognized war crime for which we court-martialed our own soldiers in 1898 and executed Japanese soldiers after World War II. Is Cheney awaiting trial at The Hague? Don’t be silly. He has not even been shunned, either for his confessed crimes or for the gross incompetence of authoring our disastrous Iraq invasion. Wyoming Republicans invited him to speak at their state convention last spring. His daughter may well carry on the family legacy in future elections.
  • Our large financial institutions are essentially crime syndicates. They have knowingly laundered money for drug cartels, illegally foreclosed on people’s homes, and colluded to fix prices on credit card transactions. And that’s just what’s come out since they almost brought down the world economy and got billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts. Are bankers in handcuffs doing the perp-walk? Maybe in benighted little countries like Iceland, but not here. Standard procedure is for the government to negotiate a settlement in which the banks pay a small fraction of their profits in fines, evidence of criminal behavior is never made public, and no one goes to jail.

I could go on; don’t even get me started on the Catholic clergy’s handling of their sex-abuse problem.

So yes, this is a story about discipline, but not about its failure: Mike Rice’s firing is a rare example of the success of discipline in America. For once, a misbehaving person in authority faced some consequences.

How did discipline succeed this time? Michele Malkin attributed Rice’s firing to “political correctness” and “the left-wing media makes a big fuss”.

In the real world, the relatively apolitical ESPN called public attention to the Rice video, and from there social media took over. Particularly damaging to Rice were the comments by professional athletes like LeBron James. And unlike, say, Goldman Sachs or Bank of America, Rutgers needs both applications from students and support from the legislature, so it has to care about its public image. (With the banks, the political pressure pushes the other way: bankers pressure politicians. Watching Congress interview banker Jamie Dimon, it was obvious who was the king and who were the courtiers.)

So in this unusual case, wrong-doing in high places got called to public attention, and the public had a way to make its power felt. Maybe that’s what we need more of if we’re going to fix our discipline problem. But Malkin disagrees:

I think there should be scrutiny of people who blow the whistle on these kinds of things.

Wussification. The weirdest response to the Rice firing came from another Fox host, Eric Bolling:

We’re in the midst of political correctness crushing our ability to teach kids, to discipline kids … I talk about the wussification of America, wussification of American men, this is it.

The idea seems to be that American kids — boys, at least — need authoritarian abuse to toughen them up. Sean Hannity seemed to agree:

Maybe we don’t have to be a bunch of wimps for the rest of our lives. My father hit me with a belt. I turned out okay.***

Again, I think they’ve got this upside-down. Who’s the wuss in the Mike Rice story? Mike Rice, that’s who. Atlantic writer Patrick Hruby explains:

Rice is lucky he’s not in jail, and luckier still that his players aren’t in jail for beating him half to death. Because if he acted the way he did in a bar, a classroom, or an office, there’s a good chance one or both of those scenarios would have taken place. But that’s the thing: Take Rice out of a practice gym, and it’s highly unlikely he would have behaved so badly. He did what he did because he’s a coach, and as a coach he had the power to do it. He knew his players wouldn’t fight back.

What’s wussier than that? We’re not “toughening” our boys by leaving them in the charge of men like Mike Rice. We’re teaching them that they should also try to gain institutional power, so that they too can push around guys they’d be afraid to face man-to-man.

Real men, real values. Hruby continues:

Forget sports culture. Forget macho culture. Like I said, this is a bullying story. And bullying is about abuse. Abuse and the misuse of power. Not to get all Spider-Man here, but in civilized society, great power means greater responsibility.

No Patrick, don’t apologize for getting all Spider-Man. That’s exactly the kind of “old-fashioned values” (Stan Lee — 1962) that American culture has lost and needs to recapture. Peter Parker becomes a hero precisely because he had an Uncle Ben in his life, not a Mike Rice.

The “real men” we need our boys to look up to are the ones who see their authority as a challenge to meet a higher standard of behavior, not an opportunity to live by a lower one.

* To his credit, Gov. Christie was having none of it.

** Full disclosure: My nephew works for the Democratic Caucus in the Tennessee Senate, which controls a mere 7 of the 33 seats.

*** Jon Stewart questioned this conclusion: “Seriously? You’re OK? Have you seen your show? Cause it seems like the show of a guy who was hit with a belt as a child.”

April 8, 2013 – 10:40 am Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

After two weeks off, the Weekly Sift is back. This week’s featured article will focus on the conservative pundits who framed the firing of player-abusing Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice as a defeat for “old-fashioned discipline” at the hands of the “liberal media” and “political correctness”.

I too see this as a story about the decline of discipline in America, but I think Sean Hannity is looking at it upside-down: America’s real discipline problem is at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom. Like Mike Rice, our bankers, billionaires, and CEOs are running wild, and their misbehavior mostly goes unpunished, even when it’s criminal. Rice has become one of the rare examples of the success of discipline in America — a person in authority made to face the consequences of his actions.

We’d fix a lot of what’s wrong in America if we could get back to the “old-fashioned discipline” Stan Lee put in the mouth of Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben in 1962: “With great power comes great responsibility.” And accountability. And a higher standard of behavior, not a lower one.

In the weekly summary I’ll review what people have been talking about these last few weeks: what the Supreme Court will do with same-sex marriage, whether this wave of outrage at gun violence will result in any changes, and how seriously we should take the threats coming out of North Korea. Plus, short notes that include what an honest cable company would tell the public.

April 8, 2013 – 7:44 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Limits

No Sift the next two weeks, but new posts will appear April 8.

[That’s why today’s Sift is a little extra-long.]

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.

 — Justice Anton Scalia, “District of Columbia v. Heller” (2008)

This week everybody was talking about the new Pope …

and especially about the symbols of his humility, like riding the bus with the rest of the cardinals instead of using a fancy popemobile, eating simple food, dropping by the hotel he was leaving to pick up his own luggage, and so on. That fits with choosing the name Francis and how he has lived as Cardinal Bergoglio. It’s also what you might expect from the first Jesuit pope.

That symbolism that could communicate something important about how he wants to run the Catholic Church — maybe a way to tell the clergy that Catholicism isn’t all about them — or it could just be the trappings of a public image. Too soon to tell.

The good part of Francis’ record is that he cares about the poor, and more generally about economic justice and the inequality of wealth. Popes usually do — something conservative Catholics like Paul Ryan tend to ignore. In general, 20th and 21st century popes have been far more socialist than, say, Barack Obama. But National Review tells the right-wing faithful not to worry:

His counting poverty as a social ill should not be misconstrued as sympathy for statist solutions to it or, indeed, as support for any determinate political program.

On the other hand, his social beliefs are pretty discouraging. Francis isn’t likely to soften the Church’s opposition to reproductive rights, gay rights, or female priests. However, he apparently did not say: “Women are naturally unfit for public office.” A lengthier version of that quote has been floating around the internet all week, but Snopes can’t find any prior record of it. (Always check Snopes.com before you forward something outrageous.)

Bergoglio was bishop of Buenos Aires during the “Dirty War” the Argentine junta waged against its own people. The Church in general has apologized for its behavior during that era, and the New Republic describes conflicting reports about Bergoglio’s role. So far, though, no smoking gun.

Some prominent human rights activists have come to Bergoglio’s defense. Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who was jailed and tortured by the dictatorship, told the BBC’s Spanish-language service that Bergoglio “was not an accomplice of the dictatorship. … There were bishops who were accomplices of the Argentine dictatorship, but not Bergoglio.”

On the other hand, he also didn’t stand up against the regime, which undermines his moral authority.

BTW, popes are like world wars. Francis doesn’t become Francis I until there’s a Francis II.

and Senator Portman’s switch on same-sex marriage

Rob Portman, the other guy Mitt Romney considered after Paul Ryan, announced in the Columbus Dispatch that he now supports same-sex marriage. He started reconsidering two years ago when he found out that his son was gay.

At the time, my position on marriage for same-sex couples was rooted in my faith tradition that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years.

Dick Cheney had a similar awakening for similar reasons in 2004, so this may be the way Republicans fulfill my prediction that everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030. And while I’m glad to see the switch, the self-centered reasoning still bugs me. When will a Republican change his mind — on anything — out of compassion for other people’s families?

Matt Yglesias’ tweets were merciless:

Did Rob Portman used to think that gay people didn’t have dads?

and

As Dr King said, I have a dream that some day all injustices that personally impact members of my immediate family will be resolved.

Anil Dash tweeted:

Eventually one of these Republican congressmen is going to find out his daughter is a woman, and then we’re all set.

which inspired Kevin Drum to note that Republicans with daughters do vote slightly better on women’s issues. And which Republican senators voted for the Violence Against Women Act? A handful of men and all five women.

and Paul Ryan’s back-from-the-dead budget

My comments are in a separate post: “I Read the Ryan Budget“.

but I also wrote about the Keystone Pipeline

The case against the pipeline involves one key point that people don’t want to hear: If we’re not going to totally wreck the climate, we have to leave some fossil fuels in the ground. The Canadian oil sands would seem to be the perfect candidate. And if not, then what is our plan? I flesh that argument out in “A Hotter Planet is in the Pipeline“.

and you also might be interested in …

As the 10-year-anniversary approaches, more and more people are looking back at the Iraq War. David Frum shares this revelation: The reason the war looked so poorly thought out was that nobody ever thought it out.

For a long time, war with Iraq was discussed inside the Bush administration as something that would be decided at some point in the future; then, somewhere along the way, war with Iraq was discussed as something that had already been decided long ago in the past.

Paul Krugman points out this absurdity: In 2003, millions around the world were protesting the looming invasion, and yet

To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that “everyone” thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents — but they were out of the mainstream.

The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration.

He notes the same circularity in today’s budget debate. If you don’t think cutting the deficit is a major priority, you’re out of the mainstream. Your opinion is unworthy of consideration, even if you’ve got a Nobel Prize in economics.

Rick Perlstein describes the outrageous state of those click-through contracts you don’t read when you buy software.

Recently I sat down to talk to an activist who’s doing something about it. When Theresa Amato of Faircontracts.org, who sat with me recently for an interview, told me about this business of companies reserving—and exercising—the right to change contracts after their customers have signed them, and courts upholding that right, I paused a bit. I said I was speechless. “Yes,” she replied. “You should be speechless. And so should everyone.” She laughs—in a laughing-to-keep-from-crying kind of way: “To call this fine print ‘contracts’ is almost a misnomer.” She corrects herself: “It is a misnomer, according to contract theory, because there’s no mutual consent there.”

Matt Yglesias points out that the time to avoid the next bank bailout is now, when the banks are taking profits out of the system. In bad times, when they don’t have money to cover their debts, it will be too late.

Meanwhile, I haven’t figured out what the Cyprus thing is all about yet.

Noam Chomsky didn’t invent this idea, but this is about the clearest expression of it I’ve heard:

 If you want to privatize something and destroy it, a standard method is first to defund it, so it doesn’t work anymore, people get upset and accept privatization. This is happening in the schools. They are defunded, so they don’t work well. So people accept a form of privatization just to get out of the mess.

Speaking of schools, Atlantic calls attention to something that always seems to get left out of American articles on Finland’s world-leading school system: The Finns don’t allow privately funded schools. So the rich can’t opt out of the public system and spend more on their own kids.

Across the board, Finland does exactly the opposite of what our school reformers want: no standardized tests, lots of teacher independence, little competition between schools. It seems to work.

This week’s indictment of American democracy: According to a ABC/Washington Post poll, 91% of Americans support universal background checks for gun buyers. But when the bill came up in the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, every Republican voted against it. It passed 10-8 on a party-line vote, but in the full Senate it won’t get past a filibuster without at least a few Republican votes.

So how does a major party unanimously defy 91% of the public? Well, look at a different news story: Scott Brown was known as “Wall Street’s favorite senator“, even though Wall Street is not particularly popular with his constituents in deep-blue Massachusetts. But now that the voters have thrown him out, Brown is doing better than ever. Monday he joined law firm Nixon Peabody, which lobbies for (among others) Goldman Sachs. He also has a gig at Fox News and makes good money speaking at conservative and corporate events. None of that would have happened if he had honestly represented his constituents.

In short, Scott Brown’s real career is as a conservative, not as a servant of the people. He furthered that career by defying the voters to maintain his conservative bona fides. That’s what the 8 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are doing.

While we’re talking about guns and Republicans: In only a few short months Ted Cruz has become my least favorite senator. Everybody has some personality trait they just can’t stomach; mine is arrogant stupidity. Like Joe Scarborough said: “When you’re condescending and you don’t even have the facts right … I’ve got a problem with that.”

Cruz’s interaction with Senator Feinstein Thursday was classic arrogant stupidity. First, he addresses Feinstein as if she might never have heard of the Second Amendment before. Then he makes two asinine analogies — comparing Feinstein’s assault-weapon ban to Congress specifying that “the First Amendment shall only apply to the following books” or “the Fourth Amendment’s protection against searches and seizures could properly apply only to the following individuals”.

The First Amendment already doesn’t apply to child pornography. The Fourth Amendment is already riddled with exceptions (like email stored in the cloud). And if the Second Amendment won’t let Congress put any limit on weapons (see the Scalia quote above) then how are we going to protect airliners from shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles?

After Feinstein slaps him down, Cruz responds with the classic “I admire your passion”, as if the considered response of a 20-year Senate veteran was just the sputtering of an emotional female.

Maybe Cruz’s response reminded Rachel Maddow of Alex Castellanos saying “I love how passionate you are” to her on Meet the Press last April. Whatever the reason, Rachel was in rare form Friday: She devoted a 17-minute segment to new details on the Newtown shooting, their relevance to Feinstein’s assault-weapon ban, and Feinstein’s history of being present at a colleague’s assassination, culminating in Rachel dishing a full heaping of scorn on Cruz’s ignorance and sexism.

It’s probably not fair to judge CPAC by one or two white supremacists, outrageous as they were. But this video looks like it might be a fair representation of how young conservatives think about climate change.

It turns out even monkeys reject unfair treatment.

Chris Hayes is leaving my favorite weekend show (Up) and taking over the prestigious 8 p.m. weekday slot starting April 1. Here’s one of the many great things about Chris: He doesn’t use the standard old-white-guys Rolodex.

March 18, 2013 – 11:38 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

A Hotter Planet is in the Pipeline

If you want to construct a simple, suitable-for-casual-conversation argument in favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline, you probably already know everything you need. The ideas are easy to grasp, and the people who want you to construct such arguments have a lot money to get their message out. Here are the pieces:

  • The oil sands are just sitting up there in Canada. BP says: “The province of Alberta contains recoverable oil sands reserves of approximately 170 billion barrels, the third largest reserves in the world.”
  • Giving our oil money to Canada makes a lot more sense than giving it to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Venezuela. For a lot of reasons: Of all the people in the world, Canadians are the ones most likely to send that dollar right back to us by buying something we make or coming here on vacation. They’re also probably not going to use the money to fund terrorism or anti-American propaganda. And we don’t have to worry much about them shutting the oil off to manipulate us or punish us politically.
  • Building the pipeline would employ a lot of people. Paul Ryan’s budget claims (page 48) “20,000 direct jobs and 118,000 indirect jobs.” But the construction-job figure appears to be inflated by a factor of about 10, and the “indirect jobs” are just wild guess.

Probably you know that the case against the pipeline has something to do with global warming, but unless you’ve gone out of your way to study the issue, the pieces of that argument don’t come quickly to mind and aren’t as easy to assemble. It’s not actually a difficult argument, it just doesn’t have as much money behind it, so you don’t have it constantly in front of you.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Global warming is real. It’s not “controversial” or “disputed” in any genuine scientific sense. People who profit from selling fossil fuels have spent a lot of money to buy political controversy and to dispute the scientific results in the media, but that’s different from there being any real scientific controversy about whether the planet is getting hotter, whether greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing it, or whether burning fossil fuels puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Our solar system already gives us a clear example of a runaway greenhouse effect: Venus, which otherwise is the planet that most resembles Earth. The atmosphere of Venus is 96% carbon dioxide, and its surface temperature is over 800 degrees Fahrenheit — even hotter than the hottest parts of Mercury, which is much closer to the Sun. Nobody’s saying that lead is going to start boiling here on Earth, but the greenhouse effect is not some speculation out of science fiction. It’s happening on the next planet over.

There’s a time lag between putting more carbon in the atmosphere and the Earth getting hotter. It’s not like the thermostat on your furnace. (It’s more like putting on a sweater that you can’t take off.) So we can’t wait until apocalyptic things start happening and then say, “Damn. I guess we better do something about this.” If tomorrow, we stopped burning fossil fuels completely — not that anybody expects that to happen — the planet would keep getting hotter for the next several decades.

Estimating how much carbon results in how many degrees warmer how fast is where the science gets iffier. (This is where there is honest debate and more research is needed. Of course, the fossil-fuel people and their minions want to cut off this research, so they can keep exploiting the uncertainty.) In general, though, this graphic sums the best guesses we have:

So, for example, carbon already released (say, by that driving vacation you took ten years ago) is going to increase the global temperature by 1.5 degrees Centigrade, or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. A carbon budget that would keep further warming down to 2 degrees C (3.6 F) beyond that is already starting to look impossible.

And this is the mainline scenario, not the worst case. Short of Venus, it’s hard to know what the worst case is, because we could at some point set off some feedback loop we currently know nothing about. At some point, for example, the methane frozen into the Siberian permafrost starts to evaporate into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas, so after that the hotter it gets the hotter it gets.

If we don’t want to have an ecological catastrophe, a lot of fossil fuels will have to stay in the ground. Nobody wants to hear this, and people who hear it have a way of forgetting. But take another look at that graphic: Just burning the gas, oil, and coal that corporations already list on their books will take us to a point about 12 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than we are now. That’s about the difference between Chicago and Atlanta, or Atlanta and Baghdad. The entire state of Florida would need a serious seawall, and hurricanes would hit New York or Boston every few years. I’m not sure what happens to the cornfields of Iowa or the vineyards of California, but I bet it’s not pretty.

The drill-baby-drill scenario, where we find every last hydrocarbon on the planet and burn it, is much, much worse.

If you’re going to leave any oil in the ground, the Canadian oil sands are a good choice. While not as bad as coal for generating energy in general, oil sand is a carbon-intensive way to produce liquid fuels like gasoline. There’s some debate about how much worse than ordinary crude oil it is, with estimates running from 12% worse to 22% worse. Another way to look at that: If carbon is the limiting factor on how much gasoline the world can have, producing five gallons of gas from oil sands might prevent us from producing six gallons from crude oil somewhere else.

Also, the sands are in the early stages of development; leaving them in the ground is a much easier decision now that it will be after we’ve spent a bunch of money to build a pipeline and install other infrastructure. And they’re in a rich country. (Imagine telling a poor country that its people will have to starve rather than develop known energy resources.)

What’s Plan B? Pipeline advocates want to take that argument off the table by saying that the oil sands are going to be developed anyway. At its worst, this is a defeatist the-planet-is-already-hosed-so-we-might-as-well-live-it-up-now argument.

But even ignoring that, the argument is disingenuous. The point of building the pipeline is that it makes developing the oil sands more economical. No energy deposit gets completely exploited — there’s always some oil at the bottom of the well that is recoverable, but only at a higher price. So building the pipeline clearly changes how much of the oil sand will be exploited.

And finally, the economic projections are based on a world that has no carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which is another way of saying that we’re acting as if changing the climate had no cost.

But if the Canadian oil sands are going to be burned in their entirety (or close to it), what is going to be left in the ground? And if the answer is nothing, then what’s the plan for mitigating the damage? What’s the plan for relocating all the Bangladeshis when that country is underwater? How high does the seawall around Florida have to be? What’s the food-supply plan when Iowa turns into a desert and the ocean is too acidic to support fish?

Pipeline advocates would have you believe that the opponents are being impractical, that even if you believe in climate change (i.e., if you believe in science), this is not the place to take a stand.

So: where is the place to take a stand? And will it still be above sea level when we get there?

March 18, 2013 – 11:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (25)

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I Read the Ryan Budget

Last week, when I talked about ideological bubbles and how to tell if you’re in one, I should have mentioned the best way to stay out of bubbles in the first place: Expose yourself to as many original sources as you can, especially the ones you know you’re going to hate.

With that in mind, I read Paul Ryan’s budget. (More accurately: I read the 91-page document he wrote to advertise his budget. An actual budget would have way more numbers in it.) In telling you about it, I’m going to try to keep my commentary as close to the text as possible, with quotes and page references as appropriate. (I wish I had the time to do an end-to-end annotation, but I’ve got some big deadlines looming.)

General impressions. Before I get into specifics, I want to say a few things about the overall impression the document makes.

As many people have already observed, Ryan’s proposal is not an attempt to reach a workable compromise with the White House or the Democratic majority in the Senate, both of which would have to agree before his plan could become law. Instead, it’s an aspirational document for conservatives: This is what they fantasize doing if and when they get complete control of the government.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but the Ryan Budget needs to be classed with aspirational budgets from the Left, like People’s Budget put out by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (which also balances the budget in ten years). Both are shots across the bow, not plausible projections of what its backers think they can pass.

So Ryan has written a rallying cry for the troops of the conservative movement, not an attempt convince or convert non-believers like me. The summary (page 7) says

This is a plan to balance the budget in ten years. It invites President Obama and Senate Democrats to commit to the same common-sense goal.

But there is no spirit-of-invitation in Ryan’s style. Any liberal who reads it will get pissed off, and I believe that’s intentional. Conservatives couldn’t fully enjoy their reading experience without visualizing pissed-off liberals.

Let me detail that: You’ve probably already heard that Ryan wants (once again) to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare). But after the first mention, he can’t just call it by name. It’s “the President’s onerous health care law” (page 33) or “the President’s misguided health care law” (page 40) and so on, as if the ACA had been imposed on the country by imperial decree and Congress had nothing to say about it — also as if the ACA hadn’t been an issue in the 2012 election that Romney/Ryan lost by nearly five million votes.

Other partisan stuff is just silly. On page 24, President Reagan is given credit both for the economic expansion of his era, and of President Clinton’s era as well. Clinton is mentioned exactly once (on page 33, when Ryan re-raises the universally debunked lie from campaign 2012 that Obama wants to rescind the work requirement of Clinton’s welfare reform). The reader would never know that Ryan’s stated goal — a balanced budget — was achieved by Clinton (who raised taxes) while Reagan (who cut taxes) ran up record deficits.

You will also hear echoes of 2009’s Lie of the Year: death panels. The ACA sets up an Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) to make annual recommendations (which Congress can rewrite before they take effect) on keeping Medicare spending within specified limits. The law specifically bans the IPAB from recommending care-rationing, but the heading of the Ryan’s section on it (page 40) is “Repeal the health-care rationing board”.

Background assumptions. In the real world, if a program is important enough, the government could conceivably raise taxes or borrow to pay for it. OK, Ryan’s balanced-budget goal won’t let him advocate borrowing. But a fundamental assumption that runs through his whole budget — usually without being stated explicitly — is that taxes cannot be raised for any purpose. Nothing is important enough to raise taxes to pay for.

Also, defense spending is untouchable. “There is no foreseeable ‘peace dividend’ on our horizon.” (page 61)

So if the domestic demands on government are growing — the population is getting older, the infrastructure more decrepit, healthcare more expensive, weather-related disasters more extreme and more frequent, future economic growth more dependent basic research and an educated workforce etc. — any money you want to spend to deal with one of those challenges has to be taken from the others.

The idea that over the long term our country could decide that it wants to do more of its consumption publicly — that it wants to take its economic growth in the form of Medicare and public education, say, rather than BMWs — is completely off the table.

Big Picture. The numbers don’t appear until the Appendix (page 80). Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put them into a bar graph:

Medicare and Social Security are usually considered “mandatory spending” (because benefits are defined by law rather than by appropriation), but I believe the additional $962 billion of 10-year savings is mostly Food Stamps, Pell grants, and so on.

So the cuts are almost entirely in healthcare, education, or anti-poverty spending. And while Ryan waves his hand at replacing Obamacare with “patient-centered health-care reforms” (page 33), apparently those reforms require no money from the government.

Meanwhile, rich people get a big bonanza: The top tax rate drops from the current 39.6% to 25%. If you make $10 million a year (some CEOs do), you could save nearly $15 million over the ten years Ryan’s budget covers.

So what isn’t in the budget document?

  • Any specifics about discretionary spending cuts. The cuts are just numbers on a spreadsheet. All the “tough choices” necessary to achieve those numbers are left to your imagination, so Ryan can deny his intention to cut anything in particular, as Mitt Romney did in his first debate with President Obama.
  • Any specifics about closing tax loopholes. Ryan claims his rich-guys-bonanza 25% tax rate wouldn’t cut federal revenue, because it would be balanced by eliminating tax loopholes. As in the 2012 campaign, Ryan says nothing about what those loopholes might be. Again, he can deny wanting to cut any specific item, like the mortgage interest deduction. But he’s got to raise that revenue somehow, and I seriously doubt it’s all going to come from the super-rich who benefit most from the lower rate.
  • Any plan for Social Security. Page 37 charges: “In Social Security, government’s refusal to deal with demographic realities has endangered the solvency of this critical program.” But rather than “deal with demographic realities” here and now, Ryan only “requires the President and Congress to work together to forge a solution.”

We have always been at war with Eastasia. The background rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul assumption allows Ryan to construct some truly Orwellian statements. This is particularly true in the “Opportunity Extended” section, which is all about shrinking opportunity for poor and working-class young people.

For example, on page 20 Ryan identifies “tuition inflation” as a problem that “plung[es] students and their families into unaffordable levels of debt”. And then he says:

Many economists, including Ohio University’s Richard Vedder*, argue that the structure of the federal government’s aid programs don’t simply chase higher tuition costs, but are in fact a key driver of those costs.

What could that possibly mean? Well, that federal aid is allowing too many people to go to college, creating a high-demand environment in which colleges can raise tuition. So the “solution” is to lower the maximum Pell grant (thereby “saving” the Pell grant program from spending at an “unsustainable” level, since we couldn’t possibly raise taxes to pay for it). Also to “target aid to the truly needy” by making families report more of their income on financial aid forms. Also “reforming” student loans and “re-examining the data made available to students to make certain they are armed with information that will assist them in making their postsecondary decisions”.

Presumably, when the facts of this harsher you’re-on-your-own world are “made available to students”, fewer of them will decide to go to college, thereby saving both their money and the government’s. So don’t worry about student debt — just don’t go to college at all if you’re not rich, and if you do go we’ll “help” you avoid massive debts by refusing to loan you money.

Oh, and we’ll also “encourage innovation” in education through “nontraditional models like online coursework”. Never mind that’s where the big scams are. Corporations profit from those scams, so that’s not “waste”.

Ditto for job training: Ryan promises to “extend opportunity” by spending less on it.

Ditto for the safety net. Since taxes can’t possibly be raised, every person who is helped by the safety net is taking those dollars away from somebody else who might be helped. So Ryan’s “A Safety Net Strengthened” section is all about spending less on the safety net. Mostly this is accomplished by block-granting programs like Medicaid to give “states more flexibility to tailor programs to their people’s needs.”

So if, say, low-income Texans need to toughen up and stop seeing a doctor at all, Texas can tailor its program that way. That’s what it’s doing already with the “flexibility” the Supreme Court gave it last summer.

Energy. Climate change just isn’t happening. Ryan doesn’t make that claim in so many words, but there’s a big empty spot where climate change would otherwise have to figure in.

He clumps energy together with a grab-bag of other issues in the “Fairness Restored” section. The “unfairness” in this case is the way that the Obama administration favors clean energy over dirty energy. Ryan will “end kickbacks to favored industries” like wind and solar in favor of “reliable, low-cost energy” like coal, oil, and gas. With climate change out of the picture, only corruption can explain Obama’s favoritism. In the Introduction, Ryan says his budget “restores fair play to the marketplace by ending cronyism.”

In current energy policy, fossil fuels and green energy are subsidized in different ways: Green energy gets grants and loans while established-and-profitable fossil energy gets tax breaks. Tax breaks are invisible to Ryan, so he can say on page 50:

on a dollar-per-unit-of-production basis, the level of subsidies received by the wind and solar industries were almost 100 times greater than those for conventional energy

Do it for the kids. So what’s the purpose of all this? A better world for our children. “By living beyond our means, we’re stealing from the next generation.” (page 5)

Of course my baby-boom generation knows how that works, because all that debt America ran up during World War II was “stolen” from us, right? I don’t know how I failed to notice.

In the real America, the big deficits of World War II kicked off 40 years of prosperity, during which the country achieved a level of equality that it hasn’t equalled before or since. So no, deficits are not “stolen” from the future. My generation did not build tanks and landing crafts and put them in time machines to send back to D-Day.

But in order to save our children from the horrible maybe-sorta-problem of the national debt, we need to under-educate them; not do basic research that might create the next computer industry or Internet; leave them crumbling roads, bridges, and electrical grids; not care for them when they get sick; move in with them when we get old; and leave them with a torched planet, where Iowa is a desert and Miami is underwater.

I’m sure they’ll thank us for our foresight.

* As best I can tell, although Ryan identifies only their university affiliations, every economist Ryan mentions by name is inside the conservative bubble. Richard Vedder is with the American Enterprise Institute and John Taylor with the Hoover Institute.

March 18, 2013 – 8:00 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s Sift will be a little longer than usual because I’m about to take two weeks off*, so I can’t push any articles back to next Monday.

Last week I talked about ideological bubbles and how to know if you’re in one. I should have mentioned the best technique for avoiding getting into a bubble in the first place: Read original documents from the other side, not just the paraphrases of them that your side generates.

With that in mind, this week I read the 91-page document Paul Ryan wrote to advertise his budget. So this week’s first featured article is my report “I Read Paul Ryan’s Budget”.

The second featured article will look at an issue the Sift hasn’t covered very well, the Keystone Pipeline. Supporters of the pipeline have done such a good job getting their message out that I think a lot of people regard building the pipeline as a “common sense” idea, while opposition seems fringy. I make the don’t-build-it case in “A Hotter Planet is in the Pipeline”.

The weekly summary talks about the new pope, Senator Portman’s switch on same-sex marriage, how an entire committee’s worth of Republicans can oppose 91% of the public, the Cruz-Feinstein clash, and a few other things.

*Not really. I’ve just got too much other stuff going to be able to get a Sift out. Next Saturday I’ll be giving two completely different talks at the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan. And I’ll be leading the Sunday service at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on March 31, which to my great surprise turns out to be Easter. No pressure there. (Funny story about that, which I’ll tell next Monday in my quarterly column at uuworld.org.)

March 18, 2013 – 7:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Alms from the Poor

The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor to everyone else.

— Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (2001)

This week everybody was talking about … well, actually nothing really caught on

I couldn’t get excited about the death of Hugo Chavez, maybe because I never got that excited about him when he was alive. I did like the discussion Chris Hayes had about Chavez Sunday, because it seemed like he really wanted to know who this guy was and what he meant for Venezuela, rather than to force him into a stereotype.

And I don’t have a lot of hope for the next Pope, so that story didn’t grab me either.

so I wrote about dysfunctions in media and democracy

“Who Do Representatives Represent?” looks at a fascinating new study: Politicians on both sides tend to think their districts are more conservative than they actually are. An earlier study said that legislators’ votes are influenced mainly by the opinions of the wealthy, so I wondered this is all one phenomenon: Maybe politicians correctly estimate the positions of the constituents they really represent — the rich.

“How Bubbles Look From the Inside” considers how you could tell if you were living inside a news bubble, cut off from actual reality. Day-to-day, you probably couldn’t. But the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion reminds us that a fantasy world is vulnerable to sudden shocks from events that are too big to spin.

and you also might be interested in

As President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage faces predictable opposition (in spite of its popularity — another one of those dysfunctions of democracy), the public should educate itself about the realities of minimum-wage life. If you didn’t read it when it came out in 2001, I suggest picking up Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, where she makes three attempts (in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota) to find entry-level jobs and live on her wages for a month.

Middle-class people have trouble grasping the reality of what economists call poverty traps: when you can’t raise enough money to live cheaply. If you don’t have security-deposit-plus-first-month’s-rent for an apartment, you’ll have to rent a motel room week-to-week. It won’t have a kitchen or refrigerator, so you’ll have to eat fast food. Maybe the only car you can afford guzzles gas. Or you can’t afford a car at all, so you can’t get to the better-paying job opportunity. At Ehrenreich’s lowest point, she’s working seven days a week and can’t find a food bank that is open when she can go.

Ehrenreich has a tough time even though she has many advantages: She’s white, healthy, and physically fit. Low-wage jobs are plentiful during the boom at the end of the Clinton administration. She only has to support herself, not a child or parent. Because she’s only trying to survive for a month, she doesn’t face the unpredictable-but-unavoidable challenges that eventually derail even the thriftiest minimum-wage budget: illness, injury, car repair, or toothache. As you read, you’ll simultaneously sympathize with Ehrenreich and realize (as she does) that real minimum-wage workers have it much worse.

And while Ehrenreich takes pride in her ability to work hard and keep up, she quickly realizes that her Ph.D. brain doesn’t stand out. No manager or co-worker ever says, “You’re really smart” or “You pick this up fast.”

Ezra Klein explains why Obama can’t make a deal with Republicans. Here’s a clear case of a Republican saying that a deal would be possible if only Obama would accept X. Informed that Obama accepted X some while ago, he still says there’s no deal.

Tod Kelly compares Portland, Oregon to a nearby city in Washington, concluding that people actually like paying taxes if it buys them visible public amenities.

If you’re stuck for examples of “wasteful government spending”, you can always pick on some science project, because it’s easy to make them sound stupid. If there’d been an NSF in colonial American, somebody would have denounced that wasteful grant to fund a guy flying a kite during a thunderstorm.

The economy added an unexpectedly high number of jobs in February and the unemployment rate fell to 7.7%, the lowest number in four years. But Fox News found a way to spin this gold into straw.

New research indicates that global temperatures are higher than they’ve been in 4,000 years and are near an 11,000-year high. (That would be the highest temperatures ever, if you’re a young-Earth creationist.)

Even that understates the severity of the situation, because the real problem is the speed of change, not the absolute temperature. The NYT brings in Penn State climatologist (and Climategate smear victim) Michael Mann for comment:

Dr. Mann pointed out that the early Holocene temperature increase [12,000 years ago] was almost certainly slow, giving plants and creatures time to adjust. But he said the modern spike would probably threaten the survival of many species, in addition to putting severe stresses on human civilization.

“We and other living things can adapt to slower changes,” Dr. Mann said. “It’s the unprecedented speed with which we’re changing the climate that is so worrisome.”

The picture explains it:

Steven Lloyd Wilson captures how so many fans of Orson Scott Card’s fiction feel about his ever-uglier political activity: sadness, puzzlement, revulsion. I’m a firm believer that the artist is not the art, and that a lot of world’s great achievements were probably created by people I wouldn’t choose to hang around with. (Yeah, Frank Miller is probably a fascist, but I still like Dark Knight Returns.) At some point, though, what I know about the author starts to interfere with my appreciation of the work. Card has reached that point. I wish I knew less about him.

Continuing the human-interest theme: NYT Magazine has a brilliant feature on an aging physics professor with previously harmless levels of cluelessness and self-delusion. Then an online-romance scam pulls him into a drug-smuggling plot.

A new study claims that religion may help criminals rationalize their crimes. I like the interpretation of Slate’s Justin Peters: It’s not that this is the Great Definitive Study — it’s based on a small sample and blah-blah-blah. But the idea that prison ministries help rehabilitate criminals is also based on pretty flimsy research.

As that Bureau of Prisons report put it, while “religious programs in the correctional setting have been the single most common form of institutional programming for inmates,” nobody really knows whether those programs are effective.

You know you’re in trouble when your defense is that you miscalculated your opportunism.

That’s more-or-less where Jeb Bush is on immigration, which is supposed to be his signature issue. For years, he’s been projecting an image as the reasonable Republican, the one most likely to forge a workable compromise with Democrats. This week we saw that the image is the point, not the policy.

Bush’s book Immigration Wars came out Tuesday, and the shocker was that his proposal — legal residency for undocumented immigrants, but no path to citizenship —  is more conservative than bipartisan Senate framework that came out in February. (It calls for “a tough but fair path to citizenship”.)

But as soon as he’s questioned about it, Bush flip-flops, saying that he could support a path to citizenship. Explanation? “We wrote this book last year, not this year.” In other words, at the time the book was written, the Republican nominee’s immigration proposals (self-deportation) were so extreme that Bush could stake out a centrist position without calling for citizenship. But by the time the book is out, the center has moved. So Bush moves too. He has never really been for or against citizenship; he just wants to be in the center.

So this whole discussion has nothing to do with immigration; it’s about running for president.

Rand Paul does an old-fashioned talking filibuster, holding the floor of the Senate for nearly 13 hours. Eric Holder responds with one word:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American citizen not engaged in combat on American soil?” That answer to that question is no.

I’m torn about Paul’s filibuster. Many of the points he was making were points I’ve made here: It’s very dangerous to allow the executive branch to assemble a “kill list” without oversight from somebody who doesn’t answer to the President. (Even a secret “star chamber” court would be better, if it had independent judges.)

But Paul was also phrasing his questions in ways that made them unanswerable. (Holder’s version puts in key caveats, like “not engaged in combat”.) At a time when well-armed Americans — many of whom seem to have Paul’s sympathy — threaten revolution if the political process doesn’t go their way, the President can’t categorically swear off military operations inside the U.S.

Last month, Elizabeth Warren was expressing her concern that “Too big to fail has become too big for trial.” This week, Eric Holder basically admitted she was right:

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.

So when you set out to regulate the banking system, your very first principle should be not to let any bank get too big to regulate.

The Menendez prostitution scandal is looking more and more bogus, vindicating news outlets that refused to break it.

OK, everybody knows that news stations sometimes edit tape to make a public figure look bad. But a 4-year-old?

March 11, 2013 – 1:27 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)